ARC: The Buried Life (26 page)

Jane paused. “Do you have the key on you?”

He fished in his pocket and held up a thick, shiny key. “Our contact in the Guard passed it to me on his way out. A double-betrayal, though I suppose Ruthers deserves nothing less. I know well what kind of man my uncle is.”

“But heaven forbid you should become the same.”

“I wish I had a choice.”

“I know,” she said with real sympathy. “And I hope that you can forgive me for this one day and understand what I’m doing for you.” Arnault looked up at Jane with mild bemusement, which grew to wide-eyed alarm when he saw the small revolver she was pointing at him. Meeting his gaze with all but banished regret, she fired.

He fell to the ground, clutching his leg and bellowing in pain. “Are you insane? What have you done?”

“Sorry,” she said. “But I think I’ve got more right to this chore than you.” Rushing to his side, she retrieved the key he had dropped and ran down the hall toward the locked door. Fredrick watched the series of events unfold as if in slow motion, and only the subsiding sounds of Arnault’s gasps and growls brought him back to real-time.

“Oh, shut up,” he muttered, hobbling to the chandelier.

Jane’s own pulse was surprisingly steady as she dashed to the end of the hall, the rotunda disappearing in a final curve. A lone door, gilded and carved masterfully, was set into the left-hand wall. She knocked.

The sounds of stirring reached her through the thick wood. “Sergeant Gorham? Is that you?” The voice was firm and commanding, and she recognized it well from an afternoon at the market that seemed like years ago. She unlocked and opened the door with the stolen key.

The man on the other side of the door looked from her disheveled figure to the revolver in her outstretched hand with open wonder, though not a hint of fear. Those pale blue eyes settled back on hers, daring her to be done with it. Feeling a touch of dread herself, Jane detected something unpleasantly familiar in the cold, malevolent stare, and she fired.

The report of this second shot sounded louder in this small room, but Jane’s hands were still steady on the gun when she lowered it. She took a moment to catch her breath, gazing at the motionless man through the gunpowder smoke, before sprinting back to the rotunda where the ruckus had grown louder. Roman had regained something of his composure and was kneeling awkwardly where he had fallen, having staunched his wound. His eyes met hers with pity. Crouching beside him, she looked at his leg.

“Never mind it.” He took her face in his wide, surprisingly smooth hands and inspected it with sadness and awe. “I never meant for you to be in this position, Jane. What have I done to you?” He brushed a lock of dark hair from her cheek. “I’m so sorry.” Drawing her face closer to his rough jaw, she kissed him.

As their lips met and searched, holding onto that tender moment as the world fell around them, Jane’s senses took her back to the orphanage, where a single jar of honey gleamed golden against bowls slopped with insipid, grayish porridge. The honey was reserved for the headmistress and her cohorts to drizzle on their bread, but when no one was looking, Jane would dip her own spoon into the jar so that she ate the bland porridge with the taste of honey on her lips. In this moment, she thought of nothing so much as bitterness refined by a touch of sweetness.

The bursting of gunshots in the rotunda broke them from their reverie. “Jane, I think they’re firing at me!” Fredrick said, ducking behind the chandelier as crystal and glass exploded around him. “Oh, I don’t want to get shot… not again!”

Jane looked at Fredrick clinging to the chandelier, and an idea occurred to her that would have seemed foolish a few minutes ago. “Go,” Roman said, giving her hand a final squeeze. She tumbled behind the chandelier, holding Fredrick against one of its golden rings.

“Hold on,” she said, pulling out the revolver.

“Why?” he asked, fearful. Jane aimed at the anchor on the wall. Seeing her, Roman drew his own gun and did likewise. Two shots erupted simultaneously. One embedded itself in a section of plaster near the fastening, and the other splintered it, sending the chandelier rocketing skyward as Sato and his men erupted into the rotunda. The only sound louder than the hissing of the rope was Fredrick’s terrified scream as he and Jane shot toward the ceiling.

“Stand down,” Sato said as the chandelier bounced one hundred feet above their heads. “It’s finished.”

Jane managed to rock the mass of gold, crystal, and glass to the outer edge of the oculus, where a railing and fastenings permitted her to anchor it steadily enough for her and Fredrick to climb to safety. A short flight of stairs later, they were at the surface and running as fast as Fredrick’s injury would permit. The skylights under their feet flashed and rumbled like the gates of hell as the fighting continued below them.

“Jane?” Fredrick’s voice sounded stronger now, and the color began to return to his cheeks as they hurried.

