by Moira Crone
“And what has happened at the jail that is so pressing he can’t come here and try this case?”
“Arceneaux brothers are talking, Madam Judge.”
Shouts. Movement. Gasps. The whole courtroom, afire with this information—except for my brother and me, who had no idea what it was about. Ariel turned around and asked someone.
“People say they raped a woman with a quadruple P.C. Could have birthed four. They are why this place is full. Waiting for their case,” the man behind us said.
“Until two-thirty this afternoon,” the judge stated, and then she stood, as if relieved, and banged on her gavel again, removed her stiff collar, and her hat, and walked rather loosely, wiggled, actually, all pomp abandoned, out the side door.
The crowds pressed the exits to leave, again, in a roar of conversation.
“Psst—”
I had tumbled into the vestibule, about to read Camille’s note, when someone touched my shoulder. “Psst. Psst. Ear looks good.” The voice was familiar.
Serpenthead.
“How are you here? How did you get out of that riot?” I was glad to see him.
“Stowed on one of the yachts. Peet knew the steward.” He grinned, his eyes widened. “Quite an evening, say? I saw your brother looking for a freighter to get to Cuba. Steered him in the right direction. He wants you to go with him. You going?”
I felt a jolt of fear, had to reach for breath. “Go to Cuba?” I could. Anything was possible now.
“Never been.” He showed me his pink palms, free—empty. “Say it’s nice.”
“Well should I?” I asked.
He shrugged. Squeezed his temples. “You want me to answer that?” he asked.
“You been following me?” I asked. “Answer that.” But I couldn’t accuse him. He’d saved me too many times. He looked better, rested. I was glad. This smockshirt was a little shorter than the last and considerably whiter. He leaned slightly against a door, scratched his head. People were crowded all around us, but I felt alone with him.
“Swear that day coming in here was the first time I saw you.” That kind open look of his. I would believe anything he said. I’d do what he told me to do, why not? He saw that.
“And the Mo Lion clan? Did you send me north, to them?”
“They had somebody to sew you up, didn’t they?”
“Do you believe I’m kin to these…Salamanders?”
“What matters is what you believe,” he said. “Far as I know they are made up.”
Everything was reversed. I wanted to tell him they were real, Ariel said so. I was willing to believe what I thought most outlandish. Part of me did believe. I trusted what I was supposed to despise. How would you live if Lazarus was all wrong? All wrong?
“Answer my question!” I pleaded.
“Malc, it is your question—” He turned and looked off.
“Why won’t you help me?” I felt the very ground beneath me disappearing. “You planned it all, everything. You knew from the start.”
He put his arms akimbo, as if that were not a proper inquiry into exactly what he was up to. “It will come to you. S’happened to me once or twice. All of a sudden, you see the cause. Of the convergence. Like I said day I met you.” He hooked his finger in the air to ask me to crunch down to his level for a secret.
I did it.
He said, “I didn’t know. I didn’t know. Just what they say, is all I know.”
“What do they say?”
“They say you will know when you hear.”
“Know what? Know what?”
“I never heard it. Just heard of it,” he said, and he turned again. “Gotta go. This guy over there owes me money.” Then he stopped and whispered, “And you already know.”
“Wait! Wait!” I called after him. I had his knife. He didn’t stop. He kept moving, in the thick, loud crowd.
*
Malcolm. I need to tell you some things. Go behind the Sugarhouse Café, enter by the back screen door, wait—Yours truly, C.
“Yours truly,” was enough. I was a new man.
It was a very clear morning—crisp. I’d heard someone say that the air was emptied of everything because there was a “storm out there winding up in the Gulf.”
But I saw no sign of it.
I found the cafe where Serio and I had got into trouble. I slid in the small corridor in the back, hoping I wasn’t too late or too early. Finally, she appeared—her hair coming undone, slightly out of breath.
I hadn’t been alone with her, really alone, in years. I grabbed her and kissed her.
She let me. Then she stiffened and asked about Lazarus.
I gave her details.
