It could only be some sort of supernatural creature, one with the power to look inside the mind of its victim and re-create his dearest desire, his most secret hope.
“I didn’t do it,” Paz said, her eyes already wet, the words pouring out of her. “I would never have hurt Gemma. Not in a million years. I would’ve died before I—”
She couldn’t say anything more after that, as Clive was holding her so tightly the breath was crushed from her lungs. “I know,” he said. “I know.”
Of course he believed her. He loved her, after all. And what good was love without faith?
6. Athène
STRANGE TO BE A TOURIST and an enemy of the state at the same time, Athène thought to herself as she walked the streets of the Anchor, furred hood pulled tight around her face, gazing on every fresh miracle with a child’s wonderment. So many lamps burned in the windows that each apartment became a new constellation. So many buildings towered three or four stories over the street that each boulevard became a sort of canyon. The ingenuity on display awed her, yet it was also frightening to think how the Descendancy had brought nature low, concealing it behind a veil of defanged design. As far as Athène could tell, nearly every tree and flower in sight had been selected and arranged according to some unknowable set of aesthetic criteria, and though she could hear sounds of wildlife—crickets and mosquitoes, even the plangent hoot of an owl—she’d yet to see any animals other than a few stray housecats and a couple large, fearless cockroaches. Did Chang want the whole continent to look like this? Paved over, flat and gray, lifeless beneath the stones? She would hate for her child to grow up in a world like that.
A tin street sign bolted to a wall read VIOLET LN, but at first glance it looked like VIOLENT LN. Athène unfolded the map she’d taken from the Protectorate office in Edgewise and tried to get her bearings. Still surprisingly far to the Bastion—gods, but this city was big. Though it would have been faster to head straight east, she deviated slightly to the north, so as to pass through the celebrated plaza at the center of the city known as Annunciation Square.
It was probably a quarter mile from end to end, surrounded by five-story buildings on all sides. The complex tessellation of gray and red brick underfoot was scarred with bomb craters, only some of which had been filled in with gravel. At the very center of the square crouched the mangled but still imposing Notre Fille, the largest single structure Athène had ever seen, a marvel of granite and glass even in its current state: its eastern facade appeared to have sloughed off, and the resulting wound was covered up with tarp and scaffold. In spite of the lateness of the hour, men could be seen a hundred feet up, working away at the reconstruction. Near the base of the church, a gallows had been erected, and a dozen bodies swung from the high beam in a morbidly balletic near unison. Though Athène was well-acquainted with death, the sight of those corpses left out to rot made her shiver. And was it her imagination, or were those young men smoking in the shadows outside that café paying her an undue amount of attention? She hurried out of the square. It had been a mistake to come here, to allow herself the diversion. Every lane was Violent Lane now, and Athène was just a Wesah woman on her own, surrounded by enemies.
The Bastion was built of huge sandstone blocks the color of dried blood. A guard stood on either side of the front gate, while another pair could be seen pacing the parapet above. Athène pushed her hood back as she approached.
“Who’s that?” the soldier on the left said. He was large, almost fat; Athène noticed the bottom button of his jacket wasn’t fastened.
“I am Andromède, leader of the Wesah nation,” Athène said. “I am here to see the Grand Marshal.”
The other guard, skinny and sallow, laughed nervously. “If this is an assassination attempt, you coulda been a bit more subtle.”
“I have no weapons,” Athène said, having thrown them into the river back by the aqueduct. “I come only to talk.”
The soldiers shared a glance. Here was the most perilous moment of the whole endeavor. If the men didn’t believe her, or if they simply didn’t want to risk wasting Chang’s time, they might just kill her on the spot, or throw her in the dungeon and forget about her.
“First things first,” the larger soldier said, proceeding to pat her down a little more thoroughly than was necessary. When it was done, he shrugged. “She’s not lying about the weapons, anyway.”
“So what should we do?” asked the other soldier.
