The first of our two rest-days turned out clear and warm, the kind of spring day that makes up for a month of rain. I woke up just after midday, finding Jandra already up and in the shower. I took one look at the brilliant blue sky over East Rakadev and knew that we needed to get out of the city.
We were both feeling groggy and slightly fragile from last night’s stay-awake. I was thankful we’d only taken a couple of capsules. Some strong black coffee and a fistful of tryptophan boosters (a trick I’d learned from the Icebox lads) took the edge off, if nothing else. Neither of us had any appetite for breakfast. There’s few slimming aids like an amphetamine habit.
Lounging naked on my living room sofa with a cigarette dangling from her lips, Jandra gave a good impression of her usual off-duty self. She teased me about always buying the budget-brand coffee, and rested her bare feet comfortably on my leg when I sat down beside her. It was only when I looked into her eyes that I saw how brittle her smile really was. When I stroked her legs, I felt the tension in her calf muscles, like an overwound mechanism on the verge of snapping. I realised she was holding herself so tightly to keep herself from shaking.
“Let’s drive up to Itan Lake today,” I told her. “We can go to one of the taverns on the north shore. Hell, we can go to a few, find the best one.” I said it with a decisive cheeriness that brooked no argument. I wasn’t going to try and get her to talk about what happened last night. What she needed right now was a change of scene, not amateur psychotherapy.
She exhaled a thin coil of smoke. “All that way?”
“Beautiful day for a drive. How long’s it been since you went outside the city limits?”
“It’s been a while. Probably not since Mother’s last visit,” she allowed, and drank down the last of her coffee. Cheap or not, she seemed glad of the caffeine. “Count me in. I can’t remember the last time I went to the lake.”
“We went in Noonmonth last year.” That was a very pleasant memory. It had been in the early days of our arrangement, when seeing each other outside of work was still a novelty. “Wasn’t exactly swimming weather that day. Remember?”
“Oh, yeah, it was torrential. We spent most of the day parked up in the car, didn’t we? Testing out the suspension.” She puffed on her cigarette and nodded towards the bedroom. Her smile widened – sweet, eager and desperately unconvincing. “D’you fancy one more, for the road?”
Sex the morning after stay-awake never felt quite right. A little too detached, almost numb. And it felt even more off today. Jandra’s eagerness gave way to a shut-in passivity, and the tension remained in her limbs all the way through. She kept her eyes closed nearly the whole time, lying there and letting me do all the work, when normally she was an enthusiastic participant. She lit a fresh cigarette immediately afterwards, hardly even waiting for me to rise off of her. This time, she couldn’t hide the way her fingers shook.
I wanted to say something. I couldn’t think of anything that wouldn’t make her feel even worse.
We dressed quickly, and I hurried us to the door. I was keen to get into the sunshine, out of the stuffy heat of the apartment. More than that, I wanted to be somewhere green, a long way from concrete and ruins and bullet-riddled bodies. I didn’t usually find Indeleon claustrophobic, but right now I was painfully aware of the weight of the city, its oppressive size and bustle.
The streets were busy. East Rakadev was a largely working-class suburb, a lot of factory workers’ families and ageing ex-servicemen. On a sunny day like this, half the neighbourhood was out shopping or strolling or walking their dogs. The local sweet vendors had set up their corner kiosks and were doing a roaring trade. Up above, jetliners scrawled their white trails across an almost cloudless sky.
I held Jandra’s hand as we walked to my car. I could tell from her forced half-smile what was going through her mind on this lovely spring afternoon. She was thinking of blind avenues of rubble, and a young man bleeding to death in the rain.
“We could stay the night by the lake,” I suggested. “There’s some decent lodging-houses up there, for the summer people.”
“I’ve only got these clothes,” Jandra said, tugging distractedly at the sleeve of her blouse. “They’re sweaty enough already.”
“I’ll get you some new ones at the emporia. Call it a Year’s Turn present.”
That provoked a brief but – I thought – genuine smile. “We’re on the same salary, Evaris. If you start booking us lodging-houses and buying me clothes, you’ll be homeless inside a month.”
“I’ll just ration my coffee for a while.” And my stay-awake, I thought.
I started up the Hawker and drove us off towards the city limits. I went slowly and carefully, seeking to draw no attention. East Rakadev had a precinct of its own, Nineteenth Watch, and I’d deliberately never made any close connections with those fellows. Still, I felt uneasy every time we passed a patrolling watchcar. You never knew who might talk to who in this city. All it would take was the wrong person spotting Jandra and I together.
