Dearly, Departed

by Lia Habel

  Beryl shook her head at this before continuing. “They’re basically embalmed. So, Baldwin there isn’t going to balloon up with gases, or ooze slime, or what have you. Victims are subject to more of a ‘dry’ decomposition … they’re almost like mummies.” She was getting excited now, science geek that she was. “And bacteria are responsible for most of our body odors, so they don’t smell like death or anything. They do wear out, but we can help them with that. It’s just the prions eating the brain that we can’t stop. We can slow it down a lot, but not stop it.”

  “So, could there be a cure?” Nora looked at me out of the corner of her eye. I found myself looking at the floor. I knew the answer to that one.

  “No,” Beryl said. “Prions essentially cannot be destroyed. We’ve tried antibiotics, antiretrovirals, acid—”

  “Freezing flesh, burning it—” Samedi ticked off.

  “Autoclaving works some of the time, but not enough to be thoroughly trusted. Um … industrial cleansers of all kinds …”

  “Your mother’s cooking …”

  “Radiation doesn’t do it—”

  “They’ve found prions on human bones in graves that are thousands of years old.” Samedi threw his arms wide. “You can’t kill them, for they’re not alive! I, for one, welcome our prion overlords. They made me who I am today.”

  “Besides,” I heard myself adding, “The ‘cure’ would really just … kill us for good.”

  I lifted my eyes. Nora was still watching me. I couldn’t read her expression at first, but then her eyes slowly closed and she lifted her hands to her temples. I noticed that she was looking a little pale. “Okay, enough science class now,” she said.

  “How about that breakfast? I told my friends we might join them, if you feel up to it.”

  Nora was still for a second before nodding. “Okay.”

  Dick rushed out of the room behind me—probably headed for the mess, to bark orders at anyone who would listen. I moved to the door to open it for Nora.

  “Thank you, Dr. Chase, Dr. Samedi,” she said.

  “Don’t mention it,” Beryl said with a motherly smile.

  “We’ll be here all week,” Samedi informed her.

  Nora didn’t look up at me when she walked past. I followed her out into the hall and walked at my normal pace for a few strides to get in front of her.

  “All right, straight on, and then we’ll cross the courtyard, outside …”

  The knock on the door was prim and precise, so I knew immediately whose it was.

  “Come in, Isambard.”

  I watched in the mirror mounted above my little vanity as my brother entered. He was a lean young man, fourteen years of age, with straight brown hair, hazel eyes, and a rather large mole on his cheek. He shut the door and bowed, a fussy movement. I bobbed my head, if only so he wouldn’t whine at me about not performing my “reverence,” and focused again on my reflection. Normally such formality was forgotten around siblings, but Isambard always insisted upon it.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  I was getting ready for the much anticipated Prime Minister’s address, which we’d been invited to attend. One of his officials had come to the house yesterday evening to present my father with a thick white envelope sealed with pearly blue wax. No one but the PM could use wax of that color, and so we’d known immediately that it was of importance.

  “The Prime Minister is sorry for the pain you must be experiencing as acquaintances of Miss Dearly’s,” the official had said, with a bow. “He wishes you to know that his father has always thought fondly of the young lady. He would be honored if you would attend as his guests.”

  When I’d thus learned that the envelope didn’t contain bad news about Nora, I nearly passed out from relief. Isambard, on the other hand, nearly had to resort to breathing into a paper bag in his excitement. I suspected that the invitation was all his peers had heard about during his morning lessons. He still attended the same public school that I had until I’d started at St. Cyprian’s.

  Isambard held out two cravats—one black with gray pinstripes, the other black with small red dots. “I haven’t a plain black cravat,” he said. “Which is more proper?”

  I stared at the cravats. “I can’t imagine that it matters, Issy.”

  “But it does!”

  “The one with the stripes, then.”

