by Andy Graham
“Nice.” He handed the pistol back to Kayle.
The Donian man wiped the handle clean with a silk cloth. Inlaid into the wood were thin spirals that looked like roses. “My grandfather gave the weapons to my big brother when he joined the Hoyden.”
“I remember the Hoyden, tattooed with scars and attitude.”
“Grandfather was from the old mould, believed in belt-buckle discipline. He was so proud that my brother was embracing the old ways. Then my brother had kids and a change of heart. It was easy to get rid of the pistols, harder for him to get rid of the decorative scars. Seems some of us spend our adulthood trying to outlive our childhood.”
“And the grandfather?”
A fond smile crossed Kayle’s face. “Stopped talking to my brother. It wasn’t long before he was ignoring me, too, just in case going soft was catching.” The smile faded. “Last I heard my brother had disappeared. His kids and partner are beside themselves.”
Ray squeezed the other man’s shoulder. “We’ll add him to the list of lost but soon-found.” He gestured to the pistols. “Do all the Donian have weapons like these? Or is it just your family?”
“Most of us have access to something.” Kayle sighted the pistol on the distant fisher gull. “Electronic stuff like your new rifles don’t work under the Donian Mountains. That’s why we have so many older weapons: revolvers, crossbows and so on.”
“That would’ve been good information to have before my squad went into the tunnels.”
Ray wasn’t sure if Kayle’s shrug was meant as an agreement, an apology, or as if to say that the fate of men from a legion that had terrorised his people for so long was of little concern to him.
“We keep these older weapons for when we have to hunt underground,” Kayle said.
“Hunt men or monsters?”
“Are they not sometimes the same?”
“That depends on whose side they are fighting.”
“Possibly.” There was a hint of a slur in Kayle’s voice that was almost Mennai. He held up his revolver. “Where did you learn to handle such a weapon?”
“AWT in EBT.”
Kayle gave Ray a sour look and popped the cylinder of the pistol open. His eyes not leaving Ray’s, he thumbed in six more bullets almost as quickly as Ray could count them in. The Donian Beret may be Rose’s lap dog, but he still had teeth.
“Alternative Weapons Training in Extended Basic Training,” Ray said. “I had to survive the latter to join the Rivermen, the 10th. I had to do the former to survive the latter. We—” He stumbled over the word. Words had no real weight but they wore a groove in your brain and your tongue that was hard to escape; just as it was hard to refer to the recently deceased in the past tense. “They,” he continued, “the 10th, knew about your antique weapons. They didn’t know why you used them.”
The moonlight tipping the waves flashed from white to a deep red. It was the colour of the sores and the weals on the flesh of the Monster-under-the-Mountain, as it had ripped their patrol to pieces.
“I guess they do now,” Ray finished.
Kayle clapped him on the shoulder and left to help prep the chopper. Ray bent to finish packing his gear, cinching the straps on the backpack so hard they left marks in his fingers. Amongst all the debris and gear the Resistance had stolen and looted, he had found some equipment from his old legion.
Stock went missing in the military. Bullets sprouted wings, bombs disappeared. One quartermaster had even complained that a nuclear submarine had been stolen (misborrowed was the term officials used if caught). Ray was hoping this gear had been stolen, rather than peeled off the corpses of previous colleagues. He set the rifle to one side (refusing to acknowledge the thought that an old-fashioned weapon such as Kayle’s could have made a difference under the Donian Mountains), and fastened the ties of his revolver holster to his leg. That was when he became aware of someone standing over him.
He knew who it was. The same presence had woken him when he’d been a child, watching him as he pretended to sleep. He’d never worked out how he’d known she was there; the darkness hadn’t hung in the right way, the silence had a hole in it. There’d been nights when she’d stolen into his room with (and as quietly as) the moonlight, and left before the sun could warm the stone path leading to the house.
He got to his feet. “Rose.”
She had a fragility about her. It looked wrong on a woman that had been clothed in defiance and rebellion for longer than he had been alive.
“Rose,” she repeated. “That’ll have to do for now, I guess.”
Her quiet words were lost in a clatter of metal. The noise was drowned out by the sheepish silence that nipped at its heels. Dylan and Seren, the Mennai twins, had dropped a crateful of flares on the floor and were now trying to make light of the matter while arming the sweat off their white and black foreheads.
“I need to talk to you, Ray. And no, it can’t wait,” she added, cutting his impatient expression off before it got to words.
“About the intel from Vena?” That name felt odd attached to a face identical to the president, like the wrong key in the right lock.
She didn’t move.
“Talk to me, Rose. That chopper’s going up in five and I’m going to be on it, whether you tell me this new secret or not.”
Behind them, one of the twins, Dylan, was climbing up the ladder. Kayle’s crossbow and a quiver full of quarrels bounced on his back. The lewd-joke kid (and Ray had owned bars of soap older than that boy) was peering down the barrel of a gun.
“Four minutes.”
And then these people were going to be his backup. He shuddered. Martinez limped into the room.
“Hey, Tino,” Ray called. The man ignored him and clambered up the ladder to the chopper. He knew Ray’s plan. He liked it even less than Ray did.
