Hurley's Heroes Collection 2015-2020, page 7
“Then why?” the girl persisted, and Zin sighed, because she realized now as the girl’s body shifted toward hers, that the girl’s interest in Merriz had been a feint.
Merriz rolled his eyes. “Here it comes,” he said.
“I do it because I want justice,” Zin said, and finished her tea. She set the empty cup down in its saucer with a clatter and pulled on her hat.
Merriz sighed and slumped from his seat, waving his hat at the table girl. “Off we go to catch another collaborator,” he said. “Soon we’ll have condemned so many there won’t be an old wretch left in Fravesa.”
“I suspect that’s the point,” Zin said, and held open the door for him.
They got three paces into the street, into the looming shadow of the great status of Savazan, Merriz still limply waving his hat at the counter girl, when the whuffing-thud of weapons fire compressed the air and shattered the glass storefront behind them.
Merriz hit the ground first, his reflexes better than Zin’s. She slid to the cobbled pavement right after him. Her hat landed an arm’s length away, its cap tangled with spidery snarls of bone fungus released from the weapon shells. She grimaced. She had very much liked that hat.
Two more shots. Then footsteps scraping the stones.
Zin peered under the row of tricycles between them and the trolley tracks and saw the shooters approaching. Two at least, possibly three.
Merriz pulled his sidearm. Hers was already out. “Your family or mine?” he asked.
She shouldn’t have gone to the trial, or talked to that stupid reporter, even for a second. Her father would know, now, that it was her who had his file. It was her who had been called upon to bring him in. She wouldn’t have shown up at the trial otherwise, and he knew it.
“Two bits to the one whose family it isn’t,” she said, and rolled up to get a look at them.
#
My childhood was normal, which no one wants to hear, because no one wants to believe they could live with a collaborator, but it’s true. Elodiz was the senior father in the house, and I suppose that gave him a bit more authority, but it also meant we saw him less. Senior family members tended to work more, and he and my two senior mothers were rarely home. Growing up, my relationship with him, and my understanding of what it was he did, was informed by the media as much as it was my mothers’ and other fathers’ stories of him. He was a figure of legend even in his own household. A former navy general, a hero. I tell you this so you’ll hear the same stories I did. So you know I couldn’t have known what others say we all must have known.
I went into the army with my sisters and most of my brothers. The war took a turn for the worst when I was fifteen, so I joined up early with my older sister Savoir, and the whole household was proud of us. Elodiz sent me a singing boy to congratulate me. I remember because his dance was so ridiculous and his voice was very poor, and that was why I recognized Merriz when I met him again a decade later when he introduced himself as the other Justicar assigned to case folder 446. I burst out laughing when I saw him, because I knew his voice right away. I still haven’t told him why I laughed, but when he gets drunk and sings along to war ballads, I have to excuse myself because I can’t contain my mirth.
Elodiz always said that when one was a public figure, the person you had to be in front of the tinny recorders and ever-smiling politicians could not be the same as the one you were at home. It was, he said, an impossibility, like a fish trying to survive on land without water. One had to make accommodations. When I was a child I pictured this as something like a fish in a bowl carried around on a cart driven by speckled deer like the ones our neighbors used for the ritualized furrowing of the fields during the fertility festival. But politics was not as easy as that. It wasn’t just a fish wearing a bowl on its head.
If you want to live in the same tree as a family of snakes, you have to become a snake.
#
Three shooters, all dressed in black and tan linen like scholars. But the long black curves of the weapons they carried at their sides were anything but scholarly.
Zin scanned for civilians, because she wasn’t permitted to shoot within sight of any of them, not even in self-defense, and then it would be up to Merriz to take these three down with some cunning combination of flash-bangs and grappling. People had scattered in the streets at the sound of the shots, most of them worshippers at the Savazan shrine, but they hadn’t retreated inside. Zin saw two men cowering in the trolley stop thirty paces up, their arms full of lilac blooms to offer at Savazan’s feet. She holstered her gun, took cover, and pulled her truncheon.
Merriz rolled next to her.
“They’re ugly,” Zin said. “Most certainly your family.”
“Civs?” he said.
She nodded. “No guns.”
He smirked. “You get funny when you can’t use a gun.” He slipped brass knuckles onto both fists and crouched low into a boxer’s walk, moving fast and low.
Zin followed. She was bigger than him, not as nimble, and kept her truncheon out, stun on. He leapt and drove his weaponized fist into the first shooter’s face as she rounded the bank of bikes. The hit was so powerful that Zin heard the bones of the woman’s face crunch. She toppled like a tree.
Zin caught the woman's weapon and threw it hard at the other woman behind her opponent. The weapon had been designed for just that purpose; a magic-imbued Enemy weapon that morphed its shape and function depending on the purpose intended by its user.
Merriz leapt off the one with the crushed face and pounced the third one. He hit her hard enough that Zin saw her jaw dislodge from its socket. It went one way, her face another. She fell.
Zin grabbed the one she’d stunned before Merriz could take her out. Zin smacked her with her truncheon, sending a stunning zap through her body that left her limp. Zin straddled her.