  “But stripes fell out of fashion last season, everything’s dots now …”

  “Give me strength.” I stood up and moved away from the vanity. I was wearing the lavender dress again. The material was thin and cool, and, accompanied by the memory of wearing it for the first time in front of Nora, it felt like ice against my skin—but I had none better. I approached Isambard and took the dotted cravat from his open hand. “Put on the striped one.”

  He scowled and said several very quiet, possibly unkind things, but slung the striped cravat around his neck.

  “It sickens me,” I said quietly as I folded up the dotted cravat, trying my best not to start crying again, “that here we are, thinking about what to wear, when my best friend might be dead in a ditch somewhere.”

  “Maybe,” Isambard said as he knotted his cravat, “you don’t realize that a good showing on our part could convince the rich to help us.”

  A slight breeze stirred the crocheted curtains hung over my room’s single open window and played with the archery ribbons I’d arranged on the far wall. “I know, logically, that everyone’s already doing all they can to find Nora.”

  He smoothed his cravat down within his black waistcoat. “Who said I was talking about her?”

  I actually heard the blood rushing in my ears. “What?”

  Isambard set his mouth in a line. “I’m serious, Pamela. This could be a big chance for us, if you’d stop being so selfish.”

  A million years went by, in my head, before I managed to ask, “Selfish?” The word didn’t come out half as forcefully as I wanted it to.

  My brother stepped closer, speaking rapidly, like a petitioner for a cause who’d managed to corner a member of Parliament on the public stage. “Yes! You never seem to take advantage of the chances that you’re given! Boom, you just happened to befriend a girl who became the daughter of a national hero! Like that, you sent off an application, and you were in the top school in the Territories! That’s not luck—that’s God’s will, Pam. For all of us! All you have to do is make a good marriage from it, and we’re golden!”

  “What?” I tried again, disbelieving. It still didn’t come out right.

  “If you do it fast enough, I’ll get into St. Arcadian’s before my schooling is up, for sure! Mom and Dad will have less to worry about—”

  “St. Arcadian’s?” It was the best boy’s school in the Territories. I stepped closer to Isambard, forcing him back. “Are you telling me that you think I should use this … this … spotlight, opportunity, whatever you might call it, to … to call attention to myself?”

  “Of course!” he said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “I mean, no one’s going to ever care about our family otherwise. Why not try to stand out while we can?”

  “St. Arcadian’s,” I said, mostly to myself, as I continued to boggle at my brother. And then the words came out. “This is because you were too stupid to get in on your own, isn’t it? Who’s selfish, here?” He’d applied, I knew, and was rejected—twice.

  My brother’s face contorted in fury. “Shut up!”

  “No, you shut up! Don’t try to foist your brown-nosing, ladder-scrambling ways on me! I’ve been lucky, yes, and I’ll do what I please with what that luck has given me! Besides, this isn’t about us—this is about Nora!”

  “So you’d let the rest of us suffer?” he seethed. “You think I’m going to be some no-name baker? Never! I don’t belong here. I’m too smart to be here.”

  “Then serve yourself, brother, but don’t you dare try to tell me that Mother and Father have some stake in it. What would you do, have my future husband
support them? They’re proud people, they’d never accept that.”

  “Why don’t you ask Mom why she’s willing to sit there embroidering, huh? If she were so proud, she’d be bucking tradition and working in the bakery as we speak.”

  “She’s doing it to protect me from embarrassment! I never asked her to!” My face felt hot and I couldn’t tell how loud my voice had become.

  “And why do you need to be protected from embarrassment, then, if you don’t care what the elite think of you?” he countered, nose lifted.

  “Get out.” I ran to the door and opened it wide. “Get out, and never set foot in this room again, do you hear me? You’re insane.”

  “What is all this?” My mother was just coming to the top of the stairs. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Nothing,” Issy agreed, voice surly.

  My mother sized us both up before telling Issy to go to his room. He yanked his folded cravat from my hand and marched out, fixing me with the fire of his eyes as he passed. I glared right back and tried to shut my door.

