Scorched Earth

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Scorched Earth Page 14

by Tommy Wallach


  Finally Kita, standing over the stove in the checkered blue-and-white apron she’d found age-stained and moth-eaten in a cabinet, coughed theatrically for Clover’s attention.

  He looked at her.

  She glared back.

  He shrugged.

  She mimed the concept of talking with her hand.

  “What do I say?” he mouthed.

  “Anything!” she mouthed back.

  They were still engaged in this riveting silent back-and-forth when Clover realized his brother was watching.

  “You want to go out?” Clive said.

  “But it’s pouring,” Clover said.

  “Oh go on, you big sissy,” Kita said. “The soup won’t be ready for a while yet, and I’m sick of standing here listening to you two not saying anything.”

  * * *

  They walked along the gleaming cobblestones through the steady rain, past a great number of drenched drunks and a few couples huddled romantically beneath their too-small umbrellas. There was a rumble from somewhere off to the east. Up in the sky, a beam of electric light transfixed a cloud bank—Kittyhawk making another assault. Though the plane would have been turned to a similar purpose regardless of his personal contribution, he felt freshly guilty for the part he’d played in its technical development.

  “I flew in it once,” he said.

  Clive hadn’t been looking at the plane, but now he did. “Really? What was it like?”

  “Terrifying. But also…” Clover hesitated.

  “Incredible?” Clive offered.

  “Yeah. Incredible.”

  A couple of soldiers materialized out of the mist, but it was dark and they looked to be in a hurry, so Clover wasn’t worried about being recognized. One of them did slow as he passed, however, to throw out a cryptic remark: “Keep your eyes on the sky, boys.” The other one laughed, and then they were gone.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Clover said.

  “No idea.” Clive gestured toward a particularly narrow street on their right. “This way.”

  At the corner, the usual green triangular sign advertised that they were entering the Sixth Quarter. A silhouette behind the shaded window of a cheap apartment block played a sad strain on a violin. A couple could be heard arguing, their baby crying in counterpoint. Occasional gunfire flared up like the first few kernels of corn popping on the skillet. Clive turned down an alley festooned with Protectorate agitprop: THE MINDFUL ARE ENEMIES OF THE STATE. REPORT ANY ACTIVITY TO THE BASTION IMMEDIATELY. The alley dead-ended at a bright red door, music seeping out from beneath it like smoke.

  “After you,” Clive said.

  Clover experienced a moment of vertigo as the door closed behind them. The room was low-ceilinged but vast, lit only with candles: a club of some kind. A man stood just inside the entrance, but he waved them through with a familiar nod at Clive. They took a table just beside the dance floor, where a scrum of bodies moved sinuously to the slow tonk of the band, whose members were all dressed in black-and-white stripes. A waitress arrived with drinks they hadn’t ordered—tall fluted glasses full of a bubbling green liquid. She greeted Clive by name and departed with a wink.

  “What is this?” Clover said.

  “House specialty. Old Church recipe, if you can believe it. Once upon a time, the monks in the outerlands would raise money for their parishes by crafting specialty liqueurs. The practice was outlawed at some point, but the drinks live on. This one’s called a Devoçion. Cheers.”

  They touched glasses. Clive drank deep; Clover sipped. A subtle bouquet of flavors, some of which he knew from his time studying botany—fennel and juniper, something like mint—masked the bite of the alcohol. “Okay,” Clover said, as if they’d finally gotten the prologue out of the way. “So just what the hell are we gonna do now?”

  “Do? About what?”

  Clover gestured around the room as if it were the world. “All this. The war.”

  “Try to survive it, I guess.”

  “That’s not enough. We have to help. We have to figure out which side we’re on.”

  “They look the same from where I’m sitting.”

  “But they aren’t!” Clover said, surprised by his own intensity. “They’re both flawed, but that doesn’t mean they’re the same.” Clive finished his cocktail and signaled the waitress for another; Clover wasn’t sure if this conversation would get easier or harder the more his brother had to drink. “Just imagine that you could control everything that’s happening, everything that will happen. What would you do?”

