by M. G. Herron
Eventually, someone came to tell them that the situation had been brought back under control. A young aide came running down the hall as Ming stepped out.
“Magistrate Ming, sir?”
“Yes?” Ming asked.
“Senator Fuquan is in the hospital. She has asked to see you.”
Captain Wallace himself escorted Ming across the torn and blasted lawn where deep gouges had marred the earth, past the twisted metal hulk of a destroyed mech. The thought that the millions spent on that war machine could have been used to invest in agricultural R&D and avert this crisis was not lost on him. The short journey affected him deeply. He retread the path that he and Fuquan had taken earlier that day, stepped over the scattered pebbles and splinters of wood and through a gaping hole in the wrought iron fence, all the while thinking—was this all worth the cost? A lawn can be re-sod, a fence can be rebuilt, but lives, once broken, are lost forever.
Ming was led into the mobile medical bay—a set of a dozen field tents—to a corner where Fuquan lay dying. He took her clammy hand in his and sat down in a plastic chair someone placed behind him.
“Is there anything I can do?” Ming asked.
“Be brave,” she croaked.
Ming hung his head. He thought this tiny woman was braver than he’d ever be. But what good would saying that now do?
“I’ll try.”
“You remind me of Mokabi Telerethon.”
Ming barked a harsh laugh. He couldn’t help picturing the absurdity of comparing himself to one of the country’s idols.
“You know, he was your age when he got involved in politics. He was more charismatic than you, I think—” Her chuckles turned into a cough that wracked her whole body for a long minute, echoing a phlegmy noise from deep within her chest.
“More charismatic, but also less clever.”
Ming smiled sadly. What good had clever done?
“I need you to finish my work. You seem to understand it better than anyone else.”
“I’m not even a senator.”
“That’s better. Your friend Senator Bohai can bring it before the senate for you.”
He tried to make a joke. “I’ll make sure he doesn’t accept aid from the U.S.”
“The UN will reject the next application you send.”
“How do you know that?”
She shook her head. “When that happens, you need to go to Norway.”
“Norway? What’s in Norway?”
Her breath was ragged and shallow now. “The Svalbard Seed Vault. Congress will grant you funds to make the journey to Norway to retrieve ancient seeds from the vault when the next UN application is rejected.”
Suddenly, Ming saw clearly into the heart of Fuquan’s mission. “You never intended to accept aid from the World Food Programme.”
She turned her head slowly from side to side. “I told you, we’d never recover.”
“You wanted to get the ancient seeds to revive our agriculture.”
“Japan will let us into their vault if we can prove that we can’t obtain aid.”
“So you were making it difficult for the UN to accept your application on purpose.”
“Not difficult.” She smiled. “Impossible.”
Ming bobbed his head. He didn’t need time to think it over. “I’ll go to Norway.”
“Good. I knew you would get it. Mokabi would have liked you, if he were still around.”
“You knew him?”
“Once. Long ago. He was stubborn like you. He believed in this country, too.”
Ming sat in silence and considered whether or not he believed in this country anymore. It had taken so much from him. It had disappointed him so many times. He wished he had Fuquan’s faith.
Fuquan fell asleep with Ming still by her side.
In the small hours of the morning, the laser wound that opened Fuquan’s stomach earlier that evening, when she stepped onto the lawn of the Capitol for a walk and into the path of a rogue mech in berserker mode, finally caused her to bleed out.
CHAPTER 29
MESSENGER
With grit in his eyes and heart, Ming entered the senate chamber before 9am the following morning.
He sat in Fuquan’s chair in the front row, ignoring the sideways glances from other senators as they filed into the room for the day’s session.
Word had circulated that Ming had been with Fuquan when she died.
The mood of the room was more somber and tense than the day before. The deaths of civilians in the protest in Telerethon Square was one thing. But one of their own, an esteemed senior senator with a track record a mile long being killed by a stray laser, was another level of wrong entirely.
Senator Khan arrived. He was well groomed this morning, with cleanly shaven cheeks, but his complexion was pale and there were dark circles under his eyes. The sight of him was the only thing that made Ming smile. Ming knew he didn’t get much sleep. Passing the biobug through his system would not have been a pretty ordeal. Harvey, his mustachioed assistant, glared at Ming. Ming thought he had probably deduced something about the source of his boss’s illness.
When Khan saw Ming smiling in their direction, he lashed out. “What’s so funny, Magistrate? Do you get some kind of perverse enjoyment out of my colleague’s death?”
The smile faded from Ming’s face. He said nothing. Nothing he could have said would have more of an impact than the words the entire senate was about to hear—and they weren’t even his. They were Khan’s. Ming let the insult pass over him like a wave.
Khan scoffed when Ming refused to engage him, and moved past Ming to his own seat a few rows above where Ming now sat.
When the vice president entered, Fuquan’s gray-haired assistant hurried to the front and dropped a slip of paper on his desk.
He read it, nodded, and beckoned Ming forward.
“You have a message for us from the Senator?”
Ming stood in the middle of the floor, alone, and addressed the senate.
