Now Playing on Outworld 5730

by R. T. W. Lipkin

  Yet she hadn’t been felled. Despite his lies, despite his death, despite his Himalayan rangeful of debts, despite having failed the Mirage audition, despite having had to stoop to taking the part of a lady’s maid at a majestic.

  Although at least in the part of a lady’s maid she wasn’t forced to have dinner with Trevelton every night, to sit at the same table with him, to see his imperious smirk, and to constantly be tempted to tell him off as well.

  Perhaps he couldn’t love her, but soon millions and billions of others would. Even if she were playing someone hateful. Still, the audience would adore her. There was no unloved character on Mirage. That was one of the fabula’s appeals. Even the villains were beloved.

  Maybe Trevelton was the lover she wanted to scream at, to break things over. She looked at the pitcher and bowl on her dresser, but they looked too sturdy, and she didn’t have the energy to try and break them. And Mrs. Allman would probably charge her for them.

  Anyway, Trevelton wasn’t there to scream at. He was probably right now in bed with Lady Katherine, who, according to Rosie, had been practically humping his thigh ever since the duel.

  “Let her have him,” Violet had said.

  “Vi, you know he’s no good for you,” Rosie had said, as she always did.

  “I said, Let her have him, didn’t I? And you can stop saying he’s no good for me. We’re not together anymore, if you hadn’t noticed.” Sometimes Rosie drove her wild with frustration.

  “It’s not what you’re saying, Vi.”

  “And you’re an expert at knowing what someone means even if they don’t say it?”

  “Maybe not, Vi, but I can tell anyway.” Rosie’s eyes welled with tears, but she didn’t cry.

  “Rosie, I didn’t mean to hurt you.” Something about Rosie’s entire demeanor broke Violet’s heart. “Tell me. What is it? Someone’s hurt you. Is it that Lord Saybrook? But you knew he didn’t care for you.”

  “It’s not Saybrook, Vi. It’s just life. And you are better off without Trevelton. He’s drinking all the time now. Not the sort of man you can depend on.”

  “Rosie, come back with me. I’ll help you find a job. There are a million things you’d be great at. You don’t have to be a maid at a majestic. And you’re my true friend. The only one I’ve ever had.”

  “I can’t go, Vi. You know that. Johnny’s here. I have to stick with him. He needs me.”

  “Johnny does fine by himself, if you haven’t noticed.” Violet thought Johnny could probably take over for Mrs. Allman if she’d give him a millimeter of leeway.

  “It’s more complicated than that. But I don’t mind, Vi. I like being a maid. It’s simple and direct. I know my duties and I do them. They pay me. Straightforward.” Rosie’s tears had dried up and she pulled her apron down on her lap, straightening it.

  Could Rosie really like being a maid? Violet wondered as she thought back on their conversation. It was straightforward, but the duties were laborious and at times grueling.

  Maybe Rosie would finally tell Violet what was holding her back, what was keeping her down, before Violet left. She’d been afraid to ask her, since she could tell her friend was harboring a very sensitive, very personal hurt.

  But Violet would ask her before she left, and maybe then Rosie would come with her. Violet had never had such a good friend, and to think she’d had to come all the way to Outworld 5730 and play the part of a lady’s maid in a nonsensical Regency-era majestic in order to meet her.

  To meet Trevelton.

  Violet sat on the edge of her bed, listening for the arguing duke and duchess, but the cacophony in their wing had died down. She wished it would start up again. It had distracted her from the one thing she refused to think about.

  Think about Mirage instead, she told herself. You’ll be there in just a few days. You’ll be back in Los Angeles, your home. You’ll be in a regular, lovely, smudgy, too-thick atmosphere.

  You’ll be able to see the ocean. Booker’s debts will be paid back soon. You’ll be free. Isn’t that what Rosie had said she wanted? Freedom? And Violet would have it.

  Outside in the corridor, a floorboard creaked. Must be Harriette, on her way to yet another tryst with Johnny.

