Amnesty

by Lara Elena Donnelly

  Lillian and Jinadh, who had not so far as Cyril knew ever been in law enforcement or enemy territory, recovered more slowly, and crept up to the door with more caution.

  Lillian blanched when she saw the damage. “Temple bells,” she said. “Marshal, I—” Then, hand flying to her mouth, “Mother and sons, where’s Stephen?”

  “I’ll find him,” said Jinadh, putting his hand briefly on Lillian’s arm before he hurried back into the house.

  It was not suspicion, on her part, but fear. His sister had not automatically picked out her son as the bomber, as Cyril had. She was only worried that he had been hurt.

  Yamitad was less sentimental, and had her hands firmly on the reins once more. “Who’s responsible for this?”

  “Me,” said Cyril. Some grit on the floor had cut his cheek when he dropped. Not deeply, but enough that the scrape had begun to burn.

  “You couldn’t possibly—” Lillian began but he turned a look on her that had its roots in their childhood together. The one that said Shut up or they’ll find us out. It had evolved somewhat, given his circumstances in later life. But she recognized it and shut her teeth.

  “Took me a minute to come when you called, right?” In truth, he hadn’t heard her calling at all. Just lingered awhile on the roof after he saw the marshal arrive. And left Stephen alone, once he descended. There had been enough time—just—for a quick-footed boy who had done all his preparation beforehand. Cyril wondered where he had built the bomb. The shed, probably, where they had found the clay pigeons and the old boxes of shells that, miraculously, still fired.

  Cyril had, indeed, taught him to build a better bomb. But he’d also tried to teach him not to get caught. While he was nowhere in evidence now, there weren’t many other people to paint the blame on. Stephen was conspicuous by his very absence. And so, Cyril claimed it.

  “It won’t do you any good,” said Yamitad. “We’ll call the station in the village for another car. Or requisition hers.” Here she jerked her head in Lillian’s direction. From her face, this would be an unwelcome turn of events. He wondered how much more she resented him now than she had five minutes ago.

  Jinadh’s footsteps echoed as he came jogging across the hall. “He’s fine. In his bedroom. I asked him to stay there, for now.”

  “In that case,” said Lillian, as if she had not just set aside maternal terror, “I can drive you to the village.”

  First coffee, now a lift? “What a gracious host,” said Cyril. Earlier, he had plucked an eloquent look from their childhood lexicon, and now it was her turn. This one said, One more word and you are dead.

  And even though he was, already—whatever Rinko said—he shut his teeth and let them put him in the car.

  * * *

  “Stop shouting, Aristide!” Lillian put her hand over the earpiece of the telephone, aware she was doing exactly what she’d ordered him not to. “Fraud, I said. They’ve arrested him for fraud. Yes, exactly like they said on the wireless.”

  She could feel the house around her, echoing with the events of the afternoon. Her brother’s absence was like an amputated limb: a sudden queasy lightness, the expectation of movement where there wouldn’t be again.

  She had expected to lose him; she had been preparing for it. She had not expected it to happen quite like this.

  Aristide rang her up at the top of the news cycle, when Flanders chimed his hourly update and the whole country—or the folk who had radios, at least—heard the news that notorious Ospie collaborator Cyril DePaul had been charged with fraud and taken into custody.

  “It’s got to be Frye,” he said.

  “Why?” asked Lillian. “She hasn’t got that kind of power. She can’t just order someone arrested because she wants them in jail.”

  “The charges are tabletop,” said Aristide. “That passport’s LSI work; I got it from Asiyah. But that’s not what I mean. She did some digging—or Custler did—and dropped a word in someone’s ear. She wanted him locked up tight because she’s worried.”

  “About what?”

  “Saeger, for one. If Cyril had run, or shot himself, or robbed Frye of her little campaign promise, she’d have been out a chunk of popular appeal.”

  All right, he had her there. But Daoud’s worries had settled in her chest and now they rattled, waking. “And two?”

  A long pause.

  “Aristide,” she said. “If you’ve done anything, said anything to Frye … You’re going to cause more trouble than—”

  “Don’t say than he’s worth.”

