"As you do unto the least of these my brothers, so you do unto me."
Lara looked at him and around him. To her right there was another person, slumped in an unnatural pose in an armchair, head lolled to the side. Amo. He looked sickly and pale, like he was the one in a coma. Flashes of the flight from Pittsburgh tolled through her head, as Amo trying to pull her out of the demon's grip.
"It comes for us all, in the end," Cerulean said. "The demon. The least of these, the most, we're all weak inside. There's a weak place, and if it ever breaks, then we too break. Did I ever tell you that, when I was alive?"
She looked at him. He was two Roberts now, perhaps three, standing in a soup of orange glow and cold.
"You want to ask me, I can see it. What is my weak place, Cerulean? What is his?" He pointed at Amo. "The answer is simple, and it's a strength as much as a weakness. You are each other's, of course."
She remembered to breathe, and it came in as a painful gasp.
"If he loses you, he'll be broken. Oh, he'll still function. He'll shuffle along. He did so before, but then he was always going to LA to die. You saved him; he saved you."
She gulped.
"But there have been moments, haven't there? When you had doubts. When he failed you. So the question becomes, how much can you forgive? How much can any soul forgive, when they see the true depths of another?"
She watched him. At the same time she was in the plane above LA, a brand new nightmare then, while fire consumed the world below. Robert was at the controls and the plane was diving. Her stomach lurched and the horizon jumped upward; LA filled the cockpit glass, with the broad forecourt and impressive red tile roof of the Chinese Theater front and center.
"When is the crime too great?" Cerulean asked. "How can you forgive when the hole inside is too deep? How do you love when you find your love is a monster?"
The little plane shook as they fell. The wind rushed outside, tearing at the wings like a growling beast.
"Where do you go when you're alone, Lara?" he pressed on. "What do you do when there's nobody there to help? What kind of terrible seeds would you sow?"
The plane's propeller whined, and the Chinese Theater grew so close she could reach out and touch it, then there was a burst of light, and…
"Lara?"
Amo was there, leaning into her field of view, his hands clamped to her hand. His eyes were already wet and his lip trembling. The explosion played out over his face.
She managed one weak sob.
"You're here," he said, squeezing her hand like he was trying to squeeze his love into her. "You're safe. Thank God."
The coma was over, but she didn't feel safe. She knew that. Cerulean had told her and nothing could be clearer. The explosion kept playing out over Amo's face as he spoke.
* * *
Clarity came and went in degrees. People came to her bedside like she'd once stood at theirs: Amo as he recovered from Don's shotgun blast; Peters as he reeled from the loss of his Abigail; Anna as a little girl, waking up in night sweats screaming for her father.
They came to her, Amo and Peters and Anna and others, and some of the time she was lucid enough to see them. Sometimes she spoke to them, and was certain for hours at least that they really had come, but then Cerulean came too, and it seemed she talked for hours to him, but she couldn't have.
"You know I'm not here," he said, while she lay still at night with Amo on a makeshift cot by her side, snoring gently. "You know I'm a symptom."
"Of what?" she asked. Her throat was better, the pain in her ribs easing, and Macy had said soon she would be up and about. "What kind of sickness?"
Cerulean only swirled one hand in the air. "The underlying sickness. The T4. The hydrogen line. We all are, this plague, but perhaps you most of all."
"Me?"
He nodded. "You didn't have a coma, did you? But you're still here. You survived. What does that say?"
She cast her mind back. Casting back was easier, better than trying to remember things from today or the last week. Hours slipped through her fingers like little silver fish. "I'm stronger. Or a different kind of immune."
Cerulean shook his head. "You're not immune, Lara."
"I had a panic attack right around the time Amo had his coma. The dates line up."
"They don't. You're just a person who gets panic attacks, I'm afraid. Or used to. When was your last?"
"I don't remember."
He weighed this information for a quiet moment. "Your secret, then. Your deep inner well. Does Amo know? Of course not. We all have our demons, an original sin that makes us. Our shame."
"It doesn't make me. I'm in control."
"Oh? Are you sure?"
He faded then, leaving her alone with her thoughts.
