The Second Rebel, page 26
I do not hesitate. “Go on…”
Lily runs a hand over her face before she begins, steeling herself for the conversation to come. The blush and the innocence in her doe eyes disappear. “Before your agreement with Aunt Genette, I asked a few friends of mine outside of the Sisterhood to look into other properties of hers, ones with building costs that didn’t match historic neighborhood values.”
Friends of mine outside the Sisterhood, she says. How has she accumulated these friends of hers? Are they allies of Aunt Margaret, or has Lily been communicating outside the Sisterhood, perhaps even writing or speaking? Are they how she accumulated the blackmail data, or are they being blackmailed themselves?
“They didn’t find what you’d expect, though. Buildings that were falling apart, yes, but also well guarded, like forts.” She pauses, swallows hard. “At one, there was a girl, and… Astrid… I…” She has to stop. Her pale face has lost what little color it normally has.
“Yes?” I coax her softly.
“It’s a brothel,” she says in one hurried breath.
My stomach churns. Perhaps Eden was right; I should not have accepted anything less than Aunt Genette’s removal from the Agora, and damn the cost to me.
Which makes me wonder: Was Aunt Genette willing to support me after I found out about the embezzlement because this was what she was really hiding?
“What is Aunt Genette doing—”
“It’s not just Aunt Genette. It’s her building, but she’s not the Aunt in charge. She only takes a cut,” Lily explains.
“Then… who?”
“Aunt Sapphira in the Order of Leo. She makes it look like some sort of Sisterhood training center for her Order, but I’ve had eyes on the place and reports of men coming and going, guards patrolling at all hours.”
The creature locked behind my ribs wakes. I feel its blackness seeping into my limbs. “She’s created a harem of her own Order?” I don’t recognize my own voice.
Ringer leans closer, predatory eyes fixated.
“Not quite.” Lily lets out a breath, something between a sigh and a whisper. “She’s lying to these girls. As far as they know, they’re leaving their homes to become Sisters. Instead, they’re not even taken care of. Thrown into a room and forgotten about. Drugged into compliance.”
I’m aghast. Struck silent by the horror.
I once worried about becoming as bad as the women we fight. How could we, when this is what they do with their power?
“The girl one of my friends found… she was wounded. She had been shot fleeing. He hid her until I could put her somewhere safe.”
I close my eyes against the rising tears. Goddess, how am I supposed to help? How am I supposed to fix the Sisterhood at all, when it is this sick?
“Your friend… is there any way to track his actions back to you?” Back to us? I don’t ask.
“I doubt it,” Lily says with a shake of her head. “How many Asters do you notice on a daily basis?”
Interesting. So her friend is an Aster, perhaps from her outreach program on Ceres. But I cannot underestimate the reach of her influence; she was the one whose connection to the Asters helped Mother Isabel III plan the Annexation of Ceres, after all.
“The girl,” Lily says, returning to the subject, “hasn’t been at the brothel for long, only a few months. But she’s willing to talk to us, Astrid. If we can help the other girls, she’s willing to do whatever she can.”
“Okay,” I say. And then again, stronger, “Okay. Take me to her.”
Lily nods resolutely, and I know we’re both thinking the same thing: we have to stop this.
* * *
THE GIRL IS extraordinarily thin. Her glassy blue eyes pop wide as we enter the safe house, a one-room studio outside the Olympus Mons dome that Lily assures me cannot be traced to the Sisterhood. She tries to push herself up into a sitting position on the bed but, with a wince, sags back into the mattress. She looks toward her guard in the corner, an Aster in traditional wraps who says nothing.
“It’s just me with friends, Nat,” Lily says. She gestures to the Aster, and he goes to stand guard outside.
The girl, Nat, lets the book she was reading fall closed on her stomach. Beneath her oversized gown are clean bandages, and there’s a twitchiness to her, whether from fear or drugs I’m not sure. My heart breaks looking at her.
