Erron already had coffee brewing and was picking his way through the kitchen dispenser, finding something for breakfast. His gaze flickered over her as she settled at the stool, yet he asked no questions. “I have to go to the farm this morning,” he said. “The Institute has a training session.”
“I have a thing of my own,” she told him. “So much for the day together. I’m sorry.”
Erron shrugged. “After the fighting broke out at the game last night, I figured you wouldn’t even be home for breakfast.”
“You saw it?”
He nodded. “They switched over to some drama story, just not straight away. I think it caught them by surprise. So there was about two minutes where all you could see were writhing bodies and fists. Were some of them really using sticks?”
“Piping, that they pulled off the stair rails,” she said, her gut squeezing.
“And you haven’t spent all night sorting it out?”
Marlow pressed her lips together. “They…the Red Guard…were in charge last night. It’s their problem.”
Erron stared at her. “You don’t mind? That’s not even the red division’s area. It’s yours.”
Marlow gripped her coffee mug, feeling the good heat in her fingers and considered if she felt angry about having her authority whisked away as it had been. In truth, all she had cared about last night was finding Jonah and assuring herself he was okay. She hadn’t wanted to leave him at the arena and for a moment her job had felt onerous. A shackle around her ankle.
Selena Roscoe, the Commander of the Bridge Guard, had assigned Nicolo Hayim and his division Red Guards to help Marlow with the growing civil unrest and Marlow had resented that. That had been days ago, though. It had been Hayim’s idea to dress Red Guards as civil guards, to provide back-up at the arena last night and that had been welcomed assistance.
When the fighting broke out, though, the red contingent had responded with far more force and zeal than she had liked.
“It was almost as though they wanted everyone to hate us….” she murmured.
Erron tilted his head to look at her. “Who? The Spanners faction? Or the patricians?”
“The Red Guard,” she breathed. She swallowed. “Stars above! I have to…” She stopped. Who was she going to tell? Hayim had aligned himself with the patricians and now he was actively working to ensure the entire ship hated the Bridge and the civil guards. Selena Roscoe was politically neutral…only Marlow had made that assumption about Hayim, too. Perhaps Roscoe had assigned Hayim to help her division because Roscoe was a secret patrician, too.
Roscoe’s superior was Roxanne Axelson, the Captain’s Chief of Staff. Marlow couldn’t speak to her directly. It was a complete breach of protocol and Roxanne would probably refuse to meet her because of it.
There was no one else.
Marlow sipped the coffee, which tasted very bitter. She grimaced.
“You went all silent,” Erron pointed out.
“I think that’s what they intended,” Marlow replied. “I’m cut off,” she added to herself.
Chapter Ten
Twenty minutes later and barely three minutes after Erron had left, Marlow put the hooded jacket back on and hurried across the corner of the market, past Bernice’s café and into the corridor.
Despite being early, Jonah was already there waiting for her. His face looked much better than it had last night, only there were nicks and cuts and bruising that would call attention to him.
“Everyone is going to be looking at you,” Marlow pointed out.
“I can’t wear a hood like you,” he replied. “Besides, while they’re looking so hard at me, they’re not going to see you.”
That was true. Jonah was still a free citizen, even though the Red Guard had him high at the top of their list of people to watch. He could go anywhere on the ship except for those areas that were off-limits for safety reasons.
“I wonder how long that will last?” she wondered aloud.
“What will last?” He glanced up and down the corridor then gently took her arm. “Come on. I don’t like standing in one place for too long.”
Was he feeling the same paranoia she was? Did that mean her guesses about being deliberately pushed into a powerless corner were correct?
As they walked in a big curve around the edges of the district, heading for the area where cabs and private cars were permitted to park, Marlow explained to Jonah her thinking about being cut off.
Jonah didn’t dismiss her theory as nonsense. He grew quiet and thoughtful. “They see you as a threat,” he said slowly.
“But why? I’m not political. I just do my job.”
“Exactly,” he said heavily.
“But the Bridge Guard is supposed to be neutral,” she pointed out. “We can’t do our job properly and safeguard the ship and everyone on it, if we pick sides.”
“You’re a threat because you won’t pick sides,” Jonah said. “Which means Selena Roscoe is probably a patrician supporter, too. Hayim couldn’t have done what he did last night without her cooperation in the first place. If you have steadily refused to be drawn into the power plays, they would be forced to contain you in some way. You’re a key player, after all.”
Marlow snorted. “No, I’m not.”
“No? Your guards control security on the ship, everywhere except the Bridge itself.”
“We’re there to maintain peace,” she replied.
Jonah glanced at her.
“What?” she demanded.
“If my guess about what is happening is right,” Jonah said, “then they don’t want peace, which means you’re in the way.”
Her mouth felt abruptly dry. She tried to swallow and her throat clicked. “Insurrection,” she whispered.
Jonah moved toward one of the small enclosed cabs parked at the edge of the district, only a few meters away from the Artery, which was much quieter now that most people were at work for the day. A train pulled away from the platform as Jonah unsealed the door for her and Marlow turned her head and ducked into the seat before anyone on the train might see her face.
