“What’d you bring those for?” Stephen asked, as he removed a short length of copper pipe and a sack of furniture tacks liberated from the pantry, a hand drill likewise swiped from the garage, cigarette papers, and a box of the old shotgun shells he had discovered in the shed.
“These,” said Cyril, shaking the tacks, “are shrapnel. This—” the pipe, “—a housing. We’ll use the papers to make a fuse. And these?” He picked up a shell and pulled the brass cap from the tube. Gunpowder escaped in a fine spray across his fingers. “Explosives.” Then, a loaf of bread, some cheese, and two leathery keeper apples came out of the bag. “This is just lunch.”
“Temple bells,” said Stephen, eyes huge in his skinny face.
Cyril shrugged, and sat down on the frozen ground to get to work. “I told you I would teach you how to build a better bomb. No time like the present.”
* * *
“Why don’t you want to go?” asked Stephen, when they’d finished emptying the shells—very carefully—into a piece of parchment paper.
“Hold this steady,” Cyril said, handing him the pipe. “And I mean steady.”
Stephen gave him a very teenaged look. When Cyril didn’t yield, the look shifted briefly to concern and then to concentration. Cyril picked up the parchment paper at either edge and placed the narrowest point of its curve on the lip of the pipe. One end was sealed already with a cap. The other cap sat by in a nest of copper shavings they had made drilling a hole for the fuse.
Both of them held their breath as the gunpowder hissed against the metal, the steady stream of it building slowly to a solid layer of black.
“Stop,” said Cyril, when they’d filled half the pipe. “Tacks.”
Eyebrows relaxing beneath the brim of his cap, Stephen said, “Really, why don’t you want to go? I’d leave.”
“You’re smarter than I am,” said Cyril. Cold had seeped through his body, turning him pleasantly leaden and impervious to small pains. He had heard that freezing to death was the easiest way to go—that hypothermia induced euphoria so sweet you met your death with a smile.
But that would be too easy. More than he deserved.
“What did you actually do?” asked Stephen, pouring a dozen or so tacks into Cyril’s palm. “Nobody’s ever said outright. Not to me. I think I’ve got about half of it from books and the news and things, but they leave the real bits out. You know. And it’s no good trying Mummy.”
What did that question mean? And where even to begin?
“Nothing good,” he said, and began placing the furniture tacks one by one into the powder.
There was a part of him that knew it wasn’t true. Three months ago he’d pulled a girl no older than Stephen through a minefield after her leg was blown away below the knee. Before that, run a dangerous comms mission for a man whose wife had just gone into labor. Gotten a family out from under the falling heel of a republican platoon on the march, in the very nick of time.
But that part of him was sealed away under glass, so that its mouth screamed silently. If he didn’t look at it, he didn’t notice it at all.
“This blast won’t be very big,” said Cyril. “It’s just proof of concept. Normally you’d want phosphorus, or ammonal. Lay out some of those rolling papers. Overlapping.”
Stephen did as he was told. Cyril constructed the fuse quickly, wrapping the paper around the contents of a few more shotgun shells. One end, twisted tightly, fit into the hole they had drilled. The top of the pipe he capped delicately, wary of sparks.
He stood from his preparations. Movement made his cold joints ache. “What do you think I did?”
Stephen looked down at the bomb: half nervous, half impatient. A clear trail of mucus marked his upper lip, where the hair had just begun to darken and grow thick.
Cyril did not move to light a match.
“I think,” Stephen said, “you did some kind of work for the Ospies. And whatever you did, it was really bad. So bad nobody wants to know you.”
Cyril struck the light. Stephen opened his mouth to say something, but Cyril cut him off. “Get back to where we marked.”
Sprinting across the clearing, he stumbled on a root, then hopped over the rotten log that had been decomposing since the Spice War. Cyril bent to the fuse, lit it, and walked at his normal pace. He’d left it long enough for leisure.
