by Carrie Patel
Jane rubbed the smooth edge of a thumbnail, letting the information sink in. “You left the door open.”
“Of course I did,” he said, eying her oddly. “You might not have been discovered for another day or two had I not.” Given the tangle of mysteries, she was pleased to have answered at least one question almost by herself. Another soon occurred to her.
“What about Hollens? How did the assassin kill him without any complications?”
“Hollens kept a staff.” He looked at her, waiting.
Her eyes widened as realization dawned on her. “And you’ve had people on the inside.” He only nodded. “People like you.”
“It wasn’t me. But yes, people like me.”
She frowned, deep creases lining her forehead and the area around her mouth. “You didn’t do it, but you knew about it. All of these people dead, and you let it happen.”
He stared back at her. “You assume they were innocent, Jane. Don’t.”
“Whether they were innocent is a different question from whether they deserved to die, Roman. Who deserves to be murdered?”
“Those who allow others to be murdered.” His nostrils flared, but his voice lacked the fire of a zealot’s conviction. Instead, Jane heard controlled reason and exhaustion.
“Does that mean you’d count yourself in that group?” Jane asked. The question sounded peevish when it left her lips, and as soon as she saw Roman’s sad smile she regretted it. Jane shook her head. “But what about the bomb victims? Or do you expect me to believe that they were also guilty of something?”
Roman’s features darkened with a quiet fury. “There weren’t supposed to be any. The bombs were intended to scatter the guards and force people indoors… and they were supposed to detonate on the outskirts of town. I suppose I was a fool to believe that the plan would be so clean.” He stared into the fire, fidgeting with something in his right pocket.
She hesitated, watching Roman’s fierce distraction before deciding on another line of questioning. “And the other night…”
He looked up again, his features almost relaxed. “An attempt to drive you away. Unsuccessful, apparently,” he said with a rueful smile.
“And your attack was staged?”
He rested a hand on the mantel, gazing back into the fireplace. “Olivia realized after speaking with you and that reporter that my name was under suspicion, and something had to be done to remove it. The attack was staged, but the wounds were real,” he said, drawing a finger across his side and turning the fading bruise on his face to her. “It had to be convincing.”
Jane winced. “That’s quite a commitment to your cause.”
“Only what was necessary. They have the plan, and I’m prepared to see it through to the end.”
Jane shook her head, feeling her impatience build. “But I still don’t understand who ‘they’ are or what your part in all this is.”
“Keep your voice down,” he said. Roman held a hand to her and waited, listening. “You’re dead if they catch you here, do you understand?”
She gritted her teeth. “That’s why I’m leaving tonight, remember? Leaving home for a place where I’ll have no money, no job, and no ties to anyone. And since I am, you might as well tell me all of it.”
He took a deep breath. “I’d hate to send you away with unanswered questions, especially knowing how far you’ll go to resolve them. This begins fourteen years ago with the deaths of Councilor and Lady Sato, which I trust you are old enough to remember.”
“Yes.”
He looked slightly relieved. “The Council had, through the research of its historians, learned of an ancient library from antebellum civilization. The Library of Congress, as it was called, was reputed to have the largest collection of books, essays, and information in the world at the time of the catastrophe, and its stores included all subjects: history, philosophy, science, technology. It was the latter category that interested the Council most. The Council learned that the Library, if it still existed, would not be far from Recoletta. Less than two hundred miles, among the ruins of a forgotten capital.
“The majority of the councilors, under the leadership of the already powerful Ruthers, were in favor of finding this Library and its hidden stores of knowledge. The only opposition came from Councilor Sato, who not only resisted the plan, but forbade it. As Councilor Sato was the head of the Directorate of Preservation and highly respected among peers and citizens, this posed a problem for Ruthers and the other seven.” Roman pawed a stubbled cheek before continuing.
“They tried to persuade him, but he declared that if they pursued the project he would announce it to the public. His decision was final, and the rest of the Council realized that there was no way to excavate the Library with Sato in place. So, a handful of councilors, led by Ruthers, arranged for his assassination. The others turned a blind eye.”
That pit of suspicion in her stomach hardened like a stone. “They killed one of their own?”
He nodded. “For a secret which they saw fit to use and he wanted to keep buried, yes. And they covered their tracks. They ensured the speedy execution of their instrument and proceeded with the excavation. But there was one figure they grossly underestimated.”
“You?”
A ghost of a smile crossed his lips. “Hardly. Jakkeb Sato was the councilor’s only child, and suspicious of a plot, Councilor Sato broke his oath of secrecy and told his son of the Library and the dispute. Days later, Castor and his wife were assassinated, and Jakkeb was left with his grief and knowledge of the betrayal that had caused it.”
Again, Roman smiled joylessly. “We had been friends since boyhood, but his behavior was inscrutable to me. He accepted no comfort and ceased speaking almost entirely. I didn’t know what to say to him.”
Jane frowned. “You mean he didn’t tell you about his plan?”
“No. I don’t even know exactly when he figured it out. But one night, he walked into a burning storehouse and everyone, including me, took it for a suicide.
