by Andy Graham
Echoes of yesterday afternoon, of the last face-to-face conversation she’d had with her sister, echoed in her ears.
“Really, my dear.” Vena pulled her chair into the shade under the leaves of the Folly Tree. “Did you honestly expect Rick Franklin to spend the rest of his life pining for you after you left him? He was a good-looking man, dependable, hard-working, loyal and kind to boot. There aren’t many of them left. He was handy with a screwdriver, too.”
Beth laughed. “One of the first things he said to me was a good screw could solve all sorts of problems.”
“From wedlock to walls,” Vena added.
They giggled as they had as teenagers.
“That was the first thing? What was the last thing he said to you?”
Beth’s giggles died. “Look after my daughter Rose.”
They sat in silence. Beth stared at her toes. She spoke. “It happened so quickly: Rick meeting Thryn, their marriage, him fathering Rose. I don’t think I had time to adjust.”
“And then Rose had children of her own.”
“More than should have been possible.”
Vena cocked her head to one side. “That wasn’t anything to do with you, was it, Beth?”
“No. Not initially.”
“Care to elaborate?”
“Later, Vena. Later.”
“I’m the eldest twin, Beth. I’ve known you longer than you have. What are you hiding?”
The thought of what she was hiding was even more chilling here deep under the streets of Effrea than it had been high above those streets on her terrace. Beth shivered and stared into the shadows lining the tunnel. Glints and fragments of light off her guards’ weapons reminding her of Rick’s infernal bent coin. The Franklin family had become the lynchpin in the saga that was no longer playing to a select few in the corridors of power. The convoluted story was dragging the rest of the population, and possibly the entire island Ailan shared with Mennai and the Donian Tribes, into its auditorium. Beth hadn’t foreseen this when she had cast her loaded dice all those years ago. Vena knew some of Beth’s plans but not all. The question was, how much did she know?
The wind hissed through the leaves of the Folly Tree behind Beth and Vena. In the distance, the ugly caw of hunting fisher gulls competed with the thud of the helicopters enforcing the no-fly zone around Beth’s tower.
“Well, if you don’t want to tell me your plans,” Vena said. “At least tell me how you are coping with the death of our mother. Our phone call yesterday wasn’t very successful.”
For you, Beth thought. “Fine,” she answered.
“Sure?”
“Mostly.”
“You know you can—“
“I’d rather not talk about it.”
Vena pulled a phone, a manila envelope and a collection of hard-boiled sweets (both wrapped and unwrapped) out of the pocket of her long black coat. She laid them on the table. “Damn it. Never got them when I need them.”
“Here.” Beth held out a tissue.
“Government issue?”
“Of course. One of the perks of power.” Beth smiled. She could hear her own voice echoing off the tiles of a basement room under a former hospital, memories of a conversation held long ago with a young Rose Franklin.
“Thank you.” Vena touched the tissue to her eyes, it came away with a black smudge. “It’s this cold air. It makes my eyes weep.” She gestured around them with a spindly hand.
Above the sisters, a vast expanse of crystal clear sky stretched out endlessly, untouched by clouds and the flashing lights of drones and sun-fans. “What’s that?” Beth pointed to the envelope.
“Just some homework I needed to pick up.” Vena pocketed her belongings.
They sat in silence, watching the leaves shimmer in the wind, listening to the dull rumble of traffic from far below.
“If you hadn’t left Rick,” Vena asked finally, “would things have been different?”
“Of course. That’s a dumb question.”
“Try this one, then. Did you leave Rick purely out of fear of him leaving you first? Did the mighty Bethina Laudanum reject Rick Franklin before he could reject her?”
“Of course not, Vena. That’s a dumb question, too.”
“Questions of unrequited love tend to be difficult, not dumb.”
“That was dumb. As Dad used to say, my leaving Rick so he couldn’t leave me wouldn’t have been so much cutting your nose off to spite your face—”
“But a case of stamping in dog shit on the pavement because you were annoyed someone had let their dog foul the streets,” Vena finished. “Dad was another good man.”
“Mum didn’t deserve him.”
“That’s harsh, Beth. Even for you. Her body hasn’t even had time to start rotting.”
Beth pulled her coat tight around herself. “I have work to do.”
They said their farewells. One of Beth’s dogs lifted its head, ears twitching as the animal watched the older twin leave. “Vena,” Beth called.
Her sister turned, blue eyes glinting.
Beth held out the manila envelope, her hand was quivering. “You forgot this.”
“Oh, yes, silly me. Thank you. I’ll be needing that tomorrow.”
It disappeared into a pocket. Beth pulled Vena into an embrace. The sunshine, cut with shades of green from the Folly Tree, gleamed on Vena’s oil-black hair, identically coloured and cut to Beth’s.
“There, there. It’ll be OK. You’ll be OK.”
“I know,” Beth replied.
Vena patted her sister’s shoulder and left, seemingly uncomfortable by Beth’s prolonged farewell.
“Ma’am,” said the head of her security team, wrenching Beth back to the dank tunnels under the city. “We should get going.”
“Yes, Captain. Give me a moment.”
