“Good boy, Slippy.”
Justen rolled his eyes. This was a time to practice pet tricks? “So are we turning around?”
“And ruining the party?” Persis asked. “Just as it was livening up?”
“Persis. There are flying machines. Shouldn’t we . . . I don’t know, warn someone?”
She rolled her eyes. “I’m sure Isla, the actual ruler of our nation, handled sending a warning quite neatly. How can we, a socialite and an unemployed medic, do any better?”
Above them, the flying machine faded from sight. It hadn’t gone south, though. If anything, it seemed to have gone west—same as they were headed.
“Persis?”
She threw open the door of the cabin. “All clear! Next stop, Remembrance Island!”
The rest of the party emerged, some looking visibly shaken by the events, and a few, like Lady Blocking and Dwyer Shift, looking relieved that the commotion had ended and they could return to their useless, silly existences. Persis had adopted the attitude of the latter group, much to Justen’s dismay and a little to his surprise. He supposed he should be used to the idea now that, despite flashes that Persis could think of serious things, she’d shown a marked preference for not doing so. For a few brief moments—in his bedroom after he’d first met her parents, in the cove when she’d told him about her inheritance, with her mother the previous night, and even just now when she held him on the deck—he’d thought that maybe, just maybe, there was something in Persis, dormant, atrophied from disuse, that they had in common.
She had passion for the plight of DAR victims, due, no doubt, to her mother’s situation. But, like so many aristos, she seemed to want to keep it buried, as if not talking about it would make it go away. Her reg heritage did nothing to change that, and the fact that she refused to have herself tested for the potential to develop DAR only underscored it. Persis preferred to live in ignorance. She preferred to devote herself to silly, useless pursuits like clothes and parties and playing courtship games.
And yet he couldn’t dismiss her entirely, either. Justen had never felt so unmoored. When he was younger, it was easy to pick out the worthy people of his acquaintance. They weren’t the ones who cared about fashion or social status or parties or romance. They were people like him and Vania, who were smart and well-read and ambitious and wanted to change the world.
But what had they changed it into? Vania was off imprisoning and torturing her own countrymen; and Justen had helped, then run away to hide. Compared to the damage they’d done, perhaps Persis’s idle concerns were the better ones. In her shallowness, she was harmless, and when she did use the brain she liked to pretend she didn’t have, it was to create beauty or to comfort her mother with silly stories, to compose entertaining poems or to playact a romance that would help the princess she so obviously loved avoid the same kind of war that he’d fled in Galatea.
Persis—silly, superficial, genetemps-partying Persis—was a far better person than he was. And if he ever hoped to correct the damage he’d caused, he needed to learn to emulate her.
There were no docks on Remembrance Island, but several mooring balls had been sunk near the shallowest bay, and it was to one of these that the Daydream attached. While most of the guests chose to travel to shore in the dingy, Persis defied the odds again, leaping over the side, dress and all, to swim in with her sea mink at her side. By the time the boat reached them on the beach, Persis had repinned stray locks of her wet hair, and Slipstream was shaking himself dry. Justen watched Persis make a sign to the animal, who snapped to attention and scampered off.
“What was that command?” he asked her, as Andrine and Tero began unloading the picnic supplies.
Persis shimmied her hips, and the seaweed-green petals of her skirt unstuck from her thighs. “Oh, you know, don’t go too far, be back after lunch.”
“He knows all those commands?”
“Don’t underestimate Slippy, Justen. You’d be surprised what he knows.” She clapped her hands and raised her voice to the rest of the party. “All right, what’s first? Food? Historical lecture and exploration? Cocktails?”
“I vote cocktails before any lecturing,” said Lady Blocking. “Otherwise I might not survive it.”
“Agreed,” said Persis. “Besides, we all know the story.” She turned back to Justen. “Though I’m curious as to the Galatean revolutionaries’ take on Remembrance Island.”
“We’re revolutionaries,” he replied smoothly, “not revisionist historians.”
Remembrance Island—a tiny speck situated halfway between the westernmost points of New Pacifica’s two main islands—was a sanctuary, a monument. It had been left completely barren and uncultivated but for a single ceramic obelisk, a remnant of the ship that all their ancestors had once lived on. Generations ago, when they marooned themselves on New Pacifica and destroyed their ship, they’d kept this one piece and inscribed it with a memorial to the Earth they had destroyed and the societies they had lost, promising to carry on, to live in the world that they’d made and to commit themselves to someday atoning for it all.
It was this promise that Justen’s grandmother Persistence Helo had used when trying to convince the old Queen Gala, the old King Albie, and all the aristos of her generation to distribute the cure she’d created. It was this promise, one of moving on and protecting the humanity they’d almost destroyed, which eventually led to the widespread adoption of the cure and the end of the Reduction that had triggered the almost total destruction of mankind in the first place. The Helo Cure had saved the world.
And in only two generations, they were trying to wreck it again.
Justen shook his head. He had to fix the refugees. He had to. He couldn’t let his family legacy be destroyed because he’d been too naive to understand his uncle’s true purpose.
Armed with kiwine cocktails as if the Albians viewed them as some sort of vital hiking accessory, the party began the ascent to the island’s summit, where the monument stood. The path was narrow and rocky, requiring the group to walk in a line of ones and twos, and explained the uncharacteristically simple outfits and shoes the Albians had chosen. He had never seen Isla without her towering high heels before, and it had been a surprise to realize how short she really was. She barely reached Tero’s chest, and they made a comical pair as they hiked beside each other. Persis was the tallest woman in the group; even in flats, she was only a few centimeters shorter than Justen.
As they went, they shared stories about their first visit to Remembrance Island. Justen was surprised to learn that most Albian aristos made it a yearly pilgrimage. He’d been once or twice on field trips in school, but the Galateans had never thought it such a vital part of their culture. Only the Peccants visited regularly, but they were generally considered a tiny and bizarre fringe.
“Perhaps,” said Isla when he shared this information with the group, “that is why your people were willing, once more, to go to war.” She didn’t sound superior when she said it, however, only sad. At the moment, she was walking near him, at the very head of the group. “Growing up, my father took my brother and me here many more times than yearly. We were constantly reminded of our duty. Whenever Albie—my older brother Albie—whenever he got particularly hotheaded on some matter of diplomacy or other, Father would pack us up and sail out here to reflect on what anger and strife can do to humanity. On how there should always be another solution.”
Lord Blocking, behind them with his lady, snorted. “Is that why you are so reluctant to help put an end to the atrocities happening in the south, Princess? Because you have interpreted your father’s teachings as a call to passive inaction?”