When the Villian Comes Home

by Gabrielle Harbowy

  “How could you do it?” Lida said, standing behind him where he never liked anyone to stand.

  But he didn’t move, just kept watching his boy and washing his dishes. Thorough. Clean. He wasn’t going to bother to play dumb. He wasn’t going to even answer.

  “The King was a good man.”

  But he didn’t have patience for this. “Keep it to yourself.”

  “One day he’s going to find out.”

  His hands stopped and he looked over his shoulder at her. Her flower face seemed withered at the edges. The kitchen light aged her.

  “He’s going to find out you killed the King,” she said.

  “How? Are you going to tell him?”

  “These things always get known.” It sounded like a plea.

  But he began to think of it as a threat. A reminder. It always sat at the back of his thoughts like some great regret of the past reaching toward an old man’s fading memory. He turned back to the dishes and rinsed and stacked one on the counter top. Then he picked up the next dirty dish and began the rotation of sponge over its surface. More soap. Eventually she left him alone and he heard her disappear into her bedroom and shut the door. More than once he looked over at his comm unit to check if the light was live. He listened to hear a voice from behind her door. But there was no light and she was quiet.

  5

  After ball with his son he saw the boy through his clean-up ritual and into the yawning blankets of the bed they shared when he was home, and he slid to the middle of the layered and covered mattress where it was deepest and wrapped his arms around the boy like they did in the desert to ward off snakes and the cold. Both entities liked to feed on outflung limbs but they lay here like a mandala of security and he let his fingers trace the soft round of his son’s skull and the scent of soap and boy filtered up as if he’d nudged a rose in bloom. This was the only peace he’d ever known and it coursed through him like blood and made his heart work almost healthy in the cage of his chest.

  “Daddy,” Jatey mumbled, “why doesn’t Aunt Lida like you?”

  “Why do you think she doesn’t like me?”

  “She’s mad at you.”

  “Is she?”

  “She says when you go away, you mightn’t come back.”

  He pulled all the threads of his son’s words together and saw clearly the overall stitching, what his sister had been weaving for months in the boy’s head. “I always come back. And I won’t be going away anymore.”

  “You won’t?” Hesitant hope.

  “I won’t. Don’t listen to your aunt, only listen to me.”

  “I don’t have to do my homework when she says?”

  “You do your homework ’cause I say.”

  “...Okay.”

  “Okay.”

  He listened for the boy to fall asleep. It didn’t come, even if there was quiet. Eventually the boy said, “Is Auntie Lida scared of you?”

  “Hmm,” he said, with his eyes shut.

  “Why’s Auntie Lida scared of you?”

  “Because I love you,” he said. “More than her. Always remember that.”

  5

  He walked his son to school, holding his hand. Lida hadn’t come out of her room for breakfast and he disabled the comm unit before leaving the house. He took his gun with him too, hidden beneath his clothes. It was a sunny day but the sidewalk lay littered with blips of news, flickering under the sun every time they stepped on it. All of the news surrounded the murder of the King. Assassination. Mourning. Replayed footage of the man on the floor of his hotel suite, a fallen effigy. Blood in circles around his body. Grainy evidence out to the world that a heinous crime had been committed. The Chancellor vowing investigation and vengeance. Crying young princes. The King of Peace was dead. Hope was lost. Barrur was bulking their army at once. The world predicted war before the season passed.

  “The only war worth engaging in is the war against lies. The war against ignorance. The war against intolerance. We must create the peace we want in the land through the peace we keep within ourselves. Be kind. Be open. Be as vast as the Bleach in your acceptance of others. Be vigilant against apathy.”

  The King’s words followed him and his son, echoing up from the ground upon which they walked, as if rhetoric were made of stone. Yes the King was a man of peace. But he’d also built an army over the years in the event that his enemies decided to march toward the city. First they would breach the walls there, and then they would swarm across the Bleach and take every town in the King’s domain brick by brick.

  There was no better end to peace than a sense of vengeance, and the people of his town cried out for their share. It rumbled in the earth like dragons being born.

  5

  Thirty young faces stared at him from behind their screens. He saw his own faint image in thirty flat pieces of optimized glass, in reverse. The teacher stood to his right, near the windows, and his son sat in the front row directly before him, smiling. Other parents sat in a line against the left wall like convicts about to be mass sentenced. This is Jatey’s father. We are happy to have him here for Parent Day. Please be polite but feel free to ask him questions. We are here to learn.

  Some others had spoken. Teachers, engineers, courtiers, dancers, artists, technicians, house managers. Doctors. Soldiers.

  He said, “I’m a mercenary.” Because that was a kinder version of the truth.

  The students shifted and sat up a little straighter. His son smiled wider. He felt the teacher take a step toward him as if to stop him, and all of the parents now stared like their children. Before anyone could say anything, a little girl stuck up her hand.

  “Does that mean anyone can hire you? For money? And you’d do what they said?”

  “One question only, Marda,” the teacher warned, but sounded unsure.

  “Not just anyone,” he said. “But yes.”

  “Have you killed people?”

  “Are you bad?”

