The Misrule series Box Set

by Andy Graham

  Beth patted the air in front of his face. Urging him to be quiet. “This was Colonel Chester’s favour for me in return for my getting her Hamilton’s bank records. Why do you think a staff sergeant with a penchant for answering back got buried in a war heroes’ cemetery with full military honours?”

  “For being a war hero!”

  “No more than the next soldier.”

  “You rigged my father’s funeral? Did you arrange for the posthumous medals, too?”

  “No, that was the army. They insisted.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Beth laid the envelope on the bench, scooting herself closer. “Think about it, Rick. Medals aren’t for those who died. What use is it to them? It’s to entice more people into the army. It’s the biggest propaganda coup in history, all the glitz and glamour. All the pomp and circumstance is designed to get more men and women into the war games. There was going to be a symbolic funeral anyway, I just made it your father’s.”

  “You—” Rick raised a shaking finger.

  “What?” she demanded. “You’re not happy he got the recognition he deserved?”

  “Not like this.”

  “Who do you think makes these choices in the first place?” Beth’s eyes flared, her lips set into a thin line.

  The stand off was broken by a soft tap on the back of the van. An arm was thrust through the door, fingers and thumb spread wide, a large watch on the wrist. Rick stared at the ticking hands, hearing the heavy pendulum of the grandfather clock in his home in Tear. He wondered if it had stopped when Private Marka and the others had died.

  The arm disappeared. Beth pulled the door shut. The buzz and clank of noise from outside faded. It left the sound of Rick’s and Beth’s breathing, quick and shallow.

  “I need to go soon,” Beth whispered, “please listen.”

  He grasped the shiny skin on his wrists. The words he wanted to shout at her stuck in his craw.

  “When I realised this revolution was actually going to happen, I panicked,” Beth said. “I didn’t want to be on my own desert island, being promised heaven while trying to outlive hell. Not knowing which bridge I needed to cross and which to burn. I was scared. And then I heard rumours De Lette wanted to make an example of you. He was worried about your popularity. He felt the rebellious streak that runs in your family was going to cause him problems. I convinced De Lette to allow me to bring you in. I vouched for your behaviour.”

  “What about the Unsung, the attack in the alley?”

  “I was told it was accidental, that an order that should have been cancelled wasn’t.”

  “You believe that?”

  “About as much as I believe the sun accidentally rises every day. I thought I could keep you safe here, Rick, make you too useful to the government for them to want to lose you.”

  “Now everyone loses me. Except for the slavers in the uranium mines.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t see that one coming.” She took his hands in hers and squeezed them. Her fingers were cold. “You have to believe me on this one, please.”

  “I do.” Rick placed a finger under her chin and forced her to meet his eyes. “Now, no more deflections. De Lette said you called me here to win me back. As devious as he is, I think he’s too worried about being caught out to tell an outright lie.”

  Beth clutched his hand to her chest, tears welling up in her eyes. “I’m sorry. Truly. De Lette was right. I never wanted you to leave.”

  26

  Wedding Burns

  The tears burst from Beth’s eyes as Rick wrenched his hand free. “You left me!” he said. “You told me your career came first, that you couldn’t waste time on me or a family.”

  “I meant it. That’s why I walked out.”

  “Walked out? You posted me the engagement ring.” There was a time when he wouldn’t have been able to say those words without shouting them. But even now, as happy as was with his wife and child, as terrified as he was of where the van was about to take him, the gut wrenching sense of disbelief when he had opened the envelope to see the ring still left a bitter taste.

  “I know and I’m sorry. It was the most cowardly thing I’ve ever done. But I thought I could do much more for the world by trying to change it from the top of the pyramid. I could never see myself making tiny vicarious changes through one or two children.”

  “You build a wall one brick at a time, Beth.”

  “It takes too long. I did what I needed to do. I’ve no time for the rabbit warren of conjecture and hypotheses: if I’d stayed with Rick, then blah blah blah. I will always do what I have to do to make the changes that need to be made to better this country.” She blinked back the tears. “But I miss you. I miss what we could have had. And I wasn’t honest with you about why I didn’t want children.”

