Fighting Gravity

by Leah Petersen

  “Loyalty’s not high on your priorities when you have no food,” I said.

  “So you agree that your unclass won’t be loyal, then?” General Mondejar said.

  “No, I’m saying that they’re not rioting because of anything so abstract as disloyalty. You don’t worry about what your actions will result in tomorrow if you’re starving today.”

  General Mondejar looked past me at Pete. “I would caution you, again, Your Excellence, about divisive and disloyal influences kept so close to you.”

  “Dis—!”

  “I need to hear more of this situation before I will know what I think,” Aliana spoke over me.

  “There’s plenty of time for that tomorrow,” Pete said, laying his hand on my knee under the table and squeezing. “I’d like to talk about something more pleasant with my dinner.”

  -

  As I turned down the hall into the Imperial area with Pete after that dinner, I was stopped by the sudden jerk of a fistful of the hair on the back of my head.

  “Ouch!” I tried to turn around but that hurt more, so I reached back to extricate myself. For my efforts I got an even harder jerk that pulled me backward.

  “Stop yowling like a little cat and stop fighting me, you foolish man,” Aliana’s voice cut through the air behind me. I didn’t need the hand trying to remove a whole patch of my hair to tell she was angry.

  “Ouc— What? What did I do?”

  “Aliana,” Pete began.

  “Go away, Peter, I am having a conversation with Jacob Dawes that you are not a part of. Go on.”

  I looked at Pete, pleading, but he just grimaced and cast a long, meaningful look at Aliana. She nodded in one quick jerk and then, without a word to me, he turned and walked away.

  Aliana jerked me down the hall to her room and, not keen to part with all that hair, I stumbled along with her. Once we were in her room she released me with a shove and I fell against an armchair. Only a quick grab at the chair back kept me from falling.

  “What was that?” I yelped.

  “Is there so much physics in your head that there is no room left for thinking?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You are being an idiot, Jacob Dawes. Do you really think you can say those things at the head table?”

  “I wasn’t the only one talking about Carolis. I didn’t even start it.”

  “Others may say what they think, but you cannot.”

  “Oh no? And why’s that?” She heard the edge of anger in my voice because her eyebrow quirked.

  “You know why. Because of what you are.”

  The hot rush of anger spread from my head down through my fingers and toes. My fists clenched. “I thought you were different than them, Your Grace, but I guess I was wrong. I don’t get to have an opinion because I’m unclass? I should have known. You’re like all the rest of them.”

  The crack of her hand against my cheek left my jaw throbbing and my ears ringing.

  “Stupid man. Yes, it is because you are unclass, and you know I do not think less of you for it. If I did, would I be trying to protect you?”

  “This is protecting me?”

  “You question Peter openly in front of the nobility and you put yourself in danger because you are unclass and they hate you for it. You have as much right to your opinions as anyone, this I believe. But you cannot afford to speak them in front of people who would have you dead for daring to even look the emperor in the eye, let alone sleep in his bed.”

  “I’m supposed to sit there and keep my mouth shut? For how long?”

  “For forever, if Peter is important to you. You have to make sacrifices to be with him, and you always knew this. Do not play the fool now. You cannot become forgetful or get comfortable. If this is something you cannot do, then spare yourself and Peter and go back to the Intellectual Complex. It is not only your happiness, or even your life at stake here. Do not hurt Peter by your carelessness or your idiocy.”

  I trembled with anger and adrenaline.

  “Do you understand this?” She fixed me with a laser stare.

  “Yes,” I croaked.

  Her face softened and she trailed her fingers over the burning patch on my cheek. “I should do this to you more often,” she said. “You are less argumentative with my handprint on your face.”

  I wasn’t quite sure what to make of that but she smiled softly. “Will you do this, Jacob Dawes, for me? You are good for Peter and you make him happy. I would want to keep you for that reason alone. But I find that I like you, myself. I would not see you hurt if I can help it.”

  I tried to smile. “Right now I’m too scared of you to do anything other than whatever you say.”

  Her mouth twitched at the edges. “It is not me you should be afraid of, my friend.”

  She left the sitting room without another word, and, stunned, I returned to my own.

  -

  She was right, but it made me angry to think about it, the suffering of others being just a minor annoyance in otherwise civil conversation at the Imperial table. An inconvenience to me that must be pushed aside for my own welfare.

  Maybe I couldn’t talk about it, to save my own skin, but I could do something about it.

  “I want to give my salary to Wildflower Hill,” I said to Jonathan the next night.

  “Anyone in particular?” he asked.

  I huffed. “A charity, or something like that. You know what I mean.”

  “I’ll draw up a list—”

  “Don’t complicate the issue. I just want my money to go to the kids. They’re probably hungry, and cold, and afraid… It’s—can you just take care of that for me?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I’ll take care of it.”

  -

  When our birthday came around, Pete took me for a long weekend, just the two of us, at the chalet in the Swiss Alps. It was so easy to forget, there, that a world outside of us existed at all, much less with problems I had to worry about.

  He taught me how to ski.

