The Emergency, page 33
“But she’s alive, thank God.”
Rustin remembered what Kask was referring to. It was part of the long and vivid dream, which must contain thousands of pictures and words that would occasionally surface to haunt him for the rest of his life. But for now there was the next step.
He had learned how to pick her up and lay her down without difficulty, even in the cramped space of the hauler. He took the key from the outside pocket of his pack where he’d first stored the gun and went around to the gate, but his body was too sore and hungry and simply old to climb easily onto the bed. Kask made an instinctive move toward him, but the cuffs jerked him back. With an unashamed moan Rustin swung a leg as high as he could and hoisted himself up onto his knees. Kask watched with puzzled detachment as the metal restraints were unlocked and removed.
A missile fell out of the sky into the hauler’s bed.
It landed at the back, away from the two men, but its mass and velocity were sufficient to spatter the tips of their shoes.
“What the—” Kask started to say.
Rustin understood at once and cut him off. “Get inside!” he shouted, flashing on the sack of food that had sailed out of an upper window in an alley and hit these shoes in the same way. The mess in the bed was large and runny, but he managed to climb out without touching it. He reached up for Kask’s hand, but Kask was rubbing his wrist and staring at his feet.
“Is it—”
“Yes.”
“But how—”
“Hurry up, step around it. Once it’s on you—like skunk spray, you’ll never get clean.”
“My God.”
As soon as they were inside the cab with the doors closed, Selva’s legs resting on Kask’s thighs, another round struck the nearby pavement. Rustin shifted into the wrong gear and jolted forward into the trash container, shattering the hauler’s lights. “Sorry,” he muttered, but Kask hardly seemed to notice. As they backed out and sped away, the hospital wall began to take one hit after another. Rustin wondered if the Yeomen had found their true target.
It was strange to come through a zone of flying horror and find his fellow Burghers a block away patiently waiting for the tram, walking hand in hand with their children, stopping to read a sign on a lamppost as if there was no danger anywhere in the world, while an enemy army gathered outside the walls.
“Where are we going?” Kask asked.
“It’ll be safer in the middle of the city.”
As he drove, Rustin briefly explained what was happening. Kask listened without saying a word. Finally, he murmured, “I don’t get it.”
The simplicity of this remark touched Rustin. “I don’t get a lot of things about the Emergency,” he said. “Maybe some historian will explain it all someday.”
There was a crowd at the main entrance to the Warehouse District. Rustin couldn’t tell if they were Burghers or Yeomen, but Kask said, “You’d better stop here, doc. These guys aren’t in a mood to talk.”
“You know them?”
“I told you. The district watch.”
Rustin pulled over by the tram tracks. Kask eased himself from under Selva’s legs and stepped outside. He leaned in the window. “Will she be all right?”
“I don’t know, but I’m taking her home. I’ll get the hauler fixed and cleaned and return it to you when I can.” Kask shook his head to say that the hauler didn’t matter. “What’s your plan, Kask?”
He shrugged. “Some of those people want to go back to the country.”
“And you?”
“Me? This is where I live.” He reached with a big calloused hand for Rustin’s, and they shook. Then Rustin thought of something. He took the gun from his pocket and laid the grip in Kask’s palm.
“It’s going to get worse before it gets better.”
12
The streets to the Rowhouse District were so familiar that Rustin could have driven them blind. At last there was nothing left between him and his home and family. He had made a mostly successful effort not to imagine the moment when he would open the door with the small nail hole just above eye level and meet the faces of his wife and son. He had let them get so far away that at times it seemed his daughter was his family. He had taken her from them only to let this thing happen, and every sentence he started collapsed halfway and died of inadequacy. And yet he felt a kind of possessiveness about all that the two of them had been through together. He remembered the expression he’d put on the night he came home from the hospital in disgrace—his normal look of contentment. Pan called it his “sunrise face.” It was the look of a man who would say, “That’s just the way it has to be.” Now the thought of it revolted him.
