Lilianna didn’t expect to think at once of Vegas.
Flustered now, Lila she the guilt she didn’t yet understand show in her face, and for all his avoidant efforts, that seemed the one cue Beau awaited. His terse look soured, no agreeable pretense left as he glared down at the weights and slapped the rack, picked up his towel again, and started walking hard away.
“Hey,” Lila said and started after him. “What’s the rush?”
Beau paused at whatever distance across the gym floor gave him the semblance of privacy required to turn and look at her with moistened eyes. Lilianna’s guilty remorse surged, and nearly took her with it as she bowed her head, her hands lifted to his shoulders as she struggled to turn her face up to him as well.
“I am so sorry, Beau,” she said.
“All along I knew it would be like this,” he said. “That’s why I never said anything.”
“You didn’t know. . . .”
“Explain why I’m not right then, huh?”
“Beau, you know, my feelings . . . I love you,” she said earnestly.
If it wasn’t the hardest direct talk she’d had in her life, that award was lost among memories of the earliest days of the Emergency. Lilianna’s hands scrunched the front of Beau’s sweaty shirt.
“I’m the loser here, too, OK?” she said. “And I am sorry.”
She’d already said the wrong thing, but at least she didn’t worsen it with fey reassurances she wanted him in her life still – that future role unknown.
Beau stood like a mannequin and Lilianna slowly withdrew her hands. A few of the pogo-ing woman looked across, saw Beau’s somehow expressionless face, and went back to what they were doing. Lilianna waited through the pause, checking back at the men near the squat rack, then taking a deep breath in.
“It’s so many kinds of fucked up,” she said. “And I know you don’t want me to talk about it all here, right now, so I . . . I would like the chance to do that.”
She flicked her eyes back up to him, her turn to play the reluctant one.
“Can we salvage something from this, please?”
Beau’s expression crumpled and just as quickly reformed. He angled himself back towards the exit, but remained on pause as he took a few rapid breaths.
Lilianna glanced at the women, then back to Beau looking likely to lose his shit.
“Beau?” she said quietly. “Would you do this with me?”
The logical yet mysterious question pulled him out of his fugue a little. He looked at her.
“What?”
“I need a training partner.”
“Training.” Not a question. More like a reluctant grunt.
“Yeah.”
She wasn’t dressed for it, but Lila removed her denim jacket, then toed off her sneakers, face like a morgue as she stepped across to another length of mats framed on the far side by treadmills and other exercise machines.
Beau watched her like an automaton, but slowly the emotional war within the scarred young man became a begrudging resolution. He snorted, bull-like, completely unamused and yet strangely compliant as he dropped the towel next to Lilianna’s jacket, glanced at her feet just in socks, and then he wrestled each of his gym shoes off, as well as his black-stained socks.
It felt as much a potential showdown between two rival fighters as a gentle sparring match, and drinking in the tension, Lila wondered just as quickly whether she’d seriously misread the mood.
Beau craned his neck around and it actually crackled. Lila swallowed hard, and raised a hand as if to ward him off. Her skin was mangled with yellowing bruises, her hands still sore with days-old rope burns and cuts.
“I have to warn you,” she said. “The attack, it showed me I could be better on my feet than I am, OK? Are you OK to do this?”
“You want a training partner.” Beau’s tone was dull.
“OK,” Lila said. “But go easy.”
Beau’s face fell in a rich varietal of grief.
“Do you think I’d ever hurt you, Lilianna?”
He asked what he pitched as a rhetorical question without meeting her eyes.
“I really hope not, Beau.”
The young man lifted his mournful gaze, but sniffled and motioned obliquely towards her rather than take their talk into even darker realms.
“At least I can show you how to fight.”
“Oh, you’re going to show me a thing or two?”
