Survivors (Harmony Book 3)

by Margaret Ball

  She managed to hold herself together until Trisha had cried herself out and could be persuaded to go to sleep. “I should have made her eat something first,” Jillian said guiltily when it was done.

  “Doubt you could have.” Ruben’s arm around her shoulders was warmth and support and – discord, she was not going to bury her face in his shoulder and weep wildly. She was Jillian Lisadel and she took care of herself…

  “I’ve gotten your shirt all wet,” she said with remorse, some unmeasured dark time later.

  “Don’t you fret over that, it’ll dry again.” Ruven held her close, patting her shoulder with his free hand. “Don’t feel bad, it’s good for you to cry it out. You loved your brother a great deal, didn’t you?”

  “We weren’t even in the same crêche.” Jillian choked for a moment. “But when the big kids were bullying me, Tomas skipped his lessons and came to my crêche to tell them to lay off. He was like that. My big brother. Taking care of people – it was his nature. And that got him killed!” She sniffed and looked around for a flimsy.

  “Time you ate something too.” Ruven felt around the table. “Where – oh, got them now.” He set three of Trisha’s scented candles upright and lit them. Jillian looked at his face, and then at his shirt. Then she snorted.

  “What was that about?”

  “Um – you’d better let me wash your shirt. I didn’t just cry on it; I smeared Number 11 Coarse all over you.”

  Ruven looked down with a startled air. “So you did… ah well, I already knew you were a dangerous woman. I think I’ll wash it myself, though.”

  They made something of a meal out of the leftovers Jillian had brought home from Romuela’s, an odd mix of appetizers and vegetable sarma and very sweet dessert pastries. And while Jillian nibbled, Ruven chatted about little things that bore no echo of Tomas: more stories of life in the cooperative, a description of the abandoned apartment he’d moved into, thumbnail sketches of his neighbors. Jillian had the feeling he wanted to broach another topic but was waiting until she was calm enough to talk seriously.

  Surely enough, after they polished off the cream and nut pastries he cleared his throat and began, sounding tentative and unsure of himself. “I was going to come anyway, even before I heard about Tomas. Look, Jillian, it’s getting worse every day, and your fine neighborhood isn’t immune. I’ve seen…”

  “I know,” Jillian interrupted rudely. She really did not want to hear his horror stories; what she’d already experienced was bad enough. “I was stopped by a gang on my way to work this morning. They wanted money or… Well, I didn’t have any money.”

  “Jillian!” Ruven gathered her in his arms again, and this time the comfort he offered was definitely not impersonal. “You should have said something, not let me go on and on about little things!”

  “It’s all right,” Jillian told him. Although right now she seemed to be having the shakes she should have had at the time. “Nothing ha-happened. I – knew one of the men. From before. He – talked the others into letting me go.” Her shaky laugh sounded close to hysteria, even to her. “All I had to do was – let them all take holos with me – the famous actress!”

  Ruven’s grip relaxed, but he did not let her go. “I’m amazed anyone recognized you in this getup. Didn’t you do your makeup this morning?”

  “It was Pol. He used to be the cosmetician at my studio. If anybody could see through a makeup job, he could.” She managed a somewhat watery giggle. “One of the others said Pol must be a miracle worker, if he’d been able to make me look beautiful! But they all w-wanted holos anyway.”

  “That does it,” Ruven announced. “Jillian, you need to get out of the city now. You won’t get lucky every time. And with this coup, I doubt we’ll be seeing any peace officers on the streets at all.”

  “You’re staying, aren’t you?”

  “I… don’t know. There doesn’t seem to be much good I can do for the cooperative. About half the Inner Circle has gone to Esilia, and the ones that haven’t cleared out yet are running around like chickens with their heads cut off, unable to say a single sensible word.”

  Jillian let her head rest against his shoulder for just one long moment before sitting up and drawing away from him. “We’ll miss you, Trisha and I.”

