Father paled. “You can’t be serious.”
“Oh, I am quite serious, little brother. I have restrained myself during your despotism for years, thinking the route I had chosen was the only way. But I can’t wait another day for our allies to swoop in and liberate us. It is time for humanity to return to Landry Park.”
“You can’t,” Father said, and struggled against Smith’s grip. “Landry Park is mine. And it will be Madeline’s after me.”
“I think you will find the legalities are on my side. And if not, then my people will help fill any loopholes.” Smith and Ewan both looked very eager to fill any loopholes in question. “My friends in the East will be delighted to witness this transition. They are very invested in what happens to the gentry.”
“Traitor,” Father said through clenched teeth.
“As for Madeline,” Jack said, as if he hadn’t heard, “she will have a place at Landry Park for as long as she chooses. And she will have the right to choose.”
Father slumped, and I allowed worry to slice at me.
Father without Landry Park? Landry Park without Father?
“There is one last thing,” Jack added, voice thoughtful. “I have dispensed my justice, but I can’t speak for all the heartbreak you have caused these people. So your daughter and I are going to leave now, and within an hour, you will be delivered alive to Landry Park. But I can’t vouch for what will happen in that hour.”
The wind whipped Father’s white scarf around his face as he stared at his brother. “You can’t hurt me, Stephen.”
The Rootless tightened their grip on him, one of them clapping a sore-riddled hand over his mouth.
I stepped forward, but then caught sight of Charlie on the terrace, shivering in Jude’s coat, tears of terror still on his cheeks. I looked into the haunted eyes of an entire group of people who’d been robbed of loved ones, beaten, starved, made homeless, and arrested—all thanks to my father.
But hurting him now would make them no better than he was.
I ran forward and threw my arms around him. “I love you, Father.” I could feel the expensive silk of his scarf against my cheek and smell lingering traces of opium smoke.
“My Madeline,” was all he said. And then I felt myself pulled away—gently but firmly—and I looked up to see Ewan’s grim face.
“Please,” I asked Jack. “Please do not let them hurt him.”
“I don’t lead the Rootless like your father leads the gentry, Madeline. I’m not an autocrat. They have made it clear they want revenge and that they will take it, no matter what I say. All I could ask of them is to spare his life, and believe me, even that was hard won. It is out of my hands.”
He met my eyes and I shivered, for the knife-edge inside them was exactly like Father’s.
And then the crowd swallowed my father, like the ocean swallows a stone, like the snow swallows sound. Hands passed him on to hands, and backs turned, and as he thrashed, more took hold of him, pushing his body closer to the center of the crowd. I pushed forward after him, but the mob pushed me back, and soon even the distinctive red of his hair was gone. I stopped, my heart pounding.
“Come,” Jack said.
“I can’t leave,” I whispered.
“It is happening whether you leave or not,” Jack said. “Would you like to watch? Or leave, knowing that he will live and be with you in an hour?”
Then Ewan, Jude, and Charlie were there, and David, with his blood-soaked scarf and slightly swollen nose. They herded me toward the street, and reluctantly I went, sending silent prayers up to the stars, now hidden in the rosy glow of a winter morning.
Jamie joined us at Landry Park—fresh from his journey from England—and was astounded to find so many Rootless milling about the estate, and me tending to David’s nose. He quickly took charge of David’s and Charlie’s minor wounds and hypothermia, gathering blankets and warm tea while I explained what had happened since I’d last written. Jude helped where he could, mostly hovering over David, looking uncomfortable whenever a Rootless person passed by.
But before we could discuss anything at length, the front doors blew open in a storm of noise and January wind, and several men came through, carrying Father’s body like a sack of grain, his arms dragging to either side of him. Running out of the drawing room, I just was in time to see Father carried up the wide white stairs to his bedroom.
He made a cracked, viscous moan, and I wanted to rush to his side, to hug him and tell him I was sorry, so sorry, but I couldn’t make myself. I was afraid to see his face. I was afraid to see what the Rootless had done. I was afraid he’d open his eyes and all I would see was anger, and I would know that I had lost my father more certainly than if he had been killed.