“You should let me in,” Athène interjected. “It has been a very long night, and I am tired of standing.”
The boldness paid off. After a brief silent dialogue of shrugs and frowns, the soldiers gave in and called up to the guards on the parapet to open the gate. Beyond was a courtyard lined with scalloped pillars and decorated with sculptures of soldiers frozen in strange poses: thrusting a sword up into the sky as if trying to skewer one of the pigeons fluttering overhead; sighting down a bow with no bowstring, one eye squinted shut; gazing heroically off into the distance with one foot up on a perfectly rendered boulder.
“Something funny?” the skinny soldier said.
Athène forced the corners of her mouth back into a reverent, respectful line. “I am liking the—how you say?—the art,” she replied, laying her weak grasp of English on as thickly as possible. “Very impressive.”
They passed through a set of doors and into the Bastion proper. The walls were constructed of the same red sandstone blocks, here polished down smooth as glass. The halls were empty, likely due to the lateness of the hour. In Athène’s opinion, this had always been the most glaring of the Protectorate’s weaknesses—the expectation that battles would be fought in the light of day after a long night’s rest. How many times had Athène’s naasyoon struck a detachment of soldiers while they slept, stealing away with a dozen horses before the men managed to get into their trousers and out of their tents?
Another door, this one held open as Athène passed through.
“You’ll wait here,” the soldier said, before shutting and bolting it behind her.
“Kaaya!” she cried out, rattling the handle and giving the door a couple of fruitless thumps. “Come back!”
But no one answered. She turned around and surveyed her prison cell—only to discover it wasn’t a cell at all. Here was a bed as large as the one she and Gemma had shared in the Villenaître; there, a cushioned wicker sofa in front of a roaring fire that cast the whole room in a cozy red glow. Paintings in heavy gold frames hung from all four walls—vast, dark landscapes whose detail only became apparent if you got your nose right up against the canvas. A bookcase stood empty but for a few volumes on a middle shelf: a tattered Filia, a thick volume promising an exhaustively dull history of the Anchor, a couple of almanacs dense with statistics. There could be no doubt that this room wasn’t for prisoners, but guests.
Athène slipped off her moccasins and squidged her toes in the fluffy mat of the bearskin rug set between the sofa and the hearth. Her eye was drawn to a small marble table, on which someone had set a crystal decanter and four glasses. She took out the stopper and sniffed—sweet and somehow warm in the nostrils, with a bitter undercurrent that made her think of death. Pouring herself a glass, she went to the bookcase and took down the history of the Anchor, propping it on her stomach as she lay back on the sofa. The author used too many large, unfamiliar words, but the general outline was easy enough to follow. If the book was to be believed, the Anchor had been founded nearly a thousand years ago, just after the Flame Deluge. A village like any other for a couple of centuries, it had been set on the path to “greatness” by a man named Gladwell, who founded a church there: the Descendant church. Over time, missionaries from the Descendancy traveled far and wide, up to the cold northern climes and even down to Sudamir. Their fevered exultations persuaded thousands to give up the old religions and move to the Anchor. The author attributed the exponential growth of the city primarily to happenstance—questions of water supply and soil consistency, defensibility
and weather, natural resources and a subcategory called “intangibles.” Athène didn’t recognize the word.
“Gardener’s Anchor History, Volume One,” someone said.
Athène sat up. Grand Marshal Chang stood in the doorway. She closed the book and touched her finger to the golden I embossed on the spine. “So this is not the whole story? There are more books?”
Chang crossed the room to lean against the marble table. “Four more, to be exact. Each one drier than the last. But you can’t hope to mold the future if you don’t understand the past.” He unbuttoned his uniform jacket—a show of relaxed familiarity—and ran a hand across his freshly shaved head. Athène had expected the very sight of him to fill her with rage, but she found herself strangely numb. Here was just a man like any other, pursuing what he believed to be the greatest possible good. The Wesah had merely been in his way. Happenstance.
