The Emergency, page 31
“Hands on the wheel! Hugo Rustin, you are under arrest on charges of consorting with the Yeoman enemy. Step out of the vehicle.”
Her assurance was remarkable. In a few short days she had acquired an air of absolute command. But Rustin didn’t move. “How can I step out with my hands on the wheel?”
“Do what I told you.”
He sighed. The words “under arrest” were unnerving, but he felt that they had been coming at him for days, for weeks—at the hospital, in Gandorig’s village, on the Cronk farm. He was tired of defending himself, and he found that a fine edge of rage on Selva’s behalf was giving him courage. “Do you see my daughter here?” He lifted the corner of the fabric from her cheek. She shrieked with pain. “I’m taking her to the hospital.”
The commander leaned forward to look through the window and winced. Iver lowered his rifle and stepped toward the hauler, and his face crumpled. “Oh no, Selva!”
“The Yeoman enemy we were consorting with? They did this to her.”
“One of us will take her,” the commander said.
“You’re welcome to come along, but I’m her father and I’m a doctor and I’m taking her.”
Rustin saw that he had created a dilemma for them all. He decided to resolve it.
“I’m surrendering myself to your custody. Remand me to the Wide Awake unit at the hospital. I have valuable intelligence for them. But my daughter shouldn’t be moved, she has a serious head injury. I’ll drive and one of your squad can ride in the bed.” He thought of something else, and even prepared the words: Under my seat you’ll find a pistol for confiscation. There are five rounds left in the cylinder. But he didn’t say them.
The conference that followed was into its third minute when Rustin told the commander that he would drive under armed guard or alone but he was continuing to the hospital. She scowled, wrote something down in a notebook, ordered the barrier to be lifted, and appointed Iver to ride in the hauler.
Rustin sped through late-night streets that he knew from countless prolonged surgeries. There were always a few people out—solitary men on their way home from working or drinking, lovers embracing against an alley wall, trash collectors making early rounds, an Excess Burgher asleep on a tram-stop bench. Public life had temporarily withdrawn, but the streets were waiting to be filled again, and you could hear the city breathing even if it didn’t speak. But this Sunday night felt as empty as the foothills and the switchgrass plains, or like the first days of the Emergency—abandoned. The houses and shops of the Heights District had lost their human purpose, and without it they’d turned to lifeless stone and brick and glass.
He had counted on being familiar to himself in the city where he belonged. But it was just like out there.
“What’s happened?” Rustin said over his shoulder to Iver, who was squatting at the front of the bed with his rifle across his knees.
“I’m sorry?” He had been staring through the back of the cab at Selva.
“There’s no one around.”
“Oh—just a precaution. They issued an advisory for people to stay indoors this weekend. In case of unexpected events.” Iver seemed to have memorized the phrases.
“What are we unexpecting?”
In the mirror Rustin saw the joke draw a blank, then a look of anxiety, and he remembered that he was under arrest. He recalled Iver’s face that day with the looters, the face of a boy who had grown up without ever hearing a word of encouragement, a year or two away from ruin. Now his hair was clean and trimmed short, and the aggrieved look was gone.
“You’ve done well, Iver.”
“Sorry, sir?”
“You were down on your luck when we first met. Now you have a position.”
“Together gave me a chance. The city never had any use for me. That’s what’s different now.”
“Did you think you’d be wearing a uniform and carrying a gun?” The question made Iver so uncomfortable that his Adam’s apple bobbed and he glanced down at his uniform. “What does Together mean to you now?” Rustin pressed.
“That’s—I’m not supposed to talk to you.” Around a corner the red and white lights on the hospital’s brick façade flashed into view. “Will Selva be all right, sir?”
“Yes,” Rustin said immediately. “She’s going to be herself again.”