“He was far too shrewd for that, and I should have known it. But I remembered the pain of losing my own parents and believed him dead until he reappeared to me seven years later.” In Roman’s wide eyes, Jane detected a hint of mingled fear and respect. “Jakkeb explained the truth behind his parents’ deaths as well as how he had spent his time since then, wandering and mixing with a resourceful breed of lowlifes: smugglers, assassins, thieves, and rabble rousers. He was already planning his retaliation against the Council, and he wanted me to know about it. Since that time, he has been growing in strength and using his considerable influence to build a following. He’s advancing to take Recoletta with his army tonight. They’re surrounding the city and moving on Dominari Hall, where most of the Council will have holed up.”
“A coup?” The word stuck like peanut butter in Jane’s dry mouth.
“Much more. Not only a shift in the regime, but an all-out revolution that will change the way Recoletta is governed forever. Never in our history, nor in the known history of any other city, has the top been replaced by the base.” Again, Jane heard awe tinged with low-frequency terror in his voice. His eyes returned to hers, and he seemed to recognize the cautious dismay in her face. “If it eases your mind, Jane, consider this vengeance for your parents.”
“What?”
“Ruthers, who orchestrated the Sato murders, was also behind your parents’ deaths. They wanted to see him removed from the Council, but they dug too deep for his liking.” He held up his hands. “If I knew more, I’d tell you, but that’s all.” Jane swallowed, limbering her tongue before asking more.
“And what’s your part in all this?” She dreaded what the answer might be.
“I’ve been Jakkeb’s informant and inside man from the beginning. We were friends through our childhood and youth, so he relied on my abilities and my sympathies when he explained his plan. Once this conversion reaches its bloody conclusion, I’m to serve as his lieutenant and right-hand man.”
“So you’re doing this for a promotion.” She felt a stab of pain somewhere indefinable, as if he had betrayed her as well as his colleagues.
Roman scowled. “Miss Lin, you surely cannot think me so base. You of all people should know that I don’t savor the limelight. Jakkeb has good reason, and I would be cold-hearted indeed not to sympathize. After all, his parents raised me as their own.”
“Yet Councilor Sato didn’t tell you anything about the Library.”
He ignored her. “Furthermore, his revolution has a certain sense to it. The current regime is on its way down, and the Council can smell it.” Roman looked at Jane’s puzzled expression. “Corrupt, inept, and desperate. If you haven’t noticed it before, consider how they’ve handled the crisis of the past few weeks.”
“And what are you going to do tonight? Are you staying here to ride it out?” she asked, hopeful.
He bowed his head. “No, I have a part to play as well. I’ve been here, awaiting the appointed time and preparing.”
“Preparing?” Wordlessly, Roman pointed to a small table where Jane saw a crystal decanter filled with brandy and a matching tumbler. “That hardly seems prudent,” she said flatly.
He stiffened, his mouth set in a firm line. “I’m not a drunkard, Jane, but I don’t look forward to what I must do tonight. Still, I know the role I’ve been assigned.”
“So you’re going to jump from being the hatchet man of one regime to the hatchet man of the next.”
“I know my strengths.”
She took a step toward him. “Jakkeb Sato and his followers may have murdered the guilty, but they’ve also sacrificed innocent people to their cause. You can’t pretend that they’re the good guys.”
He squared his shoulders against her, gazing down and into her eyes. “I don’t. But tell me this: when there are no good guys, which bad guys do you choose?” She fell silent. “There are no heroes, Miss Lin. Only survivors.”
“If that were true, you wouldn’t be risking yourself to save me.”
Roman glared intently at a spot on the carpet. “You should be going now, Jane.”
Instead, she pressed her advantage. “Roman, you don’t have to get caught in this violent cycle. You talk as if you have no choices, but you’re free to go whenever you want. People aren’t fixed in one place from birth, and their fates aren’t written in the stars. You’re only a victim to the traps that you let yourself stay in,” she said.
“Then why do people live out their lives in the same miserable cycles? If we can choose, why do we always choose so poorly? Do you really think that whatever catastrophe sent our world underground was so different from the one that we’re embarking upon now?”
Jane could feel hot tears of frustration beginning to boil up behind her eyes. “Just come with me tonight. You don’t have to spend your life gambling on the lesser of two evils. You could still redeem yourself. Let me help you get out.”
Now she was looking away in an attempt to hide her misery. Tenderly, he raised her chin with a knuckle. “Don’t you understand, Jane? You are my good deed.”
* * *
Hours before, Jakkeb Sato had recounted the same history to Liesl Malone with, necessarily, a different perspective. She had listened in silence as the whole mystery of the past sixteen days unraveled before her in a way that even she had not foreseen. The double surprise of Jakkeb Sato and his revelations numbed her pain, and she was able to put Sundar’s death out of her mind for the moment.
“What I still don’t understand,” she said, trying to put everything in its right place, “is why Councilor Sa– your father opposed the rest of the Council.”
