Under Cover of Darkness (34 page)

None chose to have their memories erased. They were eager to learn more about the ties and purposes that bound their community together.

They would also start to understand the price of silence and protection, wrapped tightly like the strongest embrace around them, one that would turn deadly only to protect its dream—and its existence. Because to break their solemn vow would mean betraying everything they had grown up holding dear.

“It was about preserving life, first and foremost, Els. We forgot that over the generations.” Lewis said softly.

The memories, the privacy screen . . . those were not enough to hold the world at bay.

He was clinging to his palmputer. He had tapped a short message before switching it off, and had taken up our conversation where he had left it.

I chose to pretend, too, for a little while longer, that it was just the two of us, and I argued back: “That's what we do: preserve life! And more! Preserve humanity's integrity!”

“By killing an innocent woman just so her lover's mother wouldn't be in the Senate to defend her proposal on differentiating the Longers before the law?”

I didn't answer.

“She might have changed her politics, upon knowing Anna better!” Lewis pressed on.

“She wouldn't have! They wanted to get married! The Lawriter said if they weren't, if Roland kept Anna as a discreet concubine, as it should be, she wouldn't oppose them, but that sterile unions were illegal!”

“Then her son would have changed . . .”

“Too late! Not certain!”

He looked at me for a long, long time. I thought I recognized that face. He was thinking deep, circling thoughts.

Yet, when he had disappeared without a word, without a trace, I had been the first surprised.

He asked, very slowly, carefully, “But now . . . everyone is aware of their affair. It's all over the news, the crushed lover, ready to commit suicide because his beloved had been murdered by some Longer-hater, her fragile neck so easily cut up in the symbol for ‘no.' Everyone sees it as a new version of Romeo and Juliet. They forget the union would have been a childless one, in a time of demographic crisis.”

“The possible rift is being sealed.”

My voice lacked conviction. I was weary beyond words.

“But how many have you created?”

I watched him, not understanding his anger. “Do you think I created new differences between humans . . . ?” The thought was frightening.

“No!”

“You don't make sense, Lewis.”

“I'm not talking about humanity, I'm talking about its reality, about
humans
. How many people's hearts have you ripped open with one death? Don't you know that we never get over grief, we just learn to live with it?”

“I know.”

The screen around us went down. Our half hour of privacy was up, the tabletop informed me uselessly.

Guards, in the blue and silver of the Force, were waiting for us on the other side.

I reached for my scarf, fiddled with it while Lewis, in a monochord voice, read me my rights.

When they took me, my scarf was completely red, tied on the left side with two knots. My hands were empty of rings.

The interrogation room was small and gray. A concrete table, not quite large enough for two, one recorder, and two chairs. Her hands, thoughtlessly stroking the place where a dragon ring had been, were mere centimeters from mine on the table. Soon, my boss would come, would demand to know how the interrogation was going, would ask for the tape I hadn't switched on yet.

She spoke before I did, before I could speak.

“I never thought you'd give me away, Lewis.”

But I didn't answer her. Because she didn't mean the murder. She was thanking me for keeping my oath, protecting the family's existence.

“Why did you do it, Elza? I thought she was your friend.”

If I expected tears, I was disappointed. She was still the same girl I had grown up with. Harsher lines around the mouth deepened as she raised her chin, shadows veiled her eyes, but she faced me straight and square. “She was. The best I ever had.”

“Then why? Why!”

“Not
how
,
why
?” Her voice had a faraway quality, as if she wondered out loud, but didn't expect an answer. Or didn't care anymore. “And yet it's the second one you should know the answer to.”

“I know how,” I told her. “We found traces of coffee in her veins. It was mixed with a slow poison. You were seen offering her a special brand of coffee, on Friday, when you left. Even Magyd heard you.”

I didn't ask her again, though. It was time to play the game.

I switched the recorder on.

She put on a good fight, as if she didn't want to speak, then, reluctantly, with a voice not her own, she painted a credible story, one of jealousy and envy.

I was alone in my cell, and all the others in Death's corridor were empty. In less than three days, they would fill the place with a toxic, painless gas. Roland's mother had told me it was too good for me. Roland had said nothing.

Sofia had cried, but remained true to the oath. Trying to rescue me would endanger them all.

I hadn't seen Lewis since my interrogation. But no one had come in search of my brethren, and no one had been suspicious of Sofia's visits, during the short trial. She hadn't spoken of the Investigator who was responsible for my arrest.

Everyone was safe.

When they had brought me here, this morning, I had welcomed the silence, the loneliness. I came believing this meeting with death would feel like a homecoming, after years as the knife and Edge of our family.

But death . . . my own death . . .
How can I leave the others with the burden, how can I trust them. . . .

I stopped my thoughts, before they went any further. It was too late.

They say we shed masks before death. I hadn't realized they meant masks we didn't know from skin before shedding them.

