Cities and Thrones

by Carrie Patel

  “Not nearly as much as you’ve put in the Qadi and her allies,” Jane said. The growing sense that she had nothing much to lose filled her with unusual boldness.

  “My allies,” Ruthers said.

  “For now. How does this work out for you, anyway? Is Recoletta supposed to welcome you back?”

  “Actually, yes,” Ruthers said. “You’d be surprised at how much people crave familiarity after something like Sato’s mess.”

  “And what’s to stop another Sato from rising up against you? Your allies in Madina and elsewhere won’t keep fighting your battles.”

  “You think I don’t know that?” he snapped. “This,” he said, spreading his hands and gesturing at the office, “this is a balancing act. And one that’s never more than a step or two from collapse. People like you, your parents – you think position is somehow a protection. A source of safety and comfort. That couldn’t be further from the truth.” Ruthers scowled, his face showing lines carved by years of slow but persistent pressures.

  Just as quickly, his expression shifted again to that look of well-bred authority that all of Recoletta had known for years. “But once you’re here, there’s nowhere else to go,” he said.

  “But you have a plan. The vault,” said Jane.

  He nodded. “Sato and I are the last two people who know the code.”

  “Once it’s open, you’ll have outlived your usefulness,” Jane said.

  His smile flattened. “You should start worrying about yourself, Miss Lin.”

  Jane looked at her hands, two empty and useless appendages in her lap. “What’s going to happen to Roman and me?”

  “That’s a matter of some debate. The Qadi’s fond of you, but O’Brien would just as soon not take any chances. Roman will last at least as long as I need in order to access the vault. And you will last as least as long as needed to keep Roman under control. I’m afraid I can’t guarantee more than that, even considering your previous mercies.”

  She remembered that moment in another room not far from here, a gun in her hand but mercy in her heart. She had let Ruthers go, thinking that it would free both Roman and herself from haunting guilt and not realizing that it would imprison them both in other ways.

  The revolver shifted in her robes and nudged her hip, as if reminding her of its presence.

  She realized, too, that she hadn’t heard any noise in the hall since stepping into the room. It seemed suddenly curious that Ruthers hadn’t summoned any guards.

  Ruthers had read the emotion flickering across her face. Misread it, it seemed. He leaned forward, interlacing his fingers. “Understand that it’s nothing personal. Merely the way of things. That’s what separates my class from yours, you know. It’s not intelligence or diligence, as many of my peers have often suggested. It’s the ability to recognize what must be done and to do it, no matter the cost.”

  Jane understood. Over what felt like an eternity, she reached into her robes and grabbed the revolver, wrapping her fingers around the textured stocks. She raised it, feeling the strange balance of the thing in her hand.

  Yet Ruthers did nothing. He watched her with polite, even indulgent, amusement. “What is it you hope to accomplish this time?”

  Jane thumbed the hammer back.

  Ruthers chuckled.

  “What’s in the vault?” she asked. The question surprised even her, but the currency of information was familiar to her now.

  “Does it matter?”

  It did not. She fired.

  Pressing her finger on the trigger took more effort than she’d expected yet not as much as she felt it should, given the consequences. Yet even as she squeezed the trigger, dragging the microseconds into an arduous procession, Ruthers waited patiently.

  It was only as the bullet lodged beneath his sternum that she saw other emotions bloom from his dry confidence – doubt, surprise, and horror.

  Distantly, Jane knew that it had all happened in a matter of seconds, that the slow unraveling was a trick of the mind to assign order to chaos. The bullet had found its mark before there was a chance to consider the consequence of the choice.

  Ruthers slumped forward in his chair with a strangled groan. He stirred, bringing his hand to his chest. It came away red, and he laughed.

  Jane looked at the revolver, torn between impulses to hide it and to fire it again. The first inklings of doubt had begun to creep into her mind. She barred the door against them, focusing on the red between Ruthers’s teeth as he looked up at her, on the blue veins popping out from his old man’s hands, on the minute asymmetries of his pharaoh’s beard.

  Anything to keep from thinking about what she’d just done and whether she should have done it.

  He looked then from his hand back to her. He smiled as if he saw her doubt like nakedness.

  “You wanted to know about the vault,” he said, coughing. “Let me tell you a story.”

  A part of Jane knew that she shouldn’t listen. And yet another part of her craved anything to distract her from the doubt already festering in her conscience. Besides, there was nowhere to go, and she had never turned down an opportunity to listen in on good information.