It took much too long for anyone to appear at the entrance. At last a security guard in the olive-green uniform of the Wide Awakes came out of the glass doors. Rustin had never seen him, and the guard didn’t seem to know the chief surgeon. While they waited for a stretcher, Rustin rummaged in his pack and gave a few biscuits to Zeus, who hadn’t eaten since morning, then watered him from the canteen. A few more agonizing minutes passed before an orderly arrived. They lifted Selva out of the hauler and placed her on the stretcher. Zeus climbed up on the seat where she’d been lying as if to hold it until she came back.
In Rustin’s twenty years there had never been an hour of the day or night when the hospital wasn’t busy. That had always been part of its hold on him—the subdued frenzy, the hive of workers all following separate paths that somehow didn’t collide but belonged to a single pattern leading to a common goal. But he encountered no one as they hurried her down the corridor to the examination room and Iver tried to keep up while managing the unfamiliar burden of his rifle. On the wall Rustin noticed signs that hadn’t been there before. It had been less than two weeks, but he had the sense of having been away from the hospital for a very long time, months and months.
He was going to have to do it with no nurse or assistant, and that was what he wanted—to be alone with his daughter. He told Iver to stand outside the door. He scrubbed and snapped on a pair of gloves over his flannel shirt cuffs. The hospital felt colder than the night outside, and he asked Iver to find a blanket and pillow, and Iver complied as if the order of things had been reversed and Rustin was in charge.
When he pulled the fabric from the left side of her face, her scream was almost more than he could bear. What a stupid idea to cover it! The dark-red glossy skin around her eyebrow began to weep, but the egg-shaped blister on her cheekbone was still intact. The left eye was swollen shut and leaking serous fluid where the lids were stuck together. He examined her under the dazzle of the lamp while her right eye, swimming in tears, watched him. The pattern of the burn looked like an oval with her eye at its center and a stripe across her forehead. The pig’s iron had been wrought with some kind of intricate tip, like a letter on a cattle brand. He wasn’t used to treating injuries like this—emergency medicine was far in his professional past—but it was obvious that he should cleanse the burn, apply ointment, and hook her up to fluids. He also gave her pain medication stronger than what Brother Baard’s wife had procured.
All the while he was looking for signs of brain activity. It was good that her one eye was open, she responded to pain, and her neck didn’t appear stiff, but when he gave verbal cues, nothing came back. “What’s our dog’s name?” he asked. Her eye filled with an effort to answer, but the only sound she made was a gurgle that buzzed her lips. From the beginning he had feared that a second-degree face burn might not be the worst of it. Selva’s keen mind was buried alive, suffocating. He wanted to hear her voice, to hear her say anything, anything—even “I want to burn up the past.”
He dreaded taking off his medical gloves, but there was nothing more for him to do. He switched off the lamp and laid his hand on her head. He bent to kiss her hair. “Sleep, Sel. You need sleep.”
From the doorway there was a noise of a throat being cleared. Iver was standing at attention, rifle at his side. Next to him was Saron, his hands in the pockets of the director’s coat.
“Come with me, Hugo.”
9
“Did you know your wife was sitting in that chair just yesterday?” Saron asked when they were facing each other across the director’s desk.
“My wife? She was here?”
Saron clearly enjoyed Rustin’s surprise. “Annabelle said you’d gone camping with your daughter. When that didn’t fly, she came up with a heroic tale about an injured Stranger boy. Okay, Hugo. Why don’t you tell me what you’ve been doing in Yeoman country.”
Rustin felt that he must say exactly the right thing. A single slip, a suspicious detail, and he might never see his family again. But everything had gotten confused with the strange atmosphere of the city, Selva’s face under the examination lamp, the resident wearing the director’s coat, the image of Annabelle in this office, the sound of her name in his mouth, the shock of jealous fear it had sent up Rustin’s spine. This young doctor, barely out of the Imperial Medical College, always had the better of him.
“What she told you is true. But things took a turn for the worse, and I couldn’t help the boy. Then my daughter—” He saw it all happening again and shut his eyes for a moment. “They hurt her. I saw something out there.” Saron was listening with a kind of skeptical reserve, not openly derisive, but without interest in Selva. “And you were right.”
