A Few Good Men (26 page)

“Two Good Men?” I had a vague idea of having heard this before. “Jan Rainer?”

“Yeah. He . . . he has just joined us. We . . . both of you need protection.” He was silent a moment. “And I think in that case, Martha might have had some influence.”

“Martha?” I said, and probably sounded more disbelieving than I should. Because when one thinks of dark and dangerous seductresses, Martha Remy, with the splash of freckles across her nose, and the sensible squarish face didn’t fit. “I mean,” I said, remembering I was speaking to her twin. “Not that she isn’t a perfectly nice girl, but . . .”

“I know,” he said. And there was amusement behind his voice. “But she has had a crush on Jan for the longest time, and I think they’ve finally come to some arrangement. I don’t know for sure because she hasn’t confided anything to me in those matters since at least twelve.” Pause. “Don’t tell my dad. He gets very odd about . . . that sort of thing.”

I imagined. I suspected I’d seen some hints of that oddness.

“Speaking of not telling my father,” he said, after a while. “If I don’t shut up and let you sleep there will be hell to pay tomorrow, so good night.”

“Nat?”

“Yes?”

“Doesn’t the floor get awfully uncomfortable?” And because I could feel his mind scrambling in the dark and was not very interested in getting verbally—if not physically—punched, I added, “We could have a cot brought in or something.”

A chuckle. “As much as it would provide an additional obstacle to someone breaking into your room, chances are I’d get tangled in it and not be very effective at defending you, if a force gets past all our other defenses. And that’s the whole point of my being here.”

“But it must be cold and—”

“Nah, much easier than the training weekends,” he said.

“Training weekends?”

A long silence. “We . . . almost all our young men and some of the women are trained for war. Part of staying fit, should the revolution happen in our time. It’s . . . religious practice. Usually we go into the continental protectorates, or at least the natural islands, because it’s easier to hide. And we train in relatively small groups. But I’ve slept on a slab of rock, on a mountain, during winter. This is downright comfortable by comparison. Now, good night, Lucius Keeva. You do not want to get my father officially upset at us.”

I tried, but it was a good long while before I was asleep, and I woke up with the door bursting open.

Before I was fully awake, I’d sat up, grabbed two burners from the bedside table, and was holding both of them trained steadily on the door. But the voice that spoke from the door was female, breathless, and said, “Where is Nat?”

I woke fully. The person in the doorway was Abigail Remy and though she was panting, as if she’d been running, she was pale as death. “Patr—Luci—sir! Where is Nat?”

I returned the burners to the bedside drawer. “I don’t know. He was here when I fell asleep.”

She made a peculiar huffing sound that managed to convey that sleeping was the stupidest thing anyone could do, and possibly—just possibly—a crime. Then she put her hand to her forehead, in a gesture that was so reminiscent of Ben it startled me.

Before I knew it, I was jumping out of bed, grabbing clothes from my wardrobe without paying the slightest attention to what they were. Something told me Abigail wouldn’t get this upset over nothing. Not a young woman steady enough to be elected to the revolutionary council at twenty. From my encounter with that group, even though mostly I’d heard them and not seen them, they were middle-aged men of crusty demeanor. And Sam, their head, had patriarch written all over them. And yet Abigail had got elected. She was a young woman steady enough to have tried to hold the meeting of the twelve together in the face of Nat’s rage and my obstinacy. “Where did you see him last?” I said, forcing my bare feet into boots. “What is your reason for being so worried? Did he say where he was going? He had told us he was going to contact Jan Rainer and Simon . . . I presume St. Cyr, since See-mon is the French pronunciation.”

“I know,” she said, and then in a tone of exasperation. “They haven’t seen him, though he called them on a link to say he was coming.”

“Perhaps there was an accident?” I said, doubtfully. But I had a growing, cold certainty that Nat Remy wasn’t accident prone. Disaster, perhaps, but not accident. I slipped the box containing the fragment of flag into my pocket. I’d have to lock it in a drawer where the cleaning staff couldn’t find it, both in case they realized what it was, and so they wouldn’t throw it away by mistake.

She shook her head. “No. The thing is, I don’t think he ever left.” She looked up at me, and her eyes, so much like Ben’s, were full of tears. “Goldie was alone, loose on the beach.”

