by P. J. Fox
“Put down your gun.” Kisten met Baugh’s gaze unflinchingly.
The erstwhile lance corporal looked him up and down. His expression was one of open disdain. The two men were standing several yards apart, not close enough to talk privately or comfortably but close enough to hear—and see—each other. “Let’s see,” he said. “Handmade shoes, enough gold on your fingers to feed a family for a year.” His words were ripe with disgust. His eyes met Kisten’s. “You must be the governor.”
Baugh, of course, had already known who Kisten was; there were pictures of Kisten and all the other top brass, civilian and military, in every government installation. But he’d made his point. From the beginning, the Rebel Coalition—and, by extension, its pet projects like the Brotherhood—had painted the royal family as a dissolute, inbred cadre of dictators who cared for nothing but their own sensual pursuits. Who all but frolicked in open money pits, while their subjects starved. The picture wasn’t truthful, but propaganda wasn’t usually known for its factual accuracy. Local groups supplied the rage—the Brotherhood wanted the Alliance gone, even though it had no clear idea of what should replace it—and the Rebel Coalition supplied the justification.
And the guns, of course.
“You are our equals,” Kisten pointed out. “We’re a diverse empire.”
“Yes,” replied Baugh. “The Bronte, and everyone else!”
“I’m part Charonite.” As if that much weren’t obvious by looking at him. “And my consort is Solarian. You are our equals, and the only division is the one you create.” He didn’t dare take his eyes from Baugh, but he could tell that his words were having an effect.
“Charonite.” Baugh spat. His tone was contemptuous. “You turned against your own people. Just like him.” He gestured at Hewson.
“I stood against men who made war on children. Would you not have done the same?”
Kisten could have ordered the man shot, or arrested, but the situation was simply too volatile to support such a risk. He didn’t know what might happen in response, and he couldn’t risk men’s lives when he didn’t even feel confident enough to make an educated guess. So long as there was even a remote chance of ending this standoff without violence, he had to stay the course. They all did.
And then catastrophe struck.
Kisten could never be sure, in retrospect, what had lit the fuse—or, indeed, if his own unwillingness to simply kill the man had been what doomed them. He wouldn’t have much time to debate the issue because, between one second and the next, Baugh went from talking to shooting.
His first shot missed Kisten, blowing Hewson’s leg open just below the knee.
The world exploded as, immediately, Kisten’s guards mobbed him. Shots buzzed overhead and the humid air turned acrid with the stench of discharged laser cartridges. Kisten could barely see what was happening, only that Hewson and Hanafi were returning fire. Soldiers from the two regiments were fighting each other, some shooting and some tackling each other amidst the clouds of dust that rose from the hard-packed earth. He felt himself being dragged backward toward one of the barracks, his guards searching for a defensible position.
Hewson, still upright despite the blood pouring down his calf, laid covering fire as Hanafi rallied his men.
Needle-thin laser beams flashed in the air, but Baugh seemed immune. He shot at random, laughing hysterically. Touched, Kisten’s grandmother would have said.
They’d reached the entrance to one of the officers’ bungalows and Kisten watched from the porch as one of the men from the 29th ran forward and threw his arms around Baugh’s waist in an attempt to restrain him. Twisting free, Baugh turned and shot the man at point blank range. Then, having spent all his ammunition, he laid about him with his sword.
“Join me!” he called. “This is for you—for us! For our religion! For our freedom!”
Acting on instinct, Kisten lunged forward. It went against every fiber of his being to sit on the sidelines and watch like—like some woman—as other men fought.
“You can’t,” Motiani shouted, “you’re the governor now. We need you alive.”
Kisten didn’t want to be alive if that meant being a coward. He’d never been the kind of commander who led from the rear, and he didn’t want to be one now. He hated that Motiani was right. “Fall back,” he said finally. “We need to establish a command station.”
And that was when the shooting began in earnest.
THREE
Aria sat in the garden, staring at the wisteria.