“Yes?”

“You remember back there when I told you to leave me?”

“Yes.”

“I really didn’t mean it. I’m glad you came back.”

“I know, Freddie.”

Back in the rotunda, Jakkeb inspected Arnault and his leg wound. “Who did this?”

“The laundress. She’d brought a revolver with her,” he added, seeing Sato’s incredulity. Sato continued to look between Roman’s eyes and his wound, as if waiting for the rest of the story.

A voice, feminine, chimed in from somewhere behind Sato. To Roman, it sounded familiar but impossible to place. “She’s a laundress, not a marksman, Sato. And Roman’s lucky. Another foot, and he’d have more than a limp to worry about.”

Sato nodded, still mesmerized by the wound.

Leaning closer to him, Roman whispered. “That’s not all she did. I told her the truth about her parents.”

Sato’s eyes went wide in astonishment. “I see. That’s just as well.” Sato paused, looking back at Roman’s leg. “Does this change things? Shall I…?”

“No,” he said. “Let her go.”

“Are you going to be alright? Your leg…”

“It’s fine,” Roman said. “I’ll get it properly dressed once this is over.”

“It very nearly is, my friend,” Sato replied. “And as such, it’s time you met our newest associate. Roman Arnault? The former Inspector Liesl Malone.” Sato stood aside as the pale blonde drew from the assembled group, and Roman recognized the speaker from moments ago. The two regarded one another with undisguised hostility.

The arrival of a panting militiaman cut the tension. He hurried to Sato and whispered something in his ear. Nodding with concern, Sato drew the messenger aside and questioned him. After several minutes of anticipatory silence, he dismissed the soldier and beckoned Malone with a bony finger. “Malone, please.” She came and he took her aside, his features drawn. In the echoing rotunda, the action seemed more like a gesture than a real moment of privacy, but she understood that it portended something grave all the same.

“I’m afraid I have some bad news. It appears that the initial outbreaks of fighting caused some confusion among several squads of the Guard. One platoon set upon Callum Station under the supposition that your people were responsible, and several officers were killed. Including Chief Johanssen. I’m sorry, Malone.”

She nodded dumbly, and he left her standing alone as he returned to the mass of followers gathered at the entrance to the rotunda. “In less than an hour, we will celebrate our victory as the new and rightful governors of Recoletta. All of the councilors have been accounted for. Our only remaining chore is to check Mr Arnault’s progress with the task appointed to him.” When he spoke, Sato lifted his arms and raised his chin, addressing his listeners with a demagogue’s grandeur. “Roman, is it done?”

Arnault gestured to the curved hallway opposite them where a rosy light tumbled forth. Sato checked over his shoulder where Malone stood, silently gazing at a seam in the floor. “Inspector? Will you be so kind as to tell us what you see at the end of the hall?” He beamed as she trotted to the room to check. Her footsteps receded to a dull echo as she reached the end of the hall, disappearing from the view of those in the rotunda. They stopped, and silence fell while Malone surveyed the room.

“It’s a small parlor,” she said, looking inside.

“But what’s in it?” Sato paused, waiting for Malone’s reply. He cleared his throat. “The body, Malone,” he said, retaining admirable poise. “Augustus Ruthers’s lifeless corpse.”

“Is not here, sir.”

His face fell and the triumph evaporated from his voice. “What?” Dashing over with every attempt at maintaining self-possession, he ducked into the room. “Not here? Arnault just said that little scrubber did it herself!” Overturning chairs and desks in a rage, he uncovered nothing but dust, and his nostrils were already irritated by the dissipating smell of gunpowder. He slammed a gloved fist into the wall and let out a bellow of rage that echoed into the crowded rotunda.

From his seat in the middle of the floor, Roman Arnault threw back his head and laughed at an outcome that even he had not foreseen.

Several layers of dirt and stone above them, Jane and Fredrick continued their flight, barely having reached the northern boundary of Recoletta. On the edge of a forest of towering pines, they crossed to where the squish and crunch of soil and vegetation replaced the thunder of paved streets and fled north under the cover of a starless night.

Epilogue

Jane and Fredrick tripped and dragged each other through the woods, breathing heavy plumes of steam, until they found the farming commune. Or rather, the commune’s farmers found them. A pair of game trappers in the woods heard something crashing in the underbrush that was too talkative to be an injured deer. They found Jane and Fredrick and took them back to the commune, the larger of the two men carrying Fredrick like an injured lamb. Inside the cabin and next to a crackling fire, Jane was surprised at how cozy the above-ground dwelling actually was.

