Beating Heart Cadavers (10 page)

The shot left a ringing silence in the air. As it circled around them, neither Merdow nor Jasper spoke; the former was in triumph, the latter in disbelief. When they had been staring at the spot where Fields had fallen for an appropriate amount of time, Merdow finally broke from his still stance and pocketed the gun that he was holding. He looked at Jasper's face with a smile.

“Don't worry, you'll get the next one,” he said, patting the albino on the back. “There are plenty more cats in the world.”

Jasper gave a numb nod, too dumbfounded to speak. As Merdow turned to leave, however, some of the shock seemed to wear off of him.

“Should – shouldn't we move the body?” he asked, glancing back at where his sister laid.

Merdow gave a thoughtful frown, his porcelain features barely moving as a result.

“No, the animals will get her. And I don't want to ruin my shoes.”

Ch. 13

Caine awoke to a stream of light hitting him in the face from the window. There were no curtains in the room yet; he was waiting for Mari to decide which ones to hang. Blue, probably, he thought to himself as he kept his eyes tightly shut. With some sort of intricate design that he wouldn't be able to figure out. And he would like them solely because she liked them.

“Simon's coming home,” he murmured to her, turning slightly to face her side of the bed. “I've spoken to Ratsel about it.”

“When?”

“Soon,” he said, his voice still heavy and tired. “There are a few more details, but then they'll let him out.”

He had spent the last few days in meetings that sought to end the mining of Hilitum and ensuring that the charging facilities would be shut down before the end of the month. He had never been good at voicing his opinion – or having an opinion at all, really – but this time he felt that he had done alright. He could finally picture Simon running around the backyard, squealing in delight as he darted under the clothesline and circled around the garden, and the ambassador's estate was beginning to feel like a home at last.

Caine let out a breath of relief. He could feel the imprint of Mari's hand laying beside his head, and a feeling of contentment came over him. He wished that he could lie there forever. Just as he thought that she might reach over and run her hand through his hair, though, she spoke again.

“Is there something you are not telling me, Matthieu?”

“What?” He frowned, too groggy to guess what she was hinting at. “What do you mean?”

“About Simon. There is something you are not saying.”

“He's coming home, Mari. I thought you'd be pleased.”

He still refused to open his eyes and look at her. He knew that she would be frowning, and he preferred to keep the image of her in his mind as one of her smiling, her dark, glittering green eyes happy with him again as they had been years before. What had happened to Simon was irreversible, but moving on from it would be the same whether or not he told her how it had happened in the first place. And he wasn't being craven, he reminded himself. He just couldn't bear to see her more disappointed in him than she already was.

“You have fought with Fields again?”

“I don't want to talk about Lad.” He pushed himself over to roll onto his back. “We should be celebrating.”

Mari made a humming noise. Even in its indistinctness, it still seemed to carry her accent.

“Do you wonder what might have happened, Matthieu? If you had listened to her?”

Caine clenched his teeth.

“No.”

Mari had shifted beside him. He could barely feel her weight pressing into the mattress as she slipped further away from him.

“Would you have still loved me, Matthieu? If we had taken her offer?”

“I love you just the way you are.”

“But
would
you have loved me?” she asked.

Caine didn't answer. He kept his eyes shut, hoping that in doing so he might remain in the comfort of the warm sunlight that he had awoken to, but the room had gone cold. When he opened his eyes, Mari was gone from the spot beside him, leaving him alone in the room. He shifted his jaw, still debating his answer.

“No,” he whispered. And he was glad that she couldn't hear him.

He pulled himself up twenty minutes later and descended the stairs without getting dressed. His head was pounding again, and the contentment that he had awoken to had worn off entirely. It stayed with him for briefer and briefer moments the more that time went on, and he wondered if eventually it would stop coming at all. No, he thought, pausing in the barely-furnished kitchen. It would return to him with full force once Simon was home.

He went to the coffee pot and fiddled with it, but still couldn't get it to work. It wasn't broken – not as far as he could tell – he had just never learned to use it properly. He should have asked Mari how it worked, but, knowing that she wouldn't tell him now, he took his empty mug and sat down at the kitchen table, gloomily staring out into the yard. He was too used to having people do everything for him, and at thirty-three he was only just realizing how maladapted he truly was. But he could still make decisions on his own, he reminded himself. And they were the right decisions, too. He had closed down the charging facilities despite knowing how Fields and Mason would react, and he had rejected Fields' idea for Mari the year before, too. He wasn't certain if the latter decision had been the easiest or the hardest decision of his life. There was only one reasonable or plausible answer, after all. And yet, if that was as true as he thought it was, he wasn't sure why his choice still kept him up at night.

By mid-afternoon, Caine had grown so tired of his work that he was entirely certain that he would never attempt to pass another bill as long as he was ambassador. It was no wonder that his father hadn't shut down the charging facilities when he had been alive: the paperwork alone was arduous enough for a regular politician, but seeing as Caine was nothing more than an accountant, it made it all the more difficult. He sighed to himself as he thought about it, and realized how much he missed dealing with figures. Numbers weren't tricky: they added up and subtracted with one possible outcome depending on the formula, and he had never had to give any thought to what they could do or ought to do if they were given the choice.

As he dragged himself from his chair and hobbled to the window in the hopes of breathing some air into the suffocating room, he caught sight of himself in the glass and noted that after only a few weeks of working as ambassador, he was beginning to look more like his father. Squinting, he pulled at his hair and tried to observe its color in the poor reflection. He hoped that the lighting was simply fading out the dark blond hue and that he wasn't really going gray.