  But on the other side of Violet’s door, cursing at himself for stepping on the loud floorboard, was Trevelton, a dark blue banyan thrown carelessly over his half-open shirt and riding breeches, which he’d pulled on before going out into the corridor to see what the ruckus was about.

  He stood leaning against Violet’s outer doorjamb. He’d come upstairs after talking with the duke, who was obviously having troubles of his own. The duchess could be a real tigress, Trevelton thought.

  Here he was yet again, in the servants’ quarters, where he didn’t belong. He listened for the sound of Violet’s movements, but heard nothing. He hoped she’d open the door—maybe she had to use the bathroom down the hall. Maybe she’d heard him.

  When they’d been in the tree house together that last morning . . . Damn his soul for what he’d said to her, for what he hadn’t said. And damn Etterly for giving her that letter, which he never should have written.

  He tried to blame Wyatt for that part, at least, but couldn’t. It wasn’t his fault. As Charlotte had also not been his fault. Ephraim had been wrong about too many things. They were piled up around him, blocking his vision, closing him off from his own truths.

  He went back downstairs. He didn’t belong in the servants’ quarters, but he also didn’t belong at Hollyhock. He belonged at his farm, what was left of it, in Northumberland. He’d go home on the next transport.

  Chapter 89

  For the first time in weeks, Jewel Allman felt like everything was going along wonderfully. The masked ball was in three days, the day of the lunar syzygy, and preparations were proceeding on schedule.

  Cook had shown her the menus, and she’d outdone even herself. Jewel could practically taste the food as she read the words—delicacies that no one else could render the way Cook could. Jewel hadn’t been wrong to hire the demanding and often difficult-to-deal-with Stephanie Greco.

  The electro had worked wonders. So what if it weren’t Regency-period accurate? She herself wasn’t sure of a lot of her knowledge. No one could be, not this many centuries after the facts, many of those facts reported centuries after the events themselves.

  Rosie had sketched out stunning decorative designs for the ballroom, and she’d enlisted the rest of the staff to help with the preparations. Jewel hadn’t known Rosie had any talent in that—or in any—direction, but she’d come to Jewel the morning after she’d announced that the masked ball was back on the schedule, bringing with her detailed drawings she’d made overnight.

  The duke had finally returned, the duchess had been her former lively self at dinner, and Jewel had just heard that the duke and duchess were already back at their passionately heated relationship. If Jewel had heard about it, everyone had. She nodded in satisfaction.

  Harriette was, at last, learning her job as Lady Patience’s lady’s maid. Perhaps she’d be useful for something after all.

  The troublesome Violet Aldrich would be gone in four days. Lord Trevelton and Lady Katherine seemed to be having a far more correct relationship than the one the marquess had had with that very Violet Aldrich, although the scandal had kept the gossip mill churning in a rather harmless and somewhat entertaining way back then, and no majestic felt complete without some scandal. The players loved it.

  There were other couples too, as there should be at this point in a majestic. Vernie Dalston and Lord Fitzmore, for example, although Baron North was involved there as well. Never mind. If they were enjoying themselves, that’s all that mattered. They would tell their friends, and the next majestic would be even more well attended.

  Jewel would raise the rates next time. She’d decided that even before this majestic had started, but now that it was such a raging success, she felt even more confident in her decision. And she’d certainly have both Cook
and Calvert back, and maybe Rosie and Johnny and possibly Nell.

  Jewel congratulated herself for having hired such a brilliant cast.

  After the ball, the couples would all rearrange themselves. That’s what always happened. Something about the masks, Jewel thought, although they hid no one’s identity. Yet everyone felt anonymous while they were wearing them.

  As though they weren’t already wearing a mask, all of them playing a part in a fantasy experience—one that Jewel Allman was a master at producing.

  The entire majestic was like one large unchoreographed ball. As the players and cast of servants circled around one another, the permutations got headier, the steps more complicated, the combinations and recombinations more fascinating.