Stephen flinched at the blast. Cyril, too, though his was less awe and more ingrained reflex. His hands began to shake, and he stuck them in his pocket. Bad as Aristide, with his DTs.
“That was it,” said Stephen, scrambling back over the log. “There’s tacks everywhere. It blew the pipe to bits! Rotten tops!”
Cyril half-followed him, settling between two soft stumps where branches had decayed away. He watched the boy—his nephew—scrape through the frozen leaf mold for a few minutes before he said, “Except you.”
Stephen looked up from a handful of tacks. “What?”
“Nobody wants to know me, except you.”
“Obviously you didn’t want to do whatever it was.” His scorn and confidence were the kind people generally lost after the world kicked them in the teeth a time or two.
“How do you know that?”
“There are all kinds of people who did what the Ospies told them and hated it.” Shrapnel held carefully in one hand, Stephen climbed up onto the log beside Cyril. “Mummy, for one. When she was in Porachis … I was little, but even I knew something wasn’t right. She doesn’t talk about it much. She and Dad, both: backed into a corner so they’d do what the Ospies wanted. And I know there’s kids at school whose parents are the same. Folk try to keep it quiet: Nobody wants to end up like you.”
It was not the answer he had been expecting, and it hamstrung him.
“It makes them feel good to see you shamed.” Stephen was speaking to the jagged pieces in his palm now, pushing them around with his finger. “Because they can tell themselves they’re not that bad after all. Which means you must have done something awful.”
Breathing hurt—the icy air scoured his lungs, and his ribs felt as though a vice had closed around them.
“It’s going to come out anyway,” said Stephen, young and smart and terribly matter-of-fact. “On the wireless and all. Why don’t you tell me now? Like you’d want me to hear it.”
Playing for time, Cyril held out his hand and made a give it gesture. Stephen looked perplexed for a moment, then poured the slurry of copper and tacks and forest floor from his cupped palm into Cyril’s.
The threatening edges and keen cold points of metal focused him. No one else was going to teach Stephen about these things. And Cyril knew how hard it was to learn in the field; experience imparted its lessons well, but its methods could be brutal.
“All right,” he said, closing a loose fist over the remnants of their blast. “I will.”
The cold kept him brief, cutting the story down to its most essential parts. But that, he realized as he told it, was how he would have wanted Stephen to hear it first: facts unvarnished by opinion. He’d already proven he was capable of forming his own.
CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
Rinko Higata had returned to Gedda several months before Lillian. She had been in the Niori peninsula, staying with her father’s family for the duration of Ospie rule. Now that she was back in the country, she still hadn’t established a private practice. Instead, she had been working off and on as an independent consultant to the provisional government and spending much of her spare time at the Yotoi temple mission on Porter Street, offering pro bono legal assistance to Niori immigrant families.
“Penance,” she had called it, looking rueful.
Lillian hadn’t spoken to her since their meeting before Solstice, about the prospect of recovering DePaul money from the abyss. She was loath to ask another favor, but at least this one was firmly in Rinko’s line.
Devotees in simple clothes welcomed her to the temple with kind smiles and soft words. She wondered if that would change if, fo
r instance, her photo started running in the papers. Or if she ended up in front of a tribunal.
Rinko, the mission director said, was with a client just then, but would be done in half an hour. Would she take some barley tea?
She would, and did, and sat in the pleasant silence of the mission’s administrative office, listening to the echoes of chanted litanies from the small adjoining temple. The director left her alone, returning to his typewriter. The half hour she passed there, kneeling in her stockings on a quilted cotton pad, drinking toasty, steaming tea, was the calmest scrap of time she’d had since Jinadh handed her his page of ciphers and asked for help. She was almost disappointed when Rinko appeared, opening the door for a wan-faced woman whose eyes sat deep in dark circles. She sent the woman on her way with a few last words in Niorese—what little of that language Lillian had learned only served to translate goodbye—and then turned to face her next task.
