Califia's Daughters (35 page)

“You?” The very idea was absurd.

“Indeed. Most of the tales in circulation have passed through old Robby. They change a bit sometimes, coming out. The number of injured men grows a bit, the weakness of the Angels gets exaggerated. Some tales even get started here. The one about Breaker's sister. Heard it?”

“About her being a—about her odd taste in food? I found some graffiti about it the other day. God, I hope you're careful, Robin.”

“Oh, I'm subtle with it,” he said, not really answering her question. “If I can't be free, I might as well indulge my unexpected taste for anarchy. Which brings me to the point. There are twelve good men and true, ready to lead a bid for freedom. Half a hundred more who would be gathered in if the wind were strong enough. Dozens willing to be blind. Three weeks is short to bring it to a head, but I can try.”

“Robin, what on earth are you talking about? All we need is someone to let you out and a minor distraction on the other side of the Quarter, not a riot.”

“Revolution is more what we had in mind.”

“‘We?'” Dian stopped dead; he got her moving again. “My God, Robin, what have you been doing here? What kind of ideas have you been putting into their heads?”

“The ideas were there. Surely you've heard what happened five years ago? Twenty-two Angels dead, half again as many men?”

“No, no, it was six and nineteen.”

“I've seen the records, Dian. Twenty-two and thirty-seven known dead, with five more missing in the fire. The men nearly had the city then, or enough to bargain with, but they hadn't the weapons, and when the Angels took back the Quarter and went on a rampage, they sealed their fate. Before that night it might have been different—negotiation, relaxing the restrictions, small breaks in the walls. Not now. Nobody's forgotten a thing. Listening to the stories, you'd swear you could smell smoke and see blood seeping down the stairs. It's gone underground, but it's very much alive. There's not a man in here, even those who were children then or have come since, who doesn't believe with all his soul that sooner or later he'll walk out of the Quarter a free man, and most of them know in their hearts that it'll be over the bodies of Angels. The Angels know it too. You never see one in here unarmed, they never eat or drink in here, very rarely stay the night. No, I haven't contributed any ideas that weren't here already. Helped give it some focus, started it coming together perhaps. But the process itself is inevitable.”

Robin continued to steer Dian's unresponsive body around the floor until the record came to an end, and went to turn it over. He came back and took up her arms again.

“There'll be another slaughter,” he continued. “One that'll make the last one look like a cart accident. Unless cooler heads retain control over the Angels, in which case it'll be just our ringleaders castrated and hanged and the rest of the Quarter sold and traded to the four winds or kept sedated for the rest of their days.”

“Robin,” she said finally, “this isn't your business.”

“It is,” he hissed, and the venom in his voice was a revelation. “By God it is. I didn't ask to be brought here. Not a man here deserves to be sold and caged like an animal. This city has to be taught that no human being has the right to do that to another.”

“Revenge.”

“Righteousness. Justice, if you prefer. It'll happen, Dian. And there'll be a bloodbath on both sides. Unless you help.”

“Robin, for God's sake, I can't smuggle guns into the Men's Quarter,” she said flatly.

“Oh, no, my dear, nothing so complicated. All I need from you is information. For one thing, does Breaker have large-scale weapons?”

“What, like artillery? I'm sure she has some portable things, grenade-launchers and the like, half a dozen machine guns, two armored cars, and a store of fuel to run them with. But I've never seen or heard of anything bigger. I think someone told me that there had been a half-repaired airplane once, but Bess took it. She's the one with the weapons. Breaker has mostly riot gear.”

“She also has a certain device, and we absolutely have to know where it's located. It's bound to be somewhere Breaker can get at quickly, a small room near her quarters, even a closet. Don't worry about how to use it, we can figure that out. We just need to be able to find it without wasting our time searching.” And he told her then what the device was, and with considerable satisfaction told her how it would be used, and it was as well that no one was watching them because very soon Dian gave up all pretense of dancing and reared back her head to stare at him, openmouthed.