  Maybe even the duke and duchess would change partners. That would be thrilling, although Jewel knew that these two players were always together. Yet one could hope.

  The two were having another epic brawl upstairs in the duchess’s rooms. How delicious. Give everyone something to talk about as the excitement for the ball ramped up.

  Thalia had told her that the players at Brixton were all tremendously excited about the masked ball as well. Their chance to cavort with the resurrected duelers and exchange gossip between the manor houses. To flirt and be flirted with. And more.

  There was a fabulous romance going on over at Brixton, so Thalia said, although her information couldn’t be completely trusted. Jewel would see for herself in three days’ time.

  Chapter 90

  “Marguerite. You knew we were going to make love while we were here. We always do. If you’ve been taking the antidote, there’s nothing I can do about that. And you never told me.”

  Marguerite had had enough of Nicholas’s lies. Really, their entire relationship was a lie, since they never met each other when they weren’t playing the role of someone else. This majestic was only the first time they’d addressed each other by their real names and had a confrontation as their actual selves.

  Maybe this was life. First your father endlessly beat and raped you and you became a cold-blooded murderer, then you were forced to marry a man who threatened you and held you prisoner. And now your lover—foolish you for ever having trusted him or loved him—deceived you, impregnated you, and put you in an impossible situation.

  Wasn’t it enough that she had killed her own father? Now she was going to be forced to kill her son, a son she already loved and cherished, a son she couldn’t bear to part with. Which was why she hadn’t gone to Brixton to talk with Dr. Hoffstead yet.

  But she couldn’t return home like this. She couldn’t dare imagine what Clive would do to her—pregnant with another man’s child. The possibilities were too terrifying and too painful to contemplate.

  “If I’m taking the antidote? You’re the one who gave it to me.” Marguerite pulled her nightgown back on over her naked form, and Nicholas sighed in frustration.

  “I’ve done no such thing. You can’t even get the antidote without applying for it, giving proof, meeting thousands of requirements. You know that.”

  “There must be a black market. There’s a black market for everything.” She knew that all too well.

  “I didn’t do it—black market or no. I would never do such a thing to you, Marguerite.”

  “I heard you say it—that you wanted an heir. Don’t deny it. And now I’m pregnant with that very heir. Your son.”

  Marguerite thought it was possible that the passionate yet often reserved Nicholas Coburn was going to cry. She’d never seen a man cry before.

  Even her own father hadn’t shed a tear while she killed him. And Clive Idrest certainly had nothing to cry about and was in fact more likely to laugh at inappropriate times.

  Like the occasion a few months ago when he’d threatened her, laughing as he described the brutal things he intended to do to his latest lover while forcing her to watch. If she didn’t cooperate. Which she did. She always did.

  If she could, she would’ve laughed at the irony of her situation. That she’d killed her selfish, brutal father only to be delivered into the arms of a man whose brutality and selfishness outstripped her father’s in intensity, frequency, and sick enjoyment.

  At her father’s house, she was never trapped as she was now. She always could have left, although she never would’ve have deserted her mother and brother, leaving them alone in the same house with Lawrence Rhodes, governor general of Outworld 15, devoted family man, rapist, and violent brute.

  “Marguerite,” Nicholas said with a shaky voice. “You’re having our son?”

  “I can’t, Nicholas, and you should know that. How could you ever have given me the antidote? You know I can’t do this. It’s impossible.” The image of Clive Idrest, his yellow eyes gleaming with sadistic pleasure, hovered in her mind.

  Marguerite was going to cry, but she stopped herself. She’d cried enough in the last few weeks, and now might be her only chance to talk with Nicholas, to let him know how devastated she was as she was forced to face the inevitable—eliminating the pregnancy and going home to Clive.

  “It’s time you told me why you stay with Idrest,” Nicholas said.

  “It’s time you admitted that you fed me the antidote,” Marguerite said. And she could never tell him why she stayed with Idrest. She couldn’t tell Nicholas—or anyone.