“Who sent you?” Zin said.
The woman’s eyes rolled in her sockets. Zin thought to zap her again, but once was usually enough to stir up the truth.
Merriz came up behind her. He wasn’t even breathing hard. “It work?” he said.
“Give it a minute,” she said. The truncheon was another Enemy weapon, one she and the other Justicars would have to give up, eventually. But not today. It encouraged truthful answers.
“You hear her?” Merriz said to the woman.
The woman blinked slowly, like she’d gone dumb.
Zin hoped she hadn’t fried her senses. She had done that before, too. “Who told you to shoot at us?” Zin said.
“Your senior father,” the woman said.
Merriz snorted and held out his hand.
Zin tucked into her tunic pocket and pulled out a quarter bit coin. Tossed it to him.
“You said two bits,” he said. “You’re short.”
“So are you,” she said.
Zin pressed the warm truncheon against the woman’s face. “Where is he?”
“I don’t know. Got the job from his secretary.”
“I heard he was in town,” Zin said. In truth, she had not. They had just started a preliminary search for him and a dozen others due for processing. But sometimes letting a witness think they were commiserating with you over shared secret knowledge got them to open up easier than the truncheon. And she wanted to make it easier on this woman before she had to kill her or bring her in. Pity had always made her soft, but no less effective. Sometimes pity and compassion got better results. She had seen torture get a lot of misinformation spilled all over the floor, and little else. “We were on our way to pick him up.”
“Yes,” the woman said. She blinked furiously. “I think… yes, the hotel.”
“The hotel, yes,” Zin said.
“Just ask her,” Merriz said.
“Hush,” Zin said. He had never liked her methods. But she didn’t always like his either.
“Shiny grim façade,” the woman said, and smiled. “All those skulls.” Then her eyes came back into focus, and Zin saw that she was back, fully present.
“Get the fuck off me,” the woman said.
“I’m a Justicar,” Zin said. “Admit your crimes and I might.”
“Go fuck yourself.”
“You know what happens if you don’t admit your crimes?”
“I know,” she said. “Do it.” And she jutted her chin forward, defiant.
“You want to die?”
“I know what you are,” she said. “I know you’re trying to erase everything.”
“We’re not erasing anything,” Zin said. “This is about truth and justice.”
“You’re erasing everything,” she said. “You’re turning heroes into monsters.”
“It’s not like that,” she said. “You have no idea what we do.”
“Do it,” the woman said. “I know the protocol. You’ll do me eventually. You’ll kill all of us.”
Zin shook her head, but an image rose up in her mind, one she had tamped down since first reading the protocol, of her own people walking into the big cremation ovens, drinking red phials of liquid, breaking apart into a thousand starry pieces. “That’s for the court.”
Merriz looked disappointed, but he went to the emergency tube box at the end of the block and pushed the button for the guardia. The numbered pneumatic tube fwumped out to the station. Zin and Merriz restrained both of the conscious shooters. But one couldn’t be roused; her jaw was clearly broken, almost comically askew.
“Should have called paramedics too,” Zin said.
Merriz shrugged. “They usually send some.”
The guardia arrived in their green-striped suits and loaded all three women into the back. Zin filled out her report and reminded them to get a medic.
The man who took her thumbprint on his report frowned at it. “They’re violence offenders, though, right?”
“Yes, but -”
“Well, you know what happens to them.”
“That’s for the court.”
The man huffed out something like a laugh. “Sure,” he said. “Once you sign this, you know what the sentence is. Think it’s different because the court says it?” He shook his head. “I don’t understand why you don’t just kill these people.”
“Because we’re not animals,” Zin said. “You let that woman die and it’s you they’ll ask to step into an oven.”
Merriz came up beside her and tugged at her sleeve. “Hey now, let’s go. We’ve done our jobs.”
She turned abruptly away. It didn’t feel like she’d done her job. It felt like she was still on the field, calling a bullet justice.
They stepped up into the tricycle lane, narrowly missing a gaggle of students headed to the campus common.
“So much for hotels,” Merriz said, picking at the flecks of blood on his sleeves. “You could have scared her more, at least. She’d have talked.”
“Torture doesn’t work,” Zin said. “Besides, there wasn’t any need.” She rubbed her face, wondering if she could rub the whole thing off and become someone else, someone with some greater purpose, and a longer future. “I know what hotel it is.”
#
The first time I did something I knew I shouldn’t have was when I fed the baby lake fowl without permission. Lake fowl have a very particular life cycle, and interrupting it can cause chaos. I was exploring the garden shed down by the pond on our family plot. It was unlocked and the food bin was open. So I just took out a handful of food and threw it out onto the lake.
It turns out that fattening up lake fowl doesn’t take much time at all, and after a couple of days of that protein-rich food, all the babies had grown into full adults, two weeks earlier than they would have just eating wild foliage. When the whales in our pond came up to feed on them the same way they did every year, there were no baby fowl in the lake, and our whales starved. I remember seeing their big bloated white bodies floating in the lake, like dead gods. I cried and cried, but I never told anyone what I’d done. The groundskeeper was fired for keeping the shed unlocked; my parents assumed some outsider had come in and tampered with our fowl to sabotage the whales. It was not unheard of. The whales were sacred creatures, the god Savazan’s favorite animal, and doing injury to them was a grave crime.
