A Few Good Men

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  I locked the gems away on my desk drawer, I called the servants to clear the table, and I went to bed.

  And woke up with Nat Remy calling out, “Lucius? Are you decent?”

  “What?” I was awake immediately, as I was whenever someone came into the room, but this seemed rather early for a moral enquiry. Goldie jumped on the bed, tried to lick my face and in the darkness, I patted him and pushed his hindquarters down.

  “Are you dressed? Dressed enough to be seen by people?”

  “Oh. Yes.” I was in shorts and a light shirt, and though no one would call it a formal outfit, I’d need to go to the most distant and strange parts of the Earth to be arrested for indecency.

  “Good,” he said. And then “Light.” Lights came on.

  He stood in front of the secret door, which was closed. Martha stood on his right, and Abigail, blushing, on his left. Why was she blushing, I wondered? She was very young, and maybe she’d never been in a male’s bedroom before. On the other hand, my bedroom was hardly indecent and I, sitting on the bed, patting the idiot dog, might be disheveled, but otherwise wasn’t even mildly titillating. Then again perhaps she’d taken in the implications of Nat’s secret passageway, in which case . . . it was none of my business. Surely she didn’t think it had been built in a week. Martha just smiled at me in a matter-of-fact way, then walked across the room and opened the door. Sam came in. By this time, I was feeling seriously alarmed.

  “Is anything wrong?” I asked.

  Sam shook his head, and it was he who spoke, “It was judged easier to have Abigail and I carry proxies for the other members of the twelve than to have all of us get together here, or have you flown elsewhere. Our intelligence gathering tells us there’s been a flurry of activity by Scrubbers. We’re not sure what they’re up to, and we are not about to take risks we don’t need.”

  The other members of the twelve. The Sons of Liberty were all young hotheads. And Sam and his wife knew nothing of what their children were involved in. And I was innocent as a babe unborn. My house was not just filled with Usaians. It was filled with dangerous revolutionaries. And liars. And yet, I thought better of Sam for doing something about the injustices and crimes that crossed his desk every day, rather than sitting still and letting evil go on.

  Sam had the grace to blush a little at my expression, then shrugged. “Sometimes, telling the truth will only endanger all those who depend on you, and to whom you swore to keep silent so they’d not be found out.”

  I inclined my head and didn’t say anything. He cleared his throat. “Nat tells us . . . That is, he says you’re willing to admit to believing everyone should be granted life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as a fundamental right. Before he left the meeting, previously, he secured people’s vote that you be allowed to join our organization on probation, if you professed such beliefs.” Was his smile totally ironic? “Of course, I suspect two or three of them, at the time, thought it was more likely for them to get hit by a meteor that had lain in ambush in an alley, waiting for them to walk by. But we got them to agree to your full induction, and we’ll do it before they can retract that. That way you’ll be a full member. And we’ll avoid another internal battle.”

  Nat cleared his throat and I thought he had suppressed laughter and it occurred to me that if any members of the council thought that they were too stupid to hold office and perhaps too stupid to live. Nat Remy was not a honeypot, and he might be the world’s worst missionary. But he had inherited from Sam a kind of bullish gentleness that would keep bringing a point up, ever so gently but so continuously that the subject of their efforts couldn’t help but surrender.

  I didn’t doubt that I’d been steered to this point. I’d need to be an idiot to not have noticed. But I was sure of one thing: Sam hadn’t cooked those records. Contrary to popular belief, a complex narrative spanning centuries was hard to create without leaving huge holes. Heck, it was hard to create a simple lie spanning hours. Which was why most novels were enjoyed despite the holes in the narrative. And those records held. Which meant, whether he’d arranged for me to ask for them or not, the reasons I was doing this were real.

  “So,” Sam drew himself up straighter. “Lucius Dante Maximilian Keeva, do you believe in Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness as individual rights?”

  “Yeah,” I said and tried to avoid the three Remy siblings staring at me from my right side. They all looked rapt, as though they had no idea what came next.