  Nicholas got up and started pacing back and forth in the small space of the dressing room, occasionally kicking at the drawers. He pushed all the hanging dresses and gowns aside, and Marguerite was afraid he was going to start destroying them, but he didn’t touch them after that.

  Finally he leaned back on the ledge at the corner of a built-in dresser. He was so handsome and looked just right, somehow, with the Regency-style sideburns complementing his beautifully wavy hair.

  Was that how someone looked when their devious plans came to fruition? When their lies all stacked up so neatly that they produced their intended result? Yet Nicholas didn’t have the same self-satisfied expression that Clive always had when he knew he’d masterfully manipulated his wife yet again.

  “Listen to me, Marguerite Idrest,” Nicholas said.

  She hated hearing her name said like that. She was Marguerite Rhodes, although that was also the family name of someone she despised. No wonder she needed to go to majestics. Far better to be Sophia, Duchess of Bedford. Or any of the other roles she’d assumed.

  Nicholas continued, unaware of the sting she’d felt. “I’ve spent most of the last decade dreaming of being with you,” he said, “of having you be my wife and not the wife of that monstrous Clive Idrest. I can’t sleep when you’re not next to me in bed. I don’t see other women when I’m not at a majestic, and when I’m at home, all I can think is that you’re pleasuring Idrest in probably the same way you pleasure me.”

  “Nicholas—”

  “Let me finish. Yet I always come back to you. I love you. I need you, Marguerite. I forgive you for things that I don’t know about and that I’d never have the nerve to ask you about. But I would never ever deceive you. And you know that. You know it. If you weren’t taking the antidote yourself, then someone else has been giving it to you.”

  “Who?” There was no one else who’d do such a thing, who’d have a reason to. And Nicholas would never forgive her for being a murderer. No one would.

  “It could be anyone here. Anyone who has access to what you eat and drink. I should think that would be anyone at all. But, Marguerite, why would anyone do this?”

  “It really wasn’t you, Nicholas? Please don’t lie to me. There’s no benefit to you at this point.”

  “Even if there were benefit, I’d never lie to you, Marguerite. A relationship can survive the lies of only one person.”

  “Nicholas . . .”

  “And in our relationship, that person is you.”

  Marguerite felt the nausea rise again, but she couldn’t get up.

  And she couldn’t contradict Nicholas. Because that would be yet another lie.


  Chapter 91

  Allene Dickens couldn’t sleep. Not just because of the epic argument that was taking place just below her room, but because Nicholas Coburn had returned to 5730. This wasn’t in the plan.

  Up until today, everything had worked out exactly as Clive Idrest had laid it out for her. Exactly.

  Starting the day he’d seen her as she was walking back from the office building to her quarters. No man had ever looked at her that way, and she wasn’t sure what it meant. Was she about to be fired? Yet she’d done nothing wrong.

  Although she’d heard that Idrest was impetuous, firing his employees for small infractions, and she had been nearly three minutes late one morning the week before.

  Instead, he’d called over to her, as though he were her friend, which she had none of on Outworld 75. She’d gone there for the promising work opportunity, which promise had turned out to have been highly exaggerated.

  Instead of a beautiful apartment overlooking 75’s red-orange sea, she was living in a falling-apart group residence, and her permanently grimy window looked out over the wasteyard.

  Instead of the opportunity of a lifetime, she was working as an underclerk, cleaning up after other people’s messes, stuck in the subbasement of a drab office building.

  And when the drought started and the water rationing began, she hated herself even more than usual, since she’d made yet another disastrous decision in coming to 75, and there was no way off. Not now. Maybe not ever. That’s what she heard other workers say. Workers who’d been there for years. And who had worse jobs than hers.

  “You!” Clive Idrest had called across the distance between them. As though he were calling to his favorite dog, she’d thought at the time, only he’d forgotten the dog’s name.

  “Yes, sir,” she’d said. She didn’t know who it was, that it was the very Clive Idrest who owned the company where she worked. But there was something special about him, something magnetically attractive.