We drove through a mile of sprawling, dust-shrouded building sites, where the pale skeletons of new tenement blocks stood wrapped in scaffolding. We passed the water treatment plant at Elthend Basin and the belching chimneys of the Vasler & Sons steelworks. We threaded through the stop-start traffic on the Martyr Girand junction, and turned onto the fresh blacktop of the eastbound R-11 highway. And then, at last, we were out of Indeleon.
The eastern plain was all farmland, a sudden shock of open green and gold after the endless concrete of the suburbs. Patchwork fields of wheat, barley and flowering rapeseed stretched off towards the grassy hills on the horizon. Tractors and motorised harvesters chuffed their way between the wind-rippled crops like gleaming steel beetles. To the south, a procession of massive electricity pylons rose against the blue spring sky.
Jandra said nothing as we drove. She rolled down the window and stared out at the fields, the wind tousling her auburn hair. She glanced my way and smiled when I patted her thigh, but otherwise gave no response.
I switched on the radio and tuned into the state news channel. It sounded like business as usual. Decisive victories over the syndicalist insurgents in the Tletoran mountains (the victories were always decisive, yet somehow the insurgency kept smouldering on, into its tenth or eleventh year now). Preparations for another manned lunar mission (following on from two successful landings on Ilath, and one disastrous launch failure). Crown Prince Thyras’ state visit to Comaghir, where of course he was received by adoring crowds (many of whom probably weren’t even bribed to be there). Triumphant updates on the national industrial strategy – the opening of X new factories, Y new airports, Z new interprovincial highways. Long live the king, praise be to the Almighty.
“Music?” I asked Jandra.
“Yeah. Something light would be nice,” she replied. Then, after a moment: “Can I have a cap?”
I hesitated. I knew it was a terrible idea, given what she was going through. I was still coming down from last night, and while the itch was there, it wasn’t yet irresistible. Not for me, at least.
“Please,” Jandra said. She turned to me with that awful brittle look in her eyes. The cool wind coming through her open window whooshed around us.
Almighty help me, I gave in. “You know where they are.”
She took the bottle of stay-awake out of the glove compartment and slipped two capsules into her mouth. I found us one of the better swing stations and let the Emerce Quartet’s bass violin compete with the rushing breeze.
*
Itan Lake was an hour’s drive east of Indeleon, nestled in a dense swathe of spruce and cedar forest. As the trees thickened to either side of the road, the timber farmhouses and drum-roofed barns gave way to grand summer homes. We passed the imposing red-brick piles of the shire aristocracy and the even larger Dynastic Revival manses of the industrial new money. Some of the houses had seen better days, with cracked forecourts and walls overgrown with black ivy, but I didn’t see any in ruins. Unlike Indeleon, this part of the province had escaped the Salv area-denial operations. There were places further north where Nilen’s men hadn’t left a single tree standing.
I opened the Hawker’s sunroof to let in more of the country breeze. It was amazing how clean it tasted, or rather, how accustomed I had become to the oily taste of the city. The sun filtered down in sparkles through the canopy above us. The road ahead was a tunnel of rustling green, roofed with spreading cedar branches.
Jandra seemed calmed by the stay-awake, as if sedated rather than stimulated. She tapped her fingers to the music, and some of the tension went out of her shoulders. She still hardly said a word. Her silence gave me time to think – mostly about the things I didn’t want to think about.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
I could have kidded myself that the silver machine had been a trick of the light. As for the ganger’s final words, delirium and blood loss could make a dying man say all manner of crazy things. It was Orczin’s parting threat that really had me spooked. It will be beyond my ability to protect you. I may not even be able to protect myself.
Contraband tech was no joke. Every now and then, the insurgents in Tletora and Zegir-Kuya got their hands on fancy new gear, guided missiles or electronic jammers or explosive drones, that let them raise hell for the King’s Army. Some of it, supposedly, was even more advanced than the best Kauln equivalents. Nobody knew who was sending them this stuff, which was keeping them in the fight even after ten years of relentless bombing. It was why those decisive victories were never decisive enough.
The leading theory was that secret sympathisers inside the military were behind it. Some said it was a network of radical syndicalists, with deep-cover cells hidden all over the kingdom. Others claimed it was diehard Salvators who’d escaped the purges after the war. Whoever it was, they were damned good smugglers, and persistent. There was a reason the Inspectorate kept setting up new checkpoints and river patrols, and press-ganging us watchmen into being their informants. No matter how much they tightened the net, contraband kept sneaking its way through.
I’d heard of dockland raids uncovering missile components and caches of explosives. I had never heard of anything like the machine in the ruins. It had been fast and sleek and unearthly, a quicksilver flash in the torchlight. If that was contraband tech, it was more advanced than even the wildest rumours. And from what Orczin had said, it was something already known to the black-bands, something they were very interested in. Something that, for whatever reason, he didn’t want us to report to them.
