“It was funny,” said Stephen, voice breaking awkwardly on the last word.
“Not to them; like you said, Gedda’s had more than enough to do with bombs the last few years.” He remembered Lillian saying how Stephen reminded her of him, at that age: sent home at the holidays with reprimands heaped on his head. Scandals and switchings and long hours spent locked away without dinner.
If Cyril was any indication, the boy was on a road to nowhere good; the same road that had gotten Cyril beaten to death’s left hand, lying on the docks with a pistol to his head. “But they’re really worried because they don’t know what to do with you. Nobody wants the responsibility. Nobody wants it to be their fault you exploded a pencil sharpener, or can’t pass your exams. It makes them uncomfortable that you can’t be fixed, so they’ll keep trying to pass you off to somebody who can. Your parents to the school, the school to your parents.”
Stephen’s fork hung suspended over his cabbage, food forgotten. “What happens if nobody can fix me?”
There hadn’t been anyone around when Cyril was that age, to tell him what would happen. To teach him what survival took, in the world that already had its hooks in him. Just his spotless sister and his distant parents, disgusted with their second child’s slow slide into failure. His father had pushed him off the cliff into tradecraft, just to be rid of him and his ragged reputation.
Cyril wondered if Lillian could see as far into Stephen’s future as he could, and whether she was preparing him accordingly.
“You don’t need to be fixed,” said Cyril. “You just have to be ready for the moment they stop trying.”
* * *
Aristide woke in his accustomed state of parched misery, head pounding, and rolled over to find he was alone in bed. If fate was kind, they could pretend—as they often did—this had not happened.
Then he heard the washroom tap and his hopes were dashed.
“You look as though you need some breakfast,” said Daoud, emerging with a toothbrush tucked into his cheek. “Or a coffee, at the very least.” He was wrapped in a white cotton dressing gown embroidered with the hotel’s monogram. Water still shone on his hair, neatly striped by the teeth of a comb.
“You’re still here,” said Aristide, redundantly. Speaking dislodged a wet chunk in his chest and the words gave way to his habitual morning coughing fit, familiar as his hangover.
«To turn you like kebab and make sure you didn’t die in your sleep.» At least, that was what Aristide thought he had said; his words came out indistinct around the toothbrush, and Aristide’s Porashtu had gotten rusty at Cross-Costa, where most of his end of the business was conducted in Geddan.
“Also,” said Daoud, from the washroom this time, where he had gone to spit. “To talk about Frye.” The tap ran again, briefly, and he emerged with a glass of water. “Here, drink that.”
Aristide reached blindly for the tin of Aceto powder on the bedside table. It would be easier to have this conversation if his headache banged a little less forcefully against the inside of his skull.
“What did she say?” asked Daoud.
“Nothing of consequence. You could hardly expect that.” Aristide swirled Aceto into the glass of water. “Still, even though she walked on cat paws all the way around it, I think we’re liable to hear from Custler soon, and positively.”
“So you think they are still in contact?”
Aristide smiled—almost leering—into his cloudy gray analgesic. “I have suspicions.”
Daoud cleared his throat and looked expectant. Aristide sighed, and made a vulgar gesture with his fingers.
“Ah,” said Daoud. “That is good. I am happy to have it done.”
“Not done yet,” said Aristide. He drank the noxious dose of Aceto in one long swallow, bringing on another coughing fit. “But nearly.”
“Nearly,” Daoud repeated. And though they had reached the end of the conversation, he did not leave to dress and begin his day.
Aristide set aside his empty glass. “Was there something else?”
Daoud sat gingerly on the foot of the bed. The pause before his next sentence put Aristide’s fine hairs on end. “Jinadh Addas invited us to their country home for Solstice.”
If he had been drinking the Aceto now, he would have choked. “I beg your pardon.”
“For the holiday.” Daoud waved vaguely. “It is only a few days. We don’t have plans. I told him yes.”
“You told him—on whose say-so?”
