Bitter Angels

by C. L. Anderson

  “Eat.” He produced a spoon, lifted my hand, and wrapped my fingers around it. “I’ll feed you if I have to. Starved, you do no one any good.”

  I spooned some porridge into my mouth. It was bland, but it was hot, and after a few mouthfuls I found myself eating steadily until my spoon scraped the bottom. “Better?”

  I nodded and pushed the bowl away. “Have you got a Bianca story to tell me, too?”

  He shook his head. “Not me. I just work here.”

  “I’m starting to get the idea nobody ‘just’ works here.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe not, but I do my best.”

  “Why? You’re supposed to be here making things better.”

  He grimaced. “I’ve come to the conclusion that that’s the first mistake. This place is rotten to the core. Trying to make it better just gets the rotten on you.”

  “And you think that’s what happened to Bianca?”

  “And Bern and Liang.” His smile was crooked and more than a little sad. “It’s probably happening to you too, only you haven’t noticed it yet.”

  “And what about Amerand Jireu?”

  Orry sighed. “You need to be really careful around Amerand…did you know Liang’s been helping him look for his mother for the last four years?”

  “No.” Something else I didn’t know. Misao had it so right. We went in on this one blind. “Is she…a hostage?”

  “Yes and no.” Orry waggled his hand. “She and his father sold themselves into debt slavery to buy him his slot in the Security. This was after they risked everything to pull all three of their kids off Oblivion in the Breakout.”

  “So he’s got more family?” I thought about Finn Jireu—thin, dried-out, and tough as leather despite his obsequious pardon-pardon.

  “He had more family,” Orry corrected me. “His oldest brother was killed in the riots that came after Oblivion’s children landed on Dazzle. His younger brother was killed in the riots that came after Oblivion died. After that, his parents decided they had to get him somewhere safe, and the only safe place was the Security, and the only way in for an OB was to pay the fees, and the only way to pay the fees was peonage.”

  “Amerand told you all this?”

  “Liang did. In bits and pieces over the years. Amerand’s parents were swallowed into the peonage workforce. Eventually, he was able to find his father and get him swapped out by claiming him as a servant.” We looked at each other, silently acknowledging the obscenity of that. “But his mother vanished. She might be farmed out on a diaspora world somewhere. Or not.” Orry shrugged once more. “The point here is that if there’s anyone who might be ready to do a personal takedown of the Blood Family, it’s Amerand. He might just decide to push things if he thinks we’re bringing about the end times.”

  Unfortunately, this squared very neatly with the Amerand I had seen: the young man who moved with a kind of forced poise. He was trained to violence, raised in a place where finding the right level of corruption was a survival trait. Had my half promises been the final straw? My throat tightened. They could have been.

  “Would Amerand kill his Clerk?”

  “If he thought the Clerk had hurt a friend or family, he might. Loyalties get very personal here. There’s nothing else to trust but the person next to you or, better, the person who shares your blood.”

  My hand tightened around the cup. I thought about the dead I’d left behind on the ship. Wasted lives I’d had no time to mourn, blood I’d had no chance to come to terms with.

  Then I thought about Emiliya Varus and her meeting with the Clerk. I thought again about the tangled chain of war and murder. It was not only loyalties that were personal here, it was command. There was nothing objective and very little exterior. Your power on Dazzle depended on whom you knew—and whom you frightened.

  “Why are you still here, Orry?” I asked suddenly.

  Orry stared at my empty bowl. “Because while I’m here to help, maybe one of those kids out there doesn’t get sold into slavery.”

  I nodded. We just sat for a while, letting all that had been said settle down further. Then a new thought dropped like a pebble into the back of my mind.

  “Orry,” I said. “If Amerand Jireu is accused of murder, why haven’t they picked up his father? His father is hostage to his good behavior, right? If Amerand does something wrong, his father gets punished too.”

  Orry stared at me. He opened his mouth. Then he closed it.

  “I don’t know. That should have been done as soon as the accusation went through.”

  “But it was his father who came to tell me Amerand was in custody.” We stared at each other. “Something is very wrong here.”

  “And in a new way,” said Orry, with something like wonder in his voice. “Congratulations, Terese. I didn’t think it was possible.”

  There were a thousand things I should have been doing at that moment, but understanding was more urgent than anything else. I had to know why Kapa and Emiliya Varus and Amerand Jireu had all been tossed into my path. I had to find out which side Amerand was really on and what it meant that Emiliya Varus was on speaking terms with Grand Sentinel Torian. Until I understood that much, I would remain caught in that spinning wheel.

  “Orry, I need a favor.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I need you to get a message to Finn Jireu for me.”

  He turned his head so he looked at me sideways. “What kind of message?”

  “I need you to say that if anyone needs to talk to me for the next two hours, I’ll be conducting an investigation of the place where Bianca Fayette was found. But you’ll have to show me where it is.” I hadn’t even been able to do that much yet.

  Orry narrowed his eyes. “All right. Bring that big-ass gun of yours and we’ll go.”