I was a faithful subject of the king; I knew how to keep my mouth shut. I could only pray that would be enough. If we were caught hiding something from the Inspectorate, a City Watch badge wouldn’t save us from the black cells.
The road switchbacked down a steep wooded hillside, then snaked through a village of pleasant thatched cottages in the valley below where the trees thinned out. A mile further on, we crested a gentle rise, and the glittering sweep of Itan Lake came into view. The near shore was crowded with lakehouses, with sloped gardens and long wooden jetties projecting out into the waves. There were dozens of boats on the lake, dinghies and ketches and expensive-looking motorboats jaunting across the sunlit water.
Jandra’s mood brightened noticeably at the sight. The smile that crept across her face was innocent, unforced. For a moment, I forgot all about Orczin and the Inspectorate. It was just us, my Jandra and I, breathing that sweet country air.
I followed the road a few miles northward, never losing sight of the water. There were several small villages strung out along the lake’s northern shore, the sort of places that looked picture-book perfect and were probably deathly boring to live in. They sported splendid old taverns, half-timbered alehouses from the days of the Korhei dynasty, with grassy beer gardens overlooking the water and names like The Fisherman’s Ghost and The Prince of Poachers. A million miles from Indeleon’s neon-washed corner bars and dingy basement clubs.
Must have been nice, to come through the war so untouched.
On such a sunny day, the taverns were busy with locals and out-of-towners. The first few we tried, in the larger villages, were all full to the rafters. We finally lucked out in Colhain’s Landing, a town that consisted of little more than a terraced high street and an old intendant’s manor. Its tavern, The Crimson Avocet, was similarly tiny and quaint, with a raised wooden deck backing right onto the lake. I was surprised to find the place had electric lighting. That seemed to be its only concession to modernity, aside from a handwritten sign in the front bay window saying NO DOGS, NO DARKSKINS.
The tavern’s wood-panelled interior was cool, dark and quiet. There were half a dozen people in the booths – not that there was space for many more – and a few more out on the deck. The bearded old fellow working the bar gave us a look that spoke volumes about his opinion of city folk. He poured us tall pints of pale lager with barely a word.
We sat outside, on a worn cedar bench facing the shimmering water. The air coming in off the lake was cool and pleasant enough, although edged with the occasional hint of mud and rot. And, despite the barman’s unfriendliness, the beer was excellent.
“It’s good to be back on the lake,” Jandra said, a quarter of the way through her pint. Her expression remained calm, though her feet tapped restlessly under the table. “It reminds me of home.”
“Home as in Kylera?” It was meant to be a beautiful city, high up in the foothills of the Great Range. I’d never visited, and probably never would. The flights alone would eat up half a year’s pay.
She nodded. “The lakes there are bigger, and bluer. And you have the mountains in the background, all the way to the horizon. But the way the sun hits the water, on a day like this…” She waved her hand at the rippling surface, which sloshed against the edge of the deck in gentle wavelets. “It’s the closest you can get, in Kauln.”
“Beats the Velmiris,” I replied. The sun was in my eyes; I wished I’d brought dark glasses. “Definitely smells cleaner.”
“In Kylera, our house was an easy walk from one of the lakes. The locals called it Akuha’s Eye. Some old Tletoran god, I guess.” Jandra’s smile was wistful. She sipped her beer and went on. “Me and my brother would swim out as far as we dared. We’d race each other to little islands, or try and climb onto fallen trees floating in the lake. Almighty, we didn’t know what fear was back then.”
I grinned at her. I was just glad to see her in a talkative mood again. “Everyone’s a reckless little shit at that age.”
“One time, we were gone so long Mother called the neighbours out to search for us. She smacked us black and blue when we got back to shore. Why did I bring you all the way to Tletora to get you away from Nilen’s bombs, she said, if you’re just going to drown yourselves? Oh, I must have cried for three days straight.”
“And then, on the fourth day, you went out on the lake again?”
Jandra laughed. “Of course. My brother would’ve called me a coward otherwise.”
I shaded my eyes and looked out at the bright water. A motorboat was burbling past, dragging a foaming white wake behind it. “When I was a kid, I used to wish I had a brother.”
“They’re overrated. Me and Mahanel fought like devils.”
“Sounds more fun than being an only child.”
In truth, I envied Jandra more than just her brother. She was only eight when the war ended. She’d never known Kauln before the bombs fell. Her family didn’t return to the kingdom until she was a teenager. Her parents were getting on in years now, but alive and well, running a tailor’s shop in the Crown City. Her brother was a chemical engineer in Ksarle on the north coast, married with two school-age daughters. They all got together every Year’s Turn, and Jandra always came back smiling, pining for her mother’s cooking.