“My own.” Daoud scowled. “You do not need to come.” A piece of his hair fell forward across his forehead and he flicked it away with an impatient jerk of his chin. The gesture gave Aristide a pain in his chest before he realized why.
Surely Daoud had done exactly that before. But with Cyril’s ghost so freshly risen and veiled in flesh, Aristide made an association he had never made before. The gesture was not so much a practicality as a finely honed nostalgic knife.
There was a part of him that was … curious? To see Carmody, where he had never before had occasion to go. To spend a long holiday in the country, with a family, as though he had one.
Every moment would cut like shattered ceramic, of course. Would make him sick and sorry for himself and angry. It would be like a flaying. And yet he could not refuse.
He thought of every time he’d left a welt on Cyril’s skin. The tears and cries and pleas for more, harder, Yes, yes, I’m so sorry, yes, and suddenly, he understood the urge.
“I will,” he said. At which Daoud looked, incredibly, more miserable than he had before. “I don’t have to, though, if—”
“No.” Daoud shook his head, put a patronizing hand on Aristide’s knee. “Of course. It will be wonderful, I’m sure.”
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
Lillian hadn’t given Saeger a card. They’d talked for perhaps two minutes. And yet, when she struggled from bed the next morning, hoarse and mildly hungover, she found a telegram waiting by her breakfast plate.
Pointedly, with great discipline, she poured her coffee and took a sip before she set aside her cup in favor of the onionskin.
MEET HALF TWO AT LYLES STOP OS END
Which was how she found herself at the top of a set of treacherous stairs on a side street off Temple, beneath a buzzing neon sign that read LYLE’S TAPROOM.
Not her usual sort of haunt. Thanks be Martí had known the place and been able to take her there. Just another odd stop in the long line of them her work over the years had called for. At least at Lyle’s she would not be attempting seduction, or sedition.
The stairs were an adventure to navigate in pumps, but she made it down and let herself in. A bell over the door thwacked dully, short a hammer. A team of metro workers sat at the bar, still in coveralls, hard hats upturned on the floor beside their stools. The trolley lines had been under nearly constant construction since Lillian returned to the city, and the dusty teams were a ubiquitous sight.
A young man with a notepad and half a pint at his elbow scratched aimlessly at a table with the nib of his pen. Two middle-aged razors occupied the corner by the jukebox, veiled in a cloud of smoke.
Out of her eye-catching gala finery, Saeger looked more comfortable, and more compelling. Lillian had never been particularly susceptible to the sway of charisma, but Saeger certainly had … something. An intensity that made her difficult to ignore.
A useful tool, already winning her support among the more impressionable of the voting populace. Lillian could help her temper it with strategy, wield it to best effect. Hopefully that was why she had been invited here: to offer her opinions and advice.
A couple of hangers-on about Saeger’s age occupied the table with her: two men, likely brothers, and a broad-shouldered woman in a sheepskin jacket.
“Lillian,” said Saeger, and the informality struck Lillian as awkward but understandable. The surname might catch somebody’s attention.
“Opal,” she said, because a ministerial candidate was even more likely to be re
cognized than a minor scandal.
“Anything to drink?” Saeger tipped her pint glass. She didn’t introduce the hangers-on, and they didn’t move to do it themselves. Were they protection? Campaign team? Friends?
Lillian smiled and shook her head. “No, thank you. Or perhaps just a shrub?”
Saeger snorted. “I don’t think they do those.”
In denim and canvas and a collarless work shirt, instead of stiff raw silk, she also spoke more easily: the barest hint of a nasal city drone, and soft, almost nonexistent consonants that let her words run together. Her mouth had a crooked cant, so her sentences came out of one side. Lillian wagered it was the same side smoke came out of, when she had a straight lit up.
“Why Lyle’s, may I ask?”
“Old haunt,” said Saeger. “And we’re not likely to run into—what was his name? The snapper?”
“Van Nuys?”
“Or anybody else like him. Not that I’m ashamed to be seen with you. It’s just—”
“I can’t be seen with you. Conflict of interest. The same reason we couldn’t put you onstage yesterday.”
