Perhaps the Stars Page 3

  The arms pulled back. “Do you want some chocolate cake?” It was the gentle voice of Carlyle Foster-Kraye de la Trémoïlle. Their hair was shower-damp, and their outer wrap stripped down to the waist, baring a tank top and a bandaged shoulder.

  Chocolate cake; the question was somehow difficult.

  “Do you want a drink of water?”

  I tried twice to produce a noise discernible as ‘Yes,’ but eventually just nodded.

  The smiling Cousin rose, and I squinted past them as they stepped out into the bright office and crossed the sea of junk between Papadelias’s two desks.

  My lenses were in passive mode, I noticed now, the conference call terminated, the Prince and others gone. Minutes had passed. How many? Math was hard. Then, “The battle!” I cried, realizing. “Cielo de Pájaros!”

  Something in Foster-Kraye’s kind blue eyes made even their wince feel gentle. “It blew up. The bash’house, the computers, all of it. We don’t know why yet. Something internal, not a missile. A lot of people suddenly rushed out and then it all went up in smoke.”

  “Then the cars have stopped?”

  “No, the cars are flying everywhere, just they won’t come when called, or land, and no one’s in them, and no one knows what’s controlling them. Well, we hope no one’s in them.” They opened the far door; the babble of the main office outside sounded far louder than the daily roar endemic to the police headquarters of our united Earth.

  I realized Foster-Kraye was heading out for water. “There’s a water bottle in the umbrella stand,” I said.

  They turned and rummaged. “Here?”

  “It’s water from Greece,” I added reflexively. I remembered Papa boasting of it to us, and sobs moved in me again. I remember thinking it was strange that I had strength for more sobs so soon after I had poured out what seemed like all I had.

  Foster-Kraye returned with the bottle. “My war spoils so far are three slightly squished chocolate cakes and a tray of mystery cheese cubes. Care to help?” They offered tissues with the water.

  A good nose blow made things feel less like a dream. “War spoils?”

  “Crashed party delivery cart abandoned out front. Waste not want not.”

  “I should use the bathroom first,” I said, not realizing how badly I needed it until I tried to stand. Papa’s office had a full bath with a shower, for the same vocateur reason it had a mattress on the floor of the evidence closet. The bathroom was steamy from Foster-Kraye’s shower, so I didn’t have to see myself in the fogged mirror. That left me alone with my message feed, and my tracker’s images of the explosion: a rush of figures out across the trenches, then a burst from underground which bulged up almost spherically, as if a huge egg were punching out through the city surface, no fire, just black earth and building guts, with broken roof glass forming a shell around it like the sugar shards of crème brûlée. One second the rubble dome rose, the next it caved in, and only then did fire rise between the pieces, swallowed an instant later by black smoke, while the sound of the explosion came last, like a soundtrack out of sync. It was gone, then, that house where I had helped Mycroft scrub doodles off the walls, and, deep below, the Saneer-Weeksbooth patrimony whose numeromancy had let the whole world fly.

  Fresh messages offered distraction. A much-relieved Vivien had heard I was safe in Romanova, and urged me to lie low, help Su-Hyeon, and stay in their flat beside the Forum, since they wouldn’t need it while stuck in Buenos Aires. I wanted to ask Vivien to help Martin escape from Klamath Marsh, but the reality of war warned me the Humanist President could no longer offer neutral friendship to the Familiaris Regni who stood third in line for MASON’s throne. Bryar sent encouragement from Delhi, and repeated Vivien’s kind command that I consider their little town flat mine for the time being. Heloïse was safe in Casablanca, clashing with Cookie across the boardroom table. An obedient Dominic did stay in Tōgenkyō, and was gathering the Interim Directors who helmed the Mitsubishi voting blocs while their true Directors waited with Andō for a trial which may never come. Prince Jehovah Mason was alone. Not literally alone, since MASON was in Alexandria, and quick-moving Achilles, but Father and ally were not the intimates which all thinking things crave, be we dolphin, ape, or God. Those precious few beings in this Universe which Our Lonely Visitor could call ‘Mine’ were all lost: Heloïse to the Cousin crisis; Dominic to Asia; Martin to America; Mycroft to death. And I to Romanova. I couldn’t reach Them. I couldn’t reach any of them. There was nothing for it but to sit with Carlyle Foster-Kraye, eat three chocolate cakes, and watch the world burn.

