Beating Heart Cadavers (27 page)

“Ah,” Ratsel said lightly, still showing no sign of being concerned, “I would – truly – Matthew, but you see, the problem is that I just don't think you'll actually do it.”

“Would you like to find out?”

“I've got a better idea, actually,” Ratsel replied. “Why don't I give you the choice of shooting one of us, and after you do so, you'll be free to walk out of here alive?”

Caine frowned.

“There's no choice,” he said. “Obviously I'd shoot you, even if Raban wasn't using Lad as a human shield.”

“But perhaps you'd consider shooting Ladeline.”

Caine gave an outright scoff, the insult too great to ignore. If Ratsel thought that he could be persuaded into shooting his lifelong friend in return for permission to leave the house alive, then he took Caine for more of a fool than Caine had initially realized.

“I'm not shooting Lad, High Officer. And I don't care what you bribe me with: like I said, if I shoot you right now, Raban's going to have to have her alive to use as a bargaining chip. And if you think I'd actually trust you to let me walk out of here alive, then –”

“It's not me you should be worried about trusting, Matthew,” Ratsel cut in. “I may be a number of things, but I pride myself on being honest, at least about my expectations and wants. I told you my plans for you the minute you signed on to be ambassador, and I told you exactly what I wanted out of you – and this house. I even told you that you'd get your son back once you helped me, and I obliged. It was you who never specified if he had to be alive.”

Ratsel's face twisted into a smile, but Merdow's clenched. Caine nodded to himself in relief: Ratsel still didn't know that Merdow had helped Fields get his son up to Hasenkamp, which meant that Simon was safe from any future negotiations that the Spӧken might be planning.

“But Fields here,” Ratsel continued, “she hasn't been so honest. In fact, I would venture to say she's told you more lies than truths. But don't take it too personally: I'm sure that's how she treats everyone.”

Caine glanced over at Fields. She squirmed beneath Merdow's grip, silently warning him not to be tricked into Ratsel's diversion, but his curiosity was too great.

“What're you talking about?” he asked. “She hasn't lied to me.”

“Really? So she's told you what she is? You've known all along, and still been friends with her?” Ratsel raised his eyebrows. “I'm surprised, I must say, Matthew. I thought that your views on that matter, at least, were up to par ...”

“What matter? What hasn't she told me?”

Fields squirmed again, shaking her head despite the way Merdow's knife caught the skin of her neck when she did so, and her eyes bulged imploringly for him to just shoot Ratsel and get them out of the situation, but he found that he couldn't.

“Tell me,” Caine demanded.

Ratsel raised his chin as he answered.

“Ladeline is a Mare-person.”

Caine halted, waiting for the rest of the sentence that he was sure was about to come that would explain the first four words of Ratsel's statement. It was a trick, he knew – a joke, really – because Fields wasn't one of the Mare-folk. Caine would have known: he would have spotted it across the playground when they had first met twenty-something years beforehand. And even if he had somehow missed it then, he would have surely realized it later, because the Mare-folk weren't like the rest of them, and even Fields, who was mistrustful and mischievous and defiant to a fault, wasn't capable of masquerading as his friend for so long and so well when she was nothing but metal on the inside.

“That's not true,” Caine said. “It's impossible. It's definitely not true ...”

But even as he said it, Fields' face began to fall, and he couldn't quite distinguish all of the expressions mixed with the one of grimacing discomfort, but he could pick them apart enough to see clear regret etched into the skin around her eyes.

“No,” Caine said again. “No, that's not true. I know that's not true –”

“I'm afraid it is, Matthew,” Ratsel said. “And believe me when I say how sorry I am that you had to find out this way –”

“It's not true,” Caine said. “You're not even letting her speak or tell me herself –”

Ratsel motioned to Merdow, and the doll-like man eased his grip on the knife, letting it fall an inch or so away from her throat so that she could speak. She took several deep breaths as Caine watched her, waiting for her to spit out a curse-laden rant about how Ratsel was lying to him to turn them against one another, but she did nothing of the sort.

“It's not true, Lad – right? They're making it up. It's not true.”

Fields raised her gaze slightly. Her eyes were heavy, and her mouth twitched against her response. She shook her head.