  “Two, eleven, one-oh-one. The first three primes of one, two, and three digits. There once was a young lady who made a terrible choice to destroy a secret, only to become the last person who knew it. The code is two-one-one-one-zero-one. Absurdly simple, isn’t it?” He coughed. “It had to be memorable. Whoever built the vault was, no doubt, counting on the other safeguards to bar it off. Or maybe they wanted it to be found, the way you want someone to find your deepest, darkest secrets to save you the trouble of guarding them. It’s easier letting these things into the open, isn’t it? Easier to let go of these veneers of civility. There’s a catharsis in letting it go, a relief in letting it pass to someone else.” His eyelids fluttered and his voice faded.

  He laughed, blood bubbling between his lips. “Well, Jane. Now you know. And what are you going to do with that? How badly do you want to take that knowledge out of the world?” He grinned, his teeth like little pearls etched in blood.

  Just then, Bailey and a guard burst into the room. “Augustus, what’s going on in here? We heard–”

  They stopped, and Ruthers looked away from Jane and over her shoulder at the newcomers. His face was milk-pale, and his eyes rolled with the first signs of delirium.

  As the others pounded into the room and toward the desk, Ruthers looked back at Jane and smiled again, and she hoped fiercely that he would die before the others reached him. To her surprise, she realized that, if she had another ready shot and another frozen capsule of time, she’d shoot him again.

  Bailey and the guard knelt by Ruthers’s side, feeling his wattled, sweat-slicked neck for a pulse, pressing Bailey’s jacket into a useless bunch against his wound. Ruthers only winced.

  He looked at Jane one last time, but whatever he’d begun to say was no more than a garbled death rattle.

  Bailey and the guard looked back at her, and Jane felt as though they could see that dark core of her secret the same way Ruthers saw her guilt.

  The guard spoke first. “She–”

  “Yes,” Bailey said.

  “Sir, he’s dead. That means Sato–”

  “Is the last one who knows the code. Run.”

  The guard was on his feet and out the door, not sparing a glance back at the prone body.

  Bailey looked back at Jane. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

  But her eyes were fixed on Ruthers’s as she made sure they didn’t open again.

  “This changes everything,” Bailey said.

  Acknowledgments

  As a new author, I told myself that getting my first book published was the real test. If I could just get one out the door, it would all be downhill from there. How wrong I was. Cities and Thrones was a challenge and a joy to write, full of false starts and leaps of faith. I’d like to thank the family, friends, and colleagues who helped me celebrate the good
and work through the bad.

  First of all, thanks to agent extraordinaire Jennie Goloboy as well as Dawn Frederick and Laura Zats of Red Sofa Literary. Jennie’s calm, seasoned advice and her help with the business side of writing have been invaluable.

  It was a pleasure to work with Angry Robot again on this book and to feel their enthusiasm for it. I count myself fortunate to have found a publisher full of passionate people willing to take risks, and my special thanks go out to Phil Jourdan for his insightful feedback, Caroline Lambe and Penny Reeve for all things publicity, and Mike Underwood for all things, period. I’m grateful as well to Marc Gascoigne and Lee Harris for inviting me to join Team Robot a year and a half ago.

  One of the joys of becoming a writer is meeting and befriending others with the same passion. I’ve met so many wonderful people over the past year, and in particular I’d like to thank Tex Thompson for her sassy good sense and eleventh-hour advice; Wes Chu, Craig Cormick, and Anne Lyle for reaching out to a newbie; and Dan Bensen, Paul Krueger, Dan Koboldt, and Jamie Wyman for their support and friendship.

  I couldn’t have finished Cities and Thrones without the thoughtful criticism of my regular critique group, which includes Jacqui Talbot, Michael Robertson, Bill Stiteler, and Joy Johnson. I’m blessed to have had them with me since The Buried Life.

  Thank you also to the wonderful team at Obsidian Entertainment. I’m lucky to have two of the best gigs in the world, and doubly so to be surrounded by such talented and hardworking people.

  Most importantly, thank you to my family for their love, encouragement, and patience. Thank you to Richard and Jackie Lytle, Pravinchandra and Sonal Patel, Julie Lytle, Ryan and Sydney Thompson, and Hiren Patel most of all.

  About the Author

  Carrie Patel was born and raised in Houston, Texas, in the USA. An avid traveller, she studied abroad in Granada, Spain and Buenos Aires, Argentina. She completed her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Texas A&M University and worked in transfer pricing at Ernst & Young for two years.

  She now works as a narrative designer at Obsidian Entertainment in Irvine, California, where the only season is Always Perfect.

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  Deeper and down

  An Angry Robot paperback original 2015

  Copyright © Carrie Patel 2015

  Carrie Patel asserts the moral right to be

  identified as the author of this work.

  A catalogue record for this book is available

  from the British Library.

  UK ISBN 978 0 85766 552 2

  US ISBN 978 0 85766 553 9

  EBook ISBN 978 0 85766 554 6

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  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-0-85766-554-6