  “There’s milk,” I said as I came out of the bathroom.

  “Where?” they asked.

  I stubbed my toe, distracted by a breaking report of street violence in Melbourne. “Mini-fridge, under the Mycroft desk, the big green box all those tubes are leaning against.”

  The Cousin fetched it. “There’re no forks, but I found a spoon and chopsticks.”

  “I have a fork,” I said.

  I saw ‘why’ on the Cousin’s lips, but it faded as they realized why any Servicer would travel well-prepared to eat whatever chance or lazy patrons offered. “Do you want the dense fudgy cake, the tall fluffy cake, or this one with sort of red jam stuff between the layers?” they asked.

  I hesitated, distracted as I fished the fork from my thigh pocket, and felt the grit of sea salt on the time-dried cloth. Sea water, bodies on stretchers, tsunami, Mycroft, gone. I pretended my sob was a hiccup. “Some of each?”

  Foster-Kraye spoon-hacked hunks off the first two cakes, but paused before the third—their tracker, like mine, must have flashed the report that the city government of Odessa had given an order to round up Mitsubishi from their homes, and possibly also Humanists; sources were vague.

  “Was it this bad before?” I asked. “Before when I was … not calm … was bad news coming in this fast?”

  Before the Cousin could frame an answer, we heard of what was being called an ‘organized militia’ approaching several bash’houses in Limpopo. “It’s been like this since the cars went down,” they answered. “I guess now people know no one’s coming to stop them, no polylaws, no Alliance aid, no Romanova. Everyone who’s had a plan is putting it in action.”

  “So many plans,” I said, as much to my cake as to my companion. Casimir Perry-Kraye had had this in their plan, Perry-Kraye who had destroyed the transit computer backup station, just to make all this more painful for the world. Were there backup backups, I wondered? Had they destroyed those too?

  “Every city its own law.” Foster-Kraye stretched back, peering at me. We are in a city. They didn’t need to say it, it was in their face, the thought, the fear. I felt trapped in their gaze, that piercing, hypersaturated royal blue which Danaë and President Ganymede taught me to fear. My mind turned to the palace at La Trimouille, and gilded bed frames, and Perry-Kraye laughing in the flames at Brussels.

  “We’re not incapable of doing real good,” they said suddenly.

  I stared. “What?”

  Carlyle Foster-Kraye leaned toward me. “Just because some of what led Earth to this crisis is our fault, yours, mine, doesn’t mean we can’t still do real good. We’re still here. Alive. We have the ability to act, and choose, and achieve. That’s real. Even if it seems dwarfed by past mistakes, those mistakes aren’t a negative number, they don’t cancel out the good things we do now, don’t make an insurmountable pit we have to climb back out of to start at zero. We can do good, and our pasts don’t take that possibility away, not while we still live and breathe. And try.”

  I stared, my fork slack in my mouth. It was mental whiplash, the surreal eye-of-the-storm crisis hush suddenly swapped for a sensayer session. Ex-sensayer? I couldn’t remember whether Foster-Kraye was still a sensayer or not, and searched for their sensayer scarf, which they did have, the black-and-white cloth knotted around their waist to keep their wrap half-up around their hips. I knew this kind of whiplash, being blindsided by metaphysics in the midst of n
ormalcy. The phrase ‘You’ve spent too long around Prince Mason’ toddled through my mind. And then I realized Foster-Kraye and I were here alone, and both insiders, and there was no reason to be circumspect. “Do you worship the Prince now?” I asked.

  A smile beamed from the Cousin’s face like sun. “I’m giving my Maker a second chance. It’s only fair: They’ve given me the same.”

  I felt my brow tense. Foster-Kraye’s tone was sweet, sincere, like springtime, but made something boil in me, noxious and familiar, like the burn of stomach acid on an already-burned throat. And when They give Mycroft a second chance, I’ll smile like that too. I don’t know how long the hate-burn held me, but we were still staring at each other when a rush of cops charged in so violently that I leapt up, grabbed a heavy pipe from under Papa’s desk, and took a defensive stance before I even realized I was moving. “… somewhere in Papa’s desk…” one of them was saying as they entered, but they stopped short in front of us, four of them, eyes glittering with lens-traffic, their gray Romanovan uniforms rumpled from the all-nighter.

