“I covered for you,” MacRobert said. “Told her what you’d been dealing with, missing the Commandant, fighting with the various commands to push for rescue.”
“Kind of you,” Grace said. “And I’ll know the next time I see her. She can’t leave the house, can she?”
“No, but Stella can. And as your niece, Stella has a family reason to see you and carry word back and forth.”
“Mac, do you know everything about my past?”
“Everything?”
“You know what I mean. I know you know I was in a psychiatric hospital for years, but—do you know all the background?”
“All of it—no. I know you were in the Unification mess, and bad things happened, and you were considered mentally unfit—with a suggestion that you had previously had, if not a breakdown, some instability.”
“My defense team thought that might mitigate my sentence. And it did, eventually. Mac, somewhere in the military is the file on me. I wasn’t officially military, but that’s who gathered the information, and supported the charges against me. I don’t know myself exactly how my father’s legal team got me off—and later got me out of that mental hospital. He didn’t tell me—he told my brother, who became my guardian after my father died. My brother didn’t tell me, either, and I didn’t ask. Then he died unexpectedly, of a fever. I asked his older son, Stavros, but he said he knew nothing about it. But what I feel now is that my crimes—and they were crimes—have come back to haunt the family.”
“So are you going to tell me?”
Grace looked at him. No condemnation so far in his gaze; he had not shrunk from any of the things he knew she’d done to protect the family in the years since the big attack on them. He knew she’d killed. He approved of those kills. He was not going to approve of the old ones, from the Unification War.
But she had to tell him. He deserved to know. Was this the right time?
“Did the Commandant ever tell you why he asked you to liaise with me?”
“Sure. The Vatta family had been helpful to him when he was a boy, an orphan from Fulland. Brought him in, educated him, paid his entrance to the Academy. He considered you to be smart and tough, politically astute, the best contact among the Vattas but one that wouldn’t be obvious to others.”
“I saved his life in the war. He was just a kid. His parents…” She looked away, at the small window with rain smearing the glass. “His parents died in a firefight. I found him hiding. Brought him along.” After a pause, she said the words. “I killed his parents.” This time, when she looked at Mac’s face, his eyes widened, then closed for a moment.
“Did he know?”
“No. He knew there were shots; crawled to the closet where I found him hiding. He didn’t see it; it was at night. The others—the others I was with wanted to kill him, too, but I was sick—sick of the whole thing—and I—I was their commander; I said we were taking him along and the person who hurt him would die. They believed me. With reason.”
MacRobert nodded. “I believe you, too.” He sighed. “Well, we’d better take another look at the Vance family, and Morrison’s, before you’re alone with either.”
“Mac… I’m tired of the hunt. If it takes my death to ease their pain and let everything die down—”
“You weren’t the only one tried as a war criminal, on either side.”
“No, but I’m still here. Most have died. I don’t know how much of this mess is vengeance aimed at me, or why nothing for decades until now, but I want Ky and Stella and even that idiot Maxim to be able to live good lives. Easy choice.”
“No. You never went in for easy choices, and I won’t approve it now. You can still do good—you already have; the military is better off now because of you, and you’re the only one who can do certain things.”
Grace pulled herself up in the chair. “All right. While I can do good. But, Mac, I’ve had death sitting on my shoulder for days, and I don’t expect to make another ten years.”
“Die of poison or die of blade or gun, but don’t die of self-loathing,” Mac said. He squeezed her shoulder, then picked up the empty teacups and walked out.
Grace folded her hands and thought about it. Was it the near-death of toxins and coma that jarred loose these vivid memories? Not yet all of them; there were still holes, still sudden stabbing pain in her head when she tried to remember. But vivid enough. From the face that first brought her into it, the boy she’d met in a café, her third day in Esterance. She’d felt so mature, shopping by herself in a strange city on another continent—another country, actually, as it was then. She’d bought her lunch, found a table, and then—he’d spoken to her. Politely, but with interest. They’d talked. They’d agreed to meet again.
And only thirteen days later he’d been killed, right beside her, dead in the street with his guts falling out of his belly, and people yelling and screaming and someone else grabbed her arm, dragged her away, made her run for safety.
Safety. Nothing had been safe from then on. Angry, frightened, disgusted, shocked—she had survived, using all the intelligence, cunning, and physical ability she possessed. She’d made it back to her parents’ friends’ house a few days later, hungry, scared, exhausted, hoping to find them, hoping to be rescued, but the house was a shattered ruin, with no sign of Gretchen and Portia and Miran. After that, in a city where both sides had roving gangs of supporters, she’d joined one at the point of a gun and ended up… standing before a court to explain how a well-brought-up daughter of a wealthy, respectable merchant family could have any excuse for what she had done.
She had no excuse. Girls like her were supposed to be immune to the seductions of handsome strangers, violent emotions, even the pressures imposed by captors. She was, according to the court, a monster who deserved death—and she’d expected it, until the day she was taken from her cell and transferred to a facility for the criminally insane, where she was drugged, probed, subjected to “reconditioning” for years. Endless years, they’d seemed. When finally the years and exhaustion quieted the turmoil inside, and suicide attempts led only to more pain, she grew numb, unresisting.
She looked at her hands. One still bore the scars—faded now—of wounds inflicted in that war. The other, almost indecently young with its smooth, unmarked skin still soft, the arm above it also young, full-sized now… had been lost to another attack and regrown from her own cells. Both her hands and arms had looked like that, before… everything. “I was beautiful,” she whispered, looking at the young arm. “I was.”
But not after. Her father, her mother had exclaimed over her, the one time they were allowed to spend a short time with her. “You look so old,” her mother had said, patting her cheeks. She had flinched; her mother had looked frightened. Her father had shaken his head. “Graciela… I don’t understand how… why. You were so pretty.” Meaning, You are so ugly now. Meaning, You ruined yourself, your value to the family.
And somewhere a file still existed, she was sure, with pictures of her young face. When she was finally released, when she could finally get to the family homes again, after her father and uncle died, she had destroyed every one of the portraits made during her girlhood. She could not bear to see them. She could not bear to answer more questions.
She pushed herself upright again, and opened the files on her desk. Enough of that. If retribution came, she would accept it. In the meanwhile, she would do what good she could for others.