“Her wake will be held tomorrow evening. You’re all invited to celebrate the life of the patriot and civic leader who showed us all what strength is. Before I go, she wanted me to play this recording for you.”
A lie for a good cause. Well. If that’s who he was now, then so be it. He would have done it again because it was not only the right thing to do, but the only thing to do.
Duty was a harsh mistress.
Ming connected the digital recorder wirelessly to the room’s speakers. He found and held Khan’s eyes across the room and pushed play.
“Fuck! How did Ming get those reports?” The word echoed, reports, ports, orts.
“I don’t know.”
“You assured me it was taken care of.”
“It was. The backup servers in the Fields district office were destroyed in the riots last week.”
The rest of the conversation was drowned out by a rising tide of cursing and indignant cries. Ming put the digital recorder on the vice president’s desk—history had proven to him the importance of redundant backups and he had already distributed several—and left the senate chamber.
Ming left the Capitol building through the west exit. He gazed across the wrecked lawn. Workers had sealed the hole in the wrought iron fence with barbed wire. Others were pouring loose earth into the furrows in the lawn.
Would that all holes were so easy to fill. Ming raised his eyes to the army encampment, and then to the city, which still lived in turmoil beyond.
Episode 5
RELUCTANT REBEL
CHAPTER 30
NEW MEMORIES
Ari woke in another room, this one with blue walls.
Fresh in his mind was the image of a Chinese man, medium height, looking down at the ground. The man’s face was frozen in an expression of surprise—eyes wide, brown irises nearly edged out by dilated pupils. The expression had yet to make the journey to his mouth. His lips were a hard, thin line. His tie was loose and he clutched a black cube close to his abdomen
. It looked heavy. He stared at the boy on the ground. The boy was maybe eleven years old. His neck was bent at an obtuse angle and his jaw hung slack.
Ari knew without knowing how that the Chinese man’s name was Kai, and that what had happened to the boy was his fault. Or it was Ari’s fault. Ari couldn’t rightly tell whether it was his own guilt, or guilt he felt on Kai’s behalf. It was all tangled up together. Ari hadn’t dreamed it. The image had just been there when he woke up, waiting for him to notice. It came in a flash and then it began to fade just as quickly.
Po sat on the other side of the room on a blue-and-white striped recliner. Her long, glistening wet black hair lay on her shoulders. Cradling a phone in her hands, she bent intently over its screen with her feet tucked under her legs. An oil painting of foaming breakers crashing onto rocks was framed with knotty sun-bleached pine.
She was lovely in black yoga pants and a white tank top. Ari’s eyes lingered on her cleavage before allowing his gaze to be drawn overhead to the shining rectangle of the vidcast reflected in the froth of the waves.
“—where I’m standing. The site of the attack itself,” came the voice of a female newscaster from the phone Po held, “is cordoned off a hundred yards on every side of the Capitol lawn and gardens. But you can see over my left shoulder the wreckage of one of the berserk APUs officials say malfunctioned yesterday. That machine and two others attacked a group of Workers’ Democratic Party officials as they were leaving an emergency session of the senate late last night.”
A second flash—a long-fingered man with a blond crew cut tinkering with miniature circuit boards by the light of a kinetic lantern. The light from the lantern faded and the blond man shook it up for a minute with a quick rattle before returning to the circuit boards with a tiny screwdriver and soldering iron.
Ari said, “There should have been four…”
“You’re awake!”
Po locked the phone, silencing the video as she rushed to his side.
“Are you okay? How are you feeling? Can I get you some water?”
“Slow down. I’m okay. Just need a second.”
She took a deep breath. The creases on her forehead smoothed out and her supple lips widened into a full-toothed smile. There was a gap between her front incisors that Ari noticed for the first time. It was cute and made his heart float. Her hand found his. She squeezed.
“I’m glad to see you, too.” But he was distracted even from her smile. “What were you watching?”
“Oh.” Her expression darkened. “Let me show you.”
She grabbed the phone and lay on the bed next to him. Ari shuffled closer to the wall to make room for her. Their bare shoulders touched and her wet hair tickled his neck. He was overly conscious of the torn left side of his face being close to her. It made it hard to see her on that side unless he turned his head all the way toward her.
“It happened last night. While you slept.”
She swiped the phone open and placed it screen down on her chest. The device projected the video on the white ceiling above them.
The video showed a woman with brown curls who held a microphone to her mouth and one hand to her ear. Dozens of soldiers and a few cars crossed in the background. The sky was a smoggy grey.
The woman said, “Senator Fuquan had just stepped off the floor after a twelve-hour filibuster against emergency legislation meant to widen the scope of the army’s power in the current occupation. Official sources confirm she was caught in the crossfire of three malfunctioning APUs. She sustained a fatal wound in the attack, and passed away at early this morning. Fortunately, it was late at night, so only a few other Congressional staff were injured before the APUs could be disarmed. We’re told that their conditions are stable, but the nature of their injures is otherwise unknown.
“After calls for Senator Khan to resign have gone largely ignored during the food riots this summer, many speculate that this attack is another violent show of force by the revolutionary faction, Citizen. According to government officials, however, no one has claimed responsibility for the attack.