It was gracious of him. Beau allowed a sharp laugh, smiling in that way he almost never did that sent a cold knife into Lila’s heart to see him just she loved him so much. It was almost merciful that his grin disappeared as quickly as it always did, taking that younger and unhurt version of him with it. Lilianna backed away, focused on her breathing and her soles in contact with the floor rather than plunging into grief of her own.
“I’m not making any promises,” Beau said. More quietly, he then added, “Even if you won’t let me watch over you, I’ll do it anyway, Lila.”
Lilianna swallowed hard. It was easiest to say nothing. Beau looked at her feet, rather than her eyes, and it took her a moment to realize he’d circled her.
She turned, just as Beau surged in, completely avoiding the hand she threw at his face, capturing the whole arm somehow as her legs swept out from beneath her and she landed hard on her back to see him now looking down at her, just the briefest of those smiles again as he offered his hand.
Despite the wind knocked from her, Lilianna recovered quickly. Now, if for pride alone, she took it on herself to go on the attack, but Beau didn’t play along like she’d hoped. Lila actually shrieked as he snapped forward whip-fast, a hand behind her neck and one on her upper arm before she’d defended either.
He froze there, nodding down meaningfully so she’d notice his knee aimed only an inch from her solar plexus.
“Yeah, OK,” she said.
They went back to their positions. Lila tried an exploratory strike, fist half-formed, not thinking she could be so easily entangled as Beau trapped her in some kind of arm hold. He tightened the hold to reinforce how she was utterly trapped. His rank armpit brushed her face a moment more, then he let go.
“OK wow, you’re good at this,” she said.
“I’ll show you a few things today you can practice on your own . . . with a little imagination.”
Lilianna cooled her eyes as they found his, nodding slowly.
“How did you learn to fight?”
“Training,” he said to her. “Here.”
He motioned back towards the men near the heavy weights, though maybe not meaning them in particular.
“You can learn, here in the Bastion, too, Lila,” he said. “With me.”
*
LILA SHOWERED AND dressed in the same clothes and grabbed her coat, seeing the day turning blustery outside. Fall leaves blew across the brick pavers as she headed straight for Building 2 where Gwen Stacey lived.
Instead, a pair of armed female troopers guarded the step.
“Hey,” Lila said and tried smiling sunnily. “Just visiting a friend.”
“Cool,” the younger of the two women said. “Can we see your pass?”
“I need a pass?”
“Yep.”
“I’ve only just come back in,” Lila said.
“There’s a lockdown in place,” the other guard said as if that explained everything.
“What about my friend?”
“Just go get a pass,” the first trooper said.
“I’m not even sure if she’s in there,” Lila said, pointing to the doorway beyond them. “Can I at least just go in and knock?”
The older woman grimaced.
“If you get a pass, sure.”
She remained immobile, but her younger sidekick smirked at Lilianna’s clear impatience.
“What’s got your panties so twisted?”
The young woman licked her lips. Pretty blue eyes weren’t matched by her open leer.
“Nothing,” Lila said. As a distr
action, she added, “You two hear about Carlotta Deschain?”
The two troopers exchanged a glance.
“No, what?” the senior of the pair asked.
“Sounds like she’s left Councilor Wilhelm for another man.”
The older trooper gave a ponderous sneer while her colleague snorted.
“No wonder Ernie’s so cranky.”
“I always told you she was screwin’ Sorrel Williams.”
“Na,” the younger trooper replied. “That’s just because you wish you were screwin’ Sorrel Williams.”
“No more than you, girl.”
“Na,” the young woman said again. “You know me better’n that.”
She offered Lilianna an unsubtle wink.
“Have you seen her, since she came back?” Lila asked.
“Deschain?”
“Yeah.”
The older woman shrugged, no idea. Her younger colleague couldn’t be bothered thinking about it, still eyeballing Lilianna, who in turn avoided her gaze.
“You just came back?”
“Yeah,” Lila said. “I got stranded outside.”
She motioned towards the main Administration building.
“I get a pass over there?”
The younger trooper gave her colleague a smirk, then stood aside.
