by Nik Korpon
A loud pop beyond the glass. Aífe dies again. I don’t know if I want to save her.
I startle as Emeríann appears beside me. She grabs my hand, hits pause, and takes a long breath before speaking. “Riab never wanted to fight. I pushed him to do it, told him it’d make his children proud.”
“I don’t want to talk about this.”
“He was scared of dying, said it wouldn’t be right to leave me alone in the house. I told him that if he thought I couldn’t take care of myself, he was as good as dead to me.” She sniffs hard. “I wanted him around, not needed, and he had to understand the difference. I was young, you know? Hot blooded. Still at the age where you believed things like that mattered.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because she’s not your fault.”
“I never said that.”
“Who are you talking to, Henraek?” She gives a half smile. I notice a small white scar, almost star shaped, beside her eye that I’d never seen before. “I cried for two years before I realized that. He could’ve said no, and we would’ve fought, and made up, and gone about our lives. But he didn’t. You could’ve gone home, given up what you believed in, but you didn’t. And that’s it.”
We sit for a minute before she squeezes my hand then hits play. She picks up the envelope from the floor and opens it with her finger.
Mebeth pops an olive in his mouth and exhales as he chews, then pushes open a heavy wooden door with silver rings for a handle, entering a small kitchen. Belousz waits in the doorway. Gleaming pots and pans hang on the walls. A cook chops a mound of vegetables on a marble counter. A Tathadann man stands behind one of the butcher’s blocks scattered throughout, flanked by a cosanta, a bodyguard. There are several large hooks hanging from the ceiling in the middle of the room, three of which hold a slab of salted ham. A drain sits in the middle of the floor, a hose coiled on the right-hand wall.
And standing behind the far butcher’s block is a young Walleus. That duplicitous cocksucker. I knew he was hiding something. He always knew about Aífe. He had to. His white suit is sharply tailored, probably bespoke, his bald head polished as ever. This was when they were still showing him how lush the Tathadann life was. He and Belousz exchange a look, but I can’t get a read on it.
“They are finished,” Mebeth says. “Take care of him then prepare a meal. Cheese, olives, something of that ilk. But nothing heavy. It’s hot outside and I don’t want indigestion.”
Walleus looks down and holds out a hand, the cosanta doing the same, and they pull up Donael between them.
My chest seizes. Emeríann gasps, whispers oh my god over and over.
His eyes project abject terror, his face dirty, his lips tinted blue by candy.
My lungs are too heavy for my bones.
He is alive. He was alive in the kitchen of the restaurant where his mother was murdered not fifty feet from him.
I try to breathe but choke. My throat is swollen with loss.
And he is alive, but I have seen this before. As soon as Mebeth closes the door there will be two shots. Why didn’t Walleus stop him?
“How do you want it?” the Tathadann man says.
Mebeth points at the hooks, then shrugs. “You decide.”
Mebeth closes the door then turns and takes an orange slice from the tray. Grunting and a clipped yelp in the kitchen. Belousz nods to Toman and they head toward the door.
In the background are gunshots. Two claps that echo through my hollow chest.
Emeríann breaks down in choking tears. The taste of metal and bile fills my mouth. I kick the viewer off its perch. The image fizzles out.
Walleus knew. He knew? The entire time. Months, years. Mornings we got coffee, I mourned my son and he knew. Afternoons at the pub, pouring beer and liquor down my throat, letting it stoke the agony and anger that burned in my gut, and he knew. Days upon days upon days I walked around in a self-loathing, self-destructive fog, wanting to die but not having the courage to kill myself, absorbing the pain of the hundreds and hundreds of lives I’d destroyed, and he knew my son had been murdered.
And he did nothing to stop it.
“Henraek,” she says.
Even if there was nothing he could do, he should have done something. Anything.
“Henraek,” she says again, and in the lilting tone of her voice I can already hear insinuation. She was right with Aífe, but she cannot be right about Walleus. She’s right but she can’t be.