  “I’d stop the war.”

  “Okay. Good. So how do we do that?”

  “We can’t. And we shouldn’t try. We should leave before things get worse.”

  “Maybe that’s true, but just play along with me for a second.”

  Clive threw up his hands. “Fine! I guess you’d have to convince Zeno to go back to Sophia and then kill Chang.”

  “Why not kill both of them?”

  “Because Chang needs the war. It’s the only reason he’s in power, which means he’s got no reason to negotiate or back down.”

  “And Zeno does?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  Clover nodded. “Okay. So all we need to do is kill Chang, figure out if Zeno is willing to call the whole thing off, then kill her too if she isn’t.”

  “Yep. That’s all. Easy peasy.”

  “Easy peasy.”

  They held each other’s gaze for a moment, and Clover felt something thawing between them. It was the silliness of that phrase in contrast with the seriousness of the subject. Clive started giggling first, and then Clover caught the bug. The absurdity only deepened the more he thought about it, the more he and his brother kept repeating the words—easy peasy—until he could barely breathe for the laughter.

  “Hey, what’s going on?” Clive finally said, managing to speak through the tears.

  Clover hadn’t noticed, but the dance floor was emptying out, the revelers sucked out through the venue’s front door like hot air through an open window. Where could they all be going at this time of night? Had they heard about a better party somewhere else?

  “Come on,” Clive said, downing his second drink in a single swallow.

  They joined the exodus, surfing the wave of gasps and mumbles all the way back out to the Silver Road, where they stood with the rest of the crowd and stared up at the sky to the southwest.

  “What the hell?” Clive said, taking the words right out of Clover’s mouth.

  Dashes of orange light were shooting out from the jagged stub that had once been Notre Fille’s bell tower and disappearing into the cloud cover. It was a gun, maybe even the same one Chang had used at the Black Wagon Massacre. The Library chemists must have found some way to trigger an incendiary device as the bullets discharged, so whoever was using the gun could track the trajectory of each shot and adjust the aim on the fly. Brilliant.

  There was a distant pinging sound; a cloud burst into flame. No, not a cloud: Kittyhawk, streaking out of the mist like a shooting star. The crowd cheered. Those who’d brought their glasses with them raised a toast. The fiery bullets kept coming, making a light show around the central display.

  “Did Paz ever tell you about her brother Anton?” Clive said. His voice was strangely quiet, as if he were recounting a dream. “The one who fell off the roof trying to fly a kite?”

  “I figured she made him up.”

  “No, he was real. I think if it weren’t for him dying like that, her family would never have left the Descendancy and gone to Sophia. And maybe there wouldn’t be any war.”

  Kittyhawk was a ball of fire trailing a plume of black smoke. Clover thought of the day Burns had destroyed Zeno’s phonograph—how it had hurt his heart to see something so beautiful destroyed. If Chang won this war, mankind might never see another airplane.

  “We both agree that Chang is worse than Zeno, right?” Clover said.

  “Of course.”

  “So
let’s start there. First we stop him, then we deal with her.”

  They watched as Zeno’s terrible, glorious creation spiraled down to crash somewhere beyond the Anchor wall. The crowd let out another cheer.

  “Okay,” Clive said. “But I’m definitely gonna need some soup first.”

  * * *

  Clover and Kita hung back as Clive approached the back door of Ratheman Chapel and knocked twice. No one answered.

  “That was the secret knock?” Kita whispered.

  Clive looked back at them. “Why would there be a secret knock?”

  “Are you kidding? There’s a bunch of Mindful hiding out in there. Of course there’s a secret knock!” Kita went up to the door herself. “It’s probably something like”—and here she knocked along with the pattern she described—“two knocks, then one, then three, then four—”

  The door suddenly swung inward to reveal two extremely unfriendly-looking women holding pistols.

  “I guess I got the knock wrong,” Kita murmured.