She got better, by small degrees. Reality hammered out into more of a straight line, though there were still voices, and images, and Robert came and went. Amo sat by her side and mumbled updates on the Maine camp, her children came and teased each other about their adventures in the snowy woods with Cynthia, and Anna came, and Feargal to check in.
Soon enough the trial of Amo for Masako's death rolled around.
Lara was well enough to attend Council meetings, and was there at the table when Witzgenstein suggested it. She'd protested, perhaps, but her thoughts were not an easy beast to corral, and she knew at times she wasn't making sense. Feargal backed Witzgenstein, and Alan standing in for Masako supported the move. Even Anna agreed, though she didn't understand why. They didn't listen to her.
The trial was held in the bunker's orange entrance hall. As Lara had feared, Witzgenstein expanded her role, and the remit of the trial. There was no real jury and no real law in evidence there. Lara was the only one trained in the law, but she couldn't think in a straight line, not with Cerulean always popping up before her and visions of LA on fire only a breath away.
So she was left trying to support Anna as she prepared Amo's defense, but not really able to. She had so many ideas, legal loopholes and gambits from her days as a student who aced the New York bar, but she couldn't grasp the facts of the situation well enough to marshal or apply them. She tried to write them down but they dissolved at her touch, like melting sugar.
So Anna made her case alone, in the orange hall the next day. It was a powerful, bullheaded rebuttal of every accusation against Amo, which then turned the tables so thoroughly that Witzgenstein ended up banished from New LA.
Lara sat with Amo in their RV together afterwards, but there was nothing to say. They sat at their table in silence, side by side, each counting all their losses. They'd spoken many times in the weeks since her coma, but with her alive he'd already begun to drift. Even sitting at her side it felt like he was somewhere else, leaving a bitter, panicky silence. At the last she reached over to him, touching his cheek.
He'd been waiting for a moment like this, she felt sure. He'd needed her strength, an aching need just like the one she felt in the pit of her stomach, but she'd been too sick to support him. She knew he'd been through awful things too, and now at last they could endure this hardship together.
But he only took her hand, and kissed it, then laid it down on the cot by his side like he would a book he no longer wanted to read, and continued staring at the wall as if she truly weren't there.
They sat like that for hours, until it grew dark. So she was alone. Amo was alone. That was all there was.
* * *
Life went on, but changed. Robert came to her less, and had less to say each time. She and Amo slept in their respective beds, close but not touching, and she was still too damaged herself to understand why. Nor did she trust herself or her own thinking to raise the topic. He was able to laugh with Vie and Talia, and perform the bare minimum of his duties as mayor, but when they were alone together they were truly alone.
She didn't reach out again. She didn't complain or try to dissuade him as he spent more time inside the bunker. He started sleeping in Salle Coram's old room, but they di
dn't speak of it, because they didn't speak. He spent his days poring over the records of the MARS3000 colonists, as if somehow that might bring them back.
She too threw herself into her work. To straighten out her mind she needed to be busy, to fill it up as best she could and make it conform to her wishes again. The Council was somewhat adrift, being tugged a different direction every day, with the people of their reduced group constantly following different priorities. Anna and Feargal were only interested in tracking the three thousand floaters from Maine, and preparing for a renewed push to assault the remaining eleven bunkers. Macy and Keeshom were focused on the survivors of Julio's pit, six of whom were still in comas, five of whom suffered from PTSD to varying degree of severity. Only Sulman and Jennifer were motivated by attaining some kind of normalcy in their lives, by sourcing quality fresh food, preparing nutritious meals, providing childcare, and with the very little time they had left, making preparations for the move back to LA.
Everyone was in shock, whether from the demons or the bunker or the banishment of Witzgenstein. Their community had been shredded, with the pieces left to flap crazily in the wind with no one at the reins, while they hovered in a limbo state, waiting for something to change.
It became plain that Amo wasn't going to fill that gap. Nor was Anna, in any more than her military capacity. She probably didn't even realize anything was wrong.
