by Doug Felton
“That was a smokescreen, and we both know it,” Zeke said. “It was always about finding out who had conditional immortality.”
“And since you knew there were others, you knew that’s what we were doing all along. So you, what, paid someone to switch out your DNA sample?”
Zeke smiled. “As I said, money has its privileges.”
“And you came here tonight to set the record straight and tell me you are one of the Ten Thousand?” Raisa asked.
“And to show you this.” Zeke looked at the dome towering above them and crouched to the floor. With one swift move, he leaped into the air, soaring beyond what a normal human being could and landed on the dome near the tholos. He climbed the rest of the way to the top, waving as he went.
Raisa’s mouth gaped open as she watched Zeke move up the dome as if he were climbing a tree. That wasn’t part of conditional immortality, so what was it? As he neared the top, she lost sight of Zeke. She began circling the terrace, looking up for him when she heard a thud and turned. Behind her, Zeke was straightening his jacket.
“What was that?” Raisa barely got the words out.
“That’s what’s possible. For us. For all of us.”
Raisa put her hand to her mouth. Zeke’s power stirred an emotion in her that she couldn’t name. It was frightening and wonderful at the same time. Like seeing a tsunami that awes and terrifies. She reached out and touched Zeke’s arm. Are you even real?
Zeke’s eyes drew her in with a gravitational pull she’d never experienced. Behind the eyes, she could see desire. He opened his mouth, about to say something when he clamped his eyes shut and put a hand to his head. He reached out to steady himself, and Raisa put an arm around his waist.
“Migraine,” he said. “I’m sorry. Sometimes they come on suddenly.”
“Raisa!”
Raisa and Zeke turned to see Alexander standing on the terrace.
He looked from Raisa to Zeke and back again. “It’s late. I was concerned.” He watched them for a moment more and then, without another word, turned and walked inside.
Chapter Five
Raisa sat in a folding metal chair placed on a lush green lawn. It was one of fifteen lined up in two neat rows facing a mahogany coffin.
Ben.
To her right was Alexander. To her left was Victor Campo, her father’s former chief of staff, and next to him was Jimbo Hayes, his large frame filling out a canary yellow suit.
Raisa stared at the coffin, guilt rising in her chest like bile. She had spent too little time mourning Ben’s death. She told herself she was busy with important matters, but if she were honest with herself, she was hiding from it. Everyone was gone. Senator Corson’s promising young family had traveled an unexpected road that ended in tragedy. That the journey had led her to the throne was little consolation. What is a kingdom if you can’t save the ones you love?
Raisa feared that if she let herself grieve for Ben, a dam inside her would come crashing down, flooding her with emotions that would destroy her. But she would do her best to give Ben this day. He deserved that. This one day, squeezed between Zeke Wellington’s startling revelation two nights ago and an unexpected trip to planned trip to Pittsburgh the next day. Two nights earlier on the terrace, Raisa had followed Alexander as he left the dome’s terrace. She needed to finish her conversation with Zeke, but her husband was her priority.
“Alexander, wait,” she said as they descended the stairwell between the domes. “You don’t have to be jealous.”
“I’m not jealous. I’m concerned. As queen, everybody wants your ear. You need to be careful who you’re listening to. Did you know Zeke called in a favor from Council member Barrymore to be here tonight?”
“Zeke’s one of the Ten Thousand. He came here tonight to tell me.”
Alexander stopped. “He’s an immortal?”
“Yes.”
He shook his head and scoffed. “And I’ll bet he had an opinion about what you should do.”
“Yes, he did, but we didn’t talk long enough to finish the conversation.”
“I’m sorry I interrupted,” Alexander said as he began going down the stairs again.
“That’s not what I mean. He raised good questions, and I want to hear what he has to say.”
“It’s your call, but what does he bring to the table other than being a celebrity?”
Raisa didn’t appreciate Alexander’s tone. “How about the fact that whatever we decide will impact his future.”
