by Ellen Larson
She swayed a little. “You? You told Authority who I was?”
“I had to. It was the only way I could save you.”
The rush of shame, anger, overwhelming grief was like an electric shock. “Save me?” She took a step toward him. “You think this stinking carcass is me? Me? I was strong! I was sure! I was faithful to the end! Save me? You fucking bastard! You destroyed me!”
She ripped the shield from her head and threw it at him. It bounced off his chest and clattered to the floor. For a moment she stared at him, utter despair naked on her face, then she turned and ran from the medlab, down the hall, and out into the streets.
For a long time she ran, without direction, without purpose, but no matter how far she went, she could not get away.
CHAPTER TWENTY
* * *
Nine months earlier
The cold was a friend. It numbed the pain in her wrists and ankles. It killed hunger. It killed despair. Heat would make her writhe and scream before it took her, but the cold would lull her into sweet, endless sleep. The shivering even gave her something to do to pass the time. How stupid of them to use cold. Fucking Rasakans. . . . Think they could rehabilitate her, did they?
“Wake up!”
A torrent of fetid water splashed against her face and chest. She gasped as the second wave hit, and had no choice but to swallow. She hunched forward as far as her bonds would let her, vomiting onto the floor between her legs, while the water ran down her torso, making streaks of pain in the cold.
She blinked open her right eye—the left one still wasn’t working too well—and tried to rub it on her shoulder to clear it. Before her, as if suspended in the darkness, was a semicircle of red shields. They referred to themselves as the medical staff, these spooks, but she knew them for what they were and despised them.
What would it be this time? Endless demands for information about her Resistance mates—who were they, where were they, what were their names? Detailed questions about the missions she had been on—from whom had she learned the art of breaking and entering, what facilities had she sabotaged, who had been targeted, how had she managed to get inside all those secure buildings? Or would it be a spell of wordless misery for its own sake?
“Merit Rafi.”
She didn’t know where he was, but she knew that metallic voice; she knew him, the little fiend who had the nerve to call himself a psychotherapist.
“I have good news for you. You will be happy to hear that we have found your family. Your maman, Delilah, and your half sister, Adele. They are alive and well.”
Waves of a different kind of nausea rocked her. Please ye Saints, no, she prayed, not this.
“And they will continue to live—and be well—if you will simply cooperate with us and accept your rehabilitation. You have nothing to fear. Surely you must understand that the value you would be to us as a Retrospector is worth far more than the destruction you have caused. You will lead a good life.” Then they showed her scans, one of her maman, a frightened look on her face, holding a newspaper with a recent date.
Merit rocked front to back in her chair, head bowed. Tears that the pain had never drawn burned her eyes and streamed down her filthy cheeks. Sweet Saints, she prayed, if you can hear me, take me now.
“Very well,” he said. “I’m sorry to have to use threats, Merit, but you leave me no choice. If you do not agree to cooperate, right now, today, your family will be brought to this prison and will share your fate—the distinction being that they are of no value to us, and will therefore be treated with much less consideration than you have been.”
The shivering was inside her. Her breath juddered out of her mouth, and she heard herself make a soft, wailing sound.
The voice droned on, each precise consonant a stiletto stab. “Don’t do that to your family—the only family you have left. The militia is disbanded. The Conservatory is rubble. The Resistance is dead. Your responsibilities to the past are ended. Live in the light again, reunited with your maman and sister, work with us as a colleague, for a better Greater Rasaka. Give up your fight. Say you agree.”
Anguish arose from a place deep within her, ripping through her battered body, rising upwards until it escaped her mouth in agonized sobs.
He stepped forward out of the shadows, a small figure in black and gray with a half silver face. “Say it!”
She tried to speak, but her sobs choked her. The cold racked her body at every move. She screamed.
“I can’t hear you.”
“I agree!” she screamed, and screamed again to hear herself say it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
* * *
Sunday, 16 April 3324, 6:40 p.m.
The sun had sunk below the row of jacaranda trees that marked the River, taking its life-giving heat with it. Soon it would be night. Merit shivered and pulled the collar of her jacket close around her throat.
It was a cruel-enough twist of fate, that she, ready to die and leave this war-scarred Earth, had been yanked back from the door to eternity and made to act out a shadow existence in mockery of the bright life she had once led. But this—the discovery that the despised agent of that unwanted reprieve was the living, breathing incarnation of the friend and lover she had idealized and yearned for through the darkest of days—this was fate gone mad.
Each sight of him these past two days had galled her soul—a reminder of the joy she could no longer feel. No matter what Gabriel Castor had said, the part of her that had once had hope was dead, murdered the day she had turned her back on the comrades who had predeceased it and agreed to help the Rasakans. She had been right to refuse to let the world in; to feel—even if she could—or to trust. She had known full well that to do so would only open her up to another round of unbearable pain and loss. The risk was too great for the coward she had watched herself become.