She pushed Vena from her mind. Farther down the corridor, the door to the VP’s underground office swished open. His Unsung guards exited. She could see the overly demonstrative gestures, the school-boy sniggers. They set off the other way. Beth regretted dragging the young men into this play. Their relatives were sure to receive a message before long. It would speak of a tragic, yet classified, turn of events, possibly a training accident. She wrapped her arms around herself so she didn’t feel quite so alone. “Captain Lacky?”
“Yes, ma’am?”
She gestured to the two Unsung. “Do you think we’re doing the right thing? Have we ever done the right thing?”
“Ma’am?”
“We take men and women in their prime, forge them in the physical furnace of training, teach them skills and encourage loyalty. But then all that time, energy and life can be snuffed out at a whim or by a mistake. It happened in the attack on Castle Brecan just before the Silk Revolution.”
“I almost died in that attack, ma’am.”
“I know.”
“Rick Franklin saved my life. I owe him.”
“Rick Franklin made the mistake that made the attack possible. He felt he owed you and many others a debt that could never be repaid.”
Lacky shrugged. “That’s life and death in the military.”
“Edward De Lette instigated the attack, Lacky.” The words tasted like dust in her mouth.
“The former president?” The legionnaire, always unperturbed, stared at her.
“De Lette bombed his own people to start the Silk Revolution to further his own ends.”
“Why are you telling me now, ma’am?”
“Your father served me well. You have served me well. You deserve the truth.”
Lacky’s heels clipped together. Beth knew he had already compartmentalised the news to pick through at a later time.
“My family and all your security team pride ourselves on our loyalty.”
“Loyalty,” Beth repeated. The VP’s Unsung were disappearing into the darkness. “Misplaced loyalty at its most costly,” she whispered, with a mental tip of her hat to Rick Franklin. “I’m sorry for what your families are
about to go through,” she whispered at the now distant shapes of the guards. Beth turned her back on the men and their fate.
Her own guards fell in beside her. She paid them enough to ensure not only their loyalty but also their families’. They framed her in the heart of a diamond. Her battle-scarred dogs materialised from nowhere. They padded alongside her, lethal shadows whose loyalty was more pure than anything a human could manufacture.
The entourage stopped at a small underground platform. The old postal tunnel was one of many tunnels honeycombing the underworld of Effrea and Tye. One of her dogs sniffed its way around the carriage. The other headed along the rails that stretched into the black maw of the tunnel. The dip and fall of the dog’s behind and the swing of his bushy tail slowly disappeared.
Beth’s guard, satisfied the carriage was clean, nodded her forwards. As the darkness closed round her gently whirring carriage, the amber bunker lights lit to drive away the shadows.
She had just rolled the dice again in a way she hadn’t for years. Against a man as lethally competent as the VP, it was a huge gamble. The VP was a dangerous opponent, one of the reasons she had kept him on her side for so long, but she was itching for a decent challenge. She’d hit him hard, embarrassed him in front of his guards, laid down the gauntlet in a manner that was as blatant as she’d dared. Now she had to sit back and wait for the dice to settle.
The train glided forwards into the darkness. The dull red bunker light reflected back out of her eyes, like dying embers in a fire, keeping hell warm to stop the permanent freeze of death.
28
The Musical Graveyard
The chopper with Ray and the rebels landed close to Effrea. A middle-aged family wagon (complete with random stains and baby seats encrusted with old food fragments) was waiting to transfer them to the city. There, Martinez led them through the maze of smugglers’ tunnels that wormed their way under the city walls. Many of the routes Ray knew had been sealed by the government’s new Underwall, a subterranean mirror image of the wall that surrounded the city above ground. But for every new dead end, two more openings replaced it. The disdain for the smugglers the military had tried to hammer into Ray as a rookie had been replaced by a sense of pride: pride in people’s refusal to stay beaten. The final tunnel opened into a warehouse.
The ground floor was vast. The walls were lost in an inky blackness. The ceilings were lit by an occasional dull crimson globe. The lights hung like the devil moons that had illuminated many of the fairy tales of Ray’s youth. The same stories the government had tried to ban. They, too, like the tunnels, defied all attempts at decapitation.
Memories of his time under the Donian Mountains stirred, the whispering smell of sulphur, the red ache in his back from the stooped march through the upper tunnels. Brooke.
His memory’s eye could see the glistening lines of sweat tracing around the curves of her body. His heart quickened as he recalled running his fingertips and tongue along those lines. The images warped. Brooke crumpled to the floor, her long legs twisted underneath her. Sci-Captain James’s rock hammer stuck out of a bleeding wound in the amber rock. And the endless, bestial roar of the creature.
The dull ache in Ray’s back flared. “Keep it together, legionnaire,” he whispered. “No dawdlin’, no maudlin.”
Ray’s eyes adjusted to the darkness. They were in a labyrinth of pianos and harps that stretched off into the blackness. “What is this place?”
“Officially, it’s Warehouse 433,” Martinez replied. “My pre-legion friends and I call it Cage 433, the silent cage. None of these things should be locked up. None of these instruments should be quiet.”