He turned onto the riverfront boulevard and glanced down to prepare for what Annabelle and Pan would see. Selva’s eye was watching him, and her mouth was open.
“Papa,” she said with a dry, clotted mouth. His heart leapt, then froze when she added: “Gard?”
He didn’t have time to think of an answer, because someone screamed. Up ahead a woman at the tram stop was flailing at something around her hair. She ran blindly one way and then another, waving her arms, shaking her hands, and her screams rose to a frantic pitch. She appeared to be under attack by a swarm of wasps. Then something came flying over the tram shelter and exploded on the sidewalk, and Rustin understood that they had the city surrounded.
On the riverfront men and women were looking up at the sky. It was crowded with crisscrossing flight paths. By the stone footbridge a small child was pointing and laughing while its mother stood motionless. Two schoolgirls sprinted toward the hauler with book bags on their heads. A man with a cane fell to the ground.
Rustin accelerated around the schoolgirls, then turned so hard into the narrow street of rowhouses that the hauler went up on two wheels. He misjudged its width and scraped against their wooden fence. Before he had Selva out of the hauler, the front door flew open, and Annabelle was there in her nightdress and robe.
“No, go back!” he called. “We’re coming.”
Annabelle ignored him. She ran down the steps through the gate and around to his door and stopped short. Her hand flew to her mouth.
She insisted on helping him carry Selva into the house, though it was more awkward this way. He had forgotten how beautiful distress made her. He tried to meet her eyes, to learn from them who he now was or could be, but as Annabelle prepared the sofa in the front room with pillows and blankets, and knelt to hold Selva’s hand, and soothed Pan’s sobbing, and put on a pot of carrot soup, she avoided looking at him. In her face there was a kind of resolve, a clarity that said: whatever comes, this is what matters. It seemed to indict his ambitions and creeds, and he wanted to tell her, “They didn’t survive out there,” but she allowed no chance for intimacies. She moved about the house with practical energy, feeding Zeus, serving early lunch at the walnut table where one chair stood empty, and when she looked at him there was neither the judgment nor the forgiveness that he craved in her eyes.
“She’ll stay downstairs,” she told him. “Make the front room a treatment room.”
“Annabelle—”
“Wash up and eat some soup. You can tell me later.”
When the moment came, they were standing in the kitchen where Selva couldn’t hear them. He began an account of her injury, and Annabelle listened for a minute before putting her face in her hands and turning away. The urge to tell her about Selva’s courage and his own foolishness, the village trial, young Monge and the Strangers, the mysterious change at Big Cronk’s farm, the animals at the quarry, the Yeoman wife and the switchgrass mother and the shitapult, the indifferent stars, the Better Human, Kask, the whole long and vivid dream, was so strong that her refusal to let him felt like a punishment.
He returned alone to the front room. “Selva! Oh God!”
His daughter was lying on the sofa as before, her open eye watching him. This was where she always used to study, and at last he saw what he had done to her. He made an effort to compose his face as he unpacked his stolen medical supplies, and cleansed the burn, and reapplied ointment.
The most immediate danger was infection. The egg-shaped blister was going down, but she would probably lose her left eye and suffer some disfigurement. He began to think through the skin graft that would be necessary to repair her face. It was impossible to know the long-term cognitive damage, but his hopes clung to the two words she’d uttered. Different shades of expression showed her awareness of each family member. She even managed a faint smile at Pan’s self-aggrandizing, self-mocking tale about his day at Grandpa’s and the hospital. She hadn’t spoken again, but he believed, without saying so or allowing himself to be consoled, that she would come back to them.
There was plenty for him to do, yet he felt superfluous in his own home, as if he had never lived here. A small matter like how to work the tricky latch on the pantry door confused him, and he had trouble making simple decisions, such as whether to take the nap that Annabelle suggested. He kept waiting for instructions from her.
Late in the morning, he found her weeping by the sofa where Selva was asleep. When he came near, she looked up at him with unutterable reproach.