“What’s wrong?” Lei asked.
She started, surprised; she hadn’t even realized that Lei was there. Lei was her friend, but she resented the intrusion all the same. She wanted to be alone before she had to suffer another lunch with Zerus. That he was a guest in her home, however much she might wish him elsewhere, forced her to observe certain social mores. However much she hated the world at the moment. This world, and its stupid values.
Even Lei’s kind face seemed like that of an enemy, in the wan sunlight. She turned away.
Lei sat down on the bench next to her, unperturbed. She was swathed in a lovely subdued red that matched her eyes, and her feet were encased in tiny open-toed sandals. Aria hadn’t yet bothered to change; she’d been in the garden all morning. After dumping her unceremoniously on the doorstep, the guards had left her to her own devices. She’d collected her tablet from her room and done some writing, but after a few hundred words she’d found herself stuck. She’d been staring at the wisteria ever since, having lost track of time.
“It’s after noon,” Lei pointed out.
“Which I suppose means that Zerus will be arriving soon,” Aria said.
“Geologically speaking, perhaps.” Lei smiled. “Soon is a relative term.”
Aria didn’t rise to the bait. Today, Lei’s humor grated on her. Why couldn’t Lei see that she wanted to be left alone?
They shared the silence for a few minutes. One of Kisten’s arboreal rodents—they didn’t have squirrels on Brontes, apparently—darted across the path. Realizing that it had company, it froze in place. Lei shifted her weight slightly, breaking the spell, and the squirrel bounded away. Aria didn’t move; she couldn’t seem to sum up the energy.
“Perhaps you’d like to discuss whatever’s troubling you?”
Aria replied without taking her eyes from the wisteria. “I hate it here and I want to go home.”
“Home where?”
Aria’s only response was to glare into space. Home where, indeed.
“It’s a fair question,” Lei pointed out. “Where is home?”
Aria resented the question, because she didn’t know the answer. She’d thought that home might be Tarsonis. At least insofar as Tarsonis was an outpost of Brontes. Over the past few months, she’d grown increasingly Bronte in both worldview and habits. Hers was a transformation that had felt authentic at the time…until it betrayed her. How could he?
She’d changed so much that, sometimes, she didn’t know who she was. Was she Bronte now? Or had she merely taken the path of least resistance and convinced herself that it was what she wanted? Every time she tried to think through the problem, her brain just—stopped. And the brick wall she kept coming up against was Kisten: the things he’d said to her, the look on his face and how desperately, awfully angry she still was at him: the man who, in a single stroke, had made her feel more worthless than Aiden had ever done.
“Somewhere,” she grated, “where that man is not.”
“Ah. I see.”
I doubt it. But Aria didn’t voice her opinion aloud. Lei sounded offensively self-satisfied. She was always so certain of her own wisdom Why hadn’t Aria seen it before? Why had she ever given this wretched know-it-all the time of day? Desperation, that was why; she’d allowed herself to become friends—to imagine herself friends—with people she detested. At that moment, she detested everyone in the Alliance. It was because of them that people like Kisten felt entitled to do anything they wanted. The Alli
ance was a culture of enablers.
Some small, traitorous part of her wondered if she was being unfair—to them and to him.
Could she really write everyone off, including Lei, because Kisten had turned out to be precisely the same selfish, self-centered bastard she’d always known him to be? He’d hardly hidden his true nature. But she was too hurt to follow the thought; all she knew was that, at that precise moment, she wanted nothing more than to crawl into some nice, abandoned cave and die. Kisten had made her feel so inadequate, so invisible that even his name tasted revolting in her mouth. Kisten, the pompous, overbred fool. Her whole life, she’d struggled with the same fear of abandonment—and he knew that, and he’d abandoned her, anyway. Well if other women were all so wonderful, then he could have them! She’d been a fool to even believe that a life with him was possible.
