At this point I realized, to my shame, that we’d all been talking over Heloïse the whole time, though it wasn’t until I was editing this transcript just now that I realized quite how much. Their comportment invites it, that toxic artificial helplessness that coded feminine in olden days, and makes us all fall over ourselves wanting to do things for Heloïse, so much so that we stifle when they try to do things for themself. I like to hope Martin and I wouldn’t have fallen so easily into the pattern without Dominic there leading us on.
« Seul, » again the Prince repeated.
“I know, Seigneur. I want to come to You. But You’ve asked me to be Your voice in the Cousins, and in this circumstance I can’t do both.”
“You make Me choose,” Their lifeless voice pronounced.
“I don’t want to, Seigneur!”
“Not thee, ma chère Heloïse. My Host. He Who Created Distance chooses now to make Me taste these many kinds of pain: separation, impotence, ignorance, and, through thee, the pain of choosing between two pains. I must lose one eighth-part of all humanity, or thee. He makes Me choose.”
Seeing them as a transcript like this, the Prince’s words feel like interruption, wasted time, but it wasn’t like that in the moment. Their calm felt liberating, zoomed things out, as if I was a tiny creature living in a snow globe, and the vast Being outside that held my little world was trying to communicate with me, get me to glimpse it for a moment, to help me realize all this blinding blizzard was just microcosm, that the real causes I was seeking lay beyond. That let the bigger problems dawn on me: “Wait, is Bryar in danger? Is this the kind of coup with posturing or the kind of coup with death?”
“Aunt Bryar is in Delhi,” Heloïse replied, “meeting with the Greenpeace Leadership. She can’t reach Casablanca, that’s why she needed me to rush back. Everyone Aunt Bryar trusts is off handling emergencies. The Nurturists are practically in charge of Casablanca. There’s no one else to stop them except me.”
Delhi? Something slipped inside me, the snow-crumb that starts the avalanche. It was all wrong. The chess match was supposed to start with all the pieces in their rows. Bryar was Cousin Chair, they were definitionally in Casablanca, that’s how the world worked, just as MASON was in Alexandria, Joyce Faust in Paris, and Heloïse with the Prince. If Bryar was in Delhi, where was Vivien? Where was anybody? Su-Hyeon? Achilles? Mycroft? I checked my messages and found half a dozen from Vivien in Buenos Aires, frantic, asking where I was, one from Bryar telling me they were safe in Delhi, one from MASON demanding that I come to them in Alexandria, others from Servicers, Huxley Mojave, Patroclus, Joyce Faust, but none from Mycroft. None from Mycroft. And then something in the mustiness of Papa’s little bedroom smelled like olive oil and I remembered. Mycroft. Sobs came fast. I couldn’t fight them, couldn’t even think to, my mind and flesh both thrown full-body into it, until there was no difference between sobs and screams. The animal part of me knew I needed this, and the physicality of it, intense as sprinting, erased all other thoughts. There were no duties now, no decorum, no messages, no maps before my eyes, no waiting Prince, just I alone in grief and no more Mycroft. I sobbed until my throat burned, and the muscles in my sides cramped, and my sobs weren’t even sobs, just sorry hiccups as I twitched against the wet shoulder beneath me. There were arms around me, awkward but warm, and I clung to them a long time before it occurred to me that arms and a shoulder meant someone was with me. Holding me. I smelled shampoo and chocolate, and pulled back enough to look up, but a door was open to some bright and noisy outside space, and the glare made me light-headed.
The arms pulled back. “Do you want some chocolate cake?” It was the gentle voice of Carlyle Foster-Kraye de la Trémoïlle. Their hair was shower-damp, and their outer wrap stripped down to the waist, baring a tank top and a bandaged shoulder.
Chocolate cake; the question was somehow difficult.
“Do you want a drink of water?”
I tried twice to produce a noise discernible as ‘Yes,’ but eventually just nodded.
