Aijlan

by Andy Graham

  As she pushed her belt through the belt loops of her trousers, she shook her head at Rick’s sharp intake of breath. “Your line of work can be dangerous — it’s part of the job description. But no one ever thinks that the not-so-small print of death and disfigurement actually applies to them.”

  “Is that where I was headed?”

  Beth shook her head. “Not as far as I’m aware. Before the revolution De Lette decided that the recently promoted Major Franklin, the very publicly promoted Major Franklin, had too much to offer to be wasted in an accidental death somewhere. So far, Hamilton shares the view that you’re useful. That’s why you’re here.” She took Rick’s chin her hand, pulling his face towards her. “And no matter how things ended with us, I don’t want to wake one day to hear you died alone in an anonymous toilet of an inexplicable heart attack, or that the computer you were working on malfunctioned and electrocuted you. I don’t want you to die because of a misunderstanding, a typo, or a misread email. You’re safer here. Out in the towns you were an easy target. I can protect you here.”

  “And my family?”

  With her other hand, she trailed her fingers across the stubble. “They mean nothing to me.”

  Rick stiffened, his nostrils flaring.

  Beth let go of his chin and walked over to the mirror above the sink. Pulling out a lipstick, she pursed her lips, and looked at his reflection. “But I know how much they mean to you. You’re safer in the capital. And if your work here is seen to be indispensable, it’s easier for me to arrange for your family’s safety.” She finished applying the make-up, picking off flecks with a fingernail. Popping the lipstick back in her pocket, she grinned at him. “Come on, let’s get you cleaned up. Your bruises are just the wrong side of fetching.” She held out a hand.

  Rick sat back on the sofa. “I guess this kind of role reversal appeals to you. You get to protect your ex, Major Franklin, the hero of Castle Anwen, the sun-fan man.”

  Beth dropped her arm. “Yes, I do. And I’d be lying if I said it didn’t feel good. But would you rather they came looking for you and your family in the Buckets?”

  “Free Towns, Beth, not Bucket Towns or Buckets. You can bury that dinosaur too.”

  She sighed. “OK. Now can we please clean you up before I introduce you to Hamilton? He has a proposition that I assured him you could help with.” She wrinkled her nose. “A hero shouldn’t smell like a budget old-people’s home. And please remember to call the old VP President Hamilton. He’s rather too keen on us all using his new title.” She held out her hand.

  Rick stayed where he was. “One more question.”

  Beth’s shoulders sagged.

  “The Unsung, those people that attacked me. They’re not terrorists, are they?”

  “I don’t know. I swear,” she added, seeing his expression.

  Beth put her hands on his knees, and leaned in close to him. Her perfume was stronger here, the distinctive scent that you could only catch when you were up close to her. Her nose was almost touching his. They were closer than they had been in years. The light glinted off her canine teeth.

  “Now, Major Franklin. Get off my sofa and follow me out of the room. If not, I’ll strip naked, and open the door screaming.”

  XIX - Red Lipstick

  The steel and white corridors gave way to damp stone. Faded white letters stencilled onto the walls marked each junction. Bunker lights gave off a light that appeared to be rusting, and beads of condensation trickled down the inside of the glass. There was a distant rumble. A lorry, Rick thought, possibly an underground train. The lights flickered, sending Beth’s smooth gait into a series of stuttering images. Interlaced in those images of his ex was the girl from his dreams.

  A riot of curls cascaded around her face, loosely tied back with a simple hairband. It was pink, with a ladybird on one side. The hair framed her gaunt cheeks and the rings under her eyes that were black with shades of purple. It was the face of a girl who, though not quite a woman, had left her childhood a long time ago.

  She smiled at him, her lips trembling as she spoke. “They’re going to take from you what they’ve already taken from me.”

  The smile slipped. A frown played with the lines already etched into her face. She dabbed at her shirt, at the red stain sticking it to her belly. She held out her hand. In her palm was a coin, chipped and bent double. Her autumn brown eyes frosted over and she keeled backwards, disappearing into the dust. She left behind the sound of a coin clattering onto a hard floor.

