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  Grizmare folded her arms and tutted. “I can see where this is going. Your family have been arrested and you come to beg for clemency. Befriend me first, of course. So as to seal the deal.”

  “That is not it at all!” The nun banged the arm of her chair with the flat of a hand. “Nothing so mundane. Oh, I know you better than that, Grizmare… Madam Titian. You wouldn’t entertain anything so mediocre and I certainly wouldn’t approach you for it. Besides, my family are all long dead. Mother and Father first. Executed for religious crimes, according to the official documentation. Because they manufactured outlawed items – which they did – and were murdered for those self-same gloves and scarves. My sisters were rounded up during one of the National Guard’s sweeps and sent to the Killing Fields. I survived because I was auditioning in Nilreb. And since then, I have survived because I am a fucking good actress and I was born with the ability to pass.”

  Grizmare pulled at her chin hairs. She was disappointed in herself. Yes, she had picked up on the nun having some driving purpose beyond attending to the toilette and eccentricities of an octogenarian. She might even have known that, deep down, Lizabeth – Eva? – was Vary. But the eyes – so blindingly green, so pure – they had really thrown her.

  “You are quite the spectacle, Eva. My son’s scientists would call you a genetic anomaly and perform unpleasant procedures on your eyes in a bid to explain them.”

  “Fortunately, my official data trail testifies to my Bleek heritage.”

  “I warrant it does.” Grizmare continued to pluck at her chin. She narrowed her eyes, the better to see Eva, the truth of her anyway. “Counterfeit data like that is worth killing for. Liable to get you killed, too.”

  “It is. But I wasn’t about to give up on my brother, Ju. When our parents and sisters were killed, he chose to work for the Resistance, putting together pamphlets using a printing press hidden in the basement of the Universium library.”

  “Why are you telling me this? Why would you think I have the slightest interest in you and your role playing, or your dead parents, dead sisters, most likely a dead brother too?” Grizmare nosed the gin glass. She took a spicy mouthful. “I suppose the real question is, what do you want from me?”

  The nun – was she even that? – fetched them both a fresh measre. She took her perch and returned her gaze to the garden. “Grizmare, I can confirm that, as of last week, Kali was still alive. But that’s where the reassurance ends because our informant was recently executed inside the walls of Abbandon. As for what I want? Quite simply, I want you to help us rise up and act. I want history to testify to the fact that you, Grizmare Titian, matter. You are not just a grandmother, not just a mother. You are so much more. You can help halt the extermination of an entire ethnic group in this country. You, Grizmare, can be a burning star in the insidious night.”

  Grizmare rocked back in her seat and honked with laughter. “Oh, Eva! You’ve me pinned as quite the modern rebel. It’s hilarious and fantastically sinister. You, girl, have been stalking me for some time then? You and your merry band of revolutionists. I hope I have forced you to watch me take several hundred shits and pick my nose! And you think I would betray my own flesh and blood? High Judge Titian is my son!” The light went from her eyes. “He is my son,” she said more gently, her heart breaking just a little.

  An uneasy calm settled over the room. The nun’s words repeated over in Grizmare’s mind. Rise up… You can matter. You can matter!

  She felt a deep shifting inside, like bones breaking and resetting.

  Eva reached out. She laid a hand over Grizmare’s very gently, as if she was handling precious china. “High Judge Titian is your son, but Kali is your granddaughter. As history tells it, you stepped in when her mother died. High Judge Titian was absent for the most part. You raised Kali – and he took her away.”

  “That is a ridiculous thing to say.” Grizmare’s lips clamped shut. There was a small flicker of a nerve under one eye. Remarkably, though, she didn’t take her hand away from Eva’s. In that moment, she felt more alone than she ever had, even when her husband died and left her to bring up a squawking infant, even when Kali was arrested and she had hidden in the darkness of the house for three days straight rather than face the pain of sunlight.

