Fire, Ruin, and Fury (Embers Saga)

by Matthew Taylor

  Dorian said nothing, but he paced quickly to the autovan door and flicked his wrist impatiently for her to catch up. Emily hurriedly took her spot in the passenger seat and reached for the glove box, where Dorian always stored a pistol for such excursions, but Lee placed his hand on her arm and shook his head.

  The pistol isn’t there.

  She glanced out the window at the snake-eaters grumbling beside them, praying they were up to the task. She welcomed the buzzing of the drones overhead as they finally set off for the estate.

  The intersections at the bridgeheads had been cleared of most of the debris and all of the bodies.

  Probably thrown into the river, thought Emily wistfully, though she was happy to roll across the bridge without incident and turn up the mountain road toward the estate.

  Arriving with some relief at the estate’s high walls, the gates swung open, and the snake-eaters and drones peeled off. The autovan whirred inside. Emily scanned the grounds again for a sight of Patrick, even though she knew it was foolish.

  The autovan finally rolled to a stop in front of the guest-house, and they both exhaled with relief. But as Emily reached for her door handle, Dorian placed a hand on her arm.

  “We need to talk about the Ellie boy.”

  “Patrick,” she sighed, stupidly.

  “Yes, Patrick. Don’t get me wrong now, Child. It was nice to see y’all gettin’ along so good. You deserve nice things like that.”

  She dreaded whatever was coming next.

  “Buuuut,” she prompted reluctantly. There wasn’t anything he could tell her that she hadn’t already told herself, but she sensed he needed to say it—possibly on behalf of her father.

  “But don’t be foolish or stupid,” he continued, shocking her with his bluntness. “You know his marriage’ll be arranged, if it ain’t been arranged already, with some girl from some important Ellie family. Some family the Baumgartens need for an alliance or business deal or some such. That’s the way of things.

  “And that truth means only one thing for you—being his mistress.” He paused, as if to let that sink in. She steeled herself for the death blow. “Or his whore. …And that’s something that neither your father or me can abide. Wouldn’t be proper, and it’d be a real unhappy life for you. You the whore, your children bastards. Scorned and reviled until his proper wife saw fit to get you disappeared. The Ellies’ve done terrible things to people like us for less.”

  Emily found herself shaking.

  “So, you be nice to Patrick if you see him again—cordial. ‘Queen’s manners,’ like your mum says. But you steer clear of anythin’ more. And if you can’t steer clear, then don’t get attached, like you did with that Goodwell boy. And if you do get attached, at least don’t get pregnant. Heavens help you if you end up with a bastard in your belly.”

  Emily’s face flushed red, and she battled the desire to punch him and scream out all the anguish and rage that had burst forth as tears the night before.

  “Stick with Grimm, if you ask me. Even that Goodwell boy, though his family’s a bunch of nutjobs, would be a better match.”

  “I know all this,” Emily snapped, trying to embrace the truth of it and contain her urge for violence. Though she couldn’t swallow over the lump in her throat, and she was grateful to Jasmine for bringing her back to earth gently, on some level she was glad that it was Dorian to finish it. He would forgive her childish folly, and she knew he shared in her sadness, despite his callous delivery. She gazed out the window, sullen and speechless, as the daylight finally succumbed to darkness.

  “‘Em, my dear,” he offered in a more soothing tone, “I’m sorry to be the one to set it straight for you. But you need to accept the reality of it if you’re gonna have half the things you deserve. Put him right out of your head. You mind my words, girl, and things’ll turn out fine.

  Emily nodded, teary and speechless.

  “Now, go inside. I need to run to the mansion to close up. I’ll be along shortly.”

  Emily shuffled into the guest house, navigated through the crowd of lesser-Ellie guests with their vape-hookahs of methylweed, admiring the brooding post-storm sky through the giant windows. She trudged up the spiral staircase, oblivious for the first time to its grandeur, arriving with aching muscles and a sad mind to the round common room that connected all the corridors to guest rooms on their floor. As she turned down the hallway towards the room she now shared with Jasmine, she nearly passed right by Patrick, who sat a table in the hallway with a spread of food laid out before him.