* * *
Around noon there was a knock at the front door. Zeus, as comfortable being home as Rustin was uneasy, sat up and barked. Rustin’s first thought was that Saron had sent a Wide Awake to bring him in. He stood up from the armchair, then looked at Annabelle, who was reading aloud to Selva from her favorite collection of folktales. “Should I see who it is?” he asked.
At the door stood a pair of teenagers, a girl and a boy. The girl, who wore a set of hospital scrubs, with her ponytail coming loose and a look of apologetic fright on her round face, was his former nurse assistant, Lyra. The boy, a few years younger, a foot taller, and skeletally thin, was his former patient, the son of Kask’s Yeoman friend, shot during “games.” He had an arm draped over the girl’s shoulder and was gasping for breath. His forehead and chin were covered in outbreaks of dry red skin.
“I’m sorry to bother you, Doctor Rustin,” Lyra said. “Hello, Mrs. Rustin.”
Rustin looked over his shoulder. Annabelle set the book down and said, “It’s you,” as if she knew the girl and might have been expecting her.
“Yes, because you said to visit if I needed anything. I’m sorry to bother, but I didn’t know where to bring him because his parents are worried that he’s getting weaker, his lungs are filling up, and the hospital wouldn’t take him, so this morning I went to the Warehouse District and we walked here with everything going on outside—”
Rustin had never heard Lyra say so much, neither in his operating theater, in the Restoration Ring, nor at We Are One. Her acquaintance with Annabelle alarmed him, because Lyra was one of the unfinished things between him and his wife; he didn’t know what might have been said, and now it was too late. But Annabelle caught his eye, raised her eyebrows, and shrugged in her way of acknowledging something slightly absurd, as if to say: I guess we’ve both seen new things. “Show them in, Hugo.”
“We’ll take off our shoes first,” Lyra said. Rustin looked down and saw that her hospital shoes and the boy’s laceless, shredding boots were stained. He closed the door behind the visitors before the house became a target. “It’s really bad out there, Doctor Rustin,” she said.
“What’s going on?” Annabelle asked.
“It’s like a war.” Lyra described the terror of the air assault, the rush of armed Burgher and Stranger units to the North and South Gates, the roundup of Yeomen at orientation sites, the conscription of cleanup brigades. The most dangerous part of the city was the Warehouse District, which was why they had such trouble getting to the Rustin rowhouse.
“Did you know about this?” Annabelle asked her husband. She had turned pale.
Rustin briefly explained what he had heard at the switchgrass settlement, but no one seemed able to grasp what he was saying. “Is it happening on our street?” he asked Lyra.
“Stopped,” the boy wheezed. His open mouth stank, revealing bloody gums and black gaps between his loose teeth.
“Sit down,” Rustin said. “Take off your jacket. Let me look at you.”
The boy’s long, wasted frame sank into the armchair. The eyes that had pleaded with Rustin on the operating table now watched him nervously. With a pilfered stethoscope he listened to the liquid chest, and by the light of the torch he examined the rotting mouth and the face rash. He gave the boy Selva’s book. “Can you lift this above your head?” The boy raised the book a few inches before his arm collapsed into his lap. Rustin looked under his shirt and studied the surgery scars. At least those were healing as they should.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with him,” Lyra said.
“Scurvy,” Rustin said. “Vitamin deficiency. We don’t see it often here. What are you eating?”
The family was subsisting on potatoes and turnips. Everything else in Warehouse District markets cost too much with the blockade of produce trucks. Yeomen were starving Yeomen.
The boy was looking at Selva, and her eye was looking back at him. “Who in the world did that to you?”
Rustin almost said, “Your friends,” but he stopped himself. The boy was his patient again, and this gave him something to do—this was what he would do. “He should stay here a few days, don’t you think?” Rustin said to Annabelle, who was returning from the kitchen with a bowl of carrot soup for the boy.
She nodded. “We can put him upstairs with Pan.”