Coming to the ground level of the Palace, they crossed the Great Hall toward the residence.
“It will impact all of our futures,” he said.
Back in the residence, Raisa couldn’t think of sleeping without talking to someone, and Alexander wasn’t in the mood. Despite the late hour, Penly and Raven came when she called. Being queen meant people came when you summoned them, no matter the hour, but Raisa knew they would have come, regardless.
“Someone put this at my place tonight at dinner.” She handed them the note she’d found.
“You’ve got to be freakin’ kidding me,” Raven said, reading the note.
“Did you show this to anyone?” Penly asked. “Does Commander Song know about it?”
“No.”
“Raisa, someone in the Palace was threatening you. You can’t keep this quiet.”
Raisa said, “I guess, but this whole thing is getting out of hand. We can find a way to make it work, but not if everybody overreacts. Right now, I need calm.”
Penly handed the note back. “That’s not a gamble I’d be willing to take.”
Raisa waited a moment before dropping the other bomb. “Oh yeah, and Zeke Wellington is one of the Ten Thousand.”
“For real?” Raven said. “That’s awesome.”
“Why?” Raisa asked.
“Now you’ve got a celebrity spokesman. People admire him. Might not hurt for him to be the face of the Ten Thousand.”
Raven was right. This was about PR as much as anything, and Zeke could buy them a lot of goodwill, but Raisa had a hard time thinking about public relations after what she’d seen Zeke do. “There’s more,” she said. “He’s different.”
“Different? How?” Penly asked.
Raisa hesitated. Now that she was ready to say it, it sounded absurd. But was it any more absurd than people who lived forever? It felt like it. “He has extraordinary abilities.”
“What do you mean, extraordinary?”
Both women were leaning in as if they might miss what Raisa said next.
“He jumped from the terrace to nearly the top of the dome and then climbed the rest of the way. As if he were a monkey in a tree.”
Penly’s face broke into a smile. “Deeson put you up to this, didn’t he? I’ve got to admit, he got me on this one.”
“No, no. I’m telling you that Zeke Wellington is a superhuman immortal. I don’t know how, but he said it was possible for all of us.” Raisa took a deep breath. Saying it made it more real. A part of her thought if she kept it hidden in the recesses of her own mind, it would fade away like a dream, but now it was out, and she had to deal with it.
“All of us people, or all of the immortals?” Penly asked.
Raisa shook her head and shrugged.
Raven squinted her eyes and said, “Wait. Doesn’t that make him a superhero?”
“Or maybe a supervillain.” Alexander’s voice came from the doorway behind them.
He startled Raisa. Without turning to face him, she said, “Do you distrust everyone? This will never work if we can’t bring people together.”
Alexander waited a long time before answering. “It’s two o’clock. The czar and his wife will leave later this morning. I think you should get some rest.”
Raisa heard the soft pedal of his bare feet retreating toward the bedroom. She looked at Penly and Raven, asking with her eyes how long he had been standing there. They both shrugged.
Great. Raisa had never given Alexander a reason not to trust her, nor had he g
iven her one, but she knew how this must look. First, out on the terrace with Zeke Wellington, then meeting with Raven and Penly, sharing sensitive information in the middle of the night. She would have shared all of this with him earlier if she hadn’t been so angry.
Father Aasir Jabari stood next to Ben’s coffin, a small black leather Bible in his hands. The early morning sun framed him in a soft glow. Raisa was not a religious person, but she could think of no one she’d rather have do Ben’s funeral. She had grown to love the old Anglican priest ever since he had helped hide her and her father from Creighton Ashwill. He had been her African angel sent to save them in a time of need. She imagined his job that morning, comforting a grieving family, would be more difficult.
