by A. E. Shaw
“I’m sorry,” she offers, voice low, “I didn’t mean to upset you.”
Aiden nods, but his mind is too fuzzy to know what best to say. He screws his eyes up, scrutinising the worry in her face, with no references at all with which to read it.
After far too much silence, she realises he isn’t going to say any more than this. It takes quite some effort for her to push forwards uninvited, but she does, because she must.
“Have you read the book?”
“Not all of it.”
She looks disappointed. It is, surely, not up to her to be something as unpleasant as disappointed? Doesn’t she realise that Aiden has done all he can?
“You have to finish it now,” she says, already backing away.
“Why?”
“I don’t know?” She leaves it as a question: the least dangerous form of speech. Questions are good, are encouraged, can be met with answers, which increase knowledge and understanding.
“But…if you give me the instruction, then you ought to know,” Aiden persists, because, to him, questions are only asked of those with access to the answers, and, by virtue of the fact that she has answered a question with a question, she must know that he has no answers…
“Please. His Excellency requires you to have finished his book. This is all I know.”
“Have you read it?” Aiden asks.
“No…” she says, in a very small voice, because she does not at all understand why he asks this, why he would think that she would have been invited to have anything to do with a book that, explicitly, is only for him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The Call to Arms
The first thing Selina notices when she wakes up is that she’s too hot. Alej’s body is furnace-hot against her; she’s been wrapped right around him. She panics, to start with, that he is ill, or fevered, or worse, but a squint in the darkness shows he is sleeping peacefully, and a hand to his tan-flat chest confirms to her that he has both breath and heartbeat, so she stills herself, focuses on her own breath and heart, and where and why she is here, and all feels well again soon enough.
She climbs carefully from the sweltering nest they’re wrapped in and straightens out her clothing. She goes to run her fingers through her hair, but stops as the tips touch the frizzled clumps, and pushes further thoughts of beautification from her mind. The most important thing right now is water, for her throat is dry, and she must also wet her hands, at least.
In the main room, only Eliza is there. She is straight-backed, an empty plate and cup next to her, and her eyes focus immediately on Selina.
“Have you been waiting for me?” Selina asks, closing the door quietly behind her, so that Alej can continue to rest.
Eliza nods. “I need to know more.”
“Can I have some water first?” Selina asks, even the request catching at her throat.
“You were told to take what you needed. If you need water, you have seen where to find it.”
And she has. So she does: she takes a cup of the cold, cold water and it is as good as anything she has ever tasted. She is not hungry, but Eliza points to a bowl of leaves, small and yellow and dry, and instructs her to eat them. They are not pleasant, but they are better than nothing, and Selina gets a handful down, standing there, as Eliza watches and waits some more.
“Have you finished?” Eliza asks, the moment Selina has swallowed the last leaf. Selina nods, and she sits obediently in the heap of rags she is directed to.
Eliza frames herself, broad on the battered wooden chair that creaks beneath her limber body, her elbows resting on her knees, her forward-leaning gaze intense, and fixed direct on Selina.
“You really don’t understand, do you?”
Selina shakes her head, slowly. “Please. Tell me.”
“When you were a girl, who was the leader?”
“San Huo.” The name comes from long ago, a thing Selina knew as a child, autopilot knowledge.
“Right. And who put you in that castle?” Eliza’s tone is winding, malicious, as if these questions are something that is in some way Selina’s fault, or responsibility.
“I…” Selina is thrown by Eliza’s aggression. It is a long, long time since anyone has been coarse to, or even near her. She catches a deep breath, and lets it sit a moment in her lungs, composing herself. “The person that put me in that castle, as you put it, was Den Huo, the Leader’s son.”
Eliza nods. “As I thought.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Did you meet him?” Again, accusing.
“I did.”
“And how did you find him?”
“He was large. He looked well. Well-fed, but also broad and strong. Incredibly solid. Somehow more real. As if, by comparison, we thin and distant people were a different species.”
“And where did you meet him?” Eliza’s questions are sharp and quick, as if Selina’s answers were irrelevant.
“A strange place. Very far from home, it seemed, though obviously I’d never travelled before.”
“Obviously,” Eliza says, and there’s a shred of wryness in her voice. “You went to The Palace?”
“I don’t know. Eliza, if you know these things, please don’t make me tell them. Perhaps you understand enough to know that was a difficult time, one which is hard to recall.”
Eliza lets out a laugh without humour, and Selina knows that she’s said something foolish. “You think that you have experienced a hard time? Until you’ve walked streets that used to be full of life and seen them knee deep in rotting bodies, you know nothing.”
Selina shivers, and regroups by pushing a depth into her voice, the way Aiden does when he’s something he feels is important to impart.
