Moments In Time: A Collection of Short Fiction (58 page)

“You may leave,” she tells each.

Sixty men and women and children pass through the throne room, each of them judged, each of them pardoned, each of their minds twisted by the Queen’s Legacy. She watches each as they leave, a changed person, another lover she’s dismissed.
The whole Last City of Atlas will love me, one by one … The word ‘rebel’ will be another one cast to the Ancients’ books, the histories, the forgotten.

The next man is brought forth by two of her guards, just as all the others have been today, and it has been a long day. He’s dropped to his knees before Her Majesty, his dark head of hair bowed down. It is a fit young man, his toned arms sweaty with the exhaustion of being held in the dungeons, awaiting this moment. She smiles down on him the way a hungry child looks down on a treat. She’s near to licking her lips when the man slowly raises his eyes to meet hers …

And the world stops.

She stares, her lips part. The breath she might’ve drawn is not there, caught prisoner in her throat. She stares and stares and stares.

The world stops and her heart with it.

Chole.

“You are knelt before your Queen, of all of Atlas,” announces the old and deep-throated Marshal of Order Umber. “Confess your crimes and await her merciful judgment.”

Her eyes have become as glass as the tiles at her feet, as the tiles of the wall, and the room … the impossibly tall and unfathomably long throne room becoming small somehow, suffocating her … the walls bending in.

Chole raises his dark head of hair, chin pointed up, eyes still affixed to the Queen with such malice it scares her. It truly, truly scares her. He doesn’t say a word, and the world waits, waits, waits for his confessions.

Atricia swallows once, her broken mask of confidence still donned as though it will save her, as though no one sees how the sight of this man has so shaken her, she wriggles out the single word: “Well?”

It echoes, echoes, echoes through the hall. That single, stupid word.

Then at long last, Chole parts his lips, takes a breath, and says, “I have committed the crime of …” His eyes drift, surveying her like a basket of fruit at the market, head to toe. Atricia’s heart races, feeling his gaze move down her body like an invisible spread of hands. So many years have gone by, but his face is just the same as she remembers. He could’ve gone ugly, could’ve lost his charm, could’ve grown wrinkled with hate and age and carelessness. Instead, he’s grown firm, grown strong, grown handsome as a prince.

“…wanting too much,” he finishes at last, bringing his eyes to meet hers again.

A deep and manic chill races up her front and tickles her neck so suddenly she has to clutch at it. For a short while, it looks like she’s choking herself.

She cannot use her Legacy on him. She swore in their youth she’d never bend his will, and for some insane reason, by some sick force she cannot sway or influence, she keeps her promise.
If it’s the only decent thing I do, damn it.

“The Queen Of Lies,” he says, still at his knees, two black pools-for-eyes pouring into her like she were the bit of bacon at the end of the hall, and he, a hungry pup. “Yeah, I see your truth. I’ve seen it since you abandoned your own truth … your life in the lower city. Ever since you traded truth for that ugly throne. Tell me, is your ass as comfortable in that chair, knowing it was given to you by the starving lowborn?”

“Put an end to his words,” advises the droning Marshal of Order. “Let him see the truth, Your Majesty, as you have shown the truth to everyone else. Let all of Atlas see the truth through him.”

She can’t do it. She won’t do it …
Not to him.

“Those diamonds that decorate your hand,” Chole goes on, “were cut from the Mechanoid Mines by men with big axes—
slum-born men
. Your robes are made of silks weaved by slum-born, blushed the off-white hue of lunar landscapes by tailors in the Hightowers of the sixth ward below. Have you met them? Have you thanked them? There—” He nods at her chest, his big lips pouring these words Atricia will not stop. “—at your neck, a rope of gems, a necklace braided by sweating women and men in another slum factory to the south. Where’s their due credit? Where’s their ‘Lift’ …?”

“Enough,” says Janlord in as patient a voice as only he can muster, and he urges Atricia to make her judgment, to enforce her power of truth, but it is the Queen who raises a hand to him—her eyes not for a second leaving Chole’s face—and she says, “Let him finish.”