Despite his age, the priest stood tall and strong before the small crowd that had assembled. “Oh death, where is your sting,” he said in his thick Sudanese accent. “That’s the question the Apostle Paul poses in the book of First Corinthians. But death does sting, does it not?” Pointing to the coffin, he said, “Burying a fifteen-year-old boy hurts. It is painful for us to be here today. It is painful to know that he took his own life. So the apostle is not suggesting that death does not sting for those left to mourn, but that Christ has removed the sting for those who die in him. And that is where I encourage you to find your hope.”
Raisa admired the old priest for his commitment to the faith, even if she didn’t share his beliefs. How different life would be if there were a supreme being overseeing the world, if the randomness of life were not random at all, but part of a larger plan. I could use that kind of hope, she thought. But even there, sitting before Ben’s grave, her duties as queen pressed in on her. She tried to push them off, but thoughts of her trip to Pittsburgh buzzed around the edges of her mind.
The day before the funeral, Colton Reeves, the charismatic silver-haired mayor of Pittsburgh, made everyone’s life more difficult by weighing in on the Ten Thousand. At least everyone’s life within the Palace.
Reeves stood before a bank of microphones looking every bit the seasoned politician that he was. “Twenty years ago, a deadly virus devastated our nation. And no city was more devastated than Pittsburgh, but we have rebounded.”
If you took New York out of the conversation, the mayor was right, the virus hit Pittsburgh the hardest. No one acknowledged the tragedy that happened in Manhattan for one simple reason. It was the stupidity of the people and not the virus alone that destroyed the city and made it uninhabitable. The virus was bad enough, but the leadership of New York turned it into a catastrophe from which the city never recovered.
Raisa knew that Mayor Reeves would never call it the Pittsburgh Virus. No one in Pittsburgh did. Who wanted the word “virus” attached to the city they lived in? Mayor Reeves was fond of saying, “We don’t name hurricanes after the first city it destroys, so why are we doing that with this virus?” Raisa didn’t disagree, but people were creatures of convenience and habit, so the name stuck.
“All of us hoped that we had seen the last of the virus and its far-reaching impact on our land,” the mayor said. “But just this week we learned that ten thousand of our citizens have the genetic condition known as conditional immortality. Her Majesty’s government has known this for some time and kept that information concealed. Information necessary for us to maintain a safe and prosperous society. And the largest number of those affected citizens live here in greater Pittsburgh.”
Raisa flushed red with anger. How did he know where the Ten Thousand lived? Maybe he figured that since the virus originated in Pittsburgh, the largest number of immortals would be from there. Or maybe someone told him.
A reporter shouted, “Are you suggesting that the Ten Thousand are a threat?”
“No, of course not. We’ve had them among us for twenty years with no problems. My concern is for the long-term implications of two very different groups of people in one society. How will the acquisition of property and power be affected by this? Will it be fair? And what about marriage? How many marriage partners could an immortal have if he or she married mortal men or women? What would that do to inheritance laws? Or what if they marry only each other? Soon there’d be a growing community of people who will live forever. Will they be in the workforce for the duration of their lives? Right now, we depend on people retiring as younger workers come along. These are a few of my concerns.”
“He wants to be on the Council,” Alexander said as he was watching the event live with Raisa and other members of the staff.
“What do you mean?” Raven asked.
“If he wanted solutions, he would have contacted us. This might be the start of a PR campaign to be governor of Pennsylvania, and a member of the New World Council. That’s not good.”
On this, Raisa and Alexander agreed; neither one wanted Colton Reeves on the council. He was a popular figure in the New World, having saved Pittsburgh when it looked as if the city wouldn’t survive. Reeves would carry influence on the council, and might be chosen as council president someday if elected. In theory, the queen was the sovereign ruler of the New World and above politics. In reality, everything was political. For all of his love of monarchies, Creighton Ashwill had built a safety valve into the New World Constitution that kept Raisa from turning a blind eye to the politics of the New World Council. By law, the council appointed the ruling monarch, as they had done in Raisa’s case. They could also remove a reigning king or queen by unanimous agreement. This way, the monarch wouldn’t disregard the council altogether. It was also useful for the occasional sovereign who might lose his or her mind while ruling, something that happened from time to time in history. But for Raisa, it meant she needed to neutralize Colton Reeves’ influence before he got himself on the Council.
