The Death of the Wave (7 page)

that they own them,

that they owe them so much.

Author.

Yes, I know a lot about Author.

Too much some days, haunting my head.

Only fragments of a picture in my mind, pale skin, dark eyes, beautiful hands.

Enemy, friend, lover.

In the Barracks when all the lights are out, I hear the cries of the men that she sent there,

and try to think of anything of her but that last day.

Try.

Try to remember.

Remember the delicate hands that paused at thinking,

the serious aristocratic face that so rarely cracked into a smile.

Strength, certainty, the light behind her head.

Anything, anything but—

the words that died in the cold and snow.

Alone at the window, gazing over the crowd that had gathered, so still and so forgotten.

And then she turned her head and laughed.

There, at the failing of a revolution, she laughed.

The one eye not put out by the brand sparkled with obscene confidence.

There was so much scarring, so much damage to the right side of her face,

the brand of Eden’s tree of knowledge snaking over her pale skin,

over the face that had been so beautiful that it had hurt to look at her, like the sun.

It hurt to look at her.

She was always beautiful, but beautiful like a fire is beautiful, not to be touched.

I touched her then, the skin that had been salvaged from the brand and from the fire

and I asked her why.

I was only sixteen.

I had only just learned to put pen to paper.

I had been hired to destroy her, to share the lies, to refute the truths that she had bared

in all their hideousness to the world.

I had been happy enough to play the dog at Galileo’s feet,

and now all I had to do was tell the world that she had been right

and that I had been wrong,

but I was so frightened and so alone.

Forty years ago, a Breaker broke and shared the truth with the world.

Twenty years ago I killed her with my words.

It was for Eden. It was—

All I can remember of her this instant, the broken creature in the fractured winter sunlight,

and she had been so beautiful.

It was in December, and it was in the snow.

I stood in the crowd, the crowd was jeering, the crowd was angry.

I was silent while a battered Galileo took the podium, stretching out those wide hands for silence.

The distant figure of my Author stood without speaking,

sandwiched between 376 and another Breaker, a gun to her side, to her ruined face.

I expected a struggle, but the chained hands never moved.

And Galileo said:

“I give you your hero.”

And the outrage poured over.

This was it?

This half-aristo shivering in the winter sunlight, listening to her sentence,

the oak tree of Eden seared into an implacable face?

Treason. Lies.

The world was looking at her with its full hatred,

but that single dark eye was looking out into the crowd,

waiting, expecting me to come forward, and humble enough to hope.

I could not look her in the face.

For the last words that I had—

But Galileo said:

“Is there anyone here who objects to this sentence?”

I had rehearsed this moment in my mind.

Eden might fall.

I struggled between my love and a nation.

But a decision then made—

I would break from the crowd, run up to the balcony,

and tear her from the Breakers’ deadly embrace.

We would escape the Palaces, I would take her back, clean her wounds, fill out her gaunt frame, get her to smile again, allow her to craft the words.

I would tell the world that I had betrayed her, that I had been alone

and had owed the aristos so much, that I had been afraid.

And I would accept the consequences.

But I said:

Nothing.

Remember. Remember. Remember.

But

I was so afraid and so alone, and I owed them so much.

I sat silently in the darkness of a Palace car, the outline of a stunner gun pressing into my ribs.

The Breaker beside me regarded me impassively, his features hidden behind his black mask,

his eyes behind tinted glass windows.

The stunner gun’s barrel dug in further and I smiled in the darkness.

Shoot, I told him.

He did not answer, nothing but the flash of his eyes behind the mask.

I would taunt him no longer, the exhilaration of being alive had worn off

and had been replaced by tedium and apprehension.

376 had done his work with an Artist’s touch.

My entire body ached from industrial boots, my ribs were bruised,

my face swollen and bleeding sullenly from a hundred different places.

I smiled at nothing, and the expression cut into my pain and left a ghost.

Alive. I am alive.

And I looked like the monster I am.

No memories but fractured thoughts, I never remember the pain.

Except, perhaps the sound of someone screaming, far off beyond the darkness.

Yes.

Perhaps that.

I was a fool to think that Galileo wouldn’t find out about my exploit in Poet’s Camp,

and in a way, I wanted him to find out.

Too obvious.

376.

He must have stayed behind.

His guilt and my sentence were written in those steady dark eyes.

I knew. Of course I knew.

I wanted an audience for my pointless rebellion

and I got the most attentive one I could have wanted.

Galileo.

My biggest fan.

Fractured pictures and I was looking into eyes of mercy, the light of a single light bulb

reflecting in his gaze like a perfect coal of hate.

Tell me everything.

And I did.

I did.

They had found my medal melted down in the possession of three unrelated Artists.

The little girl I gave it to was found in a ditch in Writer’s Camp.

Her throat had been cut.

I must have started laughing there in the darkness.

Remorse, even here, right here where I was supposed to die?

And I reached up a hand to touch that pristine face, vandalizing with my blood

that face that shone out like a blasphemy.

How marvelous.

How trite.

But I am, I am alive, for reasons that I cannot, will not understand.

The Breaker gripped my arm and led me out to my destination.

The clatter of school-children. The ring of a bell.

Down the gray corridor, down in the Hive.

It was testing day, it was testing day.

376 was there, at his post.

He saw the damage once more that he had done

at Galileo’s urging

but could only put a rifle into my hands for comfort.

