by Paige Orwin
Grace backed up before them, holding out her hands. “Gentlemen... Doctor Czernin... welcome to Barrio Libertad.”
Edmund squinted. He tilted the brim of his hat down.
Then he reached for the nearest rail as the fortress proper swam into sight.
Dante’s Hell. That was the first image that came to mind. Enormous, circular, terrace after broad terrace dug into the earth. Not underground, but in shadow. A tangle of walls and stairs and walkways, homes stacked ten or fifteen high, a perilous maze of corrugated steel, plaster, and adobe painted dozens of different hues. Vast buttresses anchored entire blocks, soaring upwards to the highest terrace and beyond. Rails larger than locomotives ran across the upper edge of the walls, gears and wheels anchoring metal sheets that folded over and across each other like the sails of a steel armada. Strings of lights hung suspended over his head, sloping gently down to a central plaza ringed with mural-covered colonial buildings. The fortress boomed: wind striking the walls, the metallic creaking of gantry cranes, a faint dull thudding he couldn’t place.
Something was missing, and after a moment he realized what it was. No cracks. No fallen masonry, no scaffolding, no half-tumbled buildings. No earthquake damage at all.
“Well?” Grace said with a broad grin, “What do you think?”
Edmund leaned over the rail. Yes, that was a garden down there. Or, given the distance, an entire farm. “It’s... something.”
Istvan peered up at the walls. “Is there a reason everything is covered in spikes?”
“Diego’s Chilean. It’s the style.” Grace started up a nearby set of stairs. “He claims he based the place on his home city, and that it isn’t a work of art, because he doesn’t do art. He’s so wrong.” She pushed open a door. “Come on, we’re going up.”
Edmund picked his way after her, not feeling any better. The rumors had never mentioned a Diego as the architect, but they had never mentioned Grace, either. Diego or Grace. Diego and Grace. The conjunctions made all the difference.
Istvan stayed right beside him.
The door led to a box, a tiny room with windows open to the air. Edmund leaned out the nearest, grateful for the view. The contraption sat on a near-vertical rail strung with frighteningly thin cables. It was a long way up... and a long way down.
Istvan took one look at it, said something about transporting wounded men the same way during vicious fighting in the Alps, and announced he’d ride up top. Edmund didn’t dispute it. Grace shut the door behind her – she’d insisted Edmund enter first, because he clearly wouldn’t know how to lock the device – and banged on the wall. The box started upwards with a creak.
“Cable car,” she said. She hung out one of the windows, arms folded on the sill. “Welcome to the city of tomorrow.”
“It’s something,” he repeated. Hat off, he propped his elbows on the window beside her.
“Don’t do that.”
“Why?”
She grinned. “You’ll unbalance the car and flip us off the rails into the abyss.”
He stepped away. He didn’t believe her, but... well, it was probably better to humor her. “What happens to Lucy?” he asked, staring out the window instead of at her. Trying to. “Is she allowed to leave after she recovers or are these walls one-way?”
A shrug. “She probably won’t stay, but most do. Most people never feel safe outside, knowing that the Susurration’s out there waiting for them. That if it really wanted it could find them again. Take them again.” She readjusted her copper circlet. “Think of it like agoraphobia. You start needing walls.”
“I see.”
A string of lights rolled past, round bulbs that glowed a soft white-gold.
“Besides,” Grace continued, “the Barrio’s not so bad. We’re completely self-contained – own food, own water, own power, everything, and it’s all reliable. Black box, but reliable.”
“Black box?”
She looked at him like he was stupid. It was a look that wasn’t wholly unfamiliar. “Put something in the box, something else comes out of the box, no one has a clue what happens inside the box. Like your phone, Eddie, but for us future people.”
Edmund leaned against the opposite window. In the old days, she would have teased him mercilessly: for the rescue, for his age and infirmity, for his reliance on the magic she claimed could be understood, if you only looked hard enough. She would have washed away the Susurration’s horrors with wit and words. Reduced it to a threat that was beatable, with an eye you could spit in. She’d believed that anything could be beaten. Anything could be solved. Anyone could be saved.