  Grizmare’s shoulders slumped. “Some part of me will always take responsibility for creating the beast which rules this country. I didn’t set out to raise my son to be wicked. If you ask me, the fucker was determined to turn out that way. And for the longest while, I thought Kali was destined to follow the same path.” She took back her hand and nursed her sour gin, taking sips to fortify herself. “Kali should have talked to me. Maybe we could have worked out a wiser approach to the whole rebellion thing. I found her notes, you know.”

  Eva became acutely alert. Grizmare was reminded of a desert otter, sitting up on its hind legs, nose twitching.

  “Yes, I thought you and your rebel kind would be interested in that little fact.”

  “What notes did Kali leave for you?” A stillness settled over the young woman, as if she feared the slightest movement would make Grizmare clam up again.

  And she was tempted; in so many ways, Grizmare wanted to go back to keeping everything inside – all the anger, all the rage, all the guilt for what she might or might not be responsible for. But she was tired of it all. Or was it more a final conceding that she, Grizmare, did not hold the same views as the holy nation of Bleekland? In fact, she vehemently opposed them?

  “Kali never has known quite which side to come down on. Good, bad, she’s always been a bit of both. But I am older, crabbier, and one thing I know for sure: if I can breed a monster, I can help find a way to stab that abomination in the heart. High Judge Titian took my Kali away,” she said numbly, wishing she could peel time back from its blood and muscles. Instead, she drained her glass and held it out. “You’d better fill this up, Eva, and then I suggest you explain what it is you and the rest of the Resistance want from me.”

  Sixteen

  The blockers were at the door to the barracks at first light, barking insults and hacking up tobacco grinds. Mohab unrolled from his corner of the bunk, hearing his joints crack. The need to piss was overwhelming. He hurried to the slop trough at the far end of the shed, desperate to relieve himself before others crowded him out or the blockers bustled them into the assembly yard. It was pitch-black near the trough. He didn’t need to see to know his stream of urine was peppered with blood; one of his testicles had been crushed during a beating by a guard even before his transfer to Abbandon. A thin wire of pain backed up his urethra.

  “Get up, hogs! Get up!” The blocker threw the insults like grenades, bouncing them off the weary men. Groans accompanied the lengthening out of stiff muscles. Others sobbed in their sleep and were prodded awake by a neighbour; one slacker could see the nicks activated for a whole bunk! In a matter of seconds, the Vary males were shuffling out into the dawn.

  Finishing up at the trough, Mohab secured his trousers and hurried over to his father. “Roll call. It comes around too soon each day, I know…” His voice trailed off as he saw two figures crouched alongside the cot. Groff, the nurse, and Lieutenant Titian. Both glanced up as he approached. Groff had a hold of his father’s hand.

  “The Speaker is dead,” said the Lieutenant. Matter-of-fact, as if passing comment on the weather. She visibly softened, shoulders slumping. “Your father is dead,” she said, reminding him the body on the cot was not just his people’s spiritual and political leader. He was the man who had told Mohab stories on the porch and who had taught him to ride red racers. ‘Firm in the saddle, knees soft at the flanks.’ His father’s voice, now a ghost’s.

  “When?” The question was gritty on his tongue, like a mouthful of sand.

  “In the night sometime.” Groff stroked the dead man’s hand. “It was peaceful.”

  “I will ask about a burial.” The Lieutenant nodded vacantly at her own suggestion. “I’ll speak with the Commandant Superi
ntendent. It may be possible to arrange it.” She turned her head towards the demanding voices from the doorway. “We need to make roll call.”

  Groff stood up. He patted Mohab’s shoulder. “Come away now, Mohab.”

  Following the Lieutenant, Groff made Mohab put one foot in front of the other.

  Outside, the yard was already crowded with men blinking and stumbling on emaciated limbs. Silently, they fell in line. Words singled a person out.

  Despite the suppression of their voices, the Vary still managed to react to the arrival of the visiting officials. Breath came a little harder. Feet shuffled. The existing guards made no attempt to contain the reaction; let the Vary express their awe and fear in the face of their great leader!