“I’m glad you’re back, Lily,” Nat says. “I kept hearing people walking by outside, and I thought…” She has a familiar accent, but I cannot quite place it.
“You’re safe here, Nat, I told you,” Lily says. Speaking softly, so as not to make her any more afraid than she already is. “They can’t find you here, and we won’t let them take you back.”
Nat nods and nods and nods, as if trying to convince herself of Lily’s words. I look to Eden at my side, who is so uncomfortable that her skin has taken on a tinge of green. She holds a hand to her stomach, as if to keep her sickness in.
I put on my best smile, though I have never felt less like smiling. “Hello, Nat, I am Astrid.” I try to make my voice like Lily’s, soothing and soft.
Nat puts the end of her blond braid in her mouth and chews, considering. After a minute of silence, she spits it out. “Where are you from?”
“The Order of Andromeda,” I say, but from the curl of her nose, I see that is not what she wanted to hear. “From Mars,” I add. “An orphanage not far away from here.”
“Oh, you look like…” She trails off. “I’m from Máni.”
The blood in my veins turns to ice. Máni and Skadi are the two moons of Earth, called those names only by the people who live on them. Like Ringer. Or, at least, that is what he told me.
“It is not uncommon,” Lily says, interrupting my laser-like focus on Nat, “for refugees to come to Mars from Earth and its moons.” I also hear what she’s not saying: Aunt Sapphira is finding people in the poorest areas and targeting them for trafficking.
Nat’s accent… it is familiar because of Ringer.
Ringer, who is unnaturally silent. Ringer, who is a gap in my mind that I grasp for like a comforting blanket.
“What do I look like?” I ask. “What were you going to say?”
Nat shrugs and turns her attention back toward her book, uninterested in being interrogated. Or scared of me, I fear. “I thought we were going to talk about that place…”
Lily’s hand on my shoulder tells me to concentrate. To calm down. To take a step back.
I could press Nat to talk about where she’s from, dig into her past with the yearning to discover my own. Or I could focus on why we are really here: to help this young girl and the others victimized by Aunt Sapphira.
My stomach twists as I make my choice.
“We want to ask you a few questions about the place you ran away from, Nat,” I say, my tone measured. “And when we are done, we are going to do everything we can to stop this from happening to anyone else.”
Nat perks up, one hand reaching for the gunshot wound on her side. “And you’ll get my friends out?”
“We are going to get everyone out,” I say, and in this moment, I do not care if I have to take a gun and save them myself.
“Okay,” she says. “Let’s talk.”
* * *
NAT TELLS US everything she can: The building is a large warehouse full of shipping containers. These are the girls’ bedrooms and where they are locked up in the mornings to sleep. In the afternoons and evenings, men come to visit them. She was there for four months, but only saw a new girl arrive once. Every girl is implanted with an ID chip between her shoulder blades, not deep like a neural implant, but in a spot that is difficult to reach so they cannot remove it by themselves. Every morning, they receive one meal—I suspect this is how they are drugged. Those who try to run away are punished by the guards, or shot, like she was. The guards are men who change often, and they are not allowed to talk to the girls or form bonds with them. She has never seen who is in charge, but she knows some girls have.
“That’s how we know it’s actually bad Sisters doing this,” Nat explains. “Once Joli—this girl in my container, she’s been there for like three years—was dressed up all nice and taken to this fancy party, and she saw a Sister bossing all the guards around.”
“Did Joli describe her at all?” I ask.
“She said she had a gold necklace of a big cat… I don’t know the word for it.”
I look at Lily, and I know we are both thinking the same thing: that “Sister” was Aunt Sapphira, wearing the Order of Leo’s lioness symbol.
In the podcar ride back, we are all silent, desperate to come up with a solution. It isn’t until we are safely ensconced in my room at the Temple—the single hair on my door undisturbed, proving that no one has come and gone—that we speak freely.
“We need Joli.” I say what we are all thinking.
Lily, sitting on my chaise lounge, rubs at her irritated eyes. “We need a plan to get her out.”
