by A. E. Shaw
“And?” Eliza leans back in her seat, stretching her limbs, getting her circulation going, where it, like the rest of her, had frozen in fury.
“And it seems I was wrong.”
“There!” Eliza says, as if that was the final word, but of course, it is not. “You can say that you were wrong about that, that you were wrong about that fact, but why, if you were so wrong about my mother, did you continue to subject everyone else - everyone - to such a terrible, cruel fate?”
“My father had tried and failed to preserve our world. When I heard what had befallen your mother, I did not wait one moment to execute him in payment.”
“And that was the right thing to do?”
“That was the only thing I could have done. I was told you were gone too. I feared for Aiden, and Alej, and I had them installed in the castle immediately. I was trying to protect you. To protect us all.”
“At the expense of everybody else.”
“But we are not…we are not like everybody else.”
Eliza looks as if she might be sick. “Everything you have done…I was there that day, and I know you can never excuse what you did. Whatever you did or didn’t do for me, for my mother, for,” and she takes a deep breath, “for us, that day, I heard your voice. And I’ll never forget it. You wanted revenge. From people who were utterly, utterly innocent.”
“And the book,” Aiden adds, chipping in because this actually hasn’t, as far as he’s concerned, been at all about him, nor even that supposed legacy. This is a ridiculous waste of his time. It also sounds very much like he’s been lied to. “You have told me what you did, and why. Yet you never mentioned any of this.”
His Excellency’s voice wavers between the gravitational shout he wants it to be, and the reedy pleading he is desperate to avoid.
“My father worked hard to be loved. He wished only to be written of as the King of All, the great and the good. But he was a cruel man. He was a vile man. He had us tested in many ways, as children - you, Selina, saw the least of that, when we had you tested, that would have been only the beginning of it, had you been treated as I was, as Anni was. The science my parents were so devoted to was a brittle, brutal one. The things my mother taught Anni, the way she turned them into such new and beautiful knowledge which Juan learnt how to put into practice. They knew it was possible to develop something better. If we could just have the space. If the world could only regenerate a little, then as a whole, then forever could be saved.”
Eliza makes a retching noise which swirls into her words. “Saved at the cost of infinite good people. Saved so that you might be written into history as the great saviour. That your name would be written larger than your father’s. This was not for humanity. Don’t tell me you believe humanity as a whole to be as important as you.”
The flush that assaults Den Huo’s broad, regal face shows full that Eliza’s supposition is accurate.
She does not hesitate to respond to the confirmation.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
The Murder
Eliza drives herself forward, lunging up and around and across the table with a motion so sudden, so strong, it defies observation. Her hand has already whisked a knife, long, slender, ornate and bright, from a thousand folds of silk at her hip, and it is poised for its mark as she flies at His Excellency. She is absolutely silent, her face soft as if she had risen only to be excused, but her aim is right and good. Every muscle in her body behaves as if it is performing the only motion it was ever designed to execute.
Aiden is her silent equal - expressionless, motionless, emotionless. He watches as his father’s neck is cut open, as a terrible deep shout rises and dies in Den Huo’s mouth; descends into a squeaking, bubbling retch.
His Excellency buckles and sinks and crumples immediately into his robes, as these things happen to a man who is everything and nothing of the man Aiden would have wished him to be, had he thought of him at all, he reacts…not at all. Sits statue still. Unblinking.
It is Selina who screams “No!” heartfelt, appalled, because no, because this must not happen, not now, not when the truth of things is so new to them. Not in blind violence and panic. She cannot bear Eliza to reach this terrible potential in front of her in this way, she never imagined that…in spite of all the threats and the rage, her terrible rage, she hadn’t thought that…and where did that knife come from? How did she get it in here?
It doesn’t matter how - clearly she knows how to use it, has she done this before? Selina is, for longer than she’d like, clad in terror which holds her tight still, a spectator again, what has happened to Eliza? This mustn’t happen to Eliza, Selina is thinking, more than to His Excellency, a man whose presence surely cannot be extinguished by -
- no, no look, she won’t stop, there’s so much blood. There’s so much blood.
The sound of murder is infinitely worse than anything Selina has ever heard: worse than infinite screaming children in the centre of the night, worse than the sound of the fire, worse even than the sound of the Pulse itself.
But Eliza would know that only too well. Eliza is frenzied, furious, a terrifying sight with no sign of stopping, even now. Selina realises no-one is coming to help.
She leaps from her seat and dives at Eliza, who has drawn and slashed with the knife again, and again, wrist-deep in blood; followed the body to the floor and is knelt over it, on it, making unpleasantly certain that it is only a body, no longer a man. Once it is certainly so, she drops the knife, kneels and stares into the glassy-wet eyes of the man she has killed.