An elderly woman joined them within minutes of their arrival, shepherding Fredrick to a nearby table and examining his wound with startlingly clear eyes. Her leathery face remained impassive as she removed his shirt and surveyed the wound, and when she administered a shot of whiskey and placed a gauze-wrapped spoon in his mouth, he swallowed and bit down obediently. Yet he felt less pain than he would have thought as the woman’s nimble fingers worked over his body, removing the bullet and cleaning the hole it left. His body felt distant, and he focused on the faces hovering over him, Jane and the two trappers. Hers was a pale moon next to nebulae of swarthy skin and tangled beards.

No questions were asked, and the exiled pair spent a week in the company of the surface-dwellers while Fredrick recovered. Their hosts were cheery and hospitable, and crowds of small children showed up every morning, their bright faces peering through windows at the new arrivals. Jane was awed by the simple temerity of the children, questioning them both about the underground with wide-eyed interest (generally about the monsters and ghosts that supposedly lived below the earth) until parents and older siblings came by, smiling shyly, to shoo them away. As Fredrick’s health improved, Jane began to take leisurely walks with him, the cloud of children always following a few yards behind.

Even more striking to Jane was the intensity of the smells and tastes around her. She had rarely experienced more than the taste of salt- or ice-packed meat, preserved for sale and consumption in Recoletta, but twice a week the communers ate freshly slaughtered game and livestock, a delicacy generally only affordable to the whitenails. The fruits and vegetables, too, had a hue and a flavor Jane had rarely tasted in her years in the city, and she found herself chewing slowly to savor every bite.

Fredrick’s humor began to return, and he went so far as to quip about the pedestrian taste of the customer from whom she had filched his clothes. “If you’re so picky, you can keep wearing your own, but don’t expect to lean on me much longer,” she said, waving the air in front of her nose.

At the close of the week, when Fredrick seemed healthy enough to continue their journey, Jane judged it best that they move on in case Sato’s men came looking for them. When at last they left, many of the hundred-odd communers gathered to see them off, providing them with satchels of fresh food for the trip, clean dressings for Fredrick’s wound, and a guide to lead them to the next farming commune en route to the next city, almost one hundred miles away. Part of Jane was sorry to go, and as they set out, she noticed that the smell of grass and trees had already settled on her own clothes.

#

Augustus Ruthers was not a man accustomed to surprises, but he received three monumental ones on the night of Sato’s invasion. The first was when an aide, frantic and frenzied, burst into his office and informed him in sentence fragments of the battles springing up around the city and of the scruffy contingents slowly making their way to Dominari Hall. Sergeant Gorham, with the usual cool, had taken over for the aide and, guiding Ruthers to a safe room, had explained that a coup was suspected. Gorham assured him that the other councilors were being similarly tended to. Locked in the office off the rotunda and awaiting Gorham’s return, Ruthers could not imagine any rivals who would act so boldly.

The second great surprise came when the door opened again, but not for anyone Ruthers had ever seen. Her round face was like a child’s, but full of tension and fury, it seemed to shine. Most startling were her eyes, fixed on him with a directness he first attributed to hatred. When she raised her revolver, he did not fear. He waited.

The last and possibly greatest surprise was when she fired into the floor at his feet. Standing in the doorway for a few seconds longer, silhouetted in golden light from the rotunda and wreathed in gun smoke, she looked like a ragged angel of mercy, and Ruthers understood that the look in her eyes had nothing to do with hate.

“You know the way out?” she asked. The real question was how she knew it, but that was now beside the point. He only nodded, his eyes never leaving hers.

When she left and Roman held her face in his hands and no more attention was given to the hall where Ruthers should have died, he slipped out of the office and felt the wall molding at the end of the hall for a tiny switch, which he pressed. The ground opened at his feet. A block of tiles slid away, and he descended into the crawlspace while Jane and Fredrick mounted the chandelier above.

Ruthers felt in the darkness as the tiles moved back into place, and ripping at the levers and jamming the gears, he locked the trapdoor in position before turning to the long, climbing passage. He had never begged for anything in his life, but it was on his hands and knees that he crawled to freedom outside of the city.

#

Farrah Sullivan, however, remained in her tunnel until the battle stopped. She knew how to fight, but outside she could not tell friend from foe. When she emerged hours later, blinking in the sunlight above the hospital, she might have been the only person in Recoletta. The streets were empty, except for the occasional pile of rubble or corpses: refuse from the sudden skirmishes. Most of the bodies were clothed in the uniforms of city guards and a few others in nondescript civilian dress.

