Ninth City Burning

by J. Patrick Black

The comment is well received among the equites, for whom traveling in style is an occupational ideal. It strikes them as the highest form of praise, inciting a raucous round of toasting “to traveling in style.” A bottle of aquavee begins making the rounds, but when it settles in Rae’s hands she passes it on without drinking, receding a few quiet steps from the crisscross of laughter and clinking glasses.

  “Don’t feel like celebrating?” I ask.

  “Just the opposite,” she says, wiping one laughter-induced tear from the corner of her eye. “Today, I’m doing nothing but.”

  “I was afraid we wouldn’t see you.”

  She looks over at me, smiling. “Oh, I wore out my welcome pretty quick everywhere else.” She glances over toward the other equites, half of whom have, for reasons not entirely apparent, descended into fits of laughter. “I’d have shown up earlier if I’d known what kind of welcome I’d get. Had a notion Sen would want a go at me once she got into the hooch. Thought you’d be gone, too, off in some smoky room somewhere with all the other bigwigs.”

  “Wore out my welcome,” I say with a shrug. And then, carefully, “And you weren’t the only one concerned about venturing into dangerous territory.”

  “Oh?” Eyebrows raised; brown eyes playful. “Dissension in the ranks?”

  “No. You.”

  “Me?” She looks surprised, but that sense of play hasn’t totally gone.

  “I had this idea you were angry with me.”

  The expression that crosses her face is one I’ve never seen on Rae. I’m not entirely sure, but I think it could be embarrassment. “I did, too,” she says. “But I wasn’t. I was angry, and you were there. It looks the same from a lot of angles.” Rae shakes her head as though clearing away a thought. “It wasn’t your fault. I was just so goddamn tired of good-byes.”

  This more to herself than me. I think I know what she means, but I can’t imagine any way to tell her so without sounding like an idiot. Claiming I understand even a tiny part of what Rae has been through could very well be the biggest lie I’ve ever told. I rack my brain for the right thing to say, trying to spot the potential pitfalls, to chart a way through. But my only certainty is that Rae is a spoiler of strategy.

  I’m saved from just blurting some clumsy, half-formed reassurance when the light all across the Keep—from the twilight sheen of the sky to the ambient illumination glowing around our balcony’s edges—begins to pulse, first welling up so that every shadow and crevice is momentarily filled, then dimming almost to blackness. The same thing is happening everywhere on IMEC-1, I know; it’s the call for our attention. On the third ebb, the lights stay down, putting the dark sky of Dis and its great catalogue of stars on full display. The music coming from the Forum has stopped, I realize. Reydaan must have finished his speech. Laughter and applause flicker back and forth over the city in the gathering quiet. The grand finale is about to begin.

  Suddenly, the Earth is there, a blue-white balloon of oceans and swirling clouds. It’s about the size the Moon appears back home, the slightest crescent slice peeled off from one end. It reflects a pale aquamarine down onto the city, the light shining on the upturned faces looking back. The nascent pockets of cheering around us fade out, and for a second or two, everything is totally silent.

  If Rae is not in the mood for good-byes, she won’t enjoy this next part.

  I’m going to say something, ask if she wants to sneak into a smoke-filled room of bigwigs with me, or just grab her and drag her back to the Forum, anything so she won’t have to watch her home disappear, but before the impulse can gather into action, I feel something press against my hand. It’s only a brief touch—her palm against mine, the pressure light but firm—but the message it carries is clearer and more powerful than anything I could have thought to say or do. The simple communication of a single, pure idea: possibility.

  My first indication that the show is over, the ceremonies officially at an end, is the sound of wild cheering all around. I get the feeling it’s been rising steadily for some time. I’m still looking toward the sky, but when I search the spot where our little blue planet had been, I see only a scattering of foreign stars. Earth has come and gone, and we’re on our way.

  “Don’t worry,” Rae says, leaning close to be heard over the sounds of celebration. “It’ll be there when we get back.”

