But he worried most for Remy, though Remy would not hear it spoken, saying with angry finality, “She will not hurt me.” If Berringer even hinted at the concern, the King would silence him with a look, and once with his fist bashing down on the desk. The topic could not be broached.
Until the General solved the problem of how to train a replacement, he was on call to be Sable’s restraining escort. Each night he would walk ostensibly with Remy, but with Sable between them, to dinner and then back to the private halls.
Every night for the first two weeks of the new arrangement, Sable arrived at the table with a slightly different expression. At turns she was amused, confused, or mentally slow, and once she fell into a dazed stupor.
Remy knew from the start she was sending Amele out to buy her every style of drug, but he didn’t ask the General to stop it. Remy had taken the news with tired patience, willing to grudgingly allow one impropriety to avoid something worse. He wanted to know what she was taking and had silently, reproachfully confiscated from Amele syringes before she could enter Sable’s rooms. Worried she might inadvertently, or perhaps even intentionally, kill herself, Remy had Dr. Branson incessantly pestering her for mindless reasons. Every hour the General was running up and down flights of stairs, from one end of the palace to the other, as he didn’t trust Sable not to show Branson his own blood if he annoyed her.
Once Sable’s drug consumption became an unspoken concession of her obliging confinement, Amele made no further attempts to lose Girard’s people. The sister led them nearly every night to someplace a little stranger than the last. Dressed in clothes that denied she was ever a nun, she would take them to nightclubs, afterhours clubs, and private parties. Her last stop had been unusually quiet, a little commune of artists and students with a lab. Across the entrance was scrawled in ink, “Leave your ego at the door.”
Sable had already swallowed the pill when Girard learned what it was.
“It’s called chapel hazardous, or hazard to help those who don’t already know to avoid it,” Catherine explained to Remy. “It’s synthetic. Taken to the extreme from a popular psychotropic, it’s a chemical dead end. The changes made a hallucinogen most people find too harsh to be desirable. It’s a hell of a powerful entheogen, certainly not something you would take socially. The hospitals saw a lot of people on bad trips when it first hit the street.”
In the first two weeks, Sable had consumed a systematic list of known chemicals. From animal tranquilizers to shamanic roots, she was searching for something. When she fell into chapel hazardous, she sent Amele back for more. It was the first time she made a second purchase, and the quantity she wanted saw the commune cooking through the night.
Weeks passed while Sable was not seen at dinner, and during that time, not a single mother passed through the double doors.
Winter
The first month of winter was upon them, but it did not stop the Alenans from gathering in front of the Prime Minister’s administrative house. Down the length of the wrought iron fence, a similar group formed repeatedly. Two were students, one worked chopping trees, there was a grandmother who urged caution, and a doctor with his wife made assembling seem respectable. They were all agents of Girard’s and they were making friends among the protesters. The teams were scattered through the crowd: two students, one laborer, married conservative, and always the grandmother holding those around her back, warning Careful. Be careful.
It was four weeks since the Queen Mother had spoken, and Girard’s agents felt the wave was breaking. They wanted the order to go.
But Remy was losing focus. When he reached for Sable, he heard tragic misfortune darken her voice. She returned to him something dreadful, bleak visions of failure that caused him to doubt. He would come to hold her, but she lifted to him eyes of devouring blackness that made her unbearable to touch. Throughout the days and into the night, she ate the pills from the artist commune, hiding behind closed curtains in an unlit room, staring purposefully ahead with blind concentration. When he could get close enough to ask her to stop and come back to him, she would tell him, “Soon. Soon it will be over.”
In the slow hours of the afternoon, Berringer was called by the guards posted outside the private halls. There were two mothers who wanted to see Sable.
“Mother Maisa, you are looking well,” the General told her. Her month of recovery gave no indication of what had transpired.
“You have no right to stop us.” She was penetrating Cloitare.
Berringer smiled at Mother Isabelle and then asked of Sister Amele, “Sable has agreed to see them?”
The three had matching faces, but Amele lowered hers to agree.
The General knew there was very little to consider. He laughed at Maisa. “You, absolutely not.”
Outraged to be so derisively refused, Maisa tried to make clear their relative positions. “The Queen Mother has consented to see me.”
“I am a soldier that doesn’t care.” He opened the door to Isabelle and Amele, but blocked the path of Maisa. “What happened before is never going to happen again.”
When the General entered Sable’s rooms behind Amele, Sable was peering through a curtain to gaze over the gardens. He assumed she was aware of the guards who constantly watched her windows.
She dropped the fabric to banish any brightness so that only indistinct outlines of contrast gave shape to the objects in the room.
“Sable,” the General spoke from routine, “you know I am going to have to see better than this.”
When he turned on a light, he was pleased to see she did not shrink to shield her eyes. It was the first time in weeks her pupils were sober. She set them on Mother Isabelle. “I assume you are here to bargain for peace.”
