When the Dust Fell, page 30
“I’m hit hard!” 5 screamed through the comm over the panic of sounding alarms.
“For God’s sake, get out!” Wildei’s voice pleaded.
POOM!
Deafness.
Darkness.
Feedback in both ears.
Flickers of light.
Crackles of static through the comm.
Nausea.
5’s alarms through the comm: “Critical system failure. Critical system—”
“Fiiiiive!” Wildei shrieked.
The cabin lights dimming, brightening, dimming.
A crash.
Silence.
The sound of his heart.
His parents’ house. Lamir nine years old, laughing in Trin’s room so hard juice spurted from his nose. His schoolmaster at the float. His father before the launch. Argen waiting in the CC, the white light all around him, the worry in his eyes. Argen’s head on the metal table, his blood in a pool, the tears in Ganet’s eyes. The acrid smell of powder. The Keeper at the chains. The fire from the cannons.
Sarah.
Sarah.
Sarah.
“18, report!”
…
“18!”
“Reporting,” Trin coughed.
“Thank God,” said Wildei. “Status!”
“What hit 5?”
“Can you fly?”
“Yes. What hit him?”
“Three projectiles.”
“Points of origins.”
“One.”
“Send me the coordinates.”
“Trin, just get out.”
“Send me the fucking coordinates.”
He went for the floats again. The stutter was worse now. A red smear of a heat signature was all he could make out. Worthless. He pulled himself across the floor to the stanchion that anchored the seat to the ship and hefted himself onto the chair. He was dizzy and parched. He tried to punch in a translation order at the console, hoping the ship itself could lock in on what Wildei had sent, but he kept fumbling the sequence.
He took the Bridge Maker from his pocket and placed it in his ear. His spine tingled and she was there. The conversation took almost no time at all, covering all the ground he needed. Find the target, he told her, and fire at will.
The ship swung around and the rain of projectiles began its attack once more.
Why did you block what you knew about Sarah? He asked her. Why did you block it from me most of all? They talked about it at some length as the plasma fired from Yorn’s handiwork and the entire park and all its surroundings burst bright with midday sun. The dust of the reddish brick building fell through the darkness and the rain of projectiles silenced for the last time.
Trin turned the ship back around to face the big building with the recorder bot hovering above. There was a balcony on the long side of it. A group of people had assembled on the short slice of railing that faced the ship.
Sarah was among them.
“Deploy the doc,” he said aloud.
50
The mayor stood behind her, his left arm across her chest and his hand gripping her shoulder tight. Sarah felt the cold of the gun against her temple. On either side of her were the large men from the room where they all had watched the transports arrive. Their guns were leveled at 18. Trin’s ship. But there was much she couldn’t see and didn’t know. Everything beyond what was directly in front of her or in her peripheral vision, as far as the mayor would allow, was a mystery. She could hear Margaret’s heavy breathing and sniffling from somewhere behind her. She didn’t know who was with Margaret or where the Kelly woman was.
The rush to the balcony had been so well coordinated it almost seemed rehearsed. When Trin’s ship took out the red apartment building Sarah was instantly swept up by the security detail and brought outside. The efficiency and swiftness of it took her by surprise and subdued her before she could even think of a counter response. There was no shouting of instructions, no panicked questions from the underlings to the mayor. It was as if a switch somewhere had been flipped. She was at the windows, then like a cut between scenes in a film, she was at the balcony. Everyone on their marks, every gun in position. Trin would be up against something he wouldn’t understand.
The transport flew to a position that allowed its stairs to lower onto the balcony. She flashed to the last time she saw this moment, the hatch opening and Trin walking down to the deck of the Lewis. This was different. When he came to the stairs now it was all she could do not to scream from the sight him.
His duster was out of its holster and pointed at the crowd. The look on his face was pure anger. His jumpsuit was covered in blood. His hands were covered in blood, and the one that held onto the railing shook with fatigue. His steps were tentative, halting, one leg clearly unable to bear any weight at all. The mayor let him make it all the way down.
“Does he speak English?” the mayor asked her.
“Yes.”
“Welcome. My name is Tom Nader.”
Trin leveled the duster at the mayor’s face. “Sarah, are you hurt?” he asked, his accent present and obvious in even four small words and it broke her heart.
“No.”
“What is this?”
“This is a game,” the mayor replied.
“What?”
“It’s called, which one of us dies first.”
“Is this a joke? You’ve seen what our weapons can do.”
“Yes. Damn fine guns. I’m lucky to have acquired several of them.”
A flash of puzzlement crossed Trin’s face. Sarah heard the click of a radio button behind her and then the Kelly woman’s voice: “Now.”
A beat later a string of plasma shot from a window behind them to the other transport. Trin nearly stumbled from the light and surprise of it. He shouted a profanity in a language only he and Sarah could have understood and lurched closer to the mayor as if his leg was miraculously made whole again, his gun arm stretched straighter and longer, his eyes blazing and his face in aguish. The mayor’s security men reacted in kind, moving quickly and shoving the nuzzles of their guns right up to Trin’s head.
“There was an innocent man in that ship,” Trin growled.