“To further complicate matters, the President’s office has confirmed that an injunction was filed earlier today against Senator Khan. He has been asked to step down from his duties immediately, pending trial for charges of negligence of duty, maladministration—and possibly worse, according to some sources.”
The clip showed a video of a large Chinese man and a portly white man with a mustache pushing past a crowd of reporters outside an elaborate, massive stone building with three wide flights of stairs leading up to a glass and gold visitor’s entrance where several doorways were broken up by a dozen massive stone columns—an important government building, Ari assumed. The big man, presumably Senator Khan, pushed the camera away with one hand. The other man held the stack of folders in his arms up to cover his face and shield him from the flash of camera lights. A People’s News of Enshi logo wiped the screen to black. The clip faded.
“Three mechs attacked the Capitol,” Ari said. “There were supposed to be four.”
“How do you know that?” Po asked.
“I don’t know,” Ari said. It wasn’t a lie. He couldn’t fathom the source of his new memories. But he felt in his bones that the facts were true all the same.
Po chewed her lower lip with her front teeth. Ari’s smile widened when he saw the cute gap in her incisors again. But her face was drawn, her forehead wrinkled.
“All I can think of is Sasha and Felix standing on the mechs in the square,” she said. “Why did they let us go?”
“I’m sure they had their reasons.”
Po lay quiet and very still next to him.
“Do you remember when Felix said that I betrayed them?” Ari asked.
Po nodded.
“That man they think I tried to help, what’s his name?”
“Kai Ming.”
So it was true then. That was Kai in his memory. The man he used to work for. Why had Ari turned on the rebels to help him? Was Felix lying…or did he simply have his facts wrong? Ari needed to find out what had happened. But how?
“Po, what if I was working with them? All those people who died in that fight in the square yesterday. That poor senator who got killed by the mechs…what if it’s all my fault?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. They were holding you captive, just like me! Besides, I was there yesterday. None of that is your fault. If anything, you saved a life yesterday.”
He looked away from her, at the door, to hide the tears forming in his eyes.
“Besides, you heard the news. No one has claimed responsibility.”
“It had to be them,” Ari said, his voice hoarse. “It had to be.”
A tall, regal-looking woman cleared her throat from the doorway. Ari sat up, sniffed, and blinked his eye clear.
“Hello,” he said.
Po slid off the bed and took a few steps across the room, where she paused and stood, self-consciously looking between the tall woman and Ari.
“This is my Aunt Kylie,” Po said finally.
At first, Ari took Kylie to be about thirty years old. She wore a tanktop and pants that billowed around the ankles, almost identical to the outfit that Po wore. Ari suddenly realized that the clothes Po was wearing were Kylie’s clothes. This house belonged to Kylie, then. He noticed the smile lines creasing the corners of Kylie’s eyes and corrected himself. She was probably in her late thirties or early forties, a confident woman at the peak of her grace. Po was a little shorter, a little broader in the shoulders, but their resemblance to each other was self-evident. Po fidgeted, avoiding her aunt’s expression.
“Thank you for taking me in,” said Ari.
Kylie smiled, which deepened the faint lines at her eyes. But her chin was set. Ari got the distinct impression that his presence was not welcome here.
“Po tells me you saved her life.”
“If I remember right, she saved mine, too. By the looks of things,” Ari gestured to the room, “I owe
you both more than mere thanks.”
Po picked up a black vial from a box on the dresser. Chinese letters were printed on its side.
“Aunt Kylie’s a nurse,” she said. “She gave you some medicine.”
Ah, Ari thought. So maybe that explains the new memories.
“I used to be,” Kylie said. “I was able to get some medicine for you from my friends at the hospital. It wasn’t cheap, but you need it. We’ve given you three doses since you’ve been here.”
“How long was I out?”
“Almost thirty-six hours.”
Ari whistled. He was tired, but felt refreshed. The rest had done his body wonders.
Kylie gently took the vial from Po’s hand. “I’ve seen RNSCR used on plenty of soldiers. I served my two years in the army like everyone else. But never have I seen it on a head wound. It’s a miracle you’re alive. You’ll probably need to take the injections longer than the normal one month regimen.”
She snapped the vial into a jet injector that was sitting on the bedside table. Ari took a deep breath when she set it against his bicep, but let her dose him with the medicine.
This formula didn’t seem to have the painkillers in it. No woozy lightheadedness flooded his body.
“Thank you,” he said.
Kylie examined him by taking his pulse at his neck with two fingers, shining a flashlight in his good eye, and gently prodding the rubbery dough that filled Ari’s left eye socket. It surprised him when he felt her fingers move along the edges where the silicate had begun to bind with his skin.
“That’s the medicine working,” Kylie explained. “It’s binding with your body. You’ve been taking the meds for nearly two weeks, right?”
“Has it been that long?” He had no clear idea of how long he had been unconscious and in Dr. Neru’s care. “That would make sense.”
“You’re very lucky. The synthetic material is still technically poisoning you, but as long as you take these injections regularly your body will adapt and eventually heal on its own. And when that happens, you’ll eventually be able to wean yourself off the meds.”