She doubted that he’d ever had a single thought about her in his entire life, other than to find her disappointing or wonder why she wasn’t waiting on him. Love? He had no notion of what the word meant. He certainly didn’t love her. She was convenient for him—she saw that now.
She explained as much to Lei, who frowned. “Arguments can often be cruel,” she said carefully. “You told him that you hated him—did you mean it?”
Aria knew what Lei was getting at. “Yes,” she said bluntly.
“I see.”
Aria wanted to hit her. “You don’t see,” she said. “You couldn’t possibly.” She willed her so-called friend to disappear. Preferably into the pits of Hell. When she wanted one of her jailers to tell her how much she should enjoy being in jail, she’d ask.
Until then, Lei could nonce around with all these other woman-hating idiots. So much for the sisterhood—look at Naomi! She’d barely been a citizen of the Alliance for two months and already she’d do anything, throw away anything, just to get noticed by some man. As though marriage were such a prize that she should overlook every flaw! Who cared how he treated her, she was lucky enough that he’d deigned to accept her into his harem—and legitimately! She felt a fresh surge of hatred for this terrible culture.
“Why are you so sure?” Lei asked.
Aria turned. “Because this”—she waved her hand, indicating the garden and the Alliance in general—”is normal to you.”
“Yes,” agreed Lei, “hurt feelings are normal to me.” She studied Aria’s face, her own impossible to read. “To everyone,” she added. “Disagreements also.” And then, “do you think yourself the only person in the world who’s had trouble adjusting to married life? Or who’s ever had occasion to be disappointed with her husband?”
Seeing Aria’s surprise, she sighed. “Yes, I see that you do. The rest of us cleave to such low standards that we accept whatever we’re offered and are grateful, is that it? We never fight, because we’re not invested enough in each other to care whether we’re in agreement? We care nothing for our own happiness, or that of our friends, because our marriages aren’t real. Is that truly what you think?”
Aria colored. She hadn’t thought of her situation in quite those terms but…yes.
“Do you really have such a low opinion of me that you think I don’t care whether my children are happy?” Lei sounded angry, for the first time since Aria had known her. “That you think I’d raise my daughter or my son to believe that love wasn’t important?”
Aria made a hopeless gesture. “He said…about Naomi….” She trailed off, too ashamed to continue.
Lei’s expression softened. “And you honestly believe that he meant it?”
“Why shouldn’t he?” Aria countered. “He can do whatever he wants.”
“So can you,” Lei reminded her. “Take what you want, and pay for it.”
That phrase had always struck Aria as more than a little ominous. “Women have no power here,” she insisted.
“Do you really think so?” Lei flashed Aria a small and slightly rueful smile, the smile of a much older woman frustrated with a child. “You have power over him, because he loves you. And trust me,” she added, “that’s the only power that counts—for men or women. You don’t want him, or anyone else, to do things because they have to; choices made out of love are better than choices made out of obligation.”
“I married him out of obligation,” Aria said bitterly. “And he doesn’t love me.”
“He’s just a man,” Lei replied quietly, “with all of a man’s flaws. Let him make it up to you.”
Her words sounded too much like Kisten’s.
Aria resisted the sudden stab of pain in her heart and, with it, the equally sudden and almost overpowering urge to empathize. Over the past few weeks, she’d come to see a different side of him—or so she’d thought. Now she wasn’t so sure. Was he the decent, generous-hearted man who’d been twisted by his circumstances into something he wouldn’t otherwise have been? Or was he really just a spoiled, high-handed autocrat after all?
She’d overlooked Aiden’s flaws often enough, and given him second—and third, and fifth—chances. She’d imagined herself to be tolerant, when in the end she’d only ever been a fool. It was dangerous, the Aria of those days warned her, to let people in or expect too much of them. To let yourself see things that weren’t there.
“He does love you.”
“Because he’s my husband?” She shook her head.
“Because of how he looks at you,” Lei contradicted her quietly.