“I am not thinking I see you tonight,” Athène said. “I think you sleep.”
Chang coughed out a laugh. “I don’t sleep anymore. Too much on my mind. Besides, it isn’t often we have Wesah royalty under our roof.”
“I am not queen. I am Andromède. No subjects—only sisters.”
“Sisters, subjects,” he said, as if they were two words for the same thing. “The important thing is that you lead, as do I. I only hope you do a better job of it than the last Andromède.” He poured a glass of the amber liqueur for himself and then topped off her glass. “To unlikely visits,” he said.
She held his gaze, as her mother had trained her to do, and met his glass with her own. “To unlikely visits.”
They drank. Athène could already feel her faculties blurring, like the dark and hazy backgrounds of those oil paintings. A tactical decision of sorts: she would lower his defenses by lowering her own.
Chang sat down beside her. “So are you enjoying the book?”
Athène frowned. “I am learning, but I think also it is wrong about many things. It says the Anchor is here because of the river, because of the rains. All these numbers. But places are more than this. Places have spirits. Where the Wesah hold the tooroon, it is not because the sand is this color or the clouds are so big. It is because it is right to hold it there.”
“Is that why you’re here? Because of the tooroon?” Athène was silent. She hadn’t intended to bring the subject up at all, but now she was curious to see what Chang had to say. “I won’t apologize, if that’s what you’re hoping for. I requested an alliance and was rejected. At that point, we became enemies.”
“And if we had agreed to your offer? You would not have done what you did?”
“Of course not,” he said, then smiled slightly. “But we’ll never know now, will we?”
She picked up the decanter and refilled Chang’s glass, leaving her own as it was. “I am not coming here for an apology, Grand Marshal. I am coming to offer you my help.”
“You can imagine how I might find that hard to believe.”
“Yes.”
Chang leaned back and swirled his drink. “So convince me,” he said.
Athène had been preparing for this moment for weeks; she hoped her shaky English would make the speech look less rehearsed. “Sophia is winning the war. Everyone knows this. You are trapped here. Once you run out of food, your citizens will turn on you, and Zeno will strike.”
“And you don’t want that? I thought your people had always got along with Sophia.”
“This is true. But I am thinking Zeno plans this. She is friends with the Wesah for just this moment. Once she wins the war, we must do as she says, or we see a different side of her, just as we see a different side of you at the tooroon.”
The logs resettled in the hearth, bouncing sparks off the wrought-iron screen. Athène hadn’t noticed before, but it was decorated with a picture of an oak tree, complete with tiny squirrels and acorns littering the ground. It looked as if the tree was on fire.
“And you think the Descendancy will treat your people better?” Chang said.
Athène allowed herself a wry smile. “No. I do not.”
“So what then? Who are you for? Who do you want to win?”
“Neither of you,” Athène said. Here was the greatest risk she would take tonight: telling Chang the truth. “I want the two of you to burn each other to the ground. This is why I offer the Wesah’s help. We make sure you and Zeno fight each other fair, army against army. Maybe you win. Maybe she win.”
“And maybe you win.”
“Yes. Maybe both of you end up so weak that you never threaten us again.”
“Daughter’s love, girl. No wonder they made you Andromède. What a plan!”
“So? Do you accept?”
Chang looked circumspect. “Tell me this: Have you ever heard of ‘scorched earth’?” Athène shook her head. “It’s a military strategy. The idea is that, as an army moves across a given territory, it should destroy anything its enemies might use—crops, buildings, water supplies, all of it. Grand Marshal Murphy employed the strategy over two centuries ago, during the Ulmann Wars. His forces were overextended, so he called for a retreat. The northern armies pursued. But Murphy destroyed everything as he went, even after he crossed into Descendancy territory, even fifteen miles from the Anchor. Which is exactly where he turned on his starving, exhausted enemies and crushed them.”
