“Get out, boy! Get away!” He added a violent shooing gesture.
The last time I’d seen my father, in the Queenswald tavern, he’d called me a bootlicker and a child and asked how I could sleep with the blood of my countrymen on my hands. I’d said, stupidly, “What have I ever done to my countrymen?” before I understood that he hadn’t been referring to Dominion. I wasn’t truly surprised—I’d looked in a mirror—but I’d never asked about my mother, and he’d never told me, and that tiny sliver of doubt had been precious to me. He hadn’t even apologized for taking it away.
And now, apparently, he still had nothing to say to me.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said, with a condescension so insufferable that Harrison would have been jealous. “Did I interrupt you mid-chant? They’re good, although I don’t know thatchancellorquite rhymes withcriminal—”
“Gonow—she’s called out the fucking cavalry—got us good and kettled—”
Only then did I realize the chanting had been replaced by cries of alarm, a rising hum of fear. An officious voice was warbling through a bullhorn. I heard the phrasesimmediate dispersalandfailure to comply,but there was suddenly nowhere to disperse to: Men in red jackets were pouring from the alleys, circling the building.
A brief and awful quiet fell over the crowd, which I recognized from the moments just before battle breaks loose. I looked down at my hands and found one of them was reaching for the revolver tucked in my coat. I clenched it into a fist instead.
Somewhere down at the front there was a sound like a brick on meat—and then war broke out.
I’d never been much of a soldier, unless I had a gun in my hand: I stood like a stone in the wild tide of the crowd. Signs were dropped and trampled underfoot. The line of red jackets marched toward us in perfect lockstep, like fascist caricatures sprung straight out of my father’s pamphlets.
I watched them come with a sense of unreality, even irony; how funny it was, that I had betrayed my country and been given a medal, and now, when I was trying to serve it, I would be arrested.
The soldiers were so close now I could smell their aftershave. I wouldhave stood there unmoving until the cuffs closed on my wrists, if it hadn’t been for the hands that shoved me backward, up the steps.
“Up you get, son, by the wall, that’s it.” I wouldn’t have believed it was my father’s voice if I hadn’t smelled the liquor on his breath.
I reached the wall and turned back just in time to see him fall. Maybe his bad hip failed; maybe he was pushed. All I saw was the look in his eyes as he went down: not surprise or fear, but grim relief. As if he knew one of us would suffer, and he was glad it was him.
I lost sight of him for a moment—there were too many bodies pressing between us, a wall of sour sweat and howling mouths. When I saw my father again, he wasn’t moving.
He was draped over the steps, slack-spined, like a rug dragged out for airing. There were two soldiers standing above him. My own jacket had faded over the years, but theirs were still a gory Dominion red, collars stiff with starch. One of them raised the butt of his rifle above my father’s body. The wood was already stained with something dark and wet.
Would I have done something—shouted, stepped between them, thrown my body over his? I never knew, because a hand closed on my shoulder and hauled me abruptly backward through a door I hadn’t even noticed.
I stumbled into a cool, windowless hallway. The door clicked shut, and the sudden silence pressed like thumbs into my ears.
There was a discreet, well-dressed sort of person standing next to me, regarding me with such professional disinterest they must have taken special courses.
“Please, my father—he’s still out there—” I was breathing hard, nearly panting, and my hands were shaking badly.
The disinterested person remained disinterested. I had an awful sense that I might burst into tears or scream or press my revolver between their eyes, and receive nothing but a politely devastatingSir?
“He’s old, and probably drunk. He didn’t mean anything by—”
But they had already executed a turn so neat it might have been plotted with a protractor. “If you would follow me, sir. She’s waiting.”
The hallway led to a series of staircases. With each floor we climbed the carpets grew thicker and the wood paneling more expensive. By the final floor there were paintings of historical monarchs lining the walls: a series of pale, lumpen men whose names everyone got confused, interrupted bymuch larger portraits of Yvanne the First, Tilda the Younger, Lysabet II. They seemed to glow from their frames, their hair electric yellow, their skin so white it shone nearly blue. Dominion has always loved its queens best.
We paused before a door guarded by a pair of extremely grim soldiers, who looked at me as if they would very much like to have me cuffed, searched, and interrogated. The strap of my holster felt suddenly very tight against my chest.
I was swept into the office before I could properly panic. “Corporal Owen Mallory, ma’am,” said the discreet voice. The door clicked shut.
Velvet drapes. Waxed parquet. A heavy desk, and a woman sitting behind it. “Thank you for coming, Corporal Mallory.”
“Oh my God. That is—ma’am—Minister Rolfe—”
“Zero for three, I’m afraid. It’s Chancellor, now. The opposition are insisting onMadamChancellor, but I think we both know that’s just chauvinism with table manners.”
A merciful pause followed this, during which I recalled the emptied streets and furtive whispers and wished very deeply that I’d bothered to buy a paper or turn on the wireless. Eventually I said, “Yes, Chancellor,” in a voice that cracked only slightly.
The Chancellor of Dominion—the single most powerful person in the nation, perhaps the whole of the modern world—gave me a fond smile. “Call me Vivian. Sit down.”