“It's true,” she said.

“Say it louder, Ladeline,” Ratsel said. “And make yourself clear so that Matthew can understand you.”

“It's – true,” Fields said. She looked at Caine intently, and there was something in her expression that he didn't quite recognize at first: fear. “I'm – I'm a Mare-person.”

“No,” Caine said again, but this time it wasn't out of disbelief, but defeat. “No, you're not … you can't be ...”

“Jasper and I got ourselves adopted when we were young so no one would find out. We hid it for as long as we could, and then when Andor found out ...” She trailed off. “Well, you know.”

“So you see, Matthew?” Ratsel asked. “I just saved you from a very poor decision. To think that you almost risked your life to save a Mare-person.”

Caine was too numb to respond. He sat back against the bathroom sink as his legs turned to rubber beneath him, and the gun felt hundreds of pounds heavier in his hand the longer that he held it. It slipped to his side, his arm banging against the marble counter.

“Now that everything's out in the open, I think we can settle this once and for all,” Ratsel said. “Ladeline, I'll ask you again, now that you have no allies here: where is your brother with my notebook?”

She didn't answer. Merdow gave her a shake.

“Ladeline, think about your options here,” Ratsel said. “Let me remind you that I'm offering you a quick, relatively painless death if you tell me the truth. If I have to force it out of you, then Raban here will be given full permission to do whatever he likes to you.”

Again Fields didn't answer. Her eyes were still on Caine, though they chose to stare at his feet rather than his face. Ratsel followed her gaze.

“Or maybe I don't need to ask you?” he said, glancing between the two former friends. “Maybe you've already told young Matthew here, and he'll tell us himself now that he knows what you are?”

Caine shuddered against the words, still unable to believe it. But it was true: she was a Mare-person. She had basically admitted to it years ago when she had made her views on them so clear to him, but he had always just assumed it had been because of Mason that she had felt that way, and had never considered that it was because her heart was the same cold metal as the ones she adamantly defended.

And it seemed so obvious but so impossible at the same time, and he couldn't separate Fields from who he thought she was and who she actually was enough to make sense of the situation. Because it didn't make sense that a Mare-folk was the person who had befriended him when no one else had, and who had taken the blame for what he had done to Andor Sawyer, and who had warned him against the Spӧken but given him the notebook anyhow when he had refused to believe her, and who had come back to get him just hours ago to bring him to his son when she of all people knew that he didn't deserve to so much as set eyes on him after everything that he had done.

“Matthew? Do you know where the notebook is? Did the Mare-folk tell you?”

And it bothered him that he hadn't realized it before that moment, and that he had heard it from Ratsel's mouth first when he should have heard it from hers, and that she hadn't trusted him enough to tell him, but he found that what bothered him most of all was that, if Fields' heart was truly metal like they all said it was and she had been the closest ally and most trusted friend that he had ever hoped to have, that it would have meant that he had been wrong for all of those years – and not wrong about her, but about the Mare-folk. And if the Mare-folk were truly no different than any of the rest of the Onerians like Fields and Mason had always maintained, and better – much better – than some, then that meant that his refusal to let Mari have a metal heart had been truly causeless, and that he had not just let his wife die, but killed her, and all because he had failed to listen to people he ought to have known to trust and chosen instead to believe the ones who had been feeding him lies for years from behind their reflecting, rebounding uniforms.

“Do you know, Matthew?” Ratsel asked again.

Caine's head snapped up, and he pushed himself off the counter into a standing position.

“Yes, I know where it is,” he said.

“Ah, very good,” Ratsel said. “Then it looks like we don't need you alive after all, Miss Fields.”

He nodded to Merdow, whose face stretched into a wide smile. As his tongue darted out to skim the bottom of his perfectly aligned teeth, however, Caine stepped forward.

“You'll still need her alive,” he said. “So don't do anything.”

Ratsel gave him a look.

“You just said you knew where Sawyer and the notebook are, Matthew. Why else would I need an extra Mare-person alive?”

Caine raised his gun and pointed it back at the Spӧke's head.

“I wasn't talking to you: I was talking to Raban,” he said. “He still needs her alive if he wants to bargain with me into letting him out of here after I kill you.”

