False Hearts (29 page)

“The King of the Ratel has lost his power,” the man says. Who is it? For a moment, I fear it’s Nazarin; but the detective is at the back of the huddled former revelers. I let out my held breath. He’s crouched low, poised to pounce, his eyes not moving from the main man with the gun. Is this what he’s been planning? Nazarin said he was trying to sow unrest within the Ratel. From the shocked look on his face, though, I’m not sure he expected rebellion so soon.

“I’ve taken control of the biggest Verve drop the Ratel has ever done. I’ve taken control of the biggest arms smuggle. You can see the result right here.” He holds up the bulky gun. His voice radiates with pride. “Ensi is so used to his routine that he’s weak. It’ll all crumble, having an old man like him at the helm. He makes too many deals with the other side. Getting soft.”

Where is Ensi? While I was upstairs, has he already been executed? Would I care?

I crouch and move down the ramp. At one of the circular cut-outs, I peer out again. Part of me wants to hide upstairs. The masked leader takes a string of men and women and lines them up against the white, curved wall. Even though most of the partiers are hardened criminals, not all of them are, and I think the masked man chose at least some of the business associates under Ratel control. People unafraid to get their hands dirty in crooked deals, but who’ve never before had guns pointed at their faces. A man pisses himself, the dark strain spreading down his trousers. Another woman shakes so badly she can barely stand. Malka has also been chosen for the line-up, but she does not look afraid. She stands tall, like the Queen she is.

“Here is the court of the Ratel, gathered for their party,” the masked man says. “Think of me as your jester for the evening, providing the entertainment to you peons. Do you realize that for every tiny bit of money you get, the King gets over one hundred times more?”

He walks closer to the men and women lined up along the wall. “But for you, I’m not your jester. I’m your executioner.” He raises his gun and points it at the first woman. As soon as he aims, someone lets out a wail. The man is startled and lets out the shot, and the woman crumples. I shudder, hidden behind the curving white wall of the ramp. I can’t tell if she’s been hit or not.

Ensi—I’m pretty sure it’s Ensi—emerges from the shadows, knocking the gun from the leader’s hand. Nazarin, seeing that the situation has changed, jumps over a frightened member of the Ratel and grabs the gun out of another of the masked men’s hands. The rest of the Ratel realize the tide has turned and follow suit, wrestling the weapons from the other side’s grasp. A few more shots fire, but they all go wide.

A masked man or woman falls to the ground, the gun skittering across the floor, the person grabbling for it. Nobody else has noticed yet. After an agonizing moment of indecision, I dash from my hiding place and jump on top of the figure, holding my gun against the temple, praying I don’t have to fire. Nazarin sees me, but masked as I am, he thinks I’m one of the insurgents. I hold up my hand and call out “Wait!” He starts, recognizing my voice, and I pull off my hood, shaking the hair out of my face. Nazarin looks stricken. I nod at him.

It’s not over that easily. There’s a riot of people fighting, and guns blaring. More people fall. The perfect white walls are singed.

Only a few people in Kalar suits have fallen—bullets have to hit the right area of the body at the perfect angle to do any damage. But even in my Kalar suit, I don’t feel safe. A fair number of Ratel revelers have died. Blood smears the white floors. I clutch the gun against his forehead, but I don’t fire. I turn off the fear, watching everything with a sort of detached fascination. It’s that, or start screaming and never stop.

Ensi wades through it all, the bullets bouncing off his suit, wrestling the ringleader behind it all to the ground and ripping off his hood. It’s the young man I met at the beginning of the party: little more than a boy, with white-blond hair and black eyes. Leo.

My eyes dart to Nazarin. His mouth has twisted, and I can’t guess his thoughts. I’m still not sure he anticipated the coup.

Leo tries to say something, but Ensi doesn’t give him the chance. The King of the Ratel takes the gun, holds it to the younger man’s head, and fires. The boy goes limp, his head nothing but a mass of blood, bone and brain tissue. Ensi is splattered with gore. I stare at him, not blinking, until my eyes burn.

Ensi pulls off the hoods of all the other masked men and women who dared to rise up against him. Then he calls out a few other names. The Ratel Pawns and Knights bring the people forward. Nazarin holds one of the named men’s arms behind his back.