While she surveyed the damage, veranda gates began to swing open around her as others came out from hiding. Below ground, it was as if the city breathed, and hundreds of doors and windows swayed open in a collective sigh. Then eyes blinked and lips began to move, slowly at first. Everyone asked the same question.

What next?

#

Jakkeb Sato did not make them wait long for an answer. His emissaries were in the streets, proclaiming the glorious revolution to a bewildered public. They also announced the appearance of their new leader that very day, a man to guide them out of the darkness, and when Jakkeb Sato himself emerged for the gathered crowd, they hailed him as a prince. Announcing the glory of Recoletta and the return of justice to the city, he spread his arms wide like a messiah and stepped into the crowd, as the parting of a sea. The insecurity that had gnawed at them earlier dissipated as a new figure filled that void of power and ceremony. The return of Recoletta’s most favored and aggrieved son proved that, for the truly exceptional, miracles are possible.

Liesl Malone watched her new boss with a remote awe. Standing on the stage where he had left her for the crowd, she saw him only a dozen yards away but felt a much greater distance between them. As his new lieutenant and Recoletta’s youngest ever head of law enforcement, she had a new set of responsibilities to distract her from the ache that persisted inside. With Sundar and Johanssen dead, it was a hollow promotion.

Sato had assured her that his rear guard had executed Hask as well as the guards and administrators at the Library responsible for Sundar’s death, and though he’d offered to show her the bodies, she’d declined. Somehow, the thought offered little comfort.

As the fanfare rose around Malone, her mind retreated to the quiet room in her quiet domicile where a cello now lay. In the first hours of the morning, as the smoke had cleared and early light had broken the gray sky, she had ventured to the music shop. When she knocked, it was hard to say who was more surprised: Malone at the presence of the shopkeeper, or the elderly shopkeeper at the presence of a customer. Malone instantly recognized the cello that Sundar had procured for her, and when she pointed to it, her hand trembling with agitation, the shopkeeper mistook her meaning and made as if to hand it over to a bandit. She shook her head, and only after several gestures to the money on the counter did he understand that she meant to buy it. Now it sat, tucked in the seclusion of her study, and she ached with bittersweet longing to think of the moment when she would finger its bow and strings with the exploratory touches of a new lover.

For now, her mind had to return to business. The force that she led was composed of some of Sato’s followers from outside, most of the surviving members of the old Municipal Police, and even several city guards. Sato had wanted a regime change, not a massacre, so he welcomed most of the old guardsmen and aides of the Council who agreed to accept his authority. Most of the old Municipals, as Malone herself understood, now felt hostility toward the Council and did not protest the usurper that was, in any case, already firmly in place.

She did not quite comprehend why the laundress and the reporter had fled, but as Sato’s celebratory address rang on, some dim corner of Malone’s mind heard it stuck on the strident note of triumph, and she began to understand. Sato’s cause was just enough, but she still felt too numb to savor his victory. At least, she hoped that was it.

Glancing to her left, however, she caught sight of the other, his chin-length black hair brushing his cheeks as he scanned the crowd. He stood offstage, less conspicuous, as befitted his position. Looking at Arnault, Malone felt a refreshing surge of aversion, and she took a measure of satisfaction in the knowledge that one thing would never change. Chance may have placed them together, but it did not alter the way she felt about his underhanded methods or smug contempt. In him, she retained at least the shadow of a moral compass.

Roman Arnault had little difficulty adjusting to his new position as Sato’s right hand man and spymaster, except for the proximity to Liesl Malone. Though they now worked for the same side, he would never trust her any more than she him. Still, he knew he was lucky.

He had not had to murder his great-uncle. In fact, Ruthers had escaped, thanks to his most surprising and resourceful laundress. He did not have to bear the burden of such an irrevocable crime, and Sato could not punish him. Certainly he had believed Roman’s story. Had he not heard the gunshot echoing down the hall, smelled the acrid air in the office? Had he not examined the leg wound itself, which was now bandaged and cleaned but destined to leave Roman with a scar and a limp? And lastly, had he not seen the laundress rising on the chandelier, a mortal lifted to near-divinity in Roman’s eyes? Sato had most of his revenge and his city. Roman could keep his peace of mind.

But first in all his fortunes was Jane’s continued safety. Roman did not know where she would seek haven or when Recoletta would return to a semblance of normalcy, but he would find her then. In the meantime, he would try his best to deserve that moment.