Tiamat's Wrath

Chapter Forty: Teresa

Every night she went to sleep, Teresa thought that maybe the next day would be the one that brought her father back. Like with the story of Pandora’s box, all the other fears and nightmares were made bearable by that one hope. Every morning that she woke, there was that sense of possibility that stayed bright as long as she could keep herself from checking in. And then Kelly, her father’s personal valet, would tell her that nothing had changed because of course it hadn’t. She’d feel let down again, and still, idiotically, stupidly, like a cartoon character with an empty grin, the thought would come up. Maybe tomorrow. Always maybe tomorrow.

His rooms weren’t grand. They never had been. A bed frame of natural wood and a thin mattress that he would rest on, even after he’d outgrown sleep. A desk with metal, locking drawers and a screen built into its surface. The only decorations in the place were a picture of her as a child, one of her mother from when she’d been alive, and a simple glass vase big enough for a single flower that Kelly replaced every day. Winston Duarte, high consul and architect of the Laconian Empire, had taken pride in having a simple man’s quarters. The greatness of Laconia wasn’t in its gaudiness, but in its works. The vastness of the empire’s ambition would have made any man seem small. Even him. That was how she thought of it, anyway. What she’d believed.

Now he sat at his desk, his head shifting as if he were trying to follow the flight of insects that only he could see. His hands rose sometimes and then drifted back down like he’d started to reach for something and then forgotten what he meant to do. Kelly had brought her a wicker chair to put beside him. Teresa sat on it, her hands clasped on her knees, watching him for any sign of improvement. Any hope that today might be the tomorrow she kept herself alive for.

“Daddy?” she said, and he seemed to react to the sound. He turned a degree toward her, and even though his eyes didn’t meet hers, something like a smile touched his lips. Kelly kept her father’s hair well combed, but it seemed thinner than she remembered it. Grayer. Greasier. The ancient acne scars on her father’s cheeks made him seem rougher, more worn than he actually was. There was an amazement in his expression, like he was constantly discovering wonders that commanded his attention more than she did.

“Daddy,” she said again, “he’s going to kill me. Dr. Cortázar? He’s going to kill me.”

He turned toward her more, his brow taking on a gentle furrow. Maybe he’d heard her, maybe it was coincidence. He reached out his hands to pat at the air around her head the way he did sometimes, only this time she took his fingers in hers, pulling his hands down, pulling his face toward hers. “Are you there? Do you understand what I’m telling you? He wants to kill me. He wants to pin me down and cut me up like those frogs. And no one’s helping. No one even cares.”

She was weeping now, and she hated that she was.

“Come back,” she whispered. “Daddy, come back to me.”

He opened his mouth as if to speak, but only made wet clicking noises. Like meat being moved by a butcher. He frowned for a moment, then looked away toward the window.

“Daddy,” she said again. And then, “Daddy!”

He flinched at the sound.

The door opened behind her, and she heard Kelly’s gentle cough. She dropped her father’s hands and wiped her tears away. Not that she could hide the fact that she’d been crying. The best she could do was show that she’d stopped.

“Is there anything I can get you, miss?” Kelly asked. He wore his usual red porter’s uniform. She’d known him forever, since she was a child gamboling down the halls with the puppy who would grow into her Muskrat. He’d brought her tea and served her meals. She’d cared about him the way she cared about doors and pieces of art. As a thing. A function. An object. Now they were in the room together, and she saw him as a person. An older man, as devoted to her father as anyone could be. As complicit in hiding what he’d become as she was.

“Does he change?” she asked. “Does he ever change?”

Kelly lifted his brows, looking for what to say. His sigh was soft and apologetic. “It’s hard to say, miss. There are times he seems to know where he is. Who I am. But that may be wishful thinking on my part.”

Her father had drifted back to following his invisible bugs through the air. His forehead smoothed. If he’d heard her at all, understood her at all, he’d been distracted from it. She shifted her weight, and the wicker chair creaked under her.

“I’ll come back,” she said. “If he changes. If he gets better …”

“I will see that they tell you immediately,” Kelly said.

She rose, feeling disconnected from the motion. Like she was watching a Teresa-shaped balloon with its string cut. Kelly stepped over to take the chair away as she walked to the door.

“He would be glad to know you came,” Kelly said. “I can’t say if he knows we’re here. But if he did know, he’d be glad. I believe that.”

He meant the words as comfort, but Teresa couldn’t bring herself to care. She walked out without thanking him or cursing him or doing anything but putting one foot in front of the other until she was out of the private rooms.

The public parts of the State Building where the mechanisms of government went on were as busy and efficient as ever. Like a beehive or a termite hill that was unaware that its queen was dead. No one stopped her or made eye contact. She passed through on the way to her own rooms like a ghost. All she wanted was to lock her doors and crawl into bed and pray for a dreamless sleep that would carry her to tomorrow. Or later. Or at least not now.