“Henraek,” she says, louder this time, but I see a flash, a white and red blur pass before my eyes and my hands wrap around a chair and hurl it at the window, shattering against the grate, and I snatch the nearest leg and smash it repeatedly on the table, shards of wood flying at me, pricking my cheeks, my face, sweat running into my eyes, but I bludgeon the table, hearing Aífe’s voice, Walleus’s, seeing their faces break apart beneath the chair leg, and as the middle of the table finally gives and collapses on itself I hear Emeríann scream my name.
I spin and face her, approach her. Chest heaving, hands throbbing.
The envelope lies torn at her feet.
“That table wobbled,” I say. She stares at the piece of stationery in her hands. It’s blank but for the Gallery masthead. A photo sits between the tri-folds.
My skin flames. The photo is grainy, taken with a high-powered telephoto lens, no doubt, but even if I were blind I would be able to read the image by sensory perception alone.
Donael is much older than I have ever seen him, becoming a young man with thin ropes of muscles on his arms and the hint of an Adam’s apple. He stands on a green lawn, holding a remote control plane in his hands as if he’s trying to fix it, Cobb beside him holding the remote.
Printed on the back of the photo is Walleus’s address.
30
Walleus
Because the two-inch glass is strong enough to be bulletproof – which Donael would appreciate – and thick enough to mute all sound, all the rioting is actually pretty beautiful.
A man springs off the sidewalk, floating up to a blue canopy before leaping off and knocking a Tathadann soldier from his horse, which rears up and slashes at the air with its hooves.
Another man stands on the capsized fruit cart, picking off soldiers with a crossbow until his head explodes in a cloud of red.
Two other soldiers try to restrain a protestor and look like they could be performing an angular interpretive dance, until the man plunges a knife into one soldier’s shoulder and the other soldier shoots the man dead.
Two mangled bikes lie on a corner as we pass. I look back, trying to see if they’re the same ones from the fisting man with the family, but the formation of soldiers collapses on a group of protestors and the bikes disappear.
The burnt bodies hanging from the lampposts by frayed ropes sway back and forth like strange fruit.
With no soundtrack of gunshots or dying screams, even the most horrific scenes can become detached and manageable. But also, without that silence of the dead, I would have never been able to spend my days with Donael.
I had gotten word from Sere, Josihe’s wife: rumors were swirling about Aífe meeting with members of the Tathadann. With Henraek in the wind and unable to keep an eye on things, Sere was worried that a few rebels would get a mind that Aífe was a threat, and neutralize that threat, leaving Donael on his own. Given that Aífe was able to fall in love and live with Henraek, poor impulse control was kind of a given, so I told Sere I’d watch her, see she didn’t do something impulsive and get herself hurt.
I tailed her for days, selling it to my new Tathadann bosses as community surveillance and using my contacts while they were still willing to talk. Aífe kept her normal schedule at first – park, day school, market – and I began to think that Sere was being overprotective, that I could relax a little, until I caught the end of a conversation about her meeting Mebeth with some information about a planned attack. I stayed on her tight the rest of the week, only leaving post at night, hoping that
, with Henraek a ghost, she wouldn’t leave a young Donael alone in the house while the possibility of retaliation still hung heavy in the air.
It took me a few days to really understand the scope of what Aífe had told them. Plans for offensives. Addresses of outposts, artillery rooms, who led which cell. She told them about the power substation, which had been the rebel’s crown jewel. They pulled out their men and told the skeleton crew to stand down, but not before diverting the power elsewhere. They knew it would make us cocky, ambitious, ready to take bigger risks, then promptly massacred half our men over the next few weeks with her intel.
All of that from Aífe’s mouth, and all because she wanted her husband back. So when Henraek asks me about that night, about when I turned, how the hell am I supposed to respond?