“Eliza!” Selina says, taking her by the shoulders, trying to pull her back. Her body is stiff, and unyielding: Selina can’t move her, so she moves to the other side of the body, reaches over it, takes Eliza’s bloody hands in her own, squeezes them hard, tacky and hot as they are. “Eliza, look at me. Look at me.”
Beneath them, His Excellency’s warm corpse spills blood across a supremely polished floor.
Her hands aren’t even shaking, Selina thinks, which is more than could be said of her own. “Eliza. What have you done?”
Eliza focuses, then, looks right back at Selina. “What have I done? The only thing that could have been done.”
“You shouldn’t have…” Selina starts, and she means well, she means to say you shouldn’t have had to or that this wasn’t the answer but she doesn’t get that far, because Eliza snaps back as quick as she drove forwards before, and is on her feet, backing away from the spreading blood, back into the centre of the room. All eyes are on her, but still no-one speaks. None of the guards lifted so much as a finger, never mind a gun, as shocked as Selina but as still as Aiden, too.
“You’re right,” Eliza hisses, and her eyes are lightning, striking hard into all she fixes them on, “you’re absolutely right, I should not have had to do this.” She turns to Aiden, still paces away from him.
Aiden wonders if she will come for him next with the knife. To him, now, she looks like the warrior queen. She looks fearless, flawless, successful. She has, after all, been successful, hasn’t she? Yes, these are Aiden’s thoughts, as his father’s blood seeps closer to his feet.
“I should never have had to do this,” Eliza continues, her voice liquid chill, the anger still disturbingly far from hysteria, “but none of you - none of you” - she gestures to the guards - “would kill a man. If only one of you would have. If only another one of you two could have. If only you had come down from that pedestal of yours, if you’d thought to ask questions, if you’d tried to-”
“We were children!” Selina shouts. “We didn’t know. We didn’t know.”
“And what would you have done if you had?”
“We were children.”
“Some of us didn’t have the luxury of being children at all.”
Selina follows her, stands out of reach, though, as she says “I’m sad to know that, I am, and your story is…you should have told us, you should have told us everything.”
“I didn’t know everyth
ing. I didn’t know, for example, that your friend, your fool of a companion was the reason for my mother’s death. For my trials. I didn’t realise that his birth was the reason for this. I wish he’d never been born, for then, maybe I wouldn’t have to live in a world in which everything is gone.”
“You can’t mean this is his fault!” Selina is outraged; trying to communicate to Eliza when she’s in the midst of this stream of nothingness is not the best idea, but few of us would have any idea how to respond to this at all, and talking is one of the few things Selina knows about.
Aiden knows most of all about it, but he has no wish to engage in this. None at all. He has finished the food on his plate and is now drinking wine straight from the carafe. It provides a warmth that does not lessen with quantity. His eyes never move from the body of his father, and his ears have not stopped hearing the phrase, none of you would kill a man. There is no further thought around it, only a wondering. Did it look like this?
“Look at the two of you, here. You were chosen. He was supposed to lead whatever he was given and make it better. I can’t believe we could have been left with this to rule.” She gestures at Aiden, who does not see anything of it. “He deserves nothing, look at him, he doesn’t even understand what’s going on. I wish I’d-”
“Eliza, stop.”
“Why? Why would I stop? Should I simply kill you too? I wish you’d died in the fire. I set it to free you, to give you the chance to get out before you were taken like I was, but it seems you were too stupid to understand.”
“You started the fire? But…the elders…Eliza, you?”
“I thought you would have guessed long ago.”
No, Eliza, why would they have guessed? Why would they, because that is crazy, why wouldn’t you simply go in there, why wouldn’t you find other ways of sending a message, why would you start a fire when you knew that the building was sealed?
Eliza can’t answer this, and perhaps she won’t ever answer this, but for your sake and mine, we’ll add here that she told herself it was to free them, but really, truly, so deep even she didn’t understand it, she was so furious with the thought that they had been spared it all that even if they did get out, she’d hoped it would be with far less ease and far more injuries than they actually sustained. If they did even get out at all. Payback? Not quite. But…action, taken when she could wait no longer, as yet another anniversary of the Pulse rolled around, as Kit and Ali grew increasingly domestic and dull and dependent, as her rage refused to melt. She was the only person left to act.
And she did not know how to act well. No-one taught her what was right. Eliza’s lessons have all been vicious, sad, and traumatic. And yet even in spite of this she still wanted justice, somehow, anywhere, wanted someone to really, truly understand what had happened.
Everything since that day when she saw people who’d had unquestioning love for her mother, for her, even after everything they had lived through, since the day she saw those people extinguished, everything has been about trying to make anyone understand the depth of the horror she felt on that day.