“And how do you suppose we do that?” Eden asks, pale but no longer green.
I do not answer. I have been asking myself that exact question since we left Nat.
“We… have someone go in,” I say after a stretch of silence. “They infiltrate the brothel. They find Joli and bring her out.”
“You want to plant someone there?” Eden asks incredulously. Lily’s eyebrows shoot up on her forehead. “Who? Because these girls have been abused—sexually abused—and you want to throw another into that meat grinder? Whoever you choose won’t be able to just stroll in and out on a whim.”
I try to keep my tone even as I speak. “Do you have another idea?”
“Not this. Anything but this.” Eden shakes her head, red hair wild. “Don’t sink to Sapphira’s level.”
The words prod at an already sore wound. “Do not presume to tell me I am as bad as Aunt Sapphira.”
Eden’s lips curl into a snarl. “If you do this, you will be.”
I say nothing, because I fear what will come out of my mouth if I speak.
“Fuck…” Eden runs a hand over her face. I expect her to growl at me like a wild dog, but she reins in her rage. Her voice is low and full of sorrow when she speaks again. “I won’t be part of this, Astrid. If you do this, you do it on your own.”
She storms toward the door.
“Eden—”
But she is gone, the door slamming behind her.
In her absence, I sink onto the chaise lounge. My heart aches, and it takes me a long time before I steel myself enough to speak.
“I will go,” I tell Lily, the plan forming before I think it through. “I will sneak in, find Joli, and get her out.”
Lily turns toward me, brows knit together in concern. “Astrid, you can’t—”
“If I am to become the Mother,” I say as if this were a confession, “I cannot ask others to do what I am unwilling to.”
Lily places her hands on her knees. For a moment, I think she will try to convince me to abandon this plan, but when she speaks, it is of something completely different.
“I was born to… a dark and cold settlement without gravity. I was a sickly child, and thus abandoned by my parents. A kindly uncle raised me.”
“Lily—”
She cuts me off. “Just listen,” she says. “Please.”
I bite my bottom lip. Satisfied, she continues.
“When I was twelve, I could no longer fight my own body. In my desperation, I turned to back-alley clinics, illegal geneassists, even an Icarii doctor.” She stops for a moment and stares at her hands, where pale patches have begun to appear. “Sigfried val Mahn died in the Leander Incident. Strange, how small the universe really is.”
For her to admit something so illegal… but I say nothing, not wanting to interrupt.
“When I was fourteen, I gave up searching for outside help and joined the Sisterhood so they would take care of me. They gave me surgery to fix my limbs that had grown poorly. Medicine for my allergy to light.” She covers the scales of one hand with the other. “I would live, and even if I still have pain, it’s no longer what it was.”
I think of her stilted movements, her lack of grace. The scars clustered on her joints. The pale patches of skin and her need for eye drops. The way she eases herself into seats and never stands for too long. A sick child grown into an ill adult.
“When I joined, I was assigned to the Order of Pyxis. After I recovered from surgery, I was a dutiful Little Sister and understood what was asked of me long before others did. But then my first assignment came, and it was… hard.
“Olympus Heights was supposedly a hospital for wounded soldiers, but it was more like a hospice. Very few left alive. Most were there to pass peacefully.” Her eyes soften as tears fill them. “I prayed with them, took their confessions, watched as they… as they died. Those who could perform, I comforted with my body. I was happy to do it. I never hated them for it. Those who could no longer engage in sexual acts, I would lie down beside them and hold them… I let them have anything they wanted. They mostly just wanted intimacy, at the end. However they could take it.”
An assignment like that… I never knew that was an option.
“So many I held, heads pressed to my chest, as they cried out in pain. As they begged me not to leave them in their last moments. ‘I don’t want to die, Sister,’ they would tell me. And then, ‘I don’t want to die alone.’ I couldn’t stop the pain. I couldn’t stop their dying. But I could be there for them. I could make sure they didn’t die alone, sickly and forgotten.”
A tear finally slips free and runs down her cheek. “I’m sorry,” she says, wiping it away.
