The Misrule series Box Set

by Andy Graham

  The rumbling in the tunnel faded. The light blared out of its cages with renewed vigour. It was no longer the colour of rust but courtroom white. Beth was metres ahead of him, marching into air that smelt of sulphur. He hurried through the settling dust where he had seen the girl fall. “Where are we going?”

  “Hamilton moved his private office,” Beth answered. “He’s never been the most gregarious of people but he’s spending more time alone these days than ever. He’s more likely to see you here than in his public quarters.” She trailed a finger along the walls, flicking the moisture onto the floor. “I’d have preferred it if he had chosen a more up-to-date place, or at least somewhere that didn’t mirror the little soul he has left.”

  Rick glanced back down the tunnel. It was empty. The girl wasn’t there. “Why did he have his offices moved?”

  “Security. I’m one of the few people who know this route. It’s easy to find when you know what to look for, but most people don’t even know it’s there to look for it. Quite an apt description of people’s approach to the truth, really.” She pointed at one of the letters on the walls. “A for anatomy. You should be able to remember that easily enough.” Beth winked at him.

  “Not the time or place, Beth.”

  “When did that ever stop us?”

  She turned abruptly into a corridor he hadn’t seen, wrong-footing him. He scrambled to catch up with her. For a woman who only came up to his shoulders, she walked at a pace that was uncomfortable. It was neither a fast walk nor a slow jog but something half a step shy of both.

  “Why’s Hamilton concerned about security? Didn’t he just win?”

  Beth slowed to a standstill. “Listen, Rick. The answers are not at the edges. Life is not an either-or choice, an in-out option. Survival is easier in the middle; that’s how animals protect their young and weak. That’s where most people feel safer. Progress, however, is made on the edges. The harsher those edges are, the more well-defined the middle becomes. It’s a reciprocal relationship, one moulds and contains the other.

  “Hamilton’s taken a risk. He’s put himself right on the edges and is yet to reclaim the middle ground. He’s climbed up the rungs of power in full view of the nation. He’s standing on a high diving board, blindfold, and has no way of saving face other than to jump into the deep end of the pool. He doesn’t even know if there’s water in it. He’s braver than I ever gave him credit for. Guess that’s one thing in his favour.”

  “And you’re OK with what’s going on? What happened to De Lette?”

  “I have to be. I couldn’t have stopped it on my own but this way I get to occasionally nudge it where I want. I can try and keep humankind’s natural tendencies in check.”

  She set off deeper into the underworld of Effrea-Tye and, after three more left turns along the A-marked corridors, Beth stopped in front of a heavily-studded door held to the walls with massive hinges. Two soldiers flanked the entrance. Above them were blackened sconces. Flexible light strips dangled from those fittings, painting the guards with a mottled light. A flinty-eyed captain stepped out of the shadows. He gave Rick a discreet nod before taking Beth’s ID card.

  “Who is he?” Rick whispered as the officer checked her ID with a small computer.

  “One of the few people I can almost sort of trust.” Beth shuffled close enough for him to smell her memory-laden perfume again. “The captain’s son is one of the survivors from Castle Brecan. He says you saved his life.”

  “Who?”

  “Sub-lieutenant Lacky.”

  Gun-grey eyes. The bomber. The stubble of Chel’s corpse rough against Rick’s skin. A bent coin. The smell of death and shit. Cherry-red bubbles on a young sub-lieutenant’s lips. Stann. Images and sensations staggered Rick where he stood, bringing beads of sweat up on his brow. Then the moment passed. He was back in front of the huge wooden doors, Beth, warm and fragrant, at his side.

  “Captain Lacky here feels he owes you.”

  “Brecan was a farce. I’m no hero.”

  “Scratch the surface of what you see and you’ll see most people are pretending to be themselves, too. Imposter syndrome is endemic.”

  “But—”

  Beth elbowed him in the ribs. “Honesty is all well and good, but let the legend breathe a little, it’ll make your life easier. And right now, it’ll make my life easier, too. It may even get us through this bloody door.”