My mother lived in a nursing home in Fort Amrinn. Senility had come to her early, and hard. She no longer recognised my face when I visited. She asked endlessly for my father.
None of that made for cheerful tavern conversation, though. We were here for Jandra’s sake, not mine. My grief was old and stale. Hers was fresh, bloody as a new-killed deer.
We sat and drank and chatted, watching distant white sails flutter in the wind. I was worried Jandra would ask for more stay-awake, but it seemed the two capsules had been enough for her. I was both impressed and unsettled by how well she was handling the drug. Aside from the usual fidgeting, she seemed quite sober.
I’d just come back out with our second round of beers when I heard a faint sound, a rising whir at the edge of my hearing. I frowned. It was a familiar sound, something I heard every day in Indeleon. But we were in the middle of the countryside, in a little lakeside village, and out here that sound was totally alien.
Jandra noticed it as well. She paused with her beer glass at her lips. “Evaris, am I imagining that?” she asked.
“No,” I told her. “I hear it.” I saw a couple of the other drinkers on the deck look up in surprise.
The whirring sound rose to a sudden crescendo. Waterbirds rose from the lakeshore in a fluttering panic. Four Inspectorate drones came into view, buzzing over our heads, alarmingly low. They flew out over the lake in a loose formation, spreading out and slowing. The downwash of their rotors made weird ripple patterns on the water as they descended. I could see the boats in their path urgently cutting motors or heaving to, none of them wanting to catch the drones’ attention by maintaining their speed.
“Almighty, can’t we even have one fucking day away from them?” Jandra hissed.
They’re here for us, I thought, for one terrifying second. They found out about the silver machine and they want to haul us in for questioning. We’re going to go into the black cells.
But it wasn’t us they wanted. We watched – as did everyone else in the tavern, all of us crowding at the railings of the deck – as the drones converged on one of the drifting motorboats, a few hundred yards offshore. They circled around it like black metallic vultures. Echoing snatches of loudspeakered orders reached us across the water. I heard the amplified words halt and surrender your vessel and impounded and under arrest.
I thought, again, of the ganger in the ruins. We’d given him similar orders.
“Terrorists, must be,” one of the other drinkers said confidently, leaning over the railing. He wore a scruffy flatcap, and had the broad accent of a lifelong country boy. “Zegiris, I bet, out planting bombs. Tawny scum.”
The man next to him, who was practically his lookalike, snorted. “Here? Who’d bother bombing Itan Lake?”
“That’s how terrorism works, ain’t it? Bomb people where they least expect it. Make ‘em afraid.”
“Why not Indeleon? Lots more people there to scare.”
“Can’t bomb what’s already been bombed flat,” the first man said, with an ugly smirk. “Fuck, another atomic would probably improve the place.”
I didn’t say anything, but I noticed Jandra gritting her teeth.
We were too far away to see any people on the boat, especially against the reflected glare of the sun. The boat itself was nothing more than a dark stationary sliver on the glittering lake. Over the next few minutes, some of our fellow onlookers lost interest and drifted back into the tavern. The drones remained on station, orbiting their prey. I assumed the Inspectorate was busy commandeering a boat of their own to bring in the impounded craft.
“Contraband runners, do you think?” Jandra muttered to me, between distracted sips of her beer.
“I don’t know. This hardly seems like the best place for smuggling. And in broad daylight, too.”
“Maybe some Inspectorate fuck just wants a new boat to take his mistress out in.”
The sudden rattle of gunfire took us all by surprise. It was a single long burst, something fully automatic and heavy-calibre. It echoed over the lake, sharp and unmistakeable. People cursed and spilled their drinks. Jandra flinched back from the railing like she’d been electroshocked. Instinctively, I reached down for a gun that was back in my locker at the precinct, seventy miles away.
“Was that the fucking tawnies?” demanded the country boy in the flatcap.
“No. Look at the boat,” his lookalike friend replied, pointing out across the lake. “I think it was the whirlybirds. They blew it up.”
He was right. The silhouette of the suspect boat had changed. It was listing heavily now, its stern lying much lower in the water. Sinking before our eyes.
“Didn’t know those things had guns on ‘em,” the flatcapped man grunted.
“Guess your tawnies didn’t want to surrender.”
“Aye, and good fucking riddance.” The flatcapped man raised his beer glass in the direction of the distant drones. “Good shooting, boys. Long live the king.”
Jandra turned away from the railing. She took a long drink of her beer, and set it down on our bench. Her hands were shaking. She gave me a wordless look.
I understood immediately. I downed what remained of my pint and reached for her hand. “Let’s go,” I said.