“You wish me to finish?” Chole smiles, and the effect it has on his face sets something afire deep within Atricia … it is a fire that is neither pleasant nor kind. “If I were to finish, I might disturb the Queen’s belly … which is likely full of her morning fruits … which, by the way, were likely grown and produced in the Greens and the gardens of the slums, farmed tediously by the hungry and the overworked. Perhaps you didn’t think it necessary to feed them in return.” His gaze is all the way lifted now, his jet hair in a fury, his eyes bleeding the devil’s black. “No one in this world needs sleep any longer … Maybe we don’t need food either. Maybe we don’t need thanks. Maybe we don’t need skin, or hair … clothes or gold … or air … or our lives. Why don’t you take those too?”

He spits at the floor, inspiring gasps from the Court. A strand of his saliva hangs from his smooth, pale chin. Atricia watches it the way one warily studies a spider web … a silken thread … a trap. His wide lips, his button-nose …
You haven’t aged a day, Chole.

“Why don’t you take our lives?” he asks again.

Janlord speaks once more, warns her. The camera presses close, close, closer. The lights, the blaring lights … Have they gotten brighter? The walls are still bending inward, like millions of ears and eyes leaning in for a closer listen, for a closer looksee … Chole’s big ears, they haven’t stopped listening either, not since the day long ago when the two of them, Attie and Chole, parted as teenagers.

When I left you behind, I took you with me. If you only knew.

Janlord’s warning voice: “Queen.”

The Marshal of Order’s deep grovel: “Your Majesty, please …”

The voice of millions of still-unconvinced citizenry, the voice of anger, the voice that was once her own, a chanting for change, a wish in the sky … from a time in her life when the underbelly of the Lifted City looked so ugly, so dark and ugly.
Sunlight used to be my friend, as Chole used to be …

As you used to be.

Then at once, Queen Atricia rises, her jewels and her robe and her hair jostled by the effort, tinkling like tiny bells. She points a long and accusing finger down at the boy on his knees … the boy whose hair is a messy pitch of night … the boy who is no longer a boy, but a man.

“Put this one in a cell of the Queen’s Keeping.” Her hand sweeps like a magician’s, calling for her guards. “That is my sentence. This man is not prepared to see the Queen’s truth. Not yet.” She squints at the cameras, making sure they capture her performance, the confident twinkle in her eye—praying the falseness and fears riling in her chest do not show. “This is the only mercy I can offer this … this man.”

Chole’s eyes never leave her as the guards take him by the arms, less than gently, and escort him out of the long glass hall. She watches him, posed ridiculously for the cameras in her final judgment of the day, watches until his shape becomes small, smaller, gone.

• • •

The bodyguard just outside, she finds she isn’t comfortable enough to disrobe for the night, no matter the assurance and security he’s supposedly tasked with providing. With that beast-thing outside her door, she feels the magical privacy of her balcony-side evenings somehow robbed, and by that notion she feels nothing but bitter resentment.
That balcony and the wind is my only comfort, and you, people of the slums, wish to take that from me too.

Or maybe it’s that boy sitting in a cell all by himself seven stories below her … a boy with the night sky for hair. Maybe he’s the one that so unrests her.

“I must go,” she decides suddenly, telling the bodyguard just outside her door. “I will return later, but I must go and you cannot follow.”

“That is not allowed.” The bodyguard doesn’t move, still appearing as a statue affixed to the wall, of stone and metal. “I am charged to protect you. My Queen, there may even be eyes and ears in this Keep of yours that you need protecting from.”

Her eyes hover on his dark form, annoyed. He appears almost like a shadow, not a person, that bleeds against the stark white walls of the hall. The day’s long badgering of her soul has left her broken, and the last comfort she’d think to ask for is a dangerous-looking banged-up man charged to protect her, yet looking as if he’s been charged to eat her limb from limb like a three-mouthed demon.

“There is no convincing you otherwise?” she asks coyly, the double meaning of her Legacy lost on the man-thing.

“No.” The man adjusts his belt, sword tapping his massive thigh. “There might be many who love you, yet still others who’d sooner put sharp things into you. I will come with you.”