“Full of life and death,” she retorts, drawing up all the gravity she can find. “I remember streets just like that. I remember those that slept crosswise on others because there wasn’t the space. I remember the tales of the time it went from strange, to normal, to see every outside space become territory. I remember the way the earth turned to dust as more and more came to inhabit a land with nowhere for us.”
“And this was not our fault,” Eliza hisses.
“I know this. I don’t know why you don’t understand that I am part of that our. I know, too, that in the past people believed that strength in numbers was all they would ever have. And I remember my parents telling me, when I was so young, that I was lucky, because there wasn’t the space for divisions any more, because the hard lives were the ordinary lives, and that there was no room for envy, or enmity. That I was lucky because we could never experience a war: we only knew the reality of each person trying to take themselves and their loved ones to the next day, and the next, and this was true of everyone, whether they’d just arrived, or had family here for generations.”
“The party line,” Eliza snaps. “Your parents were well-taught. I wonder what they did to get you to The Palace.”
“They didn’t do anything. I did. I danced.”
“Danced?” It seems Eliza would never have guessed that.
“Yes. My mother taught me, from when I was young. And Den Huo said he’d never seen, nor dreamt of such a dancer. I knew I had done enough. It would be alright.”
“Alright for you. I can’t tell if you were naive, so young, or simply selfish.”
“I went because my parents asked me to.”
“Probably hoping they’d get a place in the Complex.” So dismissive, and so mean. But for the first time, Selina is silent for a moment. Her parents’ motivation is, truly, something she’s not thought of, not in context with this transformed world. Might they still… “Did that happen? Do you think…?”
“Were they good at anything? Were they privileged? Did they know exceptional things?” Eliza spits her words.
“My mother taught me to dance.”
“But you are the dancer. That knowledge is your skill, and all inside you. She wouldn’t get a pass for that. Your father have anything?”
&nb
sp; “No. He had no work. He had studied as a boy but when he tried for work, they didn’t…they wouldn’t…take him…”
Eliza doesn’t wait to deliver her blow. “Then your parents are dead, just like everyone else.”
Selina swallows, and counts her heartbeats for a moment. One, two, three. She lets that settle, before asking, with only the start of a crack in her voice, “But how did it happen?”
“What?”
“How did everyone die?”
“The Pulse.” Short, solid words. As if they were obvious. And then, with a little thought and recollection, they become obvious.
“The sound? The high up sound, that hurts?” Selina feels a dangerous shift in her mind.
“That sound is the warmup. The Pulse itself is silent, but you can feel it.”
“What is it?”
Eliza shrugs. “I don’t have the knowledge to explain that for you. Maybe Kit can, if you really want to know. He’s spent longest trying to figure it out. Me, I don’t see the point. If it comes, it comes, and if you’re not ready for it, that’s your fault.”
“What does it do?”
“Stops your heart. Melts your brain. Dissolves your eyes. One, or all of those things.”
Selina fights her imagination, which is raring to show her images of her parents, of those she saw every day around her, struck by that. “But San Huo would never have…”
“Of course not. San Huo died some time ago.”
“But he was in such good health…”
“Was he? Was he really?”
“Our leaders’ line lived good, long lives, all of them, for a thousand years and more.”
“They did, didn’t they? Goodness, I had forgotten how it felt to trust what you thought you knew.” For a moment, there appears to be a softness, a nostalgia in Eliza’s expression, but it is only fleeting, and then it is over. “However it was, and believe me, we have our ideas about that, San Huo died, and Den Huo took over, and then, that day, that day that it was announced to us, do you know how they did it?”
“No.”
“No idea? You didn’t perhaps hear, from your lofty castle, you didn’t see anything of what was going on below?”
“Nothing. There were no windows.” And even as she says this, Selina finds that it sounds ridiculous. But, still, it is the truth, and it is a truth she did not question.
“Of course. Let me tell you, they announced it from the rooftops, literally, they had the army - an army we did not even know was there - come to shout as one that Den Huo, now to be known as His Excellency, was now our great leader, that he had succeeded his great father two days ago, that the full preparations had been made, and that now, the time had come.” Eliza takes a deep breath, and lets it sigh all the way out again, like she needs to clean her lungs in between her words.
“The time had come?”