“DePaul,” she said, hands on hips.
“Higata.” Lillian set her teacup aside, hands kept steady by concentration.
“I imagine you aren’t here about debate club reunion.”
“Astute as always.” Lillian rose from her cushion and smoothed her skirt.
“Don’t tell me you’ve fallen on times hard enough you need a free legal consultation.”
“I’ll pay you,” said Lillian. “Though given you’ve had a look through my finances, you know exactly how much you can bleed from me before I faint.”
At that, Rinko laughed. Too loudly, for the mission director’s taste: He shot a dirty look in their direction.
“Come into my office,” said Rinko, holding out an arm to Lillian. “I can guess what you’re here for, and you’ll want something stronger than that tea.”
* * *
“Your brother always was an idiot,” said Rinko, after she poured a second whiskey for each of them. Maybe that was why the insult didn’t land too heavily. Or maybe it was truth that kept Rinko’s assessment from stinging; hadn’t Lillian said the same thing about him any number of times?
“Wasn’t he sent down from Ellerslee?” Rinko went on, capping the bottle and settling back in her chair. “I remember hearing someone mention it.”
“Nearly. He did take his degree, but it was complicated. I know after, Daddy was very keen to get him into a line of work that would … shape him up. I always assumed that’s how he was funneled into the FOCIS. I never got many details.”
“That’s good. If it comes to a trial, I can use that. If I get a little more information.”
That took Lillian slightly aback. “I was really only here for a consult. Or to see if you knew someone. I … you’re largely corporate defense, aren’t you?”
“There isn’t much precedent in this country for the kind of thing Frye is proposing, and therefore very little applicable law. There would be lots of room to maneuver. Lots of room to improvise. Besides, is it such a leap from corporate to war crimes? Taschen, Taschen, and Nooz certainly defended contractors accused of worse than what your brother has done.”
“And it would be a good way to get your name into a couple of books, I imagine.”
Rinko shrugged, and sipped her whiskey.
“You have an idea already, don’t you?”
Her laugh came out a little huffy, like she was insulted Lillian thought it would take her any more time than this to create a defense strategy for a hated Ospie collaborator. “Don’t you? I kept an eye on your career when you were in the corps. I wanted to see what you did. And you were good at your job, but I taught you most of it.”
“People like stories,” said Lillian, remembering late-night preparations before debates, Rinko’s hair escaping from its pins, papers strewn across the floor of a lecture hall, half the team asleep on the benches. “The law likes facts. But the law is made and held by people. The transitive property applies.”
“So, what story would we tell about your brother, if it came to it?”
“He endured horrors,” Lillian said tentatively. Then gathering confidence, as though this were an oral exam. “And continues to endure them.”
“Start earlier,” said Rinko. “It has to feel inevitable, or he’s still at fault.”
Lillian cast back to childhood. They had been close when they were young, united against loneliness when their parents spent weeks or sometimes months away from home. School had ruined that. Lillian took to Cantrell like a fish slipped into the sea, and couldn’t understand why Cyril had such a hard time. At university, Cyril sent her miserable letters that she answered with sympathy but little comprehension. Worse was her gradual transition to her parents’ side of the front; she wasn’t sure when being the good child became something she aspired to, a set of expectations to meet, rather than simply a tool she could use when she and Cyril got into trouble.
When she graduated from Sackett and started traveling, missing holidays and summer trips to Ibet, leaving Cyril alone … that was when things had gone sour. Shame on the household, secrets hastily covered up so that even she had never understood exactly what her brother was guilty of.
“A promising young man,” she said. “Neglected by his parents, smarts left to fester. And of course, he got into trouble.” By now she was not thinking about Cyril, but her own son.
“And I will guess,” Rinko said, “that the FOCIS did not treat him any better. Even if the Ospies gave him a compelling reason to turn, if he was loyal to the service he would have resisted.”
