Dearly, Beloved (58 page)

In all my life I never would have said I had the ability to feel as much pain as I did at that moment. My body wanted to curl up, to protect my stomach, my vitals—as if his words were physical threats that could be blocked. Griswold, a monster that didn’t deserve to live or love, had taken the love of my life from me, humiliated me, attacked me—and my father’d rather have him for a son.

“I did it because I thought it was how you’d want me to do it,” I said. “Without your help. On my own.”

“I have worked
so hard
to keep this from collapsing on our heads, and you go and do something like this. Give the police an excuse to waltz right into my house.” He walked away again. He couldn’t be still. “I planned everything so carefully. I destroyed everything I made with my own hands. And now I have investigators beating down my door …”

“Keep what from collapsing on our heads?” Dad didn’t answer. His silence swallowed up the whole of my attention just the same as if he had been speaking—but then I felt the need to fill it. “My lord—I was beaten. I was kidnapped. This monster of a zombie nearly bit me, the one with the new strain of the disease … I never meant for any of this to happen!”

Rather than calm down or reevaluate his opinion, my father flew at me, his hands gripping the arms of my chair so I was imprisoned. “The biter was there?”

“He nearly got me!”

He pushed himself away and started to pace, turning over this new information, his eyes wild. “We need to stop this. We need to get him.”

“Get him?” Was my father going to make
sure
Patient One got a chance to feast on me? “Why?”

Dad managed to collect himself somewhat, his arms almost riveted to his sides. “Because he is my property. And I
will
have him back.”

“What?” The word seemed not large enough. It in no way encompassed the amount of wonder, confusion, and fear I felt at that statement.

“And the Lazarus is mine to profit off of.
My
discovery.” My father held up a hand, forbidding me to speak. He returned to his desk and sat down, breathing in and out slowly. “You’re going to get what you want, son.” His voice was returning to normal.

I didn’t dare ask. I didn’t want to know.

“You want to pretend to play with the men? Then I’ll let you play with the men. But you will do precisely what I say.” He looked at the floor. “You will have real equipment, not theater masks and winter scarves knit for you by your mommy.”

My heart twinged.

“You will have real, world-changing goals. You will actually work to protect your family, instead of casting them into disgrace and shame. In fact, your first goal will be to find these masked idiots and force them to stand beside you in the light.”

“What do we need protection from?” I dared to ask.

Lord Allister looked at me, his eyes sharp. “I think it’s time you visited the twelfth floor of Allister Genetics.” He reached over to hit a button on his desk. “And I think it’s time you met E.”

Upon being informed of Smoke’s transformation, Papa made him his new favorite project. With everything else going on, it was Monday before I could visit the ships to ask after him. I didn’t learn much upon going there.

“He hasn’t said a word since Saturday. We’re giving him a chance to recuperate before we start running more invasive tests,” my father explained. Smoke sat beside us at his desk, clothed and slowly eating a bowl of vegetable soup. “This reaction you’ve described … I’d like to see it for myself. But that might be dangerous.”

“So you don’t know anything yet? Is he alive or dead?”

“I’m not sure. His internals still look fresh, but I’ve not seen them in action.” Papa sighed. “We’ll run more metabolic tests.”

Tests aside, it was the potential Allister connection that made me uneasy. “What do you think all of this means?”

Stroking my hair, my father said, “That we need to turn our attention outward. Get to the bottom of this.” Withdrawing his hand, he added, “Lopez got in touch with me. Said you called him to talk your way into an invitation to Marblanco.”

“I did.” Fighting the fatigue this topic caused, I asked, “Can I go? I don’t want to go
anywhere
, but if I have to …”

“Yes. You should go with Miss Roe. If only to get her settled.” With that, he leaned forward to kiss my brow. “My little miracle.”

I made a face at that, even if I was relieved—especially at the suggestion that my stay at Marblanco might be brief. Before I could figure out a way to wheedle a timeline out of my father, Dr. Salvez burst in. “Lower the screen. Turn on NVIC.”

Reaching across Dad’s desk, I grabbed the remote and did both. “This just in.” Zombie reporter Marcus Maripose was reading directly from a digidiary. “Again, I apologize for the spottiness of these reports, but this is live. The Punks are abandoning the Border Zone. We have video footage of the Punks simply … walking away. No one has contacted the New Victorian government to negotiate terms of surrender, or even said … anything.” He looked extremely puzzled.

So did the rest of us.

“What?” Papa asked, his face going slack.

“They wouldn’t do that,” I said. “The Punk extremists hate us.” They’d fought their futile battles at the border for decades. It’d been their own homegrown terrorist plots that led my people to banish them to the South originally.

“I’m inclined to agree with you,” said Salvez. “But they
must
mean that the extremists are leaving. The army wouldn’t up and leave even if they wanted peace. They wouldn’t leave the border unprotected.”

“Exactly,” I said. “The army’s just there to keep an eye on things.” That was what Bram had told me. That only the extremists cared about attacking the New Victorians; that most Punks were more concerned with building their own civilization.

A second later NVIC started showing footage, and indeed, part of the Punk army was moving away from the border. Their
walking tanks and huge war machines—heavy, mechanical, “old-fashioned” and yet terribly dangerous—formed massive columns of retreat. They appeared to be escorting the un-uniformed men marching with them—the mercs and extremists. Behind them the rest of the army watched them go. Apparently they were meant to stay behind.

Just like that, the fight was over?

I slid my hands over my face. It seemed like one thing after another was happening, the entire world collapsing like a row of dominoes. And I had no idea what sort of pattern was being formed yet.

“This is a good thing,” Salvez said. There was no joy in his voice. “Isn’t it?”

“I don’t know.” I kept my eyes on the screen. “I don’t know anything anymore.”

