Chapter 37: Off Somewhere Else, Asleep

Don't leave me, even for an hour, because then the little drops of anguish will all run together,
the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift into me, choking my lost heart.

– Pablo Neruda

Marjorie didn't get much sleep these days. She couldn't remember the last time she had slept the whole night through. She tended to treasure what few hours she could manage, often resting her head on stacks of documents in some provincial intelligence office or on bags of rice in the back of a munitions truck or lying on piles of clothes in the back of whatever refugee camp Thiago decided they should operate from for the duration of that particular week. They were moving north now, north and west, towards Angeles – that much was becoming clear now, although they were taking a considerably meandering path in that direction. She woke when she was woken; she slept when she was permitted, and that was rare indeed.

For the most part, however, she had too much work on her hands to even think about sleeping, and moreso now that Thiago was faltering. He would never have admitted it to her – to anyone else, mind – but he was faltering. He was still awake when she fell asleep and awake when she woke up, but he was weakening, faltering, failing. He was ill, she thought, and felt brave enough to say a few times. He should rest. He had her for a reason – to split the workload. And now, he seemed to have accepted that fact; the young spies who arrived to feed him information had learned by now that they had to go through the formidable Marjorie Vermudez before there was any chance of their knowledge reaching the ears of the spymaster. Every moment was filled with meetings and messages and memos, but now it was Marjorie sitting in the chair by the door with a pen in her hands, writing nothing, saying nothing, but hearing all, seeing all.

In the evenings, when she retired to his bedside to relay the events of the day and ask him for next steps, he might try to give her some direction and instruct her not to overwork herself. She would respond as he always had in those first days that she had worked for him: "Santhiago, descansaré cuando esté muerto. I'll rest when I'm dead."

She might not have written anything during those meetings, but she had stacked notebooks on top of notebooks, filling up her own trove of encrypted notes with information about the Wastelands and the Kingdom alike. They were no longer living like hunted things, Marjorie mused; they were moving with a purpose, and she found herself writing with a feverish purpose as well. They were moving towards the palace; she was starting to think that she would never learn the secret this kingdom was founded on.

She had tested a few candidates on Thiago, during the evenings when he was paler and less able to listen to the precise details of troop movements, propaganda efforts, the poisoning of the false prince. She would see the expression on his face, the pain hidden in the line of his jaw and the lines around his eyes, and she would relent from his duty; he would not have forgiven her if he had known, but it was Marjorie's duty now to make sure that he never knew. Instead, she would cross her ankle over her knee and murmured, "he's dead, isn't he? Demetri Dunin."

"Do you know something I don't, Jori?"

She would slash a line through the page balanced on her lap. "He's in disguise as a girl."

Thiago would always eye her suspiciously; the whites of his eyes were bloodshot, stained red like an ugly sunrise. "You're better than this."

"You," Marjorie said, "are Demetri in disguise."

"I'd be paid much better if that was the case."

"I'm Demetri in disguise." The whole world around them was asleep while they worked, Marjorie staining her hands with ink. She was allowed a little bit of humour, wasn't she? She had earned that much. The world slept around them, but she was here and she was working and she had earned the right to make a dumb joke here or there, even if Thiago rolled his eyes as she did so.

"Not as far as I'm aware."

"Demetri," she said, archly, "is in disguise. Demetri is not Demetri."

For the first time, then, he had smiled. She thought that he might have laughed, if he wasn't dying. They had been sitting in the flatbed of a truck advancing across one of the borders – she had lost track of which – and they had bounced over some defect in the road with a sudden violence which had nearly knocked Marjorie's head right against the metal wall of the structure.

"Does that mean I'm right?"

"Hazlo mejor, habla menos." He spoke more Spanish now, when he was ill, when he was hurting. It seemed more natural, easier. He was a nicer man than he ever was in English. "Do better, talk less, Jori."

Do better. Talk less.

Marjorie kept a close eye on Thiago, and she wondered.

There had been a cup of tea sitting on the counter in the kitchen when Demetri returned to the chalet that evening. It was relatively freshly brewed; steam still wafted gently from its glossy surface. In a space of such pristine stillness, it was a piece utterly out of place. It was somehow alive, in a space that was otherwise so totally frozen. When he put his hand to the ceramic, he found that it was warm; and Demetri was grateful for it, because the night had grown cold so gradually that he had been most of the way back to the château before he had realised that he hadn't brought a jacket with him. He thought it likely that Nyguzi Tewedaji would welcome him into her bed if he turned back towards the mansa's palace – sure to be warm, the both of them – and he thought it even likelier that a younger man, or a man less inclined towards dourness might have been tempted by the offer. Demetri wasn't that old, but he felt ancient this night; he felt as though he had not slept in many years. How long had it been since he had lain next to Yue, and dreamed of home?

The nights were lighter here than they had been in the wastes of Illéa; the sky had an odd velvety texture into which the stars were deeply studded, in sharp contrast to the utter void that had been the empyrean in the Wastelands. Strange that he would feel lonelier here, where the last vestiges of light clung stubbornly to the dusk, than he ever had in the utter darkness of the heath. There, at least, there had always been someone.

And here…

Well, the General was dead. And he hadn't really had Uzohola since her brother had turned. Wick had been left behind in the ashes of the Kingdom in Exile. Thiago was adrift in Illéa, dying slowly. And Vardi Tayna was feigning death, as was her wont.

He couldn't allow himself to believe otherwise. But what was the alternative? She wasn't dead; she couldn't be. Maybe she had cut and run, as they had always feared she might. Demetri had never believed she would – she was not so cruel or so capricious as she would have liked the others to believe, not when she wore her weakness on her sleeve as she always did. No matter how long it took her to bounce back into the Inner Circle, she always did. She had sworn to protect her king; she had put him in danger often enough, Demetri thought it was only fair that she reappear to rein him back from actual devastation.

