Chapter 27: Strangely, There's Nobody
And when you go away, I still see you -
The sunlight on your face in my rear view.
- Greg Gonzalez
Taichi Yukimura had been fond of his proverbs, chanted through gritted teeth like a focusing mantra as though words alone could whet one's focus and sharpen one's resolve, particularly words repeated over and again. They had made for a rather unfriendly companion and a rather unpleasant childhood – though that probably had more to do with the chill in Taichi's voice as he said them, rather than the words themselves. At this point, it had been some four months since Yue had seen her mother's face or heard her father's voice, but the proverbs still came to her mind, rather unbidden, for each new trouble that arose in these new troublesome times.
Right now, as she watched Illéa vanish behind them, the wide tawny spaces of the Wastelands replaced by the vast sparkling expanse of the blue deep, the words that occurred to her were ame futte ji katamaru.
After the rain, the earth hardens.
She could trace it out on the window in slashes of hard lines and broad swoops of curlicues – 雨降って地固まる – but the shapes ran and blurred even as she scratched them out. Her hands were still shaking. She could still almost feel the weight of the gun in her hand. It had been so much heavier than she had expected it to be. But more than that… the knowledge that the twitch of a finger could have ended a life.
雨. Rain. Like dashes of water on a windowpane. She traced it again.
Vardi Tayna had said once that you never forgot your first kill. There was little more visceral than seeing the life drain from a person's eyes, to see them transform in a second from a human being with a live and a mind and a soul to a piece of meat in your arms. Butchering animals couldn't compare, she said. There wasn't the same totality of loss. Your first kill reminded you of how fragile you were.
Your first kill.
Was this what the rebellion was? Could you call this a noble cause? Could Yue?
"Yue."
Yue turned her eyes upwards, and found herself smiling automatically, a stretch of lips and squinting of eyes that seemed more instinctive than genuine. Atiena Morris was, to the surprise of the rest of the Selected, in a similar state of dishevelement and shock at what had occurred below in the village, but unlike the others, that surprise had faded rapidly and been replaced by a workmanlike stoicism and straight-forwardness, her mouth maintained in a tight line, her eyes without warmth – or rather, eye, for her right eye was utterly black and filled with blood. Nothing more than burst blood vessels, Liz had said, maybe a concussion, but the effect was stark and startling.
"You doing okay, kid?"
Kid, Yue thought. Atiena was a year older than her. Just a year. A lot could happen in a year. So much could happen in a year.
"You look a little pale."
"I'm fine," Yue said automatically. And she was. Raphael had got her to Wick, and Wick had got her out. No injury. Not even a scrape. And Raphael…. and Rëz…. and Kün? Vardi Tayna? Wick himself, and Saran as well? She was fine, by comparison. She couldn't complain. Not to Atiena, with her bleeding eye, or Liara, with the open wound on her cheekbone, or Liz, who had arrived with her hands covered in blood. Not her own, she had said, and Yue could not understand how she could have said that so very calmly. Farm life, maybe. A lifetime of making meat. "I'm fine."
Atiena crouched. "It's okay if you're not."
"I am. It's fine." Another automatic smile. "Don't worry about me, Atiena. Are you okay?"
She shrugged, but there was something darker in her eyes. "As okay as I can be." She paused. "We got fucked out there, Yue, but… we're fine. We're gonna be good. This is just a setback. Trust me."
Just a setback? Raphael dead and Layeni burning and Uzokuwa a traitor, and who knows else a traitor as well, and all of those people missing and left behind, maybe for good, and this small desperate group fleeing their kingdom, fleeing across the sea. Just a setback? Yue's eyes flicked about the tiny cabin – Liara. Eden. Liz. Täj. Uzohola. That was it. That was all that was left to them. Just a setback?
"I trust you," Yue said, and then, as Atiena prepared to straighten up – "Atiena?"
"Yeah?"
"I..." Her mouth had gone dry. She focused on her hands, tracing out on her fingertips the tiny familiar shapes of her mother's proverbs in the hopes that it would steady her heart – 井の中の蛙大海を知らず. Over and again, she made the shapes, as her tongue uncertainly found the sounds. "Earlier today… Rafa wanted me to keep a gun on someone."
大. It meant large, but Yue had always thought of it as a somewhat protective symbol. Like a father with his arms stretched wide.
Atiena cocked her head, but said nothing, clearly understanding that Yue was finding her way, rather uncertainly, through the necessary words.
"And it scared me. It was… real. And awful. It scared me."
"Yue..."
"I don't want to be scared anymore, Atiena."