Lyra was lingering by her former chief surgeon. He understood that she wanted to be helpful, and he asked her to sterilize his instruments in hot water.
In the middle of the afternoon Rustin announced that he was going to take a quick walk around the neighborhood and see if anyone needed first aid. Pan, who was showing Lyra his collection of dead caterpillars, jumped to his feet. “I’m going, too.” Rustin looked at Annabelle, and she looked at Pan, who looked at Lyra and said, “I’ve gotten older since Papa went away.” With Annabelle’s permission father and son went out together carrying umbrellas.
The hauler was gone, again. In his hurry Rustin had left the key inside. He felt a twinge of regret, but Kask would have more serious things on his hands. The street and the sky were empty. The Rowhouse District had no obvious strategic value—it just happened to be close to the city walls—but the Yeomen had done their work. The sidewalk was hit especially hard, and he took Pan’s hand to lead him out onto the street, but Pan pulled away. At first Rustin thought it was done in anger, but he saw how his son walked on ahead with a deliberate stride, looking right and left like a young soldier inspecting the ruins of a battlefield, and he realized that Pan was letting his father know he was no longer the little boy he’d left behind four days ago.
From the riverfront boulevard came a rasping noise of metal on pavement or stone. At the corner half a dozen men in blue jumpsuits were standing around smoking while two others scraped the street with shovels. When Rustin and Pan appeared, the smokers threw away their cigarettes and went back to work, which was shoveling shit and dumping it in a trash barrel. Rustin looked around for a Wide Awake guard. Then he noticed that the Yeomen shovelers, like the Strangers in the quarry, were chained by the ankles.
A well-dressed woman was sitting on a nearby bench, and for some reason she was sobbing.
The scene on the riverfront was far worse than the Rustins’ street. A few pedestrians were walking in the middle of the boulevard, too dazed to notice where they stepped. The windows of the bakery where he used to pick up pastries on weekend mornings were coated in filth, and so was the wall of the shop where he bought his cigars. Across from the footbridge a few feet of tram tracks looked impassable. Zeus’s favorite sniffing ground around a plane tree was humanly bespattered. These places to which Rustin had never given thought because they were the little things of ordinary life—all marked for desecration. It would take a platoon of shovelers a day and a night to dig out the Rowhouse District, and even that wouldn’t be enough. It would never be the same. The city by the river was no longer his city.
He was overcome with sadness. This wasn’t a divine plague like an earthquake, or a remote event like an empire’s collapse. It was done by human hands, by people he knew, and the ruin was so total that neither Burgher nor Yeoman hands were clean. He, too, must have played a part. He had killed a boy, and failed to save another boy, and put his daughter in harm’s way. He had lost the hospital forever.
He would have to start over again, without a guild or title or creed, with only this human stuff—water, protein, and love. He would still be Annabelle’s husband, Selva and Pan’s father. But what was left for him to give his children? This ground, this sky.
The woman on the bench kept sobbing.
Pan moved next to his father, and Rustin felt a hand reach for his. “What’s happened, Papa?”
He pretended to scan the riverfront, but in fact he was thinking, I must get to know him better.
“It seems we’ve lost our minds, Pan.”
“That’s what Mama said.”
“When did she say that?”
“When you were away, after we saw Grandpa. Grandpa said Yeomen are solid people, but Selva said they’re man-eaters. Is that boy with bad breath a Yeoman?”
“I think so, but we should try not to think about him that way.”
“They’re the ones that hurt Selva!”
Rustin saw the animals at the quarry and had to push away the urge to shoot them all. “He didn’t do it.”
“Aren’t we having a war?”
He squeezed Pan’s hand. “I’m afraid so.”
“What are we going to do?”
Because Rustin did not have an answer, he approached the bench where the well-dressed woman was wiping her cheeks with a lace handkerchief. He asked if she wanted a cup of tea.
She turned up her raw, swollen-lipped face. “What?” She didn’t seem to understand the question. “Please leave me alone.” She went back to the comfort and anonymity of her handkerchief.