But when she get there, her door was open. Colonel Ilich was sitting on her couch. He didn’t look up as she came in.

“Where’s Muskrat?” Teresa asked.

“She’s in the bedroom. You missed your tutorial this morning,” he said, his voice pleasant and nonjudgmental and false as a mask.

Teresa folded her arms. “I was with my father.”

“I respect that, but your father would want you to perform your duties. All your duties. That includes your education.” Ilich stood, pulling himself to his full height like it might lend him more authority. “And your breakfast.”

“I wasn’t hungry.”

“That isn’t the issue. We are in—”

“Dangerous times,” Teresa said. “A precarious situation. We have to keep up appearances. I know. Everyone keeps telling me.”

“Then stop acting like a spoiled little shit and do your part,” Ilich said.

It was fascinating to see his expression when the words were out. She was so used to him being in control, professional, approachable, friendly. The shock widening on his face, and the purse-lipped chagrin. And then the pleasure. Pride, even. It didn’t take more than a few seconds, but it told its own little story.

“You,” he said before she found the words to throw back at him, “are the high consul’s daughter. You are the face of your family. That makes you the stability of the empire.”

“The empire’s fucking wheels are coming off,” Teresa shouted. “Everything’s falling apart. What do you want me to do about it?”

His voice was tight and controlled. “I want you to eat your meals. I want you to show up for your lessons. I want you to project normalcy and stability and calm to everyone who sees you. Because that is your duty to your father and the empire.”

The rage felt like it was lifting her body. She didn’t know what she was going to say. She didn’t have an argument or a stance, only the power that came from being incensed beyond her capacity to contain it.

“But you can spend days running around looking for Timothy? You can have Dr. Okoye come teach because nothing she does is as important as making sure you can finish killing my friends? You aren’t doing your work either, so you don’t get to tell me to do mine. That’s hypocrisy!”

Ilich looked at her, looked deep into her eyes, and he chuckled. He reached out and ruffled her hair like she was Muskrat and he was scratching her ears. It was gentle and humiliating. Teresa felt her rage stutter and die, and a vast embarrassment flood into the place it had been. She wanted the anger back.

“You poor kid. Is that what this is about? The spy? You’re mad at me because of him?”

“I’m mad because of everything,” she said, but there wasn’t any power behind it now.

“He wasn’t your friend. He was a spy and an assassin. He was here to kill us. That cave of his? He picked it as shelter for when he set the pocket nuke off. The mountain was a landmark for his evacuation team.”

“That isn’t true.”

He took her arm just above the shoulder. His grip was tight enough to pinch. “You missed your tutorial this morning. We’ll make it up now. You need to learn something.”

The security offices of the State Building were familiar to her. They were offices like any other branch’s, except for the occasional reinforced door and blast-resistant lock. There were cells there for political prisoners, though she didn’t know if anyone was in them besides James Holden. The forensics lab, however, was new. It was a wide room with a high ceiling and movable partitions that could seal off a section and keep its atmosphere separate. Fume hoods with waldoes and blast-resistant glass lined one wall. The tables that filled the center of the room had aisles between them wide enough for specialized tool carts—chemical, biological, electronic, computational—to be wheeled to wherever they were needed. Half a dozen people stood at the workstations. And on them, Timothy’s things. The carved wood tools. The cot. The cases and boxes that had been his. Even one of the repair drones that had apparently been damaged somewhere in the violence lay on a table, the size and rough profile of a dead animal.

Ilich cleared the room so they would be alone. The technicians left, trying not to be obvious in the ways they stared at Teresa. She saw the curiosity in their faces. What was the high consul’s daughter doing there? What did it mean? The weight of their interest was like a hand on her shoulders, pressing down.

When they were alone, Ilich put her on a technician’s stool and brought a data storage core over. She recognized it from Timothy’s cave, though she hadn’t thought about it much at the time. Ilich synced a monitor, pulled up a file directory, and stepped back, gesturing to it as if to say, Go ahead. Look.

Teresa found she didn’t want to.

“Start with the notes files,” Ilich said. “Let’s see how much Timothy was your friend.”

The notes were dates and times. At first, she didn’t see any pattern in them, but the notations with the entries had a security note from the forensic tech. When she opened it, Timothy’s entries matched the security logs for those dates. He’d been watching the State Building’s guards. Working out their patterns and habits. Looking for a hole. And he’d been tracking James Holden. Those records were more scattered, because Holden had less of a pattern. He’d drifted through the buildings and gardens as he saw fit, and Timothy—Amos, his name was Amos—had marked every time Holden came in sight of his watching post on the mountain.