  “You bring this up now? Your speech about the hypocrisy of childhood and now this?” He punched the metal grill covering the van walls. Bright beads of blood formed on his knuckles. His hand should hurt but he was so wired on adrenaline he barely felt it. Maybe Dads, Stann’s old man, had been right: violence was medicinal.

  “Please, Rick, hear me out.”

  “Quickly, I’ve got somewhere to go.” He thrust his hand into his pocket and wrapped his fingers around the damaged coin. It burnt to the touch.

  “I told you how I feel about kids. I couldn’t stand myself before I hit my teens. Now? If I spend more than a minute in the company of any child, I want to throttle myself and beat myself over the head with whatever piece of cheap plastic crap they’re playing with. And as for my mother...” Her breath caught in her throat. “You once told me your mother claimed ‘the tidier a home, the more bored the children.’”

  “Father. Not mother. He revelled in the chaos of childhood. Told us we’d be following rules for the rest of our lives. Said we should enjoy the freedom while it was acceptable.”

  “Our house was spotless,” Beth said. “Rigid. You needed permission for everything. Every mouthful of food was monitored and not just because we were poor. Our days were timetabled to a point that you soldiers would think it repressive. My relationship with my mother was sterile. She would put toys away that we were still playing with. What kind of effect does that have on a developing brain? I’m long past the age that I can blame her for my actions, but I can still blame her for hers, for the upbringing she gave me. I swore I would never inflict that on anyone else.”

  “Are you saying you walked out on me because you were worried about becoming your mother?”

  “No,” she whispered. “I was scared about my children turning into me. So I decided to never have them. And the reason I ran from you is that I could imagine having kids with you. I could see myself settling down and watching the world burn through my kitchen curtains. That’s why I walked away and posted you the ring. I wanted to make it up to you. I don’t care about Thryn or Rose but I wanted to do right by you. I tried to help you, telling myself I was just doing an old friend a favour. I thought that for every string I pulled for you, I would right the wrongs that I, and the world, had thrown at you. Your father’s funeral was only part of it. I kept your wife out of the immigration camps. I suggested you be posted to Castle Brecan to get you out of the city when the rumours of the revolution got louder.”

  “That’s why I got sent there so abruptly?” It had never made sense. Now, Rick would almost have preferred it had stayed that way, but Beth wasn’t finished.

  “Colonel Chester had assured me Brecan was a safe posting. It’s one of the few things she’s got wrong. I encouraged De Lette to promote you. I insisted on longer rehab for your shoulder to keep you in the capital, and then called you back here once I realised the revolution was going live. By that point I realised I wasn’t trying to protect you, I was trying to win you back. I never wanted you to leave, Rick. I loved you more than I could ever tell you. You made me whole, gave me what I’d never had from anyone. De Lette was right.”

  As each sentence hit home,
another of the skittles that his life had been balancing on over the last few months fell.

  “I’m sorry, Rick, truly. I didn’t think my help would send you to the mines.”

  The mines. The gas. Rick coughed. Once. Get it out of the system. Forget about it. He sunk his head into his hands, dragging his fingernails through his hair. Fragments of images whirled through his head: Thryn, Rose, Stann, the dead girl from Castle Brecan. They were all dancing in Beth’s giant shadow, a woman pregnant with hope and desperation who had ensnared herself in her own puppet strings. His thoughts were broken by a noise. A sound that smelt of paper and ink. Something he remembered echoing off wooden shelves and burying itself in dusty carpets. Laughter. He looked up at Beth to see her smiling cautiously at him.

  He was laughing.

  Rick picked the envelope off the floor, where it had fallen unnoticed. “We’ve come a long way since we were caught rolling around under A for Anatomy, Beth.”

  “On the floor of Tye’s Great Library, just before it closed. It was one of my favourite places. As convenient as electronic books are, there’s nothing like being surrounded by the real thing. They have a presence, a weight, a smell to them that . . . Sorry,” she said in a small voice and wiped her eyes with her sleeve. “I’m rambling, aren’t I?”