  “I’m here to see my father,” Clive said.

  “Daniel Hamill,” Clover added. “He’s my da, too.”

  A rank smell permeated the inside of Ratheman Chapel: too many people living in too little space for too long. Blankets and pillows were set up along the pews, and the sacramental table was laid with the bony remnants of a roast ham, a few clay bowls of overripe fruit, and a glass carafe full of what looked to be either flat beer or apple juice. Clover held Kita’s hand as they followed Clive through a sea of suspicious glances and into the vestry. The mirror had been taken off a vanity and leaned against the wall so the bottom half could be used as a table. Daniel Hamill and a bunch of strangers stood around it, looking over an annotated map of the Anchor. They were arguing about something.

  “Looks like you’ve got visitors, Hamill,” said the man closest to the door.

  Clover’s father glanced over at them. His expression shifted quickly from relief to frustration to fear. He signaled one of his associates to roll up the map.

  “You don’t trust us?” Clover said.

  “I don’t trust anyone right now.”

  Clover felt a sudden flash of anger. “We aren’t anyone. We’re your children!”

  “Exactly. You’re the children of a man who used to be an Honor, who raised you to believe in the Descendancy.”

  “Well, we don’t believe that anymore,” Clive said. “We came here tonight because we all agree that Chang has to be stopped.”

  “I want to believe that,” Daniel said. “I really do. But how can I know for sure?”

  Clover looked to his brother, who could only shrug. The assembled Mindful officers were all watching, waiting.

  “Do you even know who you’re talking to?” Kita said, barreling out into the silence. “Clover Hamill studied in Sophia under Zeno herself. He helped build the airplane that terrorized the Anchor for weeks. He caused a flu outbreak in Edgewise that shut down the whole port. This boy has done more for Sophia than most of you ever will. As for Clive, he broke one of your people out of the Bastion dungeon and got the Protectorate to chase him halfway across the continent.” Kita took a deep breath, still not quite spent. “As for me, it was Protectorate soldiers who killed my cousin, Louise Delancey. Some of you probably knew her. She died for the cause, and I would do the same. If that isn’t enough for you, then I guess you all can just go to hell.” She was practically panting by the end of this speech.

  “Give us a minute,” Daniel said, taking the other officers aside to confer privately in the corner.

  “Not bad,” Clive whispered to Kita.

  “Not bad?” she replied. “I was amazing.”

  Daniel returned to the table. “You’re all sure this is what you really want?” he said. “What we’re doing here isn’t easy, or safe. Or sane even.”

  Clover swallowed his misgivings. “Yes. We’re sure.”

  His father nodded. “Good,” he said. With a flourish, he unrolled the map again. It was covered with Xs and Os, like a hundred games of tic-tac-toe that had broken free of their bars. Clover assumed each mark represented a target—for sabotage, for theft, for whatever task Zeno needed done.

  Daniel Hamill surveyed the landscape, smiling at all the opportunities it presented. “Now where shall we begin?”

  4. Paz

  AS IF IN A DREAM, she followed Flora through the dark streets of a city at once familiar and strange. Though apparently Zeno’s airplane had been destroyed a few days ago, the story it had written on the Anchor would take years to efface. A bomb crater or collapsed building awaited around every other corner, bright scraps of clothing and shards of furniture sticking out from piles of brick and stone—each one a kind of burial mound, literally in some cases. Soldiers seemed to be everywhere, hunting for bodies in the rubble, or some clue to the whereabouts of the Mindful, or just somewhere they could momentarily forget their stresses and sorrows. For the first time, Paz understood the logic of the siege. The tension in the Anchor was palpable. Things couldn’t go on like this forever; eventually the blister would burst. Anything was better than this perpetual held breath, this emasculating paralysis. People would try to flee the city, even if it meant rushing Sophia’s guns. Was that Zeno’s plan? Did she hope to thin the herd enough in those initial moments to win the ensuing battle? And what were Chang’s intentions? Or Athène’s?