“That he would do that. After all he taught you. Promised you. You must be—oh Malc.” And she kissed me again, her own kind of sweet kiss. “I am so sorry.” She shook her head. “I am so sorry. What happens to you? Who has your Trust? All that?”
“Lydia,” I said.
“Lydia?” she asked, backing away a few inches. I was too upset, I hadn’t realized how that would sound.
“He put it in her name. But let’s not talk about her.” I tried to come closer. She stepped to the side, even further away.
“Oh Malc.” She looked straight at me. “I thought they killed you. That’s what they said, on that boat, shot you dead. That’s what I thought. I’d lost you. Then here you are.”
“What?”
“Don’t take this the wrong way.” She shook her head. “Don’t think I’m trying—I just thought you should know is all.” She looked down. “I’m not saying this because I want anything. You are headed off, aren’t you?”
“What is it? Tell me.”
She brought her lips inward. That determined face she could have. “You know why I did that for Ariel and you that night?” she asked. “Why I took the blame, said he was with me?”
I never knew. I said so.
“‘Cause I didn’t want to break my promise. I knew how it could be with you. Or I thought I knew.” She held her two hands, her fingers woven, she stood apart, the same as it was when she would stand in the doorway and not come in my room, and would tell me how she couldn’t do this or do that. How dangerous I was. “I knew how it was with you. That we had such a grand way of talking, knowing what each other meant, how we could be. I saw it. And when you touched me, I saw I could fall into it.” That web was forming, it always did. It was invisible, but it grew up around us like an eager vine. I wanted another kiss. She pulled her clasped hands up to her chest. She was barring me from her heart. “I didn’t want to work at the Towers anymore. I was afraid of what—I wanted with you. First time I saw you—first time I saw the real you. It wasn’t to hurt you that I left. It wasn’t because I didn’t wantyou. Then, just the last few days, they said they’d shot you—”
“You wanted me?”
She nodded quickly with her dimpled chin. “You know I did. I wasn’t toying. Greenmore knew it. She didn’t like me around you once she saw it. Then, she got your tests back, found out your ‘potential.’ She got meaner—really turned on me.”
For a second, I was certain of something. I said, “Go with me.”
“Where?”
“Cuba—Ariel is going.” I sipped in a little air, to fortify myself. She saw it.
“You’re gonna be an Heir, though. Don’t mess with me.”
“For us. To live. To get out of here.” Saying it widened me, opened me, steadied me.
“I’m flesh,” she said, breaking her gaze. “I’m a dier. You know what that means? Really? Yeared and ugly one day. You could go back to what you know.” She shook her hair so hard wisps flew out. But she was closer to me. Her hands, unclasped.
“Why would I go back when I want to be with you?”
“Because you were raised for it.” There was a slight noise then, her eyes dashed to the left, and down. Someone walking in the kitchen cooler, which was on the other side of the flour sacks. The door slammed, the sound was gone. “We can’t
be here too much longer, “ she said. “The lunch crowd will be in.”
“You are doomed if you stay here.”
Her expression opened some. I thought I had a chance. But then she said, “What about Greenmore? Lydia? She runs you now.”
“What about her?” Though that didn’t seem exactly right, to just say, What about her?
“When you left, what did you tell her?”
She knew. How did she know?
“You were coming back to her? And now she has your Trust? Your future in her hands?”
I didn’t deny it. I just said, “I won’t keep to that now—”
She tightened her mouth. “You won’t keep to what now? What?”
I didn’t say a word. She saw I was hiding.
“Well then how do I know you will keep your promises to me? If you make a promise to me?” she asked. “We keep our promises here. I gave you up for one. To Landry.” Her warm breath on my face.
“But you have to leave. Your brother-in-law’s—” “I have a fate.” She avoided my gaze entirely for a second. “You hate him. You’ll have his children? Be a second wife?”
Her mouth lost its shape.
“Ariel says we have people in Cuba, we—”
“Well how do you know that’s not some story? Hasn’t he told a few in his life?”
