2. The Man Who Would Be King
"Of course it's Edward Ferris," Marianne said. She had recognized him immediately, had in fact anticipated this, and she was even happier now to have a gun leveled at him. No surprise that bitch Fanny was handing them over to her brother to be killed. There was surely a ruthless little band of Undergrounds waiting outside. Well, Marianne had a gun. At least she could take Edward Ferris down with them.
"Woa, hold on," he said, holding both hands up, the universal signal for I'm unarmed. "I was really hoping this wouldn't get quite so violent quite so quickly."
"So, what? You come in peace?" Elle asked, from where she was standing beside Marianne, arms crossed skeptically. At least, Marianne thought, Elle was backing her up, presenting a united front, for once in her life.
Edward Ferris's eyes flickered to Elle, and, as if judging her the most reasonable person in the room (probably true, Marianne had to admit) he addressed his appeal to her. "To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure, but none of us will ever get to figure that out if your sister shots me now. And frankly, I'm about the only person on this planet who might be able to help you."
He had a point.
"He has a point," Elle said.
But Marianne still kind of wanted to shoot him. She still held the gun, calm and steady, aimed at that sweet spot in the middle of his chest.
"Stop being such a bitch, Mari," Margaret oh-so-helpfully chimed in. "You can't shoot Edward Ferris, like, the only person on the entire planet of Crash who's done anything good for it in the past fifty years."
"By which you mean murdering our father," Marianne hotly replied. Honestly. She was a little bit tempted to turn the gun on her younger sister. It was getting really exhausting living in a cellar with that girl's attitude. And her unfortunate make-up and hair choices.
"Technically, it wasn't me who shot him," Edward interjected.
"Really?" Marianne asked, not yet lowering the gun. "You're going to get all technically at me right now?"
"Marianne," Elle said, with that hint of reprimand Marianne was too used to hearing. Then Elle turned back to Ferris and volleyed a few important questions at him. "Are we really supposed to believe you came here alone? Unarmed? The great, brilliant Edward Ferris?" she asked.
But Edward's attention was back on the girl who was holding him up. "Does Fanny know you have that?" he asked Marianne, which seemed hardly the most important question he could be asking, under the circumstances.
"We find it isn't necessary for Fanny to know everything," Elle said, in a tone that could possibly be described as cute. What was going on here? And then Edward Ferris laughed, actually laughed, with a gun pointed at him and everything. He seemed pretty cocksure he was going to make it out of this alive.
His demeanor changed again, as quickly as he had laughed. He looked at them all in turn and said with so much sincerity, "I really am here alone, and I don't have a gun."
It was impossible not to believe him, almost impossible not to like him, when he turned himself on like that. Marianne had thought it before when she'd seen him one TV, how easy it was to see why the planet was ready to follow Edward Ferris anywhere he led them. He was young—barely older than Elle, if he was older than Elle—and yet he had conceived and led a revolution on a hopeless planet with the mere force of his idealism.
She lowered the gun.
He visibly relaxed. "We have to move you," he said. "You can't stay here."
For Edward Ferris, it had been a strange ten minutes. When he'd first seen Marianne brandishing that gun at him, he'd had the fleeting thought that this was an assassination and Fanny had deliberately locked him down here to die. You couldn't put anything past Fanny. Her number one instinct was self-preservation.
But he quickly realized it was much more likely that the Dashwood daughters had staged this one on their own. Somehow they had known he was coming. So at first it had been about trying not to get shot dead by the lunatic sister, Marianne. But over the course of the conversation something shifted and he was on their side. He wanted more than to not get shot; he wanted to help them. Because he doubted they really wanted to take back Crash in their father's honor, and he just liked them. Especially the tall one, who was so pragmatic and quite funny, in an unintentionally searing way.
So at the end of ten minutes, when Marianne finally lowered the gun, he found himself throwing his lot in with theirs. He said, "We have to move you. You can't stay here."
"Where? To prison?" Marianne asked, but at least she'd put the safety on.
It seemed like the tall one—Elle, that was her name—was his best chance for reason, and so he addressed himself to her again. "Fanny doesn't want you here, and that means you aren't safe. Trust me, she'll go over my head if she has to."
"Who's over your head?" Elle mused.
Not many people, he had to admit. The throne was more or less his if he wanted it. He knew that. But he didn't want it. He wanted something better for his planet; that had been the point of all this. But then there was Lucy Steele. Did she want the something better or did she want the thrown?
"And what a lovely sister you have," Elle added.