Yue thought, i no naka no kawazu taiki o shirazu. A frog kept in a well does not know the great sea. The world is so much larger and deeper than she had ever been allowed to glimpse. Even in this Selection, what had she seen? A safehouse that was now dust, a village that was now ash, and from place to place, she had hidden behind others, been pushed here and there.
She had looked back, and Rafa had been blood.
Atiena said, softly, "you are not a soldier, Yue." Her words were without malice, softer than Yue had known the rebel from Tammins was capable of speaking, but there was a profundity lurking beneath, as though she had seen girls follow this path before – and fall.
"I know. I don't want to be. I just..."
Her hands twisted. She wanted to be useful.
Atiena said, "physical strength isn't the only kind of strength, you know. The only useful kind of strength. But..."
But. Yue looked at her. The older girl was clearly turning something over in her mind, and coming to a conclusion.
"But." Atiena shrugged. "Learning to defend yourself… is never a bad idea. Knowing you can look after yourself if you need to. If you want to learn..."
"You'll teach me?"
"I'll teach all of you." Atiena smiled, briefly. The plane rattled as it hit some pocket of air and jumped abruptly; it nearly shook Yue's bones apart, but Atiena remained still, and calm. "We'll get a class going. All four of you."
Four. Four Selected remaining.
"Atiena. Thank you."
She waved this away, smiling in a pale facsimile of her usual stoically affable attitude. "It'll make my life a little bit easier, trust me."
Yue laughed. "Well," she said, "that alone is motivation."
It was not until Täj had slipped into sleep that Liara realised she had never seen the pale man asleep, or anything less than fully, totally alert. It was transformative; the years peeled from him. He was younger than Demetri, she thought, or maybe that was just how his sharper features made him seem – she had thought it before, but never seen it so clearly, the marks of an emaciated childhood. In the shrouded gloom of the plane, his face was very pale, his hair was very pale, and she knew that if they were open, his eyes would have been like pale verdigris. She could have traced the line of every bone in his skull.
She wasn't sure why that was what she thought of. There was something delicate about Täj, when he was so still like this, without his paranoid gaze darting about, without the tension he perpetually held in his shoulders and jaw. He reminded Liara a little of Mordred, who could look like that when you caught him unawares – when he was distracted during a meeting, gazing out a window, or lost in thought at an official engagement, toying with his knife like he had forgotten where he was. The same hollow cheekbones, Liara thought, though Mordred had never gone hungry in his life – not for lack of food, that was. Demetri was always called gold, but it was a harvest gold, like light over an autumn gleaning. Mordred was some sort of gold as well, but it had always seemed more like a gold that had not yet ripened, the lightness of the crispest early mornings, the paleness of spring.
She supposed that made Täj winter, though he was a creature of the Wastes and all their arid warmth.
For a split second she had thought that he was going to put his head on her lap, and sleep that way, and the thought of it had put a new tension into her own bones. Instead he had leaned against the wall with a jacket bundled under his head, and shut his eyes, and she had watched him for several long moments, unsure whether he was asleep or trying to stay calm. Certainly, she had wondered how on earth someone could manage to sleep in the rattle and hum of this flight. They must have a good pilot, she thought, for the skeleton of the plane was proving frightfully fracturable, buffeted here and there by the winds over the pacific, which ought not have been so strong but for the fact that they were flying low, lower than they should have, lower than they would have unless they were trying to avoid something, hide from something, escape something.
And yet, Täj seemed not to notice the throw-and-hurl of the air. Maybe it would translate into his dreams.
She wondered what he was dreaming of.
And she wondered why the simple fact that he was sleeping, and vulnerable, and grieving, made her feel so protective of him – the way she had been protective of Mordred during those first long months after Demetri's abduction, when he had refused to eat and tried to leave the palace, day after day, to go find his brother. It had been an instinctive, automatic protectiveness. It brooked no argument.
There was just something so pitiable about them both.
She stood, hesitantly, afraid, quite bizarrely, that the soft sound of her rising would wake him where the roar of the engine and groan of metal had not and, finding that he still slept soundly, went very cautiously to the cockpit. Yue and Atiena were sitting on one side of the plane, Liz and Eden on the other, and Uzohola had spent some hour or so in the lone bathroom on board. Liara wasn't sure if the Saharan woman was crying, or throwing up. Maybe she was, as Atiena had for the first twenty minutes, just staring into space.
She hoped she was okay. Liara wasn't close enough to Uzohola to feel comfortable going to her now, to comfort her, in the wake of her brother's betrayal, but walking past the closed cubicle door... that felt wrong as well. She hoped against hope that someone who knew her better, Täj or Demetri or Atiena, would check on her.