“On the beach?”

She nodded. “Nat wakes up early and goes running on the beach with Goldie every morning. Goldie came home alone. There is a scuffed place, and it looks like a flyer landed and like there was a fight. My father told me to stop worrying, we’ll know in time. I can’t stop worrying. What if Nat needs rescue?”

This was way too much like waking up in the morning, in the prison to which they’d sent Ben and me, and finding that Ben was gone, and having to figure out where they’d taken him when no one would tell me. I could read the same worry in her eyes. “Martha has gone to Jan, to see if they can find out anything.”

“Right,” I said. “Right.” And because I had to do something, no matter how foolish, no matter how stupid, I said, “Show me. Show me the place on the beach that looks like it was trampled or scuffed or whatever. Show me.”

She nodded, which goes to show you she was as out of her mind with worry as I was with confusion and the unpleasant memories of Ben’s disappearance. We headed out of the room and down the hallway to the front door. Where guards barred my way. I didn’t even react badly. I was just confused at finding my path blocked by my own guards.

One of them, almost my height, and probably close to Sam’s age, spoke, looking embarrassed, “Sir, Mr. Remy said you were not to go out.”

“What?” Was I under house arrest?

“Sir . . . there have been incidents. We cannot allow you to go out.”

Abigail stopped short too, and suddenly looked like she would like to kick herself. “There have been battles,” she said. “Around the house. Mostly broomer battles, but I suppose, if they see you . . . I mean, surely they have some way of seeing around the house, and if they see you . . . well . . .”

Well, it was different. I was a prisoner in my own house, for my own good. Not that it felt any better. I felt helpless, which was the last thing I wanted to feel. I had just started to feel that I had some control over my destiny and that my life was mine to spend or waste and now . . . And there was Nat. What had the idiot been doing, running alone with Goldie, if there had been incidents around the house? “What was he thinking?”

“He never thought he’d be a target. He’s been doing this since he was twelve. You see, he was first turned down for the . . . for our . . . for training.” She gave a dubious look at one of the guards, as though not sure he was one of the Usa—one of us. She walked away a bit, her hand on my upper arm, pulling me along. It was like a row boat pulling a cargo ship, but I let her, and I bent down so she could whisper to me without anyone overhearing, and she did whisper, urgently, “Because he was the . . . you know one of a pair of twins is always weaker? That was him, and he was seriously underweight and spent most of his childhood being ill. So they turned him down, and he started training up by himself till they took him. It’s second nature to him, I think. I’ve never known him not to run on the beach every morning. And what would he think? Who would care about him and what he was doing?” Abigail said, understanding what I meant. “I mean, they’re not going to arrest every person in the house, right? They’d have to bring a really big force to bear to do that, and then it would be really obvious and not something they could sweep under the rug with Scrubbers. I think they’re still trying to keep any dissension secret, and they don’t want a major battle. So they’re sending small detachments, but we figured they would be intent on capturing or killing you. Oh, maybe Father if they suspected he had any say in your behavior. But . . . Nat? Who would care about Nat?”

I pulled her away from the door and down the hallway, to the door at the other end, next to my room, where the only rooms nearby were mine and those were empty now I was here. Better to be able to speak without constriction. I needed to know.

I had to force the words past my throat, which was trying to constrict. “What if he got in battle with them, and they killed him?”

“No. We’d have found his body. Why would they take the body? That makes no sense.”

“The Scrubbers specialize in making bodies disappear,” I said. The idea of Nat cut up into small, unidentifiable pieces and burned or dissolved made me ill. He’d been alive yesterday—a tight ball of enthusiasm and energy.

She shook her head. “Only in circumstances where it makes sense. This doesn’t. They don’t occupy the island, and arguably leaving Nat’s corpse behind would scare us more than his disappearing.”

“Perhaps they hope we’ll go in search of him.” I was thinking that they would undoubtedly know of my proclivities, and they would, undoubtedly, know of Nat’s. Maybe they hadn’t known Nat’s before Max died, but surely they’d suspect, or know afterwards. And it was entirely possible they thought they knew more about the two of us than they could possibly know. Maybe they thought it was inevitable. And I’d spent a lot of time locked with Nat in my room, and he slept there. Surely the Good Men had spies in my house. I’d have them if it were reversed. And surely they knew Nat and I had spent a lot of time together. A lot of time together alone. Perhaps they thought I wouldn’t stand to have him taken away from me. Perhaps this was a trap for me.