Athène’s faculties might have been compromised by the alcohol, but what Chang had just described sounded like madness. “Foolish to destroy your own crops. What good is winning the battle if your people starve after? If one side fights better, they deserve to win. Maybe they make better leader, too.”
Chang acknowledged this with a shrug. “Perhaps. But you’ve faced some of my men in battle. How do they seem to you? Brave? Strong? Experienced?”
“No. They fight like children.”
“Exactly. They are soft. But these past few weeks, they’ve finally begun to harden. The rationing. The Mindful attacks. That fucking plane putting the fear of God in their hearts every night—it’s done more to straighten their spines than years of training could do. Just a little bit longer, and they’ll be ready. Hungry—yes. Desperate—certainly. But ready. This is my scorched earth policy, Andromède. I am burning away their hesitation. I am burning away their fear. Only when I’m certain that’s done will we fight.”
“But how will you fight?” Athène said. “You are trapped here.”
“Zeno will come to me. She’ll break her own siege.”
“Why would she do this?”
Chang raised an eyebrow, as if to say—that’s for me to know. In that moment, Athène realized she’d made a terrible mistake. Chang was actually grateful for his losing position. Whether he was right to be didn’t even matter; if he believed the Descendancy was destined to win, he had no reason to accept her offer. She swallowed loudly in the fraught silence. “So you do not want my help?”
“I don’t need it. But do I want it? That all depends.”
“On what?”
“On what you’re offering. And on what you want in return.” He smiled broadly, sipped his drink. “So let’s talk details.”
7. Clover
MORNING FOUND CLOVER STANDING OVER the stove in the apartment above the Delancey warehouse, preparing to brew the last of the coffee. Clive and Paz sat at the table that he and Kita had made from a couple of sawhorses and some unfinished planks they’d found downstairs. They’d have to drink the coffee black—since the siege began, both sugar and milk had been difficult to procure, but now they would be damn near unattainable. After the Mindful raid on the food storage warehouse, Chang had instituted a curfew from sunset to sunrise. The Protectorate presence on the streets had been vastly increased during daylight hours as well.
“There they are again,” Clive said.
Two soldiers with shotguns strapped to their backs walked beneath the warehouse windows.
“How long was that?” Paz said.
Clive glanced at the grandfather clock in the corner. “About
fifteen minutes, if that thing runs right.”
“Same as last time.”
“Yeah.”
The water began to boil; Clover poured it over the coffee grounds. “As if it matters,” he said.
“Of course it matters,” Paz replied testily.
“Why?”
“Because eventually we’re going to have to leave this apartment and actually do something.”
“Why?”
“Because war is coming! A lot of innocent people are going to die.”
“And you really think we can stop that from happening?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Paz is right,” Clive said. “We have to at least try.”
“But how?” Clover replied. “We tried to help the Mindful, and look how that turned out.”
“That was Da’s fault, not ours.”
Clover looked to Kita for some support, but she was gazing out the window, seemingly ignoring all of them. He poured the coffee into four of the cracked ceramic bowls that were the apartment’s only dishware and carried them two at a time to the table.
“Come on, Clover,” Paz said. “Get that big brain of yours working. Chang may not have figured out how to break the siege, but if anybody could, it’s you.”
“I’m not sure Chang wants to break the siege,” Clover said, taking a seat at the table. “He could’ve met the Sophians outside the city walls, but he chose not to. He must have something else up his sleeves.”
Paz blew a ghost of steam off the top of her coffee. “Like some kind of new technology?”
“Maybe.”
“So let’s sneak into Hell and find out,” Clive said.
Clover frowned. “It’s too well-guarded. But maybe we could—”
“Daughter’s love!” Kita said, turning away from the window, her cheeks bright with anger. “Can’t the three of you hear yourselves? You’re talking like the fate of the whole world depends on us. Well it doesn’t! We’re children! Children who’ve nearly killed ourselves over and over again trying to fix things. And all we ever do is make things worse!”
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