  “I thought we might go together. It’s not going to be that easy, getting out of the city. They say the outskirts are totally lawless now. And it’ll be worse after this coup in Security.”

  Jillian shook her head. “Ruven, Trisha and I can’t go. Trisha’s not well, and she’s had some… well, she needs to lie quiet, I’ve got to stop her trying to get up and cook…”

  “Spotting? Dear girl, you don’t have to be roundabout with me; I breed dairy cattle. You think she’ll drop her calf if she has to walk very far.”

  “Um, that’s not quite how I would put it, but yes.”

  Ruven was silent for a long moment; then he gave a decisive nod. “Very well, that’s settled. If you insist on staying here, though, I want you to move to the apartment block where I’m living.”

  Jillian stared. “However did you get assigned an apartment?”

  “Squatting, I maybe should have said. The proper tenants are long gone; a lot of people have already left the city, dear girl.”

  “But where do they go?”

  “The rich ones are mostly buying places on ships for Esilia, when they can find a ship that is. The others…” Ruven shrugged. “Up the coast or down the coast where they can fish, or up the river and hoping a cooperative will take them in. If they can get past – Never mind. The point is, there are other vacant apartments in the building, and it’s a safer place for you girls. Fence around the place. We’ve organized a defense group. Only three stories; there’s room on the second floor for you. Have you thought about trying to get Trisha down ten flights of stairs when she does go into labor? She’d likely have the baby on the fifth floor!”

  “I’ve been trying not to think about that,” Jillian admitted. “But I have noticed… This apartment block isn’t really defensible, is it? All the apartments have these huge windows and balconies running right around outside them. I expect you noticed, looters have already gotten into some of the apartments on the lower floors.”

  Ruven wrinkled his nose. “Hard not to notice.”

  “So yes. We’ll move. That is,” Jillian amended, “if I can figure out a way to transport Trisha and our things.”

  “Let me deal with that,” Ruven said. “I think I can arrange something.”

  “I just wish you were going to be there. We will miss you, Ruven. But I understand. You can still leave, and you should.”

  “Wrong,” Ruven said. “It turns out I can’t leave after all.”

  “What? But you said – ”

  “That was when I thought I could get you out of the city,” Ruven interrupted. “Now it’s different.”

  “I don’t see why you should – ”

  Ruven interrupted again. “This is why.” He drew her close again and pressed his lips on hers. His embrace was hard, demanding – and not in the least impersonal. When he released her, Jillian felt dizzy.

  “You won’t leave because of Trisha, and I won’t leave because of you,” he told her.

  “Y-yes. I grasped that.”

  “Is that all you’ve got to say?”

  Jillian put a hand up to her tingling lips. “It’s… different from the holos.” Not much like the only other two men she’d allowed to kiss her, either.

  Ruven broke into a laugh. “That must be why I love you. You never say the expected thing.” He drew her to him again. “I daren’t take this too far. But I’d like to just hold you close for a while.”

  Which led, inevitably, to his hands somehow getting under her dress, and his own clothes getting somewhat disheveled, and both of them touching and kissing until Jillian thought she would go crazy and was ready to forget all about Trisha sleeping in the next room. But Ruven, discord take the man, exercised an inhuman d
egree of self-control. When the candles were no more than dying flames in puddles of wax he took his leave.

  Jillian thought she would never get to sleep, but at least Ruven had effectively taken her mind off Tomas for a few hours. She drifted off while remembering Ruven’s touch, working on plans to seduce the man. He’d made it clear how much he wanted her; what was stopping him?

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Jef Elmasri twitched from sheer boredom. It seemed to him that ever since their ship reached Travis on the coast of Esilia, his parents and their friends had done nothing but sit in this one kahve shop that had become popular with the refugees, drinking bitter Harmony-style kahve and complaining about the nation that had taken them in.