  “Where’s your wife?”

  “Are you rich?”

  “Are you a murderer?”

  Perhaps his sister was right. Perhaps this wasn’t a good idea. The soldier in the room had tight eyes. Perhaps he should have lied outright, but it was a part of his registered identity that he was a mercenary. Because he had been long ago, when he hadn’t lived in this land. The King had been the only King of Peace. In other places there was need for him and others like him.

  “Is he a murderer?” He pointed to the soldier father of another student. “He’s paid as well.”

  The children had no answer. The soldier looked offended. Then one child in the corner raised her hand and said, “But he fights for the King. Who do you fight for?”

  They were here to educate. As adults and parents. He thought the better strategy in childrearing was to never lie to your kid, though you never told them everything at once. Now was a time for specific truth. He said to both his son and his son’s classmates, “I fight for myself. That’s a belief that can never be shaken.”

  Lida would tell him that was still a lie. But she had never understood that he never doubted himself. Other men were fallible, even the great King of Peace. Men like him, hired assassins—they were just efficient.

  5

  The state funeral ran long and broadcast on every channel. Lida forced the TV on and there would be no shutting it off without some kind of major argument. His son lay on the couch watching too. An hour into it and he told the boy to go to bed. “But why? I want to watch!” Go to bed. His tone was cruel and the boy ran off to his room in a pout. Lida looked at him and he left her with the pageantry on the TV and followed Jatey into the bedroom and shut the door. The boy kicked at him when he sat on the edge of the bed and tried to get a stubborn body to roll over.

  “You didn’t care when mommy died either!”

  So much accusation m
ade in ignorance. This was the forever battle between father and child.

  “She didn’t die,” he said. “She left. But death is the endpoint. Your aunt lied to you about that and I’m sorry I never explained the truth.”

  The kicking grew worse. He grabbed hold and gathered up, and said nothing more. Death was something you understood the older you got, and for his son it would come eventually. Inevitably. The hatred would pass. The fairy tale had died. The King was dead. He held his son while the boy worked it out in breaths and rebellion, then fell quiet in his arms. The endpoint was this and sooner or later his son would realize that too. The endpoint was him, the father. The one who came from the desert and the one who would take him back.

  5

  The boy fell asleep in his arms and he tucked him under the blankets and kissed the soft blond hair. His gun lay where he’d left it after coming home from the school, set in the nightstand with the blush orange putty and the twenty million he now possessed. He picked up the gun and found a clip beneath his papers in the second drawer and loaded the gun with it and chambered a round. He left the bedroom and shut the door behind him quietly, then took the two steps to his sister’s room and opened the door and slipped inside. The house was quiet and she lay in bed, her face to the moonlight as if that would make her grow.

  The only mercy in this was that she remained asleep. He picked up one of the pillows and covered her head with it, then pressed the point of the gun into the soft down and pulled the trigger three times. It still made a sound but not enough to exit the walls of the house. Then he left her room and went back into his bedroom where the boy slept. Jatey had always been able to sleep through storms.

  He gathered the putty and two more of his guns, ammunition, a couple blades, a change of clothes for both him and his son, some official papers and extra bottles of water from the kitchen. A couple hats. Everything else he’d buried long ago across the Bleach and those caches would serve him now, like he’d always known they would one day. When the bag was ready he went back to his son and shook him awake. “Come with me, baby.” And his son followed him, holding his hand, as sleepy as the night but as unquestioning as the moon.

  5

  Finally as their steps across the midnight sand grew numerous in the hour, Jatey said, “Where are we going, Daddy?”

  “We’ll spend some nights out with the sand dragons, just like we always do. We’re going north.”

  “Are we going to find Mommy?”

  “No. Mommy’s nowhere to be found.”

  The silence was born from thoughts. Then: “Is Auntie Lida lost too?”

  “Auntie Lida is dead.”

  The truth began now, in parcels, in grains of sand. In footsteps. He looked ahead at the pale dunes and the inverted cranium of stars all blinking with their own thoughts and perhaps with some judgment. It didn’t matter. Nothing else mattered when he felt the little hand caught in his palm squeeze back as if his son were afraid he, the father, would be the next one to be lost. The next one to die.

  “Why is Auntie Lida dead?”

  “Because I love you more.” He looked down at the blond boy beside him, this miniature mirror to his own features, or some rewinding of his history. “Do you love me more?”

  Tears coated the words. “Yes, Daddy.” And the hand gripped him tighter.

  They walked on across the Bleach.

  “I don’t have to go back to school?”

  “Not soon.”

  “I’ll miss school.”

  “I’ll teach you now.”

  He leaned down and picked up the child in his arms, and held him as he walked, now only one set of footprints and soon even those would be swept away in the hot shuffle of the Bleach’s whims and moods. When the sun rose they would rest. Eventually the boy fell silent again, asleep on his shoulder, and not even the sand dragons howled, as if they too lay buried in a dormancy only violence could reawaken.