“What was I right about?”
“Yeomen. They believe insane things. They hate us. They were going to kill my daughter.” Even as he spoke he was thinking: Not Big Cronk. Or that woman, Brother Baard’s wife. I even felt sorry for the switchgrass mother with the four kids. And Little Cronk is dead. But he snuffed the thought and crushed the softening in his chest.
Saron leaned back in his chair and allowed himself a faint smile. Rustin had never seen Saron smile before; it only intensified the hostility in his eyes.
“I’ll tell you what I think happened. You had your little problem here at the hospital. You went out there to be the Great Burgher Savior—whoever needed you, Strangers, Yeomen. Were you actively providing aid and comfort to the enemy? I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter. You were behaving recklessly—just ask your daughter. You can’t be trusted in this city. That’s why you were arrested.”
“I understand the situation now. And I want to help you.”
Saron let out an ostentatious, humorless laugh. “So you’ve changed your mind about Together?”
“If Together defends my family. I’m a Burgher. I’m on your side.”
“Why should I care, Hugo? Do you remember telling me that how you think is none of my business?”
Rustin didn’t remember saying this, but he was going to accept whatever humiliations Saron chose to inflict. A few short weeks ago he had been the hospital’s chief surgeon and Saron an inexperienced resident, one of many, barely licensed. But Saron had understood the lay of the land and played it beautifully, while he had imagined a role that didn’t exist. Be true to yourself and see the world truly. He was learning what it really meant.
Instead of answering, he told Saron what he had learned about Dirt Thought, about the unit training on the Cronk farm, the violence there, the preparations around the countryside for some kind of action, the nighttime collection in the switchgrass plains …
Saron was cleaning his glasses in order to remain noncommittal, but at the word “shitapult” he slammed the hand that held his handkerchief down on the desk. “That’s impossible.”
“This is what they’re planning.”
“Not even they would do this.”
“You saw my daughter. It’s exactly what they’d do. It’s who they are.”
“But why?”
“To demoralize us. To bring us down where they are. To show anything is possible.”
Saron began clenching his jaws as Rustin had seen him do at the Restoration Ring. “How far over the walls?”
“I don’t know. A lot of the city could be exposed.” Rustin realized that both the hospital and the Rowhouse District, at opposite ends of the city, would likely be within range.
Saron returned the glasses to his face, already calculating how to respond to the threat. Together was a lofty and capacious idea, but Saron was practical, narrow, hard. You had to be hard to turn a schoolboy failure into a Wide Awake (Iver was still standing at attention by the office door), and you had to be hard to thrust a hot iron into a girl’s face. This must be the type that came to the fore in any emergency. Perhaps Together and Dirt Thought, though philosophical opposites and mortal enemies, had something in common at a level that wasn’t easy to see—an uncompromising quality that struck a hidden chord in the young.
“We don’t have to like each other, do we, Hugo?” Saron asked.
“Of course not.”
“The problem is, I don’t know whether to trust you,” he said, with what sounded like genuine uncertainty. “I’m going to give you a chance to prove yourself. Till then you’re in my custody.”
Rustin waited.
“We’ve asked Burghers to stay off the streets while we summon our Yeomen for orientation. Compliance rates have been pretty good, except for the Warehouse District. Do you know someone there?”
“A Yeoman? Yes, named Kask.” Saron nodded—he seemed to be familiar with the name. “But what do you mean, orientation?”
“Obviously, we have to keep an eye on our Yeomen if their cousins are going to start a shitstorm.”
“How are they being oriented?” Saron didn’t answer. “And I’m to do what?”
“Bring this man Kask here.”
“Why? What will happen to him?”
“Bring him here.” Saron abruptly stood up.
“Iver’s going with me?”
“Better if you go alone.”
“I really don’t want to leave my daughter.”
“She’s here with us now.”
It took Rustin a moment to pick up the whiff of menace.