  When I was lying on my back for the fifth time that morning, winded and covered in snow, my skis and poles scattered across the slope, Pete stopped downslope of me.

  “You know, there are very simple principles involved in this,” I groused, “gravity, mass, force, friction.”

  Pete grinned and held out his hand to help me up.

  “Yeah. But there’s also you.”

  -

  That night I joined him in the den where he sat in front of the fire, sipping mulled wine. As I walked past him to sit down, he grabbed my hand and pulled me into the chair with him, between his legs, pulling me back to lean against his chest. As usual, whenever he did anything like that, I tensed, counting out a deliberate few moments to let him hold me like that, then I squeezed his arms and stood, sitting down in the chair next to him.

  He threw me a quick smile but it was guarded.

  Guilt sloshed in my stomach. “You know, that’s not about you, I mean, it’s not that I don’t want to sit with you, or that there’s anything wrong with us.”

  “I know,” he said, easy and effortless, forgiving.

  I shrugged, my ears hot. “It’s just one of those things, I suppose.”

  “Mmmm.”

  I stared down at the cup of wine in my hand. “How do you do that? How do you trust people the way you do? It’s like you want to believe the best of everyone all the time. I don’t understand how you can do that. With who you are and all you see, hasn’t life proven to you how…how unsafe that is?”

  For several minutes he didn’t say anything, staring into the fire as if the answer was there.

  “I think you have a hard time trusting anything in life at all, or anyone, because nothing was ever certain, and you couldn’t rely on anyone. It was different for me.”

  He looked down at his hands.

  “I don’t remember my mother,” he said. “I’ve always imagined she was everything my father wasn’t. Even so, he wasn’t a bad man, or even a
bad emperor. He wasn’t even a bad father, exactly. He never hurt me. He just wasn’t a father.”

  I shifted to lean against the chair back, closing my eyes, letting his words roll over me. I loved listening him talk about his past. I’d always hated it with other people. It was so hard not to be jealous. But this was Pete.

  “One thing that was good about my father was that he was patient. He was good at waiting. I think that’s why I managed his coldness as a father without becoming bitter. I didn’t have someone I could love and trust without reservation. But life always gave me everything I needed and most of what I wanted, so that would come too. I just had to wait.”

  I stared into the fire, trying in the hazy warmth of the evening, to assimilate the idea, concepts that were so foreign to me.

  “Thank you,” he said quietly, “for not making me wait very long.”

  My throat tightened and my muscles tensed, ready to stand and go to him, but my mind kicked in, that frightened, instinctive voice that told me to stay away, to run. He wanted too much, too close, too vulnerable. But I shoved it away and got up, dropping into the chair between his legs and lying back against his chest, relaxing with fixed determination. His arms went around me and he kissed the side of my face. He pressed his cheek to mine and we sat together like that for a long time. The smile I felt against my cheek never went away.

  -

  We returned to the palace and to life—to our life—there.

  I was in the lab one morning when Pete came to find me.

  “May I talk with you for a moment?”

  “Sure.”

  “Somewhere else?”

  I cast a look at my experiment but I didn’t need to see it to know whether or not walking away at that point was OK. It was just that it made me nervous, the way he asked.

  “Yeah, that’s fine.”

  We walked without speaking through the hallways until we came to a part of the palace I didn’t know. Pete led me into a small gallery there. The paintings dotting the white walls were done in soothing blues and greens but in the Tveldian style that always set my teeth on edge.

  He sat down on a bench and I sat beside him. He took my hand, looking down at it, stroking the back of my hand with his thumb. But it felt like he was looking for comfort more than he was trying to give it. I stiffened.

  He looked up.

  “It’s your sister.”

  I’d been afraid of a lot of possible things he might have said, but that wasn’t one of them.

  “Carrie?”

  He nodded. “Jake…” he swiped his thumb over my hand a little too hard for comfort, “she died yesterday.”

  Everything in me went cold. He clutched my hand harder as if I’d tried to pull it away. Maybe I had.

  “How?” I croaked.

  He engulfed my hand in both of his now.

  “She hanged herself,” he whispered.

  “She…”

  He didn’t answer what hadn’t really been a question anyway.

  “Why?”

  “There was a note. It seems the man, her foster father, had been…”

  “He raped her?”

  “Yes. Apparently he’d been doing it for a while.”

  “But—” I shot up and started pacing. “But why didn’t she say something?” I turned to him, he was blurry. “Why didn’t she try to contact me?”

  The strength went out of my legs and I thunked back down on another bench. “She thought I wouldn’t care. I didn’t try to contact her once I was the emperor’s lover, living at the palace, just moved her around and—”

  Pete rushed over and sat beside me, grabbing my arms to turn me to face him.

  “No. That’s not it. She thought you were dead.”

  I blinked. “Dead? Why?”

  “Your mother told her you were. That the men who came to take you from them had killed you. Carrie never knew you went to the IIC. Maybe she wondered how she got into a home like that—” he hesitated only a moment in which I heard him decide not to address the fact that he knew what I’d done, “but she had no reason to think it would be her brother. Even with a Jacob Dawes at the palace.”