  Five minutes later, with my weapon slung on my back, Orry and I went down into the street. The crowds were thin this morning. People watched us from doorways and alleys, but hurried about their business as soon as we caught them looking. The parakeets rose in lemon-lime flocks from the trash heaps and the snakes warmed themselves on the ledges.

  I was able to walk with Orry around three corners, and across a bridge over a ragged gap where a tunnel roof had fallen in. We parted ways at the base of a huge stone tree. Orry turned left, and I kept straight on, going slow, trying to follow the landmarks he’d recited for me.

  At last, I stopped by a subway entrance that was now no more than a circular hole in the street. The skeleton of a spiral staircase led down into the dark.

  I paused, looking into that hole and steadying myself. I could feel Bianca’s eyes on me, waiting with infinite patience as she could once she’d really hunkered down. When all that patience was directed at you, it could drive you faster and harder than the worst threat because you knew no matter what you did, she’d still be there when you were done, just where you’d left her. Waiting.

  Naked struts juddered under my boots as I carefully climbed down. Stone muffled the noises from overhead but magnified the joints’ rusted creaking. The smell was of stagnation. If the vents were functioning, they were clogged. It was hot and close and still. There was dust and fermenting waste somewhere, and a lot of feces. I choked once and coughed, telling myself to get over it, I’d smelled worse.

  It worked, mostly.

  Finally, my boots touched the floor again. Thick shadows and too many rustling sounds filled the tunnels, reminding me that the lost, the hidden, the rats—and whatever hunted them—all waited down here with me. Something big moved and I turned on my heel, bringing my gun around. Footsteps moved through the darkness, fleeing. I relaxed just a little and pushed my weapon back, but I flexed my hands in their armored gloves and my mind settled into its fighting stance.

  The space under the stairs was black. A single grey beam of illumination shone from the top of the stairs like a spotlight. My back was on high alert, stiff and prickling. I shouldn’t have done this. I should have picked a different meeting spot. I s
houldn’t have climbed down into Bianca’s tomb alone.

  But I wasn’t alone. She was behind me. I could feel her breath. I could hear its echo in my own harsh breathing.

  I adjusted my uniform cuffs and brought my right hand-light up so I could shine it into the space under the stairs.

  The space was mostly bare stone. A little dirt had drifted into the corners, but not a lot of refuse. The residents of Dazzle scoured their home for any scrap that could be turned into something else and carried it away.

  The stone was stained with age, maybe shit, maybe blood.

  I switched off my light.

  The darkness was immediate. My throat closed. My heart sped up. My breath rang in my ears, too loud and too hard. All at once, I was sweating bullets inside my gloves and under my armor. It was all too heavy, and yet I was too exposed. Darkness can see you. Darkness creeps under your skin and into your head. Daylight thinks it sees, but darkness knows. Darkness is what you carry in a hole in your head. It’s already inside you, waiting to find that little crack, that break so it can leak into your brain and fill you up.

  I didn’t see anything. Of course I didn’t. I hadn’t expected to. I just wanted to be there, where they found her, to try to understand what she’d been doing here. That this was a probable blind spot in the Clerks’ network where I could reasonably be expected to be spending time was a bonus. I could wait for Amerand here, and maybe at the same time find some lost last part of Bianca in myself. I could say the prayers and swear the oaths that I held dear and begin to come to terms with wasted blood and wasted life.

  Then, in a flash, I saw Bianca lying at my feet. Rigor mortis had come and gone. She sagged, almost melted onto the stone. Her deformed head was twisted at an angle you never see on a living human, but it covered up the horrible wound over her right eye and allowed her cloudy left eye to stare up at me. Her arms were bare and bruised. Her flesh hung loose on her broken bones. Black blood crusted her lips and her fingers. If I lifted her head, if I touched her hand, it would be impossibly soft and horribly cold.

  Then it was gone.

  I knew what it was. It was a hallucination, dug up out of my black hole, tied in with my old training. I had come here wanting to see Bianca, and my tortured subconscious had provided a vision. If it was not the one I wanted, whom did I have to blame?

  But the worst part was, seeing her so bitterly, terribly dead was still better than if I’d seen her whole and alive. I wanted her dead. I didn’t want her alive. Alive now would have been so much worse.

  “Field Commander?”

  I jumped and spun, coming down in a ready crouch, my hand on the stock of my weapon to bring it around.

  Amerand Jireu walked into the thin grey light that trickled down from above, his hands up and open.

  Stunned and shaking with relief, I rushed forward and embraced him. Slowly, his hands closed across my back. For a heartbeat we stood like that, before I remembered that this was not a son, not a friend—not even a Solaran—and I stepped away.

  It was then I realized he wasn’t wearing his uniform—just a stained tunic and loose trousers, with old, well-worn boots.

  “Are you all right?” I asked. In the back of my mind, I started working up the chain of requests it would take to get him off world.

  “I don’t know,” Amerand whispered hoarsely. “They never took me in.” He said it like a man who had witnessed a miracle, a terrible Old Testament sort of miracle.

  “Why’d you send your father to say they had?”

  “I was hoping you’d work out what it meant. I…Something’s going on, Terese. I don’t know what it is. But neither one of us should still be walking around free.”