  SIXTY-FOUR

  TORRO

  I’m still here. Sometimes I don’t totally believe it, even though it’s obviously true. Like maybe there was some mistake or something. For one thing, only about half of us from Twelfth made it out of the Battle of Dis alive. That attack on the ratters was what did it, though if you’d asked me right before we launched off after those nests, I’d have said we were all about to get blued, not just like 50 percent of us. Maybe that’s why everybody from the Legion was so impressed with us afterward—because we’d charged in knowing we had basically no chance at all. Really, though, I wasn’t thinking about whether we were going to die. I was mostly just thinking about jumping off that stupid platform. A lot of people from Twelfth say the same thing. And it wasn’t like we could have run away or anything. There wasn’t much of anywhere to run to.

  But, anyway, we all got this big unit citation for valor and gallantry and so forth, the whole Third Cohort, Twelfth Century, I mean. I got the feeling that if you’d been in the Legion a long time, you’d be pretty thrilled to get an award like that, but most of us in Twelfth had never even heard of it. Generally, we were just glad to be alive, the ones who made it back. In fact, the only person I know who’d have been all that thrilled to get an award for gallantry is dead, which as it turns out means he got even more awards than anybody. That doesn’t make him any less dead, though.

  Optio Sorril told us we could take Mersh home if we wanted, me and Hexi and Spammers. I was pretty surprised she even knew the four of us were all chummies. Like, it was obvious we’d all been called up together and everything, since we came in on the same train from old S-225, but there were about a hundred other people on there with us, and somehow Sorril figured out we were the ones to ask if she ought to send him back. That was what she meant by “home.” Old Granite Shore. We talked about it, though, and we decided it wasn’t such a good idea. Out of all of us, Mersh was the only one who actually wanted to leave in the first place.

  What we couldn’t agree on was what to do instead. Spammers didn’t want to do anything at all. He said Mersh was gone, and it didn’t matter what happened to whatever part was left over. As far as he cared, the Legion could just do whatever it did with everyone else it’d gotten killed. That made Hexi pretty furious. She said Mersh was our friend, not some pile of trash, and it was up to us to do what he would have wanted, and Spammers would have known that if he wasn’t such an insensitive turd. I kind of agreed with both of them. Like, Mersh was dead, so he probably didn’t care what happened to him anymore, but I didn’t want to just leave him with the Legion, either. Also, Spammers really was being a turd. The weird thing was, it turned out he and Hex could both have it their way.

  We all agreed that if Mersh was going to plan his own funeral, he’d want something big and heroic, and when I asked Optio Sorril about it, I found out that was basically what the Legion was doing for everyone. It didn’t matter if you’d died fighting off ten million Valentines or two seconds into the battle of a heart attack or like severely impacted bowels or whatever, you were still a hero getting a hero’s funeral. Spammers tried to talk us out of it at first. I don’t know who he was madder at: the Legion for acting like making a big deal over a bunch of dead people would make up for them being dead, or Mersh, because he really would have just loved the whole sappy thing. Even Spams had to admit it was a pretty impressive affair, though.

  It was the first thing we did after the Keep took off from Earth. They had everyone go over to Green Side, because that had the most open space for people to spread out. Green really does feel a little li
ke being out in the wilderness somewhere, with all the trees and lakes and everything, especially since most of the taller buildings are on Red Side, so they’re completely out of sight. When we were all there, out in the middle of the woods, all these Legion people started making speeches one after the other about how brave we all were and everything, but especially those who like sacrificed themselves so humanity could live on. All strictly crap, of course. I mean, I’d been in the battle. I knew I wasn’t all that brave, and I definitely wasn’t sacrificing myself for humanity. The only reason I didn’t die was that I was lucky. The rescue people said if the cuts they found in my D-87s had been any deeper, I would have been blued right along with Mersh, and I doubt that would have made me any braver. What those legionary guys said wasn’t all that bad, though. I know Mersh would have liked it.