He read from a scroll, the numbers unfamiliar save for one.

I could not think. I could not feel.

I was taken around the back.

The rifle was heavy in my hands.

My thoughts were fog, a gun was at my side,

and I could not comprehend that—

The face of a marvel and a voice of velvet discarded to rot in the street.

I have need of you.

When?

Tomorrow.

But the children. The children.

The children were lined up, facing the back wall.

I could not see their faces.

I was—

I am—

resigned.

I turned to 376 and asked for a mask.

No mask,
he said, and cocked his gun.

I stepped forward with the rifle, his gun was at my back.

The other Breaker watched from the doorway to pick me off if I tried to run.

I would not.

I would not run.

I stepped down the line and fired with my eyes half-closed.

Just percussion sounds, I told myself.

Not gunshots at all.

No blood.

Just children, children made of straw.

I willed myself to stop breathing.

Just four more. Just—

I should have gone, should have turned to run, should have been gunned down there in the sunlight, should have slipped and fallen in the blood of children.

But I did nothing.

I fired down the line and I willed myself dead.

Three.

Two.

One.

I could not think. I could not feel.

And the last, my brother, he said the words for me, as he always has.

“Will it hurt?”

“No.”

And I fired in time to catch him in my arms.

In that last second he had turned his head to see me, and I held him in the sunlight.

I cannot think. I cannot feel.

But there must have been tears, the salt stung my face and I remember.

I remember.

But I was so afraid and so alone, and I owed them so much.

Aftermath. Emptiness.

I had been put under probation, close watch, not to return home.

My mother sat alone in our little house,

the news of my brother’s failure played on the third channel by midnight.

I see her now, threadbare robe wrapped, sitting on a threadbare couch.

Galileo mounted the podium, elegant and slim in robes that were too small for him,

and read the names.

He always read the names in tones of perfect solemnity, referred to them as the fallen,

but his eyes gleamed as if he were laughing,

and my mother was alone.

As I was when they took my brother away from me.

It took both Breakers to tear him from my arms, just long enough to see that my bullet,

that my bullet was true.

376 had held me for a very long time.

I had kept my promise.

It didn’t hurt.

It didn’t—

And the rain, the rain washed his blood away, I was clean enough for the Palaces.

Galileo was waiting for me.

Me.

His bruised and broken Breaker so ill at ease in his gleaming reception room where the walls shone like mirrors and others stood handsome in their sleek black uniforms.

I fell at his feet and his hands came to cup the face

that he had beaten and bruised so mercilessly.

They were cool like marble and far off, far off the voice of a small child crying in relief.

“Kill me,” that small voice said, the voice I could not, would not recognize as my own.

He gazed at me in silence and there was something like affection in those still, opal eyes.

“Is that what you want? Think now. You wanted so badly to live.”

I sagged in those elegant hands.

“I-I was…I was so afraid—”

“Of course you were.”

Eyes hypnotizing, their pupils expanding and contracting, the hands caressing.

“Will it solve all your problems, my Breaker? Will you see your brother again?

If I kill you now, will all your pain go away?”

A smile like a sliver of ice wedged itself into my heart.

“You are in pain, aren’t you?

Five seconds away from throwing yourself on the funerary pyre.

And you wish… you wish that I would burn you.

Like an injured dog that crawls back to its master, you beg for me to let it go all away.”

I reached weakly forward.

“I…I…”

The smile sharpened.

“No.

In the end, we are all someone’s dog.

You will live for me. You will stay for me. You will remember—”

“For you,” I whispered, and my hatred was complete.

“No.

For you, Breaker.

That is your punishment. I condemn you to be you for the rest of your life.”

Beginnings, the farewell of a Hive, and I had exalted in my own cleverness.

I failed the numbers, won the words, and subsequently, my life.

I cannot remember my exact score, but I thought that I had beaten them, tricked the system.

What a fool I was.

To think that I could shake off the Camps.

I am no longer part of the people.

Released to the Palaces under the watchful eyes of aristos that we thought were Gods.

And they were, they are—

Cruel as we all would be, were we gods.

And the filth of the Camps was washed away

by Galileo’s gleaming hand.

Author, why did you ever wish to return to it?

Those hollow-eyed people skulking in the streets.

How could you call yourself one of them?

I was freed.

Freed from ignorance.

Freed from pain.

Freed from hunger.

But you would have said that I bargained my soul.

For gold is worth more than silver.

I still remember my first glimpse in person of an aristo,

my first sight of Galileo rising to meet my escorts.

Still in gray uniform, darned by the female prisoners in the Factory,

I marveled at the bright new world that shining marble had promised me.

He was handsome, but it was an alien handsomeness,

a glimpse of something magnificent and unaccountably strange.

It was so different, seeing him in person, the tallness and the thinness,

the warmth and chill of each expression.

He glided across the gleaming floor to meet us and we were in the presence of a king.

It is hard to explain, the relationship between the norms and the aristos.

But we did not hate them, not at first.

And he is—was—so beautiful.

He looked down at me in my torn Hive uniform from that lofty height and I fell in love.

There is no other way to describe it, the power that a great one, one of the leaders has over you.

There is warmth and calm, it is like meeting an angel, and those eyes, those eyes are so far away.

So immensely indifferent to human suffering and pain, and never knowing fear,

twinkling as the stars gleam somewhere long past the city lights.

I knew instantly that he saw me only as an insect on a slide,