  “And have you read, and do you believe in, the Constitution of the United States of America, and believe, if followed, it would create a nation that would respect such rights?”

  “Yeah,” I said. Because it was easier than to explain I thought it had terrible loopholes and flaws, but would create a state superior to anything else before or since—at least as far as my reading of history went—and infinitely superior to the stability we’d endured for three hundred years.

  “Do you realize the Usaian religion is proscribed in most of the Earth and that, if revealed as a member, you could be summarily or publicly and lengthily executed?”

  “Yeah,” I said, at which point it occurred to me that I was being asked life-changing questions, while I sat on the bed, with Goldie lying across my legs. It didn’t seem right. It seemed like it should take place in an elaborately decorated hall, with flags flying and bands playing.

  “And are you ready, nonetheless, to become a member, and to work towards the reestablishment of a republic under that constitution, even if it should mean the loss of—”

  I fished the answer from what I remembered of my reading. “My life, my fortune and my sacred honor.”

  Someone sniffled. I thought it was Abigail. I hoped it was Abigail.

  “And do you promise to keep secret and support your fellows in this fight to the limits of your ability, and not betray anything or anyone to the authorities no matter what persuasions are used?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then Lucius Dante Maximilian Keeva, welcome to the brotherhood of free men.” And then, to my profound and stunned shock, Sam Remy stepped close and kissed me on the cheek. And I’ll be damned if his children didn’t repeat the performance.

  “And now,” Sam said, “that you are one of us, do you agree to let us use the seacity as the basis for the start of our great work?”

  I nodded. I had realized, sometime while reading those awful gems, that I wasn’t going to be the Good Man by the end of this. Not if it worked. I’d be lucky if I still had my life at the end of this, particularly if we won. And yet it was worth it. If I had my life it would be enough, anyway. I’d never wanted to be the Good Man.

  “Then, ladies and gentlemen, it gives me great joy to proclaim the revolution.”

  This is when all hell broke loose. Nat and Abigail hugged each other, Martha hugged Sam, then Abigail started crying, and wiping her tears to the back of her hands, and then two of them—I was too confused by then to tell which—hugged me.

  And that should have been the end of it, or perhaps the beginning, but my life doesn’t work that way. As things started to calm down, Sam said. “We’ll leave now. You need to sleep. Tomorrow there’s an awful lot of planning to do, and we need your permission for . . . everything, to begin with. And Nat?”

  “I will arrange for Simon and Jan to come over. And also for military people to confer.” He blinked. “Oh, and, Father, we forgot.”

  “We forgot? Wha—oh. Yes. Do you have it?”

  Nat nodded. “Grabbed it at the house on my way over, when I got the girls,” he said. He pulled a small box, maybe the size of my palm, from one of the pockets that he had to have sewn inside his tunic. It was one of those plain, ceramite boxes in which the cheaper type of jewelry is packaged. But the way he held it, as though it contained something immensely valuable and fragile made me wonder, as did the fact he had to take a deep breath before speaking, “I don’t know if you know that each of us is supposed to own a piece of the true flag, identified as a flag
that was flown in the US of A when it still existed as a sovereign republic. I know that people joke about being so many of them that they’d cover most of the world, but . . . a lot of flags were produced, and we still have a cache, kept in a climate-controlled room. There are also other forms of reinforcement of aged fabric. If your parents and your relatives were Usaians, you’d inherit one from one of your ancestors. Some pieces of the flag have been passed through family lines for centuries. They used to be worn on clothing, before we were proscribed, but now that would just condemn us and those close to us. So, we don’t do that. But every one of us has a piece and knows where it is at all times. The idea is that when we start the revolution we’ll bring it out and wear it, openly, on our clothing.” He opened the box and extended it to me. It contained a scrap of blue cloth maybe three inches long and two wide.

  As I took it from Nat’s hands, I could tell that three white stars, grown grey with age and dirt, showed faintly against the blue.