  Once the speeches were done, they let everyone who’d died just float away into space. That morning, me and Hexi’d gone to pick up what was left of Mersh, which turned out to be just ashes in a little stone container, kind of a tube with a raindrop-shaped bead at each end. I should have expected that, since they cremated dead people back in Settlement 225, too, but for some reason I’d thought we’d see Mersh just how they found him. I was pretty glad we didn’t. After those skirmer Type 3s got hold of him, there wasn’t much left. Spammers says old Mersh came back in three different pieces, and not very big ones, either. This little stone thing was a lot better, real clean and nice-looking and so forth.

  We’d given the tube with Mersh in it to Hexi before all the speeches started, and when the last speech was over, the raindrop-shaped beads started to glow, and the thing just lifted out of her hand. It was happening to other tubes all over Green Side, too, and pretty soon there were all these lights rising up above the trees. I couldn’t believe how many there were. It was very pretty to look at, but also really awful, if you thought about it for even a second. Every one of those lights had been a person, maybe someone who’d been dragged out of some settlement somewhere and sent off to fight and just wasn’t lucky enough to make it out alive.

  The tubes kept floating up and up, swirling like some big, glowing river, until finally they just faded away. What really happened was they’d passed out of the umbris surrounding the Keep, so there was no thelemity to make them glow. They were all still out there, floating on their own now. They’d keep going around and around Earth, maybe for hundreds or thousands of years, maybe forever, or maybe they’d eventually fall down into the atmosphere and burn up.

  It left me with this crazy feeling, when the lights were gone and there were just the stars and Earth hanging there with just one little sliver missing. I didn’t start crying, the way a lot of people did. I was sad, sure. But everything bad that would ever happen to the people in those tubes had already happened. I was feeling sorry for myself, probably. It was dumb, I know. I mean, I was still alive, right? But that was how I felt.

  When the lights were gone, people started heading over to Red Side, because there was going to be a huge party at the Forum to celebrate winning the Battle of Dis. Hexi wanted to stay behind for a while, to just sit around and tell stories about Mersh, but Spammers said he’d had enough of this remembering crap, and now he wanted to get drunk. And the truth was, me and Hexi were in the mood to get drunk, too, or at least Hexi was. So we all went to Red Side, and Hexi got one sip of aquavee and started telling stories anyway, and Spams joined in eventually. They looked like they were having fun, but I just started feeling weird and a little sick.

  I think I was the only person who even noticed when we finally left Hestia. We’d only been at the Forum a little while, maybe an hour. They had practically everything you could think of to eat and drink, and people were going a little berserk. I think they were all just happy to be alive, especially after that memorial thing with the lights. Hexi had given up on the stories and was just showing off her arm to anyone who would look. It’d been cut off just below the elbow after we blew up that nest, but once they got her to the infirmary, it only took a few days to grow back. She said it still sort of tingled sometimes, but the pink, shiny look it had at first was almost gone, and you could barely see the whitish line where her D-87s had sealed the skin over to stop her from bleeding to death. She kept saying, “It still looks better than beet juice!” and punching me with her new hand. It was funny, I guess. At some point, though, I noticed the stars overhead starting to swim around, and when they stopped, they weren’t the stars you’d see from Earth anymore. They were the stars in Dis.

  I used to think stars were stars, just tiny glowing dots and whatnot, and I couldn’t believe how different these were. I tried to point it out to Hexi, but she only kept punching me. It was like no one cared except me. And then I started to feel real sick, like if I didn’t get out of there right away, I’d puke. I felt like I was back at Limit Camp, running some topsy-turvy obstacle course, and I couldn’t tell which way was up.

  I’m almost to the edge of the Forum when someone grabs me by the arm. I’m sort of upset, because I’m still feeling pretty lousy, and I thought I’d gotten away without anyone noticing, and I kind of shove back before I realize the person grabbing me is Optio Sorril. I don’t know where she came from, but she isn’t happy about getting shoved. I give her the old salute, and say, “Sorry, ma’am. I didn’t know it was you.”

  “Not a problem, Miles,” she says. “We’ve all been on edge the past few weeks. That’s what tonight is for, though I’m afraid some of us are already celebrating rather too much.” She means everyone around here getting blind drunk, I can tell. I’m probably not the first one today to shove her by accident. “And I have the sense some aren’t celebrating quite enough.”

