Asteria In Love with the Prince (32 page)

Every street I hurried through was different. In some, the residents had locked their doors and stayed inside – it could almost have been a normal night, save for the wailing sirens. In others, a full-blown riot was in progress. It seemed to be sweeping outwards from the center of the city, with cars ablaze and screaming crowds. Everyone protesting seemed to be men, and it seemed to be the poorest neighborhoods that were worst affected.

It took me three terrifying hours of skulking through backstreets to get close to the palace. Twice, I had to hide from military patrols as they shone searchlights into every dark alley. Whether they were looking for rioters or me, I couldn’t tell. Both times, I hid out in abandoned buildings, back against a freezing wall as the searchlights swept in through the windows, eyes squeezed shut, imagining myself back in New York, with Jagor swinging me round and round in his arms.

Gradually, the buildings changed to the beautiful old town houses and smart shops that lay near the palace. At last, I cleared the last street and could look across the parkland that led up to the canyon, the bridge and the palace itself. I stopped dead.

Armored personnel carriers and troops lined the bridge and the gates were open: I could see soldiers walking inside. The palace had already fallen.

I slumped to my knees, cold mud soaking through my jeans. Jagor was likely dead. The King and Queen, if alive, were in the hands of the enemy. I was utterly alone.

Chapter Twenty

I don’t know how long I knelt there, half-hidden in the trees, the cold ground slowly chilling me. I know that I cried in long, silent sobs: for Jagor, for our life, for what could have been.

I heard them approaching, heavy boots squelching in the mud. I pulled off the wig and shoved it into a pocket because I knew it was over.

There was a shout behind me as they saw me; I put my hands up. When I stood and turned around, I saw there were two of them. One was a soldier barely out of his teens, nervously pointing a rifle at me as if I was armed to the teeth. The other was a huge bear of a man, his bald head making it hard to judge his age. “It’s the Exkella,” the young one said, disbelievingly.

“Call it in,” said the bald one. He spoke in thickly-accented Asterian – he sounded Russian, and as he stepped forward I could see how much older he was – late fifties, at least. “He’ll want to meet her.” Then, to me, “Turn around!”

I turned to face the palace – probably the last time I’d see it. I felt him step close and jerk my hands behind my back. My wrists were pulled together by something hard and scratchy that dug into my skin.

Then I felt his hand cup my ass and my whole body went cold.

“I’m not sure—” said his companion.

“Who’ll know?” said the bald one. “Who’ll care? They’re going to kill her anyway.”

In front of me, maybe a hundred feet away, lay the ravine. If I sprinted, I might reach the edge and throw myself over before they caught me. Better that than....

I ran. There was a shout of surprise from the young one and cruel laughter from the other. My feet slithered and skidded on ground turned to mud by hundreds of soldiers’ feet. Every slip made my heart leap into my throat: if I fell, I had no way to catch myself, and once down they’d be on me in a second. Or would they even bother chasing me: would they just shoot me in the back as I fled? With every step, I tensed for the sound of the shot ringing out.

I reached the ravine…and stopped, feet skittering on the very edge. I couldn’t even see the bottom: just the rocky sides descending into pitch-blackness. Behind me, the sound of boots lazily approaching.
Why have you stopped?
I screamed at myself.
Do it, do it, do it!

“She won’t jump,” I heard the bald one say.

I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. I wasn’t going to let him touch me. I lifted one foot….

Behind me, the brutal sound of wood on bone. I spun and saw the young one slumping to the ground. The giant who’d felled him stepped out of the darkness, his dinner jacket shredded and his shirt stained with blood.

Jagor.

The bald one barely had time to turn around before Jagor swung the tree branch, face contorted with rage. The man crumpled like a rag doll.

Jagor grabbed me and pulled me away from the edge, his strong arms wrapping around me. Neither of us could say anything for a few seconds.

“Did they hurt you?” he asked.