  They were just people; Paz knew that better than anyone. Yet to think of them now was like thinking of gods—off in some distant empyrean, making their plans with little concern for the people who were hurt along the way.

  It took them nearly half an hour to reach Mitchell Poplin’s house, and in spite of the chill of the night and the miasma of threat on the air, Paz found herself flooded with a cozy sort of nostalgia at the sight of it. There was the window where “Irene” had spent many a sleepless night scheming her little schemes. Here was the door from which she and Clover had embarked upon their tours around the city, hand in hand like any other young couple in love.

  It was quiet and cold inside the house. Paz was struck by the thought that Mitchell Poplin might have died while they’d been away. What with losing both of his granddaughters, to say nothing of Kittyhawk’s raids, his old heart might have just up and collapsed somewhere along the line. She overtook Flora and went into the kitchen—a crust of bread and an open jar of honey were on the table, but those could have been there for days.

  A soft pulse of light flickered in the stairwell. The steps had always been a little too tall, so that you felt a kind of vertigo walking down them. Paz nearly lost her balance as Flora hurtled past her.

  “Who is that?” Mitchell called out.

  By the time Paz reached the bottom of the stairs, Flora was already buried deep in her grandfather’s chest, heaving with sobs. Mitchell, covered in sawdust and still holding a horsehair brush sticky with lacquer, could only stroke her head with his free hand, tears running down the furrows in his cheeks. Paz gave them a moment before announcing her presence with a cough.

  “Gemma?” Mitchell said, squinting in her direction.

  “No,” Paz said gently.

  Mitchell sighed. “Of course not. She’s… well, I guess you probably know.”

  “Yeah.”

  Mitchell looked down at Flora, still bawling in his arms. “You’re safe now,” he whispered, shushing just for the sound of it. After a moment, he glanced back at Paz. “You’ll stay here, won’t you? Help me look after her?”

  Paz was momentarily nonplussed, moved by this unexpected and undeserved act of generosity. “I wouldn’t feel right about it,” she said huskily. “You let me live under your roof and I lied to you. You don’t even know my real name. The things I’ve done—”

  “You brought my girl home to me. That’s all I need to know.”

  Paz turned away before either of them could see her own eyes welling up. “I’ll put a kettle on,” she said. To the sound of Flora’s sobs, finally beginning to slow, she climbed back up to
the kitchen.

  * * *

  Paz sat with her knees hugged to her chest in the clerestory window. Flora was out cold in her bed a few feet away, breathing evenly. Paz had given up trying to sleep hours ago. She gazed down the long avenue opposite the house: utter stillness, like some kind of trompe l’oeil, like a trap.

  During dinner, Mitchell had caught her up on the situation inside the Anchor. Apparently Clive’s father, Daniel, was alive. He’d publicly disavowed the Descendancy at a Church service, and both he and Clive had been sentenced to death. Paz’s heart had been in her throat as Mitchell described the scene at Annunciation Square—the hangman fitting the noose around Clive’s neck, Chang’s speech, and the last-minute arrival of Kittyhawk. (It seemed to her that Zeno had cut it a little close with that particular piece of theater.) Clover, who’d been staying at the Poplin house since his release from the Bastion, never came back after that day, and there’d been no sign of Clive either.

  Had they been killed in the bombing? Were they prisoners of Chang, or of the Mindful, or had they left the city and all its dangers behind? These questions and a thousand more repeated endlessly in Paz’s mind, tenacious as the tides, pushing sleep a little further away every moment.

  Something moved out in the street. The darkness at the end of the lane shifted as silhouettes rounded the corner. They seemed to glitter, like the flower fairies Paz had imagined populated the forests of her girlhood, but the banal provenance revealed itself a few moments later: uniform buttons and belt buckles, sword hilts and gun butts. At least there was some consolation in solving the mystery of why neither Clive nor Clover had come back to Mitchell’s house; they’d both been smart enough to realize that Chang would have eyes on the place—eyes that must have seen Paz the instant she arrived.

 

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