We all make mistakes.
“Diego’s an engineer, too?” he asked.
She turned back to her view of the fortress. “You have no idea.”
They sighed to a halt just below the upper rails, shadowed by the enormous sheets of metal folded against them. Every inch looked worn, old and used, like the mechanisms had been in service for decades.
Grace motioned him out of the cable car. A rickety catwalk led to another tunnel hollowed in the wall, and then to a round of circular stairs. Edmund focused on his feet: the steps were so narrow they more resembled the rungs of a ladder, and the stairwell so steep it came close to being one. Around and around.
Grace didn’t speak. Edmund didn’t know how to begin. Istvan waited for them four stories up, having managed only a few yards before losing patience with conventional methods.
Grace threw open a hatch in the roof.
Edmund took his bearings. They were on top of the wall, a broad expanse like the deck of a battleship. One of the turrets loomed nearby, the slow tick-tick-tick of odd mechanisms now audible over the deep rumbling of its motors. Close up, it resembled a conventional maritime gun, only superficially – Edmund had seen enough of those in the Pacific theater to know. Beside it ran a narrow catwalk, and beyond that…
A vast grid of identical shelters, encircling the fortress as far as he could see. Acres of white canvas. No structure taller than two stories. The streets were dust, pounded flat, heaps of rubble piled around squares of rough farmland and pushed into once-molten wastes, stone frozen into bubbled whorls of black and grey. People – not all human – sorted through the remnants. Tiny figures worked the fields. No one seemed to be resting, or talking. Hundreds of thousands, Grace had said. Trapped, not because the fortress wouldn’t let them in, but because their own minds wouldn’t let them out.
The crater wall rose in the distance, glassy and striated, a hulk of ruined towers and broken fangs crumpled across it like a landslide. Beyond that… the river. Dammed.
Edmund looked away. Providence. All of Shokat Anoushak’s forces congregated in one place, looking for something she’d never found. Never would find.
He’d never wanted to come back.
“How can anyone live there?” Istvan breathed.
“Work,” said Grace. She drew up before them, leaning on the rail of the catwalk. She didn’t look at the wastes. “Hard work. Industry is a virtue, I’m told, even if you don’t realize you’re doing it and sometimes drop dead without knowing why.”
“What?” The specter stared at her, appalled. “Why don’t you stop it? Why don’t you help them?”
“What do you think we’re trying to do?”
“They’re on your bloody doorstep, woman! Can’t you go out and haul them in, one by one, or build more of those pylon devices, or–”
“Istvan.” Edmund waved him into silence. “Istvan, we don’t know the situation. Grace, if the Susurration goes to all this trouble to collect people, why would it work them to death?”
She shrugged. “As far as it’s concerned, people are a precious commodity, in bulk. Individuals tend to get lost in the shuffle. It doesn’t intentionally mistreat t
hem, as far as we can tell. It just... well, it’s a harsh environment out there. Everyone has to do their part. Everyone gets the minimum required to survive, and everyone’s happy – that’s what matters, right?”
Edmund winced at the bitterness of her tone. If she could save them, he knew, she would have. The old Grace would have. Before. “What about the outside agents? The smilers? How many are out there?”
“We don’t know. It seems to keep the majority here, but we’ve found smilers operating in Triskelion and as far away as Tornado Alley.”
“I see.”
“Do you?” She turned to him, even as he turned away. “Do you see what we’re doing out here? What we’re trying to stop? What the Twelfth Hour should be marking as Number One on the Things We Should Take Down list?”
He stared at a point just behind her. The barrel of the turret. What was there to shoot at, he wondered. “You’ve made a convincing case.”
“Good, because your Magister never even bothered to listen. We need her to do something for us. You were Magister yourself, once – she listens to you, right?”