“Whatever he was doing for them, he ended up in the hospital.” Vivid memories showed her the thin, purple line of his lips, gashed through the green-white mask of his face. The black stripes of stitches marked neatly over a livid red wound. “Again, I don’t know the details.”
“We can get those later,” said Rinko. “So. He turns. But only under duress, I assume?”
“Yes. You know Vasily Memmediv?”
Rinko’s eyes widened, showing white all around the near-black iris. “The separatist?”
“Yes. He used to be a part of the FOCIS, and he knew Cyril then. Before the Ospies.”
“What’s he like, in person?”
“Slippery,” said Lillian.
Rinko hmphed. “And now he’s slipped one too many times. Fallen out of favor over there. How politics pulls people apart! They say he used to be good friends with Ianiźca before the schism, and now she’s calling for his arrest. Do you think he’ll flee Tatié?”
Lillian shook her head. “No. He’d bleed out into the earth if he thought it would help his … country, now, I suppose.”
“Funny,” said Rinko, “how far people will go for a lost cause.”
“Excuse me?” She knew what Rinko meant; it had simply taken her by surprise. The other woman had seemed so confident as she outlined her ideas.
“If Frye is elected and moves forward with this tribunal, what are you hoping for?” Rinko folded her hands around her glass and leaned in across her desk. Papers slithered underneath her elbows. “Acquittal? Exoneration?”
“I thought—” she started, then began again, astonished. “But what about everything you just said?”
“That wasn’t a legal defense,” said Rinko. “There is no legal defense for what your brother has done. There are records showing his confessions to treason and murder.”
“Ospie records,” said Lillian. “Coerced confessions. Probably under torture.”
“This country wants to see your brother hang. I might be able to keep him off the scaffold, but do not ask me to set him free. It is beyond my skill, or anyone’s. And that is something you need to understand from the outset, or we will be working at cross-purposes.”
Speechless, Lillian watched Rinko tip her glass back, gray pearl earrings sweeping the skin of her neck. When she set it down she said, “Now, may I come up to Carmody and speak with Cyril?”
“You’re welcome to try,” said Lillian, hearing her own words at a distance through the ringing in her ears. “But who knows if he’ll talk.”
SEVENTEEN
West Cultham Rail Company had a warehouse near what had once been the bad end of the harbor and didn’t appear to have gotten much better. The only thing that had changed was the graffiti. No Ospie quartered circles, or regionalist yellow and blue. Still dirty jokes and scatological sketches, of course, but here and there Aristide saw a motif of parallel lines hatched at regular intervals. Train tracks, with Saeger’s name scrawled beneath them in dripping paint. Or, sometimes, Cordelia’s.
Swathes of the neighborhood had once been his territory, under a different name than the one he used onstage. A gnarled wen on the city’s ass made up of vast hangars and the piss-stinking alleys in between. A place where anything might be bought or sold: flesh, drugs, false documents, and foreign currency. Shipping containers could conceal a multitude of sins. Such as the poppy tar now biding its time in orderly rows, listed in the harbormaster’s books as tin, cloth, and exotic woods.
“Humble, ain’t it?” Custler asked, leaning heavily on the railing of the screeching metal gallery that ran around the warehouse walls. “We’re sitting on a hoard, and yet you’d never think to look. Canny art, that.”
“Indeed,” said Aristide. “But never one I strove to master.”
She cased him from the sides of her eyes. “I don’t think it’d look as good on you.”
He thought of the patchy beard he’d grown in the Culthams. The uneven tangle his hair had made as it grew out in the bowels of the steamer to Hyrosia. “You’d be quite right.”
Side by side for a moment, silence settled between them like a lanky, dour bird with evil eyes. Aristide had just begun to worry when Custler said, “Your, um … your pencil pusher. He ain’t here?”
“Back at the hotel answering letters, I’m afraid. I’m capable enough without him, when it comes to certain things.”
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