  Thanks to its history as the dumping place for Harmony’s unwanted, who typically arrived with nothing but the clothes they stood up in, Esilia already had a well-defined system for welcoming refugees and helping them find their place in a new land. The system might not have been needed much in the generations since they won their independence and Harmony stopped exiling their dissidents, but evidently the government had started hiring people and funding the department some time before the crisis at home became so bad.

  “And that proves,” Alex Kry said, pounding his fist on the primitive wooden table, “proves that Esilian sabotage really was behind the crisis. How else did they know Refugee Support Services would need to be revived, even before we ourselves knew how bad things were?”

  “Mmm,” Ray Elmasri said noncommittally. Jef had to admit that Dad was not quite as bad as the rest of them. He’d told him and Mom, in private, that he thought ‘Esilian sabotage,’ was a fiction spread by the Central Committee to cover up their own corruption and mismanagement. What he hadn’t said in front of Jef – but Jef had learned by a program of cautious eavesdropping – was that since he was just as corrupt as the rest of the Inner Circle, he was perfectly content to shed public blame on the Esilians as long as he could get away with it.

  But he wasn’t going to risk stating a contrary view in front of their friends, and it seemed he was going to be just as bad as the rest of them, living through their ninety days of free lodging and spending their resettlement allowance without even thinking about what to do when that ran out. Jef twitched again and tried to get a better look at the street outside the kahve shop. A whole new city, a new country, a new continent to explore, and because his parents insisted he stay close to them he’d hardly seen anything yet but the inside of one lousy kahve shop decorated with poster pictures of Harmony. Flat green fields of red-topped sasena on either side of a wide river. The city glowing against a night sky. Slender trees bent by the autumn wind and the slashing rain that blew nearly horizontal in that wind…. They weren’t even holos that might have made the room actually seem like a part of home; you couldn’t walk into the glittering city, couldn’t see the trees bending with the wind. Esilia really was incredibly backward.

  But it was also different.

  When Jef looked at that poster of Harmony City’s lights, and contrasted it with the dark and broken city he’d left, he wanted to cry. But when he looked at the street outside, the white glare of sunlight, the red dust, the casually dressed people all moving as if they were in a hurry to go and do something terribly important? Then he wanted to get outside and be a part of all that driving excitement.

  “For harmony’s sake, Jef, stop fidgeting!” his mother exclaimed.

  “Mom, can’t I go for a walk? Just up the street a little ways and back? If I promise to come right back?” He felt embarrassed to be begging like a little kid when he was nearly grown up. But Mom had been… well, fragile since they left Harmony. Easily upset and more easily frightened. Ray had taken him aside and explained that big changes were naturally upsetting to women, and that it was a man’s job to make the change as easy and natural as possible so that women’s weaker minds could adjust to it.

  But there wasn’t much that Jef found easy or natural about having his backside practically nailed to a hard wooden chair in a dark café for hours and hours.

  “Let the kid go, Anji,” Ray advised, and Jef felt passionately grateful to his father. “I’ve been out on that street – twice! – and I haven’t seen anything that could harm a great big boy like Jef.”

  “The sun. The heat.” Anji’s voice was already defeated. “What if he gets sunstroke?”

  “Oh, for concord’s sake, Anji. The boy’s not stupid enough to stay out until the heat and light make him sick. Are you, Jef!”

  “Yes, sir! I mean no, sir! I just want to look around a bit.”

  “Oh, very well, but don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Anji sighed. “I’ll be worried every minute until he gets back, but naturally you don’t care about that.”

  By the time Jef got to the door, his mother was already expressing her deep concern for him by arguing with Jorj Saylor’s wife about whether they should give in to the casual Esilian styles or try to uphold the Harmony standard in fashion.

  He was, in fact, almost stunned by the blare of heat and sun and sound that surrounded him as soon as he stepped into the street. Temporarily blinded, he backed up to one of the pillars supporting a shady awning in front of the café, and stood there for a short while, getting his bearings and letting his eyes adjust.

