Valverna

by A Clarkson

  Moving to the bed Ira picked up the frame and stared at the young couple portrayed there.

  They stood on the deck of a ship, the ocean spraying the boards behind them as they laughed and embraced, pure undiluted joy radiating from their faces. They were a tall and slender pair, only a few years older than Ira, with dark hair and eyes, with arms wrapped around each other in casual affection.

  The woman wore a knee length white dress embroidered with flowers and held a bouquet of flowers in the crook of her elbow while she rested her palms on the man’s chest over his three piece suit, and stared up at him adoringly.

  Ira wondered if this was their wedding day. She remembered hearing that for years following the Drought, couples living outside of one of the emerging territories would sometimes choose to be married out at sea by a captain.

  The man was looking toward the camera, one arm wrapped around his partner’s waist, the other raised to shield his eyes from the bright sun above them. His windswept hair blew around a face that was stretched into a radiant smile.

  It took Ira a moment to process what she was seeing. Not because the man standing in the image before her now lay in a bloody heap in the kitchen below. No, she took a moment to grasp the fact that the person in front of her was the very same man she had seen in her dream the night before.

  She hadn't realized it until now. His corpse too battered and beaten and too far into the stages of decay to resemble the frantic and terrified man she only briefly glimpsed in her nightmare. But looking at this image of him as he stood smiling on the deck of a boat, his glasses glinting in the bright sunlight, the same rounded spectacles that Ira saw flashing in candlelight, and that now sat on the nightstand before her, Ira could not deny it was the same man.

  Alistair had been his name. Ira remembered now as the details of the dream returned more vividly. Clarisse called him Al, as though they were more than casual acquaintances, but friends, close enough to have adopted intimate nicknames.

  Why had Clarisse never mentioned this man? Ira had certainly never seen him before, so why had she dreamed of him? Of Clarisse meeting him?

  Perhaps Clarisse never met this man, and Ira simply invented the exchange. A pure figment of her imagination.

  But what were the odds that she would dream of this man? This man specifically, of all people? A man she had never seen before. She supposed that if she had seen him walking on the street, or drinking at the bar, or even passing her while she sat in some cafe, perhaps, perhaps she could have dreamed of him. She could have subconsciously remembered him and placed him in her strange and confusing dream.

  But how would she have known his name? Alistair. Al.

  Ira didn’t understand. This didn’t make sense. None of this was making sense.

  She grabbed the photo and moved back down the stairs.

  “I think this man knew Clarisse,” she told Magnus, showing him the photo of Alistair with his young bride. “I’m now sure why, but I think they knew each other.”

  Magnus looked at her with a slight frown of confusion. “Why do you say that? What do you mean that you are not sure why? Have you met him? Did she mention him?”

  Ira shook her head, frustrated at the fact that she was saying anything. What if it really was just a dream, and there was no connection at all between Clarisse and Alistair?

  “I’m not sure. I just...” Ira searched for the right words, “have this feeling,” she confessed. “I think she was maybe a customer of his.”

  Magnus didn’t seem convinced. Clearly Ira wasn’t doing a very good job of persuading him.

  “Look,” she sighed, “maybe we can check the shop records? See if she was ever a customer?”

  He gave her a suspicious look but agreed.

  “We can leave this to my men,” he said, gesturing with a nod toward the house around them. “You and I can head over to the store.”

  Relieved that he agreed, Ira moved back upstairs to return the portrait to its home beside the bed.

  Staring at the laughing couple Ira felt pain cut through her heart in a stab of grief.

  “I’ll find who did this Alistair,” she whispered softly under her breath. “I’ll make sure you didn’t die in vain.”

  Chapter 17

  The Epiphany

  The jewellry store looked exactly as it had in Ira’s dream.

  What she thought was a desk, was really a small counter that displayed a range of watches and rings. Behind the desk sat the small cupboard where Alistair fetched the wooden box he gave to Clarisse.

  Ira wasn’t sure what to make of it. She was certain she had never been in this store before.

  Could she have been here and not remembered? When she was younger? Was the dream some kind of flashback to a memory?

  No, it was nothing like a memory. For one thing, Ira wasn't there. She could hardly have a memory that wasn’t her own.

  And yet - that was exactly how the dream felt. As though she was remembering something she witnessed. An exchange she had viewed from the sidelines.

  It felt similar to Ira’s recurring nightmare in that way. The dream of the men fleeing into the night, a crying baby in their arms. Ira always felt as though she was silently watching that scene playout as though through the memory of another. An invisible observer. An interloper with no place being there.

  She never considered her nightmare as anything other than a dream. Why would she?

  But now? Now she didn’t know what to think.

  The dream hadn’t been proven true, not exactly. She still didn’t know if Clarisse had been here, or if she even knew Alistair. Let alone if she called him Al. But it hadn’t been wrong either.

  The store was exactly right, and Alistair, name and all, was exactly as she dreamed him.

  And now neither Clarisse nor Alistair were alive to confirm it either way. Had they really met here late at night in order to exchange a box? Had her dream been a memory? And if so, whose? And why had Ira seen it?