She hesitates, genuinely considering whether to “talk” him into leaving her alone for good. She can do it with the ease of batting away a fly, considering her Legacy.

“Fine,” she says instead. Janlord and Umber and the rest were likely looking for a man with whom she’d have little to no sexual interest, which is quite a feat, to be honest. Indeed, their purpose was to keep her secure, not distract her with her more commonly-used medicine. “Protect me as you ought to, but stay behind, and stay away.”

She moves like a sudden wind, silks flapping behind her as she descends the smooth metallic steps of Cloud Tower. Her sweeping is punctuated twelve steps behind by the heavy footfalls of the armored bodyguard. Passing through six security points where codes and keypads must be fussed with, she arrives on the floor that was once called the King’s Keeping … that she, in her reign, renamed the Queen’s Keeping.

Within its eighteen large barred cells, there is only kept one single occupant. She finds him sitting with his back against the smooth metal wall, his knees pulled up to his chest. The shadows of the bars and the poorly-lit hall play funny shapes across the room, across his face, across hers.

For a while, she can’t say a thing, and neither does Chole even bother to lift his chin to look at her.

“I’m safe enough here,” she tells her bodyguard without looking away from Chole. “You can at least afford me a touch of privacy.”

“With that rebel back-talker?” questions the man-thing. Queen Atricia turns her eyes onto him, long and cold is her shocking stare. The bodyguard realizes his insolence, says, “Sorry, Your Majesty. Of course.” And he dismisses himself through the large steel doors that lock with electronic beeps and tones, to wait in the stairwell.

The bodyguard gone, no other guards or officials present … only her and her Chole … she finds herself suddenly lighter in all capacities. As if her bodyweight were cut in half and she were floating, she kicks off her sandals, throws off her regal robes and sits on the floor by the bars in just a silken slip. This strangely girlish action is the thing that catches Chole’s eye at last. He turns his face slightly, watches her as she plops on the ground. The Queen is, in this moment, just a girl from the slums … a girl from the slums in Queenly silk slip and finely decorated hair with gems that wink within its complex designs.

“Let’s pretend I’m not some queen, and you’re not heading some rebellion to kill me.” Somehow, the smell of the floor reminds her of home. They’re not by any means unkempt—even the cell bars are polished smooth as glass—but something about being seated on the floor, her hands not minding the grit of ground that is
not
mirror-bright tiles and pearl and glass … it makes her think of childhood.

“I don’t want to kill you,” he says quietly.

She watches the side of his face as his eyes are cast to the ground, picking at something near his feet.

“You can be real with me,” Atricia tells him. “Really. I’m … I’m not … Chole, you’re the only person in the world who knows me. I promise you, the girl you knew in the slums is not gone. And I know the boy isn’t either.”

“You didn’t even say goodbye to your parents.” Chole takes a deep breath, lets it go, yet his eyes still stay glued to the floor. “The last thing your mother said was how proud she was of you, and she was sure you’d visit her someday. Her and your dad, they kept believing and believing … even years later, believing you were just busy. Oh, how busy a Queen’s life must be, they can’t even fathom it. They likely still believe in you, the fools.”

“I wouldn’t call my mother and father
fools
…” She chuckles. “They may not be the brightest in the fourth ward, but … but I love them and—and I’m sure they …”

Even as she says it, the words die on her tongue and lose their meaning. Chole’s voice has cut her in half. Just the sound of it, his voice in this empty cell, this empty hall … The fragile boyishness of it that’s still there, even after their teen years have abandoned them both and left them in the bodies of twenty-somethings, that voice grips her by the soul and squeezes, squeezes, squeezes.

“I’m sure they understand,” Chole finishes for her.

I wish you’d look at me, those two black endless eyes.
“They don’t. That’s probably the worst of it … that they don’t know how their daughter could become so … egomaniacal. I know you think it too. I ran away with the Queenship, left everything behind, and I’m just … I’m just enjoying the pretty dresses and the lavish meals and this tall metal thing I live in. Really, I’m surprised no one’s tried to poison me yet. I’m such an easy target, like a bird in a cage.”