Instead, I walked slowly over to the doors and pushed them closed, shutting out the snow and the cold. Enough snow had blown in that I could see faint footprints revealing the gleaming marble underneath. The snow looked like white ashes.
I looked around the foyer, lit as it was with winter daylight, and felt a cold fear that I would never see the house the way I wanted to again. I would never see it as simply beautiful, as simply ancient, as simply a part of me. And then I felt a fear about that fear—why, after all I had learned, was it so hard to let my perception of Landry Park go? Would I always be a gentry at heart, caring more about things than people?
I walked toward the stairs and climbed the first step. My fingertips brushed the cold marble of the banister and I found myself clutching the railing, feeling off balance, like everything was being ripped away from me. My father, my house, my life. . . .
In this light, the bust of Jacob Landry was almost shadowless, and so was the tiny atomic symbol underneath it, the symbol that comprised our family crest, that decorated our home, that reminded us that our power and wealth and legacy rested in the unseen forces of colliding and splitting matter.
It was a symbol that meant everything to Father, and I used to think it meant everything to me. But now I knew that it would haunt my dreams, possibly as it had haunted Jack’s, knowing all the misery that had stemmed from one man’s decision to misuse a gift of enormous power. Tears burned at my eyes, and I wasn’t sure who—or what—they were for. I stared at the bust for several minutes, my thoughts wandering from my father to Charlie to David, from Cherenkov lanterns to journals to the atoms themselves. Atoms that comprised the banister I was holding and the bust I was looking at and the air I breathed.
And then—on this sprawling estate, in this large house, on the brink of a revolution—I was reminded of the power of the small. Small ideas, small acts, small people. After all, it was the furious industry of those tiny atoms that fueled the stars, stars that then nourished planets, and planets that then nourished life. No matter how small I felt, how infinitesimal my feeble gestures seemed, I was part of a larger chain, a larger system, and so help me, I would bring order to this chaos.
I turned away from Jacob Landry and started up the stairs.
• • •
Jack was in Father’s room with Ewan, and Jamie was by the bed with his tablet, using it to take readings of Father’s breathing.
“Is he all right?” I asked Jack.
“He is alive, as I said he would be,” he said, and gestured to Father. I approached the sleigh bed, where Father had been dumped on top of the silk, hand-embroidered duvet. His coat, gloves, and shoes were missing, and the raw red of his feet and hands made me think they’d been stripped away shortly after I left. His eyes were closed, but he was writhing slowly, his hands grabbing and clutching at the duvet.
And his mouth—
“What happened to him?” I cried, going to the side of the bed and taking his hand. He clutched at my fingers with a steel grip.
“I will send for my doctor bag,” Jamie said, looking queasy. “We may need to call for a surgeon.”
Jack’s face was a statue’s, but there was a trace of sadness in his words. “I believe they chose to give him a taste of his own medicin
e, so to speak. They pinned him down and forced the gibbet food inside his mouth for several minutes. Not enough to kill him, but enough to burn his mouth. Enough to give him severe radiation poisoning and probably cancer.”
Father’s mouth was more than burned. The lower half of his face was unrecognizable—dark brown with blisters covering his lips and tongue. Bloody ulcers were beginning to form at the corners of his mouth, and smaller burns stretched down his chin and neck, as if he’d thrown up radioactive bile.
“Father, it’s Madeline,” I said, brushing the hair away from his forehead. “Jamie is going to help you, okay? He will be back any minute and he will fix you.”
Father’s eyes fluttered open. He reached up to touch my hair, and then closed his eyes again with a groan.
“A shame,” Jack said.
“He was about to do the same to Charlie,” Ewan reminded his father. “If we hadn’t stopped him, you’d be watching this happen to Charlie right now.” But even Ewan looked a little sick at the sight of my father’s ruined face.