Rustin remembered what Kask was referring to. It was part of the long and vivid dream, which must contain thousands of pictures and words that would occasionally surface to haunt him for the rest of his life. But for now there was the next step.
He had learned how to pick her up and lay her down without difficulty, even in the cramped space of the hauler. He took the key from the outside pocket of his pack where he’d first stored the gun and went around to the gate, but his body was too sore and hungry and simply old to climb easily onto the bed. Kask made an instinctive move toward him, but the cuffs jerked him back. With an unashamed moan Rustin swung a leg as high as he could and hoisted himself up onto his knees. Kask watched with puzzled detachment as the metal restraints were unlocked and removed.
A missile fell out of the sky into the hauler’s bed.
It landed at the back, away from the two men, but its mass and velocity were sufficient to spatter the tips of their shoes.
“What the—” Kask started to say.
Rustin understood at once and cut him off. “Get inside!” he shouted, flashing on the sack of food that had sailed out of an upper window in an alley and hit these shoes in the same way. The mess in the bed was large and runny, but he managed to climb out without touching it. He reached up for Kask’s hand, but Kask was rubbing his wrist and staring at his feet.
“Is it—”
“Yes.”
“But how—”
“Hurry up, step around it. Once it’s on you—like skunk spray, you’ll never get clean.”
“My God.”
As soon as they were inside the cab with the doors closed, Selva’s legs resting on Kask’s thighs, another round struck the nearby pavement. Rustin shifted into the wrong gear and jolted forward into the trash container, shattering the hauler’s lights. “Sorry,” he muttered, but Kask hardly seemed to notice. As they backed out and sped away, the hospital wall began to take one hit after another. Rustin wondered if the Yeomen had found their true target.
It was strange to come through a zone of flying horror and find his fellow Burghers a block away patiently waiting for the tram, walking hand in hand with their children, stopping to read a sign on a lamppost as if there was no danger anywhere in the world, while an enemy army gathered outside the walls.
“Where are we going?” Kask asked.
“It’ll be safer in the middle of the city.”
As he drove, Rustin briefly explained what was happening. Kask listened without saying a word. Finally, he murmured, “I don’t get it.”
The simplicity of this remark touched Rustin. “I don’t get a lot of things about the Emergency,” he said. “Maybe some historian will explain it all someday.”
There was a crowd at the main entrance to the Warehouse District. Rustin couldn’t tell if they were Burghers or Yeomen, but Kask said, “You’d better stop here, doc. These guys aren’t in a mood to talk.”
“You know them?”
“I told you. The district watch.”
Rustin pulled over by the tram tracks. Kask eased himself from under Selva’s legs and stepped outside. He leaned in the window. “Will she be all right?”
“I don’t know, but I’m taking her home. I’ll get the hauler fixed and cleaned and return it to you when I can.” Kask shook his head to say that the hauler didn’t matter. “What’s your plan, Kask?”
He shrugged. “Some of those people want to go back to the country.”
“And you?”
“Me? This is where I live.” He reached with a big calloused hand for Rustin’s, and they shook. Then Rustin thought of something. He took the gun from his pocket and laid the grip in Kask’s palm.
“It’s going to get worse before it gets better.”
12
The streets to the Rowhouse District were so familiar that Rustin could have driven them blind. At last there was nothing left between him and his home and family. He had made a mostly successful effort not to imagine the moment when he would open the door with the small nail hole just above eye level and meet the faces of his wife and son. He had let them get so far away that at times it seemed his daughter was his family. He had taken her from them only to let this thing happen, and every sentence he started collapsed halfway and died of inadequacy. And yet he felt a kind of possessiveness about all that the two of them had been through together. He remembered the expression he’d put on the night he came home from the hospital in disgrace—his normal look of contentment. Pan called it his “sunrise face.” It was the look of a man who would say, “That’s just the way it has to be.” Now the thought of it revolted him.