  The captain waved them forwards.

  “Let’s go,” Beth said. “How do I look?” She tugged her jacket straight.

  “Fine.”

  She gave him a withering look. “That good?”

  “OK, great. To die for. Better?”

  Beth shook her head and pulled out her lipstick again. “I’m not really Hamilton’s type,” she said. A shudder ran through her body as she rolled the make-up on. “But those of us who aren’t living legends need every advantage we can get.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Red lipstick. It has a power that can succeed where diplomacy fails. Even I know that.”

  Captain Lacky hammered on the door with the heel of his hand. The echoes thumped down the damp corridors and the doors creaked open.

  15

  Rumours & Dreams

  The old strip light in the windowless cube of a room flickered. Rick spun in his chair and watched the ceiling tiles come back into focus. Stann had almost got it right: Rick hadn’t been promoted to take a fall, he’d been promoted to be forgotten. If De Lette had known he was about to be dethroned, he could have saved himself the trouble of signing through the order and used the ink for something useful, like drawing eyebrows on a worm. From corporal to major, it was as ridiculous now as it had been then.

  His spinning chair slowed. Rick took in the cluttered piles of computers and old hardware in the store cupboard-cum-office that had become his home. He knew how many keyboards there were, had counted all the monitors and servers, too. He hadn’t got round to the tiles on the ceiling but, long before he had been shown to this airless box, someone had kindly scratched the answer on the wooden desk: 144. The numbers were black with the years of grime, their own minuscule ecosystem. He didn’t want to think about the layers of DNA buried in those grooves. Neither did he want to think about the plastic bag lurking in the corner. It was stuffed full of cables and wires. When he got bored, maybe he could untangle that octopus orgy. He would have to be really bored to do that. Maybe this afternoon.

  The soles of his shoes squeaked as he set the chair spinning again. Grinning, he rubbed the bump on the back of his head. There had been a roundabout in Axeford he and Stann had once linked up to a motorbike engine. They’d learnt very quickly that the centrifugal forces on the inside of the roundabout were much weaker than those on the outside. Rick had almost cracked his skull open when the momentum had overpowered his grip and he’d been thrown into a nearby tree. His thoughts drifted back through roundabouts and motorbikes and horny octopuses and inked worms to what Beth had said about life being safer in the middle. That conversation in the tunnels had been almost two months ago. Rick’s meeting with the new president had never happened. Luke Hamilton had been, and remained, busy with pressing matters of state. Instead, Beth had introduced him to the Minister for War before taking him back to her office and stripping to her underwear to change for a formal occasion. It had been the last time he’d seen her, alone in a moonlit room that seemed full of lace, perfume and a large expanse of sofa.

  He’d sent her messages, tried to set up a meeting but hadn’t been able to get hold of her. With the troubles in the city, he’d been allowed one call to his family. It had been monitored by a man with the oddest face Rick had ever seen: almost all forehead with the rest of his features jostling for space in the little room that was left.

  Rick had been away from home for months. Brief though his time with Beth had been, he’d seen more of his ex than his wife and daughter. He wanted to go home, hold his daughter, be with his wife. But, increasingly, he fo
und himself thinking of Beth: her perfume, the challenge in her eyes, the invitation, the dare. It was an odd sensation which made his skin feel too warm.

  Rick adjusted the keyboard, fingers quivering as he attempted to focus on the work ahead. The Minister for War, or the Minister for Munitions and Punitions, as he was known in Sci-Corps, had assigned Rick back to the sun-fan project. The idea had been so popular, it had been rushed through the testing phase. The fans were ready to roll. Rick’s task? Debugging the new dragonfly-lens cameras which had been retrofitted into the fans and were supposed to communicate autonomously.

  “Great idea,” he muttered, tapping on the computer screen in front of him. “You save seconds and have a backup system that is harder to hack only because one camera doesn’t know what the other is doing.” The screen flickered. The images and text compressed down to a single line of black and white static. He groaned and smacked his forehead against the yellowing keyboard. “Why, why, why?” he moaned. “Dinosaur politicians, fossilised computers, stubborn friends and more hormones than are good for me.“

  “Sir?” A voice from behind him.