“Those words exactly. And would you believe, His Excellency had the grace to thank us, just like that. ‘His Excellency thanks you for your lives, your time, and your contribution to this, the greatest day in the history of humankind. Be grateful that you were a part of it.’ And then The Pulse came. It started with the whining sound, that high-pitched sound, and everyone watched and waited and stared, and they thought that it might be a good thing, that this might be some kind of reward - I have no idea what they expected, perhaps to be beamed to a new world, and I can only hope that in any sense at all that that is what happened, but here on Earth at least, what happened was that the noise grew, and grew, until the ears couldn’t take it any more, and people began to scream, and to cry, to shout, to run, pressing their fingers so deep into their ears that they bled, and still nothing would stop the sound, and then silence, the Pulse is a beat of silence, or else it’s so loud that it was the absence of noise itself, and then there was more silence, but it was the silence of horror, where there are infinite sobs and screams, but you can’t hear them, the brain won’t let you take their noise in for it’s too awful to comprehend.”
“But you…”
The onslaught of words would be too much for anyone who had not spent as long with Aiden as Selina has.
“You want to know why I didn’t die?”
Selina nods.
“Obvious question. Straightforward answer. I’m quick, Selina, I’m really quick, because I’ve had to be really quick the way my life’s gone. I’ve lived with my eyes open. So when the army comes all masked up, they’re clearly dressed for protection. Everyone else trusted we lived in this good kind world you’re talking about, that we lived in these…benign times where nothing, no-one could - or would - even try to get to you. But I knew otherwise.”
Selina goes to open her mouth to ask more about that, but Eliza holds up a hand to cut her off.
“That’s not for you. Not now. You just have to take my word on that one, but I knew that life was hard, oh I knew, and I knew that there was more going on, and so when I saw them there, lining the distance in these headsets and masks, I picked one of them, caught him standing with his back to common sense and out of eyeshot of his colleagues, and I had him unconscious before he could use his communication box to do anything. I stripped him of his armour and put it on - it reeked, Selina, absolutely reeked of sweat and aching; I could feel how far they’d marched, dressing up in those clothes. I heard through the helmet what they were being told to shout and repeat, and when I spoke, joined in, my voice was magnified, not my own, it was guttural and brutal. When the Pulse came, there was a warning. I edged the helmet away, just for a second, and I heard the whine, and I yanked it back down tight about my neck but I stayed calm, too, like all the other soldiers who didn’t show a shred of fear. I tell you why they didn’t, too, because in our ears, mine and those of the other soldiers, there were these beautiful calm words, like nothing I’ve heard before or since, gentle and soothing like the old tales of a lulling bye, and it honestly felt as if there could be no wrong whilst those words went on.”
“What did they say?”
“I can’t remember. I tried, because they seemed as if they might almost be magic, or as if they might be a clue, but no. Nothing. I don’t remember. It didn’t change the carnage I witnessed whilst they were there, but it meant that I was able to look, that I saw it all.”
“And everyone died.”
“Not immediately. Some survived the first wave. The unluckiest of all.”
“And you…”
“I ran. Not immediately, I waited until we were to fall in line. But the bodysuit I wore was thick and good, made to camouflage with the brown of the ground, and the rainbow of tones of many of the bodies. You remember that shifting pattern of colours, all kinds of people, living all kinds of lives?”
Selina does. The more Eliza speaks, the closer she gets to her memories. The more a feeling rises within her that she has a purpose. A duty? Perhaps. That something is owed. And that someone is coming to collect it.
“Do you understand, yet?” Eliza asks.
“What? Do I understand…what?”
“What happened in this world, once you were safely tucked away.”
Selina swallows again, her mouth so terribly dry that her tongue sticks to the roof of her mouth when she tries to speak. “Yes, Eliza. I understand.”
“And you understand why I feel harshly towards you.”
“I…that’s not for me to say.”
“Isn’t it? Then, at least, tell me that you understand why I have certain expectations of you.”
Selina won’t be waiting long to perform her duty. Eliza has a plan. Eliza has had a plan since she stood up, upon the hill, the body of a man unconscious and stripped behind her, adjusting to the confines of a uniform unlike any she’s ever worn. She spent her life until this point on the road, a tumultuous, exhausting life which pulled her from one group to another, each seeming to her to be worse than the last, her behaviour increasingly wary, increasingly self-protective.
She began as a lost child, with no concept of a family, no early memori
es of fondness and familiarity to hold her to the idea of goodness and worthwhile concepts.
Her first memory is of warmth. Cosiness, firelight. Laughter, coming from all around her. Her second memory is of running through the legs of infinite people in a crowd, wearing something white. The idea of wearing anything white is so strange to her now that she thinks this might be a mistake, that she’s remembering it wrong, but she isn’t. Her third memory is the beginning of her wanderings, the terrible event that pushed her out into the world, alone, hiding, to start with, consciously choosing to move in one direction, and to keep going. It’s been an infinity of begging, borrowing and stealing food and water. She needs little in the way of sustenance, can easily go two, three days without either, as long as she can sleep enough, and sleep is the one thing that is easy to find in this crowded world - you take your place where you can, you curl up small as your body will let you, and you get on with it.