  “Pamela, don’t you dare shut your door on your mother.” I stopped and looked at her. She bent her head down. “I do not want to hear you raise your voice ever again. Is that understood?”

  “Isambard told me—”

  “I don’t care what he told you. I don’t care what anyone tells you. We are going out into good society this morning. I know you are upset—we are all upset. But you must keep your head and act like a lady. Ladies never raise their voices.”

  I stared at her in horror. Isambard was right. “I’m not a lady,” I reminded her, voice breaking. “My father bakes bread.”

  “You can become a lady. You can have a better life,” my mother said, taking my chin in her hands. “You are a smart girl. Think.”

  It was hard for me to swallow, the way she held my head up. I tried desperately to keep the tears back. I thought of what I might say, how I might argue my way out of this. But in the end all I said was, “All right.”

  Mom nodded and kissed my forehead. “Breakfast will be ready in a few moments,” she called, for Isambard’s benefit, as she headed back downstairs.

  After I shut the door, I knelt down and tried to pray for strength and patience.

  I ended up beating the floor with my palms until I could no longer feel any pain.

  After a cheerless and awkward breakfast, we walked to the town square. It was perhaps a mile from our house, but pretty much a straight shot up George Street.

  The buildings of New London were a mixture of refurbished prewar structures and new edifices designed to suit. What was now the Cathedral of Our Mother, for example, was actually a centuries-old bank outfitted with marble columns and a granite statue of the Mother of All, her head bent solemnly over the proceedings in the streets below. Depending on cost and circumstance, some people chose to erect blank concrete shells of buildings and throw up holographic exteriors. Whenever the power grid went down, they would flicker and die, though, and the city would look as if it had been subjected to a silent bombing or the pillaging of a swift and ghostly army.

  The street was crowded. It was eleven on a Tuesday, which meant we had to contend with the usual shoppers and workers and schoolchildren returning for their afternoon lessons. Boys in low tweed caps bearing packages rushed right through the foot and vehicle traffic, the small screens chained to their wrists barking orders at them and providing them with maps. Street vendors hawked their wares from their carts by screaming about them.

  “Apples by the pound!”

  “Have you been reading Barney the Vampyre? The latest chap-book in this phenomenal series is out! Download it to your digidiary now!”

  “Wind-up toys! Perfect for the holidays! Dogs, ponies, ballerinas!”

  Screens glowed within houses and businesses alike, all showing the same thing—correspondents waiting outside City Hall for the arrival of those invited to hear the PM speak. Digital clackboards twirled bright advertisements at us as we walked past, reading the chips in our wrists and customizing the content to our publicly available data. As a teenage girl, it was assumed I was interested in face cream and the upcoming spring fabrics and trims. Isambard’s head turned to take these particular ads in. The skies above us were filled with silver zeppelins, most of them military but a few flashing animated advertisements for new plays and television shows.

  Young women in worn but clean clothing sold vegetables and flowers from baskets beneath the shop and theater awnings. One had a small guitar and was singing “Greensleeves.”

  I watched the flower girls with deep emotion. I promised myself that if Nora were ever returned to me, I would marry the ugliest, smelliest man in the world in order to afford every flower I could get my hands on, and I would bury her in their fragrance and beauty.

  We were among the first to arrive at City Hall. They’d set up a barricade against the press, so although they shouted at us, we were able to slip on by. Father, in his best clothes, the flour brushed out of his hair, provided the guardsman with our invitation. The guard nodded smartly and turned to lead us in.

  City Hall was a palatial building of iron and granite. The floors within were marble, the walls carved with relief forms of our former Prime Ministers, the ceiling painted with images of the Flood from Genesis. This was a recurring theme in New Victorian design, as our forefathers had considered themselves the survivors of a flood of ash, ice, and snow.

  “Goodness me,” I heard my mother say, voice full of respectful awe.