“Ariel tells the truth. He’s always—I found out. He’s not a liar.”
“Well, that is new.” She paused for a second, straightened. She arrived back into her face. She was not slim and tall and regular like all the Heir women. She was true and ample inside her dress. I saw reason for hope. She was imagining it. Imagining us.
“If we did this, it wouldn’t be just about our love. It would be about giving up who we are. Giving it up. You understand.” She nodded, looked into me.
For a moment, I had a theory of everything—what I was doing, what I was going to do. It was Camille’s clarity. She was taking it seriously. She knew more than I did. She knew what I felt and why I felt it. In her gaze, even, I saw Lazarus’s actions—and his faith, too, and his loss of faith. It was Lazarus, not something that I, myself, Malcolm, had caused. I saw her as she saw me. She was considering it all, the whole plan, conjuring it in those brown eyes of hers. It became real, there, for the first time. I had to have her thoughtfulness in my life, to guide me. Her love.
“You will do it,” I said. “You will. You will come with me.”
“If you go talk to her first. Greenmore. Tell her where you are going.”
“I’m not going,” I said. “I can’t be away from you.”
“Yes, you are,” she said. “You have to talk to her and see if you can say goodbye. See how it feels to go back to—that easy life. It’s got no ordinary trouble, that life—”
“The ship leaves after the hurricane warning passes. Ariel told me the name. The Madder Rose. It’s in the harbor now.”
She shrugged, but I saw her softening. “You are asking a lot of me, and you aren’t my kind,” she said. “Maybe you are my love but not my kind—”
“I won’t leave you.” Someone came into the kitchen then. We heard him on the other side of the sacks. He turned on a recording of old rickety jazz.
“Well, then I will leave you—you talk to her, then come back to me,” she said.
“Will you come with me?” I asked.
She looked straight at me. It was a very long pause, hovering near yes, a single nod. Then she left me there, joyful, bursting behind the flour sacks.
*
As soon as I started climbing up the steep pine stairs to the courthouse at two, I saw Klamath at the landing, waving at me. Throngs were behind him, scurrying down the stairs. I didn’t understand. It was time for court to start again. “You are the one I need to see!” he shouted. He was wearing a hooded slicker, the one he wore on his boat.
He was in a terrible hurry. He explained briefly: court had been dismissed. The noon report said the hurricane, Isis, was indeed heading for the Sea of Pontchartrain. Serio’s charges had been dropped; because they couldn’t secure the jail in a storm, all but the serious felons had been let free. He was being released at this moment. They were headed out to the Pearl River, to the new Exodus lands, so was the entire population still left in Chef Menteur. Lydia was back from her Re-job and very worried about me, and hadn’t left even though WELLVAC had recommended it, since a hurricane was in the Gulf. Why hadn’t I communicated? I’d disappeared, as far as they were concerned. WELLVAC was coming for her that afternoon. She’d put it off to the last minute because she was waiting for me. “You need to see her. You have to come home. She has news, she says.”
“What?” I asked.
“Don’t know, be safe,” he said, and he smiled at me like a man with a secret. He hugged me and as soon as he let go, I missed him. “Have to get moving,” he said.
He meant both of us.
XIII
3:10 PM, October 21, 2121
Wood Palace on the Sea of Pontchartrain
Western Gulf De-Accessioned Territory, U.A. Protectorate
It was a glassy sea, a white sky without any clouds. I pulled Serio’s boat up to the dock. Klamath had given me the real keys and told me to put it in the boathouse for protection. When I turned from tying it up, there was Lydia, by the kitchen doors, looking splendid, in high water boots, a new long white storm coat with a shining collar framing her face. It was good to see her, in a way.
“Come in, I’ve missed you so—oh, what is that? Stitches in your ear? What has happened? You look so different, rough—the elements.” That jarring intimacy. She had not forgotten. It seemed a lifetime since I’d last seen her, and also, no time at all. In her unblinking, steady, newly-lensed eyes, I saw. I was not blind now. Not to her desire.