“You got here in time,” I told him, and saw his jaw tighten. “Are you hurt?” I asked. I wanted to run my hands over his chest, check that the blood wasn’t his, but my hands were still tied.

“I’m okay,” he said simply, and searched the soldiers until he found a knife. He cut the plastic tie they’d bound me with and we hugged again.

“What are we going to do?” I asked. We both looked at the palace: at the mass of soldiers around it. The younger soldier was still out cold, but the bald giant was starting to groan.

“Run,” he told me, and led me by the hand.

He had a motorbike parked in the trees just off the road. We mounted up, me behind him. He pressed buttons a little uncertainly. “I stole it,” he told me. “It was easier on the way here: the engine was already running.”

I looked over my shoulder, expecting soldiers to come running at any second. Jagor finally managed to get the thing started and gunned the throttle a few times.

“Do you know how to ride it?” I asked.

“I rode one once in Abu Dhabi. A prince showed me how.”

Before I could protest, we were off, a sudden burst of speed that almost tipped me off the back. I clung to his waist as we sped diagonally across the main road, horns blaring as we cut across traffic. We lurched one way, then the other, and then we were picking up speed, heading back into the heart of the city.

I’d never ridden pillion before – I’m the
librarian,
remember – but I was pretty sure it wasn’t meant to feel like that. It was as if Jagor was riding an untamed horse: he’d pull it one way, then overcompensate and go the other. When we were going straight, he sat rigid-armed, trying not to upset the bike’s delicate balance.

At first, I closed my eyes and pressed my face against his back, but that just made me feel sick as well as terrified. I settled for watching over his shoulder and trying to warn him of obstacles.

“Car!” I screeched in his ear. The wind was plastering my hair back into my face: I could barely see.

“I
know
,” he said tightly, and turned, almost smacking into a tree.

Looking back on it, we can’t have ridden for more than five minutes. It felt like hours.

We eventually pulled up in a neighborhood I hadn’t seen before: shabby apartment blocks, some of them derelict, most of them vacant – at least officially. There was graffiti and litter, and the occasional glow of a fire that signaled squatters. I was stunned: I hadn’t thought such places existed in Asteria.

“As good a place as any,” he told me. “Come on.”

We found a block that seemed to be completely empty – a gray concrete monstrosity with mostly broken windows. In the orange light from the streetlamps outside, we found a deserted apartment on the first floor: it had one room with the windows still intact. And there, sitting in the corner on the bare floorboards, we could finally rest.

Just
stopping
after all that running felt strange. My limbs turned to lead: I felt like I’d never move again. The quiet of the apartment, after hours of sirens and bellowing crowds, was other-worldly. It sank in that we were safe: for the moment. And then I just turned and hugged him and didn’t let go for almost an hour.

***

Later, when I’d cried and he’d wiped my tears away, we told our stories.

He listened, the fear in his eyes growing, as I related how the crash team had pulled me from the opera house and why I’d fled. “I invited them,” he muttered. “They were loyal to the coup leaders the whole time, and I invited them right into the palace.”

I told him how I’d cut the collar off. “You did the right thing,” he told me. There was pain in his eyes: he found it just as much of a wrench as I had. When I pulled out the broken collar to show him, his eyes widened in amazement and delight, and he hugged me. “You kept it,” he said, “my God, Lucy; you kept it.”

When I told him how a man had nearly claimed me, he pulled me into his arms and stroked my hair. “That won’t happen again,” he told me. “We’ll both get out of here – together.”

He’d woken after I had, buried under the other bodies. Apart from a cut above his eye and a few bruises, he was unhurt. “I stumbled out in the smoke,” he told me. “I asked someone in the street: they said the crash team had taken you. I didn’t see them – they must have given up looking for me, or thought I was dead.” When he’d seen the army in the streets and realized a coup was in progress, he’d stolen the bike and ridden to the palace, hoping I’d go there.

“But what’s happening?” I asked. “Why the coup?”