After Father Aasir spoke, Raisa stood to speak about her brother. By agreement with Jimbo, she would speak about the brother she remembered as a child. Jimbo would talk about Ben in the last couple of years of his life. That suited Raisa since she didn’t know who Ben had become after she was taken from their home. They had begun to reconnect recently, and she thought they were making progress, but then he ended it all. She was still angry at that Ben, the one who had killed himself, but she could never be angry at the Ben she had taken care of after their mother died.
“The first memory I have of Ben was just after he was born at home. I was four, and I remember a neighbor watching me as my mom gave birth, and my dad and a midwife helped in her room. I remember his squeaky cry. I didn’t like it, and I asked the lady watching me if he was going to always be like that. And then, after what seemed like a very long time, my dad came and got me, and I went into the room, and there he was.” Raisa paused, letting the emotion ebb away before continuing. “My mom let me get up on the bed with her and hold him. At that moment, I thought being a big sister was the greatest thing ever. My mom said, ‘Now, you have to be careful with him. Remember, you’re his big sister, so you have to prote—’” Raisa’s words choked off in her throat. She swallowed hard and finished in a whisper. “‘You have to protect him.’”
Raisa had planned to say so much more about their years growing up together, but she couldn’t get past the guilt pressing in on her. It had a grip on her throat, like a chokehold, squeezing it shut. Unable to say anything else, Raisa took her seat, angry at herself. Ben deserved to be remembered, and she couldn’t even do that.
Chapter Six
That night Raisa drifted in and out of restless sleep. Since sharing a bed with Alexander, sleep wasn’t something at which Raisa had to work. It wasn’t just his muscled body next to her, giving her a sense of security; it was his calm, confident demeanor that soothed the tension she carried into their bed-chamber.
But not that night. A blend of worry and anticipation kept her floating on the surface of slumber, never diving deep. For the first time in their marriage, she and Alexander disagreed about something that mattered. She knew that having grown up in the household of Creighton Ashwill, he had more experience and natural abi
lity than she did dealing with policy issues. He was thoughtful and measured in his advice, always, and Raisa had always depended on his insight in making crucial decisions. But not this time, and neither knew how to handle it. They had always been kindred spirits, and now they weren’t. The bond between them had stretched uncomfortably, leaving Raisa disoriented, her emotional equilibrium off balance.
Even so, Raisa would not change her mind about the Ten Thousand, or about her trip to Pittsburgh. Her decision to go against Alexander’s advice had opened a wound in their relationship, and Alexander informed her he would not be traveling with her. The thought of traveling without him for the first time troubled her, but she had to go. So far in her life, Raisa had met only five other people with conditional immortality, six including Zeke. Now, thanks to Zeke, she was getting ready to meet twenty more with her same genetic condition.
“I’ve known Colton Reeves all my life,” Zeke said to Raisa after the mayor’s news conference two days earlier. He had stayed in Washington following the state dinner and contacted Raisa after the Mayor’s speech. “He and my father go way back. Let me talk to him. I think it would be in your best interest to go to Pittsburgh, to show the people there that you’re serious about the issues he raised. He’ll issue an invitation if I ask him.”
“I’m the queen. Do I need an invitation?”
“These people didn’t vote for you, but they’ve kept Colton Reeves in office for the last twenty years. In Pittsburgh, he’s more royalty to them than you are. Let me talk to him.”
“I’m not sure Alexander or President Tate would advise me to go to Pittsburgh. It will look as if I am letting Reeves set the agenda and following his lead.”
Zeke waited before he spoke again as if measuring his words. “I’m just an entertainer, but I thought the point of being queen was that you didn’t have to worry about political perceptions.” He smiled. “I heard your speech on the day of the signing ceremony. It was very good. And call me naïve, but I kind of believed you.”