The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy: 2014 Edition

by Rich Horton

  This rally was the largest Clare had ever seen. Her generation had grown up hearing grandparents’ stories of protest and clashes (civil war, everyone knew, but the official history said clashes, which sounded temporary and isolated). While their parents grew up in a country that was tired and sedate, where they were content to consolidate their little lives and barricade themselves against the world, the children wondered what it must have been like to believe in idealism.

  Gerald’s target this time was the strongest candidate the PTP had ever put forward for Premiere. The younger generation flocked to Jonathan Smith. People adored him—unless they supported the RLP. Rallies like this were the result. Great crowds of hope and belief, unafraid. And the crowds who opposed them.

  Gerald said that Jonathan Smith was going to be assassinated. Here, today, at the rally, in front of thousands. All the portents pointed to this. But it would not result in martyrdom and change, because the assassin would be one of his own and people would think, our parents were right, and go home.

  Clare and Major stood in the crowd like islands, unmoving, unfeeling, not able to be caught up in the exhilarating speech, the roaring response. She felt alien. These were her people, they were all human, but never had she felt so far removed. She might have felt god-like, if she believed in a god who took such close interest in creation as to move around it like this. God didn’t have to, because there were people like Gerald and Major.

  “It’s nice to be saving someone,” Clare said. “I’ve always liked that better.”

  “It only has to be a little thing,” Major said. “Someone in the front row falls and breaks a bone. The commotion stalls the attack when Smith goes to help the victim. Because he’s like that.”

  “We want to avoid having a victim at all, don’t we?”

  “Maybe it’ll rain.”

  “We change coach horses, not the weather.” But not so well that they couldn’t keep an anarchist bomb from arriving at its destination. They weren’t omnipotent. They weren’t gods. If they were, they could control the weather.

  She had tried sending a message about the government building behind Gerald’s back. He would have called the action too direct, but she’d taken the risk. She’d called the police, the newspapers, everyone, with all the details they’d conjured. Her information went into official records, was filed for the appropriate authorities, all of which moved too slowly to be of any good. It wasn’t too direct after all.

  Inexorable. This path of history had the same feeling of being inexorable. Official channels here would welcome an assassination. The police would not believe her. They only had to save one life.

  She wished for rain. The sky above was clear.

  They walked among the crowd, and it was grand. She rested her hand in the crook of Major’s elbow; he held it there. He wore a happy, silly smile on his face. They might have been in a park, strolling along a gentle river in a painting.

  “There’s change here,” he said, gazing over the angry young crowd and their vitriolic signs.

  She squeezed his arm and smiled back.

  The ground they walked on was ancient cobblestone. This historic square had witnessed rallies like this for a thousand years. In such times of change, gallows had stood here, or hooded men with axes. How much blood had soaked between these cobbles?

  That was where she nudged. From the edges of the crowd, they were able to move with the flow of people surging. They could linger at the edges with relative freedom of movement, so she spotted a bit of pavement before the steps climbing to the platform where the demagogue would speak. A toe caught on a broken cobblestone would delay him. Just for a second. Sometimes that was enough to change the pattern.

  “Here,” she said, squeezing Major’s arm to anchor him. He nodded, pulled her to the wall of a townhouse, and waited.

  While she focused on the platform, on the path that Jonathan Smith would take—on the victim—Major turned his attention to the crowd, looking for the barrel of a gun, the glint of sunlight off a spyglass, counter-stream movement in the enthusiastic surge. The assassin.

  Someone else looking for suspicious movement in a crowd like this would find them, Clare thought. Though somehow no one ever did find them.

  Sometimes, all they could do was wait. Sometimes, they waited and nothing happened. Sometimes they were too late or early, or one of the others had already nudged one thing or another.

  “There,” Major said, the same time that Clare gripped his arm and whispered, “There.”

  She was looking to the front where the iconic man, so different than the bodyguards around him, emerged and waved at the crowd. There, the cobblestone—she drew from her pocket a cube of sugar that had been soaked in amaretto, crumbled it, let the grains fall, then licked her fingers. The sweet, heady flavor stung her tongue.

  Major lunged away from her. “No!”

  The stone lifted, and the great Jonathan Smith tripped. A universal gasp went up.

  Major wasn’t looking to the front with everyone else. He was looking at a man in the crowd, twenty feet away, dissolute. A troublemaker. Hair ragged, shirt soiled, faded trousers, and a canvas jacket a size too large. Boots made for kicking. He held something in his right fist, in a white-knuckled grip.

  This was it, the source, the gun—the locus, everything. This was where they learned if they nudged enough, and correctly. But the assassin didn’t raise a straight arm to aim. He cocked back to throw. He didn’t carry a gun, he held a grenade.

  Gerald and the others had planned for a bullet. They hadn’t planned for this.

  Major put his shoulder to the man’s chest and shoved. The would-be assassin stumbled, surprised, clutched the grenade to his chest—it wasn’t active, he hadn’t lit the fuse. Major stopped him. Stopped the explosive, stopped the assassin, and that was good. Except it wasn’t, and he didn’t.

