by Andy Graham
Martinez blushed under his scars. “Trapdoor at the back of the kitchen. Hidden under the copper-shod beer barrel.”
“I can’t move a beer barrel.”
“It’s got a fake bottom, there’s only beer in the top third. Take this.” Martinez tossed her the wooden bat. “Just in case.”
“Why?” A look of puzzlement crossed her face as she read the words.
“Just because. And…” He sighed, a fond smile drifting across his face. “Lynn called it her diplobat. Said it responded best to a woman’s touch.”
“I’m sorry about Lynn,” Stella said, clutching the bat. “She was a good woman.”
“She gave me a home and a life. She gave me hope,” Martinez replied. “But I reckon I’ve lost the least of all of us here today.”
The chair clattered to the floor as Ray lurched to his feet. His back pain was done teasing, it hit him with a cut-glass ache that made his toes tingle. He shouldn’t have sat down, he needed to keep moving. His mother was gone. His real brother was dead. His father had been executed years ago. Ray was left with Stann Taille and a murderous half-brother intent on wiping them out. Ray and Stann were all that was left of their family. Except—
An image crept into his mind: blue eyes bathed in light from a red-seamed rock, the taste of sweat on soft skin. Except he wasn’t alone anymore. Brooke was pregnant with their child. The thought brought him up in goosebumps. He’d wanted to shout at Stella that no amount of white-coat magic and stethoscope wizardry would bring Rose back when she’d just had a dig at him and Martinez. “Dead means dead,” he’d wanted to scream, “no matter how many syllables you wrap it up in.” Instead, he found himself saying, “Can I help with Em?”
“With my daughter?” The surprise on Stella’s face was blatant.
“I don’t have much experience with kids. I’m going to need the practice.”
“You know then,” she said.
Ray’s eyes cut from her impassive face to Martinez. At least he had the grace to look embarrassed. “Looks like I’m the last one to find out. You could have told me.”
“We’ve been busy, Ray. You know, dodging the government death squads, falling sun-fans, choppers and hunting dogs. Trying to find medicine for my husband, who could be dying for all we know. Coming up with a plan to rescue my son from that half-brother of yours.” Stella tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. She looked utterly exhausted. “What in the name of all the gods that never lived is going to happen next?”
“Werewolves,” Ray said absently.
“Werewolves?” Stella replied, voice rising.
“Or the Cracks,” Martinez added.
“What cracks?” She pointed the diplobat at the men in turn. “What are you two talking about?”
“The Cracks,” Martinez said. “The cracks in the pavement that leak into your leg. It’s how you get stress fractures and then your bones break. My mum said they break your soul so the good drains out and leaves you evil on the inside. People end up with a rotting heart . . .”
Under Stella’s withering gaze, a doctor force-fed studies and statistics in med school, a woman with as much use for hearsay and superstition as a fish had for a snorkel, a woman now clutching a well-used baseball bat, Martinez stuttered to a halt.
“Help me out here, man,” he said to Ray.
“The Cracks?” Ray shrugged. “Never heard of them.”
“You devious fucking c—”
“That’ll be enough, Tino Martinez.” Stella’s voice cut the air. “If this barrel is so easy to move, perhaps you’d like to do it for me and show me where my daughter is sleeping. And if she is not there, then I’ll use this bat to extract your heart, rotten or not, and feed it to you. I’ll even put a white coat on, just to remind you all that time we doctors spend studying how not to hurt people gives us an unfair advantage when it comes to hurting people.” She smiled sweetly as she swung the bat through the air. The swishing sound it made was as painful as it was suggestive. “Get it?”
Stella and Martinez left Ray in the bar. Dan was asleep on the floor. The nightmares that had been tugging at his limbs not so long ago must have gone. He lay motionless. Ray counted silently as he waited for the man’s chest to move. At what point did he check Dan was still breathing? At what point did he call for the doctor with no white coat or stethoscope?
