I felt a twitch of defensiveness. “They say that he stopped global warming with the nuclear charge. If it had not caught on when it did, the world would have been pushed past the breaking point, and the weather would be even worse than it is now.”
“And yet the Empire forced America into sustainability well before the Last War. Perhaps such a result was on its way with or without Jacob Landry?”
“I suppose.”
“I say this not necessarily to disparage your ancestor—although I will freely admit that Jacob Landry is little liked in these parts—but to probe your perspective. I sense that you’re convinced of the injustice of our lifestyle—and perhaps have been so, at least academically, for a couple years—but are still on the cusp of action. Our David—forgive my informality, but I am old and it is a privilege accorded to us—is in the same place. I have urged him to stay where he is, and to keep up pretenses, because he is too valuable to us as an informant. But I think my urgings have come as a relief to him, because he’s not ready to divest himself of wealth and comfort and the things that have defined his life for so long.”
“But surely he is of more help in a position of wealth?” I asked. “He can give food and money to the Rootless community, and he could not do that if he gave up everything and lived with you. When he’s in the military, he’ll have even more information that could help your revolution.”
“From a pragmatic point of view, you’re correct. But I’m not only worried about supporting my community and finding our freedom, but about David himself. And about you, young Madeline.”
“Me?”
“How long do you think you can live like this? How long can you dance and twirl in pretty dresses knowing that people are starving and dying? No one can open their eyes to truth and then continue to live as they are. It would tear them apart.”
“I guess I try not to think about it,” I said in a small voice.
“You see David, so violently lurching between good humor and anger, eagerness and malaise. He’s the perfect example: if you do not act according to your conscience, you risk becoming complicit in the misery. And you and David are better than that.”
We came upon a large clearing. A concrete shed with metal doors was in the middle, and the trees around us were strangely silent, as if the birds and animals didn’t dare to come here.
Jack pushed open a door.
“Welcome to the sorting yards. After today, you can no longer claim ignorance as an excuse.”
Inside the doors, Jack handed me a suit of radiation-proof polymer. In the blue-black of the barely lit darkness, I struggled with the heavy sleeves and clunky lead zippers.
“There aren’t very many of us working in the afternoon. In the heat of summer, most come in the dark of morning and work until noon. After sunset, they’ll come back to finish the day’s work. Funny to think it now, but in the winter, I almost crave the warmth.”
He pulled on a suit, and we walked down a dark flight of stairs, marked infrequently with Cherenkov lanterns. The first thing I noticed as we reached the sorting floor was the heat. Stifling heat from the crowded sorting platform, where people worked ceaselessly, sweat visible through their clear polymer masks, and heat from the trains, which zipped through at impossible speeds, sending welcome drafts of air followed by waves of steam from the nuclear-steam engines.
I could see that most of the polymer suits had holes or tears in them, and some people went without gloves or boots or masks. I hurriedly checked my own suit, fears of radiation poisoning suddenly overwhelming everything else.
“You are quite safe,” Jack assured me, his voice muffled by the mask. “Your suit is one of the newest, purchased kindly by David just last month. Someone must have just left; normally the newer suits are taken right away. At any rate, you would need to be exposed quite a bit longer than a few minutes to contract anything stronger than a headache. Come.”
Cane clunking on the floor, he led the way past the sorters hunched over lead bins, cracking apart charge cases like oyster shells and stripping them of their pearl-sized uranium spheres. They were quickly moved into the bins filled with water, where the Cherenkov radiation took effect, sending blue light onto their sweaty faces.
After a bin was filled with three or four uranium pearls, the packers clamped lids on the bins and dragged them to the waiting trains, of which there were always three or four. They loaded the leaking, cracked bins into place, and then wedged themselves alongside for the three-day ride.
“They are only allotted one bottle of water for each day of their journey,” Jack said, using his cane to indicate the packers. “And these polymer suits, while efficacious enough for protection, are uncommonly hot, especially in the closed-in tunnels, where the steam keeps the temperature around one hundred degrees. If the men wore these suits, they would be dehydrated within a day, fatally so by the time they reached their destination. Even if they could stay alive in such a state, they would almost certainly be too listless to ride the sharp curves and accelerations safely. The tunnels are littered with the corpses of the men too weak or sick or tired to remember to hang on. And so the packers choose not to wear the suits, and by doing so, they choose a slow death over a quick one.”
“Why can they only have one bottle of water a day?” I demanded. “Who would make that rule?”
“That was your grandfather Lewis Landry’s idea. He felt that the incidental radiation of the work was not a strong enough check on any radical tendencies that might arise from the Rootless. Since the packers are normally the fittest and strongest of the community, he rightly guessed that poisoning them quicker would stay any attempts at an armed uprising. Such a small thing, a water ration. Yet with enormous consequences.”
“But there are no gentry or police here in the sorting yard. Why don’t they just take more water? Who would know?”