  Rick shivered and wiped his forehead. The rumbling in the tunnel faded. The light blared out of its cages with renewed vigour. Beth was metres ahead of him, marching into air that smelt of sulphur and charcoal. He hurried after her, holding his breath as he passed the spot where he had seen the girl. “Where are we going?”

  “Hamilton moved his private office,” Beth answered. “He’s never been the most gregarious of people, but he’s spending more time alone these days than ever. I should take you to his public quarters, but this way he’s more likely to see you.” She trailed a finger along the walls, flicking the moisture onto the floor. “Though I’m sure he could have chosen a more up-to-date place than this.”

  Rick glanced back down the tunnel. It was empty. The girl wasn’t there. “Why did he have his offices moved?” he asked.

  “Security. I’m one of the few people who know this route. It’s easy to find when you know what to look for, but most people don’t even know it’s there to look for it. Quite apt, really.” She pointed at one of the letters on the walls. “A for anatomy. You should be able to remember that easily enough.” Beth winked at him.

  Rick missed a step. The jolt of his feet caused his shoulder to smart. “Not the time or place, Beth.”

  “When did that ever stop us?”

  She turned abruptly into a corridor he hadn’t seen, wrong-footing him. He scrambled to catch up with her. For a woman who only came up to his shoulders, she walked at a pace that was, for him, uncomfortable. It was neither a fast walk nor a slow jog, but something half a step shy of both.

  “Why’s Hamilton concerned about security? Didn’t he just win?”

  Beth slowed to a standstill and took his hands in hers. “Listen, Rick. The answers are not at the edges. Life is not an either-or choice, an in-out option. Survival is easier in the middle; that’s how animals protect their young and weak. That’s where most people feel safer, but progress is made on the edges. The harsher those edges are, the more well-defined the middle becomes. It’s a reciprocal relationship, one moulds and contains the other.

  “Hamilton’s taken a risk. He’s put himself right on the edges, and is yet to reclaim the middle ground. He’s climbed up the rungs of power in full view of the nation. He’s standing on a high diving board, blindfold, and he has no way of saving face other than to jump into the deep end of the pool. He doesn’t even know if there’s water in it.” She shrugged and let go of his hands. “He’s braver than I ever gave him credit for. That’s at least one thing in his favour.”

  “And you’re OK with what’s going on? What happened to De Lette?”

  “I have to be. I couldn’t have stopped it on my own, but this way I get to nudge it where I want occasionally. I can try and keep mankind’s natural tendencies in check.”

  She set off down the corridor, and led him deeper into the underworld of Aijlan-Karth.

  After three more turns along the A-marked corridors, she stopped in front of a heavily studded door. Giant, ornate, hinges covered most of the aged wood. Two armed soldiers flanked the door, standing under blackened sconces. Flexible light strips twisted round the metal. They dangled to the floor in slow curves, giving off a mottled light. A flinty-eyed captain in a nondescript uniform stepped out of the shadows. He gave Rick a discrete nod. Beth handed over her ID card, and the captain stepped away to a small computer.

  “Who is he?” Rick whispered.

  “One of the few people I can almost sort of trust,” Beth replied, sh
uffling closer. “Captain Lacky’s son is one of the survivors from Castle Anwen. His son says you saved his life. This gentleman feels he owes you.”

  “That was a farce! I’m no hero.”

  “Scratch the surface of what you see, Rick, and you’ll see that most people are pretending to be themselves too. Imposter syndrome is endemic.”

  “But—”

  Beth elbowed him in the ribs. “Honesty is all well and good, but let the legend breathe a little, it’ll make your life easier. And right now, it’ll make my life easier too.” She jerked her thumb over her shoulder.

  The captain coughed and waved them forwards.

  “Let’s go,” Beth said. “How do I look?” She tugged her jacket straight.

  “Fine.”

  She gave him a withering look. “That good?”

  “OK, great. To die for. Better?”