I do not know what to say. Whether to encourage her to cry, or to hold her hand. I never knew this was part of the Sisterhood. My assignments had always been among the stars, never on the ground. My heart aches for Lily, having to watch so many die in her arms.
“One day Aunt Margaret caught me writing.” Forbidden, my mind hisses, though I say nothing. “A soldier had asked me to send a letter to his brother, begging him to come visit before he passed, but the man… his hands…” Lily shakes her head. “He couldn’t write, but I could.”
“What did she do?” I ask softly.
“She took the letter from me and sent it herself.” Lily smiles even if her lips tremble. “Maybe you haven’t figured it out yet, but Aunt Margaret likes a rebel.”
“Well, she likes me…”
“Exactly.” She chuckles forcefully. “She started showing me favor after that. Had me come to her and tell her whatever the soldiers asked for. She helped them reconnect with their families or write wills. Some just wanted to write down their recollections, to have some testament to leave behind so that they wouldn’t be forgotten, and she allowed me to write these. She helped them find peace.”
“Is this when she gave you back your voice?”
“Aunt Margaret wasn’t the one who returned it.” Lily laces her fingers together in her lap. “There was another young rebel whom Aunt Margaret was desperately trying to influence: Mother Isabel III.”
The Mother. Almost immediately, Ringer wakes within me. “Remember the sound our fists made, turning her face into ruin?” he asks in a whisper. I yearn to reach into my pocket for the neural implant in its little box.
“In my spare time, I would work in the Order of Pyxis’s gardens, and, with Aunt Margaret’s blessing, I started a community program to include Asters in the creation and restoration of parks across Mars. One day, the Mother came to see what we were doing, and Aunt Margaret introduced us. The Mother took a liking to me, to my odd way of approaching things, and after that, we would talk in the hand language for hours. She was the one to return my voice. I was… distraught. How could I not have known? But now that I had it, I should use it, she said.”
It sounds just like her… I remember her cold words on Ceres as she glared up at me, bloodied and bruised. You want your voice? she asked. You have to earn it.
“I don’t know where the idea for the Annexation of Ceres came from initially, whether it was her or me who brought up approaching the Asters, but once it had been mentioned, she became obsessed with it. I suppose you know the rest…”
“You became her second because of your hand in arranging a truce between Geans and Asters.”
“Yes, and then lost that position when I disagreed with her methods of dealing with the Asters on Ceres. She had agreed to allow them certain freedoms and a percentage of earnings from the water purification plant—” Lily cuts off abruptly, her face full of disappointment. “I suppose it doesn’t matter now. I’m telling you this because I want you to understand. Much of my life has been left up to chance. Imagine I had signed up to join the Sisterhood, desperate to heal my illnesses, only to become one of these young girls trapped by Aunt Sapphira’s lie. Or imagine Aunt Margaret had me punished for writing, and I had lost my life.
“What I’m trying to say is, I want to help you, Astrid. You asked me why on the Juno. I’m answering now. I knew Mother Isabel III. I knew her well, and she did not care half as much as you do for the downtrodden and desperate. So, if you are going into this brothel…” She fixes me with a determined stare. “I am going with you.”
I feel as if the floor has fallen out from under me. “What? Lily, you can’t—”
“Can’t I?” Her eyes are hard, her shoulders squared. I cannot believe I ever thought her soft; that I, like so many men stretching back hundreds of years, saw a small woman and mistook her as weak.
“I’ll find a way. I don’t care how.” She stares at me, through me. “I’m coming with you,” she says again.
This time, I don’t fight her.
CHAPTER 22 HIRO
With my father
I would watch dawn
over green fields
“With My Father” by Kobayashi Issa, framed poem in Shinya val Akira’s office
Shinya leads me into the warm interior of the little tea shop with its peeling red paint and yellowed paper lanterns. Only a few of the low tables are taken, the patrons all elderly with sagging skin and baggy clothes, stained fingers clutching e-pipes heated red.