He turned onto the riverfront boulevard and glanced down to prepare for what Annabelle and Pan would see. Selva’s eye was watching him, and her mouth was open.
“Papa,” she said with a dry, clotted mouth. His heart leapt, then froze when she added: “Gard?”
He didn’t have time to think of an answer, because someone screamed. Up ahead a woman at the tram stop was flailing at something around her hair. She ran blindly one way and then another, waving her arms, shaking her hands, and her screams rose to a frantic pitch. She appeared to be under attack by a swarm of wasps. Then something came flying over the tram shelter and exploded on the sidewalk, and Rustin understood that they had the city surrounded.
On the riverfront men and women were looking up at the sky. It was crowded with crisscrossing flight paths. By the stone footbridge a small child was pointing and laughing while its mother stood motionless. Two schoolgirls sprinted toward the hauler with book bags on their heads. A man with a cane fell to the ground.
Rustin accelerated around the schoolgirls, then turned so hard into the narrow street of rowhouses that the hauler went up on two wheels. He misjudged its width and scraped against their wooden fence. Before he had Selva out of the hauler, the front door flew open, and Annabelle was there in her nightdress and robe.
“No, go back!” he called. “We’re coming.”
Annabelle ignored him. She ran down the steps through the gate and around to his door and stopped short. Her hand flew to her mouth.
She insisted on helping him carry Selva into the house, though it was more awkward this way. He had forgotten how beautiful distress made her. He tried to meet her eyes, to learn from them who he now was or could be, but as Annabelle prepared the sofa in the front room with pillows and blankets, and knelt to hold Selva’s hand, and soothed Pan’s sobbing, and put on a pot of carrot soup, she avoided looking at him. In her face there was a kind of resolve, a clarity that said: whatever comes, this is what matters. It seemed to indict his ambitions and creeds, and he wanted to tell her, “They didn’t survive out there,” but she allowed no chance for intimacies. She moved about the house with practical energy, feeding Zeus, serving early lunch at the walnut table where one chair stood empty, and when she looked at him there was neither the judgment nor the forgiveness that he craved in her eyes.
“She’ll stay downstairs,” she told him. “Make the front room a treatment room.”
“Annabelle—”
“Wash up and eat some soup. You can tell me later.”
When the moment came, they were standing in the kitchen where Selva couldn’t hear them. He began an account of her injury, and Annabelle listened for a minute before putting her face in her hands and turning away. The urge to tell her about Selva’s courage and his own foolishness, the village trial, young Monge and the Strangers, the mysterious change at Big Cronk’s farm, the animals at the quarry, the Yeoman wife and the switchgrass mother and the shitapult, the indifferent stars, the Better Human, Kask, the whole long and vivid dream, was so strong that her refusal to let him felt like a punishment.
He returned alone to the front room. “Selva! Oh God!”
His daughter was lying on the sofa as before, her open eye watching him. This was where she always used to study, and at last he saw what he had done to her. He made an effort to compose his face as he unpacked his stolen medical supplies, and cleansed the burn, and reapplied ointment.
The most immediate danger was infection. The egg-shaped blister was going down, but she would probably lose her left eye and suffer some disfigurement. He began to think through the skin graft that would be necessary to repair her face. It was impossible to know the long-term cognitive damage, but his hopes clung to the two words she’d uttered. Different shades of expression showed her awareness of each family member. She even managed a faint smile at Pan’s self-aggrandizing, self-mocking tale about his day at Grandpa’s and the hospital. She hadn’t spoken again, but he believed, without saying so or allowing himself to be consoled, that she would come back to them.
There was plenty for him to do, yet he felt superfluous in his own home, as if he had never lived here. A small matter like how to work the tricky latch on the pantry door confused him, and he had trouble making simple decisions, such as whether to take the nap that Annabelle suggested. He kept waiting for instructions from her.
Late in the morning, he found her weeping by the sofa where Selva was asleep. When he came near, she looked up at him with unutterable reproach.