Jack inclined his head. “A fair question with an unfortunate answer. First, I should mention that the police do venture down here once or twice a year. Those infrequent visits are violent enough to be a deterrent for most of us. Secondly and sadly, there are some in the community who are disposed to tell the police of witnessed infractions in exchange for certain amenities or protections. So yes, every once in a while, a packer dares to violate the rule. And he may not get caught for several trips. But when he is caught—when he is betrayed by his own neighbors—he is never seen again. Often, his family suffers as well, through reduced food rations or forced relocation.”
Nearby, one sorter collapsed in a heap. Others came to help her, pulling off her mask and fanning her face. Cankers clustered around her mouth and nose. Her hands were bare, save for the lesions that looked almost like rough red gloves, they so thoroughly covered her skin. When I examined the room closely, I could see several people lying supine. One teenage boy threw up behind me, each heave obviously costing his body some extraordinary amount of pain, because when he finally stopped, he continued crying and crying.
Children—of the poorer families who needed the additional ration card, Jack explained—were there, too. Children as young as four struggled to open the cases and dump the spent fuel into the bins, some without even a shred of polymer clothing to protect them. Without thinking, I pulled off my mask and offered it to the father of a young girl. He was also without polymer clothes, and so I stripped all of it off and gave that to him as well.
Eyes wide, he mumbled thanks, and quickly dressed his girl in as much as would fit.
I felt naked for a moment, wondering if I could feel the radiation seeping into my pores, wondering if I could feel the DNA in my cells corrupting and breaking apart. But I refused to have more fear than the little girl, who now peered at me through the mask with painfully innocent eyes.
Even without the suit, the heat was unbearable. My dress, which had been smashed into the suit, now stuck to my sweaty legs, and my hair was wet enough to curl into ringlets, which clung to my neck and back. The smell of vomit permeated the air. The soft cries of hot a
nd dehydrated children ebbed and flowed in between the clamor of the trains and shouting packers.
After another few minutes, Jack took my arm and steered me out of the sorting yards, and after he took off his suit, we went up into the clearing. The metallic air smelled deliciously fresh and even the hot sun felt cool in comparison to the toxic sauna of the yards.
“Forgive me, Miss Landry,” Jack said, coughing and wiping his face. “I wanted to show you more, but in my old age, the heat affects me quicker. I have put in time as a sorter and as a packer, but my people insisted that I take a gentler job once my grandchildren were born. A happy circumstance of my youth made it so that I have lived to see my children reach maturity—most Rootless cannot. I even had the chance to remarry after my first wife died and to father little Charlie.” He closed the door to the sorting yards. “But now my second wife has perished, too, and I believe it won’t be long before my atoms are reunited with those of my loved ones.”
We walked back to his house in silence.
“What do you think?” he asked when we reached his front steps. “Are you ready to help us?”
I paused. The answer was yes, of course. How could I not after seeing the sorting yards? After hearing David’s description of the Rootless ghetto in Atlanta? But despite what Jack had said earlier about living a double life, I couldn’t imagine forsaking Landry Park. “I want to help,” I said. “Money, supplies, anything you need.”
Jack took my hand in his rough one, and I realized, for the first time, that I had been touching Rootless people all day . . . Smith and Ewan and Jack . . .
“And what about your heart, Madeline? Are you prepared to give up everything to fight with us?”
I kept my eyes on his house. I could see the charcoal drawings through the window. “I can help more if I stay where I am at,” I said uncertainly. “I know I can. And I couldn’t leave Landry Park—”
“You must make a decision, sooner rather than later, about what being a Landry means. Will you follow in Jacob’s and Lewis’s and Alexander’s footsteps? Or will you make your own legacy?”
“I’ll talk to my father about treating the Rootless better,” I promised, “and I’ll convince Cara to tell the truth about her attack—I can help, I swear.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw David approaching, the sunset lighting his fair hair on fire.
Jack gave my hand one last pat, let go, and started climbing the steps to his house. “When I was young, I managed to find some unsupervised time in the Landry Park library, whereupon I came across the most extraordinary journals. Jacob Landry’s journals. I found quite a different man than is usually described in the history books.”
David reached us, looking alarmed at my disheveled and sticky state.
Jack turned and faced me. “I propose a deal: you stay at Landry Park and fight for us there, as David has done from his home. But in the meantime, find Jacob Landry’s journals and read them. I think they will help you in your decision. Good night, Madeline.”
“Good night. Oh, and Jack?”
“Yes?”
I thought of the unrelenting heat of the sorting yards, the dimly lit anger of the Rootless in the tavern. I had learned more today than I had in years. “Thank you . . . for everything.”
“My dear, it is nothing less than you deserve.”
• • •
David and I started west for the gates into the city.
“He took you to the sorting yards, didn’t he?” David asked after a few minutes of quiet walking.
“Yes. Have you been?”
He nodded. “Several times. Every time I go, I bring a new suit or new lead bins, but it never seems to make a difference. It’s always just as awful, just as dangerous.”
“I don’t see how anything we can do will make a real difference,” I said, feeling a sudden exhaustion overtake me. “There are so many of them.”
“But we have to try, right?”
“Yes.” But only twenty minutes removed from the sorting yards, I felt the undercurrent of passivity tugging at me. It would be so easy to go home and soak in a bath of lavender and rose petals and pretend that none of this had ever happened.