Once Jonah was in and the car sealed up, no one would be able to see either of them. As he eased the car forward, over the train’s magline and onto the Artery, where the remote pilot connected and pulled them forward at ever-increasing speed, Marlow let herself relax.
“Where are we going?’ she asked, deliberately trying to change the subject.
“To meet an old friend of mine,” he said. “It’s his birthday and I was invited to the party tonight. Under the circumstances, I don’t think I should go. So I said I would visit today, instead.”
“He doesn’t work?”
“Not anymore.”
“So when you say he’s an old friend, you meant his age.”
“I meant both. I’ve known him for a very long time. Since I was a child.”
Jonah had grown up in the Palatine, she remembered. “So we’re going to the Palatine, then? That’s where you met him?”
“When I was six,” Jonah said.
“Who is he?”
“I won’t say. Not in a public cab.”
That had been the same reason she had turned the subject away from insurrections and civil chaos. The Bridge routinely denied that conversations held inside public cabs were monitored and that was the truth, just not all of it. Conversations were recorded rather than being actively monitored. So was the name of anyone who used a cab, along with their departure and arrival points and the time of day. That data was freely available to her division to assist in peace-keeping activities, although the Red Guard controlled and stored the data.
She didn’t know who might dip into the data and listen to her and Jonah. Jonah’s name would be attached to the cab as he was the one to borrow it and she would be an anonymous passenger in the data. Her voice, though, would be recognizable to most of the people on the Bridge.
Marlow searched for innocuous subjects instead. The weather was always safe. Gossip about pe
ople on the Forum and entertainers in the Aventine were also harmless.
It only took a few minutes to reach the hub of the Palatine torus, because they only had to traverse the Esquiline itself. If they had been travelling from the Bridge, it would have taken much longer. Even so, Marlow was relieved when the car parked itself in one of the available slots and they could get out. Gossip and insubstantial news did not come to her naturally.
There was a taxi-boat at the hub, already waiting. The operator nodded at them both pleasantly, although Marlow could see his gaze flickering from one to the other of them. She brought her hood up over her head, pulling it forward so he couldn’t gaze at her.
Jonah gave the operator their destination. “The gray house, please.”
The operator’s brow lifted, yet he punched in the coordinates and lifted the taxi away from the hub gate.
The taxi-boat drifted along the zero-gravity spine of the torus for most of its length. Marlow had not been to the Palatine very often in her life. There had been outings to the public parks a few times as a child. She had never had reason to venture here as an adult, not even for her job. The Palatine was bucolic and almost completely crime-free. The only trouble they had was neighbor disputes over water access and despoiling public views, which mostly got sorted out with an arbitrator.
In the last year, since Erron had applied for a position with the Farming Institute, Marlow had accompanied him to the central farm three times. Each time, she had hung over the side of the taxi-boat to look down at the surface, fascinated. But as the farm was on the very edges of the torus, the glide down to the surface had been quick and almost featureless.
This time, though, she could look down at the curved surface beneath her long enough to notice it moving. The slow roll of the torus took sixteen hours to complete a full circle, yet that was enough to create standard gravity on the surface.
From up this high, she could see the main river, little tributaries, lush woodland, the patchwork formal paddocks for the farms at the end. There were groves where houses hid and more houses that disdained trees, yet were surrounded by green gardens.
Even the air smelled differently here.
“You must have had a wonderful childhood,” she told Jonah, unable to tear her gaze away from the view below. The daylight divider had moved already, casting houses and trees into dark.
“I did,” Jonah said quietly. “But so do most children, even those who grow up in the Esquiline and the Capitol. Children are universally doted upon.”
Marlow nodded. She had been an Esquilino her entire life and she had known everyone in the district almost that long. There was always someone to talk to if she really needed to talk, although for nearly two decades, that had been Taniel.
She sighed.
The thick belt of trees in the middle, running the full circumference of the torus, was the public park area. There were meadows and clearings among the trees and she could even spot the Trail that wove through the park, an infinite loop around the torus. There were people who walked the Trail as a challenge, or simply to spend time in the park itself, among actual trees. She had always been too busy for that.
Only the really exclusive houses were located beyond the park and as the taxi-boat drift over the top of the park belt with no hint of descending yet, Marlow’s curiosity rose.
Jonah touched her arm and pointed to a white house among trees, with a little creek twinkling next to it. The day divider was on the other side of the house. Dawn in this section had occurred not long ago. “My parents’ house…it was.”
“They’re no longer alive?” she asked.
Jonah shook his head. “They didn’t get me until they were in their eighties.” He smiled fondly, his eyes distant. “They always said it was a mistake they had no intention of correcting. I think, though, that I grew up wilder than I should because they weren’t always able to keep up with me. So neighbors tended to pitch in.”
“Which is how you met your friend….” she finished.
He nodded. “Nearly there,” he added.