  Smith recovered from his near-fall. He mounted the platform. The bodyguard behind him drew his handgun, pointed at the back of Smith’s head, and fired. The shot echoed and everyone saw it and spent a moment in frozen astonishment. Even the man with the grenade. Everyone but Major, who was on the ground, doubled over, shivering as if every nerve burned.

  Clare fell on top of him, crying, clutching at him. His eyes rolled back, enough to look at her, enough for her to see the fear in them. If she could have held onto him, carried him with her, saved him, she would have. But he’d put himself back into the world. He’d acted, plunged back into a time and place he wasn’t part of anymore, and now it tore him to pieces. The skin of his face cracked under her hands, and the blood and flesh underneath was black and crumbling to dust.

  She couldn’t sob hard enough to save him.

  Clare was lost in chaos. Then Gerald was there with his cloak. So theatrical, Major always said. Gerald used the cloak like Major used the jack of diamonds. He swept it around the three of them, shoving them through a doorway.

  But only Clare and Gerald emerged on the other side.

  The first lesson they learned, that Major forgot for only a second, the wrong second: They could only build steps, not leap. They couldn’t act directly, they couldn’t be part of the history they made.

  So Jonathan Smith died, and the military coup that followed ruined everything.

  Five of them remained.

  The problem was she could not imagine a world different from the burned-out husk that resulted from the war fought over the course of the next year. Gerald’s plan might have worked, bringing forth a lush Eden where everyone drank nectar and played hopscotch with angelic children, and she still would have felt empty.

  Gerald’s goal had always been utopia. Clare no longer believed it was possible.

  The others were very kind to her, in the way anyone was kind to a child they pitied. Poor dear, but she should have known better. Clare accepted the blanket Ildie put over her shoulders and the cup of hot tea Fred pressed into her hands.

  “Be strong, Clare,” Ildie said, and Clare thought, easy for
her to say.

  “What next, what next,” Gerard paced the warehouse, head bent, snarling almost, his frown was so energetic.

  “Corruption scandal?” Marco offered.

  “Too direct.”

  “A single line of accounting, the wrong number in the right place, to discredit the regime,” Ildie said.

  Gerald stopped pacing. “Maybe.”

  Another meeting. As if nothing had happened. As if they could still go on.

  “Major was the best of us,” Clare murmured.

  “We’ll just have to be more careful,” Ildie murmured back.

  “He made a mistake. An elementary mistake,” Gerald said, and never spoke of Major again.

  The village a mile outside the city had once been greater, a way station and market town. Now, it was a skeleton. The war had crushed it, burned it, until only hovels remained, the scorched frames of buildings standing like trees in a forest. Brick walls had fallen and lay strewn, crumbling, decaying. Rough canvas stretched over alcoves provided shelter. Cooking fires burned under tripods and pots beaten out of other objects. What had been the cobbled town square still had the atmosphere of an open-air market, people shouting and milling, bartering fiercely, trading. The noise made a language all its own, and a dozen different scents mingled.

  Despite the war and bombing, some of the people hadn’t fled, but they hadn’t tried to rebuild. Instead, they seemed to have crawled underground when the bombardment began, and when it ended they reemerged, continued their lives where they left off as best they could, with the materials they had at hand. Cockroaches, Clare thought, and shook the thought away.

  At the end of the main street, where the twisted, naked foundations gave way and only shattered cobblestones remained, a group of men were digging a well into an old aquifer, part of the water system of the dying village. They were looking for water. Really, though, at this point they weren’t digging, but observing the amount of dirt they’d already removed and arguing. They were about to give up and try again somewhere else. A whole day’s work wasted, a day they could little afford when they had children to feed and material to scavenge.

  Clare helped. Spit on her hands, put them on the dusty earth, then rubbed them together and drew patterns in the dust. Pressed her hands to the ground again. The aquifer that they had missed by just a few feet seeped into the ditch they’d dug. The well filled. The men cheered.

  Wiping her hands on her skirt, Clare walked away. She was late for another meeting.

  “What is the pattern?” Gerald asked. And no one answered. They were down to four.

  Ildie had tried to cause a scandal by prompting a divorce between the RLP Premiere and his popular wife. No matter how similar attempts had failed before. “This is different, it’s not causing an affair, it’s destroying one. I can do this,” she had insisted, desperate to prove herself. But the targets couldn’t be forced. She might as well have tried to cause an affair after all. Once again, too direct. Clare could have told her it wouldn’t work. Clare recognized when people were in love. Even Republic Loyalists fell in love.

  “What will change this path? We must make this better!”

  She stared. “I just built a well.”

  Marco smirked. “What’s the use of that?”

  Fred tried to summon enthusiasm. They all missed Major even if she was the only one who admitted it. “It’s on the army now, not the government. We remove the high command, destroy their headquarters perhaps—”

  Marco said, “What, you think we can make earthquakes?”

  “No, we create cracks in the foundation, then simply shift them—”

  Clare shook her head. “I was never able to think so big. I wish—”

  Fred sighed. “Clare, it’s been two years, can you please—”

  “It feels like yesterday,” she said, and couldn’t be sure that it hadn’t been just yesterday, according to the clock her body kept. But she couldn’t trust that instinct. She’d lost hours that felt like minutes, studying dust motes.

