The Buried Life

by Carrie Patel

  “I’m afraid I have some bad news. It appears that the initial outbreaks of fighting caused some confusion among several squads of the Guard. One platoon set upon Callum Station under the supposition that your people were responsible, and several officers were killed. Including Chief Johanssen. I’m sorry, Malone.”

  She nodded dumbly, and he left her standing alone as he returned to the mass of followers gathered at the entrance to the rotunda. “In less than an hour, we will celebrate our victory as the new and rightful governors of Recoletta. All of the councilors have been accounted for. Our only remaining chore is to check Mr Arnault’s progress with the task appointed to him.” When he spoke, Sato lifted his arms and raised his chin, addressing his listeners with a demagogue’s grandeur. “Roman, is it done?”

  Arnault gestured to the curved hallway opposite them where a rosy light tumbled forth. Sato checked over his shoulder where Malone stood, silently gazing at a seam in the floor. “Inspector? Will you be so kind as to tell us what you see at the end of the hall?” He beamed as she trotted to the room to check. Her footsteps receded to a dull echo as she reached the end of the hall, disappearing from the view of those in the rotunda. They stopped, and silence fell while Malone surveyed the room.

  “It’s a small parlor,” she said, looking inside.

  “But what’s in it?” Sato paused, waiting for Malone’s reply. He cleared his throat. “The body, Malone,” he said, retaining admirable poise. “Augustus Ruthers’s lifeless corpse.”

  “Is not here, sir.”

  His face fell and the triumph evaporated from his voice. “What?” Dashing over with every attempt at maintaining self-possession, he ducked into the room. “Not here? Arnault just said that little scrubber did it herself!” Overturning chairs and desks in a rage, he uncovered nothing but dust, and his nostrils were already irritated by the dissipating smell of gunpowder. He slammed a gloved fist into the wall and let out a bellow of rage that echoed into the crowded rotunda.

  From his seat in the middle of the floor, Roman Arnault threw back his head and laughed at an outcome that even he had not foreseen.

  Several layers of dirt and stone above them, Jane and Fredrick continued their flight, barely having reached the northern boundary of Recoletta. On the edge of a forest of towering pines, they crossed to where the squish and crunch of soil and vegetation replaced the thunder of paved streets and fled north under the cover of a starless night.

  Epilogue

  Jane and Fredrick tripped and dragged each other through the woods, breathing heavy plumes of steam, until they found the farming commune. Or rather, the commune’s farmers found them. A pair of game trappers in the woods heard something crashing in the underbrush that was too talkative to be an injured deer. They found Jane and Fredrick and took them back to the commune, the larger of the two men carrying Fredrick like an injured lamb. Inside the cabin and next to a crackling fire, Jane was surprised at how cozy the aboveground dwelling actually was.

  An elderly woman joined them within minutes of their arrival, shepherding Fredrick to a nearby table and examining his wound with startlingly clear eyes. Her leathery face remained impassive as she removed his shirt and surveyed the wound, and when she administered a shot of whiskey and placed a gauze-wrapped spoon in his mouth, he swallowed and bit down obediently. Yet he felt less pain than he would have thought as the woman’s nimble fingers worked over his body, removing the bullet and cleaning the hole it left. His body felt distant, and he focused on the faces hovering over him, Jane and the two trappers. Hers was a pale moon next to nebulae of swarthy skin and tangled beards.

  No questions were asked, and the exiled pair spent a week in the company of the surface-dwellers while Fredrick recovered. Their hosts were cheery and hospitable, and crowds of small children showed up every morning, their bright faces peering through windows at the new arrivals. Jane was awed by the simple temerity of the children, questioning them both about the underground with wide-eyed interest (generally about the monsters and ghosts that supposedly lived below the earth) until parents and older siblings came by, smiling shyly, to shoo them away. As Fredrick’s health improved, Jane began to take leisurely walks with him, the cloud of children always following a few yards behind.

  Even more striking to Jane was the intensity of the smells and tastes around her. She had rarely experienced more than the taste of salt- or ice-packed meat, preserved for sale and consumption in Recoletta, but twice a week the communers ate freshly slaughtered game and livestock, a delicacy generally only affordable to the whitenails. The fruits and vegetables, too, had a hue and a flavor Jane had rarely tasted in her years in the city, and she found herself chewing slowly to savor every bite.

  Fredrick’s humor began to return, and he went so far as to quip about the pedestrian taste of the customer from whom she had filched his clothes. “If you’re so picky, you can keep wearing your own, but don’t expect to lean on me much longer,” she said, waving the air in front of her nose.