  “Why are you here? This is a secure area!” one shouted. I recognized this one—tall, classically beautiful, South-Asian-looking with a Whitelaw Hiveless sash about their hips—but their name escaped me.

  Foster-Kraye rose and kept their hands prudently visible. “I’m Special Informant Carlyle Foster, I’m—”

  “I know what you are.” Rolled eyes condemned, either the liberties Papa took with their informants, or this Cousin specifically. “Do you have orders to be here?”

  Foster-Kraye smiled. “My last orders from Papa were ‘Stay down and don’t get lynched,’ but I don’t have that in writing. Papa left me here to look after [Anonymous].”

  Suspicious eyes grew more suspicious as they turned on me. “AWOL from your dorm? And in a state of emergency, no less.”

  “Not AWOL,” I answered. “Papa let me stay.”

  The officer shoved past Foster-Kraye, toward me. “I suppose you don’t have that in writing either?” I recognized their uniform at least, gray with gold piping and that sparkling, holographic blue trim that home printers can’t replicate, just like Papa’s except lacking the cross-swirl. Deputy Commissioner General, then. The title summoned the name: Bo Chowdhury.

  I held my ground. “I’m working.”

  “In a top security office? Doing what?”

  The truth was off-limits, but in my mind I said it: I’m the damned Anonymous!

  Chowdhury pounced on my hesitation. “Drop the weapon, Servicer. You don’t want armed resistance on your record.”

  I froze. I felt like I was a spectator, watching myself in horror, cursing at my body: Drop the pipe, you idiot! Threatening the Deputy Commissioner General? What are you thinking! Yet my body would not move.

  Chowdhury nodded for the others to advance on me. “Take the Servicer to the cells.”

  Foster-Kraye stepped in. “No need for that.” I couldn’t tell whether the sweetness in their tone was fake or just irrepressible. “I’ll escort [Anonymous] to the nearest dorm.”

  Chowdhury’s eyes were stone. “Cells. Now. And you’ll be sharing a cell with them if you interfere again, Cousin.”

  “Blacklaw,” Foster-Kraye corrected, rising so the black sash about their waist lolled down from amid the wrap’s folds, like the dangling legs of a sleeping cat. Their posture felt different suddenly, striking, with an intentionality I could not quite call menace. I’d forgotten Foster-Kraye had followed Dominic so far. “Call Papa,” Foster-Kraye challenged, calmly. “They’ll settle this misunderstanding.”

  The cops in the back exchanged unhappy glances.

  “Drop the pipe, Servicer,” Chowdhury ordered again. “Now.”

  My knuckles where I gripped the pipe turned white. “Where’s Papa?” I asked.

  Unhappy glances turned to full-on winces.

  “I won’t ask again.” The Deputy Inspector General drew their stun gun, and at their nod two others did as well, but the fourth cop took a step toward me, smiling, reaching gently for the pipe. I recognized them, vaguely: red-haired and strong-boned like a caryatid. I had made them coffee more than once, and the trust bond born of breaking bread—or cookies—together calmed me enough that I was able to unbend my fingers as they took the pipe. I fell back, relieved, into Foster-Kaye’s waiting arms.

  “[Anonymous] is in shock.” Foster-Kraye squeezed my shoulder. “They were at the harbor front all night. They lost—”

  “Their Beggar King?” Chowdhury caught my wince. “Did you imagine Papa hasn’t been watching? That we don’t know who the other leaders are in Mycroft Canner’s private army?” They nodded to the other officers. “Take them both to the cells, I’ll see them when things are calmer.”

  All at once I was in a web of grabbing hands.

  “Stop!” Foster-Kraye cried. “You can’t—”

  “You’re a Blacklaw,” the Whitelaw reminded us, “I can lock you in a trunk and throw away the key.”

  Foster-Kraye had no leg to stand on there. “You have no reason—”

  “You’re both spies.”

  ‘No’ was on my lips before I fact-checked myself. We were spies, both of us. We always had been. I’ve spied for the Prince, Mycroft, Achilles, Vivien, Martin, while Foster-Kraye had spied for Julia in earlier days, then Papa, Dominic, the Prince too. Thoughts too complex to congeal into sentences buzzed through me, held me mute. We were bustled, hands on my arms, a hand on my head pushing me down and forward, toward the door, toward useless cells, inertia, waste of hours, waste of me, capture, so pointlessly, and on the first day of the war. The dreamlike absurdity of it made it impossible to resist, as my stunned brain insisted the solution should be to wake up. Help?