The taxi-boat was finally starting to descend, only the area it was aiming for was filled with trees. Not the taller bushes and smaller trees that surrounded other houses. This was almost a forest, with giant trees and dense canopy. There was no house she could see. Not through that thick foliage. The taxi-boat was definitely heading toward it, though.
A narrow rivulet wound into the copse and disappeared.
The taxi-boat hovered over the grassy meadow beyond the trees and the operator opened the gate for them. “Not allowed to touch down around here,” he apologized.
There was only a long step down to the grass, that was flattened by the anti-grav propulsion field under the taxi-boat. As soon as they were both on the ground, it lifted up and curved back toward the null-gravity center of the torus.
After a few seconds, when the pulse of the taxi-boat faded, the sound of birds and small animals started up. There was a soft cheeping sound that Marlow had learned as a child was the sound of crickets in the grass. She had never seen one, only images of them. Her first sight of a real bird had frozen her to the spot in amazement and now she could hear dozens of them.
“It’s so quiet,” she said. Her voice sounded loud.
Jonah was looking up at the other side of the torus far over their heads. That side was in darklight. Very little detail could be made out. There were lights everywhere, where houses were located.
“The lights are twinkling,” she said, astonished.
“It’s the air between us and the lights that makes them look as though they’re winking,” Jonah said. “When I was a kid, someone told me that the lights in the Palatine twinkle just like stars used to do when they looked at them from the surface of old Terra.”
“Is that true?”
“I believed it when I was a kid. Now, I sometimes wonder if the person who told me was simply trying to make the Palatine sound more like Terra.”
“That’s what I heard when I was a kid—that the Palatine was a piece of old Terra.” She looked around and sighed. “It really is beautiful.”
Jonah took her hand. “Come on.”
There was a sandy path between the trees, worn smooth by many feet. Jonah followed it as it curved parallel to the stream, which tinkled and gushed musically. Once they were fully beneath the trees, the light grew soft and indirect, filtered through the thick tops of the trees, many meters overhead.
“What are these trees?” she asked. “They’re not like the ones in the park.” She remembered those from when she had visited as a child. The trees in the park were tall and their branches circled the trunk in even layers and sprouted spiny leaves all over them.
These trees had massive trunks, much wider than she could put her arms around and the trunks soared up high, with branches starting much farther above. The branches emerged in irregular places and the leaves were flat and elliptical in shape.
“They’re called redwood. They’ve been growing here since the Endurance left Terra.”
“They’re three hundred years old?” she breathed, astonished.
“Many of them.”
She craned her neck to look up at them, awed. Her hood fell back and she let it fall. There was no one here to see them.
The path curved around the bole of one of the massive trees and Marlow stopped in the middle of the curve, her mouth opening.
There was a house ahead. It wasn’t one of the big white ones with the many windows and two levels, that seemed to be the fashion in the Palatine. It wasn’t one of the glass and steel ones that were the alternative preference. Those flat, low houses sometimes enclosed part of the landscape inside the house itself as a natural courtyard.
This house was unclassifiable. It looked very, very old. Perhaps it was. Perhaps it was as old as the trees around it. It certainly looked as though the trees and the forest had grown up against it over time. There was green trailing growth over the walls and up to the roof. Among the greenery whit
e flowers nodded in the little shaft of light that broke through the canopy above.
The roof was all odd angles and slopes, made of some dark colored material Marlow couldn’t even begin to guess the nature of. There were windows, only they weren’t flat against the wall like normal windows. They were grouped together, in threes and fives. They curved out from the side of the house.
What she could see of the walls beneath and between the clinging green plants was a light gray color and made up of big hunks of some substance…perhaps stone, except that she had never seen stones bigger than her fist before. There was a paler gray mortar holding them together.
“The gray house,” she murmured. “It’s…wonderful.”
There were bushes with fat leaves and red flowers, plants with more flowers, pretty plants with no flowers and with delicate leaves that looked like lace.
The path led over the creek to a front door that looked like worn wood. There was a little footbridge over the creek that was made of the same stone-like material as the house. The path over the bridge was flat stones, edged with thick grass that muffled their footsteps.
It was charming. Marlow didn’t want to move forward. She wanted to stand here on this spot and absorb every detail.
Jonah tugged her hand. “You can come out later and look around, if you like,” he told her. “I’ll show you where my playhouse used to be.”
“You played here….” She sighed again. “Everyone should live in the Palatine,” she declared. “How could you ever want to move away?”
“Come inside and find out. I’m sure Grey will want to tell you.”
“Grey?” she repeated, startled again. “You mean, this house is named for your friend?”
Jonah shook his head. “Most people think it is, only this was the gray house long before Grey acquired it. Come on—their perimeter wards will have warned them we’re coming.”
The idea that somewhere as tranquil as this place would need security screens was just as astonishing as the house itself. Marlow let herself be drawn forward.
The door opened as they got close to it and Jonah stepped inside and drew Marlow in with him.
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