"You should meet my brother," he ruefully replied.
Marianne gave an exasperated little sigh, which prompted Elle to ask him the real question: "Why do you want to help us?"
"I'm not sure I can explain. I just know that I do," he said. "I mean, you don't actually want the planet, do you? You're not going to plan a coup?"
"I might," Marianne offered, and the youngest one sent her this death glare. Marianne rolled her eyes. "It's a joke, Marg. Take a joke." Then Marianne turned to Elle and said, "Well, oddly enough I believe him. And I'm apparently the hard sell here."
Elle turned to him. "We don't have anywhere else to go," she admitted. "As you may be aware, we're very unpopular at the moment. We've sort of run out of options."
"I'll figure it out," he said. "One thing I do know is where to hide things in this city."
"Oh," Elle said, smiling. "I reckon you know a lot more than that."
He was going to have to watch himself around her. This had the potential to turn into a serious case of wanting what you could never, ever have.
He had left them, gone back up the cellar stairs and out to "handle Fanny," as he had said he would. Elle could feel Marianne looking at her, with an expression akin to bewilderment.
"You flirted with him," Marianne said.
Had she? Elle wasn't entirely clear on that point.
"You tried to kill him," Margaret accused Marianne.
Marianne shrugged. "Only when I thought he might kill me."
"I'm just saying, that's worse," Margaret replied. She pulled her hood up on her head, plugged her headphones in and walked away from them, sitting down in her usual spot, no longer interested in the conversation. What were they going to do with that girl? Elle was still really hoping it was just a phase of adolescence.
"You did flirt with him, though," Marianne said.
"Well at least I got him to like us," Elle replied. "You with the gun weren't much help."
Marianne grinned. "At least you got him to like you."
Elle sighed. "Mari, I think we can safely assume that Edward Ferris has more on his mind than that."
"He's a boy. What else do they think about?"
But in the case of Edward Ferris, there were plenty of other things. She believed that he wanted to help them, but she didn't necessarily believe that he would make good on his promise. He would find it too risky, too impossible, or he would simply find that he had too many other things to do now—defeating the lingering Dashwood loyalists, establishing a government, pulling the Crash out of the dismal straights it was in. He had other promises to make good on, promises to an entire planet, not just to three lost girls.
"I very much doubt he'll be back," Elle said, shaking her head. "We still need to think about getting off planet."
"You're probably right," Marianne sighed. "Fanny will just up and kill us herself soon." Oddly enough, the episode with Edward Ferris had calmed Marianne down. She had mellowed since that morning, when they'd learned of their father's death. The hysterics were over. "But I think he'll come back," she added. "Is Edward Ferris not the soul of integrity?"
"Make a bet?" Elle suggested.
Marianne laughed. "Right. And which of my illustrious possessions would you like me to wager?" She gestured grandly around the cellar. They had with them little more than a few changes of clothing, Marianne's gun, and Margaret music player. So they did not make a bet. But if they had, Elle would've lost.
He was back the next day, and he came with a plan. Half-baked, but a plan.
"I know where to take you, I just don't know how to get you there," he admitted. "It's so risky. You're too damn recognizable. Especially Marianne."
"I'm recognizable? Elle's the giant," Marianne retorted, as if recognizable was somehow an insult.
"I just meant with the hair and….everything," he finished, gesturing vaguely at Marianne. But Elle knew what everything meant and felt a weird twinge of jealousy. Which was really a stupid feeling to have about Edward Ferris. He continued, "I mean, clearly Margaret is the one with the brains. She's the only one of you who knows how to be covert."
Elle knew, immediately, what he was doing: trying to bring Margaret on board. She was sitting in her usual spot against the wall, headphones on. But as Elle so often suspected was the case, she was listening. She slid the headphones down to her neck and looked at Edward.
He said to her, "Obviously, your sisters could learn a thing or two from you."
"I know, right?" Margaret said. And she didn't quite smile, but it was the closest Elle had seen to a smile since they'd been in the cellar. Maybe since long before that.
"Alright then. You two run along and play," he said, waving dismissively at Marianne and Elle. "Margaret and I will come up with the plan, since she's the expert." He crossed the room and sat down with Margaret, then seemed to actually engage in a serious conversation with her on how best to get them from the cellar to wherever they were going.
Even Marianne was impressed. "Well, I have to say, Margaret likes him. And Marg doesn't like anyone."
"And to think you almost shot him."
Marianne made an incredulous face. "Oh come on. That was nowhere near almost. Besides, I never almost shoot someone. I shoot them, or I don't."