Martinez pointed them out with his crutch, naming them as he did. A grand piano towered protectively over the baby grand by its side. There were uprights and one honky-tonk; its silent, dusty guts were on display. There were pedal harps, lap harps, lyres and guitars. A forest of stringed instruments were propped up against each other, including a steam bass and a bull banjo. Trumpets, a slide horn and a tail-gate ’bone hung in the air, brass bats on invisible wires.
“Shortly before I signed up, the government cut funding for the arts completely,” Martinez said. “It hadn’t been much more than a trickle for years, but they turned the tap off totally.”
“I vaguely remember that. Didn’t really affect us out in the Towns. There’s no time for luxuries like music and art.”
Martinez’s gaze took in the instruments around them. “The government claimed anything not involving numbers was a waste of a child’s education and recreational time. They said the arts had a detrimental effect on the earning potential and meaningful employment opportunities of their citizens. They kept the concert halls open but revoked all performance licences. Many of the musicians and venue owners had to sell up to meet with the compulsory retraining costs that were foisted on them.”
Martinez snapped at one of the Mennai twins, Dylan, to stick close. His voice echoed back at him, accompanied by a shimmering in the air, the aural equivalent of the moons of Ailan setting in the sea. “There was one obvious problem: who could you sell musical instruments and art paraphernalia to when everyone was trying to sell the same?”
One of the harps next to him hummed a discordant response.
“The market had been gutted. The Great Museum managed to buy a few instruments, but that was it. Then one of the government ministers stepped in. With a huge fanfare — literally — she rounded up, and probably sobered up, every remaining brass player she could find. She proclaimed she would buy up any instrument that anyone would sell for a proportionate fee. One massive cheesy publicity stunt.”
“Is there any other type?” Ray asked.
“Since when did you get cynical?”
“A couple of months back. Looking for a twin brother in a secret government research camp and then discovering you are that brother will do that to a man, you know?”
Martinez returned the smile. The burn marks on his face glistening in the half-light. “What the minister didn’t say was her way of valuing the instruments was to weigh them. They paid an amount for wooden instruments equivalent to firewood of the same weight, and scrap metal for the brass. A day later the rumours were that even possession of musical instruments was going to be considered seditious. Word was that they were going to classify music as a drug for its effects on the nervous system. People sold their instruments. They had no choice.”
Martinez flipped up a piano lid, the ivory keys gleamed. He pressed one of the keys. A plaintive note crept into the air. The sleeping giants around them stirred, dust tumbling off the gently vibrating strings.
“The ban on musical possession was never enforced,” Martinez said. “I tracked down the source of the rumour using the Light Net.”
“Let me guess, it originated in the office of the minister who bought all this stuff.”
Martinez nodded. “You really have become cynical. You’re not related to your mother, are you?”
Ray snorted a laugh. “After everything else that has happened, I wouldn’t be surprised if she was some kind of maternal decoy.”
There was a soft popping noise behind them. The young kid, Sebb, had his weapon at his shoulder and was pretending to take shots at the pianos. Ray groaned. “What happened to all the instruments?”
Martinez rapped Sebb over the wrist with his crutch. The boy’s face flushed a dirty red. “I checked again recently. A minister has proposed a pilot programme to reintroduce music to some of the richer schools. The only problem is the schools have no instruments.”
“So who do they buy the gear from?” asked Ray. “Don’t tell me. The woman who bought them at a rock-bottom price in the first place.”
“That’s too obvious. Her daughter owns the instruments now. She’s selling them back. She has a different family name to her mother.”
“Clever.”
Martinez nodded. “A predictable coda to go with a clever exposition.”
“Where do you fit into th
is?”
“I come from a family of musicians. When I was a kid, it was all I wanted to be. Mum said I could sing before I could talk, dance before I could walk.”
“Mothers exaggerate, they remember the good things.”
“I wish your mother would,” Martinez said.
“Maybe she’s forgotten how.” Now that really is maudlin, Ray thought. Brooke wouldn’t have bothered with verbal recriminations for a comment like that. She’d have just slapped him.
Martinez wiped the dust from the piano off his fingers. “I remember watching my dad on stage in a secret gig. He was a straight-faced man, bordering on dour. When he was playing, you could see the joy burning through every vessel in his body. He had a smile that could shatter rocks. He had devoted as much time and money to his profession as any doctor, lawyer or politician.” Martinez’s voice hardened. “At a stroke of a pen, it was all taken from him.”
“And you joined the legions? We’re not the most musical bunch.”
“Dad encouraged me to sign up. He said the conformity of the nonconformity prevalent amongst so many musicians could easily be channelled in the military. He said I already had the necessary discipline and was used to surviving on not much sleep.”
“Dying on stage isn’t the same as dying on a battlefield, Tino.”
“I know. I got lucky, I just lost a leg and some of the skin on my face. There are many who got handed a whole lot less luck than me.”
Skovsky. Hamid. Aalok. Lenka. Rhys. The names rattled through Ray’s head. But not Brooke. Not Brooke. Heat prickled up his back. He wasn’t sure if it was hope or guilt.
“What happened to your dad?”