  Ira simply didn’t know what to believe. It all felt too surreal.

  The clerk was very helpful in showing them the customer records, and Magnus and Ira set to work in sorting through them. They were looking for anything that might connect to Clarisse. Any sign of why she may have met Alistair.

  Ira spent hours sifting through files. She started with the most recent, but as no sign of Clarisse appeared, she moved on the older and older files, desperate to find any evidence of Clarisse’s relationship with Alistair.

  When she found nothing, Ira moved on to looking for signs of Maureen.

  After going through months of customer logs, Magnus called her off. They weren’t going to find anything here.

  “So what was she doing here?” Ira asked in a frustrated voice as she stacked another file of customer logs onto the desk in front of her. “We know she was here, she was seen entering. So if she wasn’t a customer, what was she doing here?”

  “That’s the question,” he agreed. “She was worried she was in danger, hired a hitman in the hopes of protecting her, and when that failed she came here. Did she deliver something? Pass on a message?”

  “You think she passed on whatever John gave her to Alistair? Why? He wasn’t a researcher. He was a jeweler.”

  Magnus shrugged. “It certainly looks like our murderer thinks she passed it to Alistair. Otherwise why go after him?”

  Ira thought for a moment. “Maureen must have given Alistair’s name to the murderer. There just doesn’t seem to be another reason for him to have been targeted,” she said, shaking her head. “Even if the murderer saw Maureen walking out of this shop that night, why would he assume it was connected? No, I think Maureen wasn’t able to keep Alistair’s identity hidden.”

  Magnus bobbed his head side to side as he considered.

  Ira looked back at the log books in front of her, but after a few minutes of staring at the same name she accepted that she would not be able to focus again. They had been at this for hours now and she wasn’t even sure
they would find anything. It didn’t look like either Clarisse or Maureen had ever been a customer here, so what had they been doing in this jewellry shop?

  Ira was missing something, and she felt as though whatever it was, it was staring right in her face.

  She needed a break. Needed to get out of here and clear her head for a minute.

  “Beer?” she asked with an exhausted sigh.

  He gave her a crooked smile and nodded.

  A little while later they sat in the back of Flor’s bar in a private booth, sipping two large beers, a plate of fries between them.

  Flor beamed at Ira when they first walked in. “You made it!”

  Ira wasn’t sure what the other woman was talking about until she noticed the large signs and papers across the tables inviting people to “Raise your voice against the tyranny of the Merchant Guild!”. Ira managed to stifle her eye roll, this was the last place she wanted to be right now. She mustered a small smile at her friend. “Yep. Told you I would be here.”

  “And you managed to bring the merc.” Flor added with a less than subtle wink in Magnus’ direction.

  Ira was surprised at the turn out. There were well over one hundred people from various industries crammed into Flor’s small bar. It looked as though a group had come from the processing plant, a second on behalf of the field workers, as well as a few of Ira’s fellow sluggers. She could also see that a representative from the Merchant Guild had crammed themselves into the far corner. Most surprisingly of all was Chelsea Brooks, who spoke animatedly to her neighbour from where she sat comfortably on a bar stool.

  She greeted both Ira and Magnus warmly before declining their offer to join them in the booth.

  “Flor has asked me to speak during the meeting,” she explained, then added with a grimace, “Though I’m not sure she’ll particularly like what I have to say.”

  Chelsea had been right. After Flor spent ten minutes explaining to the room why they had gathered, and outlined the benefits of a nationalised system for the rybrum, Chelsea countered almost every point.

  Flor’s main argument was that the Guild’s ownership of the rybrum created a natural monopoly because nobody could compete with the established power grid. She believed that by nationalising the fields, the private sector would no longer be able to exploit this monopoly. This would cause the cost of the rybrum would go down, making it more accessible to the average person. She also argued that public ownership would allow for the profits of external rybrum sales to benefit the city as a whole, rather than just continuing to line the pockets of the Guild members.

  “Valverna would have the funds to install public transportation, better public healthcare, and even public education,” she explained passionately to murmurings of approval from the room.

  When Chelsea joined Flor at the front of the room, the occupants had grown quiet, excited to hear from the famous woman who had taken on the Guild five years ago.

  Their excitement turned to disappointment when Chelsea outlined why she disagreed with Flor’s proposal. “Unfortunately I don’t think it would work the way you imagine,” she explained with a sympathetic look to the bar’s owner. “Nationalisation has historically resulted in greater inefficiency of production. In many cases this resulted in higher, not lower costs for consumers.”

  “It is also notoriously lethal to technological advancements,” she continued. “Nationalisation would almost certainly result in the stagnation of any further research into the rybrum.”

  “You can’t deny that it would be better for the workers,” Flor countered. “People like Ira would be better equipped to tackle the slugs because it would be in the public interest to remove them. Right now the Guild sits on their asses because they would rather the fields stay riddled with slugs.”

  “And get paid less to risk their skin every day?” Chelsea returned. “Being a slugger may not be glamorous, but the Guild pays its people well. I don’t think a nationalised system would equip their staff any better, and they wouldn’t be able to pay even a portion of the current wages.”