  “Yes.”

  “‘You know what that means’, you said.”

  “Yes. I know what it means when you play with the mole on the end of your nose, too.”

  Her hand snapped back down to her lap. There was a momentary silence save for the thump of his heart. The distant sound of a clock pendulum beating.

  “They were good times, fun, mischievous.” Beth picked at a thread on her trousers, a faint blush colouring her cheeks. “We never did get to work our way through the alphabet. I think the librarians are thankful.”

  “And the cleaners.”

  “Yuck.” She wiped a tear off her cheek and pulled a folded paper square from the envelope. “Here, this is for you.”

  He unfolded the paper, his fingers tripping over themselves, and emptied the contents into his hand. It was a piece of paper, covered in a child’s oversized writing. “This is the picture from the wall of your office.”

  “Those simplistic children’s stories I told you about? My mother was full of them. Most were the banal stories I mentioned about the good guy who always wins, gets the girl, sweeps her off her feet and they ride off into the sunset to live happily ever after.” Beth looked to be a prayer’s breath away from spitting her disdain into the corner of the van. “But her two favourites were different, old ones that survived the Great Flood when they should have drowned. The first was about a boy who proved his manhood by pulling a sword from a stone. The second, a girl who proved her womanhood with a bruise caused by a pea buried under a stack of mattresses she had slept on. A man’s validity to rule based on strength; a woman’s on weakness. This is the crap that pollutes children’s minds from an early age.”

  Rick traced his fingers around the bubble letters. “‘The pea is mightier than the sword,’” he read, finally understanding what the text meant. “It’s not a spelling mistake?”

  “No, it was my twin’s idea. She wrote it down one day and I did the picture. As ten-year-olds we found the sentence hilarious, repeated it so often that even my dad told us to shut up.”

  Rick squeezed his eyes closed, wincing at all the memories of him shouting at Rose to find a new joke, to stop giggling every time someone said ‘bum’. He wished he could take back every harsh word, every curse and moment of irritation, and replace them with a kind word, a hug or a smile.

  “That’s one of the rules of childhood: the more often a child tells a joke, the funnier it gets. I thought even you knew that?”

  Beth grunted and waved her hand at the picture. “My mother didn’t get it, the picture that is. But then she doesn’t seem to understand anything not involving a cookbook, or articles with titles like ‘Seven Ways to Achieve an Unbelievable Whatever’, ‘The Must-Read Secret to Such and Such’, or ‘You’ll Never Believe What Happened When Blah Blah Blah.’” It’s infantilising, attention-baiting crap that feeds our insecurities. A form of insidious mental slavery that women are force-fed since birth.”

  “Some of the men’s magazines aren’t much better.”

  “That’s not my problem. You have enough muscle-headed heroes to fight your corner.” Beth took a deep breath, calming herself. “The picture still makes me smile when I think of it, of my sister, but it means so much more to me now. Everyone has their own reason to fight. I have mine. This is why I do what I do.”

  He gave her the picture but she pushed it back into his hands. “Take it. It won’t replace your family, or what I did and didn’t do, but it may do something.”

  Rick turned the paper over, tracing the letters with his finger. Random letters were capitalised, colourful lines tracing bubbles around the words. He folded the picture up along the precise lines she’d pressed into it, and placed it back on her lap. “Thank you, Beth, but this is your fight, your family.” He pulled the coin out of his pocket. It was bent and blackened. Dark flecks still clogged up the milling around the edges. A simple thing that was heavy with threats of what was to come. “This is my fight.”

  As he clutched the coin in a fist, the scars on his wrists gleamed. Beth took his hands in hers. “Why did you do it? Burn yourself like that?”