The threshold was affecting David, too. I could almost feel his restlessness as we passed through the gates. His stride quickened and his shoulders tensed. I scurried to keep up, trying to unglue my skirt from my legs.
“Do you realize that we’re supposed to be the knights, Madeline? The two of us? Against an entire country of people whose lives depend on the system we are promising to destroy? Gawain and Bedivere had it easier than this. They were heroes and the dragons they were fighting were dragons everyone could see and acknowledge. We are fighting something that most people spend their lives ignoring.”
“I thought you were the one who believed in knights?”
“I do. What I don’t know is whether or not they’re worth anything in the real world.”
And then he shut his mouth and said nothing more as I hurried to follow him across the city to my estate.
“Is this the last time I’ll see you before you leave for the army?” I asked as we reached Landry Park.
“Probably. Yes. I leave in a couple days, and I plan on spending those days drunk and insensate.”
I winced. He sounded completely unlike the David of a few hours ago.
He passed a hand over his eyes. “I’m sorry. I’ve just got a lot on my mind right now, which I’m sure you can understand.”
“I should get inside,” I said. “I suppose you’ll need to get home, too. Or back to Cara.”
He laughed a harsh laugh. “Right. My girlfriend. Good-bye, Madeline.” And with a bow that was more mocking than polite, he walked off my property and into the twilight.
It wasn’t the last time I saw David before he left. The morning before a train would whisk him away to the mountains, he paid an unannounced visit to my house. Jane Osbourne and I were taking tea in the morning room, discussing her father’s latest attempt to marry her to a local manufacturing heir, when David strolled in, trailed by our anxious butler. Crawford, I thought to myself. His name is Crawford.
Morgana twined around David’s legs, purring.
We stood and he bowed. “Ladies.”
I didn’t really know what to say. After what we had seen two days ago, what we had shared with each other, to be back here in a gentry house, staring at each other over a tray of frosted cakes and teacups . . .
He reached down to rub under Morgana’s chin. “Miss Landry, could I have the privilege of taking a turn about the grounds with you? Miss Osbourne is welcome to join us, of course.”
“Actually, I was just leaving,” Jane said tactfully, and made to go.
I quietly panicked. David and I had gone from outright fighting at Cara’s debut to confessing each other’s deepest secrets in the Rootless ghetto. And now that I was acutely aware of how he affected me and how much I cared about him, it made being near him that much worse, because I knew that he would never return those feelings, not as long as he dated Cara. The thought of being alone with him terrified me.
“Oh, no,” I told her. “Really, you can stay.”
She smiled. “My family is expecting me.” She curtsied and he took her hand and kissed it. “Mr. Dana,” she said, inclining her head. And then we were alone.
A few minutes later, we were out on the lawn. The sun was out and beating down hard; today was the first of the truly hot days that would dog the city until fall.
I felt acutely aware of the space between us—palpable and electrified. He was dressed in his usual expensive clothes—a well-tailored suit and tie, a charcoal color that set off the starched white of his shirt sleeves, pinned with onyx cuff links. His silky hair ruffled in the humid breeze—a few stray tendrils already beginning to cling to his neck—and the sunlight was catching on his blond eyelashes like drops of gold.
“I thought you were going to spend your last days in Kansas City drunk and insensate,” I said, u
nable to stand the silence any longer.
He squinted back toward the house. “I changed my mind.”
“Why?”
“Because of you.”
A breathless need blossomed in my chest, razored and painful.
“I wanted to come and give you my apologies for my behavior the other day,” he continued. “I was rude and I had no excuse, save for that I was frustrated and confused.” He stopped and plucked a small white flower out of the grass. I fought away a blush as he handed it to me.
“I have always known that I would enter the military like my father,” he said. “Despite our fortune, we have no estate, and I wouldn’t feel my future secure if I didn’t have an income. And it’s a career that I’ll enjoy.” A breeze blew through the orchards nearby, sending a storm of fluttering white and pink petals blowing onto the lawn. “I’m tired of what I do here. I’m tired of trying to figure out what’s best. What’s right, what’s wrong. Or, more accurately, what’s most right or least wrong.”
He looked over at me. “It may sound hawkish or even stupid, but I can’t wait to go to a place where there is one enemy—the East—and our days are spent in single-minded awareness of that fact. No more double-guessing, no more subterfuge. The army exists for one reason, and that’s to protect us from the East.”
“Do you really think the only reason for having an army is to fight against the Empire?” I asked. I looked westward toward Glasshawke, where the many windows winked and flashed in the sunlight. “I think the need for a standing army is only as far away as the closest nuclear charge.”
He smiled a tight smile. “Leave it to you to take away my only comfort.”
“That’s not what I was trying to do,” I replied quickly. “I just don’t think that any change of situation is going to remove these feelings because it can’t remove who you are.”
“And who am I?”
I didn’t know. Even after he’d haunted my thoughts for weeks, I still didn’t know.
He passed a hand over his eyes. “It’s okay, Madeline. I can’t answer that question either.”
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