The problem was that though they were all wrong, I couldn’t stand to have him taken away from me. I wasn’t even sure that I considered him a friend. If I did, we had an odd sort of friendship that consisted of annoying each other into some sort of consensus. But he was Ben’s nephew, and the more I thought of it, the more I realized he was not only an honorable man, but a loyal one. And I needed all the loyalty I could get.

She looked doubtfully at me. “I don’t think they think the Sons of Liberty will go in search of him,” she said. “I mean, we look after our own, but it takes a while to organize, and we’d never let someone who is a high-profile target go.”

It hit me, perhaps belatedly, that I’d sacrificed some of my freedom in order to join the fight for freedom. Policy and organization. Not just Lucius striking out on his own. And part of me wanted to do just that. To take the secret tunnel to the beach and go in search of Nat. “I didn’t mean the Sons of Liberty,” I said, my voice catching. “And speaking of that, shouldn’t you be in the Daughters of Liberty?”

She looked up at me. “Why? You mean you don’t think I should be active?”

I blinked at her.

“The Daughters of Liberty,” she said, “are support and propaganda. I’m not suited to that.” She paused a moment. “You know Martha and Nat taught me broom riding and broom fighting, right?”

“You mean . . . but . . . you’re a woman.”

“What does that have to do with anything? The groups have that name because of their work in the Revolution in the USA. It has nothing to do with gender. And do you really want to argue this now? I thought we were going to find Nat.”

I blinked again. “Find Nat? But you just said the Sons of Liberty don’t do that.”

“Did I say anything about the Sons of Liberty?” she said, and her eyes flashed up at me, just like Ben’s did, when he thought I was being particularly dim.

“Us?” I said. “You and me?”

She nodded, intently, desperately, then hissed in annoyance, and made a head gesture that indicated that someone had approached. I looked in the direction her chin had tilted. That too was a Ben-gesture and I read it instinctively and without thinking. Steps from me stood one of my valets, seemingly dancing foot to foot, in the pose of someone who hopes to be noticed without actually interrupting anything. I wondered what in hell he thought he was interrupting. “Yes?” I said, turning to him.

“Patrician, if you would, that, is . . . Mr. Remy asks if you’d see him . . .”

I felt relief flood me for just a second, and was about to ask where Nat had been and where he was now, when I remembered. Mr. Remy was always, unless in very specialized circumstances, Sam. So, I straightened and said, “Where is Mr. Remy?”

“His office, sir.”

“Father!” Abigail said, as though this comprised a comprehensive indictment of his manners, morals and possibly the fact he dared to be alive at all. And before I could ask what in heaven and hell she meant by that, she added in a rush. “It’s just like him.” She grabbed my upper arm again, and squeezed hard. “I’ll see you af— I’ll find you. Be ready.”

And like that, she turned around and ran down the hallway, her childlike movements reminding me that she was indeed still a child in some ways. I had no idea what she meant by my being ready. I had no idea what she meant by finding me. For that matter, I had no idea what she meant by saying that she and I should go and find Nat. But the one thing I would need to make sure—very sure—I remembered was that she was the child, and I was the adult. No matter how capable, how daring, how brave she was, she was seventeen and I was almost twenty years older. Which meant it was part of my duty not to let her run her head into a noose or worse.

Which is exactly what I was thinking, as I walked back into the main offices, and by guess more than memory, identified the door to Sam’s office right next to mine.

I don’t know what I expected. But I didn’t expect to slam the door open and find Sam sitting behind the desk, looking like this was a perfectly normal day.

My Son

And then he looked up, and he didn’t look anything at all like normal. He looked like a man who had lost his son.

There is no other way to say it, no other way to explain it. It sounds odd, but I didn’t know there was a particular look that translated as that before, and if anyone had told me such a thing existed, I would not have believed it. And yet, that was the only thing that applied, when Sam looked up at me.