  He stood up, smiling eagerly as she came in.

  “We had a dinner date tonight,” he reminded her with a grin.

  Emily’s heart flipped in her chest, trying to reconcile her thrill at seeing him with her desperate desire to charge the table of food, her sudden awareness of her filthy appearance and body odor, and her desire to flee into her room to escape it all.

  “The old guys are still at the mansion talking. When I heard your day was tougher than they had thought, I thought you might use some food—and maybe some company.”

  She turned uncomfortably and looked over her shoulder at her room door.

  “I can take it all away if you are too tired,” he added sheepishly.

  “No, no. It looks lovely.” She quickly put her sweat-drenched and tangled hair into a pony tail. She was still bothered by her disheveled state, but her positive response was all Patrick needed, and he half-skipped to her, taking her hand, and pulling her gently to a padded chair.

  Sitting down, Emily savored the smelled of the food. A meat stew with a side of grilled asparagus and a heap of mashed potatoes cradling a lake of melted butter. She resisted only a moment, before diving into the meal, her consciousness of manners forgotten. As she scarfed down the food, he apologized that they had sent her into the town, he said as she chomped. Bad intel on the security situation there. Something about her father being worried sick and them deploying more aerial combat drones to make sure they were safe. She occasionally grunted an acknowledgement, but she didn’t bother to look up, fearing the disgusted expression she expected to see on Patrick’s face as she slurped her stew and cleaned her plate like a ravenous animal.

  When the food was gone, she finally looked up with reticence, but was surprised to see him wearing a satisfied grin.

  He’s happy just to have made me happy, she realized.

  He leaned in as she wiped her mouth and chin, evidently undaunted by the stink she could smell on herself.

  “Em, I’m not betrothed.”

  She looked at him puzzled. Holllly fuck, she thought at the dramatic non-sequitur.

  “I spoke with my father last night. …I asked him to put aside any plans for a while—”

  “Patrick, I don’t want any trouble,” she interrupted. She had no idea what to say next, but she felt the need to fill the space. “I like you and all, but I’m not interested in being a conquest. …Or a mistress. …Or some kind of whore on the side. I don’t want bastard children.” Her heart broke a little with each word, but she was proud of herself for channeling Dorian, and oddly thrilled at the idea of rejecting an Ellie.

  You won’t have me, she thought defiantly.

  “Of course not,” he replied, appearing genuinely surprised at the suggestion. “I’d never want that for you. I asked him to hold off because—well, because I want to see if this is what I think it is. What I think it might be. That probably doesn’t make any sense, since we have only known each other a day.”

  No, it doesn’t, she admitted, though the feeling of flight was returning to her spirit.

  “It didn’t even take much convincing for him to hold off.”

  “Patrick, I’m just an urchin. My whole family’s urchins. Even if we clicked, it’d never work.” But hers was a rear-guard action, and she secretly hoped he would break through.

  “If it did work between us,” he pressed on, “the Estate would likely pass to my younger brother, Joey.” He paused for a moment, as if
the reality of that was hitting him for the first time. “But I don’t even care. We would never be poor. We would always be protected. —I mean, once we get to know each other, and if things went well.”

  He changed his seat at the table to sit beside her, never giving any hint that he smelled the body odor she smelled on herself. They talked a little more about the chasm between the Ellies and the commoners, and the other fissures between people. Race, class, religion, region, language, vocation. The conversation meandered—effortlessly—as it had the evening before. Eventually though, her exhaustion began nagging her, and she looked at the clock to learn they had again consumed more hours than she could afford.

  “You need to sleep,” he acknowledged. “They are obviously not sending you outside the walls again until they are a hundred percent certain everything is safe.”

  She was relieved, not only for escaping another harrowing trip into town, but at the realization that her safety was on Patrick’s mind.

