The Second Rebel, page 18
Unfortunately, so is Aunt Marshae’s. She has, somehow, kept a meticulously clean trail as she’s clawed her way to power. Her file even lists me as a known associate, which makes me wonder how deep her lies have gone. But there is nothing obvious that I can use. Though it pains me to turn my attention to easier targets, I know I must.
Aunt Sapphira, who also voted against me, spends her Order’s allotted taxes preferentially. The Order of Leo is meant to preserve the remaining animal species and to bring archaic animals back from extinction, but Aunt Sapphira focuses on the care of species she favors, most notably big cats. Still, it’s not enough to cause a scandal, no more noteworthy than Aunt Margaret focusing on flowers as opposed to fruit.
There is a rumor about Aunt Salomiya sleeping with Sisters in her care. While the Order of Virgo is dedicated to public health, it has long been shadowed by gossip regarding group sexual practices, so I wonder if these are more of the same. Lily’s file notes that none of the women her sources spoke with had slept with Aunt Salomiya, but that their Auntie had encouraged the Sisters to couple among themselves so as to learn to better serve soldiers. Unless we can find someone to testify that Aunt Salomiya abused her power, there is no recourse here.
Then there is Aunt Genette’s file, where I finally find something useful. Fighting to eradicate homelessness, the Order of Norma regularly buys property, builds houses and community centers, and repairs Sisterhood-owned assets. The file, large as it is, takes me hours to parse, but the more I read, the more little errors I spot, and the more those little errors add up to big ones.
In the pages compiling receipts of payment, many of the various construction companies are legitimate—I find them with a quick search of Mars’s feed—but a few do not seem to exist outside these documents. Those questionable businesses often have recurring payments made to them for various sites. After highlighting the companies, I go through the documents and flag every connected property. If Aunt Genette is embezzling funds, these places will be evidence of that.
Scrolling through the list of addresses, I check the ones that stand out to me. Many are homeless shelters or temporary living facilities for those without work. Others are buildings sold to the Order of Leo to be used as laboratories or the Order of Virgo as hospitals. Then I come upon a section that changes everything.
Orphanages. Not just newly built ones, but also repairs to existing Order of Andromeda orphanages. The payments are recurring and large, but the majority of the addresses are in poor neighborhoods that would not warrant such prices. Why pay so much to repair buildings that would be better off torn down and rebuilt?
I stop at one address in particular. Just seeing it written down sends a chill through me. I have to remind myself to breathe.
Before I can doubt my instincts, before I can talk myself out of it, I call for a podcar. I have to visit this place myself.
* * *
THE JOURNEY THROUGH the caldera beneath the sprawling starscrapers is a quiet one. Twenty minutes after we leave the Temple, the driver slips through the hermium-powered dome and starts down the slope of the mountain, but it takes another forty minutes until we reach Karzok, one of the small cities clustered around the fringes of the capital.
I have never forgotten this place, its industrial buildings belching black smoke and painting the sky with swaths of gray. Its clustered architecture, square buildings butting up against each other. Its sparse yards, cluttered with metallic rubbish. Its overcrowded population, sitting on porches watching us pass; the long, crooked bodies of laborers are all I see.
When we reach our destination and I step out onto the cracked sidewalk, I am transported through time. The gravity is lighter and the shadows are long, leaving me to feel as weak and small as a child. When the neighbors, middle-aged workers in faded, patched jumpsuits, see me in my gray dress, they bow their heads and sign respect for the Sisterhood by touching their first two fingers to their foreheads and then over their hearts, before shuffling into their houses. Giving me privacy with Matron Thorne, or afraid of what a representative of the Sisterhood might mean for their neighborhood?
There is nothing remarkable about the orphanage, built of featureless stone painted a cheerful yellow, or its meager yard fenced in with black iron. As the sun sets on Mars’s twelve-hour day, I should be able to see the sky turn bloodred, but this close to the factories, there is only heavy gray smog.
I remember this view being more beautiful from my childhood, but that is the way of memory. Everything looks smaller and shabbier, because I have outgrown the orphanage I left behind.
I take a few pictures of the outside with my compad, doing my best to see the touch of children in the chaos of the garden—grass turning brown, weeds choking flowers, overgrown hedges—before a middle-aged woman hurries through the heat-swollen front door and down the cracked steps toward me. I don’t need to see her soft-jowled face or the hook that she uses in place of a right hand to know her: Matron Thorne, the woman who cared for me when I was a child.
I catch myself before I speak her name—out of childish habit or surprise at seeing her again, who can say? But she fills the silence, as expected, after dipping her head in a shallow, pained bow and touching her fingers to her forehead and heart. “I was unaware one of the Sisterhood would be visiting me today,” she says in that breathy way of hers.
I wait for her face to soften, to show recognition as she looks me over, but I find nothing in her expression. Nothing but fear as she stares at the capelet embroidered with chain-wrapped stones, marking me as an official ambassador of the Order of Andromeda. Instead, I listen to the hiss of her lungs. Her breathing is worse. Her shuffling too. I could not possibly know what she has faced this past decade, but I can see the years have marked her in a way they have not me.