Chas came back that day. She’d led the AG minions on an epic chase up the Honduran coast before losing them near Belize. She had souvenirs for us, trinkets from seaside towns. Pastel pinwheels and taffy. When Samedi asked her about the Rolls, she shoved a piece of candy into his mouth and told him to treasure his ignorance.

That night, with Matilda’s help, I packed. As she shoved petticoats and shoes into my trunk, it occurred to me that I ought to take my identity papers along, just in case. I didn’t have my chip anymore. So I went to the study and started combing through my father’s desk, looking for my birth certificate, anything that seemed useful.

After twenty minutes of fruitless searching I stumbled upon a water-stained folder. I flicked through it out of curiosity—but what I found astounded me. Schematics, budgets, architectural plans. It wasn’t until I got to the written pages in the back that I
realized my father had been designing a school, or perhaps some sort of institution or asylum. The building designs were High Victorian and beautiful, with gardens, sunny hallways, operating theaters, and …

 … a graveyard. A lovely, sheltered graveyard, for the people who would inevitably die there.

Back in the jungle, he’d said he had something he wanted to keep a surprise. This must be it. It was right after he talked about my education—he must have been dreaming of starting some sort of co-mortal academy or college. Maybe he’d been considering the idea all during his stint with Company Z.

My father
had
looked to the future. Even if only for a few weeks, a few months. He’d wanted to do something great. And New London had trapped him, too.

Closing the folder, I put it on the desk and wiped my eyes.

“Are you all right?”

Dr. Chase was in the doorway. I nodded. “Yes.” I wasn’t sure if I ought to share my father’s secret, so I told her, “I just don’t want to leave. Bram. All of you. Especially when we have so much to do.”

“It won’t be forever.” Beryl came forward and wrapped me in her arms. I shut my eyes, taking in the powdery scent of her perfume. “And it’s not that far away. You’ll just have to commute to the fight.”

“It seems a world away.” I’d tried hard to avoid thinking about Bram, but now the idea of leaving him seemed immediate, inevitable, and my rib cage felt too small for my heart.

Dr. Chase withdrew and looked into my eyes. “Miss Dearly …” She seemed to win some internal debate, and guided me to a chair. She sat by my side. “I don’t know why I want to tell you this, but I do. Maybe it’s because I see some of myself in you.”

“What?”

“As a girl, I had a happy life. I grew up in a sweet New Victorian
town in Venezuela. Close to the border. Postcard-pretty. My father was the sheriff.” Beryl straightened up. “And when Baldwin showed up at our farm, I ran away with him hours later. I traded everything for him. And then … I refused to let him go. I turned him into a zombie. I, too, have made reckless decisions that have brought me both elation and pain.”

It wasn’t that I didn’t know what to say—it was that my brain suddenly wasn’t sure how to operate my mouth. “Huh?”

Beryl actually laughed a little, before pressing her hand over the nub of hair at the nape of her neck. “God, it was so long ago. After he gave up smuggling, Baldwin started running these engineering cons. He showed up with this machine he claimed could draw water out of thin air, out of the earth. It was an amazing piece of tech—and a total scam. Dad ran him off, but … he had me. You should have seen him when he was alive, and younger. ‘Dashing’ doesn’t begin to do him justice.”

“I can believe it,” I said.

“I guess you could say I became his assistant. Ran his scams with him. Baldwin was good with machines—his dad was a smuggler before him, and he grew up keeping his getaway carriages in working order. I grew up fixing things around town. We’d build these contraptions that made people think we’d come up with some spectacular new technology—replication of objects, perpetual motion, teleportation. Mom taught me calligraphy in home school, so I used to work up fake patents, fake endorsements. Not under either of our real names, mind.” She plucked at her blouse. “I guess now’s as good a time as any to admit neither of us has a Ph.D. in anything? Diplomas are exceptionally easy to forge.”

That thought had never even crossed my mind. “You’re kidding. You’re not a doctor?”

“No. I’m an old maid, I’m still Miss Chase. Anyway, people’d invest in the machines, and we’d take the money and run. That’s
what I have amnesty for. We ran the con on the NV side a few times.”

“Wow.”

“I know. I regret it. And it wasn’t until later I learned how dark his life truly was. That people like the Ratcatcher existed. But by that point I didn’t care. He told me I could have adventure, and I could have him, and he never lied to me about either.”

“How’d he become a zombie, then?”

Beryl seemed to shrink a bit. “We were running the scam at some Punk’s place. She was a dangerous mark—she was also into moving contraband. That’s how Baldwin met her. She operated off an aerial platform in the desert. I think one of her men must have come in from a smuggling operation sick.” She looked at her hands, which were starting to shake. “Those were the worst three days of my life, with that dead thing on the other side of the door wanting in, and Baldwin dying in my arms from a gunshot another man had fired, and … when it looked like I was going to lose him, I let the zombie in. I’d seen another victim reanimate and keep his mind. At least, it seemed that way. So I got it to bite him. I knew I’d lose him forever, otherwise. And I do love him. I
do
.” She licked her lips. “After it bit him … and I just let it in, and used him as a human shield, it wasn’t hard … but … afterward, the host turned on me, and I killed it with a marble statue. Just hammered, over and over, till its brains leaked out. And then I sat down with the statue in my lap and prayed I wouldn’t have to do the same thing to Baldwin.”

I didn’t dare try to formulate a response to this. She didn’t look at me. There was much more behind their relationship than I’d ever guessed. My chest tightened as I realized just how hard she had fought to stay with him, in every sense of the word.

“After he reanimated … I still had him, but there’s no way I can ever atone for what I did. Especially after it became clear that if we talked, if we went forward with what we’d seen, the Punk
government would kill him and lock me up. That’s when we crossed the border for the last time. That’s when Company Z found us.”