  “It’s an old wedding tradition for Thryn’s people. The southern Mennai don’t do it anymore. You wrap your hands in a thin sheet of cloth and someone sets fire to it. It’s only supposed to leave superficial marks, though some people let it burn for longer.” He pressed the coin into the shiny skin on one wrist until it bit into the skin. “A measure of their devotion, I guess. Occasionally, couples make the mistake of wearing long sleeved shirts or billowing veils. So most ceremonies have at least one bucket of water hidden somewhere nearby. Highly decorated, of course, just in case it does need to make an appearance.”

  “Why not just exchange rings?”

  Rick looked up to see his own image staring back at him out of Beth’s eyes. The mole on her nose she had once admitted to trying to slice off with a razor blade. The woman who had once meant everything to him until Thryn turned his world, and his heart, upside down and gave him a daughter who sent the same heart into a tailspin. One was his morning, one was his evening. His reason for breathing, his reason for digging.

  “You can take a ring off.”

  A metallic rap on the door, and the van was once more filled with artificial light. Captain Lacky informed them the regular guards were on their way back. Beth thanked him and turned back to Rick. Tears streaked down her cheeks, catching the grey light inside the van.

  “You know you’re—” Her voice cracked.

  He pulled her close, folding his arms round her. She was more petite than his wife, seemed to take up less space. Odd that six years ago, she had fit the space between his arms just as perfectly as Thryn did now. He squeezed her shoulders, felt the heat of her skin on his, drank in the scent of her perfume, flowers singing on a dew-covered morning.

  “Look after my family, Beth,” he whispered into her hair. “Look after Rose.”

  27

  The Gunpowder Tower

  Edward De Lette kicked his feet against the balcony floor, his swinging bench lurching into a lazy arc. Above him, a black stone tower stretched into the night. The peeling gold leaf glittered an answer to the spires and skyscrapers dotted across the star-lit city.

  The building De Lette had appropriated had been one of the original gates to an early incarnation of the capital city, Effrea. Not Effrea-Tye anymore, just Effrea. He regretted that having happened on his watch, but devolution was sometimes a necessary part of progress. The tower straddled a road that led to one of the main squares in the city. Originally named after a long forgotten saint — the patron saint of superstition, the president had joked to a sniggering aide — the structure had been renamed the Gunpow
der Tower.

  Kegs of the stuff had been stored there in preparation for an attempt at sabotaging the Palaces of Democracy. An attempt that failed when one of the bombers had run a small test to check the quality of the powder. Rumour had it the compulsive smoker believed you could taste a powder’s quality. A sister rumour stated the man was both clumsy and forgetful. De Lette took it to mean that even evolution had a sense of humour.

  Once the rubble had been cleared out and the tower basement scraped clean of plotters, a forward-thinking monarch had his builders construct a series of underground chambers and tunnels during the repairs. One of De Lette’s predecessors had upgraded them. Edward had deleted the records.

  He liked the irony of living here. Hidden in the heart of the city in a building synonymous with a history of rebellion. The symmetry was ever sweeter now the square in front of him had become the de facto meeting place for the resistance’s demonstrations. The nightly face-offs, though largely peaceful, would dissolve into violence when given the right prompting. Colonel Chester’s legion of Unsung were proving more useful than he had envisaged.

  De Lette scooped a mobile computer screen off the cushioned seat and thumbed it to life. A harsh glow flared as the video started. A man was standing in front of a full-length mirror, half a hand gripping a wooden crutch. Unshaven, gaunt and topless, he examined his torso. Violent purple circles and blue, baton-shaped bruises whipped around his body. The ex-soldier’s eyes spasmed shut with pain. His hand slipped off the crutch and he crashed onto a dented, metal tube on the floor. As the tube rocked to a standstill, De Lette realised it was a false leg.

  He set the screen down. It was a fine night; he didn’t want to spoil it. He’d told the Unsung to get the information out of the ex-soldier any way they could. Their reports stated the man — Taille, he thought his name was — had withstood the beatings but cracked when the Unsung had threatened his family. De Lette’s men had been a little more enthusiastic than he had wanted. He would have to have a word with someone about that. They needed to be more discreet. A bruise was still a bruise, no matter where it was.