  High Judge Titian walked ahead of the rest, flanked by the Secretary of State, Magne Kirkland, to his left and the camp’s Commandant General, Håkon Drescher, to his right. Behind walked Commandant Superintendent Joltu, and several of his higher-ranking officers. All wore the black uniform of the National Guard, collars stiffened with beet starch, wide razingstock leather belts at their waist.

  Two rows from the front, Kali had a clear view of the inspection party. The coarse pyjamas she wore rubbed her skin, but there was lightness to the prison clothing that she had never felt in all her years dressing as a guard. Her organs weren’t constrained by the belt. Her neck was free of its starched brace. The National Guard, meanwhile, sweated under their peaked brims.

  The sight of her father almost broke her and she had to fight to bring her emotions back under control. In red boots and matching lapels, he looked as officiously neat as she had ever seen him. Here in the desert, where the sun baked down and the earth steamed, he was the picture of control. Before him stood row on row of starving Vary and he was so utterly put together.

  Bile rose into Kali’s mouth. She swallowed the sourness back down.

  The sun was rising, but already the temperature was uncomfortable. All around, Vary swayed on unsteady feet, struggling with light-headedness and the fear of blacking out. On the far side of the yard, and separated from the males by two walls of slice-wire, the women and children stood and stared.

  High Judge Titian talked amongst his staff. Occasionally, he gestured to a barrack building or pressed a handkerchief to his temples.

  The usual roll call went ahead, with the weaker of the Vary picked off and led in the direction of the firing range. The invalids made no complaint. Kali suspected the poor devils had long forgotten why they were in Abbandon. She hoped their nicks would slice deep and deliver them from the pain.

  It was not enough that her father come and survey the Vary’s decay. It was soon apparent that he wanted to rescind their belief in false gods.

  “Where is the Speaker?” he demanded in the screech tone which characterised his orations and was entirely alien to Kali’s homelife.

  The question activated a chain of command which went from Commandant General to Commandant Superintendent to the block chief to his bully boys. The bark went out to, “Bring your father here, Speaker’s son!”

  Kali turned her head as much as she dared and saw a figure pulled out of line four rows back. She had a sudden, overwhelming desire to step forward too. ‘Do not expose yourself,’ she repeated silently as Mohab was dragged towards her father.

  XX

  Mohab remembered the weeks each summer when the red racers would require breaking in and his father stayed home awhile.

  “Let me tell you a story,” his father would say of an evening, settling into the old rocker on the porch and giving the seat beside him a pat. Mohab would climb up alongside his father and look out at the coarse prairieland of his family’s homestead and the low sun at the horizon. A first few stars would brighten, tiny diamonds ahead of the rush of night.

  Those evenings, Mohab would listen sleepily to his father’s stories of patchwork men, magic gourds, gilded lilies, tarnished knaves, white crows, and three young sisters enchanted into teaspoons – one brass, one silver and one gold – and a blind minister forced to taste his soup with each. All the triumphs and suffering of the Vary, lifted from the family books of all the hundreds and thousands of Vary descendants out there in the world. No matter how many times the Vary were driven from their homes, beaten, and degraded, the stories endured.

  Kneeling in the dust on the day his father breathed his last, Mohab finally thought he understood their value. They had kept his father elsewhere for most of his life, but they were also the only thing that felt solid any more.

  “My father is dead.” Mohab forced back his shoulders, steeling himself against a second blow.

  The blocker went to raise his makeshift beater, but a voice snapped, “Stop!”

  Mohab had only heard High Judge Titian speak on the National Broadcast, transmitted three times daily. But he recognised Titian’s voice from that one word and felt a reflexive jolt of fear.

  The blocker nudged him between the rows of prisoners to the very front.

  Mohab had seen enough photostats and parodies of the man to recognise High Judge Titian. He was stouter in the flesh, his cheeks slack and faintly grey, and he had the same delicate pale green eyes at Kali.

  “Speaker’s son.” Titian focused intently on Mohab’s face. “Where is the body?”

  “In the sweat box.”

  “Sweat box?”