“Seven,” he decided. He’d heard it was a spiritual number, had no idea why, had never had any interest in spirituality. But with his mother freshly dead, he wanted to believe that there was something beyond, something to give this madness sense.
“Beyond,” he muttered as he counted silently. “Beyond, where even the Cracks fear to tread.” Dan still hadn’t moved. “Five. Six.” Ray’s fingers gripped his chair. “S—” With a breath like a drowning man breaking the surface, Dan’s chest stuttered into motion. Fingers scrabbled on the floor and he settled back into an uneasy sleep that matched Ray’s mood.
Silence settled over the bar again. It seeped into walls that had been scrubbed clean of their cancerous yellow grime and were cut into odd shapes by shadows. “Too quiet to sit still,” Ray muttered. Too much of both of those things led to thinking. And this close to his mother’s death, he wanted to avoid that. He feared that the old need to crawl into a bed and pull the covers over his head to avoid the world would rear up and sink its talons into him, too deep for him to shake off. Lenka, his surrogate aunt, had chided and encouraged that tendency out of him with love and exhortations to responsibility.
(“There’s not much that teaches perspective better than the needs of little children and starving animals,” she had always said. “At least for those people who don’t have a wallet where their heart should be.”)
The legions had a more direct approach to therapy. Forced marches in boots with a bullet sandwiched up against your heel both made a point and ensured you were first out of bed the next day, especially when that bullet had the ‘sleeping beauty’s’ initials etched into it. The legion’s brutal therapy worked, admittedly in much the same way as opening a window to cool a room down when the heating was turned up too high, but it got results. Feet crunching on broken glass, Ray left his reflection in the waxed table and negotiated the fallen chairs and tables across to the jukebox.
“My baby,” Martinez said from behind Ray.
“You move quietly for a man with one-and-a-half legs,” Ray replied without turning.
“Less of me to make noise.” He flicked a switch on the side of the machine. A crackle that could have been a tune spilled out of the speakers. “The Unsung trashed my baby. Said it was contraband. Claimed there’s a new ruling banning all music. Not surprised, really. Get rid of the books first, then the music, then the art. Routine procedure for a dictatorship.”
“You sound like my mother.”
“Maybe that’s because Rose was right.” Martinez turned up the volume. “Never been anything that couldn’t be made better with music. A good groove is the backbeat to our soul. No wonder the suits want to strip it away from us.
“Keep us down,
Keep us glum.
Keep us grim,
Keep us dumb.
Never gonna happen.
Not while we got,
Feet to move,
And lungs to sing with.
Hips to grind,
And hearts to feel with.”
“One of yours?” Ray asked.
Martinez grunted. “Not really good with lyrics. Good at listening to them, no good at making them.” He turned up the volume. White noise crackled, punctuated by pops and whines. “Listen to it.”
“That’s just hiss. There’s no music there.”
“White noise is not the absence of music; it’s all music. Think about it.” He shuffled closer. “If it’s all frequencies, you get to pick the tune you want to hear.”
“You’re saying white noise is your way of keeping the arts alive, your way of continuing the rebellion.”
Martinez smiled, a grin Ray r
ecognised from years serving alongside each other. “You got any better ideas, Franklin?” He glanced at the door and edged the volume up a touch. The speakers throbbed. There was a beat there, faint, but alive. Unbidden, Ray’s eyes drifted back to Dan Swann. His chest was still rising and falling. Out of time with the music but also alive. Ray wondered if he should move Stella’s husband off the Cracks in the floorboards.
Martinez nudged him. “That pop and thump could be the sweetest groove you’ve ever heard. The groove that’ll get your woman grinding against you doing the horizontal. Doing the vertical and the diagonal, too, if you’re lucky.”
“Not sure Brooke does music.”
Martinez cuffed him on the arm. “Idiot. Everyone does music. Even those with a rotten heart. Only people who don’t do music are those that never lived. When this mess is over, you and Brooke gotta sit down and do your homework, educate each other about who you really are behind the uniform and the scowls, especially her. Man, that woman can scowl. Then—”
Ray held up a hand and shushed him.