“I was raised,” Aria said, quietly now, “to believe that love meant being with one person forever, investing unreservedly and completely.”
“And he hasn’t done that?”
Had he? As Lei spoke, Aria’s anger had slowly been replaced by confusion until all she could think of was disappearing into that cave and how good it would feel to not feel anything. “If he truly cared for me,” she said bleakly, “he wouldn’t want to be with anyone else.”
She hadn’t thought so a week ago. A week ago, the whole concept of Kisten being with other women hadn’t seemed real. No, she checked herself, that wasn’t quite right. A week ago, she hadn’t felt jealousy because she hadn’t felt fear—fear of the unknown, fear of discovering that her judgment wasn’t reliable after all, fear of being abandoned on a strange planet by a man who’d turned out to be just as much of a mirage as Aiden. She’d felt secure in the knowledge that Kisten loved her, or at least wanted her, and now….
“You have to define your own happily ever after,” Lei said. Her tone was gentle.
The necessity of further comment—or of Aria herself bursting into tears, as she was very much afraid she might do at any second—was forestalled by the arrival of Zerus and, with him, the ill-famed Daughter of the House of Singh.
Pasha, too, was resplendent in glittering robes far too formal for a casual lunch. But then again, Pasha always looked like she’d just been unpacked from a hatbox. Aria very much doubted that she so much as went to the bathroom without first applying mascara.
She stood. “Good afternoon, Zerus. Good afternoon, Pasha.”
“What are you dressed as?” Pasha demanded.
Is this woman really my friend, too? But Aria discovered that the spite had gone out of her, along with everything else. She felt like a scraped-out gourd. Hollow. Numb. Part of her wanted to wrap herself in the protective cloak of routine and pretend that this morning never happened. And part of her wondered if it wasn’t time to stop railing at the wall. Maybe she should face the fact that things weren’t going to work out, that she was obviously not what Kisten wanted, and leave. She’d never be the kind of milksop who could content herself with children, or knitting, while her husband lived a real life.
You have to define your own happily ever after. But what did that mean?
“You’re wearing pants,” Pasha repeated.
“It’s a fashion statement.” Aria glared.
She led the little group onto the verandah where they all took their places in the oversized, overstuffed chairs. Aria ordered lemonade and wished that she could order something
stronger. Zerus started droning on about toilets almost immediately. He was a professor, or had been; this was, Aria realized, what he must have sounded like in class. He, like Lei, had made no comment on her choice of attire. In Lei’s case, it was tact; in Zerus’ it was that, being a self-described bohemian, he undoubtedly approved. Possibly the one thing Aria liked about Zerus was the fact that he had no use for gender roles.
Indeed, when she took how he treated Kisten out of the equation, she liked the old man a great deal. He had a good sense of humor, and he treated women like people. Was it really fair to judge him solely on the basis of how much he disliked his grandson? Was Kisten, an insidious voice asked, really so immune from criticism?
Perhaps, Aria thought uncomfortably, Zerus was right.
“It’s an uphill task, you know,” he said, sipping his lemonade.
Aria sighed.
FOUR
Zerus droned on about toilets for most of the next hour.
For all his supposed good points, he did love the sound of his own voice. Which Aria, having never known her grandparents, found perversely charming.
“Roughly sixty percent of the rural population and forty percent of the urban population defecates in the open,” he said. “The engineer I spoke to told me that the leach pit should be dug at least thirty feet away from the well and ideally a great deal further! But do you know what he told me?” Zerus pulled a face. He’d obviously enjoyed conducting this research more than he’d let on, and was greatly enjoying telling them about it now. “He told me that the leach pit is usually placed right next to the well because the homeowner’s astrologer commanded it!”
“Astrologer?” Pasha repeated, plainly dumbfounded.
“A specific kind of astrologer, yes: one concerned with the metaphysical plan of a building and who offers advice both on how to improve it and on how to minimize the damage inflicted by…supernatural forces.”