  People moved faster than they did on the civilized paved streets of Harmony City, and didn’t seem to mind the red dust they stirred up in passing. The only two men who weren’t hurrying past were standing nose to nose in the middle of the street, yelling at each other as if they were on the verge of a fight. Jef watched, eyes wide, and was just ever so slightly disappointed when one of them laughed, clapped the other one on the shoulder, and walked away, still laughing.

  Stepping into the street was like the time he almost got carried away and drowned by a wicked undertow on the beach south of Harmony City. Buildings and people alike were covered in bright primary colors that all but vibrated in the intense sunlight, and the movement of the crowd on his side of the street carried him down and away from the kahve house. There were signs everywhere, from crude hand-drawn notices in capital letters to sophisticated flimsies with moving lines of script. Jef stared at one of the latter until its “Going Out of Business, 2 for 1 Sale!” message had cycled through every color in the spectrum.

  Business.

  Job.

  Would he have time to register with the Esilian Bureau for Labor before Mom noticed how long he’d been gone?

  A boy not much older than Jef paused and gave him a friendly glance. “Lost?”

  Jef seized his chance. “Could you direct me to the Bureau for Labor?” He added “If you please?” when the boy only stared at him.

  “Bureau for Labor?”

  “You know. Where they assign jobs?”

  “Oh…” Some understanding appeared on the stranger’s face. “You a Harmonica?”

  Jef raised his chin. “I am from Harmony, yes. Does that mean I’m not eligible for a labor assignment here?” He felt stupid. He should have thought of that. How would Harmony’s Bureau for Labor have reacted to an Esilian waltzing in and demanding job placement?

  “Uh, no, it’s just that we… don’t do things that way. See, there isn’t anybody here whose job it is to see that you get a job.”

  That hardly seemed possible. In a city the size of Travis? Even if it wasn’t more than a wide place in the road compared to Harmony City, it still seemed far too big and busy for anyone but a government official to keep track of the jobs available.

  “But – then, how do I find work?”

  “Same way as anybody else. Grab today’s newsflim and look at the jobs listing. Or look at the signs!”

  Jef’s eyes went back to “Going Out of Business,” which now seemed to be exploding in a shower of multicolored sparks.

  “Not that one! Look at the “HELP WANTED” signs, they’re all over the place.”

  Those were the plain, awkwardly printed signs that to Jef, until now, had been only a backgro
und for the colorful moving signs advertising sales and special deals.

  “See, there’s plenty of work for anyone who wants it. Our economy is exploding since we got the new needleport.” The older boy studied Jef’s face for a moment. “You do look kind of lost. Maybe I can help. Oh – I’m Chuy Manalang.”

  “Jef ‘lmasr,” Jef mumbled, intentionally slurring his last name. People’s attitudes changed whenever they learned that he was part of the powerful Elmasri family.

  “Well, Jef Whatever-you-said, you want a job, what can you do?”

  Jef’s mind flashed over his past life. There didn’t seem to be anything that could recommend him to an employer. What had he ever done besides crêche lessons and playing hologames with his friends?

  “I can read,” he said finally. “And I’m strong for my age, I can lift things. And I’m not afraid of hard work.”

  His new friend’s face fell. “That’ll get you hired some places, but you’re not going to like it. I know you think you’re strong enough to do a man’s work, but we have to face facts: nobody fresh out of Harmony can take on heavy labor in a climate like ours.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  Chuy looked at him pityingly. “Did no one tell you how Esilia was populated? Harmony shipped out everybody they didn’t want for, like, centuries. Believe you me, we have had extensive experience in retraining city people from a nice cool climate with plenty of clouds and mist, and it takes several months before any of them are much good for physical work. It’s just a biological fact.”

  Jef felt both inferior and deeply depressed. “Yeah. Well. I wish I hadn’t spent so much time playing hologames instead of apprenticing to something useful, but…” He didn’t want to come right out and say that members of his family never apprenticed to a trade. Fortunately Chuy didn’t wait for him to finish the sentence.

  “Hologames? Real-time, multi-player? You any good?”