So she had tried to keep him out, the way she kept everyone out: any way she could. Saints, what choice did she have? She was only half alive. But he had found a way in, the way the knife finds its way through skin and sinew and nerve to pierce the heart. Only it was not her heart, for she had none, but her soul that, thus pierced, now spasmed and bled.
In the past year, she had spent many a fretful hour consumed with an angry desire to find out who it had been—imagining what she would say to him, do to him, if she ever met him—that man who had told Authority little Sparrow’s real name. She had lived with her rage and hatred, nurturing it in preparation for the day it would be most needed; hungered for the satisfaction she would feel when she could release it. And now that she knew? There was no satisfaction. No release. Only the clamor of demons, whose hysterical laughter rained upon her mind like poisoned darts.
She looked up, and was surprised to observe familiar landmarks: a building with one side blown out, a crater with a pool of black water at its bottom, a mound of refuse. So. Though her mind had been elsewhere, her feet had carried her along familiar pathways.
The JCP barracks were surrounded by upturned cement and the dross of human habitation—flattened cans, sodden bits of cardboard, rotten clothing. Such as these had replaced the ornamental trees, the rustic benches, and the flower beds she remembered so well. The barracks themselves weren’t in much better shape. The north wing was a mound of rubble, home to rats and memories; the south wing still stood, its brick walls blackened with smoke, its glassless windows staring like empty eye sockets. All the world was gray, and soon it would be black, if she were forced to perform the ultimate humiliation: to flex in the name of Rasaka.
As she stood before the barracks, the nausea began—a mental nausea, rooted in revulsion and panic. She had nothing left to fight it; she simply could not face being alone in the dark. Anything but that—even if it meant admitting to others as well as to herself that the once-proud Resistance fighter was afraid of the phantom despair that haunted her nights. Afraid of the dark.
That was one decision made; one reality faced. But where in this barren world could she go whe
re she might expect some welcome, some understanding of her fate? Thad? He was just a man, neither better nor worse than many others she had known. If he’d been available, she might have—no, would have—debased herself by begging him to take her in. Even his rejection would at least have taken up some time. But he was at the Priory, obediently guarding the pacifist traitors to his state at the behest of the massacring conquerors.
There was always a bar, an easy pickup—anybody would do. Or would any body do, now that her secret hope of being reunited with Eric had been exposed for the impossibility it had always been? She sobbed a little at the loss of the dream that had kept her emptiness from being wholly complete, then hated herself for being such a fool.
There had to be somewhere.
The wind howled through the empty buildings, scattering bits of paper and plastic. Iron-gray clouds rolled in overhead.
If only she could go back in time, to when she was a child. If only she had never been chosen to be a Prospective. She could have stayed with her family, enjoyed her father’s last years. Family. They had no idea what she had done for them—she would never have burdened them with that knowledge. She had only seen them twice since her release. But that was nothing new. She hadn’t gone home much after her father’s death. She’d been too busy. At least that’s what she’d told herself. But perhaps it was not too late to undo the past and find some small portion of the comfort she so desperately needed.
She turned her weary steps to the south, walking slowly toward the sprawling slum that had grown up on the edge of the greatest ruin, and was swallowed up by the darkness.
“People will say you broke your parole,” said Maman. Her cracked hands were white with flour, the skin of her arms brown and sagging. She thumped the dough onto the table. “Why else would you want to stay here when you’ve got your own posh billet, paid for up front by the JCP? You don’t understand what our life is like these days. It’s suspicion and lies and accusations. Oh, people smile when they see your face but it’s all sneer and jeer the second you show ’em your back. There isn’t a day I don’t go to the market but I hear ’em whispering and staring, and I know what they’re thinking: how come we survived? How come we made it through, when so many families who never lifted so much as a finger against the Rasakans are dead?”
Merit stared at the teacup in front of her. Its shiny surface was decorated with kittens and ducklings, playing with one another in fantastical harmony.
“Everybody says it’s punk,” said Adele, without raising her eyes from her waterlogged schoolbook. “Everybody wonders how come you didn’t get hanged with the rest of the Last like you were s’pose to. Everybody thinks it’s because you sold out your friends for filthy lucre. They say that makes you a collaborator. So nobody wants to be friends with me.”
Merit raised her head. Her half sister was blossoming into young womanhood. Silky brown hair framed her heart-shaped face; her eyes were blue and her lips red, like in a fairy tale.
Maman slammed the dough onto the table. “I should never a let those Conservatory people take you. Nine years old! I told your father, but he was ‘Oh no, this is what she was born for!’ They promised me. ‘Your daughter is special—just the right size, with just the right metrics,’ whatever that means, ‘and so wonderful bright. We’ll treat her well,’ they said. ‘And you’ll never want for a thing, nor you nor your family. You’ll live off the cream of the land and everyone will look up to you because your daughter will be selected. Your daughter will serve the state.’ Well, what I want to know is, where are those promises now? ’Cause I ain’t seen any cream for some odd years, not to mention the cow, because they were all et up by the third year of the war. Nothing but blood running in the streets. If you were a teacher or a cook, the neighbors wouldn’t look at me now like they do.”