Demetri was doing something similar. Liara stared at the dashboard for a moment – lights, and switches, and buttons, and she didn't have a clue what any of them might mean – and then at Demetri, for another moment, and found that her old friend was looking at her the way that Ysabel used to look at spiders, like a cured phobia, so that where once there may have been fear there was now only apprehension.
Apprehension made sense, she thought ruefully. He finally had nowhere to run from her.
She eased herself into the seat that would have belonged to the co-pilot, and gazed out at the sky. Her guess had been correct – they were flying low, mostly under the cloud cover. They'd be using up a ton more fuel flying this way, she thought, and hoped he knew what he was doing. There was no trace of doubt on his face, or in his hands, as he guided the… what was it called, a yoke?
He caught her watching. "I promise," he said. His voice was low – husky, the way Täj's usually was, like he had picked up the latter's smoking habits in the last hour. "We're not going to crash."
"I felt better before you felt the need to deny it."
Trajan had enjoyed flying, though the king was infrequently permitted to do so, due to scheduling and safety concerns; nonetheless, he had, on multiple occasions, brought Mordred and Demetri flying with him, the two boys bundled together and wrapped up against the cold, owing to Trajan's favouring old-fashioned, open biplanes. He had brought Liara a few times, when she had asked nicely, and one of the boys would always hold her hand during take-off, partially to reassure themselves, partially to reassure her. They needn't have worried; she had never found it too inspiring of either fear or wonder. She remembered that, and wondered if it was something genetic that made someone yearn to break gravitational holds, to aim for the sun, to ape Icarus in style if not in substance. Liara, personally, had never had that impulse, never understood the urge. As a teen, she had always slept on flights, no matter how long or short.
Always, until now.
Demetri shrugged. "To be honest, I'm trying to reassure myself as well."
She paused. "Well," Liara said, "that is enormously concerning."
Demetri smiled, and then she smiled as well.
Promising.
Without her needing to ask, he leaned forward, and indicated. "This is the glareshield panel. Autopilot and all our readings – heading, altitude, speed. We're making good time for Masr. This is the primary flight display – environmental readings, air speed and some altitude indicators. The navdis – this one, here – that's wind speed and wind direction."
"The wind seems strong."
"It is. We'll make it, but we're burning through fuel pretty quickly trying to fight through this weather." He caught the expression on her face, and shook his head before she could ask. "You know the phrase, under the radar?"
"Literally under?"
"That's the goal." He gestured towards the instrument display at the rear of the pit, and said, "backups. Battery-powered, magnetic. Don't look so worried. We look like a supply plane, and we'll be treated as one."
He was talking, and smiling, and there was absolutely no life behind his eyes. He was going through the motions of charisma, Liara thought, playing the role without liking any of his lines. There was something so utterly false and sweetened about it all, like spun sugar.
"If you say so." She looked at the nearest dial, where numbers were flicking up and down, seemingly without meaning. "Learning to fly seems… extravagant, for the rebellion."
He shrugged. "Antonov An-2."
"I'm sorry?"
"It's a Russian plane. They use them for crop-dusting in the southern provinces. And firefighting, sometimes, around Angeles and Fennley. Small, fixed-wing craft. Beginner's vehicle, so to speak."
Liara said, "that's funny. You always said you wanted to be a fireman."
He laughed. "What?"
"Rather than a king. You wanted to be a fireman. To help people, and be in the thick of things, but not a soldier. Mordred wanted to be…" She paused. Demetri waited. "A doctor? Shit, was it? Yeah. A doctor."
He smiled. His voice was fond as he said, "I remember. And you wanted to be… a ballet dancer?"
That was correct. She hadn't expected him to remember.
She hadn't expected him to know.
Because Demetri had always been quite set on his future as king. Responsibility instilled at an early age, not to shirk your responsibilities. And he had hated fire, to the point of phobia. And Mordred… he had wanted to be a historian. Something with paper, something in the back corner of a library, where he wouldn't have to talk to people unless he wanted to, and study things that had been without having to make decisions about what must be.
If Demetri hadn't been taken, Liara thought, maybe he could have been. The image of a still kind-eyed Mordred bent over a set of books… almost enough to make her smile. And if Demetri hadn't been taken, there was no question. He would not have strayed.
"Imagine if we had stayed." Her voice sounded hollow, even to herself. In that split second, she missed Mordred more than she could have imagined she was capable. He was her best friend, her oldest friend, the most stable and constant point in her life – and right now, she was further from him, from home, than she had ever been. With people that might turn on her. With people who were lying. "Do you think we would still be friends? Me, a dancer. You, a fireman."
"A fireman," the man who called himself Demetri said, and avoided her question utterly as he continued, "I guess it's ironic."
