“Traitors, the lot of you.” It was my driver, leaning one elbow out the window and enunciating very clearly, as if he’d been rehearsing during the drive.
I was not surprised by this statement. The war was over, but the occupation was proving messy and expensive, and there were plenty of people who were thrilled to find someone with brown eyes to blame for it. I also happened to be, by literal and legal definition, a traitor.
But then I saw the crowd gathered at the steps of the capitol, signs and banners waving, and felt a surge of embarrassment instead.
“Oh, no—I’m not with—” But the driver had already slipped back into traffic.
I turned quickly away from the crowd, hunching my shoulders. I comforted myself that treasonous chanting was probably quite diverting, and there was no reason any of them should notice a panicky scholar lurking nearby. And anyway, they might not even be affiliated with my father. Those radical organizations were always dividing and sub-dividing, as if their true purpose was not the downfall of tyranny but the invention of new acronyms.
“Owen? That you?”
I flinched, feeling like a boy caught sneaking out of the house, except that my father had never much cared where I went or when I came back.
I turned, sweating hard, and saw him limping gamely through the crowd, one arm raised.
“Well, if it isn’t my favorite propagandist,” my father said, and smiled at me.
It was such a good smile—sincere but a little roguish, the bags beneath his eyes folding up like merry accordions, as if our last fight had never happened or wasn’t worth remembering—that I muttered, “Hello, Dad.” And then, more stiffly, “What’s all this?”
“Ah,” he scoffed, “some friends of mine. Just a little gathering.”
“A gathering with slogans is called a protest, Dad.”
The smile faded. Without it, my father looked more like what he was: old and tired and hungover, probably in a great deal of pain. He’d always been thin, but now he resembled the scraps one might save for a stray, all bone and gristle.
“That bloodthirsty tyrant—”
“Her title isMinister Rolfe,and as our first female Minister of War I think she deserves a certain degree of respect—”
“Oh-ho, does she showrespectfor the women who’ve died in her munitions factories—which she refuses to investigate, because they’re owned by her nasty industrialist friends?” I often imagined my father would have made a good solicitor, if he hadn’t taken up anarchy instead. “The union girls invited her to speak at one of their meetings and do you know what she called them?Poison!” My father shook his head. “She wants to be Chancellor, if you ask me. Thinks we’ll all just go quietly along with it.”
He added a scornfulha!,but the truth was that I’d spent the last several years going quietly along with it. It wasn’t hard; I simply never read the papers or listened to the wireless or voted. I declined every invitation to veterans clubs and kept my Medal of Valor in my loose change jar. If it wasn’t for the dreams and the shaking fits, I might have been able to pretend I’d had my throat slit in a terrible archival accident.
My father was still talking. “But I can tell you our pamphlet circulation is up two hundred percent! Not everyone wants to see their tax dollars support an illegal occupation. Not everyone was happy to waste their sons on a ridiculous war—”
“Some of us shed a lot of blood for thatridiculouswar,” I interrupted, in that especially priggish tone I seemed to reserve solely for my father. “Some of us fought for crown and country—”
“A country with colonies is called an empire, son.”
We regarded one another unhappily for a little while. The chanting continued shamelessly on. The sun shone heartlessly down. I was very conscious of the strap of the holster beneath my coat, and the sheer insanity of bringing a weapon to the capitol of Dominion.
Eventually, my father offered, with gruff resignation, “There’s extra signs, if you’d care to join us.” Behind him two men were unrolling a long banner that read:VETERANSAGAINSTWAR!
“I thought you were the Veterans for Peace.”
“Don’t you mention the VFP in my presence. Class traitors and sycophants, all of them.” My father softened, leaning close. His breath rose in fumes between us. “What do you say, son?”
I looked at him, with his pinkish-white complexion and his hair the color of underbaked bread, and marveled that he had never truly noticed the difference between us. He didn’t seem to understand that a man like me would never be wholly beyond suspicion, no matter how ardently loyal, while a man like him would never be wholly condemned, no matter how faithless. That I had always hated him, just a little, for the privilege of his deviance.
I answered, in my coldest Cantford drawl, “No, thank you.”
My father would have said something else—I had never in my life gotten the last word—but someone touched my right elbow and said, “This way, sir,” with the professional unobtrusiveness that I associated with spies or very good waiters.
“Excuse me,” I said to my father, and turned away with profound relief.
His voice followed us into the building, asking why I wasn’t angry and how I slept at night, and finally, plaintively, as we approached a nondescript door, “And why the hell are you wearing that coat? It’s hot as the devil out.”
The spy/waiter led me through the door, where I was handed off to an even more unobtrusive person, who took me through a series of hallways that ended in another door, which was attended by someone so masterfully unobtrusive they seemed to blend into the plaster.