  “You didn’t let me finish. He’s my brother, Aristide, and whatever he was to you, he’s still that to me.”

  Someone knocked on her office door. Magnusson, and he looked worried. She held up a finger, begging for a moment.

  “What possessed you?” she asked. “What did you possibly think you could accomplish?”

  “Possessed me to do what, exactly?” his voice was poisonous over the phone, the sibilance turning into static, the hard consonants to cracks. “Please. Elaborate.”

  “You know very well,” she said. “And Mr. Qassan knows, too. You told him instead of me, when you chose to meddle in the affairs of my family—”

  “Daoud is my secretary. There’s no point in keeping secrets from him.”

  “What a miserable excuse. I had a right to know!”

  “No,” he said, “I don’t believe you did.”

  She took a shaky breath to stop herself from outright screaming. “If you insist on carrying on by yourself, in this slapdash secret manner, it’s only going to make things worse. You always have. Before Acherby, even. Before the coup. Your schemes make middens out of people’s lives.”

  “Those schemes,” said Aristide, “would have gone off without a snag if your mud-fisted brother hadn’t cast his own line and tangled it with mine.”

  “Or if you had told him you had one in the first place!”

  “Lillian.”

  Jinadh’s voice recalled her from the depths of her rage and she surfaced as if from icy water: clenched all over, desperate for air. Aristide was still yelling into the telephone, but as she lowered it from her cheek the noise became tinny and indistinct.

  Magnusson had gone, replaced by her husband, but the worried look on his face was the same. “You should come downstairs,” he said. “There is a special bulletin on the wireless.”

  “About Cyril?” she asked. The receiver slipped into her lap and she realized her hand ached from gripping it.

  He shook his head and she almost relaxed, but something in his expression held her in a state of unease.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “An explosion,” he said. “In Amberlough.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-ONE

  Aristide had grown accustomed to success, as he had to luxury.

  There had been a time when he could hardly afford to eat, but he had left that far behind in favor of bespoke suits, silk lingerie, and a weekly manicure. All of it was, of course, unnecessary for survival, but on occasions when he had been suddenly deprived of it he felt as if the earth had turned to quicksand underneath his feet.

  This swift disillusionment felt discomfitingly similar.

  They had heard the blast, faintly, even this far across town: a crack that echoed into juddering ripples. The window of their shared parlor looked south, and so they had a decent view of the smoke rising into the painful brightness of the winter sky. Smoke coming from the docks, near the train yards.

  Aristide already knew what had happened, fifteen minutes before the special bulletin interrupted Margaret Tse’s Melody Hour midway through an advertisement for Snyder’s Straights.

  “I told you,” said Daoud, as they sat listening to another iteration of Aristide’s failure on the wireless. “I said it would go badly.”

  “Please,” said Aristide, drunk and irritated. Half a martini sat on the glass-topped table at his elbow; he’d lost count of how many he’d had. “You didn’t. You coul
dn’t even have known.”

  “It was a stupid idea.” Daoud stood from the sofa and stalked to the desk, littered with papers. He picked one up by its corner and frowned at it as though it were a slimy thing pulled from a gutter. “You have lost a heap of money and any leverage you might have had.” With that, he sunk into the chair behind the desk. It squealed beneath his negligible weight, which meant he must have fallen with some force. He had grown older in the last five years, but not much stouter.

  “I followed you into Oyoti,” said Daoud, putting a beleaguered hand to his head. “Into Niallo Benggi. I picked chiggers out of your feet. And all I have ever earned is scorn. What is it about this man? Why does he make you act this way?”

  Aristide’s laughter turned into a wet cough, which made him breathless and dizzier than the alcohol would have done alone. At the end of it, he swallowed phlegm and finished his martini. Fishing inelegantly for the lemon twist at the bottom of his empty glass, he asked, “Jealous, are we?”

  “I would be insane.” It wasn’t cruel or vindictive. If anything, Daoud sounded surprised Aristide would suggest such a thing. “I am only trying to understand. All my life I have worked hard, done well, given others everything they asked from me. And I get nowhere. I get nothing. Cyril DePaul has betrayed, failed … he has floundered through his life. You were famous, and wealthy, and you threw away everything for him.”