“There are no innocent men in this world, Trin,” said the mayor. “Not anymore.”
The group stayed locked in that dangerous huddle of guns. Trin was sweating and his chest was heaving. His breath clouded around him in bursts of white. The security men were doing no better. Sarah was tight up against the mayor’s chest. His breathing was quiet and slow.
“Trin,” she said, “you’re hurt. He won’t stop.”
“Kelly, bring Sarah’s sister here, please,” the mayor said, as if to underscore the point.
Sarah watched Trin’s eyes make sense of the moment.
The Kelly woman did as she was told and Margaret was suddenly in Sarah’s view, her face a swollen mess and her eyes filled with fear.
“I want you to understand something.” The mayor moved his polished revolver away from Sarah’s head and leveled it at Margaret. “The greater good is everything to me. This,” he cocked the gun, “is nothing.”
“Wait!” Trin took a hobbled step back, lowered his weapon, and placed it on the balcony floor.
The mayor nodded in approval. “Good game.”
Whatever the rules to the game were, whatever constituted a good and meritorious example of it, Sarah would only ever know that fair play had nothing to do with it. The silver gun went off like a bomb and her sister crumpled to the ground.
51
A table and chair had been brought out to the balcony and the mayor sat comfortably there drinking wine and examining the Bridge Maker taken from Trin’s ear. Sarah was on the ground, her back against the railing next to Trin, imagining the many ways she’d like to see Tom Nader die.
“Now that the question of Margaret has been answered, I hope we can get down to business,” the mayor said.
Sarah looked away from him and laughed. It came up and out of her without permission, tinged with tears and soaked in exasperation. “You’re a monster,” she finally managed.
The mayor set the maker carefully on the table and smashed it with the handle of his silver revolver. “Not true, Sarah. I’m a janitor, and if the clean-up on aisle four is unpleasant, if it makes us all hold our noses, the fault is in the nature of the mess. If you had finished what you’d started none of this would be necessary.” He gestured with the gun in a way that said by this he meant the world around them. “You’ve left me no choice because you left us as you did. Half alive, mostly dead. Ants only partially crushed and spinning in circles trying to get their footings. That, that negligence was a crime crueler than the one that preceded it.”
He swirled his glass in the light spilling from the open doors that led to the balcony.
“I’m going to give you the opportunity to make amends for that crime.”
“Fuck you,” said Trin.
“Still on the fence, I see. Okay. Then let me provide a few additional details. Be my ambassadors to the ship. Secure for me the weapons and technologies needed, and I will do your dirty work. I will straighten out the mess and take the garbage out. After that, well, we’ll have generations of mistakes to guide us to a better place.”
Sarah closed her eyes and fought back her tears. She’d come for Margaret and had lost her in the worst way possible. She’d been crazy to have taken this chance. The only question left in her mind was this: How many more will she let die?
“No,” Sarah said. “The power you crave, the things you think should be yours, the weapons, the people, the dominion…we won’t let you have it. None of it.”
The mayor smiled and cocked an eyebrow. “I think you misunderstand the situation here. Most of all, Sarah, you misunderstand me. The things you think I must have, they’re not the point at all. Possession is merely a road. Travel it with me, however, and you’ll get to the real destination. Redemption. Isn’t that what you want? What you and the people on your crippled ship need most of all? I’ll provide it. I will redeem you. Do you understand? In the eyes of all the world, and in the eyes of God.”
He pushed back in his seat as if he’d settled the thing, grabbed hold of the end of his tie, and with it began to polish the mirror finish of his gun. In the brief moment between words, a noise in the far distance, subtle and maybe not really there at all, crept into Sarah’s awareness.
“I’d leave God out of this if I were you,” Trin said.
“Who are we to leave God out of anything?” the mayor frowned. “Besides, it just so happens that I know Him well. Someday, in the fullness of time, or sooner, you will too. The question is how will God know you? As destroyers? As the breaker of things, the stealers of souls? Or as something holy and eternal, something, Sarah, to honor your name? That’s the opportunity I offer you and everyone on that cursed ship, if you can see it. An opportunity to shape the contours of that meeting with your Maker.”
He got up from the chair, walked over to the railing, and knelt down with the gun, holding it casually between his knees.
Sarah was sure now the noise was real. Still far, but there. Like thunder from an ocean storm too distant to see. In the mayor’s face, a small tic of the green eye’s brow made her think he’d heard it too. He pushed on with his point.
“You’ve set this decision in motion,” he said. “Now you must make it. Will it be two bullets?” He gently touched the end of the gun’s barrel to Sarah’s forehead and then to Trin’s. “Or will you help me?” He looked Sarah in the eyes, his own mismatched pair suddenly aligned in direction and piercing in their unnatural way. “Help me, Sarah. Live to see through the promise you already hold in your womb.”
“Wait, what?” Trin said.
A cruel smile emerged on the mayor’s face. “You haven’t told him, have you?”
The noise now, she knew what it was. A plane. No, not just a plane. A jet. And coming their way.