  “Since you’ll be around a while, I was hoping I might bring you lunch tomorrow. …I promise not to distract you too long.”

  “That’d be great,” she replied, knowing she was crossing a Rubicon into forbidden and dangerous territory.

  Chapter 36: Outbreak, Mid-Atlantic Province

  (Jasmine Goodwell)

  Jasmine Goodwell was curled up on a brocade armchair at the Baumgarten Estate, consumed by her computer tablet and surrounded by unread church documents as she waited for her scheduled comms window to call her family. It would likely be days before she would be allowed to fly home, as the Mid-Atlantic Province was still in a state of emergency and under martial law. All non-security air traffic was grounded indefinitely, and she didn’t dare attempt the trip by land; with the fighting and lawlessness following the storm, she wouldn’t make it out of the province, much less all the way back to Park City.

  She worried about the devastation and human suffering still grinding outside the walls of the estate, and she wished she could join relief efforts. But she knew the Baumgartens would never permit it. Her family—or at least their PetrolChurch—had too much strategic value to the Ellies’ profiteering schemes making her at one precious and expendable. So, she had to stay put, despite the boredom.

  Emily Goldbloom had been her only companion since she’d arrived, apart from the occasional check-in from Patrick Baumgarten. Emily had pretty much moved into Jasmine’s quarters, and they tried to eat breakfast and dinner together so they could see each other as much as possible. Emily was very busy helping with repairs on the compound and the nearby areas to keep her company, though, and Patrick was taking up more and more of her friend’s time.

  Jasmine’s mind had been wandering, forcing her to re-read the same passages over and over, and she took to doing some extra-curricular research in the Commonwealth Identities and Citizen Information System, affectionately dubbed “CICI” by the Ellies. The Consortium had given her access to more information than she could ever consume, but the content—including in-depth dossiers on millions of Commonwealth citizens, businesses, and organizations, as well as a multitude of foreigners—confirmed the widespread suspicion that the Ellies maintained mass data files to help them with social control.

  The Ellies never admitted to having so much data, but they made it clear to individuals in the lower castes that they knew more than enough to keep them in line—a tacit threat always present in their tone. The lower castes nevertheless continued to offer more information about themselves than was required by law—usually in trade for essential services, such as travel, work permits, residency passes, and medical care outside of the state hospital-mills. More often in exchange for entertainment—porn, social and familial connections, games, smut-news.

  It felt like a dirty, dishonest thing to explore CICI like this, but these were strange times, and she knew precious little about any of the people on whom her life depended. The combination of fear and boredom had led her to CICI for profiles of anyone she was scheduled to meet—and just to be safe, anyone who had entered her quarters while she was out. She resisted the urge to read Emily’s profile, but she read what limited information they had provided about the Baumgartens—and the other members of the Gang of Seven. She checked on her father’s church ministers, servants, and functionaries—some of whom turned out to have suspicious connections to the Great Families.

  This morning, her security detail was on her mind. She knew little about them, despite the time the crew had spent with her family since her brother’s crash months before. “Sherman’s men,” as they were collectively known in her family, alternated teams and assignments, so that no one in the crew ever spent too much time with any one member of her family—probably to avoid shifting in loyalties.

  The manager of the crew, Ben Holland, was escorting her brother on his aid mission in the southwest. She suspected they were having some kind of affair—the kind that was punishable by death in some of the Commonwealth’s Provinces, most of its Territories, and all of its mobs. A few of the guards were on assignment with her father and mother back in Park City.

  The two who were here with her at the estate had been at the Nautilus meeting, and they had helped save her brother during the crash. But they were also mercenaries—the henchmen of the warlord Farid Sherman. She had seen them moving unmarked crates and metal drums in and out of Church facilities and work sites. They were treated like pariahs on the estate, and she was confident that Senator Baumgarten had assigned guards to guard her guards.