So Lara would take the reins. For ten years she'd served as a kind of quartermaster and all-round administrator for New LA, and now those skills came into play. Portioning out their manpower and resources had always been a simple matter of defining goals and assigning roles, and clear goals and roles were what was needed now more than ever, barely a month after the demons fell.
She called the Council meeting with twenty neat, handwritten requests for attendance. It would not be in the bunker's grand orange entrance hall, as past meetings and the trial had been held, nor in one of their RVs or tents, all huddled tightly around one of the small tables. Rather it was to be held on chairs around a table she set up herself, out in the snow in the middle of the fields.
From before the dawn she set to work, dragging heaters and generators out into the darkness through the thick, icy snow, along with chairs and tables, paper and pens, a coffee maker. She baked hard ginger cookies on a camp stove. Last of all, she delivered her invitations through the doors of the RVs, then went to her table with the heaters on, to sit and wait.
Slowly the encampment came awake as the sun rose, pale as an oyster in the dishwater sky, and Lara watched them. Her people looked like refugees, bundled in mismatched clothes, borrowed from others and stolen from the bunker, emerging from grease-streaked, fluttering tents and ancient RVs. They stamped their feet and blew into their hands and started about whatever they had planned for the day, all the while watching her, sat at her table in the middle of the field, like she'd finally gone mad.
She watched as Anna huddled with Ravi in the door of their RV, shared with Macy and Keeshom, reading their invite. They blinked and looked up at her, out in the brilliant white snow. She watched as Anna went over to Feargal's RV and they spoke. Feargal read the note and saw Lara and his eyes bugged.
Lara waved. Feargal waved back awkwardly before Anna made him stop. 'Don't encourage her,' Anna was surely saying. 'She needs help, not humoring.'
So she waited. Within an hour, Anna came over. She came alone over the snow, watched by pretty much everyone in the camp, as subtly as they could. Just like the confrontation with Witzgenstein.
Anna pulled up and stood at the edge of the table. Lara watched her.
"Nice set up," Anna said.
The words hung awkwardly between them.
"Aren't you going to offer me coffee?"
"No," Lara said, "because you're not here for the meeting, are you?"
Anna frowned. "I'm here, aren't I?"
"So sit down. We'll talk. Then you can have coffee."
Anna didn't sit down.
"Where's Feargal?"
"Listen, Lara," Anna said, then paused.
It was so obvious, really, what Anna was thinking. What they all were thinking, because Lara had been through it before. Rest up, her parents had said, after the first panic attack. You can't live at this pace any more. It's not good for you.
She'd ignored them and it had cost her. But this was different. This wasn't only her fate. Someone had to caretake New LA, and if it wasn't going to be Amo or anyone else, then it would be her.
"I'm listening."
"OK. Good." Anna was clearly uncomfortable. Perhaps this was harder than facing down Witzgenstein. The thought amused her. Could she, sitting out here at her table in the snow, constitute a threat? Or was the threat Anna?
"You can see this is crazy, right?" Anna said. "A table out here in the snow? I mean, it doesn't look good. Everyone back there, you know, they know you were squeezed by a demon." Anna mimed squeezing, then let her hand drop. "Nobody expects that to just shake off. And a meeting's a good idea, but how about we do it later? We can meet in the bunker, or in the RV. Wait for Amo to come back up, I'm sure he's had his fill of the bunker for one day. I've got a few things to do too. Everybody's busy, we're barely getting by. You've been out too long to see that."
Lara studied Anna. It was amazing really, how someone could see so much but miss so much too. They were barely getting by, Anna thought. Lara's mismatched ideas would only slow them down. It was plain that she looked at Lara and saw only weakness now. Maybe madness.
That had to change.
"Two days," Lara said.
Anna frowned. "What?"
"Amo. You said one day, but he's been down there for two days, and two nights. He won't listen to me. I know he won't listen to you, or anyone. He's gone, and he's left us on our own."
Anna shifted uncomfortably. There it was, that shared feeling of guilt. Lara hadn't been there for the aftermath of Pittsburgh or for the conversation with Salle Coram over on the hill, but it was obvious something bad had happened. "He's had a rough few weeks, Lara. He needs time. We all do."