  “But these people would finally have a stake in the resources they work so hard to produce. Wouldn’t that make it all worth it?”

  There were a few grumbles of agreement from the field workers.

  “But who would pay for this? We live in a monarchy and the Crown already owns a stake in the fields. What incentive do they have to fork out more money to buy out their partners at the expense of their own investment?”

  “I could ask you the same,” Flor countered. “How would anyone afford to buy into the field expansion? The Guild won’t put forward the money again,” she accused with a glance toward the Guild rep in the corner. “They clearly only did that to appease the public in the past, so who would pay for it? Or is this project only really for the benefit of those like you who have the capital to invest in the fields, and the rest of us will be stuck as we are?”

  The meeting ended shortly after their debate, and the crowd left no clearer on the path forward, neither woman having convinced the crowd of their arguments.

  Flor agreed to join them for a beer in their booth to vent her frustration at how the meeting transpired. “Can’t say I expected Chelsea Brooks to railroad my plans,” she said glumly. “I always thought she was a supporter of the people. I expected her to love a project like this.”

  Ira listened distractedly to her friend’s grumblings. Her mind was too occupied with trying to make sense of all that happened in the past week.

  She couldn’t shake the feeling that she was missing something, and her mind kept wandering back to what Clarisse said in her dream. This is going to change the world.

  Whether the dream really happened, or had been a figment of Ira’s imagination, she couldn’t help but feel the truth of those words.

  People were dying and for what? What did they discover in that lab in Caldessa that would lead to so many deaths? So many senseless murders.

  The anger Ira felt upon seeing Alistair Wong’s body came flooding back, and she shook her head to clear it. She needed to be careful from now on or Adrian would suddenly pop up next to her to make sure everything was ok.

  Ira huffed a laugh. That kid. He was not what she expected. When he first appeared in the field she assumed he was some entitled rich kid out inspecting his future inheritance.

  She supposed he was still an entitled rich kid, but he seemed to genuinely want to understand the world. He wanted to be a good person, and she felt in her heart that he may one day make a great ruler.

  Flor raised a brow at Ira’s spontaneous chuckle.

  “I’m just thinking about Adrian,” she explained. “Do you know, the first time I met him he told me slugs were like lemmings?

  Magnus shook his head and frowned at her, “But he corrected that. He told you that he remembered the lesson wrong.”

  Ira nodded. “Yes, but I’m not convinced that he got the whole lesson wrong. I think he just mixed things up a bit.” She thought for a moment, remembering their original conversation. “I feel like I’m missing something that connects everything together. And I can’t stop thinking about what Adrian said about slugs being like lemmings.”

  Flor laughed, “Slugs don’t have much in common with lemmings.”

  Looking at the older woman, Ira asked, “Why would an economics professor talk about lemmings?”

  Flor considered for a moment, “Lemmings are sometimes used as examples of overconsumption, or when herd instincts drive people to act against their self interest.”

  “Like lemmings following their herd off a cliff,” Ira said as she chewed on her lips and tried to remember what Adrian first said. “Originally he said that his instructor told him that slugs are like lemmings, and Adrian understood that in a very literal way. Lemmings do this, therefore slugs do too. He’s ten years old-”

  “Eleven,” Magnus corrected absently.

  “-so for him, the dramatic detail he remembered was that lemmings jump off cliffs, which he u
nderstood to mean they were committing suicide.”

  “Which he clarified he was wrong about,” Magnus reminded her.

  Ira looked up and pointed a finger at him. “Exactly! They don’t. So what was the lesson? What was the comparison the tutor was drawing between the lemmings and the slugs?”

  She thought for a moment, taking a sip of her beer, while Magnus watched her with curious eyes.

  “What if,” Ira said slowly as she lowered her beer glass back to the table, “the slugs were actually an allegory for the cliff.”

  Flor arched a brow at her, “Now you’ve completely lost it.”

  “No, no, hear me out,” she pleaded as she frantically tried to make sense of her thoughts. She sat up straighter in her chair, hands in front of her in a ‘slow down’ gesture as though she could curb the speed her mind was moving. She had to be wrong, it couldn’t be true.

  “What if, the instructor was saying that in the same way that lemmings jump from cliffs as a way to control their population - albeit unintentionally - the slugs exist to control the rybrum? A self regulating mechanism that ensures the rybrum fields don’t get too big, just as the lemmings leaving their colonies ensures they don’t outgrow the available resources.”

  Magnus’ eyes darkened and his lip curled into a sneer. “Unfortunately that would not be surprising. We know that Valverna has no interest in letting the rybrum fields grow any bigger, it is not a stretch to assume that the slugs were brought in as a safety net to ensure they never did.”

  Ira’s eyes widened as the implications set in.

  “You’re right. The slugs were intended as a permanent measure, to keep the rybrum under wraps. So what if it cannot be undone. What if once introduced, there is no way to undo this plague?”

  “What would that change?” Flor looked at her in confusion. “The city has no interest in removing the slugs if they still hold the market. There would be no benefit to them suddenly flooding the world with rybrum.”