“Shall I gather the children?” she asks, but I do not have time to shake my head before she goes on. “Yes, let me do that. Come in, Sister, come in.” The gate is unlocked, the stairs leading up to the house short and stubby. I follow, passing a well-loved but dirt-stained plush toy on the porch, into the house. It is smaller still, nothing like the high-ceilinged, sprawling domicile I remember. The portrait of the Warlord, hung on the wall opposite the door, has not been changed since I left and depicts Warlord Vaughn as a much younger man. The paint is peeling. Cobwebs clutter the corners. The sitting room I spent so much time in is more a closet than a common area.
“Can I offer you something to drink? To eat?”
I dismiss her offer with a shake of my head and enter the sitting room. There are few chairs, mismatched with flattened cushions, and I settle into one that used to swallow me but now fits me comfortably. I used to play that this was my throne, once upon a time, and I a princess holding court. I would pretend that once the spell binding the king’s and queen’s memories was broken, my parents would come for me and sweep me up in their arms, promising never to lose me again.
Suddenly a voice echoes from my past, a boy I had forgotten until now. There are no kings and queens on Mars, he told me. You don’t have parents, and no one will ever come for you. Though I hadn’t let him see, I had cried that day—and many others, whenever he told me such.
“I’ll… fetch the children,” Matron Thorne says, an odd expression on her face.
Does she recall me now that I sit in my favorite chair? Or does she see only the gray dress, the capelet with the symbol of the Order of Andromeda?
Am I the girl she cared for, or merely the symbol of my office, come to judge her worth to the Sisterhood?
Nestled beneath the end table at my side are a selection of tattered books. As I trail my fingers along their spines, I let my mind wander. What happened to the other orphans from my time here? Did they find respectable trades or apprenticeships? Did they join the Sisterhood, like me? Or did they become foot soldiers, lost in the expanse of stars and war?
My head aches with all my questions. I pull a thin book from the shelf, full of stories with colorful illustrations. I absentmindedly flip through it, recalling all the words as if I had just read them. A story of a cat with boots. A cow jumping over the moon. An old lady with too many children living in a shoe.
“Looking for me?” Ringer asks, and though he startles me, I do not jump.
I look up at him, the pages fluttering through my fingers, the cover of the book falling shut. His shadow crosses over mine, darkening it.
“You won’t find me here, little sister,” he says. I frown, but he offers me no more insight. Why does he seem to know more about his origins than I do?
The sound of small, heavy footsteps draws my attention to the stairs; he is gone when I look back a moment later.
The children burst into the room. There are five of them—all girls, all under the age of ten. They are each, in their own way, beautiful despite their tattered clothing. And all of them, from the eldest with silky black hair to the youngest with curling pigtails, look at me with hope in their big, glittering eyes.
And suddenly, I realize what they must think.
Oh no…
“Do they please you, Sister?” Matron Thorne asks, and the fear in her face is finally gone, replaced by eagerness. “They are young but skilled. Cara knows how to knit, and Dany helps me with the cleaning.” The named girls glow when she praises them. Those not named pout and look between me and Matron Thorne.
One breaks from the pack, skinny as a twig but with shining emerald eyes. She cannot be more than eight. “I can mend clothes and care for babies,” she begins, but I have eyes only for her long legs with their telltale stretching and curving from the lack of gravity medication.
“Amalia—” Matron Thorne starts, but the bold girl continues.
“I would like to tend a proper garden and am eager to learn whatever else the Sisterhood would wish to teach me—”
I stand abruptly, cutting Amalia off.
The girls have not been trained to hide their expressions—why would they have been?—so I can see each of their faces fall, read the disappointment there as I brush past them and walk out of the room.
“Sister, wait—” Matron Thorne calls after me, but I do not stop until I am outside the house. The girls do not follow after, but instead cluster around the windows, peering out at me from behind gauzy, threadbare curtains.
“I apologize for Amalia,” Matron Thorne explains. “She is young and earnest, that’s all.”
But it was not Amalia that upset me so. It was that each of these girls looked at me like I could save them, and I know that I can’t. Even if I accepted them all into the Sisterhood, how is that any better than what they might face here in Matron Thorne’s orphanage?
“Please, Sister,” Matron Thorne says again, stepping close enough to touch me. She takes my hand in her left one, the hook held limp at her side. I think for a moment that she has finally recognized me, or that now she will reveal having known me all along. I find I long for it, the familiarity of the person who was the closest thing to a parent I ever had.
But instead she leans toward me and whispers, “If you could intercede on our behalf, we would gratefully use another month’s supply of gravity medication. Repairs here have been expensive, and I’ve been forced to trade some to the laborers for—”
I jerk my hand from hers. All at once I remember why I have come here—this place supposedly received payments from the Order of Norma. This home was meant to be repaired, and it clearly is not. And if the girls are dirty, hungry, and sick from a lack of gravity medication—and I can see they are, with my own eyes—then where is the funding going?
How far does the corruption go?
I turn my back on Matron Thorne and get into the waiting podcar. As the home of my youth fades into the distance, I look away from the window, my eyes settling on the seat next to mine, where Ringer sits with a dark grin on his face.