  “We debated giving you a new piece,” Nat said. “But we thought you’d prefer this one. The stain on the top is blood of one of our martyrs who wore it sewn on his clothing at the time the religion was first proscribed. His fellow believers rescued his body and his flag.” He hesitated. “There is no other blood on it, but it has belonged to many courageous and honorable men who paid the ultimate price for freedom.” He had to swallow, before continuing. “The last one of those was Benjamin Franklin Remy.”

  And then I cried.

  COME HELL

  Nightmare

  After they’d left, and Nat had lain on the floor, across my bedroom door, and the lights were out, I lay in the dark, with my hand on the box that contained the scrap of flag. I’d closed it again, because I didn’t want to risk tearing the precious fragment. I couldn’t hear Ben, but I could feel him all around, feel him closer than I ever had, as close as my hand on that box.

  I thought if I opened my eyes, I would see him sitting on the bed, smiling at me, the same way Sam and Nat had when I had answered the questions. But I knew of course that I wouldn’t see him, and so I kept my eyes closed and held on to the closeness, the sense of having him near.

  I couldn’t sleep, though there was nothing bothering me. Oh, a certain embarrassment over bawling like a baby in public, somewhat lessened by the fact that the girls—even Abigail, who couldn’t have remembered her uncle very well—and then Nat had joined in. Though Nat had done a manful job of pretending not to feel his tears, till he turned away presumably to wipe them to the back of his hands. Sam hadn’t cried, but looked like he really wanted to. And I’d stopped as soon as I could.

  So, the embarrassment wasn’t great, and the only strange feeling attending me was a sense of belonging, which struck me as very odd. I’d never belonged to anyone or anything before. Oh, my mother and Max, perhaps, but even there a certain constraint had remained, because first of all I, and them, belonged to my father, and only at a remove did we belong to each other. We weren’t a group, but a few people over whom father held power of life and death. More so than I’d thought at the time.

  Goldie had lain across my feet, and I could hear Nat turn by the door. “Nat,” I said, low enough that he wouldn’t wake if he were asleep.

  “Yes?” he said, in the same sort of hushed voice, like he wasn’t sure he’d heard me.

  “This . . . revolution of ours,” I said. “How likely is it we’ll succeed?”

  He made a sound that was part exhalation and part chuckle. “I’d give us a good ten percent chance,” he said.

  “Uh . . . that’s not very good,” I said.

  “I should say,” he said. “Our analysts, the ones who do these calculations, give us a ten percent chance.” He paused. “And it is very good. The best it’s ever been. Two Good Men in our ranks. And one who will cooperate, though his beliefs are different from ours.”

  “Two Good Men?” I had a vague idea of having heard this before. “Jan Rainer?”

  “Yeah. He . . . he has just joined us. We . . . both of you need protection.” He was silent a moment. “And I think in that case, Martha might have had some influence.”

  “Martha?” I said, and probably sounded more disbelieving than I should. Because when one thinks of dark and dangerous seductresses, Martha Remy, with the splash of freckles across her nose, and the sensible squarish face didn’t fit. “I mean,” I said, remembering I was speaking to her twin. “Not that she isn’t a perfectly nice girl, but . . .”

  “I know,” he said. And there was amusement behind his voice. “But she has had a crush on Jan for the longest time, and I think they’ve finally come to some arrangement. I don’t know for sure because she hasn’t confided anything to me in those matters since at least twelve.” Pause. “Don’t tell my dad. He gets very odd about . . . that sort of thing.”

  I imagined. I suspected I’d seen some hints of that oddness.

  “Speaking of not telling my father,” he said, after a while. “If I don’t shut up and let you sleep there will be hell to pay tomorrow, so good night.”

  “Nat?”

  “Yes?”

  “Doesn’t the floor get awfully uncomfortable?” And because I could feel his mind scrambling in the dark and was not very interested in getting verbally—if not physically—punched, I added, “We could have a cot brought in or something.”