  At the close of the week, when Fredrick seemed healthy enough to continue their journey, Jane judged it best that they move on in case Sato’s men came looking for them. When at last they left, many of the hundred-odd communers gathered to see them off, providing them with satchels of fresh food for the trip, clean dressings for Fredrick’s wound, and a guide to lead them to the next farming commune en route to the next city, almost one hundred miles away. Part of Jane was sorry to go, and as they set out, she noticed that the smell of grass and trees had already settled on her own clothes.

  * * *

  Augustus Ruthers was not a man accustomed to surprises, but he received three monumental ones on the night of Sato’s invasion. The first was when an aide, frantic and frenzied, burst into his office and informed him in sentence fragments of the battles springing up around the city and of the scruffy contingents slowly making their way to Dominari Hall. Sergeant Gorham, with the usual cool, had taken over from the aide and, guiding Ruthers to a safe room, had explained that a coup was suspected. Gorham assured him that the other councilors were being similarly tended to. Locked in the office off the rotunda and awaiting Gorham’s return, Ruthers could not imagine any rivals who would act so boldly.

  The second great surprise came when the door opened again, but not for anyone Ruthers had ever seen. Her round face was like a child’s, but, full of tension and fury, it seemed to shine. Most startling were her eyes, fixed on him with a directness he first attributed to hatred. When she raised her revolver, he did not fear. He waited.

  The last and possibly greatest surprise was when she fired into the floor at his feet. Standing in the doorway for a few seconds longer, silhouetted in golden light from the rotunda and wreathed in gun smoke, she looked like a ragged angel of mercy, and Ruthers understood that the look in her eyes had nothing to do with hate.

  “You know the way out?” she asked. The real question was how she knew it, but that was now beside the point. He only nodded, his eyes never leaving hers.

  When she left and Roman held her face in his hands and no more attention was given to the hall where Ruthers should have died, he slipped out of the office and felt the wall molding at the end of the hall for a tiny switch, which he pressed. The ground opened at his feet. A block of tiles slid away, and he descended into the crawlspace while Jane and Fredrick mounted the chandelier above.

  Ruthers felt in the darkness as the tiles moved back into place, and, ripping at the levers and jamming the gears, he locked the trapdoor in position before turning to the long, climbing passage. He had never begged for anything in his life, but it was on his hands and knees that he crawled to freedom outside of the city.

  * * *

  Farrah Sullivan, however, remained in her tunnel until the battle stopped. She knew how to fight, but outside she could not tell friend from foe. When she emerged hours later, blinking in the sunlight above the hospital, she might have been the only person in Recoletta. The streets were empty, except for the occasional pile o
f rubble or corpses: refuse from the sudden skirmishes. Most of the bodies were clothed in the uniforms of city guards and a few others in nondescript civilian dress.

  While she surveyed the damage, veranda gates began to swing open around her as others came out from hiding. Belowground, it was as if the city breathed, and hundreds of doors and windows swayed open in a collective sigh. Then eyes blinked and lips began to move, slowly at first. Everyone asked the same question.

  What next?

  * * *

  Jakkeb Sato did not make them wait long for an answer. His emissaries were in the streets, proclaiming the glorious revolution to a bewildered public. They also announced the appearance of their new leader that very day, a man to guide them out of the darkness, and when Jakkeb Sato himself emerged for the gathered crowd they hailed him as a prince. Announcing the glory of Recoletta and the return of justice to the city, he spread his arms wide like a messiah and stepped into the crowd, as the parting of a sea. The insecurity that had gnawed at them earlier dissipated as a new figure filled that void of power and ceremony. The return of Recoletta’s most favored and aggrieved son proved that, for the truly exceptional, miracles are possible.

  Liesl Malone watched her new boss with a remote awe. Standing on the stage where he had left her for the crowd, she saw him only a dozen yards away but felt a much greater distance between them. As his new lieutenant and Recoletta’s youngest ever head of law enforcement, she had a new set of responsibilities to distract her from the ache that persisted inside. With Sundar and Johanssen dead, it was a hollow promotion.

  Sato had assured her that his rear guard had executed Hask as well as the guards and administrators at the Library responsible for Sundar’s death, and though he’d offered to show her the bodies she’d declined. Somehow, the thought offered little comfort.