Sato shot her a crooked grin. “The councilors wanted to uncover the Library’s secrets, but only for themselves. These are the tyrants who would entertain us with Shelley’s odes but keep from us his ‘Queen Mab’.”
“Who?”
Sato seemed to ignore the question. “A visionless oligarchy. No respect for the history they would unearth and no discipline in using it. They would create storehouses of vaccines only for themselves if they could. Textbooks on suppression and propaganda, but none on philosophy.” He paused, tempering his fervor with a thoughtful, confiding turn. “Before the catastrophe, people had weapons that you and I can hardly imagine: bombs capable of destroying the Earth in a single detonation and plagues that could wipe out all life in a matter of days, grown like crops and kept in glass. Some believe they still exist, also buried in remote locations. Can you imagine these weapons in the hands of a man like Ruthers?”
“But it wasn’t to be just Ruthers. There’s the partnership with South Haven.”
Sato’s wild red hair waved and trembled. “The South Haven delegations are a farce. The Council only invited them as a show of power, to convince them to submit quietly. Ruthers wants to reconstruct an empire, and that’s what my father opposed. He believed that these secrets had been buried for a reason and that the conflicts and the fear that they recall are best left forgotten. To him, the remembrance was a disease, and if we were to allow it to drive our ambition or taint our good sense, we would become as corrupted and as damned as the ancients.” Again Sato paused, a quiet grin spreading across his face while his eyes flashed with inner fire. “But he was wrong, too.
“The Council was corrupted by their greed, but my father was naïve in his reluctance. He failed to see how this Library can advance civilization. The antebellum peoples engineered their own downfall with their addiction to power and their dependence on weapons, but we know better.” He picked up speed, his voice rising in pitch as he brought Malone to his thesis. “There is so much that we can learn from them, and, with the record of their mistakes, we can surpass them. Instead of hiding in our pitiful caves, keeping to ourselves, we can return to enlightenment and once again open ourselves to the world. That knowledge is a birthright – not just of the few, but of many.” The blaze of the fanatic burned behind his words.
Careful not to douse him with her doubt, Malone edged into an objection. “But it’s done that way in every city-state I’ve ever heard of,” she said, watching his eyes for a dangerous flare. “Perhaps we aren’t ready to open Pandora’s box.”
“Long ago, I would have agreed, but I spent fourteen years traveling, planning, and seeing the world. Once you’ve seen all the lands between the mountains and the oceans, you can never go back to the cave. I was born into privilege and I completed my education as part of the chaff. I’ve lived both extremes, and I know that a person isn’t born into his station, he becomes it. And we can become the people that restore civilization.” He leaned in, a few red wisps swaying in front of his eyes. “Would you like to know something else? This isn’t the first revolution in which the substrate overthrows the top. That’s another thing the whitenails and their Council don’t want you to know. History isn’t stable, and revolution has been done before, and successfully.” He gazed beyond Malone with a distant, hungry look.
“And you think Recoletta is prepared for one now?”
“Not just prepared, but ripe. The Council has proven its feebleness and its depravity,” he said. “They began the murders, but I will finish them. You know, I could never even bring myself to hate Mortimer Stanislau. He may have killed my parents, but he was just another instrument of the Council.”
“How exactly does Roman Arnault figure into this?”
Sato smiled knowingly. “My old friend had risen in the ranks without quite joining them by the time of my first return to Recoletta. I know that you’ve been following him. He is a truly brilliant man, and the Council saw that. He served them well, of course, and they were eager to make use of his unorthodox talents. Of course, the problem arises when you begin to see a weapon like Roman Arnault as distinctly your own. The Council had relied so heavily on him as their spy that they could not ever envision him as anyone else’s spy.”
“Then he was the one providing the keys,” Malone said. Sato nodded. Malone asked the next natural question. “And what m
akes you so sure that he’ll always be your spy?”
“Who says I am? He’s my friend, but I know better than to believe that I can control him. He’s a fierce individualist, and I respect that. I have to. Roman Arnault will stay by my side as long as he believes that it best serves his purpose, whatever that may be. Permit me to say that I know his limits – where I can push, and what he would not allow.” He paused, meditating. “I’ll allow him the freedom he requires, and I’ll keep him close. I know him well enough to make sure that I never give him a reason to betray me. He’s not prone to slavish devotion, and it is partially for that reason that I value his alliance so highly… and his friendship.” He smiled at Malone, looking sly and pleased at sharing a confidence. “I know that you don’t harbor a high opinion of him, but there is no one I would rather have loyal to me than Roman Arnault. Almost no one, that is.” He turned a sharp eye on her as the fall breeze rippled between them.
“Inspector Malone, I’ve been following you for months now, and I am impressed. In fact, it was downright flattering that the Council had to take you off the case. I’m offering you a place among my ranks. Like Roman, I want to keep you close.”
Malone was speechless. At first she thought he was joking, but the seriousness of the situation began to sink in, along with the realization that Jakkeb Sato did not seem like a man accustomed to joking. “I am an inspector of the Municipal Police,” she replied, measuring her words carefully. “For all intents and purposes, I still serve the regime you want to tear down.”