I felt sick, trapped, but retching, giving in to the body's pain didn't stop the thoughts, the feelings.

Death crowded me, choked me, and even that was an affirmation of life.

 

I had slept, after hours of crying and screaming in the dark, my dignity saved only by the soundproof walls of my cell, the emptiness of the place.

Morning had come through the window just as I opened gritty, puffy eyes.

I'm almost dead
. This time, the thought rang empty in my tired bones, my too-tight skin.

The words were on my lips before I was aware of it.

I repeated them, over and over, keeping through the meaningless, repetitive sound nausea and panic at bay.

I locked the first door, and started down the long corridor that led to her cell. I stopped, the different keys in my hand, sorted through them briefly and put the others back in my vest pocket. With a trembling hand, I opened her cell. Her voice greeted me, with familiar words.

For a second, I actually wondered why I couldn't hear the others. But that had been years before, before we were told the story of the Exiles, before words pieced together the dreams and beliefs we grew up with into a net of obligations and choices that shouldn't have been ours to bear nor make.

I wanted to leave, wondered why I was pouring salt on such an old wound, and took one step forward.

The door closed silently behind me.

She didn't stop.

Those words . . .
I will never betray the trust, the name, the shelter of my tribe.

Why was she throwing those words at me?

She stood, repeating the oath I had broken. I waited for her to make a move, anger stopping the words I had come here to say.

When her voice died out and she was still standing by the window, I finally understood that she hadn't been aware of my presence. I turned on my heels, ready to leave.

“Lewis?”

Her voice sounded so fragile. Uncertain.

I couldn't help it. I turned back and took three, quick steps, until she was one breath away. My fists were clenched, at my sides.

Her black, long hair hung on her smooth, brown shoulders. Her face was turned toward mine.

“I had to come,” I told us both.

“Thank you for what you did.”

She seemed smaller somehow. Almost gone.

“You were wrong, Elza,” I told her.

“We just disagree . . .”

“That's not what I meant. About me forsaking our cause. I just don't serve it the same way you do. Life . . .”

I opened my hand. The key had made a small indent mark on my palm. I could feel my flesh more tender under its light weight.

“Come with me, Els.”

She closed her hand over mine. Her head nodded, once, twice, and my heart started beating again.

“I can't,” was what she said. It took three more heartbeats for her words to sink in.

“Why?”

“I can't. I'm already too much of a liability for our family. If I disappear, they might follow the trail. . . .”

I didn't want to feel anymore, not anger and despair anyway.

My hands captured her face and I drowned in her.

The key fell at our feet.

Against her swollen, teasing lips, I whispered, “I missed you. So much.”

“You're not alone anymore,” she murmured, and I wondered how such a strange woman could read my heart so easily. Her shoulders were as smooth as I remembered them under my thumbs. Hungry for her, for the eternity of her, I captured her lips again with mine, let my hands settle on her waist until she melted into me.

Everything was new, time had stopped and started again.

Again she spoke, and brought me back to my senses.

“You don't have to live like this, alone. Come back to the family.”

“You don't have to die like this, Els. Come with me. . . .”

She bent down, picked up the key, and put it back in my hand.

We stood for the longest time, each lost on our side of the rift. I wondered if someone, somewhere, worked to close such rifts, as she believed she did those between communities.

In the end, it didn't matter.

In the end, Elza and I made our choices, like everybody must. And nobody ever came to rescue us from ourselves.

Douglas Smith

A
LEXANDER KING FIRST met the Dancer on the day the street people began to glow.

He drove to his office in downtown Toronto early that July morning in his newest toy, a vintage Jaguar XKE, dark red with black leather seats—a toy he'd always wanted, and one of which he'd already tired. He pondered this as he parked in his reserved spot beneath the building of blue glass and silvered steel that bore his name. Riding his private elevator to the penthouse executive floor, he felt a strange unease awakening with the day.

He met first with his management team to finalize the acquisition of a competitor. They sat in his office, walls hung with original Tissot drawings he'd once loved. Before signing the takeover papers, he noted both the concessions he'd won and the absence of any pleasure in reaching a goal that had consumed much of his considerable energy for seven months.

He ordered the sale of the one profitable plant in the acquisition, and the closing of the remaining operations. But it didn't bring him the rush that exercising new power normally did. He felt none of the usual thrill of moving the pieces in the game.
His
game.

With a growing disquiet, he focused on his senior staff sitting around the huge teak table. He'd picked his team early in their careers, molding them into business weapons for his corporate arsenal. It came more as confirmation than surprise that he no longer felt pride in them.

After the meeting, he had his assistant clear his calendar for the morning. She closed his large oak office door as she left. Unfolding his tall, well-exercised frame from his chair, he moved to the window to stare down absently at the busy intersection of Wellington and University thirty floors below.

His toys, his deals, his people. Not a good sign, he mused, when the surest symbols of success in your chosen life bring you no happiness whatsoever.