If she could look into Selina’s eyes right now, if she could see the fury and the well of sadness and the panic and the everything that is so clearly there, for the first time, Eliza might just feel that she has finally achieved her aim, that someone else in this world really does understand what it is like to know true horror.
“Eliza,” Selina repeats, and she has nothing more.
Eliza responds with a torrent of furious words, painful to hear, based on nothing, twisting themselves and contradicting themselves, declaring a thousand intents, recollecting the night she stalked the castle, knew they were there, the night she returned and started the fire, the night she watched the castle burn. Her face is inhuman with incandescence.
Something catches the corner of Aiden’s eye, and, finally saved from the focus on his murdered father, he turns to see what it is.
Tabatha is standing at the door. Her eyes are repeatedly travelling the scene. Her expression is utterly blank. None of them know how long she has been there for.
Eliza falls suddenly silent. Will her new challenger come forwards?
Tabatha obliges.
“I have never seen you before,” she says, “and I do not know what you speak of, nor what we might have prevented, but I do know that you have done something that no-one here would ever have dreamt of doing, and I cannot imagine why.
“I do not understand where you have come from, and I am no fool - if you have come from Outside, then things are not as we supposed. I would ask that you do not berate us, for a great part of this puzzle is missing, and you have killed a man that I feel sure could have given us many answers.”
Eliza stalks right up to Tabatha, who flinches only a little, to her credit, but also because she has never known, nor had to demonstrate fear before.
“Oh, answers from him would be no better than answers from them,” she gestures at Aiden and Selina “for he lived in the true world no more than they. I can tell you things you’d wish you’d never heard. You, locked up in here, I don’t know if I feel glad for you or if I wish you’d seen what I’ve seen.”
“That’s enough,” Selina says, creeping up, carefully, carefully. “Come on, Eliza, this is going to have…the guards… GUARDS!” She shouts out, hoping for them to come, wondering why they have not yet done so.
Eliza wheels around and Tabatha hurries away, out the door. Selina immediately wishes she had someone, anyone, who could be trusted to go and stop her, because now people are going to find out what’s happened, and the repercussions could be anything.
Anything could happen. This moment is a whole new knife edge, and the complete lack of action from those present is at least better than chaos, but Selina has heard of chaos, has heard of uprising, and with Aiden so still, and everyone else so…remote, what’s to be done?
“Don’t. Touch. Me.” Eliza hisses. She raises her hand and knocks Selina’s outstretched arm out of the way. She’s turning from ice to fire, and as Selina sees her eyes flicker back to the knife, which lies where she dropped it, she panics.
Tabatha returns at the door, accompanied by two men, large, broad, uniformed. “Help her!” she implores them. “We need to get her somewhere safe…for her, and for us.”
Two guards look at each other, and then they look at Aiden, as if he ought to have assumed charge.
Aiden doesn’t even realise that they’re looking at him at all. He’s looking at the jewels on his father’s claw-shaped fingers. They’re important, he thinks to himself. They’re beautiful. His father has looked after them well. They shouldn’t be lost, and they oughtn’t to get covered in blood. His father should have thought of that. He shouldn’t have worn them tonight.
“Now!” Selina barks, as Eliza begins to laugh in the low, manic way that conveys that that hysteria is just about beginning to kick in, that the magnitude of what she’s done is seeping in.
The guards are quick indeed, and they reach Eliza just as her outstretched fingertips reach the bloody handle of the knife. She is hauled away, spitting fury and dripping another’s blood as she goes.
In the silence that remains, Aiden gets up and cautiously approaches his father’s body, as if it might snap back to life. He kneels by it, ignoring the cloying wet that attaches itself to his black trousers, and takes his father’s hand, redness transferring itself immediately to his own. He doesn’t flinch. The flesh dents under his grip, his fingers leaving their imprints, and it would be unsettling to anyone more used to holding a human hand than Aiden.
With more reverence for the jewellery than the body, Aiden removes the rings, one by one. He clutches them tight in his hand. They’re slightly warm.
“Thank you,” he says, to the body, “for my inheritance.”
He stands.
His father looks very small, lost in the slashed and filthy cloak, the contents of his carotid artery darkening and seeping into the gold threaded rug that was made to enhanc
e, rather than protect, the cold stone floor.
CHAPTER FORTY
The Arrival
Alej hardly sleeps at all, but he does get in just enough to come back around to the idea that he is, after all, human. When he wakes, he is certain that he is late, that he ought to have left already. He has not dreamt, he has no way of knowing what the time is, nor, this far underground, what the sky is up to. Panicked, he dresses hurriedly, takes a blanket with him just in case of cold, because what he would have given for more blankets the last time he had to leave somewhere in a hurry is too much to speak of, and is in the living area in a moment.