“What? I’m serious about this, it’s important.”
“Quiet!” Ray killed the volume on the jukebox. One red flashed across the floorboards, warning. The air in the Kickshaw was thick and cloying.
“I can’t hear—” Martinez pivoted on his good leg.
Rat tat tat . . . rat tat . . . rat tat.
“—the door to the alley,” he finished.
Memories of a conversation held in the Morgen Towers out at sea surfaced in Ray’s head. You need timed knocks on doors. A plethora of passwords and code names. The Night Phoenix would be mine, Ray. And you absolutely must have one slow dripping leak you can never fix. Stella had been there with Kayle and Rose. The last two were both dead now. There had been one more person there, too, besides Ray.
Rat tat tat . . . rat tat . . . rat.
“People knocking on your door in the small hours is never a good sign,” Martinez said.
“People knocking your door down at this time is worse.”
They ducked under windows and wove between the flashing red light. It was like being in a submarine, Ray thought, except this time the pressure was on the inside. And this submarine had someone knocking on the outside.
Rat tat tat . . . rat tat . . . rat.
“We’re closed,” Martinez called. “Go home and get some sleep.”
“Who’s that?” a woman’s voice replied.
“Doesn’t work like that,” Martinez said through the door. “You knocked. You introduce yourself first. Maybe we’ll tell you our names after.”
Silence.
Rat tat tat . . . rat tat . . . rat.
“Is this woman for real?” Martinez whispered. “Who is it?” he said.
“Me.” A woman’s voice.
“Me? Not You, Him or Her? Funny. Very funny. Ha ha. You’ll have to do better than that.”
“It’s me.” More insistent this time. “Vena. Vena Laudanum.”
The men looked at each other. “Could be,” Martinez said. “Sounds like her.”
“Just like white noise sounds like music? You got cameras on that door?” Ray whispered.
“What do you think?”
“This is a safe house for the Resistance. You should have cameras.”
“We put unauthorised cameras up outside this building, we might as well hold a weekly party for Our Saviours the Resistance and have a giant fucking firework display that spells out Bethina is a Bitch whenever we help someone. Of course we got no fucking cameras, you dumb rook!”
“Just asking, Tino. No need to start talking like Nascimento.”
“Who’s to say he didn’t learn it from me?”
“Never mind. What’s the password? You must have one.”
Martinez looked down, knocked some dust off his shoe with his crutch. “We, umm, we . . .”
“You don’t have a password, do you?”
“There was never any need. With just me and Lynn running this place we stopped using them. And your mother” — he coughed — “no disrespect, Ray, but Rose kind of achieved what she did through being a figurehead rather than any skill at leading.”
Rat tat tat . . . rat tat . . . rat.
Again. The same pattern.
“Will you please let me in? There are police everywhere.”
“There could be police with you,” Ray said.
The silence was broken by the drip of beer into a tray behind the bar.
Plink . . . plink . . . plink. You need timed knocks on doors. A plethora of passwords and code names. And you absolutely must have one slow dripping leak you can never fix. The words were clear in Ray’s mind, as was the woman who had said them, sitting in her chair in the Morgen Towers with a battered tin cup of tea in her hand.
“You know who I am?” he asked the door.
“Yes.”
“Say it.”
“Ray Franklin.”
“Good. Give me the password you used the last time we were together.” The answering silence was broken by Dan crying out in his sleep. “I’m going to count to seven—”
“Seven?” Martinez mouthed. “What’s wrong with three?”
“—then there’s going to be trouble.”
“What trouble?” Martinez threw a hand in the air. “You can’t do anything to this woman without opening this door and that’s what she wants!”
“Shhh!”
Rat tat tat . . . rat tat . . . rat. The knocks were slower this time, almost . . . thoughtful.
“One. Two. Thre—”
“The Night Phoenix.”