Saeger nodded, sipped her beer. She looked so at home here, and so in her own skin: much more than she had at the gala. “That was a hard time, listening to it all and keeping my teeth shut. Delia would’ve been firing smart remarks like a chain gun, with all those swells telling made-up stories about her.”
“You don’t think she’d be pleased to be remembered?”
“Pleased? Absolutely. Polite? Not a chance. She wasn’t exactly tactful. Or tactical. Me, you didn’t hear a peep, and I smiled through it. I know about grand gestures. Spent enough years lighting ’em. Back when this place was Curtains.”
“Stagefolk bar?”
“Only the name’s changed really. Though there’s fewer strippers and all that now.” Setting her glass between them, she put her palms on the table and leaned in. “But I didn’t want to talk to you about old times. The party’s called Forward Gedda, after all.”
Lillian tipped her head: a nod, barely.
“You’ve noticed the press doesn’t treat me kindly. How do I change that?”
“I’m afraid as far as the Telegraph goes, you’re scratched. But you might get a better class of censure if you actually matched Frye policy for policy. If she talks about her tax plan in a debate, you’d better have a rejoinder.” The first one, a month ago, had been a joke. “Rallies are one thing, but when they put you opposite Frye you need to be able to counter her points.”
“My policy is to help Gedda,” said Saeger. “Delia used to say she just wanted to get the Ospies out, get things back to normal. But I’d always tell her if the house fell down the first time, why build it back the same?”
“And what did she say to that?”
“She said that’s why I was the brains of the operation. She told me when we scratched Acherby, I ought to be in charge. She meant it for a joke, I think, but after she … I just kept hearing her say it. The way she used to tell me to round up our folk, there was a train tonight that wouldn’t make the station.”
“A mission,” said Lillian, despairing.
“Maybe. But it ain’t just for her. I don’t want my country run on bribery and favors, welfare gutted to line somebody’s pockets. I want a better, cleaner Gedda, but I don’t want to sound like Acherby when I say it. I just want something that works for us all.”
Idealism. Lillian held down a shudder until it died. “That’s all very fine, but Frye has clearly outlined foreign policy plans. She has a stance on international trade. She has donors, too. With deep pockets.”
“I’ve got the labor unions,” said Saeger.
“Which are still in tatters. You’d be well advised to seek out some softhearted philanthropists who want a sop for their guilt.”
Saeger’s frown had been deepening as Lillian spoke. “I asked you here to help me. And this is what I get?”
Lillian had slipped, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to walk it back. “I am helping. You need to hear it from someone.”
“All right,” said Saeger, squaring her shoulders. “In my place, what would you do?”
If Lillian had brought a folder, this is when she would have opened it and spread the papers. “The wealthy despise you, and so do Tatien loyalists. Older folk are divided—some of them are nostalgic, some of them are suspicious. You’re playing on your youth; your Catwalk credentials; your ties to the unions, the workers, the poor.”
“And the Chuli,” Saeger said. “We blew those guard towers. The camps came down because of us, and we put guns in their hands.”
“The Chuli,” said Lillian, “can’t vote.”
“They’ll be able to once I’m in office; that’s a promise.”
Lillian held back a sigh of frustration. “I wouldn’t bring it up until after the inauguration.”
“That’s cheap,” said Saeger. “I’ve got integrity.”
“Yes, but that doesn’t win you an election. The appearance of integrity will do you wonders, but you’d better stay slippery until the polls close. Your numbers might be better than Frye right now, but she’s still got a solid base. Stealing some of them from beneath her will serve you well, but they won’t be swayed by voting rights for stateless nomads.”
“I don’t want to win on lies,” said Saeger. “I want to win on my convictions.”
“It would be wonderful if that was how this went,” said Lillian. “But those odds don’t invite a wager.”
Saeger shrugged, and Lillian saw a wall go up between them. “It worked for Delia, didn’t it?”