Rose stepped over to the open door where Ray had fired Kayle’s antique pistol.
“Three minutes.”
The steel cables wavered between the towers, humming a discordant note in the sea air.
“Two things,” she said, lowering her voice.
There was another crash, an ugly shearing noise of metal on metal. It made every hair on Ray’s body stand on end. He twisted on his dodgy ankle, froze when he thought it was going to collapse, breathed a quick sigh of relief when it held, and turned that sigh into an expletive-filled yell for whoever to fix whatever whichever idiot was breaking.
He checked his watch. “Two minutes.”
The circle of silence settled back around Rose, a hole in the hive of activity that swarmed through the room.
“One minute. Enough,” he muttered. “I’m not going to stand here and watch you breathe. Time to go.”
“I told you I owed the Donian. I didn’t say why.” The words were crisp and staccato. “The tribes took me in when I ran away as a teenager. They provided me with the shelter and love I refused to accept from my mother, Thryn. She . . .” Her voice cracked. “I wish you could have met her. My mother was everything I wasn’t. She would have doted on you and enjoyed what she called her revenge at the same time: watching me as I dealt with young children of my own.”
The words picked up pace. “She tried everything she could with me. She did everything she should have done, but I refused to see it or accept it. It was a particularly spiteful teenage phase I went through where my happiness was directly related to her unhappiness. I thought claiming the Donian understood me in a way she didn’t and couldn’t would hurt her. It didn’t. She is the only person I have ever met who truly believed in live and let live.”
“Why are you telling me this now?”
Rose squeezed her eyes shut and pushed on, as if she were trying to remember a speech she had prepared. “Much as she missed me, my mother, Thryn, was happy that I was content in the mountains. That happiness drove me into more desperate acts. Then when I was fifteen, she died. Three years later, David Prothero ended up in my bed. I think that was one of those desperate acts, too.”
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Ray’s eyebrows shot up. “You slept with David Prothero? The dead guy?”
“Don’t be dumb, Ray. Thirty years ago he wasn’t dead. Very far from it, in fact,” she said, pink spirals blooming in her cheeks.
Ray grimaced. “Stop. Please!”
“Do you think you were all carried into this world by fisher gulls and left in crisp white swaddling on the chimneys?”
“No, it’s just—”
“David was a very charming, very charismatic man, just a little more messed up than I thought.”
“That’s what Brooke called him: charismatic.”
“He had to be to survive in that cesspit of a government.”
“Unless he knew which closet their skeletons hid in.”
“You’re learning, Ray.”
“Thanks, Rose. But still.” Ray shuddered. “Prothero?”
She started ticking points off on her fingers. “I was young. I made a mistake. David could charm snakes into a basket. It happened once, that’s all. I didn’t make a habit of it. I promised it’d never happen again. Then I met your father. You know the rest.”
“Are you saying my twin and I were a mistake?”
Rose put her hands on her hips and cocked her head to one side. “Are you looking for another fight or are you arguing like a girl just to spite me?”
“Like a girl? The quest for equality doesn’t extend to insults, does it?”
“Don’t be so precious.”
The fisher gull burst into the room, trailing bloody feathers behind it. It disappeared up the ladder to the helicopter. Hoots of laughter and swear words exploded through the hatch.
“Why are you telling me this now?”
Rose stood parade-ground stiff. “I’ve made too many mistakes. Some I know of, some I can now see, others are lurking, biding their time. I need to start unmaking some of those mistakes.”
Ray gestured to his watch. “You can fill me in on your past when I get back. We don’t have time. I—”
“Brooke’s alive.”
The bubble of chaos in the room popped. He and his mother may well have been back in his small childhood room in Tear with the ill-fitting darkness. Kayle’s shouts were in black and white, not colour. The slow thud of the rotors above them became the distant thump of a star fly batting against a light bulb.
“Alive?” His voice sounded like someone else’s.
“I saw her, the last time I was in the Donian village.”
“When?”
“Two days ago.”
“Is she OK?”
Rose’s long black coat, alarmingly similar to the garments the Laudanums favoured, fell in rigid folds. The cloth seemed immobile, impervious to the sea wind that flapped through the door and tugged at the cloth. “Is she OK?” Beth said. “Yes, I think so.”
The noises of the loading bay were creeping back through their bubble of isolation. Kayle was tapping his wrist. Ray had insisted on a quick take off, quicker than Kayle had wanted. Ray was in danger of blowing his own plan.
“Brooke.” Her name no longer rang in hues of crimson and amber but the bright blue light of dawn. “She’s alive.”
“She’s . . .” Rose cleared her throat. “When she was found in the caves, she was weak, so weak she’d been given up for dead. But in some respects there was more life in her than there ever had been.” Reflected moonlight sparked out of eyes that were fierce and proud. “Just before you were pulled out of the Weeping Woods I heard that her condition had worsened. No one knows why. But she’s—” She clamped her teeth around the next word.
Kayle materialised out of the self-imposed fog that surrounded them and grasped Ray’s arm. “She’s coming,” he said to Ray and shinned up the ladder to the chopper.