  I stared at him. I felt so stupid and numb and empty.

  “I sent her there.”

  Pete sighed. “I know. But it’s not your fault. That man had been cleared by the authorities to foster children. You were just trying to—“

  “To assuage my conscience without ever doing anything for her. Without calling her or going to see her. Without inconveniencing myself in any way.”

  “Hey, it’s not like that. And anyway, it would have been a delicate situation even if you had talked to me about it.” There was only a hint of reproach in the words. “It’s not like we could have brought her here to live down the hall.”

  “Why not?”

  He stared at me for a minute.

  “Well, because…Jake she was—”

  “Unclass.”

  “That’s not what I was going to say.”

  “That’s what you were going to mean.”

  “You’re not being fair.”

  “I wonder sometimes how you accomplish this great feat of having an unclass in your bed like there’s no difference between us. It’s just because you make yourself forget what I am. It would have been harder with Carrie here, wouldn’t it?”

  “It’s not like that. There are political complexities—”

  I walked out.

  -

  I dreamed of Abenez that night. I dreamed of Carrie with her new family, only they lived in the penthouse apartment in the building we’d grown up in. It was as bare and dirty as ours had been, just bigger. I found them there, Carrie, a gaunt, pale teenager, huddled in a corner. Our father stood over her, his belt raised. Thick, livid welts screamed on her bare arm. The belt cracked down again and the sound was like a world exploding.

  He dropped the belt and hauled her up, shoving her against the wall. He grabbed her breast hard enough to make her cry out.

  “Now, bitch, you know what I want.”

  Carrie looked straight at me with hollow, hopeless eyes.

  “Why?”

  I woke up sobbing.

  “What is it?” Pete asked, his hand warm and heavy on my arm. I was trembling so hard it hurt to try to hold myself together.

  “Jake?”

  I buried my face in the pillow and pretended I hadn’t woken enough to hear him. He wrapped his arm around me and stroked my face and hair until he fell asleep again, long before I did.

  -

  He waited for me to say something first. It was five days before I had anything to say about it. I came to find him in his office.

  “Are you going to kill him?”

  His eyes darted back and forth for a second as if he could catch the traces of the conversation he’d missed.

  “Who?”

  “That man.”

  He knew what I was talking about then.

  “No,” he said. “He’ll be Resettled.”

  “I want to kill him.”

  “I know. But that’s not how it works.”

  “Why not? Make it work. You’re the emperor.”

  He grimaced. “Believe it or not, Jake, I can’t just break the rules when it pleases me, or you. If I don’t abide by the laws too, the whole system falls apart.”

  “It’s just one man.”

  “It’s never just one man. Look, they know what he did. No one goes easy on child molesters. Not the judges or the Resettlement officials or the other inmates. And someone always manages to make sure wherever he’s sent they’ll know what he did. He’ll pay for what he did. For the rest of his life.”

  “Just this once?”

  He shook his head. “Not once, not ever.”

  -

  There was something missing in that argument that I couldn’t put my finger on, but it did prove one thing, I couldn’t count on Pete for help with this.

  He meant well, I knew he did. But there were some things that you co
uldn’t talk about between an unclass and the emperor himself. And in spite of whatever else we were to each other, we were still that.

  As if in some cruel cosmic joke, the months after Carrie died were some of the best I can remember. Maybe Pete was trying to make it up to me. Maybe I was trying to make it up to her, by living for both of us.

  -

  It was at an evening party Pete was holding for the Torrean ambassador when Blaine sidled up to me.

  “It’s a shame about Carrie.”

  I nearly dropped my drink. “What?”

  “Your sister. I heard how she died.”

  I stopped myself asking him how he knew. He’d told me that already, back on the ship.

  “It was one of your precious high class who did something like that to her,” I hissed.

  “Yes,” he said. “A high class man. And he knew exactly what you’d put in his home. What else was he to do with that?”

  Jonathan had come up beside me and if he wasn’t in time to hear what Blaine said, he saw what I made of it. Jonathan grabbed my arm as my fist flew toward Blaine and he put all of his weight into it. I stumbled backward with the power of the counter-force applied against my fury.

  “Jacob!”

  I was never sure afterward if Jonathan had actually used my name or if I’d imagined it.

  I straightened slowly, in the echoing hush that fell around us. Blaine smirked at me.

  “Are you well, Mr. Dawes?”

  Jonathan pulled hard on my arm. “His Excellence sent for you, Mr. Dawes.”

  I glared at Jonathan but he didn’t drop my gaze.

  “I believe it’s rather important,” he said.

  I shoved Jonathan hard as I turned and stormed off.

  -

  “Blaine’s an ass,” was my only answer when Pete asked me that night in our rooms what had happened at the party.

  “You know you can talk to me,” he said, hesitantly. “If there’s anything wrong. Just talk, you know.” He slid his arms around me from behind and laid his cheek on my shoulder. “I love you.”

  “If there was anything to tell, honestly, I’d tell you. Who else do I even talk to?”

  He snorted.

  “Sometimes I wonder what you’re doing behind this brooding exterior,” he said.