That last day, I trailed her to the meeting with Mebeth. Getting into the café’s kitchen took a surprisingly small amount of sleight-of-hand. In hindsight, they knew I was trailing her, so I think Mebeth called her to the café because he wanted me to witness what the Tathadann was capable of – possibly as a warning, possibly as reassurance that I’d made the right choice, possibly to wag his dick a little at how feeble the rebellion was becoming when compared to the Tathadann. Whatever the reason, that surprise was chickenfeed compared to walking into the kitchen and finding Donael sitting on the tile killing floor with his back against a butcher’s block. Some cosanta stood beside him, picking his teeth with a paring knife.
In all of my gathering, not once did it come up that they’d planned to kill Aífe – one of their main and most reliable leaks – and gut Donael in order to destroy Henraek, thereby cutting the head off the rebel snake. I never found out if that was the plan all along or if she’d outlived her usefulness, but it really didn’t matter because when Mebeth came into the back with that self-satisfied grin of his saying that they were finished, it came as a pretty big goddamn shock to both Donael and me. He said to finish with the boy before walking out. For all the horrible things I’ve done both during the Struggle and after, at least I did them myself.
I felt bad about taking out the kitchen help after I shot the two Tathadann men, but he raised a knife around Donael and deserved to get it lodged in his face. Donael lay crumpled on the tile floor, not crying so much as trying to destroy his body with convulsions. I tried to carry him out but he kept beating on my chest and asking where his mom and dad were, figuring that was what Mebeth meant by they like I had, not they as in the rebellion. He finally fell against me. His tears soaked my trousers and left snot-marks down my thighs. There was no way I thought someone like Mebeth could take out Henraek, but I didn’t know anything more than what I’d seen, so I stayed silent until Donael caught his breath. Then we left.
When Mebeth caught up with us the next day, his men were ready to execute Donael – and probably me – on the spot. I talked their guns back into their holsters and Mebeth offered his ultimatum: I could have Donael if I gave them Henraek. They wouldn’t kill Henraek, Mebeth promised, but they would break him. He’d be Macuil Morrigan’s guest of honor at the press conference announcing the end of the Struggle. He’d call for all the rebels to honor a ceasefire, swear the Tathadann truly was the way.
When the liquor is low in my bottle, I imagine my silence is a knife in Henraek’s neck. If I’d been a true friend and brother, I’d have told Henraek a week later that Donael hadn’t been crushed but was sleeping on my couch. But by the time I found Henraek he was already soaked with booze and rage. He attacked Macuil Morrigan at the conference, then got locked in a cell and dressed for a firing squad. He barely escaped death a month later after I explained to Morrigan that while he was a leader now, Henraek would become a martyr if we killed him, and I agreed to take him under my supervision.
Those early days slipped into weeks, most of which Donael spent mourning Henraek and Aífe. Then the weeks piled into months, and by then Donael had acclimated to life with Cobb and me. He’d already been through more than any kid should have. And with Henraek, he would have been hurrying to school between volleys of gunfire and chucked bricks and eating squirrel or raccoon or whatever vermin Emeríann dressed up. Not to mention what he would have suffered before Henraek and Emeríann even got together. At my house he has sheets and clothes without holes and as much food as a growing boy needs. He has a brother to learn responsibility with and a school that will help him become more than Henraek and me.
And anyway, all that aside: he’s my son.
“Mister Walleus,” the escort says. “We’re here.”
31
Henraek
I stalk around the rubble that had been our dining room table, slapping a chair leg in my palm. In any other circumstance, I would look ridiculous, but after an hour of doing it, my throbbing hand is the one thing keeping me in the room.
“One in the forehead and one in each eye before he blinks,” I say. “That’ll be a start.”
“You need to talk to him first.”
“To hell with talk!”
“Don’t you yell at me, Henraek,” she shouts back. “I’m the one sitting with you now, trying to keep you from making a mistake.”
“Killing him will not be a mistake.”
“No, but killing him without finding out why will be.”