  Beth shook her head, and pulled out a lipstick. “I’m not really Hamilton’s type,” she said. A shudder ran through her body as she rolled the make-up on. “But those of us who aren’t living legends need every advantage we can get.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Red lipstick, it has a power that can succeed where diplomacy fails. Even I know that.”

  She patted him on the cheek, and Rick stiffened. The watching captain lowered his eyes, turned, and nodded at a soldier. The soldier hammered on the door with the heel of his hand. The echoes thumped down the damp corridors, and the doors creaked open.

  XX - Rumours and Dreams

  The old strip light in the windowless cube of a room flickered. Rick spun in his chair, watching the ceiling tiles come back into focus. Stann had almost got it right: Rick hadn’t been promoted to take a fall, he’d been promoted to be forgotten. If De Lette had known he was about to be dethroned, he could have saved himself the trouble of signing through the order, and used the ink for something useful. From corporal to major, it was as ridiculous now as it had been then.

  His spinning chair slowed. Rick took in the cluttered piles of computers and old hardware in the store cupboard-cum-office that had become his home. He knew exactly how many keyboards there were, had counted all the monitors and servers too. He hadn’t got round to the tiles on the ceiling, but, long before he had been shown to this airless box, someone had kindly scratched the answer on the wooden desk: 144. The numbers were black with the years of grime, their own minuscule ecosystem. He didn’t want to think about the layers of DNA buried in those grooves. A plastic bag lurked in a corner, stuffed full of cables and wires. When he got really bored, he was planning on trying to untangle that octopus orgy. He would have to be really bored to do that. Maybe this afternoon.

  The chair stopped, facing the slogan stencilled onto the wall.

  “Work hard, live more,” he read yet again. He’d seen the words so many times, he wasn’t sure they were even spelt right anymore. The sentence still made more sense than that from the picture on Beth’s wall.

  The soles of his shoes squeaked on the polished floor as he set the chair spinning again. He played with the angle of his legs to see how it affected the momentum. Grinning, he rubbed the bump on the back of his head. There had been a roundabout in Old Town that he and Stann had linked up to a motorbike engine. They’d learnt very quickly that the centrifugal forces on the inside of the roundabout were much less than those on the outside. He’d almost cracked his skull open when his fingers had slipped off the rusty metal bar, and he’d been thrown into one of the Arch Trees.

  His thoughts drifted to what Beth had said in those underground corridors about life being safer in the middle. That had been almost two months ago. Rick’s meeting with the new president had never happened. President Luke Hamilton had been, and remained, busy with pressing matters of state. Instead, Beth had introduced him to the minister for war before taking him back to her sub-office. Once there, she stripped to her underwear again to change for a formal occasion she had that evening. It had been the last time he’d seen her, alone in a moonlit room that seemed full of lace and perfume, and a large expanse of sofa.

  He’d called Beth, tried to set up a meeting, but hadn’t been able to get hold of her. With the troubles in the city, he’d been allowed one call to his family, which had been monitored by a man with the oddest face Rick had ever seen: almost all forehead with the rest of his features jostling for space in the little room that was left.

  Rick had been away from home for weeks. Brief though his time with Beth had been, he’d seen more of his ex than his wife and daughter. He wanted to go home, hold his daughter, be with his wife. But, increasingly he found himself thinking of Beth: her proximity, the challenge in her eyes, the invitation, the dare. It was an odd feeling that made his skin feel too warm.

  Rick adjusted the keyboard, trying to focus on the work ahead. The minister for war, or the minister for munitions and punitions, as he was known in Sci-Corps, had assigned Rick back to the sun-fan project. The idea had been so popular, it had been rushed though the testing phase. The fans were almost ready to roll. Rick had been tasked with debugging the new dragonfly lens cameras that had been retrofitted into them.

  “Great idea,” he said, tapping on the computer screen in front of him. “You get to save milliseconds, you have a built in backup system that is harder to hack, and one fan doesn’t know what the other is doing.”

  The screen flickered, and all the images and text compressed down to a single line of black and white static. He groaned and dropped his head onto the keyboard, the faded yellow plastic keys pressing into his forehead.