Rose grabbed Ray’s sleeve. “When we failed to rescue Stella’s family, I decided not to tell you about Brooke. I thought you’d be torn between making the decision of going to save Stella’s family or back to Brooke. I was trying to protect you like I always have. I’m too far lost in this labyrinth of errors I’ve made for myself to know which way to turn.”
The thumping of the rotor blades was increasing in speed. The vibrations of the air in their box room beat at his eardrums. Kayle’s red face appeared at the top of the stairs. His bulging eyes screamed at Ray to move.
“There’s something else you need to know, Ray.”
He barely heard her. Brooke’s alive. “It can wait.”
“No, it can’t.”
“Your secret has lasted this long. It can wait a little longer. Brooke’s alive, that’s good enough for me.”
Without a backwards glance, he scampered up the ladder and slammed the door closed.
25
Flinty-eyed Fury
The metal box that held Rose shuddered. Rivets shook in the walls, quicker and quicker in an agitated tussle with the aged metal. Then it was over.
The rotor wash flattened out the moonlit-crested waves of the ocean. They, in turn, distorted the reflections of Lesau and strip-mining-scarred Melesau into grimacing faces. The fisher gull squawked at the retreating helicopter and sidestepped back to the feast of red, purple and grey it had stashed in a corner between two girders.
Rose, staring at the smeared trail of moonlight the chopper left on the waves, balled her hands into fists. “You need to know that the man who has taken Stella’s family, the man who I fear you want to kill, is your brother. The VP is your older brother by two years. I gave him up when he was not much more than a baby. His father was David Prothero. Brooke is pregnant with your child.”
The words fell easily from her mouth. She had said them enough times in front of a mirror, toothbrush in hand and mouth full of foam, wearing this expression or that. She’d practised it until she thought she wouldn’t be able to stop saying it once she started.
She had failed.
When the door to the corridor clanged open, Rose didn’t budge.
When Stella, dressed in military fatigues, hair tied back into a thick cord, her face glowing with fear and determination, burst into the room, Rose didn’t flinch. When Stella heard the distant thud of the chopper fleeing the towers, Rose didn’t notice. But when Stella realised Ray had tricked her, had left without her, and she started howling with fury, Rose reacted.
There was a way to smash down the walls of this labyrinth she had made for herself. And Stella, spitting flinty-eyed fury against the youngest of Rose’s two surviving children, would help her do it.
The fisher gull on the distant tower, gorged and sated on its slower cousins, cocked a beady eye across the waves and shrieked.
Stella swung the iron pipe like a bat. It slammed into the metal rungs leading up to where the helicopter had so recently stood. The harsh vibrations stung her fingers. They threatened to shake her teeth free of her skull. The pipe whistled through the air again. The sound of metal on metal whiplashed within the small rusting cube of a room.
“Why didn’t you stop him?” she shouted. “You knew I wanted to go.”
Rose didn’t reply, her long coat flapping around her ankles. She was as close to the open doorway as you could get without falling, a strong breeze away from plunging down into the water attacking the tower supports.
“Rose?”
The ugly caw of the lone fisher gull answered.
“Rose? Did you hear me?”
The pipe clattered to the floor. Rose hadn’t moved. Stella called her name again. Rose’s breath came in puffy, twisting clouds. It mixed with the tendrils of sea fog slinking into the room. “I’m sorry, Stella. I was too focused on telling my son what he needs to know. I didn’t realise you weren’t on the bird.”
“The what?”
“The helicopter. My people like these military terms. I encourage it, it adds weight to our cause.”
There was a tone in Rose’s voice that quieted Stella’s anger. It was flat, unemotional, but somehow charged with sparks of barely restrained emotion. Years of dealing with people in pain, hours of telling
patients both good and bad news kicked in before she realised what she was happening. “How did it go with Ray?”
“OK, I think. I took that first step towards making peace with him and my past. It was more of a stumble than a step, though,” she added.
Rose tapped the soles of her shoes on the steel threshold. The dark water below chopped and churned, reaching up to her in purple-green plumes. “Every time I try and do what I think is best, my good intentions lurch left rather than go right. I’m beginning to think that there is no point. Why shouldn’t we just roll over onto our backs and let the Fates tickle our belly when they feel kind, and step on our tails the rest of the time?”
Is that a dog analogy, or cat? Horse maybe? I’m a city girl, Stella protested to her inner critic.
“The elite always get what they want,” Rose said. “Always. We can protest, squeak and cluck about fair and unfair, right and wrong, but nothing changes.” The muted sparks in her voice were gone, leaving it as empty as a hangman’s noose waiting to be filled.
Stella sidled closer. Could she grab Rose in time if she decided to jump?
“Is there a point?” Rose asked. She repeated the question in ever quieter tones until it was lost in the sounds of the waves.
“Rose,” Stella said, sliding closer. “There’s always a point. While we breathe, there is a point. We—”
“Is there a point?”
A thump of air batted across the room. Stella did a double take. The president had just walked into the room, holding Emily’s hand. Then Stella’s brain caught up. She shot Vena an imploring look. Vena’s fingers tightened on the manila envelope she was holding.