* * *
Around noon there was a knock at the front door. Zeus, as comfortable being home as Rustin was uneasy, sat up and barked. Rustin’s first thought was that Saron had sent a Wide Awake to bring him in. He stood up from the armchair, then looked at Annabelle, who was reading aloud to Selva from her favorite collection of folktales. “Should I see who it is?” he asked.
At the door stood a pair of teenagers, a girl and a boy. The girl, who wore a set of hospital scrubs, with her ponytail coming loose and a look of apologetic fright on her round face, was his former nurse assistant, Lyra. The boy, a few years younger, a foot taller, and skeletally thin, was his former patient, the son of Kask’s Yeoman friend, shot during “games.” He had an arm draped over the girl’s shoulder and was gasping for breath. His forehead and chin were covered in outbreaks of dry red skin.
“I’m sorry to bother you, Doctor Rustin,” Lyra said. “Hello, Mrs. Rustin.”
Rustin looked over his shoulder. Annabelle set the book down and said, “It’s you,” as if she knew the girl and might have been expecting her.
“Yes, because you said to visit if I needed anything. I’m sorry to bother, but I didn’t know where to bring him because his parents are worried that he’s getting weaker, his lungs are filling up, and the hospital wouldn’t take him, so this morning I went to the Warehouse District and we walked here with everything going on outside—”
Rustin had never heard Lyra say so much, neither in his operating theater, in the Restoration Ring, nor at We Are One. Her acquaintance with Annabelle alarmed him, because Lyra was one of the unfinished things between him and his wife; he didn’t know what might have been said, and now it was too late. But Annabelle caught his eye, raised her eyebrows, and shrugged in her way of acknowledging something slightly absurd, as if to say: I guess we’ve both seen new things. “Show them in, Hugo.”
“We’ll take off our shoes first,” Lyra said. Rustin looked down and saw that her hospital shoes and the boy’s laceless, shredding boots were stained. He closed the door behind the visitors before the house became a target. “It’s really bad out there, Doctor Rustin,” she said.
“What’s going on?” Annabelle asked.
“It’s like a war.” Lyra described the terror of the air assault, the rush of armed Burgher and Stranger units to the North and South Gates, the roundup of Yeomen at orientation sites, the conscription of cleanup brigades. The most dangerous part of the city was the Warehouse District, which was why they had such trouble getting to the Rustin rowhouse.
“Did you know about this?” Annabelle asked her husband. She had turned pale.
Rustin briefly explained what he had heard at the switchgrass settlement, but no one seemed able to grasp what he was saying. “Is it happening on our street?” he asked Lyra.
“Stopped,” the boy wheezed. His open mouth stank, revealing bloody gums and black gaps between his loose teeth.
“Sit down,” Rustin said. “Take off your jacket. Let me look at you.”
The boy’s long, wasted frame sank into the armchair. The eyes that had pleaded with Rustin on the operating table now watched him nervously. With a pilfered stethoscope he listened to the liquid chest, and by the light of the torch he examined the rotting mouth and the face rash. He gave the boy Selva’s book. “Can you lift this above your head?” The boy raised the book a few inches before his arm collapsed into his lap. Rustin looked under his shirt and studied the surgery scars. At least those were healing as they should.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with him,” Lyra said.
“Scurvy,” Rustin said. “Vitamin deficiency. We don’t see it often here. What are you eating?”
The family was subsisting on potatoes and turnips. Everything else in Warehouse District markets cost too much with the blockade of produce trucks. Yeomen were starving Yeomen.
The boy was looking at Selva, and her eye was looking back at him. “Who in the world did that to you?”
Rustin almost said, “Your friends,” but he stopped himself. The boy was his patient again, and this gave him something to do—this was what he would do. “He should stay here a few days, don’t you think?” Rustin said to Annabelle, who was returning from the kitchen with a bowl of carrot soup for the boy.
She nodded. “We can put him upstairs with Pan.”