10
It was still dark when he came out of the hospital. He hadn’t eaten in almost twenty-four hours, and a wave of nauseous hunger dizzied him. The last of the biscuits had gone to Zeus, who was thumping his tail on Selva’s seat where Rustin had left him. The only food in the pack was a tin of oily fish. He couldn’t face eating it. Then he thought of going home.
For days Annabelle had been hovering on the edge of his awareness. She was rarely a conscious subject but always a presence, inside and around him, like the haze surrounding a lamp on a foggy night, or background music he wasn’t quite listening to. He wasn’t making an effort not to listen, but whenever the music rose to his ears he felt a quiver of pain and shut it out. He knew that the pain had to do with longing and shame and the unfinished things between them, from the morning of his departure extending back through the whole of the Emergency to all their years together. And now he saw her standing in the front room; he saw her face, not angry or frightened, but with a look of inexpressible, irremediable sadness. Not just for Selva but for what he had let happen to them all.
When she worried, especially when she worried about her family, Annabelle slept badly. Even now, before dawn, she was probably awake. But he wouldn’t go home yet. First he wanted to sort things out at the hospital. He wanted to make sure Selva was safe—to show Saron whose side he was on. He drove to the Warehouse District.
At the turnoff into the maze of huddled dwellings and gaping façades, he thought of the gun that he’d left under the seat. It was still there. He was wearing his jacket again, with the lavender fragrance of Selva’s soap on the shoulders, and he stowed the gun in its pocket.
The dominant feature of the district—the infernal noise of engines and tools and men—was gone. A ghostly quiet met him as he navigated the dark streets and tried to avoid colliding with junked machinery or falling into watery potholes. He didn’t know where Kask had rooms, or whether he was here at all, so he drove deeper in the direction that he thought he remembered would take him to the street of vehicle parts, seeing no landmarks, getting hopelessly lost. All the while he had the sense of being watched from alleys and high windows.
He was jolting along a narrow cobblestone lane that ran between a canal and a row of warehouses. A vague feeling of familiarity came over him. On a brick façade the hauler’s lights caught the nearly illegible words ELECTRICAL AND PLUMBING SUPPLY, and Rustin realized where his wandering had brought him. He wasn’t surprised. On some level he had known from the moment Saron had mentioned the Warehouse District that he would end up here.
There was nowhere to park except in the middle of the lane. Rustin turned off the engine and cut the lights. Getting out with his pack, he slipped and nearly fell on the slimy stones. He gestured for Zeus to come, and Zeus, confined for hours, bounded out of the hauler as if they were about to go for a long walk in the park, then ran nose to the ground sniffing madly over to the canal and flitted back and forth between new smells, trying to get rid of his pent-up energy.
A corrugated gate was shut over the warehouse bay and padlocked to a metal plate screwed into the cobblestones. To the left of the gate there was a mullioned window. The panes were so filthy that Rustin could make out nothing inside, only a murky stillness.
He was contemplating smashing the nine panes one at a time with a loose stone when he noticed that the warehouse was bordered by an alley. He took the torch from his pack and followed the alley down, led by Zeus, who chased after the scuttling noise of a small creature. A mound of metal scraps and rods and wiring and broken pieces of clay was piled against the warehouse wall. Just past it, before the alley came to a dead end at a fence, there was a low wooden door made of vertical boards held together by a diagonal brace, like a coal door. Perhaps this was where the Manager got rid of unwanted parts. Rustin pressed down on the thumb latch and pushed. The door was loosely bolted on the inside. He had never broken into a building. He stepped back and gave the door a hard kick, and it flew open with a sound of splintering wood.
He was in a cramped, low-ceilinged room. It had a pleasant smell of lubricating oil and melted wax. The light of his torch found a table with scattered papers, clay masks strewn across the floor, and, in a corner, a pile of bronze knobs like the one he’d seen on Selva’s throat. It was the office of the Manager. He’d come bustling out of this room to reprimand an intruder: No, no, no! Absolutely not! Rustin stood and listened. At this hour the workshop seemed empty.