The smiling Cousin rose, and I squinted past them as they stepped out into the bright office and crossed the sea of junk between Papadelias’s two desks.
My lenses were in passive mode, I noticed now, the conference call terminated, the Prince and others gone. Minutes had passed. How many? Math was hard. Then, “The battle!” I cried, realizing. “Cielo de Pájaros!”
Something in Foster-Kraye’s kind blue eyes made even their wince feel gentle. “It blew up. The bash’house, the computers, all of it. We don’t know why yet. Something internal, not a missile. A lot of people suddenly rushed out and then it all went up in smoke.”
“Then the cars have stopped?”
“No, the cars are flying everywhere, just they won’t come when called, or land, and no one’s in them, and no one knows what’s controlling them. Well, we hope no one’s in them.” They opened the far door; the babble of the main office outside sounded far louder than the daily roar endemic to the police headquarters of our united Earth.
I realized Foster-Kraye was heading out for water. “There’s a water bottle in the umbrella stand,” I said.
They turned and rummaged. “Here?”
“It’s water from Greece,” I added reflexively. I remembered Papa boasting of it to us, and sobs moved in me again. I remember thinking it was strange that I had strength for more sobs so soon after I had poured out what seemed like all I had.
Foster-Kraye returned with the bottle. “My war spoils so far are three slightly squished chocolate cakes and a tray of mystery cheese cubes. Care to help?” They offered tissues with the water.
A good nose blow made things feel less like a dream. “War spoils?”
“Crashed party delivery cart abandoned out front. Waste not want not.”
“I should use the bathroom first,” I said, not realizing how badly I needed it until I tried to stand. Papa’s office had a full bath with a shower, for the same vocateur reason it had a mattress on the floor of the evidence closet. The bathroom was steamy from Foster-Kraye’s shower, so I didn’t have to see myself in the fogged mirror. That left me alone with my message feed, and my tracker’s images of the explosion: a rush of figures out across the trenches, then a burst from underground which bulged up almost spherically, as if a huge egg were punching out through the city surface, no fire, just black earth and building guts, with broken roof glass forming a shell around it like the sugar shards of crème brûlée. One second the rubble dome rose, the next it caved in, and only then did fire rise between the pieces, swallowed an instant later by black smoke, while the sound of the explosion came last, like a soundtrack out of sync. It was gone, then, that house where I had helped Mycroft scrub doodles off the walls, and, deep below, the Saneer-Weeksbooth patrimony whose numeromancy had let the whole world fly.
Fresh messages offered distraction. A much-relieved Vivien had heard I was safe in Romanova, and urged me to lie low, help Su-Hyeon, and stay in their flat beside the Forum, since they wouldn’t need it while stuck in Buenos Aires. I wanted to ask Vivien to help Martin escape from Klamath Marsh, but the reality of war warned me the Humanist President could no longer offer neutral friendship to the Familiaris Regni who stood third in line for MASON’s throne. Bryar sent encouragement from Delhi, and repeated Vivien’s kind command that I consider their little town flat mine for the time being. Heloïse was safe in Casablanca, clashing with Cookie across the boardroom table. An obedient Dominic did stay in Tōgenkyō, and was gathering the Interim Directors who helmed the Mitsubishi voting blocs while their true Directors waited with Andō for a trial which may never come. Prince Jehovah Mason was alone. Not literally alone, since MASON was in Alexandria, and quick-moving Achilles, but Father and ally were not the intimates which all thinking things crave, be we dolphin, ape, or God. Those precious few beings in this Universe which Our Lonely Visitor could call ‘Mine’ were all lost: Heloïse to the Cousin crisis; Dominic to Asia; Martin to America; Mycroft to death. And I to Romanova. I couldn’t reach Them. I couldn’t reach any of them. There was nothing for it but to sit with Carlyle Foster-Kraye, eat three chocolate cakes, and watch the world burn.