It was true that Marianne was a decent marksman, although Elle was the real clutch shot. They'd grown up on Crash, after all, daughters of a much hated czar. They all had their survival skills. Marianne had made herself into something of a mechanical savant. She could fly, drive, or fix nearly anything. You didn't expect it, looking at her, and it didn't do them much good in Fanny's cellar. But it had come in handy in the past.
After a prolonged discussion that excluded them, Marianne and Elle were invited back into Edward and Margaret's conversation. "Margaret thinks it best, and I agree with her, that I'm not along when you move to the new safe house."
"The chances of being recognized are pretty much double if he's with us," Margaret added, without a hint of surliness. Edward Ferris was apparently a great miracle worker.
"When?" Elle asked.
"Tonight," he said.
They'd hastily arranged a senate, he and Lucy Steele, who he'd had to reluctantly accept as an equal partner in this venture—setting up a new government on Crash. It frustrated him that he was suddenly yoked with Lucy, after all of his years leading the revolution. He didn't trust her. But she'd come out of the woodwork at precisely the right time and fired precisely the right bullet. The public loved her, and he couldn't get rid of her easily.
Their first meeting was that night. It should have been his crowning moment, but it wasn't. He felt distracted. He kept thinking about the Dashwood daughters, who were probably right at that moment making their fraught journey across town to his safe house. He had given them a key and as clear directions as he could, a map drawn on the back of a napkin from Fanny's kitchen.
It turned out to be a blessing, having Lucy Steele in the room with him. He looked at her and the thought came into his head, I can't let her take this over from me. And so he pulled himself together, put the Dashwoods out of his mind, and bore himself considerably better through the second half of the senate. Afterwards, he left quickly.
When he reached the house, it was dark, and he felt an ominous sense of foreboding that they had not made it. But he realized if they had, they surely would've been smart enough to keep the lights off until he got there. Of course, there was only one way to find out.
He turned the lock and opened the door, immediately shutting it behind him and locking it again. Someone other than him turned a table lamp on. It was Elle; they were saf. In the dim light the lamp had made, he saw her tall, lithe frame sitting in one of his chairs. She put one finger to her lips. Marianne and Margaret were both asleep, Marianne on the couch and Margaret on the floor beside it.
They spoke quietly. "What is this place?" She asked. "It's not a safe house. It's just a house, in the middle of the city."
"This is where I live," he admitted.
Her eyes widened. They looked almost black. "This is a terrible idea," she said.
He was delighted now that he knew they'd made it. The weight that had been wearing him down—Lucy Steele and the senate and all of the problems of Crash that he would be expected to, but possibly could not, fix—was lifted. And he grinned. "It's a fantastic idea. And you haven't seen the best part. Come on."
He took her hand—it seemed the most natural thing—and led her through the kitchen. He showed her how the pantry shelves could be pulled forward and that they concealed a door. She followed him through it, and down the stairs.
"Another cellar?" she asked, with humor in her black eyes.
He smiled. "Just wanted to make sure you felt at home."
It wasn't a cellar. It was the safe house part of the house. A bedroom, bathroom, and even a satellite screen. "Who else knows about this place?" she asked, after he had shown her the whole space.
He shrugged. "A few people. We used it to hide political prisoners, or make satellite calls back when we thought we might be able to get some off planet support for the revolution. Haven't really used it in years, though. Most of those who knew about it wouldn't think twice about it now."
She sighed and pushed her short hair back from her face with one hand, and it seemed suddenly odd to him that Marianne was always described as the pretty one. Whoever said that, they hadn't been this close to Elle.
"I don't know. It seems risky. For you, I mean." Elle paused and turned, facing him directly. "I understand what you're trying to do here on Crash, that you're trying to make a better world. And I just think… well, if anyone catches you aiding and abetting the Dashwood fugitives, that's going to undermine everything you've ever worked for."
"But what makes it perfect: no one will ever look for you here," he insisted.
"Alright," she agreed resignedly. "I'll accept it as a temporary solution. Come on, we'd better wake the troops and introduce them to their new living quarters."
As they made their way back up the stairs, she added, "You know, it's impossible to disagree with you for long. You're so damn earnest."
He laughed. "That is what I'm famous for. Earnestness and naiveté"
And maybe it was naïve, but he felt like everything was going to be okay. Better than okay. It would all work out marvelously in the end. He would save the Dashwood daughters. He would change the planet's mind about them. It was, after all, a new era for Crash. These were the days when anything was possible.
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