She said, “The boy is probably at City Hall. They have a makeshift prison there.” Unless he was dead. Which was possible, even likely. But Dex must surely know that, and Linneth didn’t want to say more in front of the mother.
The Stockton woman said something about a neighbor who had seen the soldiers taking her boy into City Hall—so at least Clifford had been there, not long ago.
Dex said slowly, “There may not be much of a guard. All the Proctors are gone by now. Soldiers, though, maybe.” He looked at Linneth.
She thought, He wants me to decide. Then: No … he wants my permission.
Because it was her life at risk, too, not just his own.
She thought, But we might die. But surely that was true no matter what. People were already dying. More would die very soon, and she would probably be among that unfortunate majority—and so what?
The Renunciates had taught her that if she died outside the Church she would be scourged by the angel Tartarouchis with whips of fire, forever. So be it, Linneth thought. No doubt Tartarouchis would be busy, with the war and all.
City Hall was five blocks behind them. She told Dex, “We should hurry,” wanting to get the words out before her courage failed.
He smiled as he turned the car around.
Symeon Demarch sat braced against the plushly upholstered rear bench of the Bureau car as his chauffeur mumbled to himself and drove at a dangerous clip east toward the highway.
Demarch had stopped thinking about Evelyn. He had stopped thinking about Dorothea, or Christof, or Guy Marris, or the Bureau de la Convenance … he wasn’t really thinking at all, only gazing from this sheltered space at the pine-green and cloud-gray shape of the exterior world. He faced the window, where each flake of snow that lighted would cling a moment before it slid into wind-driven dew.
“Some trouble at the military barracks,” the chauffeur said. The chauffeur was a young man with pomaded hair and a Nahanni drawclass="underline" a civilian employee, not a pion. Demarch saw the nervous way his eyes flicked to the rear-view mirror.
They turned onto the highway heading south. This road connected with the route to Fort LeDuc, but it also passed the motor hotel that had been commandeered as a military garrison. Demarch said, “Is that a threat to us?”
“I don’t know, Lieutenant, but it may be. See that smoke up ahead?”
Demarch peered forward and saw nothing but snow, the same snow that sent the wheels askew whenever the car turned a corner. “Must you go so quickly?”
“Sir, if I slow down we might end up spinning our wheels for traction. I prefer a little momentum.”
“Do what you think best.”
A few moments later the driver said: “God and Samael!” And the car lurched sickeningly as he pressed the brake.
Ahead, on the left-hand side of the road, the military barracks was burning. It was a strange sight in the falling snow and Demarch was mute, marveling at it. Black smoke billowed from the many windows of what had once been the Days Inn. The flames rising from the embrasures looked almost like faces.
The road was blackened with soot but passable. “Don’t stop,” Demarch said. “Not here, for God’s sake!”
Then a window shattered. It was the front window, driver’s side. The chauffeur jerked and turned as if to look back, but his visible eye was full of blood. His foot convulsed against the gasoline pedal and the car bucked sharply as he slid away from the wheel.
The car rolled into a mile marker. Demarch was thrown forward by the sudden stop, and before he could right himself he saw the chauffeur’s bullet-cracked skull staining the upholstery with slurries of blood. A cold wind came through the broken window. Demarch looked past the clinging tines of glass to the pine woods opposite the burning motel, where soldiers were emerging through flags of smoke. They carried rifles. Most of their rifles were aimed at the car.
The soldiers took aim as Demarch scrambled from the right-side rear door. He was wearing his Bureau uniform; even at this distance they would know him for a Proctor. Glass exploded all around him in brittle showers, and he heard the whine of bullets and their hammering impact on the snowbound roadway. When he stood to run, he felt the bullets enter his body.
Then he was on the ground. The soldiers shouted and waved their weapons, but that sound faded into noise. Breathless, Demarch turned his head to look at the burning building. The roar of it was all around him. The fire had melted the snow into mirrors of ice: mirrors full of sky, fire, ash, the world, himself.
Clifford Stockton had slept a little during the night. Lukas Thibault had not.
Each had been given his own cage in the basement jail at City Hall. They were separated by a dusty space in a room that had once been the building’s archives. All the filing cabinets had been moved out and their contents burned when Delafleur took over the building. The walls were concrete. The ceiling was white acoustic tile. The floor was green linoleum, and it was as cold as winter earth. Clifford had learned to keep his feet off it; his snow boots were scant protection. He spent most of his time on the tiny hemp cloth cot the Proctors had provided.
He woke to the sound of Lukas Thibault’s cursing.
“I want my breakfast,” Luke was shouting. “Assholes! We’re starving down here!”
Brief silence, then the rhythmic banging of Luke’s fist against the bars. Clifford didn’t bother to look. He could see Luke’s cell only by forcing his head against the bars of his own cage and peering around an L-bend where the cages followed the wall. It wasn’t worth the effort.
He was grateful for the relative privacy. Clifford emptied his bladder into the crockery pot provided for the purpose, embarrassed by the sound. It was cold enough this morning that the pot steamed for a few minutes after he was finished.
He sat back down on the cot and wrapped the blanket around himself.
“Fuckers!” Luke was screeching. “Cretins! Bastards!”
Clifford waited until the soldier had lapsed back into silence. Then he said, “They aren’t here.”
Luke said, “What?”—startled, as if he had forgotten Clifford was in the basement with him.
“They’re not here!” It was obvious. For hours after dark the building had been full of sound: legions of feet upstairs, doors opening and closing, motors roaring and then fading away beyond the high, dust-clogged windows that vented the basement. “They’re gone. They evacuated. Today must be the day.”
The day of the bomb, he didn’t need to add. That was why Luke was here: for talking about the bomb.
That was also why Clifford was here, though no one had told him so—no one had talked to him. The soldiers had just put him in this cage and gone away.
It was too late now to do anything but wait, and he told Luke so.
Thibault called him a little idiot, a criminal, a liar. “They can’t leave me here. Sons of Samael! Even the Proctors wouldn’t do that!”
But the morning ticked on and Luke lapsed into a despairing silence. Clifford knew it was past dawn by the faint light in the vent windows. That was his only clock. The shadowy fluorescent tubes overhead were the only other light—and most of those were burned out.
Clifford gazed at that patch of daylight far up at the margin of the ceiling for a time he could not calculate; it was interrupted only by the sound of Lukas Thibault’s sobbing.
Then there was another sound: gunshots, and not far away.
“Sophia Mother!” Luke cried out.
This was a new threat. Clifford was dismayed: better the bomb, Clifford thought, than a gun. He had read about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bomb washed everything away in a tidal wave of light. The people were gone with only their shadows left behind. He had resigned himself to dying in the bomb blast, but this gunfire was different. It worried him.