Jamie came back not ten minutes later, hurrying in with his bag. “I have called the gentry hospital to arrange for home treatment,” he said breathlessly. “They should be here within the hour.” He set the bag on a nearby table and began pulling out syringes of morphine and vials of anti-microbial medicine. “We will need to clean the wounds as best as possible, and then cover them with a dry dressing. Necrosis of the tissue will set in within a few days, and we don’t want to risk sepsis. We will also need to order cellular scans to estimate the level of DNA damage and cancerous cells.”
“Will his mouth heal?” I asked. “Will he be able to talk with his tongue and throat burned like this?”
Jamie prepared a syringe of morphine and then eased it into Father’s thigh. After three or four minutes, his squirming stilled somewhat, and his breathing deepened. Jamie nodded, and began dousing cotton pads in anti-microbial fluid. “There is always a chance,” he replied finally. “But at this point, I think it doubtful that he will ever eat or speak or smile again.”
• • •
That night another snowstorm came like soft, soft music. When I woke, even the ice in the trees was covered with a thick blanket of white. Cold seeped in along the baseboards and through the frosted windows. The house was muffled and empty, bereft of the guests that had filled its rooms the day before. All the Uprisen had fled back to their homes, probably conspiring over their next move, searching for a new leader now that Father lay wordless and suffering, a prisoner in his own home.
I pulled on a warm dress of ivory angora and went downstairs, where I found Mother grimly contemplating a chunk of bread in the morning room.
“Your uncle has given the servants a holiday,” she said, poking at the bread with a knife. “When they come back, he wants to talk about a pay raise. Regular days off.”
“Mother . . .”
She burst into tears. “Your father, darling, your poor father. Your cousin says he doesn’t know if your father will ever heal properly and that he probably has cancer. What will those Rootless do to you or to me when they have the chance?”
“They had the chance with me,” I reminded her. “And they did nothing. It was only Father they wanted.”
“Here they are gloating and nattering about justice, when they are nothing more than violent criminals. It makes me sick. I can’t see how one brother would let that happen to another.”
If the brother in question was about to kill his son . . . But I agreed with her. I felt the same shaky nausea as I did after seeing the battle on the wall screen a few months ago. So much violence, so much destruction. “Where is he? Uncle Jack?”
“Back at his hovel, I suppose,” she said. She pushed her plate away. “Preparing to invade our home and kick us into the streets.”
“He promised me a place to stay,” I told her. “I am sure you can stay, too.”
“But who would want to? After what he let those animals do to your father? And with that awful journal of Jacob Landry’s circulating around? The Rootless are refusing to change the charges, the working poor and the middle class are in an up-roar, and now that awful man is in charge of Landry Park. Oh, Madeline, why couldn’t you have just left all this alone?” She put her face in her hands. Even despairing, she was beautiful.
I sat next to her and put my arms around her slender frame. She leaned her head on my shoulder.
“Everything was going so nicely,” she said sadly.
“For you. Everything was going so nicely for you and people like us. But it could not go on forever. Isn’t it better that Jack takes control now, rather than have the Empire help the Rootless overthrow the gentry?”
“I don’t trust a man who deals with the Empire,” she answered.
“Desperate people make desperate choices.”
“Then why didn’t he just stay?” Mother demanded. “Stay and inherit Landry Park and then administer whatever social changes he wanted to then? Why fake a death and then come back to claim his birthright?” She stood up. “I’m going to lie down. This day has already exhausted me.”
“Mother?”
She stopped and turned, her dark eyes and dark hair lovely in the pale winter light. I thought of the night of Charlie’s capture, of the flash of agreement I saw in her eyes. “Didn’t you ever feel that Father was unjust? Didn’t you ever wonder about the suffering of those around us?”
“Your father has always been just—it is what the Landrys pride themselves on.” She answered quickly enough, but I could see her hands balled in her skirt. I stood and went to her, staying silent.
She pulled me into a fierce embrace, pressing my cheek against hers. I could feel the lingering tears on her face.
