Never Lost.
Bellum omnium contra omnes
across the top. Stared at the strange symbol. It looked oddly like a baby bird to him.
Randomly ripped from a book to write on? Or something more? Abandoned the question. Wrote:
two bodies
fell
Thought about the Partial, daring to contradict Heretic. Heretic’s secret amusement. What did that mean? At least he knew what Heretic on the scene meant: the gray cap must suspect the case had some connection to the rebels and their elusive commander, the Lady in Blue. She who was now larger than the city and yet not of the city. Most saw her hand in any act that seemed to cause the gray caps grief. Although such acts of resistance seemed rarer and rarer. Some thought she didn’t exist. Or was dead.
The trapped rebel soldiers. The Lady in Blue.
Was the fate of either better or worse than his?
* * *
Finch sees again, back across six long years, the columns of tanks and infantry in retreat, traveling through the city toward the north. Recognizes with hindsight that the path they took had been chosen by the gray caps. Forced by the rising water.
Distant explosions had split the air as the gray caps attacked stragglers at the end of the column. Even then, small-arms fire no longer registered with Finch unless it was close by.
Despite the risk, many people had come out to watch the rebels. From the roadside. From balconies. Peering out of windows reinforced with metal bars. To bear witness to the rumbling tread of the tanks. To remember the faces of the troops: pale and dark, old and young and middle-aged. Beneath green helmets with the intertwined H&S/F&L insignia that rankled so many. Armed with automatic weapons, bayonets, knives. Most in uniform. Many damaged. A welter of bandages on heads, legs, arms, that hid evidence of strange fungal wounds.
One man’s face held Finch’s attention. Salt-and-pepper beard, creases in his forehead, wrinkles that made him look as if he were squinting. A red patch on his cheek. Body slumped, then tensed, against the lurching of the tank. A gaunt hand clutching his Lewden rifle, knuckles prominent. Gaze turned forward, as if unwilling to acknowledge the present.
Which had made Finch realize again that these men and women leaving, they were the same ones who had fought one another during more than three decades of the War of the Houses, broken only by armistices, cease-fires, and the dream of empire. The ones who had brought ruination upon Ambergris in so many ways before the Rising.
Yet they were still from Ambergris, of Ambergris, and even Finch felt it in his chest, Wyte standing there beside him with his Emily. Almost as if Ambergris itself was retreating, leaving behind only ghosts and children. But also leaving a perverse giddiness. A sense of celebration at seeing such a mighty force. The retreat portrayed as a new beginning. The lull before the launching of a great offensive.
Even the tanks were part of Ambergris. They’d come out of the eighty-year-old metal deposits found in eastern Ambergris that had catapulted the city out of the past but not yet into the future.
Rebel tanks had two turrets: one pointed ahead, one unseen beneath that pointed at the ground. Specially built to open up and deliver bombs to underground gray cap enclaves. Once, their rough syncopated song had been heard all over the city. Juddered through the ground into the walls of buildings and tunnels alike. Like a kind of defiant echoing growl.
In retreat, though, it was the singing of the troops as they left that Finch heard, their voices ragged over the rumble of the tanks. Patriotic songs composed long centuries before. A refrain that had started as a prayer by the Truffidian monks.
Holy city, majestic, banish your fears.
Arise, emerge from your sleeping years.
Too long have you dwelt in the valley of tears.
We shall restore you with mercy and grace.
City of wounds. City of wounding. For a moment, Finch had felt the urge to climb up onto one of the tanks, to join them in what was then the wilderness of North Ambergris. But Finch wasn’t one of them. He’d had no officer to report to. Had bought his own weapon. Off the books, off the record. An Irregular, fighting alongside other Irregulars in his neighborhood. Defending their sisters, brothers, parents, and neighbors against the invaders.
After the last tank had rumbled past, Finch had gone back with Wyte and Emily. To await the next thing. No matter what it might be. The need to work. To eat. To have shelter. People were already telling themselves things might still be better under the gray caps than during the War of the Houses, at least. Joked about it. Like you might about a passing storm.
Waiting it out at Wyte’s house. By candlelight. Drinking. Laughing nervously. Trying to forget. Finch’s father dead almost two years.
Just after midnight: a sound like a giant flame opening up and then winking out. A devastating whump, as of something hitting the ground or rising from it. When they looked outside, they’d seen a dome-like haze above the north part of the bay. Green-orange discharge like sunspots. They’d just watched it. Watched it and not known what to say. What to do. Barricaded the house. Spent the rest of the night with weapons within reach.
In the morning, a paralyzing horror. Across the bay, when they slipped out through back alleys to get a clear view: the seething area that became known as the HFZ, and no sign of anyone alive. No sign of the tanks. No messages from the rebel leadership.
Thought but not said: Abandoned. Gone. On our own.
Then the realization, as the gray caps began to appear in numbers in the streets, and as their surrogates the Partials began to help occupy the city, that the war was over for now. That each citizen of Ambergris would need to make some kind of peace with the enemy.
Always with the hope sent out across the water toward the HFZ: that the tanks, the men, might come back. Might reemerge. That the rebels were not dead. Destroyed.
Lost.
4
Midafternoon. A soft, wet, sucking sound came from the memory hole beside his desk. Finch shuddered, put aside his notes. A message had arrived.
Some detectives positioned their desks so they could see their memory holes. Finch positioned his desk so he couldn’t see it without leaning over. Tried never to look at it when he walked into the station in the morning. Still, the memory hole was better than the dead cat reanimated on Skinner’s doorstep, message delivered in screeched rhyming couplets. Or the mushroom that walked onto Dapple’s desk, turning itself inside out. To reveal the message.
Exhaled sharply. Peered around the left edge of the desk. Glanced down at the glistening hole. It was about twice the size of a man’s fist. Lamprey-like teeth. Gasping, pink-tinged maw. Foul. The green tendrils lining the gullet had pushed up the dirty black spherical pod until it lay atop the mouth.
Finch sat up. Couldn’t see it. Just heard its breathing. Which was worse.
The gray caps always called them “message tubes,” but the term “memory hole” had stuck. Memory holes allowed the detectives to communicate during the day with their gray cap superiors. Finch had no idea if the memory holes were living creatures or only seemed alive. Fluid leaked out of them sometimes.
Once, impulsive, Finch had crumpled up the wrapper around the remains of his lunch and shoved it down the hole. Lived in fear the rest of the day. But nothing had happened. When he’d thought about it since, it had made him laugh. Heretic, down there, hit in the head with a piece of garbage. Maybe cursing Finch’s name.