Edmund rubbed at his face. He preferred diplomacy any day, but usually he wasn’t hit in the head before talks. Usually the women he loved didn’t come back from the dead with no explanation of how or why or when. “Sometimes.”
“What do you mean Magister Hahn didn’t bother to listen?” Istvan demanded, “You’ve approached her before? You’ve told her of this... this Susurration creature?”
Grace crossed her arms. “I didn’t, Diego did.”
“Well, in that case, she clearly did listen, Miss Wu: weren’t you aware that Barrio Libertad is on our blacklist?”
“Yeah, but did she ever tell anyone why?”
“Perhaps she thought it would cause a panic! You certainly never tried to–”
Edmund held up a hand. “Grace, what was it you needed?”
Anything. Everything. How can I make this right?
Grace, I don’t make promises, but if you want one...
“The Bernault devices,” she said.
“What?”
She looked out at the wastes, then away. Fixed her masked gaze on him, eye to goggled eye, bold and beautiful and grim. “I’m sorry, Eddie. We need those Bernault devices you intercepted.”
Chapter Thirteen
“You certainly do not,” snarled Istvan.
“Grace,” said Edmund, light-headed and leaden-stomached, “you realize what this sounds like.”
“What, the rogue state asking for weapons of mass destruction? Believe me, Eddie, I–”
Istvan advanced on her. “What sort of ploy is this, woman? Wait until Edmund is the one targeted, drag us here through that horror, play on our sympathies, and then beg for a shipment of the very same weapons the Twelfth Hour has tried for years to bring under control?” He slashed a hand at the sorry shelters beyond the wall. “What were you planning to do? Deal with your little problem by blowing Providence to bits a second time?”
Grace didn’t budge. “That shipment is ours, you idiot. The whole trade is ours.”
Oh, hell.
Edmund put on a pleasant smile. “I’m sorry, I’m not sure if I heard right. Did you just admit responsibility for the Bernault smuggling ring?”
She set a hand to her forehead. “We’re the good guys here, OK? We collect them off the streets, pay a fair price for them, keep them from falling into the wrong hands, the whole deal, and without them that–” She pointed at the wastes. “–gets out.”
“So Barrio Libertad is the buyer.”
She levered herself off the rail. Reached for him.
Istvan snapped a wing open between them, a wall of decaying feathers and bent wire. “Don’t you bloody touch him.”
She slapped him. Wing, shoulder, and part of the specter’s arm blew apart with a crack.
Edmund shielded his eyes – too little, too late. He blinked away spots. “Grace!”
Again she reached for him and this time caught his shoulder as Istvan slumped against the rail, cursing, bleeding mist and poison. Her grip tingled through her glove. Electric. Literally electric.
Edmund shivered, not from pain. The current wasn’t strong enough for that. Not anymore. “You didn’t have to do that,” he said.
She snorted, steering him towards the inner wall of the fortress. “I didn’t have to, no.”
Wire snaked around a new framework of replacement bone, a wing already reforming. Istvan didn’t follow.
Edmund tried to concentrate on something other than her touch. Now wasn’t the time for that. “Grace…”
She stopped. She didn’t take her hand off his shoulder. “Look,” she said. She waved at the opposite wall, the city tiers, the massive machines ringing the perimeter. “How do you think we’re powering all this? How do you think we keep that monster pinned down? Eddie, Barrio Libertad is the only reason the Susurration has borders. We’re the only thing standing between civilization and happy, friendly, eternal stagnation with a side of regrettable death. You didn’t think Lucy tipped you off to the jackpot because you’re pretty, did you?”
Edmund reached for one of the catwalk rails. Shocked himself. Bit back a curse of his own.
Barrio Libertad, behind Big East’s most dangerous trade. Barrio Libertad, surrounded by a mind-controlling monster, claiming that they needed weapons of mass destruction to keep it in check and hiring Triskelion mercenaries to acquire those weapons. Losing them to the Twelfth Hour because of a tip from Lucy. Lucy, controlled by the Susurration. No devices, no power, and the monster would get out.