She didn't need to ask what. "Yes," she said, to the King of Ashes. "Ironic indeed."
Eden managed to sleep for a short time - not nearly long enough, for when she woke she found that there was still a sharp, insistent pain behind her eyes that suggested a stress migraine was incubating somewhere deep within her skull. She and Liz had fallen asleep against one another, and she lifted her head off the other girl's shoulder groggily, not sure if the others were sleeping as well or if she had missed some new emergency and cataclysm.
It didn't seem that way. The whole place had the funereal hush of a cemetery, and despite the noise of the wind outside and the fact that there was nothing more important going on, anyone who spoke did so in a muted whisper, and only after first darting a look in the direction of the others, as though to ensure their hushed words did not upset anyone or provoke some new wave of violence. It was a motley and assorted group, Eden thought, and certainly not the crowd that she had expected to encounter at this stage in the Selection.
If you had asked her, on the first day of the Selection, which of the girls would make it to the Elite – no, not to the Elite, to the final five – she wasn't sure if she would have named any of the girls here. Liara Lee, maybe, as the childhood friend of the king. But shy little Yue, rough-around-the-edges Atiena, withdrawn and practical Liz? No. She wasn't sure she would. She wasn't sure, on the first day of the Selection, that she would have known their names.
And yet here they were.
She couldn't quite say that this turn of events was unwelcome, of course. She wasn't sure how many of the other girls would have had the strength to overcome what they had so far.
She hoped Saran was okay. She hoped Wick had found her. She hoped, against hope, that Vardi Tayna was alive somewhere in the ruins of Layeni.
She wasn't sure how much of this she was allowed to hope for. How much more could she hope to hope for?
Liz, stretching out her limbs peaceably beside her, said softly, "what time is it?"
She glanced at the screen on which had displayed the Saharan symbols: የሰሃራ ፌዴሬሽን. Below those characters, a small digital clock display.
Liz answered her own question. "Nearly time for the Report."
The Report. In the rush of the previous hours, even Eden had forgotten that so much of the festival was due to be televised that evening. She wondered what they would show. Had the members of the Report been part of Uzokuwa's attempted coup? Were they Demetri loyalists? Would there be a Report at all?
Enyakatho had helped Eden to escape. She had to trust in that. And she had to trust in what she knew of him – that if he had to die to get his Report in front of the Kingdom, he was willing to do that.
Maybe he had.
The screen flickered and the characters faded, replaced by, quite simply, a tableau of Layeni. Eden had not known the village for long – for her, familiarity was still the farm at Pa's, a broad courtyard filled with chickens and haybales, a little kitten wandering about as an inept hunter, the soft sound of horses and running water some distance away – but it still filled her with some profound sense of melancholy to see the village as it had been only a few hours ago, all neat cobbles and children playing and lovers embracing on the corners.
So much could change so quickly.
There were a few clips of the various events of the festivities that Eden had glimpsed over the course of the previous nights – various dance competitions, singing performances, the sorts of things Eden might expect at a festival in Fennley and then some other things that seemed distinctly Wastelands: shooting contests, performances involving throwing knives and juggling fire, fishing competitions, relays across the bridges. Everyone in the images was smiling, faces glowing from flush and from the lights twined across the various landmarks, lips and skin stained brightly in a rainbow spectrum of colors. It gave Eden the same feeling as when she looked at black-and-white images of the past, the strange sense of pensive wistfulness at what had once been, all the people whose worlds had collapsed inwards before Eden had even known they existed.
There were, here and there, a few flashes of the other Selected girls, without any great focus placed on them. There was Liz, her mouth crooked in a half-smile, sitting by a small crackling bonfire beside Wren, her bright blue hair styled into an elaborate a-line hairstyle, gesturing emotively with a hand dripping with cheap brass rings; there was Liara, visible at the corner of the screen, relaxing on a balcony twined with ivy next to Raphael and Agares, laughing at something one of the older women had said; there was green-marked Vardi Tayna and silver-stained Täj sitting on the railing of the bridge by the river, arm around waist as Uzokuwa gestured emphatically with a drink; there was little Yue, framed amongst other dancers, laughing as she spun, the other girls mere colorful shadows around her, a flash of silver here and a flash of golden there; there was Saran, listening intently to a little girl with her hair wound up with blue ribbons, nodding and agreeing with whatever flight of fancy the child was embarking on, pointing at the dancers in the square.
And there was Eden. And Demetri. Mouths stained orange.
Oh. Oh, yes. She had almost forgotten. Almost.
He had felt so steady, so reliable, so solid. Eden should have treasured that more, in that moment.