  “The barracks.” Mohab’s throat flexed around a surge of grief.

  “He died of natural causes?”

  Mohab wanted to scream, ‘No, you rancid fucker! There was nothing natural about my father’s death. He was starved, beaten, and repeatedly humiliated.’ The words stayed unspoken. What was the use speaking to Bleekland’s High Judge in a language of truth he could never understand?

  Instead, Mohab just nodded.

  “Fetch the corpse.”

  Corpse? Mohab’s pain crystallised. What words! What terrible, festering words to say to a son! His rage was self-replicating, swelling to take up every last space inside of him.

  Titian repeated the order. Commandant Superintendent Joltu stepped forward.

  “Get your father.” Joltu nodded to a couple of guards. “He will need assistance.”

  “To carry the body of one old man? I think the male can manage,” said the Commandant General.

  Joltu stepped back, overruled and superficially unmoved.

  Mohab walked away, watched by Bleek and Vary alike and feeling the weight of so many eyes.

  Inside the gloom of the barracks, it took him a few moments to see again. Oppressive with body heat at night, the air inside was even more cloying in the sweltering day. The smell was animalistic – the shit-soaked slats of the bunks, the sulphur stench of opened orifices, and something new: the oaky putridness of a dead body.

  Mohab considered sitting down on the floor beside his father and waiting for death in whatever form it might take. But something about the instant degradation of his father’s body made him want to escape back into the light. He considered dragging his father’s body out on the low cot; he didn’t know if he wanted to touch him.

  “Hurry up, boy.”

  A guard stood in the doorway. Mohab struggled to lift the body. The lifeless head lolled against his shoulder and he cradled it there, reached behind the knees and lifted the body up into his arms. He had no doubt that his father was feather-light, but in that heat, with High Judge Titian waiting on him, the body was a tremendous burden.

  As the guard barked his demands, Mohab laboured to put one foot in front of the other. His father had opened his bowels on death, expressing the crud of his used-up existence. Mohab stumbled forward, immersed in its stench.

  Two rows back, Kali watched the Speaker’s son stagger from the barracks with the body in his arms, face straining under the weight. No one said a word as Mohab made his way slowly across the yard until he arrived at last in front of her father and stood, swaying under the strain put upon him.

  “Check the pulse,” Titian said to the air.

&n
bsp; Joltu unbuckled a cylindrical nick key from his belt. He checked for a pulse at the Speaker’s neck, undid one wrist nick, checked again and undid the second nick. “No pulse.” He threw the set of nicks to one of his officers, fastened the key back onto his belt and stepped back.

  Kali’s heartbeat quickened. What now? Crucify the body in a public place? Or would the fennec foxes get the best of the meat out in the desert? It was all so pathologically brutal. The man deserved a proper burial.

  “The Speaker has left his stain on this camp,” her father announced in his screech voice. “He spoke of change that wasn’t his to offer! Abbandon will not become a germ centre for fresh sedition. If other countries fear the gross indoctrinations of conscience and morality, we Bleek alone will embrace the label of barbarians. We will root this nation in acts of eradication in order to break down the core disease. Variness shall be made stagnant and it shall be made to burn.”

  He addressed his staff, but the oration was meant for the prisoners. Kali wanted to rush out of line and put a hand across his mouth. She did not love the Vary the way she had her own people, but the words which had once uplifted left the taste of ashes in her mouth. When the National Guard knocked their hands against their breasts in sharp salute, she wanted to break every arm. How could her people embrace barbarianism when they had language, architecture, schools of learning, music, poetry, dance, performance, and philosophy?

  There were no notions of beauty in her father’s next utterance. “Take the body to the factory and throw it in the furnace.” This, to the Speaker’s son, still cradling his dead father. There would be no burial; Kali understood that in the harshness of day. But to demand that a son cremate his father like a bag of slop at a slaughter house went against everything Kali understood about belonging to a cognitive species.

  “You cannot ask that!” she called out. “The man is dead. Why further the suffering?” With no way back, she stood up straight, imagining herself in uniform once more.