  “Clare—” Gerald said, admonishing, a guru unhappy with a disciple. The thought made her smile, which he took badly, because she wasn’t looking at him but at something the middle distance, unseen.

  He shook his head, disappointment plain. The others stared at her with something like fascination or horror.

  “You’ve been tired. Not up to this pressure,” he explained kindly. “It’s all right if you want to rest.”

  She didn’t hear the rest of the planning. That was all right; she wasn’t asked to take part.

  She took a piece of charcoal from an abandoned campfire. This settlement was smaller than it had been. Twenty fires had once burned here, with iron pots and bubbling stews over them all.

  Eight remained. Families ranged farther and farther to find food. Often young boys never came back. They were taken by the army. The well had gone bad. They collected rainwater in dirty tubs now.

  And yet. Even here. She drew a pattern on a slab of broken wood. Watched a young man drop a brick of peat for the fire. Watched a young woman pick it up for him and look into his eyes. He smiled.

  Now if only she knew the pattern that would ensure that they survived.

  When they launched the next plan—collapse the army high command’s headquarters, crippling the RLP and allowing the PTP to fill the vacuum, or so Gerald insisted—she had no part to play. She was not talented enough, Gerald didn’t say, but she understood it. She could only play with detritus from a kitchen table. She could never think big enough for them. Major hadn’t cared.

  She did a little thing, though: scattered birdseed on a pool of soapy water, to send a tremor through the air and warn the pigeons, rats, and such that they ought to flee. And maybe that ruined the plan for the others. She’d nudged the pattern too far out of alignment for their pattern to work. The building didn’t collapse, but the clock tower across the square from which Fred and Marco were watching did. As if they had planted explosives and been caught in the blast.

  Too direct, of course.

  She left. Escaped, rather, as she thought. She didn’t want Gerald to find her. Didn’t want to look him in the eye. She would either laugh at him or accuse him of killing Major and everyone else. Then she would strangle him, and since they were both equally out of history she just might be able to do it. It couldn’t possibly be too direct, and the rest of the world couldn’t possibly notice.

  Very tempting, in those terms.

  But she found her place, her niche, her purpose. Her little village on the edge of everything was starting to build itself into something bigger. She’d worried about it, but just last year the number of babies born exceeded the number of people who died of disease, age, and accident. A few more cook fires had been added. She watched, pleased.

  But Gerald found her, eventually, because that was one of his talents: finding people who had the ability to move outside the world. She might as well have set out a lantern.

  She didn’t look up when he arrived. She was gathering mint leaves that she’d set out to dry, putting them in the tin box where she stored them. A spoonful of an earlier harvest was brewing in a cup of water over her little fire. Her small realm was tucked under the overhang formed by three walls that had fallen together. The witch’s cave, she called it. It looked over the village so she could always watch her people.

  Gerald stood at the edge of her cave for a long time, watching. He seemed deflated, his cloak worn, his skin pale. But his eyes still burned. With desperation this time, maybe, instead of ambition.

  When he spoke, he sounded appalled. “Clare. What are you doing here? Why are you living in this . . . this pit?”

  “Because it’s my pit. Leave me alone, I’m working.”

  “Clare. Come away. Get out of there. Come with me.”

  She raised a brow at him. “No.”

  “You’re not doing any good here.”

  She still did not give him more than a passing glance. The village below was full of the eve
ning’s activities: farmers returning from fields, groups bustling around cook fires. Someone was singing, another laughing, a third crying.

  She pointed. “Maybe that little girl right there is the one who will grow up and turn this all around. Maybe I can keep her safe until she does.”

  He shook his head. “Not likely. You can’t point to a random child and make such a claim. She’ll be dead of influenza before she reaches maturity.”

  “It’s the little things, you’re always saying. But you don’t think small enough,” she said.

  “Now what are you talking about?”

  “Nails,” she murmured.

  “You have a talent,” he said, desperately. “You see what other people overlook. Things other people take for granted. There are revolutions in little things. I understand that now. I didn’t—”

  “Why can’t you let the revolutions take care of themselves?”

  He stared at her, astonished. Might as well tell him to stop breathing. He didn’t know how to do anything else. And no one had ever spoken to him like this.

  “You can’t go back,” he said as if it was a threat. “You can’t go back to being alive in the world.”

  “Does it look like I’m trying?” He couldn’t answer, of course, because she only looked like she was making tea. “You’re only here because there’s no one left to help you. And you’re blind.”

  Some days when she was in a very low mood she imagined Major here with her, and imagined that he’d be happy, even without the games.

  “Clare. You shouldn’t be alone. You can’t leave me. Not after everything.”

  “I never did this for you. I never did this for history. There’s no great sweep to any of this. Major saw a man with a weapon and acted on instinct. The grenade might have gone off and he’d have died just the same. It could have happened to anyone. I just wanted to help people. To try to make the world a little better. I like to think that if I weren’t doing this I’d be working in a soup kitchen somewhere. In fact, maybe I’d have done more good if I’d worked in a soup kitchen.”