14.

EMERÍANN

 

Brighid gathers me before I can even finish my breakfast. Just like last night, my meal this morning saw a serious uptick in terms of quality from what I’d been given before. Part of me thinks she’s still thanking me for saving her ass during the ambush yesterday. Another part thinks she’s trying to cushion the blow that comes after killing one of your close friends. A deeper, darker part of me thinks she’s trying to lull me into complacency before flipping the tables.

We climb into a car – a real car, with a roof and everything – and head north. It’s just the two of us this time, which is a little strange and, in some way I’m not ready to acknowledge yet, kind of nice.

Winding through the city, I’m overwhelmed seeing, all at once, the changes the last six months wrought on the city’s landscape. It started with the Gallery and the water distribution plant. After those two fell, it was like they sent shockwaves through the city, destabilizing everything else. Two of the commercial centers north of Macha were completely destroyed by Tathadann forces, and those took out two more when they tipped over. Eitan’s silhouette is flatter now, but also more contrasted, the buildings taller than three stories sticking up like skyscrapers. It makes me wonder about the future, whether the structures will ever be rebuilt as tall as they had been or if people will keep everything small – harder to knock over, and quicker to rebuild if another revolution comes.

“What’s important enough for us to drive all the way up here?” I say to Brighid.

She nods out the front window in place of an answer. The mountains sit a bit back in the distance, a group of block buildings rising up before them.

“High-rises?” I say. “You looking to invest in real estate? You might’ve been gone a while, but you know only amadans do that here, right?”

“It’s not the buildings I’m interested in,” she says as the car pulls to a stop. “It’s the people inside.”

She grabs a set of binoculars from the back seat and hops out of the car, then climbs up the side of a brick wall that had once been part of a home. I scramble up behind her. She looks through the binoculars a minute, then hands them to me.

“What do you see?”

I scan the building but don’t see much. Once or twice it looks like somebody passes by a window, but otherwise the building appears deserted.

“A couple lagons, maybe. Nothing really.”

“Turn on the thermal imaging.”

I do, and the screen lights up. Where before it looked like there were only three or four people, now I can see dozens milling around across three floors. Positioned at the perimeter are armed guards, rifles resting against their shoulders. Some people inside hold what look like pots and skewered animals. A burst of light shoots up where flames flare after someone lights a fire. I yank the binoculars from my eyes, blink at the change in color.

“What the hell is that?”

“Do you know who those people are?”

I let out a sigh. “I’m guessing you’re going to tell me.”

“These are rebels who had commandeered the building. Obstructionists. We surrounded them and captured them. Then we started using it as a holding center. Some are your friends. People you probably fought with, drank with, conspired with. So I understand that this is not going to be easy to hear.” She looks at me for a measured beat. “These people are the problem, the reason Eitan is being held back.”

“Oh, go to hell,” I say, but she holds her hand up, and there’s something incredibly composed about her that makes me fall silent.

“This isn’t a Tathadann screed. This isn’t death to all rebels or any of that authoritarian decree masking as liberation frequency. This is me, talking to you.”

Her voice is different from how it normally is, graver. More sincere. More human.

“These rebels are within their rights to protest, but you have to ask yourself what they’re protesting.”

“Um, the slaughter of their friends and comrades?”

She gives me a look that nearly makes me laugh.

“They’re protesting anything that’s not them, just like I said last night,” she says. “That’s why we captured and detained them.”

“Who’s in there?”

“The most influential one we can identify is a man called Cantonae. Perre Cantonae.”

I recognize the name immediately. He led the charge for that whole cadre of insurgents, the ones who thought Henraek and I weren’t going far enough after taking down the Tathadann. He’s a real asshole.

“But what we want to do…” Brighid pauses a minute, collecting her thoughts. “To best benefit everyone, we want to raze that whole complex.”

“You’re going to destroy all that housing on a whim?” Even as I say it, I recognize the irony. But that was in service of a larger good. This is just destruction.

“Have you been inside there? You know there’s a reason the old and infirmed party members are shipped up there, right? If there was still a functioning government, they would be brought up on war crimes for letting people live there.”

I start to reply but figure it’s better to stay quiet, let her say her piece.

“Twenty years ago, those places were beautiful. Fit for Tathadann elders. But no one’s touched them since they were built. Those places are falling apart now. The electricity pulses when it’s actually working. The floors are tilted. There’s black mold in most of the kitchens, where they cook. Once the new detention facility is complete, we’ll raze the buildings,” she quickens her pace, not giving me a chance to interrupt, “so that we can build new housing. Housing anyone is eligible for. Housing that is current and affordable and more efficient than those giant units they built. We’ll fit four families for every two they had. Can you imagine what we could do for people here, what we could provide, with Ragjarøn’s technology and resources?”