“Here is what we must do, little sister,” he says, and I lean toward him to listen closely.
* * *
I RETURN TO the Temple for reinforcements. Lily arrives in my room not five minutes after I call for her. I pace before the window and its view of the smogless sky. The silence makes me restless.
Lily bites her bottom lip, hesitating before speaking. “Is everything well?”
I want to brush her off, or tell her that we should wait for Eden before beginning, but the words come thundering out of me, unrestrained. “How far down does the corruption go? Is everything tainted by the Sisterhood’s control, or are people just selfish?”
Her large, dark eyes, normally so unassuming, narrow and flash with a hint of gold, there and gone in an instant. I have begun to recognize this face as one she makes when she speaks of something unpleasant but true. “When those in control of the Sisterhood are selfish, it hardly matters.”
The truth slices me to the core. Poison wells up from the wound, spilling from my lips. “They take us as children, and we have no choice in the matter. They assign us to an Order and, as soon as we are old enough, a place to warm a soldier’s bed. And once we are considered ‘undesirable,’ they toss us into an abbey to be forgotten, as if that is a reward for all we have suffered, or we age into Cousins, mere glorified servants. Only if we are lucky do we find some happiness—some freedom—in our assignment.” I look up to see that Eden has slipped into the room, but she does not interrupt, and I cannot stop myself. “They control everything! Where we go. What we do with our bodies. Even our voices—they take them so we cannot complain.”
Lily shakes her head vehemently. “I understand what you’re saying, but language is more than what’s spoken.” She lifts her hands and begins to sign alongside her words. “Their intention is to control how we communicate. To cut us off from anyone outside the Sisterhood, regardless of the language we use.”
And of course, the hand language the Sisterhood teaches is, by law, only to be used by Sisters. They want to control how we communicate. They want to control everything.
Lily drops her hands as Eden sits beside her on the chaise lounge. “What’s this about? Has something happened?”
I fetch the compad from my bed and hold it out to Eden. She hesitantly takes it from my hands. “Read this.”
Lily holds my gaze as Eden goes through the files, her pale-scaled, irritated hand hidden beneath the smooth other. She gave me those documents. Surely she came to the same conclusions I did.
When Eden reaches the section of images I snapped from the podcar outside Matron Thorne’s, I speak again. “We need more evidence,” I say. “Pictures from all the properties we can use to prove the payments are going to shell companies.”
Lily agrees immediately, but Eden, clearly shocked, sits petrified. Ringer lurks in the corner, as if he has been there all along.
If my visit to the orphanage accomplished anything, it was to illuminate something for me: There is no time to play nicely with the Agora, waiting for them to decide whether I would make a good Mother or not. The Agora controls the Orders, and the Orders control the distribution of medicine and funds. I cannot abide a single weak link in the chain when girls like Amalia do not have the time to spare.
I must fix this broken system by becoming the Mother. At any cost. Even if that is to turn to Lily’s unsavory methods and blackmail the Agora into choosing me.
“You know what you must do, little sister,” Ringer whispers.
“Will you help me, Eden?” I ask.
Slowly, she lifts her green eyes from the compad to me. “Yes,” she says, softly at first and then with more fire. “Yes.”
I take the compad from her lap and bring up the file of addresses. “Then let’s split these up. We need to visit as many as we can and get evidence before Aunt Genette discovers what we are doing…”
Neither of them questions me. They snap into action at once. And while this might not be the most honorable way of becoming the Mother, I cannot help but feel that the Goddess is smiling down on me from Her heavens as I work to destroy the corruption in Her midst.
CHAPTER 15 LUCE
No one knows Cytherea like an artist
These streets are mapped with our veins
And painted with our neon blood
We dance on the endless rooftops
And sing in the empty hollow spaces
There’s a whole world just out of sight
But I won’t tell you where to find it
Lyrics to “Cytherean Nights” by Shimmer val Valentine
I’m out of the lab and into the packed streets—walking quickly, shoulder to shoulder with the crowd—before I even know what I’m doing. Before I even have a plan. My compad buzzes wildly, Castor’s messages a constant stream.
What’s happening
Did you get it
Where are you
We talked about this, scenarios of what if whispered late into the night. Now that it’s happening, I feel lost. I know I can’t go home. They know where I live. I’ll have to go to Castor’s safe house. Find someplace to change into the clothes in my bag and ditch my work uniform. But then something cold trickles down my spine, a feeling like eyes on my back. Paranoia?
I take my compad, turn on the camera, and focus it over my shoulder.
People in flamboyant, sharp-lapeled business suits… Paragon influencers in this season’s biodome coats… No—there—beneath a hologram bust of Shimmer val Valentine, two men cut through the crowd like sharks. One is far too familiar.
Mathieu…
I do my best to keep my numb legs moving, one high heel in front of the other, suddenly grateful the theracast fell off last night. As I watch, doing my best not to look like I’m watching, he gestures to the other guy—a tall man with dark hair I’ve never seen before—and his friend cuts down a side street while Mathieu follows me at a measured pace.
