Now I went straight from campus to the address listed in the letter. It was several hours before dawn, but the wait no longer struck me as significant.
I tried to lean unobtrusively against the wall, but passersby still cast me concerned looks and made wide arcs as they passed. It was the twitching of my hands and face, I imagined; a person wasn’t meant to remember several different lifetimes, all at once.
At half past eight I walked into the building—a blandly carceral structure, like a sanitarium or a school—and presented my solicitor’s letter to the clerk. The clerk called her supervisor, who called his chief, who escorted me to a small room the color of soap scum.
I waited. Eventually the door opened, and my father walked through it.
He wasn’t wearing chains. For a moment I was relieved—but the skin around his wrists was chafed and pale. His limp had worsened, so that his top half had canted sideways, like a building with a crumbling foundation, and the whites of his eyes had turned the faint, malarial color of old lemons.
He looked—to my profound shame—genuinely surprised to see me. The corners of his eyes folded up. “Hello, son. How’s the autocracy faring, these days? I have to bribe these boys”—he gestured here to the guard behind him—“for newspapers, and I’m out of booze.” He sat, legs wide, expression determinedly jovial, because he was the kind of man who would wink at the executioner as he walked up the scaffold. It had embarrassed me once, his flippancy, his refusal to worry, but now I wondered if it was a species of bravery.
I gave the guard an imperious nod, praying that my solicitor had put the fear of God, or at least civil damages, into them all. The guard left.
I wet my lips. “Hello,” I said, and didn’t know what to say next.
When I’d received the letter from the Ministry of War, I had indulged in a little fantasy of sweeping heroically into my father’s cell and rescuing him—somewhat belatedly—from his imprisonment. Perhaps he would forgive me. Perhaps he would even be proud of me.
In the fantasy, I had come to save him, rather than to ask a very specific and highly criminal question.
My father had never suffered silence well. “How’d you rig this, then? Did Her Majesty grant you a boon?”
“No, I paid a bad man a lot of money. But, speaking of Her Majesty, I was wondering if…” I laughed, extremely awkwardly. “If you could tell me how a person might break into the personal quarters of the Chancellor of Dominion. If they needed to.”
For the first time, my father’s smile faded. “Now, why would I know a thing like that?” His voice had acquired a hard, hollow ring, like knuckles on a shut door.
“Well,someonecertainly broke into Chancellor Gladwell’s room and painted the names of dead boys on his walls. If it wasn’t you, at least tell me who it was, so I can go ask them.”
My father had looked at me with variations of disappointment for most of my life. But the expression on his face now was far worse: a bewildered betrayal, which soured quickly into something meaner. He said, with dignity, “I know I wasn’t much of a father to you. I know we’ve never seen eye to eye on—well, most things. But there’s no call for this.” He shook his head. His scalp shone pinkly through his thinning hair. There was a livid scar on the left side of his skull that hadn’t been there before. “I already told them everything, anyway.”
Mortification arrived, thick and sour in my mouth, but I managed another awful laugh. “Like hell you did. You always said the worst circle of hell was for sympathizers and squealers.”
“And centrists.”
I swallowed, dry mouthed. “I’m not—this isn’t a trick.” That my own father would suspect me of informing against him—that it would not be the first time I’d led someone I loved to their death—the scum-colored tiles swam, sickly, around me. “I’m not trying to get a confession out of you. I swear.”
Bewilderment returned to his face. “Then what exactly are you trying to do?”
“I am trying,” I said, tiredly, “to break into the personal quarters of the Chancellor of Dominion.”
He looked at me, closely and for a long time, as he rarely had. His eyes had always tended to slip over me, as if it pained him to linger.
The silence thinned like stretched putty between us. I broke it in a guilty rush. “I understand how you must feel about me. But I didn’t know you were in here until a few weeks ago, and then for a long time no one would admit they had you, and—” I broke off, swallowed again. My memories were piled atop each other now in unwieldy stacks, so that every scene was haunted by its own variations. But I remembered our last argument clearly enough; it always went the same. “I said some—very cruel things, the last time we spoke. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t you dare apologize. Not to me.” My father was breathing hard, and the color had left his face, so that the burst veins stood out like wet fireworks. “You don’t owe me anything—not a damn thing.”
“Yes I—”
“You don’t understand!” A shrill, almost petulant note entered his voice. He passed a hand over his face, scrubbing hard, and then he said, “I thought I was doing the right thing. Just one good and proper thing, after so many wrong ones. Or maybe I just took a shine to you—I was half cracked, by then.”
I knew then that he was speaking of his time during the last war, which he hadn’t done in any of the dozens of lives I could remember. I willed myself into total stillness.
“We’d made it to the Marro River, far in the south. We were hungry and frightened, just beginning to understand that we were losing. That a backward little island could outlast and out-fight and out-hate the most powerful country in the world. And then we heard movement in the rushes, and we…”
He trailed away, unable to say what they had done. But I, too, had once been a frightened young man surrounded by other frightened young men, far from home; I already knew. I could almost hear thewhizzandthockof bullets into muddy ground.
He continued, eventually, “When… when it was over, and nothing was moving anymore, we went to look. We found ten or twelve people on the bank. Roving Folk, probably—they had the finest little ponies, and hundreds of scrolls rolled up in their packs… not that it mattered. We wrote them down as hostiles, in our report.”
His right foot had begun tapping, arrhythmically. “Anyway. There was a girl—a woman, I suppose, but God she looked young. She hadn’t tried to run when the shooting started. She’d just knelt down, curled around something, like it was the most precious thing in the world.” His eyes, rheumy and yellow, met mine. “Which it was, of course.”