I snap a piece of table with the chair leg and kick it. On the television, the newscaster warns residents that those caught outdoors after the curfew has gone into effect will be jailed, and that all travel outside the city has been prohibited except within authorized vehicles. The Tathadann cordoned off certain neighborhoods earlier this afternoon, which will make my trip to kill Walleus longer, but I will find a way regardless. They are locking down Eitan tighter than they ever did during the Struggle, but we weren’t hanging bodies from lampposts last time. The years of Tathadann oppression are finally bearing their fruit, and violence will bloom across the city like a bloody rose.
“Can you imagine living the rest of your life without knowing?” Emeríann says. “You, of all people. The man who tried to burn down half the city to find out why your wife died. You’re going to kill Walleus without any explanation as to why he took your son? Kept your son? Worked with you and drank with us and never said one word?” She shakes her head. “I’ll move out if you do that, because you will lose your goddamned mind.”
I drop the chair leg on the pile. “OK, I’ll talk to him,” I say. “Then I’m going to kill him. Then I’m going to hunt Mebeth and kill him too.”
I change into an old delivery uniform we used during the Struggle to gain access to buildings, grab a clipboard and a cardboard box, then scribble Walleus’s address and some bogus return address on the front. I glue a white wrapper in the top right corner to stand in for postage, though if they get more than a cursory look, it’ll never pass. They shouldn’t be close to me long enough to look, and if they are, they’ll end up dead.
I strap on my kit beneath my shirt, set a towel inside the box to give it some weight, then get my pistol from beneath the couch and tuck it in my waistband.
In the bathroom I drag a straight razor across my face to shave off a few days’ worth of stubble and look as different as possible. Emeríann appears in the mirror.
“I’ll come,” she says. “Nael can wait. You shouldn’t have to do this by yourself.”
I wipe off the blade against the porcelain sink. “That’s the only way to do it.”
“It’s OK to accept help once in a while. It doesn’t make you weak.”
“I don’t need help. I need to do this.” Her face deflates slightly. I lay down the razor and face her. “I’m not shutting you out, Em. I promise. For the first time…” I pause, reconfigure the words in my head. “I am completely present now. I’m here with you. But this?” I pull out my pistol, tap the muzzle against my temple. “This is something you can’t be a part of.”
“Then what am I supposed to do?”
I snuff out a laugh, wipe my face with a stained towel. “Well, there’s a whole lot of cha
os going on out there.” I lay my hand on the back of her neck, touch my forehead to hers. “I’m sure someone’s going to want the woman who planned the bombing that kicked off the revolution.”
After a belt of bourbon for good luck, I pick up the box then kiss Emeríann and head out.
She calls my name when I’m at the door. The window backlights her, forming something like an aura around her silhouette. “I’m sorry you have to do this.”
A hundred voices ring in my ears. A thousand faces slip over one another. People I’ve known, fought with, fought against, seen in the bars, in the safehouses, in the streets. Of those, only four stick in my head. And soon, three.
32
Walleus
In Clodhna’s front courtyard’s garden, the ferns are so thick I can barely see the marble fountain through them. Huge pink and purple flowers burst from root balls in front of the ferns, all of it penned in by stones and rocks. In the hour-plus it took us to get over here, I ran through a hundred versions of my pitch, mouthing the words to get the timing right, making sure the scope and violence of Daghda and the coup are bright-blooming in front of Morrigan’s eyes, because it’s going to have to be near perfect to keep my neck out of a noose.
I enter the marble vestibule. It’s strikingly still, a hell of a difference from the last time. Maybe people are out in the field, or are scared and staying away. A different secretary greets me this time – same hair as the other – then escorts me through the door, down the mirror hallway with the polishing droids and into Morrigan’s office. She extends a hand, offering me a seat.
I wait until the door closes behind her then scan Morrigan’s desk for anything official – a decree for my head, authorization of deployment of force, hell, even a receipt for four bombs paid in cash. After a minute it occurs to me that if anyone was to approve those measures, it would be Promhael not Morrigan, and that would assume this city has an operating government in the best times. Getting a stamp before leveling a neighborhood ain’t likely to happen when there are a bunch of crazy bastards singing songs and blowing everything up. Still, not seeing my name written down gives me a little hope.