“OK, princess,” the Latino woman said. “Next time, you need a hall pass. Be quick.”
The duo snickered and Lilianna hurried up the stairs with their reprieve.
A clipboard in the lobby of Miss Stacey’s place was a life history of the building. Names were crossed out, circled, overwritten, and scrawled into the margins. It took a few minutes to find her supervisor’s unit number buried beneath all the pencil and ink, and Lila extracted a Bastion-issue flashlight from the ass pocket of her jeans, but didn’t switch it on until she made the third-floor landing. A kerosene lamp burnt at the far end of the hall, but Lila used the flashlight to check her footing on the advance, coming to Miss Stacey’s unit halfway along without any natural light.
After a minute, Gwen Stacey opened the door with a drawn face, her chestnut hair tied back just as tight.
“Lilianna,” she said. “Good to see you. Come in.”
The tension dropped as Lila entered. The one-bedroom apartment had a living room featuring several sofas and a low table, and a spinning wheel and a basket of raw wool sat in an area almost cordoned off by the woman’s craft duties. A low candle burnt on the coffee table, but plentiful daylight streamed from the petite kitchen out back.
“Is everything OK?”
They asked the question at the same time. Miss Stacey softened further, while Lila found it hard to ignore a feeling of alarm.
“Seriously, though,” Gwen asked her on seeing it. “You OK, Lila? I didn’t know you were back.”
“I came in this morning,” Lila replied. “I would’ve been back sooner, but –”
“It’s probably good that you weren’t,” Gwen said. “Has the rumor mill told you I’ve been reassigned from Comms?”
“Not the rumor mill,” Lila said. “They told me this morning when I tried to report in. Where’s everyone else?”
“There’s people missing,” Miss Stacey said. “I’m not sure all of them were because of the Incident.”
“That’s what they’re calling it?”
“Yes they are,” the Texan woman agreed. “How’d you escape it? I heard you helped fight the fire, way after it all began?”
“It was a long night,” was all Lila said.
“Well, I’m glad to see you safe, but you don’t report to me anymore. I’m sorry.”
“Have you seen Councilor . . . I mean, Miss Deschain?”
Miss Stacey blinked at her.
“No one told you?”
“Told me what?” Lila asked. “No.”
“The Furies got her.”
The tightness returned to seize Miss Stacey’s face, and looking around somewhat dazed at the news, Lilianna saw a deadly crowbar propped just to one side of the front door.
“You’re afraid,” Lila said.
The other woman only shrugged tiredly.
“When am I not, sweetheart?”
“Carlotta came back here yesterday,” Lila said to her. “My dad said so himself.”
“Your father was here?”
“Near here, yeah,” Lila said. “How could Carlotta be killed by Furies?”
“They said she was found that way,” Gwen said. “Troopers heard the noise from inside and broke in to find her and another man, both. . . .”
“Dead?”
Miss Stacey gave a dark laugh, but looked thoroughly sickened.
“Oh no,” she said. “Turned. They were rabid. It’s awful. They said he probably turned, then took her with him.”
Lilianna didn’t ask who “he” was. Her stomach roiled with tension at thought of Carlotta and her lover somehow dead.
Or slain.
“Just another reason this place is on lockdown,” Gwen said.
“My father said he gave Carlotta an escort almost right to the gate.”
That creased look of fear again split the older woman’s face.
“Lilianna,” Gwen said. “I told you, you don’t report to me now. I’m glad you’re safe. But you should go.”
“But you’re telling me Miss Deschain is dead? And –”
“Killed by Furies,” Gwen replied. Was she willing herself to believe it? “We’re still counting the dead, Lilianna. Don’t you get it?”
“Then why reassign you from Comms?”
Gwen still hadn’t offered – and Lilianna hadn’t taken – a seat. The older woman considered the question thoughtfully, then moved a couple of paces off.
“Who reassigned you?” Lila asked more directly.