Ratsel's face dissolved in surprise, but no sooner had he opened his mouth to speak in sheer disbelief than Caine pulled the trigger, and the crack of a bullet hit the air in time with the splatter of red that shot over the white-tiled walls and over onto Fields' and Merdow's shocked faces.

The Spӧke fell to the floor, crumpling against the wall and slipping down over the bloodied tiles. For a long moment Caine stood over him, the gun still pointing at where his head had been moments before, and then he slowly lowered it back down to his side and turned to Merdow.

“So, Raban, what'll it be?” he asked the mannequin-like man.

Merdow let go of Fields and raised his hands in the air.

“I saved your son, Caine,” he said. “Ladeline must've told you that by now. I saved him – it was all me.”

Caine waved Fields forward and she hurriedly crossed the room to stand beside him, out of reach in case Merdow decided to forgo his life simply to end hers. When she was safely situated next to him, Caine gave Merdow a nod.

“You're right,” he said. “You did.”

He kept the gun by his side. Merdow's eyes were peeled to it, but when Caine didn't raise it to shoot him, he raised his gaze back to Caine's face.

“You're – you're not going to kill me, then?” he asked, his silky voice rippled with anxiety.

Caine shook his head.

“No, I won't kill you,” he said. He gave the effeminate man a smile. “I think Ladeline would get more joy out of it.”

He turned to Fields and held out the gun.

“Do you want the gun, or would you rather use the knife?” he asked her.

Merdow gave a stifled noise of indignation, but after several moments of contemplating the weapons with a thoughtful frown, Fields shook her head.

“Neither,” she said.

Merdow let out his breath.

“Lina –” he breathed, “– thank you. I knew you wouldn't really –”

“Stop talking, Raban,” Fields said, cutting through his word of thanks. She nodded to the tub behind him. “Turn on the water.”

Merdow simply stared at her.

“I … what?” he asked.

“The bathtub. Turn it on,” Fields repeated.

“I … but … why?”

“Because,” she said lightly, a taut smile coming to her lips, “you're not a cat, which means that I can drown you easily.”

Ch. 36

The tent was billowing around them, the canvas fabric rippling like water as it caught the blast from the wind, but neither of them paid it much mind. It was fairly warm now that summer had finally arrived, and though the area was as dry and parched as ever, there was a certain calmness all throughout Hasenkamp that made it rather pleasurable. As Caine sat back in one of the wooden chairs, his arms wrapped around the sleeping form of Simon, Fields carefully rolled a cigarette for herself, her fingers running over the paper as she urged it to form into a cylinder.

The piece of metal that they had found with Andor's body had indeed fit the lock in the notebook that Jasper had brought to the border some weeks beforehand, and the information that they had found inside was neither pleasant nor disparaging. The Hilitum that had been mined for so many years and brought to Oneris had been mixed with a separate metal – the one that the knife-like key was made out of – and as the people of Hasenkamp had already informed Oneris that it had been the Spӧken who had been poisoning the Onerian people for so many years, not the Mare-folk, they were only waiting out the next steps that the Onerian government would take to disband the Spӧken once and for all. The cure that the Mare-doctors had found was simple, untainted Hilitum, not a devised plan for genocide as Andor Sawyer had hoped for.

“And then we can go home,” Caine told his son, running his hand over the boy's soft hair.

“What's left of it,” Fields remarked.

She finished rolling her cigarette and stuck it in her mouth to light.

“It'll be a better place now, Lad,” Caine replied. “Everyone knows that the Mare-folk aren't responsible for the sterilization, and the government's already reopened the charging facilities.” He paused and gave her a look. “Which I should have never agreed to close,” he added. “I know that now.”

She shrugged indifferently and flicked a piece of lint off of her shoulder.

“I wasn't chastising you. I was just making an observation.”