Once she’d gotten through the notes file, she didn’t stop. She opened a tactical maps file and recognized the architecture of the city, of the State Building. A series of files showed blast radii of a small nuclear device. If it were planted at the wall. If it were set off in the city. If it had been smuggled into the State Building. Each one had notes speculating on deaths, on infrastructure degraded. She opened a file called “evacuation protocol.” Topographical maps showed a primary evac site close to where she’d met him the first time and a secondary a day’s hike away, with notes Timothy—Amos—had added about what parts of the visible defense grid would have to be taken out for each site to be practical.

Here is how he would have killed us. Here is how he would have left. Here is the man he came to save, here are the people he came to destroy. She waited for the rage to come back. She expected it. Instead, she thought of James Holden. If he said he was your friend, then he was.

“Do you see now?” Ilich said. “Do you see what he was?”

All these plans to kill her and her father. To slaughter them all. You should lie down on the floor there. Flat as you can. Put your hands over your ears, okay? Were those the words you said to someone you wanted to kill?

“I understand,” she lied. “I do.”

Ilich shut off the monitor. “Then we’re done here.”

He took her arm again and led her away. She hadn’t seen him order up food, but when they got back to her rooms, it was waiting for her. A thick, white protein slurry like they fed to sick people. A steak of vat-grown meat seared black at the surface and warm pink in the center. Eggs. Cheese and fruit. Sweet rice with flakes of dried fish. It was all on a metal tray with a fork and dull knife. Muskrat trotted in, but caught the sense that something was wrong. When Ilich held his hand out, offering to scratch her ears, she ignored him and went to sit on Teresa’s feet instead.

“Now then,” Ilich said. “Eat your meal. Get some rest tonight. Tomorrow, you will be on time for your lesson. We will be in the east garden where everyone on staff can see us, and you will act as if everything were normal. Do you understand?”

“I don’t want to eat this. I’m not hungry.”

“I don’t care. You’re going to eat now.”

She looked at the food in front of her. Reluctantly, she picked up the fork. She remembered something from an old film she’d seen about a girl in Sol system. On Earth. “I don’t have to do this. Body autonomy is written into the constitution.”

“Not ours it isn’t,” Ilich said. “You will eat this now, while I sit here and watch you. Then we will sit for another hour while you digest it. Or else I will call in Dr. Cortázar with a funnel and tube, and we force you. Am I understood?”

Teresa took a forkful of the steak and put it in her mouth. Intellectually, she knew it tasted good. When she swallowed, Ilich nodded.

“Again,” he said.

After he left, Teresa didn’t move. She just sat on her couch, feeling the weight in her stomach. She hadn’t eaten a meal that large in weeks, and it left her feeling bloated and wrong. Muskrat sensed that something was off, and put her wide, furry head on Teresa’s lap, looking up at her with complex brown eyes.

Teresa put on a feed. The same one she’d watched as a child. The nameless Martian girl and the fairy named Pinsleep. Familiar images washed over her, bringing something close to comfort. A sense of predictability, at least. She knew that at the end, the nameless girl would escape fairyland. That she’d go back to Innis Deep and her family. That in the last scene, she’d pack away all her girlhood toys and leave for upper university and an adult life. That was the sign that she’d won. She was free to make any life she wanted, and not be a prisoner of the elves.

She lay down on the couch, resting her head on a pillow. The girl was taken in by Pinsleep again, and ran, and fought to escape. And escaped. Teresa started it again from the beginning.

Prisoners and their dilemmas. She let the images play and took up her handheld. In her notes, she found Ilich’s old diagram.

She ran her fingers over it. She’d forgotten that Ilich’s first name was Jason. She’d forgotten a lot of things.

The puzzle—the unsolvable part—was that no matter what she did, it was better for the others to defect. If she was good, they should take advantage of her. If she was bad, they still should. And the same logic applied to her, except she hadn’t done it. Everyone else had defected, and when she didn’t cooperate, they forced her to. Even though the thing that made sense was to defect.

Pinsleep discovered that the girl wasn’t in her cell and screamed. Thin fairy fingers balled in stylized fists. Muskrat snored deeply, her fuzzy body pressed close to Teresa. She put her own hand down and scratched the old dog. Black with gray in her muzzle and at the tips of her ears. The thing she hadn’t wanted to know pressed at her throat, welling up like a bubble rising from the bottom of the ocean. She felt like she could watch it come, and she knew that when it reached the surface, nothing about her life would be the same. Everything would have to change, because she’d changed.

And it happened, not with a scream, but with an exhalation. She leaned down, her lips almost against Muskrat’s floppy ear. When she spoke, she whispered.

“This isn’t my home anymore. I can’t stay here. I have to leave.”

Muskrat looked up and licked Teresa’s cheek, agreeing.