  “Yes,” said Aristide, and though he was drunk, anger made his diction sharp as broken glass and dragged the sibilance across it into tatters. “Twice.”

  “Why, Aristide? You are so canny about everything else. Why does he make you act so mad?”

  Aristide swallowed another fit of laughter, wary of aching lungs. “Maybe I just like a challenge. And Didi, you are anything but.”

  * * *

  Aristide only caught Kostos by the grace of a loose-lipped receptionist at FWAC. She told him when news was likely to drop after dinner, Kostos drank his at Sarah’s on Adler Street, just south of Ionidous Avenue.

  The place had been something else before—Aristide tried to remember and it eluded him. Something he hadn’t had much interest in. Bad restaurant, perhaps, or a soda fountain. Something inoffensive where he had no important business. Now it had become a smoky bar with a low tin ceiling, kept too warm by ugly radiators. The place teemed with men and women not unlike Kostos: fast talkers and hard drinkers with cynical expressions and wrinkled shirts.

  The man himself stood at the bar over a greasy piece of newspaper covered in the remains of something fried. The smell of vinegar was thick as Aristide approached, mingling with sweat and cigarette smoke.

  “You stand out a little bit,” said Kostos, taking in Aristide’s fur collar and the razor crease at the front of his flannel trousers.

  Aristide likewise cased Kostos’s rumpled jacket and loosened tie. The top button of his shirt was open, revealing stubble and the loose skin of his throat. “I should hope so.”

  “I can guess what you’re here about.” He swiped a chip through mayonnaise, leaving streaks across yesterday’s news. Aristide saw Saeger’s name, read … rallied today, optimistic despite Frye’s gains … between oil spots and egg white. There was a picture of a young man lifted on the shoulders of a crowd, holding a ragged flag marked with Catwalk train tracks.

  “My editor don’t go in for hearsay,” Kostos went on. “And that’s what I got now. Not a story.”

  “You’ve still got the affair.”

  But Kostos was shaking his head. “Nah. The peach resigned this evening. You ain’t heard? Frye works fast. Can’t say I don’t admire her get-it-doneness.”

  Aristide’s extremities went cold. “Double martini, please,” he told the bartender.

  “I don’t trust the gin at Sarah’s,” Kostos said. “Stones, nor the whiskey neither. But whatever they cut it with, at least it don’t repeat on me.”

  Indeed, it seared like paint thinner. But it put his problems at a bearable distance and slowed the beating of his heart.

  “You look like you’re gonna faint,” said Kostos. “Take a seat. Supposed to be something coming down from the hounds any minute. I’d’ve gone to the station, but they’re keeping the numbers clamped down for security. There’s a peach with the Evening Expo who’s got an in with the chief—or he’s got it in with her—and she said she’d come ’round and tell us after. She’ll keep all the crispy bits for herself and her scoop, but maybe you’ll hear something good.”

  Expediency trumping decorum, Aristide downed the rest of his drink in one swallow. “I very much doubt it.”

  Awareness of a commotion at the entrance spread through the crowd like wind through grass, making voices rise and fall, heads turn. Folk shouted, then hissed at each other for quiet, until finally, Aristide asked, “What’s going on?”

  But Kostos had hopped down from his seat and nabbed a colleague. They were both craning their necks to look over the sea of oiled hair and pillbox hats. “Is that Oleksa who just came in?” asked Kostos.

  “Can’t tell,” the other man said.

  “Hey!” Kostos might not have had a radio voice, but it carried. “Oleksa! What’d you hear at the kennel?”

  “Laurie,” said the bartender, “don’t you go shouting like that in my place.”

  Four people turned around to shush her.

  “Polanka says it’s Catwalk.” The woman Kostos had addressed, who was the cause of the commotion, climbed up on a chair and flipped a notebook open like she was giving her own impromptu press conference. “I already filed it, scullers, or I wouldn’t be so free with my spoils. Our pal Chief Polanka says early investigations turned up three crispy bodies and explosives similar to those used by the nice folk who ousted Acherby and tore up half the country in the meantime.”