Barrio Libertad wanted him to hand over enough firepower to destroy Providence twice over, so the monster wouldn’t get out.
No. No, the woman he loved – who wasn’t dead, who was maybe with someone else now, who was still as stunning as ever – was asking for the equivalent of twenty nuclear warheads in a gift box and it wasn’t even Christmas.
How was he supposed to explain this to Mercedes?
He shut his eyes, then opened them again. “Did Magister Hahn know about this?”
She let go of him. “I don’t know what she knows. But it’s a lot more than she’s telling you.”
Istvan stalked across the catwalk towards them, reformed wings flickering, flaring and fading and flaring again. “More than she’s telling us? What about the truth about this place? Springs up out of nowhere, stockpiles dozens of superweapons, we haven’t even met the bloody architect–”
“You have,” she snapped back, “and if he wasn’t willing to–”
“–forbids teleportation, trapping Edmund where you want him, and what about the rage, Miss Wu?” He pointed at the turret behind them. The accent he’d stopped trying to hide struck the first syllable of every word like a nail hammered into a wall, sentences hanging skewered in even cadence. “This fortress of yours is seething! Fury, unwavering, unnatural, leaking from the bloody walls! Did you think I wouldn’t notice?”
She clenched her fists, sparks crackling through her hair. “Did you think I wanted you here in the first place?”
Istvan bared his teeth. “I never abandon my own, Miss Wu.”
“Oh, so you’re staking claims now? Eddie, did I miss something?”
“Miss something? Miss something? Only the last seven years of his life, you… you evil, heartless, brazen hussy!”
She lunged.
Edmund caught her wrist, yelped as shock jolted up his arm. Twisted sideways, sending her into the rail, fingers gone numb. She struck with a snarl and spun around. Istvan drew his knife. Another moment spent – another blow expected –
Edmund interposed himself between them, nerves jangling. “Are you out of your minds? Are you both really out of your minds?”
“Me? You’re the one who just lets him get away with this stuff, Eddie!”
“She comes back after seven years faking her own death and suddenly I’m the mad one? Suddenly I’m the one who can’t be trusted?”
“Suddenly y
ou’re allowed to commit war crimes and never pay for it?”
“I never–!”
“You were allied with the Nazis!” Grace spat. “You’ve personally killed more people across more continents than anyone in the history of ever, and I’m supposed to just sit here and be OK with that?”
“You, Miss Wu, are supposed to be dead!”
Edmund stayed where he was. This wasn’t happening. This wasn’t happening. Not again. Nothing he ever said had worked – arguments that Grace was a good person, really, to Istvan, that Istvan wasn’t a monster, to Grace, that both of them should try talking to each other for once rather than skipping immediately to worst impressions – all of it, useless.
They’d always hated each other. Always.
Then Grace had died, Istvan remained, and it had been over... until now. Until it wasn’t. Until they made him choose, again. Until they forced him to weigh up a friendship that would last against a love that was mortal. Assuming Grace would ever take him back. He’d missed her. He’d missed her so much.
He stood there as they yelled at each other, and tried to swallow back the oil in his throat.
He couldn’t lose her again. Couldn’t bear even the thought of…
“I’m sorry,” he said, pushing them apart as best as he was able, “but we should be going.”
Grace threw her hands up. “You’re leaving? Just like that?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not even finished!”
“I’m sure we can meet again at a later date.”
“There won’t be a later date. You go out there, Eddie, and the Susurration will come after you again. It doesn’t stop, do you understand? It doesn’t stop, ever, until it gets what it wants!”
“Oh, now you worry about him,” snarled Istvan.
Edmund brushed a wing away, or tried to. “That’s enough. We’re leaving.”
Grace shook her head. Wonder. Disbelief. Disappointment. “You really haven’t changed, have you?”
“You have.” Edmund flipped open his pocket watch with his free hand and then remembered: no teleporting in or out of the fortress. He started off down the catwalk. “Istvan, come on.”