  “I don’t really feel like it, I guess, ma’am.”

  Old Sorril nods slowly. “It’s not too late to change your mind, Torro. I can have a velo ready in ten minutes to take you back to Earth.”

  Mersh wasn’t the only guy from Settlement 225 who had the chance to go home. The day after I got out of the infirmary, Optio Sorril called me to her office. I’d been in there almost a week, way longer than I needed to be. I wasn’t even all that hurt. A few patches of skin had gotten messed up from being exposed to outer space, which was easy to fix, but I’d been low on oxygen for a while, so they made me wait around to be sure I didn’t have any like permanent brain damage. Anyway, old Sorril and me chatted for a while, then she asked me if I’d like to go back to Granite Shore. I thought she meant with Mersh, to take him home and everything, and I told her me and Hex and Spammers had already decided we weren’t going to do that. But that wasn’t what she meant. Old Sorril was offering to send me back for good.

  The Legion was trying to change the way it managed relations with its settlements, was how old Sorril put it. If we wanted to build a Legion strong enough to fight off the Valentines, we’d need everyone cooperating as much as possible, and the Legion had decided the best way to do that, to like get everyone on the same side, was to be totally honest about the war. They were going to tell the settlements everything—about the Valentines, thelemity, the whole deal. And they figured all of that would sound a lot less like abominably insane if people heard it from someone they knew, so they were looking for legionaries they could send back to their old settlements to explain things. If I wanted, I could be the guy for S-225, what Sorril called a “liaison.” She said I’d be good at it because I was so empathetic and personable and whatnot.

  It actually sounded like a pretty good deal. All I had to do was tell everyone on Granite Shore how this crazy, made-up-sounding stuff the Prips were feeding them wasn’t a complete and total lie, and maybe demonstrate thelemity by showing off with lazels and trenchers and so forth. And since I’d be an officer in the Legion, I’d outrank all the local authorities. I wouldn’t have to worry about Qu or Ghalo. I could order around that fathead Gemt whenever I wanted. I could even get Cranely for what he did to me. And I could be with Camareen. Sorril didn’t
come out and say all that, but she let me know I could kind of pick up where I’d left off. And after ten years, I could choose to stay in the Legion or go and do whatever I wanted. Deals don’t get much better than that.

  I turned her down, though. I knew even before she finished talking that I wasn’t going to do it. I wanted to go home more than I’d ever wanted anything. It was just that I couldn’t, not when everyone else was going off to fight. It’s crazy, I know. If I’d asked Hexi or Spammers, or anyone from Twelfth, they would have told me to go. I could have said, “Listen up, kiddos, I’m going home to Granite Shore, good luck with the war and everything,” and they would have thought that was just great. They’d have been happy for me. But I still couldn’t do it, and I can’t leave now, either.

  I tell Sorril thanks, but I’m part of the Keep, and that’s all there is to it. I think she understands, the same way Hexi and Spammers would’ve if I’d gone. She’d have been glad to see one of us get out, but she knows why I can’t. As I’m leaving, she says, “Well, Miles. It seems you turned out to be a volunteer after all.”

  SIXTY-FIVE

  TORRO

  After that, I just kind of wander around. It’s about the first time I’ve been in the city when I wasn’t doing some kind of work. I got put on repair duty approximately five seconds after I’d finished up my meeting with old Sorril, and from there it was pretty much nonstop until now. It feels nice, walking up and down the empty streets.

  The streets aren’t totally empty, I suppose. Now and then, I see someone walking up ahead, or down some alley or something. They’re probably people like me, people who didn’t want to be at the Forum. I never say anything. I just let them go by. The city is real quiet and peaceful, and I don’t want to mess that up. It doesn’t even seem like someplace people built—more like people haven’t even discovered it yet. Like a deep, dried-out riverbed with high stone walls. You can still hear everyone at the Forum cheering like crazy, but it seems far away.