“You really thought I didn’t know exactly what you were trying to do?” Ensi asks.

He shoots the first person.

I flinch.

“You really thought that, in my own house, I wouldn’t sniff a rat?”

He shoots the next person.

“This is my house. You are mine.”

Another shot. Another fall.

“You should have learned this long ago. Most of you have.”

Bang.

“You cannot cross me and hope to live.”

Bang.

“Reward me with loyalty, and I will reward you.”

Bang.

“Cross me, and reap the consequences.”

All the men and women are dead, to join the other corpses on the ground.

“It’s simple, really.” He smiles at us all.

I look at all the bodies on the floor, numb. It feels like a warning. He’ll find out about me. And he’ll kill me. He’s walking toward me. Is he about to shoot me in the head?

He aims the gun. I squeeze my eyes shut. Better not to see it coming.

The gunshot is so loud my ears ring.

I’m not dead.

I open my eyes. Ensi has shot the man I captured. The blood spreads across the floor, a slow red tide. A woman’s crying, screaming, and I wish she’d shut up. More lines from the poem return to me. The paradise of Xanadu is ruined.

Then reached the caverns measureless to man

And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean.

And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far

Ancestral voices prophesying war!

Nazarin has a spray of blood on the left side of his face. He stands straight, at attention, his expression blank as a soldier’s.

Ensi stops in front of him. “Thank you,” he says. “Skel, isn’t it?”

“That’s right, sir.”

“You saved a lot of lives tonight. You’ll be rewarded. Speak to Malka about it.”

“Thank you, sir.” I almost wonder if Nazarin will salute.

Ensi looks around at the silent party. “Let this be a lesson to you all.”

Does his gaze flick to me? A shiver runs down my spine. He comes toward me, the gun still in his hand, and I steel myself. He’s going to kill me. Shoot me in the head. Even if I wasn’t involved with this uprising, if he knew about that, he must know about me.

He looks down at me with something very like tenderness. “You didn’t stay.”

“I couldn’t.”

He stares at the man I captured. The man that’s now a corpse, though not by my hand. “Good job.”

“Thank you.”

For a moment, I wonder if he’s going to hold out his hand, and lead me back upstairs. The blood has washed the last vestiges of the drug from my system, and I’ve scanned the notebook. I have no desire to go back up there. Then Ensi turns, his head down.

“Malka,” he says.

She comes forward, to his side. I can’t tell if they’re romantically linked, but their bond, whatever it is, is deep. The King and the Queen walk away from the ballroom, side by side, leaving the carnage behind them.

TWENTY

TAEMA

I dream that I went with Ensi, and I awaken in a silken bed.

The sun streams through the window. Ensi lies next to me, fast asleep, his arm thrown over his eyes against the light. His face is clean of blood, like the events of the night before never happened. But they did. And this, right here, is the man who did them.

His other arm is around me and, trapped in his embrace, I can’t stop thinking about all the dead bodies. The fact that I had taken a gun and gone down there, something I never thought I’d do. I still feel like I’m changing and morphing. I’m becoming more like Tila, but I’m turning into someone else I don’t recognize, either, and perhaps someone I don’t like.

I turn and watch him, sleeping peacefully. I look at his torso, chiseled by modern medicine. What would he look like now if he couldn’t alter himself? Would that taut skin sag against a growing paunch? Would I recognize his face, with its lines that show the type of life he chose to live?

He opens his eyes, and his eyes are black pits. His mouth stretches wide, and deep within his throat is a glowing, pulsing light.

“Are you strong enough to kill me?” he asks, his voice crackling like a flame. “Do you really have what it takes?”

*   *   *

I jerk awake, for real this time.

I’m in the room in the safe house where I store my things, but where I hardly ever sleep. It’s my first brainload-free night in over a week.

I ease out of the bed, my sore muscles stretching. I have a bruise on my side, where a bullet grazed the Kalar suit. If I hadn’t been wearing it, the bullet would have killed me. I rub my sore muscles and stagger into the shower to wash off the sweat and the imaginary scent of blood that still clings to my nostrils.

After I’ve scalded myself, I go down to the kitchen, ordering strong, real coffee from the replicator despite its warning that caffeine is bad for me. I load it with cream and sugar, to boot.