“I hope you never know what it is like to love a man like your father,” she whispered. With a swift kiss, she left, the silk skirt of her dress making a pleasant swishing on the marble floor.
I stayed in the room, watching snow drift idly outside. That Mother loved Father, I had always known. But that she felt it a burden, I had never considered. Under her plum-colored dress, under the silk chemises and fragrant oils and lotions, beat a heart that I realized I barely knew.
Laughter echoed in the hallway—a girl’s laughter—and a shh! noise that was followed by scuffling feet. Curious, I got up and walked into the hallway to see Cara pressed against the wall, kissing someone with ferocious intensity. Someone who was decidedly not David.
I gasped, and she heard me, breaking apart from her paramour.
“Ewan?” I asked, flabbergasted. “Cara? Why are you here?”
“Oh, I spent the night last night,” she said, as if that answered all my questions.
“I should go,” Ewan told Cara, and pressed his lips to her cheek. “Bye, love.”
She smiled her stunning smile and moved her fingertips in a wave. “Good-bye.”
Grinning, Ewan walked past me. “Cousin,” he greeted me with a nod.
Shocked, I turned to Cara, waiting until Ewan was out of earshot before I erupted. “Cara, what on earth is going on? Ewan is Rootless! And you’re dating David!”
“That did not stop you from kissing him yesterday in the park.”
I blushed, ashamed and a little grateful that she didn’t know about the other kiss. “I didn’t mean for that to happen—we were scared and he was about to save Charlie and it took me by surprise,” I tried to explain.
“Like I care.” Cara started walking, and I scurried to walk beside her. “David told me himself after everything settled down. I can’t believe it took this long, either. I would have gone for it ages ago if I were you.”
“What?” I was so confused.
“Please. Did you think I was really dating David Dana?” she scoffed.
“Yes! You debuted with him. And at the Lodge, you kissed—”
“And other than that, how often did we kiss? Did we ever seem like we were madly in love?”
“While he was gone, you were so withdrawn. Everybody
said you were heartbroken over David being in the mountains. I just assumed . . .”
“You assumed wrong.” We stopped at a window and looked out at the snow. Ewan was trudging down the driveway, already covered in white dust. “Look, David came to me, okay? Last spring. He knew. He knew.”
“He knew about what?” I watched her follow Ewan down the path with her eyes, and then the truth began to connect. “You and Ewan.”
“David found out when he started meeting with Jack that Jack’s son was in love with a gentry girl. We each had something the other needed. I needed him to keep his mouth shut about Ewan, and he needed the appearance of being a normal gentry boy. He needed to look happy and carefree, and I could help him with that. In public, of course, which ended up backfiring once Ewan heard that we were dating. You saw him at his house. I thought he was going to throw me into that laundry vat. He wrote me a letter telling me never to speak or write to him again. After that, I—I was upset. I didn’t care about anything else if I didn’t have Ewan.”
Cara and Ewan. The idea was ridiculous, and yet it fit together with everything that had happened this year. “How did you meet?”
“The first time he came to change the Westoff charges, he couldn’t find his way into the house, and we met face-to-face on the patio. I didn’t realize he was Rootless at first because he was so healthy and strong. I thought he was a servant and I teased him a little about being so quiet. He told me that it was because he had heard I talked enough for an entire city. Then I dared him to kiss me.”
“Did he?”
“Of course.”
“Like that poor servant boy when we were girls.”
She shrugged. “Ewan’s the only person who has never treated me like a princess or a concubine. He made me feel strong. He made me feel like I could do anything I wanted.” She sighed. “He made every boy that wasn’t him seem frivolous and spoiled. After we ran into each other two or three more times on my estate, we started meeting in secret.”
I struggled to imagine Ewan—the tense revolutionary, the angry rebel—falling in love with a spoiled girl like Cara. And Cara—who had never once expressed any sympathy for anyone less fortunate than her—how had she found herself craving the company of a charge changer?
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