Isabelle crossed the room to speak discretely but was annoyed to find the General proceeding her movement. Every step she took to Sable brought the General with her until they were standing in a conference. She expressed her rigid disapproval, but he simply waited without interest.
Isabelle spoke tersely. “You agreed to accept.”
Sable shrugged and smiled. “You can travel freely.” From her hand, she threw a single pill in the air and caught it. “The territory is hazardous, but I have not stopped you from entering.”
Berringer watched the closed face of the Cloitare meet the grinning dare of Sable and wondered who this time would give in first. Sable gathered energy, pulling at something malign until her teeth began to show.
Isabelle looked down. She wanted to do things differently. “You should send your guard away.”
Sable laughed. She tossed her voice airily and motioned to the door, “Yes, General, you may leave,” and then laughed again with scorn. “I am not the one who controls him.”
“If you do not, then I will.”
Sable stopped smiling. Berringer knew the posture of her body, the relaxation that came before a move, the centering of intentions that meant she was preparing to strike. He was immediately between them. He asked Sable severely, “Are we about to have a problem?”
Her answer was a warning to Isabelle. “No, a problem would be most disagreeable.”
Without taking his eyes from Sable, the General said, “It’s time for you to leave, Mother Isabelle.”
Sable dropped the drug into her mouth and then offered her hands to Berringer as a gesture she would be easy to catch. She leaned to see past him, speaking to Isabelle around the pill, “We should settle this quickly.” Berringer could not break his attention from Sable to see Isabelle’s reaction, but he watched Sable become malevolent, promising, “I know these dark roads well and I can keep us on them forever. I have only one demand.”
Isabelle’s voice was no more pleasant, “Speak your treason clearly.”
“I won’t ride the freeways screaming, but no one travels through my mind.” Sable held the treacherous hallucinogen in her teeth, waiting for an answer.
The soft shifting of fabric meant Isabelle had either inclined her head in agreement or
denial, but she was certainly turning to leave.
When Sable spit out the pill, the General knew he had just witnessed her win large against the Cloitare. He understood what had been implied, and for all the ferocity and dedication Sable had given it, he was beginning to think it might be possible.
~~~~~~
The King was sitting across from the political secretary in the sunny front room of his quarters. He did not hear her, but he was certain he felt Sable coming down the hall and was not surprised to see her open the door without invitation. She gave no indication she saw Laudin. She stopped before Remy, eyes never having left him, and exhaled softly so that her body relaxed.
The King motioned for Laudin to leave.
When he was gone, she pulled her skirt up and dropped to straddle Remy’s lap, running her hands through his hair, pulling his head to her chest, whispering, “I am back, take what you need.”
The sun was beginning to set when the King called Girard and told her to start the revolution.
~~~~~~
The crowd in front of the Prime Minister’s administrative house was agitated. In pockets, it was being focused, united.
The students started it, rallying those around them, “Message everyone you know. Tell them to meet here tonight.”
The laborers agreed. “Enough.” They drove their fists into their hands. “We have given the Prime Minister more than enough time. We end this tonight.”
“I’ll be right here beside you,” the doctors told their wives.
When their numbers had swelled, the grandmothers, who had always advised restraint, threw caution to the wind and called for decimating havoc, pointing the way forward. “We go over the fence.”
It was a work of devastating beauty. Catherine watched the wave of violence on her screen and gave the next order to go.
Alena’s cities were pitched into powerless darkness.
~~~~~~
“Seriously, this place is getting too depressing.” Nika watched smoke fill the northern sky and could find in it nothing attractive. Rebels, foreign agents, provocateurs, or whatever they were being called at the moment, would have taken out another warehouse of food, or fuel, sending Alena further from recovery and ensuring the country’s continued dependence on Erentrude aid.
The decline started the night the protesters had climbed the iron fence to seize the Prime Minister’s administrative house. A turbine in one of the country’s coal power plants had shut itself off. The pull for power on the grid had been redirected, but it overloaded the next circuit, shutting it down as well. In a system always running close to critical, it quickly turned into a cascading cycle of failure until the whole country went dark.
Batteries and generators at the cellular masts had lasted a week, but the blackout had upturned the financial district. With no one being paid, the fuel stopped moving.
Enzo and Nika had studied the landline phone for what seemed an absurd amount of time, pressing random buttons to make it send the number they were calling before figuring out how to use it. “So that is a dial tone.” Nika wondered who had decided to use such a horrible noise.
They were calling home to Erentrude to arrange a pickup of batteries. “We’ve gone primitive,” Enzo told them. “No easy contact from us for the foreseeable future.”
The last time Nika had been to the pulp mill to collect counterfeits, she had read about the virus taking out the power plants in Alena. The generators had shut down to protect themselves, but when they were brought back online, attack codes took control of the turbines. The operators’ screens showed the turbines accelerating slowly, but the code spun them wildly fast, gaining speed until the blades ripped free and broke through the casings, destroying the entire thing
Of the eleven plants in Alena, eight had been destroyed and three sat dormant while technicians tore apart the software looking for the cause of the sabotage.