Nazarin isn’t here. He’s gone to report in to the Ratel, receive his reward for helping with the fight. I want to ask him if that was his plan all along. I thought he wanted to foster unrest. So why, when unrest presented itself in a very real way, did he decide to help Ensi instead?

Using every security measure I can think of, I bring Ensi’s scanned notebook to my implants.

His handwriting is almost impossible to read, so tall and slanted. Each appointment is only a few letters and a time, perhaps a first name. Last night’s entry was only “XNDU,” presumably shorthand for Xanadu. There’s nothing over the next few days, but Wednesday has an entry: “D/O. MM.” I flip through the rest of the pages, wondering who the names are. On the last page of the book are various scribbled notes. Up in a corner, I spy “MM.” Next to it is a phone number, strange enough in itself, and it brings me up short.

I recognize it.

It’s the number for the emergency line at Mana’s Hearth.

I looked it up, after we left, after the surgery. When, despite everything, I was homesick. So many times over the years, I had turned on my implants, ready to input the number. I wanted to see if my parents were all right. If the Hearth was all right. I was too afraid, and I never pinged.

My throat tightens with unshed tears. It’s not totally unexpected, but it’s still a shock. We knew there might be a link between the Ratel and the Hearth when we discovered Vuk was Adam. We still don’t know what the connection is, exactly. Is Mana-ma sending people to the Ratel, and if so, why, and to what purpose? Is Mana-ma working with Ensi? That means interacting with someone Impure, and having a connection with the world she always taught us was evil.

I flip back to Wednesday’s entry. D/O. Drop off. Sure enough, Wednesday is the 15th—the date Tila and I used to look forward to. The date that the supply ship would come from the far-off shiny city of San Francisco. I guess, even ten years later, it hasn’t changed.

MM stands for Mana-ma.

“Fuck,” I whisper, wondering if I’m reading the signs wrong. Maybe I’m just seeing what I want to see. I flip through the calendar. Every two or three months, right on the 15th, there’s an entry with “D/O. MM.”

Why? When I lived there, people didn’t die more than once or twice a year. Has Mana-ma started making more disappear? Or is there something else the Hearth has that Ensi and the Ratel want? The hairs on my forearms stand up straight. I’m still missing something.

What?

How long has this been going on, whatever it is? At least ten years. That’s when Adam disappeared. I have a feeling it’s been longer.

I take a deep breath. Nazarin comes into the kitchen and I send everything away, hiding the scans deep within my implants again.

He nods at me in greeting and grabs the SynthGin. It’s early in the day.

“Did it go badly?”

He pours liquid into the glass, bringing over a second one for me. “No. I’ve been promoted. He’s going to Test me, make sure I’m trustworthy. It’ll be different to yours, as he’s not using me for lucid dreaming, but I imagine it’ll be along the same lines. I guess we’re celebrating that somehow things didn’t totally go to shit last night.”

“Did you know what was going to happen?” I ask him.

He takes a swig. “No. I knew Leo was going to try something, but I thought he was months away from actually doing it. I guess he didn’t trust me enough to include me in his plans.”

“If he had, would you have sided with him?” If he had, would the end result have been different?

“No. Too dangerous. If there’d been even a hint I was involved, I’d be as dead as the others.”

“Right.” I sip the SynthGin. “Did you know Tila is sleeping with Ensi?”

“She’s his canary?” he asks. “No. I most definitely did not know that.” His eyes ask the question I don’t answer.

I take another gulp. “What does that mean, to be his canary? Malka called me that, too.”

“Tila is—you are—his newest pet. His newest toy. He’ll play with you for a time, like a cat with a canary.”

“Then, what, he’ll eat me? Is that what he does with the others?”

“Sometimes. If they displease him. If not, he lets them fly away, and then finds another.”

“Right. He’s been with her before. Tila. I got the feeling it’d been more than once. He seemed to … care.”

Again, the question with his eyes. I sigh. “I didn’t sleep with him. I almost did but we were … interrupted by gunfire.”

“Right.” He takes another sip. “How did the Test go?”

“It was horrible,” I say. “If you’re going to be Tested, I shouldn’t tell you about it.”