  A chuckle. “As much as it would provide an additional obstacle to someone breaking into your room, chances are I’d get tangled in it and not be very effective at defending you, if a force gets past all our other defenses. And that’s the whole point of my being here.”

  “But it must be cold and—”

  “Nah, much easier than the training weekends,” he said.

  “Training weekends?”

  A long silence. “We . . . almost all our young men and some of the women are trained for war. Part of staying fit, should the revolution happen in our time. It’s . . . religious practice. Usually we go into the continental protectorates, or at least the natural islands, because it’s easier to hide. And we train in relatively small groups. But I’ve slept on a slab of rock, on a mountain, during winter. This is downright comfortable by comparison. Now, good night, Lucius Keeva. You do not want to get my father officially upset at us.”

  I tried, but it was a good long while before I was asleep, and I woke up with the door bursting open.

  Before I was fully awake, I’d sat up, grabbed two burners from the bedside table, and was holding both of them trained steadily on the door. But the voice that spoke from the door was female, breathless, and said, “Where is Nat?”

  I woke fully. The person in the doorway was Abigail Remy and though she was panting, as if she’d been running, she was pale as death. “Patr—Luci—sir! Where is Nat?”

  I returned the burners to the bedside drawer. “I don’t know. He was here when I fell asleep.”

  She made a peculiar huffing sound that managed to convey that sleeping was the stupidest thing anyone could do, and possibly—just possibly—a crime. Then she put her hand to her forehead, in a gesture that was so reminiscent of Ben it startled me.

  Before I knew it, I was jumping out of bed, grabbing clothes from my wardrobe without paying the slightest attention to what they were. Something told me Abigail wouldn’t get this upset over nothing. Not a young woman steady enough to be elected to the revolutionary council at twenty. From my encounter with that group, even though mostly I’d heard them and not seen them, they were middle-aged men of crusty demeanor. And Sam, their head, had patriarch written all over them. And yet Abigail had got elected. She was a young woman steady enough to have tried to hold the meeting of the twelve together in the face of Nat’s rage and my obstinacy. “Where did you see him last?” I said, forcing my bare feet into boots. “What is your reason for being so worried? Did he say where he was going? He had told us he was going to contact Jan Rainer and Simon . . . I presume St. Cyr, since See-mon is the French pronunciation.”

  “I know,” she
said, and then in a tone of exasperation. “They haven’t seen him, though he called them on a link to say he was coming.”

  “Perhaps there was an accident?” I said, doubtfully. But I had a growing, cold certainty that Nat Remy wasn’t accident prone. Disaster, perhaps, but not accident. I slipped the box containing the fragment of flag into my pocket. I’d have to lock it in a drawer where the cleaning staff couldn’t find it, both in case they realized what it was, and so they wouldn’t throw it away by mistake.

  She shook her head. “No. The thing is, I don’t think he ever left.” She looked up at me, and her eyes, so much like Ben’s, were full of tears. “Goldie was alone, loose on the beach.”

  “On the beach?”

  She nodded. “Nat wakes up early and goes running on the beach with Goldie every morning. Goldie came home alone. There is a scuffed place, and it looks like a flyer landed and like there was a fight. My father told me to stop worrying, we’ll know in time. I can’t stop worrying. What if Nat needs rescue?”

  This was way too much like waking up in the morning, in the prison to which they’d sent Ben and me, and finding that Ben was gone, and having to figure out where they’d taken him when no one would tell me. I could read the same worry in her eyes. “Martha has gone to Jan, to see if they can find out anything.”

  “Right,” I said. “Right.” And because I had to do something, no matter how foolish, no matter how stupid, I said, “Show me. Show me the place on the beach that looks like it was trampled or scuffed or whatever. Show me.”

  She nodded, which goes to show you she was as out of her mind with worry as I was with confusion and the unpleasant memories of Ben’s disappearance. We headed out of the room and down the hallway to the front door. Where guards barred my way. I didn’t even react badly. I was just confused at finding my path blocked by my own guards.