Ray slid the bolts back. There was dry blood on one, he noted. Behind it stood Bethina Laudanum, the president of Ailan. Not Bethina, Ray reminded himself, Vena, Beth’s twin sister.
11
A Twin Arrives
Vena stood on the threshold. Moonlight gleamed on her oil-black hair. It picked out individual strands that led to a face more pinched than usual. “Aren’t you going to invite me in?”
“Still can’t get over it. You look just like the president,” Ray replied.
A muscle twitched in her jaw. “That’s what happens with identical twins.”
“Not sure most people would know that, ma’am. On account of twins being illegal for the last few generations. I didn’t even know twins existed until I discovered I was one and my twin brother had been murdered in a government-sanctioned research camp. Things like that and the government deleting records has an effect on knowledge, I find.”
“Sarcasm does not become you, Ray Franklin.” Vena looked at him the way a child does when deciding which leg to pull off a spider first. “And you know as well as I do that your twin brother died while he was in your mother’s care. The government didn’t kill Rhys.”
“Don’t start—”
“The truth is a hair shirt that not many people have the stomach to wear. Facts are uncomfortable. But, for what it is worth to you, I am genuinely sorry about what happened to your mother.”
“Why? Your sister hates her.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Ray saw Dan roll into the shadows from the wax table. Half-in, half-out. Half-alive, half-dead. Vena clasped her hands in front of her. She was wearing a long black coat that brushed against the tops of her leather shoes, the coat that the Laudanum sisters seemed to be welded into. “At times, yes, Bethina hated Rose, though, personally, I suspect it was because it was easier to admit to hate than resentment. She also admired her in some ways. Hatred and respect are not mutually exclusive.” Vena’s voice grew soft. “Rose gave this country something as essential as order and stability: dreams.”
They stared at each other through an open door that was still symbolically shut to Verina. Never step on a Crack; never invite your enemy over the threshold. Rose had told Ray something similar once — your enemy isn’t the person that you invite in, the real enemies are those that invite themselves in. A wail, rising and falling, punctuated by shouts and barks, broke the stillness. “Hear tha
t?” Vena asked.
“Sirens.”
“Sirens getting louder.” She shivered. “It’s been a long night already and I fear there is much more to come before the sun warms the streets again. Can I come in, please? Or are you going to let an elderly woman freeze to death on your doorstep? I know the people of the Free Towns pride themselves on being more hospitable than us Gate-born. Are you going to prove me wrong?”
“Vena’s one of us, Ray,” Martinez said.
Ray stepped aside and motioned her through. “I know. Just find it hard looking at that face.”
She sniffed. “I see you inherited Stann Taille’s manners rather than Rick Franklin’s; he was ever the gentleman.” She hiked up her coat and walked over the threshold. “Oh my. What happened here?”
“Unsung happened here.” Martinez dusted a chair off and offered it to her. “Came in shooting and screaming and hollering about fugitives. They trashed the place and left without searching. Reckon they just wanted to turn this place over because the 10th Legion like drinking here. The 13th don’t like being thought of as thugs so—”
“So they behave like thugs.” Vena smoothed her coat across her lap as she sat. “Classic human behaviour: classify someone in a certain category for long enough, they will behave that way to spite you. So the circle is complete and the classification justified. Prediction becomes validation.”
“Yes, ma’am. Just what I would have said. I think. I’ll put the kettle on.” Martinez disappeared behind the bar.
Ray’s gaze found Vena’s. Wary, they watched each other, two prize fighters in a ring, already battered but the fight a long way from over. “You don’t have to trust me, young man, but it will make things easier.”
His shoulders sagged. “Sorry, Vena. Not had the best twenty-four hours. I don’t think I’m going to find another mother like I found I had another brother.” He slumped on one of the benches running around the room, his shadow entwining with Dan’s. The seat vibrated as a heavy vehicle rumbled down the street. Police most likely. Question was, were they enforcing the curfew or looking for Ray and the others?