  KARIN LOWACHEE was born in South America, grew up in Canada, and worked in the Arctic. Her first novel Warchild won the 2001 Warner Aspect First Novel Contest. Both Warchild (2002) and her third novel Cagebird (2005) were finalists for the Philip K. Dick Award. Cagebird won the Prix Aurora Award in 2006 for Best Long-Form Work in English and the Spectrum Award also in 2006. Her second novel Burndive debuted at #7 on the Locus Bestseller List. Her books have been translated into French, Hebrew, and Japanese, and her short stories have appeared in anthologies edited by Julie Czerneda, Nalo Hopkinson, and John Joseph Adams. Her latest fantasy novel, The Gaslight Dogs, was published through Orbit Books USA.

  THE WOMAN WHO SHATTERED THE MOON

  Jay Lake

  I am the most famous woman in the world.

  That’s something to be proud of, something no one else can say. It does not matter that the European bastards have locked me up for the past forty-one years, seven months and eleven days. It does not matter that they dynamited my stronghold and sealed off the steam vents that drove my turbines and powered my ambitions. It does not matter that Fleet Street and the American press and governments from the Kaiser’s Germany to Imperial Japan have all forbidden my name from being mentioned in writing.

  Despite all that, they cannot unmake me, because every night my greatest deed glimmers in the sky, a permanent reminder that I am the woman who shattered the moon.

  5

  Colonel Loewe comes to see me every Tuesday. He is proper, starched and creased in his lobster-red uniform with the white Sam Browne belt smelling faintly of oiled leather. His moustache is full and curved, something that must have come into fashion after I’d been imprisoned here in this hidden fortress, as it looks silly to me. In recent times, he has grown exactly nine white hairs hidden in the auburn of the moustache. The colonel’s face is sometimes as red as his jacket. I am never certain if this is exertion or anger.

  We meet in a tiny room with a knife-scarred wooden table between us. The floor consists of boards ten centimeters in width. There are thirty-six of them in a row most of the time. Some weeks there are thirty-seven of them. My jailors think I do not notice these little changes. It is much the same as the patterns in the dust and cobwebs, for nothing is clean in this place except what I clean for myself. I save my old toothbrushes to scrub out the mortared joins in the stone walls of my cell.

  The walls of our meeting rooms are covered in stucco, so I do not know if they are stone beneath. I see patterns in the plastering, but they are never the same, so I suspect my own imagination may be at fault.

  Either that or they have many more nearly identical rooms here than seems practical simply for the purpose of manipulating a single prisoner.

  This week, Colonel Loewe has brought me a chipped stoneware mug filled with a steaming brown liquid which appears to be coffee. After eleven years and fourteen weeks as my interrogator, he knows my ways, so with a small smile, the colonel sips from the mug to prove to me that it is not something dangerous or unpalatable.

  I inhale the rich, dark scent. There is of course the possibility that he previously took an antidote, but even in my darkest moments I recognize that if my jailors wished to kill me, they have had ample opportunities over the decades. Whatever my final end will amount to, I strongly doubt it will be poisoning at the hands of the colonel.

  “Madame Mbacha.” He always greets me politely. The coffee is a break in the routine.

  I take the mug, the warmth of it loosening the painful tension that always afflicts my hands these years. The odor indicates a Kenyan bean. Another small politeness, to bring me an African variety.

  “Good morning, Colonel.” I follow our ritual even as I wonder what the coffee signifies. The routine is that he asks about my work, my machines, precisely how I shattered the moon from my East African mountain fastness. In all my years here, I have never revealed my secrets, though I am sure forensic teams extracted much from my laboratories before their terminal va
ndalism rendered my works into dust.

  Why should I offer confirmation of their abuse? Why should I give them the secrets of gravity which I and I alone discovered, after being laughed away from the great universities of Europe and America for the inescapable twinned flaws of being African and a woman!?

  What Colonel Loewe should say now is, “Let us review the facts of your case.” That has been his second line for the entire time he has been my interrogator. Instead he surprises me by departing from his script.

  “I have news,” the colonel tells me.

  I tamp down a rush of frustrated anger. In my years of incarceration I have become very good at containing my feelings. Long gone are the days when I could work out my troubles on some trembling servant or prisoner. Still, how dare he change our rules now?

  “What news, Colonel?” My voice barely betrays my intensity of emotion. This cannot be good. Change is never good.

  He clears his throat, seeming almost embarrassed for a moment. “Madame Mbacha, it is my happy duty to inform you that your parole has been granted by the plenary session of the League of Nations on humanitarian grounds. You will shortly be processed for release, and will be free to go where you will, within certain restrictions intended for your own safety.”

  I stare at the colonel for a long moment, then began to laugh. It is the only way I can stop the tears that threaten to well up.

  Home. I can go home. The one thing I have never expected here in my imprisonment was to ever be allowed home again.

  5

  They bring me a newspaper with my supper. Such a thing has never before happened in my time in this prison. The change in routine intensifies my discomfort. At least the meal is consistent. I have been served the Tuesday menu. Sausage and cabbage, steamed so the meaty scent mingles with rankness of the vegetable. Also hard brown bread. The relief cook is on duty, I can tell by the way the food is prepared. Even that is part of the routine, though his shift does vary.