  Rick sprang to his feet, knocking the keyboard to the floor in the process. “Shit. Who— Private Marka?”

  The young woman who had escorted him to Beth’s sub-office after the incident with the Unsung smiled. “You remember my name, sir.”

  “It is distinctive.” The poor woman must have endured no end of jokes on account of that name and rank.

  Marka nodded, her stiff khaki collar cutting into the dark skin of her neck. “Yes, sir, I guess it is for you. It’s normal at home,” she added, handing him the keyboard. Her hands were shaking, too, he realised.

  “Home is?”

  “The Donian Mountains. The superstitions of my people were stifling me so I decided to come here. Your kind are a little more progressive than us. I wanted to enlist in Sci-Corps.” She clamped her mouth shut. “Apologies for speaking out of turn, Major. I’m not here to talk about myself. Do you need anything?”

  “Some information would be good.” He patted the chair next to him, frowning as he remembered Beth doing the same thing half naked. “Take a seat, Private. Tell me what’s happening outside. I have no phone and no internet. I’m not allowed out of the compound. I’ve been told it’s not safe.”

  Private Marka glanced at the open door. Rick kicked it shut. “I’m not asking for anything classified, just give me some news about what’s going on. Whoever said no news is good news has never had to survive in an information vacuum.”

  Marka sat bolt upright in the chair. Her back didn’t touch the ergonomically designed fabric that had been made to fit ‘anyone and everyone, the above-average person in all of us’, another example of the meaningless double-speak infesting their language. There were tens of thousands of these chairs. Everyone in any government or military department, no matter their rank, had one. They were very comfortable but with breakable, bespoke parts. If he ever saw Beth again, he could ask her which of her colleagues benefitted from that decision. She claimed to be the secretary that held the nation’s secrets. Maybe she knew the truth about how old Marka really was, too. She was not much out of her teens. The private had probably lied about her age to enlist, not that the army ever made any checks. She couldn’t be much older than the girl who had tried to kill him in Castle Brecan.

  That young woman had been back every night since, dancing through his sweat-filled dreams, twisting his bed sheets into knots of blame and guilt. Sometimes she had eyes, other times holes or bayonets or sockets full of swirling pools of blood. But, every night, she would offer him a bent coin before her stomach exploded in a shower of crimson.

  He pushed the dreams away and focused on the young woman in front of him. Lean and androgynous, any curves Marka may have had were flattened down by the uncompromising uniform. And before he knew it, Rick was thinking of Beth on the night when she had worn his military jacket, tie, hat and not much else.

  “Stop it,” he muttered, digging his nails into his palms. He had been away from home for too long. His eyes were drawing their own conclusions about what they weren’t seeing. Maybe he should start on the cable bag in the corner and ask Marka to retangle them as he untangled them. It could be his penance, his bottomless bucket to fill, his hair shirt. Though at this stage he wondered if he’d be better off with horse-hair underwear. Or maybe porcupine-quill pants.

  “Sir, are you OK?” Marka asked.

  “What?” Rick blinked. “I’m sorry, Private. I’m getting submarine-sickness in this room. This is the longest conversation I’ve had in days.”

  “I’m not sure what news to give you.” The words poured out in a rush. “Most of us have been confined to barracks but I’m still required to run errands between the president’s team and Sci-Corps. That’s how Ms Laudanum met me. She asked if I would help you.”

  Rick got the distant impression she was blushing.

  “Sub-Colonel Chester has been promoted to colonel,” Marka continued, her gaze sliding from his. “Some of the senior ranks are grumbling she’s too young for the job, but her record speaks for itself.”

  “That it does,” Rick agreed. Whether the record was Chester setting herself up for a political career as well as her military one was something else to consider. “Is that it?”