  We were escorted to the second floor, which contained a velvet-and-gilding amphitheater designed to seat five hundred people or more. Workers were bustling about the stage, and reporters were setting up their recording equipment in the back. Above the stage, on a long piece of blond marble, were engraved the words, INDUSTRY, HONOR, CIVILITY, FAITH.

  “The Prime Minister would be honored if you would sit here, in the first row,” the guard told us. I swear my brother almost had a heart attack. As we took our seats, my mother slipped between him and myself, for which I was grateful.

  I recognized some of the people who came to sit near us. In a rare turn of events, it ended up being me and my fellow classmates who had to introduce our families. I took great pleasure in introducing my brother last each time. They told us they were praying for Nora’s safe return, and we thanked them. As the room filled, the introductions stopped, however, and soon we were simply one more family in the babbling crowd.

  “Familiar with so many of them, aren’t you?” Isambard breathed, tone smug. I ignored him. Truth was, I had spent more time with my classmates over the last eight years than with my own family.

  And yet I knew in my heart that they would never accept me fully. Issy would never understand that. He thought everything was so easy.

  Ten minutes later the Deputy Prime Minister made his way onto the stage and the gas lamps along the walls were dimmed. Final coughs were indulged in, and ladies fanned themselves in the artificial twilight, an endless whooshing of disembodied wings.

  “Ladies and gentlemen of New London,” he began. He was my father’s age, his chiseled features handsome, his skin the color of sun-baked earth. “I am very pleased to welcome you here today, and so very, very glad to see all of you. In these trying times our people will remain strong. It is the ability to carry on with life that will see us triumphant in the end. Your very presence here is a blow to the enemy.”

  There was thunderous applause at this.

  “As ever, it is my honor to introduce the Prime Minister of New Victoria, Mr. Aloysius Ayles.”

  We all stood to welcome the Prime Minister as he stepped onto the stage. Mr. Ayles was no older than his late forties, although lines already chased the corners of his eyes and mouth. He had molasses-colored skin, black hair, and a matching mustache and goatee. He looked much like his father, who’d retired from public life many years ago.

  He gestured for us to sit down. “I regret,” he began,
in his usual forthright tone, “that I have no news to share with you regarding either the attacks or the whereabouts of Miss Nora Dearly. Of course, all of our prayers are with her.”

  I fought back another rain of tears.

  “I invited you here today on rather short notice, and I am sorry for that. I should have spoken sooner. All of my attention has been focused on assigning our best and most capable men to the task of tracking down the villains who did this and bringing them to justice.

  “On the practical front, I can inform you that we are recalling three companies of soldiers to keep closer to home. We are simultaneously reorganizing our troops so we can step up our efforts on every front that is seeing active combat with the enemy. And we are growing a task force devoted solely to the mission of locating Miss Dearly, and bringing her home.”

  The tension in his voice grew with every word. “Why would anyone do something like this? Was their plan to murder, to rape and pillage? We’ve had no reports of confirmed deaths, no evidence of other homes targeted besides that of the late Dr. Dearly. They were obviously on a tightly focused mission. What was its purpose, then?

  “I believe it was to terrorize us. To frighten us. To make us alter our way of life. This is nothing new. Things like this will continue to happen so long as human beings have the capacity for fear.”

  My shoulders were tight, and I tried to relax them. I glanced at my family. Dad was listening intently; Mom was crying a little. Isambard was looking around without trying to look as if he was looking around. His posture practically screamed, Adopt me! Someone notice me and adopt me!

  Ayles lowered his eyes to the podium and picked up a stack of papers. He showed them to the room at large. “My notes here say that I should tell you that ‘our ancestors were not running from something, they were running to something.’ And then that I should go on to explain exactly what it is about that ‘something’ the Punks find so objectionable. But earlier this morning I decided that I shouldn’t patronize you. You all know our history. You all know what makes us the strongest tribe on the continent.