Adele’s ruby lips pouted. “If they’d come for me I wouldn’t a gone. I’d a run away. Stupid Conservatory.”
Merit’s throat was uncomfortably dry. She reached for the teacup—and stopped. Had one of the kittens raised a paw, or was it just the flickering light from the oil lamp? She picked up her teaspoon and pushed at the handle, turning the cup around.
“No one knows what I’ve gone through,” continued Maman. “From the first day, people looked at me with nothing but jealousy, because their daughters were too big, or had bad metrics, or they had nothing but sons, or because they didn’t have a nice home with a big auto. At least they had their daughters around to watch grow up! Not that I ever saw you to speak of after your father died—you two thick as thieves—with you turning your back on me just because I didn’t want to live alone, not that Adele’s dad didn’t turn out to be a drunk and a bully. And these days, it’s all suspicion. People wonder where I’m hiding my riches. They don’t believe I got nothing. I can’t convince ’em. They know you work for the JCP, when hardly anybody’s got a job. They know who you are, and they think you must be well off.”
“Nobody talks to me,” said Adele. “Because everybody knows my sister went to be a guerilla insurgent after the treaty was signed and everybody else laid down their arms. If anybody has a guerilla insurgent in her family, nobody talks to her, or plays with her. If you had quit fighting when you were s’posed to, the war woulda been over a lot sooner, and everybody’d be a lot better off.”
Merit put a hand to her forehead. It was burning hot. “Which is it, Adele? Am I a collaborator or an insurgent?”
“Both. Everybody hates you! That’s why everybody hates me!”
“The boys will always like you, sister, as long as you show them a good time.”
Adele shrieked in anger, then burst into tears.
The dough slammed onto the table. “You don’t need to be cruel, Merit. She only repeats what she hears at that miserable cesspool they call a school. You needn’t think I raised her to be a flirt. How am I supposed to bring her up when I can’t lay my hand on a centime for pretty things and the shoes on her feet tied on with twine?”
Merit avoided her mother’s look. “I gave you extra this month, Maman.”
“A few dollars, gone before I had the time to fold ’em in two. Shut up, Adele. The price of flour went up again, and how would we survive without what the bread brings in with those thieves at social services skimming away the best of everything we have? Adele needs a new book for school, which doesn’t mention that the school is four walls and no roof, so don’t come if it rains, books or no. You don’t understand that, working in your fancy office in the JCP. No wonder you never come to visit us. Somehow—now I’m not saying I know how, nor I’m not saying I want to know—but somehow you made it through the war just fine, even though everybody knows you were one of the Last. Yet nothing happens to you, and you pop up when it’s all over like a duck in a bucket of water—though I hadn’t heard a quack from you for years to ask if we were dead or alive—none the worse for it, back at your old job. Nobody believes you ain’t gettin’ paid a pile by the JCP, so I don’t try to tell ’em.”
Merit rose slowly and pulled out her billfold. She tossed it onto the table. She dug her hand into her front pocket and pulled out a handful of coins. They bounced across the tabletop and onto the floor.
Maman wiped her hands on her apron. “Don’t you go throwing your money at me, missy. I gave birth to you and all your perfect metrics. I kept you warm at night, and I fed you when no one else could or would. If you can’t show some respect to your own maman, you might think twice next time you decide to stop by unannounced looking for a free meal and a bed, riling up the neighbors with their suspicions.”
“I’m sorry,” said Merit. She walked to the door as if she were walking off a cliff.
“Don’t you show your back to me!” cried Maman. She followed Merit to the threshold and stood in the open door. “Merit? Where do you think you’re going?”
But Merit did not answer. Instead began to run. She ran for a long time, on and on, till she tripped on something in the street and fell face forward.
Rolling over, she lay on her back, catching her breath, then she just lay there, staring at the dark sky. Evening passersby treated her to nervous glances, but no one stopped to see what was wrong or if she needed help. She didn’t blame them. She was just one of thousands of addicts and locos roaming the slums of Oku City these days, lost and alone.
Her mother thought she didn’t do enough for her. More irony. Didn’t think she showed respect. Respect, expect, suspect, select, prospect, retrospect.
Retrospect. Most of the time during these past two days she had simply pushed the issue aside and gone through the motions. She had become quite good at that in the two months since her release—wandering through her days, accomplishing the minimum amount of work required of her, just doing what she was told without thinking about it, rejecting the possibility that this day might ever really come. But against all odds, come it had. In something over fifteen hours she was expected to climb into the Vessel and flex at the bidding of the people who had destroyed her world. Now, as the clock ticked inexorably toward the appointed time, she had no choice left but to choose.
If she refused, it would discomfit the Rasakans for a day or two, but it would devastate her crew and endanger her family—Gabriel Castor had made it perfectly clear that there would be consequences. And it would leave Thad on a knife edge. Moreover, according to Marshall Frey, it would deal a killing blow to the JCP’s ability to keep Authority in check.