“
All
the Angels?” she whispered, aghast.

“Not you, of course, I'll take care of you,” he began, and then he realized that what he saw on her face was not just surprise but horror. Revulsion. He let her go and took a step away from her, and with that small movement the stubborn faith that had brought her after him, that had bound them together and given them both purpose through all the dark nights, quivered like a spider's gossamer in a strong wind, and a great hungry chasm yawned up at their feet. In ten seconds Dian watched him age a decade, and his eyes sagged and looked at her with fear.

“Oh, God,” he said. “What have I done? At least promise me you won't report us. You owe me that, Dian. Please.”

Robin begging was more than Dian could bear. She grabbed his hand as if to keep him from falling into the rift between them, or perhaps to keep herself from falling, and she wrapped it between both of hers, holding it against her chest.

“Robin, please, don't look like that. Of course you're safe with me. It's just—you're talking about mur—about killing more than two hundred people, in cold blood. And not all of them deserve to die, really they don't, Robin. There's a lot . . . Some of the Angels . . .” She took a deep breath and started again. “Look, let me think about it, see if I can come up with something else not quite so . . . drastic.” Barbaric. Terrifying. Their hands lay just above the rise of her belly, and she held them there until she saw most of his fear subside. Nonetheless, the memory of it stood between them, and changed everything. She moved to lessen the damage.

“I mean it, Robin. I will think about it, I promise you. But honestly, I think it would be a great mistake to wipe out all the Angels. For one thing, it probably wouldn't take out the top echelon, certainly not Breaker or her sister. For another, I swear to you that there are some Angels who would make valuable allies and friends, and you—the men—would be fools to cut yourselves off from them. Surely you can figure out how to make this . . . device . . . selective?” She was now the one to plead, and Robin saw what this meant before she did: she was more than halfway committed to this act, because it was he who asked it of her. She was an Angel, yes, with power of life and death over him, but she was Dian, and she would hold to her faith, if it cost her more than her life.

In the end they agreed to meet in two days. Robin would talk with the men. Dian would find the room. She left, not looking at him, her hands cold but her black uniform clammy with chill sweat. She felt as though her forehead were branded:
Escapee
.
Mass Murderer.
And worst of all:
Traitor.

         

That night Dian could not eat dinner, could not sit still, lay awake restless until Margaret (who had never actually moved out despite her threat) finally asked her what was the matter. Dian snarled at her and got up, went to the kitchen and made herself a cup of hot whiskey-tea, and took it to drink in the dark living room.

Thoughts flew about her head, as uncontrollable as if she were already drunk. God, what had he gotten them into, stupid goddamned male ruled by his balls, I thought Robin had more sense. Some distraction that would make: the Quarter rising, men spilling out in all directions and setting the whole stinking city on fire, Angels dropping like flies, nobody'd take much notice of two horses making their way off. Tomas—no, can't think of Tomas, too excruciating, think of Tadpole inside, no longer a tadpole, kicking out as the whiskey hit it, punching too, on the other side, bossy damned kid, Don't drink, Mama. Oh, God, Robin, what have you done to me? If I stop you, you're dead, and half the Men's Quarter with you, but if I go along I put the necks of every single one of these women I've lived with, fought beside, slept next to, under a guillotine blade controlled by a lot of power-drunk adolescents with testosterone in their brains. And Breaker won't even be here, damn your eyes. If Breaker were here, if I could be sure your rioting menfolk would get their greedy hands on her, God, I don't think I'd hesitate, not even for Margaret, but the witch will be out of reach, safe with Queen Bess—until she comes back to crush you all. Wait until she's home? And with Bess inside the city walls too, take out the both of them at once—but no, not possible, there'll be too many guns without Angel implants waiting to cut down untrained rioters, male or no. Jesus and Mary, I need another drink, go to sleep, Tadpole, Mama's gonna get smashed.

But the alcohol did not remove the thoughts flying about in her head, only slowed them, simplified them, made them all the more stark and terrible.