Trin turned to her with a look that broke her heart. She couldn’t believe this would be how he’d learn he was a father. Yet another thing she’d managed to ruin. She opened her mouth to speak, to tell him the truth, all of it. Except the noise had suddenly grown too loud for anyone to ignore. And before she could say the thing she wanted to say the most, “I’m sorry,” before she could take his hand and press it to her belly, the hurricane scream of a jet airplane exploded from the night sky. The jet shot out between a gap in the surrounding buildings low and fast, a calamitous riot that shattered window glass, shook the ground, and pounded her like a wave. Too loud to talk or even yell over, it moved across the park from one end to the other, like a howling demon, pushing its way through the void left by the dusting of the red brick apartment house.
As it rocketed by Sarah saw a shape catch just enough light from the windows and moon to separate itself from the night. A triangle of gray. The delta wing of a fighter plane. A French fighter plane.
Elouise.
The plane used the streets as canals of travel through the thicket of buildings and arced itself upward and back toward the park. Just as the sound ebbed it grew terrifyingly loud again as the jet raced toward the old city hall building. Trin threw himself in front of her. A burst of light flashed from the plane and before she could connect the dots of what it meant, the rocket and its payload hit the rotunda, exploding the central core of the building outward and blasting dust and debris through the broken windows and doors of the balcony. Anyone who was standing was knocked off their feet.
Dust. That was all she could see, breathe, and taste when she came to. She had no idea how long she was out. A minute, an hour, a lifetime? She felt a pull at her arm. Trin. He was yelling at her. And maybe not for the first time since the rocket. “Are you hurt?” pushed its way through the dull ringing in her ears.
She shook her head.
“Get to the transport!”
“No, both of us!”
“Just go!”
She stood up slowly on shaky legs. The air was thick and painted white by drywall, brick, and the ancient hopes of a city turned to powder. She grabbed Trin under his arms and helped him off the ground. He screamed with pain when he put both feet down, but stayed upright, which was enough to get them both moving. The trick was picking a direction. She was disoriented by the blast and dust. Trin was in too much pain to navigate. She decided to wait before expending too much energy in the wrong direction. They stood there together, holding tight to each other. She looked up to find a break in the dust and a star in the sky, something to give her hope.
As if on cue, a gentle breeze began to blow, a wind so subtle it was barely there. Or maybe it wasn’t there at all. Maybe it was just her longing playing tricks upon her perception, giving her what she wanted. Only when a patch of night began to push its way through the haze, did she trust herself. A moment later the ringing in her ears allowed the distant noise of a jet to make itself heard. Within the clearing of black above her, like a painting in a frame, Elouise passed between the moon and Earth and Sarah felt a shiver run through her.
How much did Elouise know when she’d first called out to Sarah? Tears spilled down her face and the journey she’d been on these past weeks flashed in fragments through her mind. Poor Dwayne and his mother and the Honda. The buck and the roadblock and Bobby lighting a cigarette the way she’d seen him do it a thousand times. Gabi and Solli. Her mind took her all the way back to the beginning, to the deck of the Lewis, when Trin, still shocked by Argen’s death and improvising in the moment, picked her of all people to return with him to the Kalelah. Her of all people. Then you’ll find something else. Or something else will find you. Heather’s words.
Sometimes the killed have special jobs to do. She remembered that too. Heather did hers apparently. And Margaret, Sarah suddenly understood, had done hers as well. Without Margaret, there’d have been no journey at all. No way forward.
The air cleared enough to make out a path through the debris to the ship. She didn’t dare look anywhere else. Until his voice turned her around.
“I can do this without you, Sarah,” the mayor said, his words clear and strong, as if the rocket had never been fired. “I have enough weapons to take what I need.”
He stood amidst the rubble between them, one side of his face and body lit by the muted glow from the park lamps below, the other side in shadow, except for the green eye. It shone like an emerald, illuminated from something within the man’s soul, if indeed he had one. The silver gun was down by his side. Trin’s duster was in the mayor’s shooting hand now, the ejector blade leveled at her.
“But it will be better with you. More complete. More as it should be. Think of the greater good, Sarah. Because none of you are getting on that thing.”
She shook when the weapon went off. The mayor’s hand dropped first, then the mayor himself fell. Among the hundreds of impossibilities all around her it was the most incredible of them all. A moment later Kino stepped out of the shadow, a long-barreled Old West style gun in his hand. He bent and took the duster from the mayor, turned it off, and walked it over to Sarah. She took the gun and offered her kidnapper a nod she hoped would say everything that needed to be said. That whatever they both were before this moment no longer mattered. There was work to be done and she would need his help to do it. He nodded back and started toward the blown-out doors that led to what was left of the main part of the building.
Trin put a hand gently to her belly and she looked up into his eyes. They held each other in that embrace a few minutes longer as the world rearranged itself once again. She had only the vaguest sense of what would come next, but she knew they would greet it together. The three of them. This much was certain. This much was everything.
She walked to the mayor and knelt where he lay. His eyes were open but had resumed their divergent positions. His face, still handsome, was framed by a circle of black blood. She thought he could see her, that he knew it was her kneeling there. Before his eyes finally closed for good, he managed to push from his mouth four last words.