* * *
Lunch with Frye was a more dignified affair, and one she hoped would get her into less trouble. After all, it was her only option now.
Lillian presented herself at the agreed-upon time, clicking up the concrete steps of a town house on Fountain boulevard. A maid in a spotless apron led her to the parlor and brought coffee. Frye appeared shortly after the tray. Unlike Saeger, who had been ill at ease in formalwear and more comfortable in work clothes, Frye seemed equally at home in a tweed suit as she had a ballgown. The open lapels of her jacket showed a conservative collar of pearls.
Lillian stood and offered her hand. Frye shook it, smiling, and sat down at a right angle to Lillian, so that they were both leaning on the arms of their chairs to speak. It felt conspiratorial, and this gave Lillian hope. If she had a choice, she’d rather join the Frye administration, since she seemed to know what she was doing better than Saeger did.
“I hope you were able to get a little rest yesterday,” said Frye. “I know how hard you’ve been working.”
This meant Frye had been keeping an eye on her. That was good. “I had a slower day than usual. Which isn’t saying much.”
“I wish half my team had half your work ethic,” said Frye. “We’d be polling three times as high.”
Lillian sipped her coffee and shrugged. “It’s not that I don’t appreciate the praise…”
“But?”
“I’m not sure you have what Saeger does. Even if you put in more hours and more money, you’re missing something vital.”
Frye cocked her head, touching her pearls with one contemplative finger. “She does have a … an aura. A pull. I’m not sure what I’d call it. It’s not enough to run a country.”
“No, but it might be enough to win her an election.”
Sighing, Frye dropped her hand back to her lap. “Sometimes I hate how sentimental folk can be.”
“You may hate it,” said Lillian, “but you’d better learn to use it or you’ll end up giving a concession speech.”
“And you have an idea.”
“Several.”
That got her the small nasal huff of Frye’s laughter. “Start with one.”
“Nostalgia is a strong emotional hook,” said Lillian. “And Saeger doesn’t even have to work for hers: She stands for the lights on Temple Street. For the cherry trees on Talbert Row. She ousted the Ospies from power, and
not metaphorically. To at least a third of the country, she’s a folk hero.”
“And the other two-thirds?”
“Half of that’s your base,” said Lillian. “People angry at the collateral damage caused by the Catwalk. People suffering from the destroyed infrastructure. People who don’t like the idea of their taxes funding welfare. Maybe a few people with some lingering Ospie sentiments.”
Frye made a despairing noise at odds with her conservative pearls and the refined appointments of her parlor. “Those stone-sucking sow-shits just won’t lie down and die. One fart out of them and a whole room’s foul.” She sighed, heavily. “I apologize for my language. They just gnaw at me. As I’m sure they do you.”
“In different ways, I think. If you want to keep their votes, you have to make them feel sure of you without pandering, because pandering will lose you the rest of Gedda. You have to balance on the edge.”
“And you?”
“I’m not running for prime minister,” said Lillian, looking into the rippling black mirror of her coffee cup. “My best option is to keep my past quiet and do my best in the here and now. My parents did it—not with the Ospies, but they made their way after Grandmama and the Spice War. It’s a matter of compartmentalization. And humility. You take what you can get, do it well, and strive for better, all the while making people like you now instead of hating who you used to be.”
Frye made a tch noise, tongue behind her teeth. “That must chafe.”
“It comes more naturally to me. My brother has always had a much harder time.” As the words left her, she felt the same horrified inevitability of watching a glass fall from a table, a child run in front of a car. Time slowed. She had made a grievous error.
“Forgive me,” said Frye, disconcertingly casual. “I did know you had a brother, only … I was under the impression he had died? I remember reading something, several years ago…”
Lillian’s lungs felt atrophied, unable to pull in air. Her hands on the saucer and coffee cup went numb. “Yes,” she said. “I did. I mean, I do.” Breathe. In Porachis she had learned how to escape a pit of quicksand—a problem sometimes in the upper waters of the Shadha. Once it had you, struggling would only pull you further in. Calm was the key to escape.
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