There was a time he would have said he could trust any one of the Inner Circle to do the same for him. Could he say that now? He thought not. He suspected not. He feared not. Was this what it felt like to be adrift? He didn't like it. He didn't think that he ever would. But it was late at night, and he was tired, and he was cold, and so he reached for the cup.

"That's my tea."

Demetri almost jumped. Almost. He had missed Täj coming into the room behind him; that was most unlike Demetri, on whom Täj very rarely – if ever – got the drop. But somehow the pale man had entered the room, ghost-like, behind him, and Demetri found himself lifting up the cup and raising an eyebrow and saying, "is it?" even as he drew a sip and offered his friend a slight smile. "You shouldn't have left it lying around, then."

Täj tapped his cigarette against the lip of the counter next to which he stood. "You're back late." There was always something slightly frozen about Täj that the Wasteland never could thaw, but moments like these Demetri always thought he understood why the rebels called him the pale dog, when they thought he wasn't listening. For a moment, only his eyes seemed alive. "Any news?"

"We've been blamed." Surprising no-one, of course.

His old friend's voice was soft and yet there was no softness in it. "That's not what I meant."

"No," Demetri said, "there hasn't been any news." He paused, and set the tea back down upon the stove. Täj was a dear friend, and the only kind of brother he had ever known, but even Demetri knew that he had one crippling blind spot. "I didn't expect you to still be here."

"Your Selected girls," Täj replied coldly. "They have a way of crawling into your skull."

Oh, he knew.

"I'm glad. I don't know what I –"

Täj interrupted him brusquely. He was speaking clippedly; it was the same way that he had spoken the first time that Demetri had seen him again, after they had been reunited in the Wastelands, after their new names had settled upon them. "Are they right? To blame us?"

"No," Demetri said. The answer sounded like it had been ripped from him; it was automatic, and it was awful. "No."

"Wesick didn't get to him? You didn't give the order? Yeni wouldn't have…?"

"We're fighting battles on the ground," Demetri responded softly. He thought of Raphael and Uzokuwa and Wick. "You think I'd be throwing all my men under the wheels of war if a vial of poison was a viable alternative?"

"I think you'd do anything if it meant you didn't have to anymore."

He was right. Demetri could not argue against that. It wasn't that he wouldn't have tried to assassinate Mordred – he just never could. They'd never been able to get close enough. Obelisk would never have allowed them. Täj could never have been allowed to find out. Vardi Tayna… Vardi Tayna wouldn't have made it out alive afterwards.

Sometimes Demetri was glad that he was never going to be given the chance to see what choice he would make in such a situation. He thought of the first words he had shared with the smaller girl, the first time that he had seen her, after the death of the General: he was probably glad to get away from all of this. Demetri thought that he could understand a little better why the General had always seemed so dogged with tiredness, so stooped with age. A kingdom was a heavy weight on one's shoulders; futures could not be spent carelessly.

"Even if that's true," Demetri said, slowly, cautiously. "I give you my word that we had nothing to do with what happened to Mordred."

He eased himself into a chair beside the kitchen table; Täj remained standing in the threshold, watching his king as he so frequently watched the men intended for hanging. It was in the sharpness of his eyes, Demetri thought, like he was mentally measuring the other man for a noose. The General had put Täj to such a task as a teenager; Demetri had never questioned the rationale. Because he had done the work for Gildas in another life? Or because he had to prove his worth, his devotion, to the cause of the Kingdom?

His eyes were shrouded in gloom; Demetri could not see their colour, though he knew them to be pale green like verdisgris – pale, like all the colour had been drained – pale. They hadn't managed to get that right. They had got so much wrong.

After a long moment of silence had been permitted to pass, Demetri found the words that had been hanging on the tip of his tongue for some hours now. "I'm closing the Selection sooner rather than later. If you have something to say to –"

"Closing it."

Demetri's voice was flat. "Choosing."

Täj stared at him; Demetri didn't have to look at him to tell that he would be wearing an expression of subtle incredulity. Shock, as only the pale man knew how to wear it. Maybe his eyes would be a fraction wider; maybe he would have inclined one eyebrow. It was as close as he ever came to a heart attack.

"I think you know what my decision will be."

"Your decision?"

Demetri almost flinched. He might have deserved that, but what could he say? I don't love her, but I could; once upon a time, I might have loved her – if I never loved her, then nevertheless she seemed loveable to me. I never loved her but I almost did. He remembered at the start thinking that he could just pick Tayna at the end of this all, if he failed to find a wife; he remembered, at the safehouse, thinking that he could have just chosen Nina and moved on with the rest of the war, heedless of the rest; he remembered, for a brief moment during their flight from Layeni, looking at Liara and wondering what if. How quickly everything had changed. "The Selection must end," he said. "I won't love any of them like this, in these conditions… but the kingdom deserves a queen."

"As it deserved a king."

Demetri didn't intend for his voice to sound as sad as it did. "Past tense, Täj?"

His oldest friend said nothing; Demetri ran his finger along the edge of the cup and mused, softly, whether the girls would be disappointed to hear of the choice to which he had, at this point, resigned himself. Maybe they had realised this long before he ever had. Eden, he thought, Eden and Elizabeth, Elizabeth and Liara, Liara and Yue.

He said, finally, "our troops have broken into Angeles, Täj, and the bastard king is on his deathbed. This could be it. We might be going home."

"Home," Täj said. He echoed it, his voice bitter. "That's not the word I would have used."

"It is home," Demetri said. He touched his pocket, where he kept the letter smuggled to him earlier that evening. It could make or break his kingdom, he thought; it could bring it all crashing down if he took a single false step. "It will be home. It has to be."