She was larger, newly Treated, just had her Re-job. “Come now, take off your jacket, have you washed these things?”
She led me inside. Everything was the same as when I left, except that the pool in her room was overflowing slightly, so that there was a thin film of water on the floor, and the edges of her sheets and blankets on the square blue mountain in the corner that was her bed, were soaked. Things that might get wet from a surge were stacked up on the highest shelves. Klamath’s handiwork. She did not seem to notice the water.
Her eyes were now gold again, her cheeks full, and vibrant. Her new prodermis round and inviting, I had to admit. She resembled herself when I first met her—same ash head job, same blue ivory, even teeth. Same scentless breath. But she had also changed. She was more contemporary. And she was solicitous of me. I didn’t see her the way I used to see her at all. She was copy-beautiful—kin to ugly.
But I didn’t exactly want to leave.
She said, “Sit beside me.” I went over and sank into the bed, recalling the last time I was on it, making her promises. That now, I wasn’t going to keep. Or was I? I felt sorry, confused.
“Home from the voyage,” she said. “Let me look at you. What waylaid you? All these injuries—”
I began with the lien on my Trust. I was quite vague. Then, the scene in Port Gramercy, in the Sugarhouse. I left out certain characters. Then, jail, then Mississippi—the Sim Verite. I edited, didn’t throw Heirs around, or strip them naked in swamps, flay them, or—I told myself I was getting to that scene in the back of the Sugarhouse, by the flour sacks, I was getting to that.
She interrupted. “He was always unstable, radical,” when I got to Lazarus. “What did he do? Give yours away?”
I hesitated. Ariel told me not to tell anyone.
“What? What happened?”
I said, “He went the so-long.”
Her mouth hung open.
“It is true,” I said, and the sadness of it came to me, all over again.
“What a waste, he was an Heir, even if he was an idiot—it just isn’t done. It is never done,” she said.
I told her yes, I was sure. Made her promise to tell no one, but I was worried.
“Oh, that idiot,
that radical idiot, I never liked him.” She leaned forward, as if to embrace me.
I pulled back. I didn’t fold into her arms. She didn’t understand.
“It’s all right, the taboo can be broken—only you and I are here—” she said. “Did he ruin your Trust? Please,” she said. “Explain.”
I shook my head. She thought I was only shy. I was shy, but also—
The back of Lydia’s bed was wrought iron, and antique, and looked like a pair of gates. That I was never going to go through. I thought of that, for a moment. All this luxury and ease forsworn, for some beach in Cuba, some legend. For brown eyes.
“What did he do with the Trust?”
“He told WELLFI bank to put it in your name,” I said. “Make you the sponsor.”
“One thing rational,” she snorted.
I nodded. “He had his reasons, he wrote them, he told us the story of his whole life—”
“Before he was an Heir, even?” She combed through my hair with her fingers. I was weary. Exhausted. I had been through so much. The difference between this timeless time with her, this suspension, and the low, noisy world where I’d spent the last twelve days. You are back with her, you are home, the rest is chaos, she was good to you.
“Never mind, don’t trouble yourself with his reasons, he lost his mind, years ago. Honestly, anyone who would still cling to those old North notions, that everyone, even has a right, or that the world could sustain, or, or—such people would be mad, that is clear.” She continued, stroking my rough hair. I wanted her to stop—it was pleasing, and confusing. She went on. “Would you hang yourself over the fact that dogs only live fifteen years? Or cats? Or—someone said something up at Memphis, that I thought was very wise—Albers made us a new species, and we can’t concern ourselves too much with the survivability of the other one. I thought that very meaningful. I knew I had to take it in. That wisdom. I thought about how I had to give up my investigations. I see my error now. To think that other species have anything to teach—”
“I’m one of that kind,” I said.
She looked up, sharply, for I was crossing her. “Not for long,” she said. “That’s my news. I know a way for you to be Treated sooner. Right after your Boundarytime. So we don’t have to wait—I talked to Memphis, I made—”