  Name: Bruce Gibson

  Known Aliases/Nicknames: “Nanner”

  DOB: Unknown

  Year of Citizenship: 2125

  POB: Unknown

  Family:

  Mother – Matilda Gibson [deceased]

  Father – Marco Acosta [deceased]

  Location:

  Baumgarten Estate, Harrisburg, Mid-Atlantic Province.

  Criminal History

  Employer: Unk. Suspected: Farid Sherman

  Occupation: Private Security

  Medical:

  Communicables: Unk.

  Vaccinations: Unk.

  Psych: Depression, Anxiety, PTSD

  Enhancements: See All

  Pharmas: Unknown

  Associates:

  Farid Sherman

  Benjamin Holland

  Felipe Arrivillaga

  William “Billy” Washington

  MORE

  Associates in Common with User: Jasmine Alias Goodwell

  Emily Goldbloom

  Name: William Washington

  Known Aliases/Nicknames: Billy

  DOB: Unknown

  Year of Citizenship: 2125

  POB: Unknown

  Family:

  Mother – Unknown

  Father – Unknown

  Location:

  Baumgarten Estate, Harrisburg, Mid-Atlantic Province

  Criminal History

  Employer: Unk. Suspected: Farid Sherman

  Occupation: Private Security

  Medical:

  Communicables: Unk.

  Vaccinations: Unk.

  Psych: Depression, Anxiety, PTSD

  Enhancements: See All

  Pharmas: Unknown

  Associates:

  Farid Sherman

  Benjamin Holland

  Felipe Arrivillaga

  Bruce Gibson

  MORE

  Associates in Common with User: Alias Goodwell

  Emily Goldbloom.

  More orphans, she thought. They’re all orphans. She wanted to dig deeper into their criminal records, though she was afraid of what she would learn—and what the knowledge would do to her already-shaky trust. She also resisted the temptation to look at Farid Sherman’s records, having no idea who was monitoring her traffic, whether they’d pass her curiosity onto him, and what he would do if he found out she was snooping.

  She wanted to see what the Ellie’s were reading about her as well, but that would have to wait. It was almost time f
or her to make her way to the comms room for her call with her parents. She didn’t want to be late, lest she miss her slot, so she roused herself from her chair just as the bell to her room chimed.

  “Bruce Gibson is at the door,” Operetta announced cheerfully.

  Speak of the Devil. Bruce “Nanner” Gibson. CICI forgot to mention his affiliation with Vic Lancaster. Prob’ly for the best.

  Eager to conceal her reading, she switched off her screen and opened the door with a forced, awkward smile.

  “Miss Goodwell,” Nanner greeted stiffly. “Your comms window will be open in a few minutes. I’m here to escort you to the comms room.”

  “Yes, of course. Thank you.” She offered her hand to greet him. Although her family had been catapulted into the sphere of the Ellies, who generally shunned touching the lower castes, part of her family’s role was to be the friendly, accessible interlocutors to the unwashed masses. Jasmine also knew her upbringing didn’t make her superior to anyone.

  The lower castes generally despised nouveau Ellies, though especially when they took on the trappings of their masters. There was no winning for people like Jasmine in such situations. Either had to have been co-opted by the aristocracy—so thinks she’s better than her true rank—or she was determined to flout social norms, putting the defenseless lower castes at risk of punishment. The scavengers, reclaimers, and waste sanitation workers were most sensitive to this, along with the sex traders, the polytheists, and the exposed atheists. Lastly, the mercenaries and warlords.

  Jasmine, like everyone in the PetrolChurch, had nonetheless resolved to continue exchanging courtesies to all people of all castes. They were clergy, so the risk of causing harm—detention, corporal punishment, or revocation of work permits or residency passes—was lower. Her family was also mindful that the PetrolChurch was just an interesting little experiment to the Ellies involved—and a secret. Their good fortunes could be reversed on a whim, and they’d be cast back among the urchins. Should that day come, their reception might be less hostile if they had never put on airs.