  “Curfew now starts at 1700 hours, 1800 if you have a permit, but they’re harder to get hold of than sundust. Most of Tye is a ruin: the Old Docks and the Sunken Clock Tower survived the worst of the violence. The Stone Bridge escaped unscathed. Most of the other bridges are still burning. You can see the smoke for miles.”

  “Any news on the old president, De Lette?”

  “No, sir. I know Mr Hamilton elected himself president using something called VIPER. I helped the team of lawyers with their IT. There was something strange about the whole process, though. The VIPER files had recently been updated by someone using an electronic backdoor. I was told not to worry about it. Probably just Hamilton,” she added.

  Marka may be young but she was not stupid. The suspicion on her face was dangerously obvious. “VIPER?” he asked. “Never heard of it.” He typed it into his computer.

  “Violent Incident Protocol Emergency Rules,” Marka replied. “It’s an old law that has only been used once before. It was introduced by the Nation First Party last century.”

  “Never heard of them either.”

  His computer spat a random series of codes across the screen and shut itself down. Rick swore under his breath.

  Marka was playing with the end of her tie, smoothing the shirt down across her stomach. Just like Beth had done that night so long ago. As the sirens started crooning in his head, Rick kicked the chair into a circle again. The bag full of rutting octopus cables winked at him. He fixed his eyes on the ceiling tiles: twelve rows of twelve. 144. He started counting.

  “Most people in Ailan haven’t heard of VIPER,” Marka said, “and the Nation First party changed their name to something more acceptable. They wanted something that would appeal to the rich, conservative people they were courting who shared their ideals of a republic. In the end, the poisonous bickering within the party ripped it apart from the inside out.”

  “How do you know this when I don’t?”

  “We in the Donian Mountains have had the VIPER law quoted at us more times than we care to count, each time you came to claim more land. We remember our history. We learn from it.”

  The chair slowed. Rick smiled at the young soldier in a way he hoped wasn’t patronising. Or lecherous. “Your people have a fearsome reputation.”

  “We were just protecting our own.” Her words echoed those Beth had said to him not so long ago.

  “‘A little dog is no less territorial than a big one, never underestimate them,’” Rick quoted. “That was what the soldiers sent to your mountains were told about dealing with the Donian tribes.”

  Marka’s chin rose. “Your soldiers called us dogs. It was supposed to be an insult. F
or us it was a compliment. The animals we share our homes with are our second best friends.”

  “Who’s your first best friend, Private Marka?”

  “Come to the mountains with me and I’ll show you, sir.” This time, the blush was obvious.

  Rick kept the smile on his face, trying to take the heat out of the situation. Marka reminded him of Thryn. There were elements of the pig-headed stubbornness of his daughter, too. Would Rose grow up as docile as her wolf of a mother, or learn to contain it like Marka? Maybe Rose would rebel against her genes in her own quiet way by toeing the line? He’d tried to discuss this with Thryn but she’d asked him to let life happen as it will. Some people made peace with the world very easily, others never stopped fighting that battle.

  The image he had of Rose sitting on Thryn’s lap, both of them mimicking each other’s playful pout, melted. Into it stepped Beth. She was watching her cousin’s kids playing, a look of distaste smeared across her face. Rick swore as the dull throbbing in his shoulder started up again. “And the former president? Are you sure there’s no news?”

  “De Lette? Nothing concrete. Most say he’s dead. There are rumours he’s holed up with the resistance that has sprung up, other whispers that he’s been thrown out of a plane over the South Sea. Some say a distant relative in Mennai is sheltering him.”

  “And I’m sure someone else believes he cycled to the moons to hide in one of the mines. He’s probably waving at us now.”

  Marka smiled politely. “I don’t know, sir, there’s an information embargo in force. All non-essential internet activity has been shut down. Many self-employed people and small businesses have gone bust. Some of the Free Towns have had all power cut.”

  The chair clattered into the desk as he jumped up. This was too much. He was stuck in this office shuffling lines of code across a screen as his country was being turned into maggot meat. Marka scrambled to her feet.