  He told me what had happened, how he had witnessed his Clerk’s suicide, what Hamahd had said, and how he had been warned to keep his mouth closed. He’d walked back to his station, expecting to be taken into custody at each step. But nothing had happened. Nothing at all.

  “I wanted to make people think I’d been arrested.” He spread his empty hands. “If I wasn’t even questioned, everyone would wonder why. Everyone would believe I’d finally given over, crossed the lines. I’d be…shunned. My network would disintegrate. I wouldn’t be any good to anyone. I wouldn’t even be able to protect my father.”

  I nodded. You couldn’t look like you were connected to the Blood Family, which is the only comprehensible way you could be free after your Clerk died.

  “If I disappeared for a day or two, and just…came back. It would look like I’d been questioned and cleared. I think. I hope. My father’s waiting for the Clerks to come to our house. If they don’t in the next couple of hours, he’s going to disappear for a little too…” He stared at me, genuinely afraid. “Hamahd said they were using me, Terese. To finish their new network. What the hell does that mean?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered honestly. One more piece in the puzzle. One more piece and I couldn’t see how any of them fit. “I wish I did.”

  “But it doesn’t make sense.” He whispered the words. A man who had lived his life being overheard wouldn’t shout. “They know I’m running around loose. If they’re using me, why haven’t they even given me a new minder? Why haven’t they come after me?”

  “I don’t know,” I said again. “Unless…”

  “Unless, what?”

  “Unless we really are at the end of something. Unless whoever is running the game thinks you’ve been compromised by what Hamahd said, or that they can afford not to care about us.” Or unless you really are their spy.

  Or unless “they” just want us to think that. But if Amerand is spying for them, why would Dr. Varus be reporting on him? My stomach turned over. That’s the problem with having an agent—you need another agent to check up on them.

  Or is she just in trouble with the Clerks for murdering one of their own?

  Unless they just want us to think that.

  Paranoia is infectious. It’s also an incredibly useful tool. If you can make people afraid enough, uncertain enough, they will simply stop moving.

  I had thought the Erasmus Saeos had my cage waiting for me on Fortress. Perhaps I was mistaken. Perhaps they had built it for me right here. The triangle of Varus, Jireu, and Kapa had certainly managed to keep me thoroughly distracted since I got here. Look at me. I was here with him, worrying about what he was doing and what Dr. Varus was doing instead of what had been going on between Bianca and the Blood Family.

  “He said to let you get me out of here,” whispered Amerand.

  That halted every thought careening through my mind. “Who did?”

  “Hamahd, before he pulled away. He said to let the saints…let you get me out of here.”

  “Do you want me to?” Say yes, Amerand. Just say it, and I can pull you out of here immediately. I can get you safe where they can’t overhear you and we can find out what you really know.

  “What about my father?”

  “Him too, if he asks.” I touched Amerand’s arm. He was far too young for all he had been through. “You don’t have to stay here, Amerand. All you have to do is ask and I am required by the Common Cause Covenant to grant you asylum.”

  He looked at my hand on his sleeve, and I found I could not read his expression at all. “And my mother?”

  I drew back. “I’ll do everything I can to help find her.”

  Which was probably very close to what Liang had promised him four years ago. Amerand turned away from me, and faced the shadows. His fingertips rubbed together as if he were trying to scrape something off them.

  “What about Emiliya?” he asked softly. “Her too? If she asks?”

  Now it was my turn to hesitate. “There’s something you need to hear.”

  I told him about finding Emiliya in her empty home, our “pointless” conversation, about how I followed her.

  About how I saw her meet with a Clerk.

  “No,” he said flatly.

  “I’m sorry, Amerand. I saw…”

  “No,
” he said again, holding up his hand, blocking the words. “You may have seen a Clerk speak to her, but he did not meet with her.”

  “She went straight from talking with me, to…”

  “No,” he repeated. “I don’t know what happened. Maybe the Clerks took her family in. They might be holding her people against her good behavior.” He looked sick at the thought and like he wanted to bolt immediately.

  “Then why didn’t she go with the Clerk? Why didn’t they take her in? She wouldn’t have simply left if they were holding her mother…”

  “I said, no!” His fists clenched, and for one sick moment, I thought he might actually raise one to me.

  He seemed to think so too. He backed away. He turned, shaking, trying to catch his breath. He ran one hand through his tightly curled hair. When at last he turned back to me, he seemed unable to speak above a whisper.

  “You don’t know her. You don’t know…Do you even know what happened to us? To Oblivion?”

  I didn’t understand where he was going with this, but I was going to have to follow. “I know Oblivion died,” I said carefully.

  “It was left to die. Our punishment for rebelling. Our punishment for deciding we didn’t want to be a prison anymore.

  “When the system really started to fall apart, the prisoners began attacking the guards, more or less to see what would happen. I was five when I saw my first murder. It was a guard, and it was the first time I saw that they were human, that they could bleed. I cheered.

  “After that, the guards started leaving, and we prisoners started helping them along. We even let some of them take whole ships.”

  He waited for me to be shocked. I wasn’t. He was a child, a child of prison and violence, how could he not join in a rebellion? It was only human.