So this was how it went, now. Anna telling her what was right for her own husband. For her family. For all of New LA. And look how far it had gotten them. Her children were eating bristlecone soup, protein from foraged seeds buried in the ice and the odd trapped squirrel, plus whatever rationed supplies they'd dredged up from the bunker, dating back eleven years. They were spending their days in a kind of permanent hiatus, with no real schooling, only games in the woods, running directionless while the adults sat about and moped. PTSD was settling in deeply everywhere, entrenched by the environment they'd placed themselves within. The coma victims weren't getting the support they needed. Jake wasn't getting the treatment he needed for his cracked skull. Defeat was in everyone's eyes, that was clear even to Lara with her head full of fog, with only the long, slow trudge to more massacres in Europe to look forward to.
She couldn't accept that. She wouldn't. They had to do more than just survive.
"No," she said.
Anna shifted and her eyes narrowed. "What do you mean, no?"
"I mean no. We've had enough time. You can't see it because you're focused on your mission, blow up the bunkers, get your revenge, so everything else can wait. But New LA is dying on the vine here, Anna. You think we're going to heal by staying in this place? That's bullshit. This place is the T4 in our cells, and we need to get it out. You heal by getting away from the disease, wouldn't you agree? We need to get a grip on ourselves if there's any hope of this community staying together, and that starts by shaking off that bullshit bunker, and this bullshit refugee life." She pointed at the bunker and the RVs in turn. "That's why I'm out here, and that's why you, and Feargal, and Peters and Jake if he's able, and anyone else who gives a goddamn about New LA is going to come out here and join me in this field, so we can vote on a new Council and make a plan for going forward."
Anna shifted her weight again. "Bullshit? That's a bit strong, Lara…"
Lara could see it, just beneath the surface. The old, cocky Anna. She was, after all, just sixteen years old. Teenage girls were notoriously rebellious, and Anna was the worst of any Lara had known. It was only six months ago that she'd run away from home in the grandest gesture possible, then traveled the whole world before she finally came back. Lara loved her still, but her cocky, know-it-all attitude could be so self-defeating. Lara had had enough, and she let it show now.
She stood. She waved a finger sternly and adopted a hard, aggressive tone she'd not used once since mock cross-examination trials before taking the New York bar.
"If you make one more flip, smart-ass comment, young woman, I'll have you kicked off the Council and Ravi reinstated in your place. Try pushing your military plans through when the last thing he wants is for you to go."
Anna's easy smile wavered a little. She'd never heard this tone from Lara before and it threw her off balance. "You wouldn't. You couldn't. He ceded it to me."
"By agreement of the Council. Feargal's with you, the only other member of the Council now, but that's only because he hasn't spoken to me. And what I see when I look at you is an emotional, impetuous girl with some lucky maneuvers in her immediate past, and I know he'll see it my way too. You're a hero, Anna, I don't doubt it, but I've been working with Feargal and the others for years, building New LA, while you were doing what, spraying graffiti on abandoned buildings? Racing your catamaran over the waves, risking your life, cursing out Amo and Cerulean and anyone who ever tried to help you? What the hell do you know about running a settlement, Anna, or keeping a community together?"
Anna tensed up. Her eyes flared wide, and for a moment Lara thought perhaps she'd pushed it too far. To lose Anna now would be huge. Perhaps there was a softer way of bringing her around, but Lara didn't know what it was, so a blunt instrument would have to do.
And that instrument was Cerulean. It was a guilt button she could push one time and one time only, so she had to make it count.
"Cerulean would agree with me. You know he would. Look at the people around you, living like they're homeless, like no place is safe any more, and waiting for what? For you to finalize your massacre plans? For Amo to come round? He's out of it, Anna, you're right, he'll be no help for weeks yet, maybe months. There's no hope right now, but that's not how New LA works. Cerulean knew that too. Hope is the glue that binds us, our shared vision of a better future, and we can't get that in this place. We sorely need it, and I'm betting you'll realize that. I'm betting you really are the good, sweet girl I've always known you were, and you're going to help me get this engine moving again."
The Last Mayor Box Set Page 119