For the freedom fighters, it was a grudging recognition. “If it weren’t for King Remius’ army at the airports dispensing food, the country would be starving.” But winter was only starting and Alena had not converted to run their households on battery power. Old chimneys were opened in houses to burn wood, and in several places, fires had taken the house and the neighborhood back to their foundations. After one month of total blackout, trash was burning in the streets where it piled and sewerage ran untreated into the rivers.
Nika was flying out of the mess in Marlow’s ugly Pigeon, using it to replace the cargo plane she’d been forced to sacrifice to the King’s lithium brine. The first time back in the air had seen her at the controls talking to herself, “Nothing to worry about. Done it thousands of times. Nothing’s going to happen.” Her concern for the plane was a fear of being caught, of going back to the cell, the isolation, and then the dark living smoke that came to free her. After three months in the air, she only felt it at night when the moon was gone and the instrument panel was the sole source of light. She feared what was behind her, what she could not see, afraid to look for seeing tendrils floating in the cabin. She would end up talking to herself to keep from panicking, imagining she might throw down her headset and pitch herself out a side door, damn the altitude and lack of parachute.
And the Pigeon seemed worse than any other plane. Its surfaces reflected memories of who was missing and Nika didn’t want to touch them for fear of displacing more of Marlow’s prints, as though each lost trace of her removed another chance she might return. Enzo felt it too. He thought Nika’s resistance to use the Pigeon was an unnecessary respect for property Marlow had never observed, but today he flew with Nika and felt the absence fresh. He was shaken every day that Marlow had called him for help and the last words he heard from her were fear-drenched denials for what she saw was about to befall her.
“We’ve been going about this the wrong way.” As they entered the clean air of Erentrude, Enzo saw the shape of things clearly. “Max can only go so far electronically. We need to play this like Marlow. We need to grab somebody by the fucking throat and rip the answers out of them.”
“I like it, but whose jugular are we going after?”
“I’m thinking General Bear.”
Nika could hardly speak for laughing. “Oh damn, and I thought I was the one who went insane. You’re thinking a bit too big for yourself.”
“I don’t have to be anywhere near him to bitch-slap him. Every relevant search Max did inside the prison for what might have happened that day in Eudokia referred him to a private network and a file named Retrieve. Then, right before Max was kicked from the system, he gets a hit for Mission Retrieve in the military record of the tech sent to secure the prison software. Fallon, Lieutenant Fallon, we’re going poke that fucker with a battery-powered ass-kicking stick to get the Bear’s attention.”
Enzo was glad to see it all plainly now, but he hadn’t come to Erentrude to think; he’d come with Nika to get their money to the Count. The hedonistic accountant had been buying every flavor of anodyne to nurture his habit from a client’s teenage son for years and he barely recognized his dealer as an adult when Enzo came to him complaining of “suitcases shitting cash.” Trading drugs for his services, the accountant had begun his criminal life lightly, nothing more than making hard currency respectable by getting it into the system, but then Enzo just kept referring more people to him and from them he had stepped heavily into economic fraud. Every new contact seemed to bring another until he also found himself with the problem of too much money. In the inspirational cloud of smoke provided by Enzo, it made beautiful sense to become the financial proxy for Erria’s most corrupt, transferring electronic funds covertly to serve criminals of every title. With the clients the Count managed of late, if Enzo were not the friend that had originally named him the Count, he would have offered too small a profit for the accountant to risk handling.
The traveling bank was passing through the capital and its tellers weren’t terribly happy to be taking Alenan currency. “This is the last time I’m going to accept
it until that country gets itself fixed.” The Count left his assistants thumbing through the bills on the dining table to move onto the relative privacy of the hotel suite’s balcony. To keep from falling into the nodding side of his addiction, the Count kept on his feet, slowly pacing the scroll railing. “You noticed none of the royalists traded in anything but the crown coin. They haven’t lost more than pocket change. You might as well start getting your customers used to it.”
“They’re more likely to switch to the Sierran dollar,” Enzo told him.
“Not with this coming out.” The Count motioned for one of his guards to give him a tablet from inside and then flicked through the screens until he found a page that caused him to frown. On his next pass by the lounge chairs, he handed it to Enzo. “That virus looks like it came from Sierra: Sierra software, Sierra virus protection, and a visit to the plants by a Sierran technician last year.”
Enzo read the technician was missing.
“Theory online is Sierra was trying to force Alena into renewables. They’d make a fortune in contracts. Now, instead, there is talk Sierra might invade.”
Eye-rolling disbelief played across Enzo’s face. “You’re too old to believe in such fantasies.”
The Count looked over his thin, aging body. He looked older than his fifty years, and he knew his preference for thick buttoned sweaters paired with slip-on shoes didn’t help. “I’m young enough to think there are monsters under my bed.”
“Well, you should know, you invited them. But you don’t actually believe the lies you’re repeating about Sierra?”
Sister Sable (The Mad Queen Book 1) Page 19
