It was a symbol that meant everything to Father, and I used to think it meant everything to me. But now I knew that it would haunt my dreams, possibly as it had haunted Jack’s, knowing all the misery that had stemmed from one man’s decision to misuse a gift of enormous power. Tears burned at my eyes, and I wasn’t sure who—or what—they were for. I stared at the bust for several minutes, my thoughts wandering from my father to Charlie to David, from Cherenkov lanterns to journals to the atoms themselves. Atoms that comprised the banister I was holding and the bust I was looking at and the air I breathed.
And then—on this sprawling estate, in this large house, on the brink of a revolution—I was reminded of the power of the small. Small ideas, small acts, small people. After all, it was the furious industry of those tiny atoms that fueled the stars, stars that then nourished planets, and planets that then nourished life. No matter how small I felt, how infinitesimal my feeble gestures seemed, I was part of a larger chain, a larger system, and so help me, I would bring order to this chaos.
I turned away from Jacob Landry and started up the stairs.
Jack was in Father’s room with Ewan, and Jamie was by the bed with his tablet, using it to take readings of Father’s breathing.
“Is he all right?” I asked Jack.
“He is alive, as I said he would be,” he said, and gestured to Father. I approached the sleigh bed, where Father had been dumped on top of the silk, hand-embroidered duvet. His coat, gloves, and shoes were missing, and the raw red of his feet and hands made me think they’d been stripped away shortly after I left. His eyes were closed, but he was writhing slowly, his hands grabbing and clutching at the duvet.
And his mouth—
“What happened to him?” I cried, going to the side of the bed and taking his hand. He clutched at my fingers with a steel grip.
“I will send for my doctor bag,” Jamie said, looking queasy. “We may need to call for a surgeon.”
Jack’s face was a statue’s, but there was a trace of sadness in his words. “I believe they chose to give him a taste of his own medicine, so to speak. They pinned him down and forced the gibbet food inside his mouth for several minutes. Not enough to kill him, but enough to burn his mouth. Enough to give him severe radiation poisoning and probably cancer.”
Father’s mouth was more than burned. The lower half of his face was unrecognizable—dark brown with blisters covering his lips and tongue. Bloody ulcers were beginning to form at the corners of his mouth, and smaller burns stretched down his chin and neck, as if he’d thrown up radioactive bile.
“Father, it’s Madeline,” I said, brushing the hair away from his forehead. “Jamie is going to help you, okay? He will be back any minute and he will fix you.”
Father’s eyes fluttered open. He reached up to touch my hair, and then closed his eyes again with a groan.
“A shame,” Jack said.
“He was about to do the same to Charlie,” Ewan reminded his father. “If we hadn’t stopped him, you’d be watching this happen to Charlie right now.” But even Ewan looked a little sick at the sight of my father’s ruined face.
Jamie came back not ten minutes later, hurrying in with his bag. “I have called the gentry hospital to arrange for home treatment,” he said breathlessly. “They should be here within the hour.” He set the bag on a nearby table and began pulling out syringes of morphine and vials of anti-microbial medicine. “We will need to clean the wounds as best as possible, and then cover them with a dry dressing. Necrosis of the tissue will set in within a few days, and we don’t want to risk sepsis. We will also need to order cellular scans to estimate the level of DNA damage and cancerous cells.”
“Will his mouth heal?” I asked. “Will he be able to talk with his tongue and throat burned like this?”
Jamie prepared a syringe of morphine and then eased it into Father’s thigh. After three or four minutes, his squirming stilled somewhat, and his breathing deepened. Jamie nodded, and began dousing cotton pads in anti-microbial fluid. “There is always a chance,” he replied finally. “But at this point, I think it doubtful that he will ever eat or speak or smile again.”
That night another snowstorm came like soft, soft music. When I woke, even the ice in the trees was covered with a thick blanket of white. Cold seeped in along the baseboards and through the frosted windows. The house was muffled and empty, bereft of the guests that had filled its rooms the day before. All the Uprisen had fled back to their homes, probably conspiring over their next move, searching for a new leader now that Father lay wordless and suffering, a prisoner in his own home.
I pulled on a warm dress of ivory angora and went downstairs, where I found Mother grimly contemplating a chunk of bread in the morning room.
“Your uncle has given the servants a holiday,” she said, poking at the bread with a knife. “When they come back, he wants to talk about a pay raise. Regular days off.”
“Mother…”
She burst into tears. “Your father, darling, your poor father. Your cousin says he doesn’t know if your father will ever heal properly and that he probably has cancer. What will those Rootless do to you or to me when they have the chance?”
“They had the chance with me,” I reminded her. “And they did nothing. It was only Father they wanted.”
“Here they are gloating and nattering about justice, when they are nothing more than violent criminals. It makes me sick. I can’t see how one brother would let that happen to another.”
If the brother in question was about to kill his son… But I agreed with her. I felt the same shaky nausea as I did after seeing the battle on the wall screen a few months ago. So much violence, so much destruction. “Where is he? Uncle Jack?”
“Back at his hovel, I suppose,” she said. She pushed her plate away. “Preparing to invade our home and kick us into the streets.”
“He promised me a place to stay,” I told her. “I am sure you can stay, too.”
“But who would want to? After what he let those animals do to your father? And with that awful journal of Jacob Landry’s circulating around? The Rootless are refusing to change the charges, the working poor and the middle class are in an up-roar, and now that awful man is in charge of Landry Park. Oh, Madeline, why couldn’t you have just left all this alone?” She put her face in her hands. Even despairing, she was beautiful.
I sat next to her and put my arms around her slender frame. She leaned her head on my shoulder.
“Everything was going so nicely,” she said sadly.
“For you. Everything was going so nicely for you and people like us. But it could not go on forever. Isn’t it better that Jack takes control now, rather than have the Empire help the Rootless overthrow the gentry?”
“I don’t trust a man who deals with the Empire,” she answered.
“Desperate people make desperate choices.”
“Then why didn’t he just stay?” Mother demanded. “Stay and inherit Landry Park and then administer whatever social changes he wanted to then? Why fake a death and then come back to claim his birthright?” She stood up. “I’m going to lie down. This day has already exhausted me.”
“Mother?”
She stopped and turned, her dark eyes and dark hair lovely in the pale winter light. I thought of the night of Charlie’s capture, of the flash of agreement I saw in her eyes. “Didn’t you ever feel that Father was unjust? Didn’t you ever wonder about the suffering of those around us?”