From the corner of her eyes, she was vaguely aware of Yue turning her face away and leaning into the wall, shoulders curling.
And then – short clips of interviews. Eden couldn't even remember these being filmed. Could she remember? Yue saying that she thought Liara had the prettiest dress, and Saran saying that Atiena had the best sense of humour, Atiena saying something droll about Demetri's hair, Liara thanking her kind hosts for their hospitality and Liz offering a flower crown to her interviewer. They all looked, Eden thought amusedly, like they'd been given a few drinks right before the cameras had come out.
There was a brief section next that must have been filmed a few days ago, because Wren's hair had still been in a green Mohawk and Farid hadn't yet earned a black eye. Eden tried to focus on what they were saying, desperate for a distraction, desperate for some proof that her attempts to ingratiate herself was working. They were discussing popular opinions of the Selected girls, popularity and theories, and Eden was gratified to see that she was not at the bottom of the polls.
She wondered if her kiss with Demetri would change that fact. Were they eliminating based on popularity?
She wondered if the letters she had found at Pa's house would help, if the kiss did not. She would feel bad, dirtying a dead woman's name like that, using a lost love as blackmail... but Raphael was dead. Eden, and the people she loved, were not. Not yet.
She could still swing this.
Yue was in the lead, with Vardi Tayna breathing down her neck, though Eden had seen the data used to compile these reports and knew that the results varied hugely depending on the demographics. Rebels adored Tayna; citizens of the Kingdom and northerners loved Yue, and preferred even Liara over Tayna. After that, it was Eden, more liked than disliked, which was the most she could hope for, and then Liz and Saran, roughly equal, at the bottom of the poll. They had removed Atiena's place on the display at the last minute, once news had filtered down from High Command that she was being removed from the Selection in favour of a new military role, but Eden had known Atiena had rivalled Yue in popularity, competing with Vardi Tayna for rebel approval without the corresponding issue with legitimacy in the eyes of the citizenry.
Wren and Farid were reading a few comments. Eden had read most of them before, but Enyakatho had not permitted her to hear those which pertained to her. Something about maintaining a thin facade of impartiality. She focused on those now.
She was too cold. Too aloof, seemed arrogant. Or maybe she was too smiley in front of the camera, too warm, too polished. Or maybe she seemed shy, withdrawn, an unsuitable candidate for queen.
Not for the first time, Eden was deeply grateful that there was no public participation in the Selection. These people didn't know what they wanted.
The other criticisms were predictable, though not necessarily any better founded – Liara was a suspicious figure, too cold, not to be trusted; Yue was too delicate, too sweet, to be queen of the rebellion; Saran didn't seem to have her whole soul in the competition, seemed to have her mind and heart set more on the orphanage of Layeni, on becoming part of the kingdom rather than seducing its leader; Liz, similarly, was seen as removed and detached, too distant, not making enough of an effort.
Farid and Wren managed to make it seem friendly, throwing the comments back and forth and chipping in occasionally. "You've clearly only seen Liz before her coffee fix," Farid said, as though he knew her, as though they were friends, as though he had any reason to call her Liz rather than Lady Elizabeth.
"Yue seems sweet," Wren added, "seems sweet… people think Yue's sweet!"
"People are right," Farid said.
"Maybe," Wren said, and laughed. "No, she's a sweetheart..."
Yue was not looking at the screen, but down at her hands. The others were also paying little attention to what was playing out on the Report – it was only Liz, who clearly wanted something else to focus on, and Eden, who was rarely focused on anything else.
The section afterwards was brief. Some stock footage of rebels, of frontline action, of medical tents, of men smiling and women waving, of guns being reloaded and explosions occurring far in the background.
The rebels had breached Fennley. Not only that, the rebels were in deep Fennley. Eden could only stare. They were… they were nearing the Angeles border. What was this? Was this accurate, or was it yet more propaganda? Could it be believed?
If the rebels were on the verge of entering the capital… then Eden needed to maintain her position here. She needed leverage. Her mother, her family, all of her friends, were a few days away from a nasty encounter with a firing squad. She couldn't believe it.
They were so close – on the edge of seizing the capital – and yet they were so far – fleeing their own kingdom for the refuge of a foreign nation.
Her gut twisted.
Fuck, was all Eden could think. Fuck.
The next section. The image of the frontlines slowly faded, a soldier's smile wavering and flickering out of existence, and then, bright and abrupt: ruins. A field of destruction. Was this Layeni? No. The rebellion wouldn't show that now. No. What was this?
Eden knew in her gut what this was.
Axiom offices, utterly destroyed.
Ash and dust.
Eden could only stare.