  “Why, why, why?” he moaned. “Dinosaur politicians, fossilised computers, stubborn friends, and more hormones than are good for me.“

  “Sir?” a voice said from behind him.

  Rick sprang to his feet. “Private Marka.”

  The young woman who had escorted him to Beth’s sub-office after the incident with the Unsung smiled. “You remember my name, sir.”

  “It is distinctive,” he replied.

  She nodded and her stiff khaki collar cut into the dark skin of her neck. “Yes, sir, I guess it is. Back home we don’t do rank like here in your army. I’m just Marka there. Sir,” she added.

  “Home is?”

  “The Rukan Mountains. The superstitions of my people were stifling me, so I decided to come here. Your kind are a little more progressive than us. I wanted to enlist in Sci-Corps.” She clamped her mouth shut. “Apologies for speaking out of turn, Major. I’m not here to talk about myself. Do you need anything, sir?”

  “Some information would be good.” He patted the seat next to him, frowning as he remembered Beth doing the same thing half naked. “Take a seat, Private. Tell me what’s happening outside. I have no phone and no Internet. I’m not allowed out of the compound. I’ve been told it’s not safe.”

  Marka glanced back at the open door.

  Rick kicked it shut. “I’m not asking for anything classified, just give me some news about what’s going on. Whoever said no news is good news has obviously never had to survive in an information vacuum.”

  Marka sat bolt upright in the chair. Her back didn’t touch the ergonomically designed fabric that had been designed to fit ‘anyone and everyone, the above-average person in all of us’. It was another example of the meaningless double-speak that was infesting their language. There were tens of thousands of these chairs. Everyone in any government or military department, no matter their rank, had one. They were very comfortable, but with highly breakable, expensive bespoke parts.

  Marka coughed into her hand. The young woman was not much out of her teens. The private had probably lied about her age to enlist, not that the army ever made any checks. She couldn’t be much older than the girl who had tried to kill him in Castle Anwen. That young woman had been back every night since, dancing through his sweat-filled dreams, twisting his bed sheets into knots. Every night, she’d offered him a bent coin before her belly exploded in a shower of crimson. He pushed the dreams away, a
nd focussed on the young woman in front of him. Lean and androgynous, any curves Marka may have had were flattened down by the uncompromising uniform.

  Rick screwed his eyes shut. He really had been away from home for too long. His eyes were starting to draw their own conclusions about what they weren’t seeing. Maybe he should start on that cable bag in the corner, and ask Marka to retangle them as he untangled them. It could be his penance, his bottomless bucket to fill, his hair shirt. Though at this stage he wondered if he’d be better off with horse-hair underwear.

  “Sir, are you OK?” Marka asked.

  Rick blinked. “What?” He adjusted his trousers. “I’m sorry, Private. I’m getting submarine-sickness in this room. This is the longest conversation I’ve had in days.”

  Her eyebrows narrowed over her aquiline nose, and then the words poured out in a rush. “I’m not entirely sure what to say, sir. Most of us have been confined to barracks, but I’m still required to run errands between the president’s team and Sci-Corps. That’s how Ms Laudanum met me. She asked if I would help you.” Her eyes dropped, and she cleared her throat.

  Rick wiped his brow with the back of his sleeve, scooting his chair backwards.

  “Sub-Colonel Chester has been promoted to colonel,” Marka said. “Some of the senior ranks are grumbling that she’s too young for the job, but her record speaks for itself. Curfew now starts at 1700 hours, 1800 if you have a permit, but they’re harder to get hold of than sundust. Most of Karth is a ruin: the old docks and the sunken clock tower survived the worst of the violence, not much else did. The Stone Bridge escaped unscathed. Some of the other bridges are still burning. You can see the smoke for miles.”

  “Any news on the old president, De Lette?”

  “No, sir. I do know Mr Hamilton elected himself president using something called VIPER. I helped the team of lawyers with their IT.” Her eyes glazed over. “There was something strange about the whole process. The VIPER files had been recently updated, by someone using an electronic backdoor. I was told not to worry about it. Probably just Hamilton,” she added.