Could they—could she—trust the men? That was the question gnawing at her mind like a living thing. Given the tool for murder, would the men use it well, use it to carve for themselves some freedom of movement, or would the revolt be only a carnage of bloodthirsty revenge, like the story Kirsten had told once about what happened Before when groups of well-meaning animal lovers loosed the wild tigers and lions from their cages? What had started as a personal and private bid for freedom had exploded into . . . this, and too many lives were at stake. Too many women. Too many—ah, yes, that was the point, wasn't it? Too many friends.

Thirteen weeks was too long to remain aloof. The Ashtown Guard was no longer an anonymous mass of black-garbed monsters. On the day she had finally met Robin, she had told herself that everyone hated and feared her, but it had not been true; even then she had known it was not. Yes, some of the Angels were sadistic horrors, but she had found those to be surprisingly few, had discovered the disquieting fact that most of the Angels, behind the closed doors of the Center, revealed themselves to be strong, capable women, not unfriendly, not without humor, with an above-average complement of intelligence and a powerful sense of loyalty.

She liked them. To her amazement, considerable consternation, and occasional self-loathing, yes: there were some she would count, were she honest with herself, as friends.

And Margaret. What of Margaret? They had become lovers a little more than a month after Dian's arrival, for a complexity of reasons Dian still had not sorted out. Loneliness was part of it, odd in itself for a woman who by her nature preferred solitude. Simple animal affection entered into it, a response to the one hand held out to her on her arrival, and wanting to give something in return. The surface reasons—that it made her stand out less among the other Angels, that it fit the role expected of her—she no longer even considered, because whatever it was that existed between Margaret and herself, it was not surface.

The edifice she and Margaret were creating had lies and deceptions for its foundation, but the building itself was an honest one. Moreover, as the superstructure took on more weight and substance, it was settling down and compressing its false base into a real one. Somewhere she still knew herself to be Culum's Dian, Judith and Kirsten and Isaac's Dian, but that woman of the South was fading, turning into an insubstantial ghost at the shoulder of the Angel Dian, that Vampire among a community of creatures bound by the taste of a Captain's blood. Dian had proven her worth: a dependable guard, formidable despite her current condition, silent and steady and working her way rapidly up toward A status, her Captain's fair-haired girl.

Sometimes at night she would get out of bed and stand in front of the bathroom mirror, naked but for the identity tags on the thong around her neck, trying to discern what those around her were seeing, what the Captain, Margaret, the Angels thought was there. She herself saw nothing, only an ever more blatant and bitterly ironic contrast between her swelling belly and breasts and the increasing angularity of her face, bordering on gauntness and dented with the beginnings of what in a few years would look like the lines carved by chronic pain. Her face looked older than Judith's, her breasts full and nubile, her belly ageless. She would look again at the lines beside her mouth that had not been there in August, flush the toilet, and return to bed. On the nights Margaret was there, they would make the awkward and ultimately unsatisfying love Margaret seemed to want, and lie back to back in the night, pretending to sleep, obscurely comforted.

She took her drink into the bathroom, closing the door and turning on the light. Tonight when she dropped her robe in front of the mirror, her skin was flushed with the alcohol, and the scar of the Angel on her left breast looked almost like fresh blood. It had begun to pull as the tissue beneath it expanded, a minor discomfort, little more than an itch on top of the deep and perpetual burn. She touched it faintly with the fingertips of her right hand, traced the familiar shape of it, and thought with a remarkable lack of fear about what Robin had told her, the truth of what lay beneath the scar, the truth that explained how the two guards whom she had bested on the snow-covered forecourt back in January had come to drop down dead before the day was out, how Angels who displeased their Captain tended to have heart attacks out of the blue. Beneath this brand in her flesh lay the ultimate power of Ashtown's Captain, the key to her authority, the secret weapon that Robin proposed to hand over to the men, Robin's own gentle, cold-blooded, and utterly ruthless means of striking back at this nest of snakes that had drawn him in.