  As the fanfare rose around Malone, her mind retreated to the quiet room in her quiet domicile where a cello now lay. In the first hours of the morning, as the smoke had cleared and early light had broken the gray sky, she had ventured to the music shop. When she knocked, it was hard to say who was more surprised: Malone at the presence of the shopkeeper, or the elderly shopkeeper at the presence of a customer. Malone instantly recognized the cello that Sundar had procured for her, and when she pointed to it, her hand trembling with agitation, the shopkeeper mistook her meaning and made as if to hand it over to a bandit. She shook her head, and only after several gestures to the money on the counter did he understand that she meant to buy it. Now it sat, tucked in the seclusion of her study, and she ached with bittersweet longing to think of the moment when she would finger its bow and strings with the exploratory touches of a new lover.

  For now, her mind had to return to business. The force that she led was composed of some of Sato’s followers from outside, most of the surviving members of the old Municipal Police, and even several city guards. Sato had wanted a regime change, not a massacre, so he welcomed most of the old guardsmen and aides of the Council who agreed to accept his authority. Most of the old Municipals, as Malone herself understood, now felt hostility toward the Council and did not protest the usurper that was, in any case, already firmly in place.

  She did not quite comprehend why the laundress and the reporter had fled, but, as Sato’s celebratory address rang on, some dim corner of Malone’s mind heard it stuck on the strident note of triumph, and she began to understand. Sato’s cause was just enough, but she still felt too numb to savor his victory. At least, she hoped that was it.

  Glancing to her left, however, she caught sight of the other, his chin-length black hair brushing his cheeks as he scanned the crowd. He stood offstage, less conspicuous, as befitted his position. Looking at Arnault, Malone felt a refreshing surge of aversion, and she took a measure of satisfaction in the knowledge that one thing would never change. Chance may have placed them together, but it did not alter the way she felt about his underhanded methods or smug contempt. In him, she retained at least the shadow of a moral compass.

  Roman Arnault had little difficulty adjusting to his new position as Sato’s right-hand man and spymaster, except for the proximity to Liesl Malone. Though they now worked for the same side, he would never trust her any more than she him. Still, he knew he was lucky.

  He had not had to murder his great-uncle. In fact, Ruthers had escaped, thanks to his most surprising and resourceful laundress. He did not have to bear the burden of such an irrevocable crime, and Sato could not punish him. Certainly he had believed Roman’s story. Had he not heard the gunshot echoing down the hall, smelled the acrid air in the office? Had he not examined the leg wound itself, which was now bandaged and cleaned but destined to leave Roman with a scar and a limp? And lastly, had he not seen the laundress rising on the chandelier, a mortal lifted to near divinity in Roman’s eyes? Sato had most of his revenge and his city. Roman could keep his peace of mind.

  But first in all his fortunes was Jane’s continued safety. Roman did not know where she would seek haven or when Recoletta would return to a semblance of normalcy, but he would find her then. In the meantime, he would try his best to deserve that moment.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to the entire Angry Robot team for taking a chance on a debut, with special gratitude to Lee Harris and Mike Underwood for indulging an impromptu pitch at a busy WorldCon. Caroline Lambe’s publicity assistance was invaluable, as was the encouragement of Robot-for-a-Day, Nikki Walters.

  Every first book needs first readers. Josh Sabio and Will Moser kept me writing when I was still wondering how (and whether?) I’d reach the end of the first draft.

  This book needed several other beta readers, too. Thanks in particular to Jacqui Talbot, Michael Robertson, and Bill Stiteler for their insightful critiques and writerly camaraderie.

  Thanks to my agent and advocate, Jennie Goloboy, for shepherding this book (and me!) through the publication process.

  Thanks to all the friends and family whose faith and encouragement kept me going. To my sisters, Sydney Thompson and Julie Lytle; my brother-in-law, Ryan Thompson; and my parents, Richard and Jackie Lytle, for not making crazy faces when I told them I was going to give this writing thing a try. Most of all, to Hiren Patel.

  ANGRY ROBOT

  An imprint of Watkins Media Ltd

  Lace Market House

  54-56 High Pavement

  Nottingham

  NG1 1HW

  UK

  angryrobotbooks.com

  twitter.com/angryrobotbooks

  Underground, overground

  An Angry Robot paperback original 2015

  Copyright © Carrie Patel 2015

  Cover art by John Coulthart

  Distributed in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York

  All rights reserved.

  Angry Robot is a registered trademark, and the Angry Robot icon a trademark of Angry Robot Ltd.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the

  products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  UK ISBN 978 0 85766 520 1

  US ISBN 978 0 85766 521 8

  Ebook ISBN 978 0 85766 522 5