He mustn't have been, he decided, shaking his head to clear the image of himself from his vision. Fields would have told him – delightedly, no doubt – and offered to pluck each white strand from his head. The scent of cigarette smoke was still clinging to his unchanged clothes, and he had the urge to light one even though he had given up the habit when he had gotten married. Or he had promised to give it up, he reminded himself. He had slipped up a few times over the years, notably whenever Fields was around. It was no wonder Mari was always so exasperated with him.

But Mari wasn't there, and the thought of smoking in the yard outside his father's old shuttered estate like he used to do as a teenager was rather more enticing than finishing the work on the desk, and so he abandoned the paperwork and moved from the room. Hurrying down the hallway, he made his way through the residence and descended the stairs to the first floor. There was an exit through the kitchen that led to a walled garden that he and Fields had unofficially claimed as their own. No one ever went out there after Caine's mother had died, and the herbs and vegetables that she had grown had all withered from a lack of water and care. The billowing clouds of cigarette smoke that had permeated the air probably hadn't helped their survival very much either, though.

Caine paused outside the kitchen door and knelt down by the terracotta pots, uncovering them one by one until he found where a lighter and the stash of cigarettes had been hidden a decade before. He gingerly plucked them out. The cardboard had grown so moist that the pack didn't quite resemble a box anymore, and the ink had faded from the writing and images – including anything that might have given an expiration date – but he resigned to this option rather than going into the city to buy more. Opening the pack, he tapped out a cigarette and put it in his mouth to light. Considering that they were deadly anyhow, he wasn't sure how much more harm a decade's worth of staleness could do to him.

He soon discovered that he was quite wrong.

The cigarette was positively acrid. The filter had disintegrated, and Caine wiped his tongue against the sleeve of his shirt to get the pieces of loose tobacco off of it. His eyes watered a bit as the taste sunk deeper into his mouth, and he pressed it out against the espaliered fruit trees. If only Fields was there, she could have given him one. But he got the unsettling feeling that he would never see her again.

He should have said something different to her when she had returned, he knew. In the back of his mind, he was aware that her true reason for leaving Oneris for such an extended period of time had more to do with the argument that they had found themselves in rather than her worry about the government's treatment of her, but even still he didn't know what to say to remedy it. He didn't regret what he had said, though, and he couldn't forget what she had suggested, so there was neither anything to apologize for nor to forgive. If anything, she should have apologized to him, both for offering such a disgusting idea and intending to make him feel guilty for turning down her suggestion when she knew that it was an impossible choice. More than anything, though, she should have apologized for missing the funeral, and for leaving him on his own.

Caine wasn't aware that the phone was ringing until the answering machine clicked on, and as the mechanical voice of his father's former majordomo floated out into the garden from the kitchen window, he pulled himself inside to answer it.

“Matthew – Jim Selicky here. There's a matter that I wanted to discuss with you – rather urgently – if you could call me back –”

Caine reached the phone and pulled it from the hook.

“I'm here, Mr. Selicky.”

“Oh – good.”

Selicky faltered upon hearing Caine's voice as though, even though he felt the it was urgent to speak to Caine, he hadn't truly wanted to in that moment. He cleared his throat and started again.

“It's good to hear you, Matthew. We haven't spoken in quite some time.”

They had never really spoken at all, Caine thought fleetingly, except to exchange polite greetings whenever Selicky passed Caine on his way to the Ambassador's home office, but it hardly seemed like the time to point it out.

“What can I help you with?” he asked instead.

“Ah. Well – it's – it's about the Ambassador's estate, really. Your estate, I should say. You – I've – there's been some concern over it.”

“What sort of concern?”

“The High Officer mentioned that you … weren't keen on having them enter it.”

Caine blinked.

“I said I didn't want them searching it,” he replied. “I never said anything about –”

“But it reads as the same thing, Matthew,” Selicky cut in. “And telling the Spöken that you don't trust them in your home is admitting that you have something to hide –”

“I'm not hiding anything. I was just trying to make things easier. If Ratsel tells me what document he's looking for, I can get it for him.”

Selicky gave a long sigh.

“He doesn't want you to get it for him, Matthew. The High Officer isn't a subtle man: if he didn't want it hand-retrieved by one of his men, he wouldn't have asked for it that way.”

“But I could get it for him just as easily. I'm the ambassador, after all.”

“Why can't you just let them in, Matthew? I've been in that house far more times than you have in the past ten years, and there's no reason that the Spöken can't walk through it.”

“Why can't you just tell me what the document is – and where my father put it – and then I can have them come and pick it up?”

“I don't know where it is. No one does. That's why they want to look for it – and the Spöken are not a patient group, may I remind you.”

Caine chewed the insides of his mouth, still trying to decide on a bargain that would allow him to get around having the house searched, but came up short.

“Matthew,” Selicky said, his voice lower and firmer, “just let them in the house. You're doing yourself a disservice by going on with this charade of yours, and if you don't think that there will be consequences, then you're much more unaware of politics than I thought.”

He paused, waiting for Caine to answer, but when only silence met his words, he went on.

“Think about your son, Matthew. Whatever reason you have for being afraid to have them in the house can't be as bad as having Simon in that institution for any longer.”

And he was right, Caine thought – or he would have been right if not for one small detail. Because it wasn't so much that Caine was frightened of what they would find, or what they would realize upon discovering it – it was that he knew that if he let them into the house, and they dug up his mother's old garden and found what was buried there, then no amount of servitude or favors or pushing bills to be passed would remedy his wrong, and he would without a doubt never lay eyes on Simon again.

Selicky's voice broke through his thoughts.

“So, can I tell the High Officer that you'll allow them into the house?”

Caine shut his eyes and pressed his face into his hand.

“No,” he said, and hung up the phone.