  “Stop. Arrest Deputy Chowdhury.”

  The hands that held me slackened. Royal purple filled the door before us with its brilliant authority. Or should I say republican purple? That deep red-purple only the very rarest, highest officers of old Rome could wear back in the days of togas, and which only one office wears now. The Censor. My heart leapt at the thought of Vivien, but of course the calm, small, slightly panting figure was Jung Su-Hyeon Ancelet Kosala, bright in their new Censor’s uniform, flanked by their Censor’s Guard. Su-Hyeon smiled, caught my eye, and in that smile lay all the glow of hope and home. I felt the prickle of fresh tears in my relief. And there was more. The Pillars of the Earth had followed Su-Hyeon here to save me, two of them, trailing prudently close, just in case the young and fresh-in-office Censor was too green yet to command obedience: to Su-Hyeon’s left, the tiny Senate Speaker Jin Im-Jin stared up at the towering cops with all the righteous condescension of a great-great-grandba’pa, while, to Su-Hyeon’s right, broad and calm and bearded like a bushy oak, stood Senator Charlemagne Guildbreaker Senior. Their silent gazes dared the stunned and slack-jawed cops to refuse the order, which the Censor repeated now: “You heard me. Arrest Deputy Chowdhury.”

  “But…”

  “They work for Joyce Faust D’Arouet.” Su-Hyeon said it so flatly, so simply, six words, done, but it all came together then: Chowdhury’s strange hostility, their odd knowledge of me, of Mycroft and the Myrmidons, their scorn of Carlyle Foster-Kraye, this purposeless arrest. They’d nearly captured both of us. For Madame.

  Chowdhury’s gasp gave the lie to their protest even before they voiced it: “What? No, I … no, it…”

  Su-Hyeon didn’t need to raise their voice. “You’ve been to the Parisian brothel called ‘Madame’s’ seventy-six times this year. I believe your customary partner there is one Dolmancé?”

  My heart cheered as Chowdhury stared dumbly, and I imagined Madame off somewhere staring dumbly too. What would the Tyrant-Queen have done with me, I wondered? Tried to break the Anonymous to their command? Or use me as a hostage against Vivien? And Foster-Kraye, could the “bastard love child” card still work against Danaë? Or had that hand been played out, leaving the ex-Cousin useful only as a goad for Dominic, or a prize for the pleasure of wha
tever servant best pleased the mistress any given day? The young Censor didn’t even have to nod for the others to release us and seize the Deputy.

  “No, you don’t understand!” Chowdhury sputtered. “It isn’t what you think! Those visits aren’t … You have no authority to do this! In Papa’s absence I’m…”

  I hardly heard the lies. It was over. It had been over since those first six words, as surely as if with “They work for Joyce Faust D’Arouet,” Su-Hyeon had drawn a knife across Chowdhury’s guilty throat. The others dragged the sputtering Whitelaw away through the sea of desks in the outer office, where the jungle of screens and voices froze in a triumphant hush as we watched one victory at least come easily on Day Two of the war.

  “You, third from the left,” Speaker Jin Im-Jin called suddenly into the silence, “yes, you in the yellow wrap. What’s the desk say? O’Callaghan. Are you O’Callaghan?”

  “Yes?” The pale, fidgeting Cousin rose from one of the larger desks.

  “Think of a number between one and seven.”

  “Wha—what? Uh … three?”

  Before the syllable was finished, Speaker Jin slapped a tablet against a desk, simulating a clap, which Jin’s skeleton fingers were too frail to produce themselves. Many jumped at the noise, but only O’Callaghan yelped aloud. “Arrest that one too,” Speaker Jin pointed. “They’re in on it. Oh, and that one in the corner also? In green, the Mexican Humanist. Yes, that one. You all really shouldn’t glance at your co-conspirators quite so much, most unsubtle. All three with low digits in the fourth and fifth, that’s interesting … 3–7–7 … very marked…”

  We all stared as the smiling Speaker drifted off into some incomprehensible Brillist reverie, all except Senator Charlemagne Guildbreaker, who, I suppose, had grown accustomed to it, serving beside Jin Im-Jin for however many decades. “Do you want them to arrest those two as well, Censor?” the Mason prompted, gently.