Lyra was lingering by her former chief surgeon. He understood that she wanted to be helpful, and he asked her to sterilize his instruments in hot water.
In the middle of the afternoon Rustin announced that he was going to take a quick walk around the neighborhood and see if anyone needed first aid. Pan, who was showing Lyra his collection of dead caterpillars, jumped to his feet. “I’m going, too.” Rustin looked at Annabelle, and she looked at Pan, who looked at Lyra and said, “I’ve gotten older since Papa went away.” With Annabelle’s permission father and son went out together carrying umbrellas.
The hauler was gone, again. In his hurry Rustin had left the key inside. He felt a twinge of regret, but Kask would have more serious things on his hands. The street and the sky were empty. The Rowhouse District had no obvious strategic value—it just happened to be close to the city walls—but the Yeomen had done their work. The sidewalk was hit especially hard, and he took Pan’s hand to lead him out onto the street, but Pan pulled away. At first Rustin thought it was done in anger, but he saw how his son walked on ahead with a deliberate stride, looking right and left like a young soldier inspecting the ruins of a battlefield, and he realized that Pan was letting his father know he was no longer the little boy he’d left behind four days ago.
From the riverfront boulevard came a rasping noise of metal on pavement or stone. At the corner half a dozen men in blue jumpsuits were standing around smoking while two others scraped the street with shovels. When Rustin and Pan appeared, the smokers threw away their cigarettes and went back to work, which was shoveling shit and dumping it in a trash barrel. Rustin looked around for a Wide Awake guard. Then he noticed that the Yeomen shovelers, like the Strangers in the quarry, were chained by the ankles.
A well-dressed woman was sitting on a nearby bench, and for some reason she was sobbing.
The scene on the riverfront was far worse than the Rustins’ street. A few pedestrians were walking in the middle of the boulevard, too dazed to notice where they stepped. The windows of the bakery where he used to pick up pastries on weekend mornings were coated in filth, and so was the wall of the shop where he bought his cigars. Across from the footbridge a few feet of tram tracks looked impassable. Zeus’s favorite sniffing ground around a plane tree was humanly bespattered. These places to which Rustin had never given thought because they were the little things of ordinary life—all marked for desecration. It would take a platoon of shovelers a day and a night to dig out the Rowhouse District, and even that wouldn’t be enough. It would never be the same. The city by the river was no longer his city.
He was overcome with sadness. This wasn’t a divine plague like an earthquake, or a remote event like an empire’s collapse. It was done by human hands, by people he knew, and the ruin was so total that neither Burgher nor Yeoman hands were clean. He, too, must have played a part. He had killed a boy, and failed to save another boy, and put his daughter in harm’s way. He had lost the hospital forever.
He would have to start over again, without a guild or title or creed, with only this human stuff—water, protein, and love. He would still be Annabelle’s husband, Selva and Pan’s father. But what was left for him to give his children? This ground, this sky.
The woman on the bench kept sobbing.
Pan moved next to his father, and Rustin felt a hand reach for his. “What’s happened, Papa?”
He pretended to scan the riverfront, but in fact he was thinking, I must get to know him better.
“It seems we’ve lost our minds, Pan.”
“That’s what Mama said.”
“When did she say that?”
“When you were away, after we saw Grandpa. Grandpa said Yeomen are solid people, but Selva said they’re man-eaters. Is that boy with bad breath a Yeoman?”
“I think so, but we should try not to think about him that way.”
“They’re the ones that hurt Selva!”
Rustin saw the animals at the quarry and had to push away the urge to shoot them all. “He didn’t do it.”
“Aren’t we having a war?”
He squeezed Pan’s hand. “I’m afraid so.”
“What are we going to do?”
Because Rustin did not have an answer, he approached the bench where the well-dressed woman was wiping her cheeks with a lace handkerchief. He asked if she wanted a cup of tea.
She turned up her raw, swollen-lipped face. “What?” She didn’t seem to understand the question. “Please leave me alone.” She went back to the comfort and anonymity of her handkerchief.