Elodiz liked a lot of hotels in Ceriz, especially the ones on the water, because he could watch the lake fowl spawning. Spring was a busy time at the waterfront, and for three weeks every year, all water traffic ceased in order to accommodate them. The lake fowl courted, mated, and laid their eggs at the bottom of the lake. Two weeks later – so long as they weren’t overfed by overzealous children - the slimy, squawking larva emerged, halfway between gory amphibian and arrogant fowl. They grew quickly and took flight just a week later, but the arrival of the whales was the real spectacle. The whales hibernated the whole year long at the bottom of lakes. They came up for a single week and gorged themselves fat to sustain themselves for another year of hibernation. The whales were tremendous things, each the length of a trolley, with great feathered frills around their wedged heads. In the spring the harbor was full of the sounds of their chattering language, a series of whistles, pops, and water thumping with the front two of their eight flippers.
They were fully sentient animals, eerily so. When a few citizens occasionally gabbled about why we stopped traffic in a lake with whales in it every year, the city elders reminded them that the whales had been here longer than we had, and the alternative to allowing them three weeks of time to feed and breed was to murder them all, and then what would we be then? We would be no better than our own Enemy.
One season I met with Elodiz at one of the hotels, a grand old pre-war building with fanciful leering faces on the façade. The faces were meant to be jolly, I think, but the art style of the time depicted people with bony features and starved bodies. There were few portraits that did not emphasize the bones of the skull beneath, painting all skin as slightly translucent.
He and I stood out on the balcony watching the fish while two of my sisters bickered over the breakfast cart in the room behind us. Sometimes Elodiz would take a few of us out with him on business like this, so each of his children got to spend time with him and meet the various magistrates and politically powerful people who we might need to make an impression on later in life.
I was only ten at the time, though, so I saw these ventures as little more than great fun. An excuse to eat rich food from a hotel cart and spend time with my senior father.
We watched the whales on the beach below. They were clever, those whales. Though they ate many of the larval foul, most often they used the larva to bait the much larger adults. The whales would slide up onto the shore and deposit an injured baby lake fowl there, and six or seven adults would swoop and circle and crowd in to defend it, and then the whale would slide back up onto the beach and swallow one of the adults whole.
This seems, in retrospect, to be a strange pastime for our people, to watch this dance of death and rebirth every year at the lake. But Elodiz said he found it very cathartic.
“What’s happening in the lake below is just like our lives with the Enemy,” he had said, “only time is compressed. It’s like watching the whole cycle speeded up.”
“But the whales aren’t evil,” I told him, already firm in my sense of fairness and justice at that age. “They’re just doing what they need to do to survive.”
“Yes, they are,” Elodiz said, and he reached down and smoothed my hair and crossed my forehead for luck. “Sometimes we must do terrible things just to survive, Ahgazin.”
I remembered that day well.
I also remembered the grim, skeletal façade of the hotel.
#
Zin hesitated on the steps of the Hotel Savazan, struck by how the bony, grimacing figures leering at her from its exterior looked both more and less terrifying than they had when she was ten. Merriz was already at the door, his hand on a handle carved to look like a femur. Zin had taken her fair share of anatomy classes during basic training – it was supposed to make the soldiers more effective killers – and found that she could name the types of bones decorating the archway, too: metatarsals, fibula, patella, two sacrums, a coccyx….
“This the right one?” Merriz said. He wore smoked glasses now, though the day was so overcast that the sky hardly seemed to change during the sun’s multiple rotations. The black dust of the winter season had blown in a few hours before, two weeks ahead of usual. Zin expected to see a lot of angry farmers in the news on the counter display at dinner.
“It’s the right one,” she said. “Let me go around to the other side. As soon as you ask for him at the front, he’ll bolt.”
“They can’t legally announce our presence,” he said.
She raised her brows. “Elodiz is very convincing. He’s known the people who run all these hotels for years. Why do you think nobody’s turned him in yet?”
“I won’t know what room he’s in unless I ask,” he said.
“I might know,” she said. “Let’s try meeting up there first. Highest floor, center room facing the lake. It’s his preferred room. If he isn’t there, we ask, and have a brawl just like you want.”
“I don’t always want a brawl.”
She made a noncommittal grunt and waved at him. She went around the back of the hotel and through the lush gardens. The great bountiful faces of the blue margonias were already drooping. Soon they would wither and become clotted with fungi. Most gardens became fungal havens during the winter season; dying flora, darker skies, and the invisible but radiant heat of the winter star made conditions perfect for them.
Zin pulled off her red coat and left it on the banister. Without the coat, she looked slightly less like a Justicar. She couldn’t imagine anyone would recognize her – Elodiz was the senior father of a household with two dozen children, and none of them had become politically powerful. Elodiz had wanted to make them all into well-connected politicians, but most, like Zin, found they preferred community organizing and military service to politics.