“It was an order from the Council President.”
“Lowenstein?”
“Yep.”
“I thought it might be a Wilhelm thing.”
“Oh, it’s a Wilhelm thing,” Gwen said and even her unamused chortle had a twang to it. “Remember, they’re worried communications with the Washington’s been compromised.”
“But that’s why they brought you in.”
“Lilianna,” Gwen said again. “You’re a smart young woman. Really, you should go. Now. Don’t get involved.”
She repeated herself before Lilianna could answer, leaving her nothing to do but nod her head and agree. Miss Stacey opened the door with finality – and then closed it shut behind Lilianna, leaving her back in the almost unlit hall.
*
REPORTING FOR DUTY the next morning confirmed the deep nagging sense of unease in Lilianna’s gut when the woman with the clipboard looked more irritated than she needed be at the interruption to her whispered conversation with two older women in the Bastion’s default uniform of poorly-fitted polo shirts and slacks. Despite the advanced age and waistlines of the two older workers, the viper-faced younger woman was clearly in charge. She eyeballed Lila through hard-framed spectacles.
“You need to report to Human Resources,” she said.
“Why?”
“You’ve been reassigned.”
“To what?”
“Why the hell do you think I said you need to report to Human Resources?”
Lilianna tried not to look too gobsmacked at the woman’s tone. Given the events of the past week, an adrenal flare wasn’t far away. Using the uptight young woman as practice for Beau’s BJJ moves wasn’t going to earn Lila any points.
“I thought the Bastion was in lockdown. . . .”
“There’s an HR officer in Admin,” the woman answered curtly. “No need to leave the Bastion.”
Lilianna also didn’t like that she felt relieved. But if the indicators were anything to go by, the Bastion lockdown had extended to the sanctuary zone itself – as maybe it probably should – and working out how to get back to her quarters from a trek outside wasn’t part of her plans for the day, even if those plans were now utterly awry.
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Her trepidation only mounted as she made her way back across the cluttered courtyard, noting teams of men and women disassembling some of the emergency shelters in place since long before Lila and her family arrived in Columbus. It surely wasn’t a coincidence the old tent network for processing new arrivals was coming down at the same time Enclave numbers had taken a serious hit. One of the workers remarked to others how it was “always part of the plan” to clear the vast public open space between the big tenements and their bureaucratic hubs for even more City-backed agriculture. And God knew the City needed to increase food production at a rapid pace – provided anyone was left alive to benefit.
Thoughts of Carlotta Deschain claimed by Furies descended on her. It was enough for now to fight back tears, and Lilianna pledged to get a message to her father somehow.
But as the toiling figures around her showed, there was plenty of work to be done.
*
A THIN, PALE-eyed Administration officer trying to grow a decent moustache signaled her from the alcove where he’d been installed. Lila quit her impatient jiggling, sitting on one of the long hard wooden benches nearby, and followed the man into a wood-paneled side office with a bespoke desk, a rotary telephone, and blinds lifted to admit the milky daylight through its barred, street-level windows.
“Lilianna Vanicek?”
“That’s me.”
“Have a seat, please.”
“I didn’t catch your name,” Lila said and smiled as she took one of the two seats on the other side of the officious desk the man settled into with an almost grateful sigh.
He flicked those pale eyes at her hands a moment, following them with a slight frown.
“You don’t seem to be wearing your tag, Miss Vanicek.”
“My what?”
“Your ‘newbie tag’?”
“Newbie tag?” She barked a laugh. “They cut mine off weeks ago.”
“I don’t see that noted on your record.”
He lifted the manila folder and Lila felt a mild surge of discomfort to see herself so neatly bureaucratized in paperwork she also presumably wasn’t allowed to read for herself.
“Then there’s a . . . mistake,” she said. “Councilor Wilhelm assigned me to Communications himself, and now I’m told there’s a change in my duties?”
After The Apocalypse (Book 5): Retribution Page 16