When she and Caine had first entered Hasenkamp together and she had seen him reunited with his son, some small part of her had thought that she might feel differently about the world. Yet even with the knowledge that the Mare-folk would soon be able to charge their hearts with Hilitum without fear of being rounded up by Spӧkes, and knowing that any children who were born in Oneris with metal hearts would not be subjected to the sterilization that had ruined so many generations of Mare-folk before them, she was every bit as hardened and cold as she had always been, and none of it truly seemed to matter. Mason was dead, and her brother was dead, and killing the Spӧkes in Caine's house and drowning Merdow hadn't done anything to change that. Because, just like always, she was alone again.

Caine fidgeted in his place across from her, unsettled by her silence.

“What's it like, Lad?” he asked after a moment, breaking into her thoughts.

“What's what like?”

“Having a metal heart.”

Fields paused, momentarily taken aback, but she could find no reason not to answer him. She took a long drag of her cigarette as she mulled over her answer.

“It's like sitting in a glass of water,” she said. “You can see everything going on around you, and hear it, but you know that you can't touch anyone, and no one can touch you.”

Caine ran his hand over Simon's back as the young boy continued to sleep, and Fields took another drag from her cigarette, hoping that the action might do a better job masking her expression than her voice was doing. She exhaled a stream of smoke, careful to blow it as far from Simon as she could, and watched as it disappeared into the canvas wall, like a spirit flitting from a room.

“I'm sorry about Mason, Lad.”

Fields glanced up to find Caine staring at her, but she only shook her head dismissively.

“I wasn't thinking about him,” she said, but she knew all too well that Caine recognized the look she had been wearing, if only because he so often wore it himself when he thought of his wife.

“Alright,” Caine said. “But I'm still sorry. And I'm sorry for what I said about him when I heard he died protecting a Mare-folk – when he died protecting you, I should say. I didn't mean it.”

“Yes, you did,” Fields said. “But it doesn't matter. You think differently now.”

He dropped his head back down so that his chin rested on top of Simon's head, and with his unshaven face and lack of uniform, and his hands curled around his son to hold him steadily in place, Fields thought that she finally recognized him as the person she had befriended so many years ago. She only wondered if he recognized her, or if he had ever really seen her at all.

The tent opened and someone stuck his head inside. Fields turned to find Sunset giving her a nod.

“They've opened the border,” he said, his deep voice resonating around the room. “We're free to go back into Oneris. People are packing up as we speak.”

He ducked his head back out as he moved to the next tent, and Fields stuck her cigarette back into her mouth. Caine noted her expression with a frown.

“That's good news, Lad – we can go back.”

“Does that mean the world will be different?” she asked.

Caine gave a sigh.

“No, not necessarily,” he conceded. “But it means that it might be different one day.”

He made a face at her as he tried to read past her expression, and then shifted Simon up into one arm so that he could lean towards her. He waved her forward.

“What?” Fields asked, surveying him mistrustfully.

“Let me see your hand for a second,” he said.

Fields pulled further away from him instead.

“You're not taking my cigarette,” she said. “Roll your own.”

“I'm not trying to steal your cigarette,” Caine said indignantly. “Give me your other hand, then, if you don't believe me.”

Fields rolled her eyes at him, but consented to reach forward with her left arm, her other one still tightly holding on to her cigarette in case he decided to reach forward and snatch it from her.

Caine took her hand in his free one and gave it a tight squeeze before letting go. Fields raised her eyebrows.

“What was the point of that?” she asked.

“Your theory's wrong,” Caine said.

“What theory?”

“You're not sitting in a glass of water,” he said. “I can touch you.”

He smiled gloatingly as he said it and his voice was permeated with a teasing tone, but there was something of the utmost seriousness in his eyes, and Fields let out a slight scoff as she considered him. Perhaps he hadn't seen her for who she really was for all the years that they had known one another, and perhaps it was because he had been so wrapped up in his hatred for the people that he had never tried to understand, or perhaps it had been because she had never allowed him to see her, or to know her, because she hadn't been able to admit who she really was to anyone – even herself. But in any case, she considered, she had been wrong: he saw her for exactly who she was now.

She put her cigarette back to her mouth and took a final drag, her hand hiding the slight smile that had come to her lips. Because whether or not he was right, she knew, she wasn't about to let him think that he was.

“No, I am sitting in a glass of water,” she said, flicking a piece of cigarette ash at him. “You just don't realize it because you're in here with me.”