Jagor ran a hand through his hair. “The bike had a radio: they must have taken the radio and TV stations, because they’re broadcasting their lies.” He hesitated. “They’re saying we’re criminals, Lucy. They’re offering a reward for information on us. And they’re threatening that if people shelter us, they’ll be killed.”

“The public won’t side with them, though - will they?”

“I don’t know. They’re telling the people - especially the poor - what they want to hear.”

“Which is?”

“What the poor always want to hear. That they’ll do better under the new regime; that the palladium mines will be sold off and the money redistributed.”

There was a long silence.

“I need you to explain to me—” I said quietly.

He sighed. “It’s complicated, Lucy.”

“Why are there slums like this – slums you never told me about – when Asteria has more money than it knows what to do with. You have a
747—”

“I know,”
he said sharply, but I couldn’t stop myself.

“We fly around the world; we spend weeks in Paris and Monaco and there are people living like this –
here,
in Asteria?”

“I KNOW!” and his shout was deafening in the bare, echoing room. His fists were clenched as he tried again. “I know,” he said. He put his head back against the wall, staring at the ceiling, and tried to explain.

“They only found the palladium in ’85. The first mine didn’t get going until ’86. Before that, we were poor.
Really
poor: most people lived off the land. We’ve gone from that to being one of the richest nations in the world in
less than thirty years.
We suddenly have a mineral economy, but it doesn’t employ that many people: machines do all the work these days. We have money, but not enough jobs. We spent millions modernizing the farms so they could compete with other countries, but that only put more people out of work. That whole section of the population that used to work the land – it’s going to wind up behind a desk. That’s the way rich economies go. Only here it’s happened in fast-forward. We’ve built schools and hospitals and highways and airports, but farmers can’t retrain as construction workers overnight. So however hard we try, some of them – a lot of them – are out of work.”

“But the money from the palladium.... You could afford to pay them all enough to live on – more than enough!”

He closed his eyes. “When the country got rich, under my father, he kept spending the same way he always had – just
more
. We didn’t have a welfare service in those days and the farmers were almost self-sufficient. But we’d been used to spending on the military – we had to protect ourselves, since we didn’t have any defense treaties.”

“And the bigwigs in the military got rich.”

He stared at me, his eyes big and sorrowful. “That’s why I was working with my father on a defense agreement with the French. Once we were secure, we were going to cut the military right back so we could afford to lift people out of the slums.”

Suddenly I understood. “That’s why the military staged the coup: you were going to take all their money and power.”

Jagor looked like he was going to be sick. “And that’s why they poisoned my father: they’d heard he was going to sign the treaty - that he was on my side. I’d convinced him, Lucy: it’s my fault! And that’s why they tried to kill us at the opera house. Wipe out or imprison our family, and there’s no-one but them to rule.” He sighed. “I knew they were angry but I never thought they’d do something like this. I was stupid.”

“You weren’t stupid. From what Sarik said, the white-haired man arrived and got them riled up. So who’s he?”

Jagor shook his head. “I have no idea. Sarik was the only one who had a hope of putting all this together and I don’t know where he is. He wasn’t in the lobby when the bomb went off, but....” I tried to imagine what he must be going through. His best friend and his only link to the truth, gone.

He suddenly slammed his fist on the floor, making me jump. “It would have
worked,
Lucy. Another five years and we could have helped the poor. Now the military chiefs will score one last big pay-off when they sell the mines, then flee the country with the money. Foreign corporations will move in and run the mines without giving
any
of it to the people.” He looked at me. “I know my country’s not perfect, I
know
it’s unfair, but it’s changing fast. Thirty years ago, we had children dying of diseases you’d wiped out in America. Now we have some of the best healthcare in the world. We could have solved the problems – this could have been....” He sighed. “This could have been paradise.”

I was beginning to see what a good ruler he’d make. Good-hearted, like his father, but with this mother’s cunning. All he needed was someone to fill that void in him left by his brother.

“The rioters,” I asked, “whose side are they on?”