  Some shouted protests, swiftly put down by people eager to hear the rest of the story.

  “Yup,” Oleksa went on. “Emmeline Frye’s private interests look to be the target of Catwalk terrorism.”

  In one fell swoop, Frye had made herself the victim of a grievous wrong, taken a chain gun to Saeger’s chances, and ruined Aristide’s prospects for blackmail. If he wasn’t so utterly furious or empty of hope, he might admire her.

  “Say,” said Kostos, leaning in. “You knew Lehane. What d’you think she’d make of this?”

  “This big swell knew the Spotlight?” asked a woman sitting next to them. “Knock me. Hang on, Laurie is this that sculler … Makricosta, right? No swineshittin’?” She pulled out a steno pad and pencil. “Yeah, what would she say? You were friends, right? Good friends. You think she’d have backed Saeger?”

  Kostos half-managed to look sheepish.

  “Hang on,” said the bartender. “You were friends with the Spotlight?”

  “That dry-bite bobtail killed my cousin,” said the barback.

  “Shut your teeth.” The bartender snapped a towel at him. “She didn’t do it herself.”

  “Her folk blew his train. And he weren’t an Ospie. He just shoveled coal.”

  “Three dead today,” said the first journalist. “None of them Ospies, either. Come on, Makricosta, what’d she think?”

  It spread just like the news of Oleksa’s arrival had, only now the heads were turning his way. Eyes found him, and questions clogged the air. He couldn’t breathe. The rancid gin was burning back up his throat and he just had to get out, get out—

  How he made it to the street, he wasn’t sure, but awareness found him on all fours under Kostos’s shadow, vomiting into the gutter. There was little in his stomach to bring up but acid.

  “Told you not to trust the gin,” said Kostos, offering him a handkerchief.

  Aristide eschewed it in favor of his own, which would be ruined. Small price to pay for spite.

  “I’ll get you a cab,” said Kostos. “Least I can do.”

  “Thank you,” said Aristide, spit sour in his mouth. “But I prefer to walk.”

  PART

  3

  CHAPTERr />
  TWENTY-TWO

  Despite the bombing, they shuttered Damesfort and came to town. It was too expensive to keep both houses open and travel between them, if they were going to be paying a lawyer as well. Jinadh needed to be in the city for work—keeping his unmarried name had saved his job. Fewer folk clocked him straight off. His sections sold papers, and his writers liked him and turned their stories in on time. He was an acceptable risk to his employers. Lillian was thankful, as his income kept them from drowning too quickly.

  They let most of the staff go, and none of the outgoing employees seemed terribly torn up. Magnusson remained, accepting a cut in pay. “I’ve always been sympathetic to the DePauls,” he said, “ever since the Spice War. The women in your family make hard decisions, and they don’t make them lightly.”

  Lillian could have kissed him.

  Stephen kept his head bent on the drive into town, reading books for a spring term he might never see. At least not at Cantrell. Even with Rinko offering an old friend’s rates, it was a serious question whether they could afford to send him back, the results of his probation notwithstanding.

  They would find a way. If there was not one hidden somewhere in all this mess, she would will one open. There were some things, surely, she could still control.

  An encampment of journalists had sprung up outside the front door of twenty-four by the time they arrived. Didn’t they have anything better to report on, besides her family’s comings and goings? Saeger would be eager to talk to any one of them; with a month and a half to go ’til the election, she needed to reach the voters by any means available. She’d wrangled a slot on Backchat the day before and issued a scathing rebuttal to the verdict that the Catwalk had bombed Frye’s warehouse.

  “I think it says more about her than it does about me,” Saeger had said. “Is she afraid of me? Worried folk like what Forward Gedda stands for, more than they like what she’s proposing? Worried her gambit with these tribunals won’t pull her far enough ahead? We didn’t bomb that warehouse, but I’d like to know who did. And I’d like to know why the hounds are lying about it.”