“You’re insane to partner with him.”

“You only know what lies the Tathadann told you,” she says. “You have no idea what we could accomplish in this city with their help. We’ll tear down the vestiges of the Tathadann, including their architecture, and build something that reflects this city. The whole city.

“But all of this would require the remaining rebels – the ones, I’m sorry, that you’ve been helpful in identifying – to concede, and join us.”

“There are rebels and there are insurgents. The insurgents, Perre’s people, they won’t listen because they’re only content with chaos. And the rebels, my people? They’ll never lay down their weapons. Not for someone who beheaded their savior.”

“They are all fighting against us, so they are all rebels. They’re all fighting against Eitan,” she says. “Do you know why, out of all the abandoned buildings in the city, the rebels chose those high-rises to take over?”

“Why?”

“Because, with a good enough rifle, they’ll have a clear shot on us.” She points toward the mountains, down at the foothills. “That’s where the new power station is going. The one that will bring Eitan back online, provide water and electricity to everyone. Free, consistent water and electricity.”

“If the power station is such a good thing for the city, why would they try to take it out?”

“You already answered that,” she says. “I’m the one who beheaded their savior. They’ll never listen to me, even if they don’t know what Daghda was really like.”

“What if I pitched it? They might listen to me.”

Brighid nods for what seems like forever. “I wouldn’t count on that. Between you being seen with us, and Henraek’s contentious status…” She trails off a minute. “It only takes one bullet, and that bullet doesn’t care about mislaid patriotism. I understand where those people are coming from, all that idealism and principle. I’ve seen it exposed for what it really is a hundred times over in my travels, but I still understand it.”

“But?”

“But you have to clear the brush before you plant the field,” she says.

“That’s someone’s sister out there. That’s someone’s son,” I say.

“So are the dead. They’re sisters, sons, fathers, mothers,” she says. “So if people have to die – or, like these rebels, fight against any leader who isn’t the amorphous the people – then they have to die. I’d rather them join us and I would gladly welcome them in, but they’re trying to kill us while we’re trying to help Eitan. And I’m sorry, but the whole must come before the individual.”

“Morrigan said the same thing to us.”

“What would you have us do, Emeríann?” she says, more aggressive than I like. “What’s your grand plan to unite Eitan? Should we let the rebels go? Should we let loose ten angry people so that they can gun down thirty of my people who are trying to provide electricity and water for two hundred more? Just because they’re on the ‘wrong side’?”

I stare through her a moment. “I don’t know what the answer is.”

“It’s easy to tear down what’s wrong. It’s much harder to build up what’s right. I’m not saying we’re doing a perfect job, and I don’t know what the right answer is, but when I say the whole, I mean everyone.”

“Except for those who stand against you.”

“No. Except for those who try to kill us.” She points out beyond the mountains. “The city. The counties. Anyone willing to work to better our home is welcome. But we can’t let an angry handful ruin it for everyone else.”

“What are you worried about? You’ve got all the guns and shit of Ragjarøn behind you. Ødven eats out of your palm.”

She snorts. “Ødven Äsyr is helpful right now, but the day will come when we need to survive on our own. If we can all pull together and work as one, we will stand. If we don’t, if we continue with in-fighting and cutting down one another at the knees with ideological purity, then we will fall. But whatever our fate, it will be our fate.”

I look out over the city, at groups of prisoners huddled around a fire – a fire lit inside a goddamned building – and think about what she said. The possibilities of it. What if this city was actually rebooted with real people in mind? With something that resembled inclusion, equality, someone who gave as many shits about the Brigus as the bankers. Could she actually be telling me the truth?

Maybe it’s because I watched this woman chop off her own father’s head, but some part of me still calls bullshit on the whole people’s revolution thing. Maybe it’s Henraek’s spirit, traveling alongside me.

“Why should anyone believe you?” I say to her. “What makes you different from any other party mouthpiece, or the Morrigans – who, you know, many people will see you as an extension of?”

And then she turns to me, almost smiling from incredulity.

“You know how I grew up. Do you know how many cities I’ve seen ripped apart? How many countries I’ve seen thrown into civil war? How many acts I’ve borne witness to that started those wars? If there’s anyone who understands the dynamics of mass populations, who can predict reasonably well which actions will incite bloodshed and which will spurn it, I think I’m the prime-goddamn-candidate.”

I hold up my hands, partially to calm her down and partially so that if she’s angry enough to charge me, at least I’m ready. “I’m not saying you don’t, but you understand how you’re viewed around here.”

“I do. Unfortunately.” She inhales a long time, then lets out a breath that seems to drain her of everything. “Is moving twenty families into pre-fab housing the best choice? Maybe not, but it’s better than four families taking that space and the others living on the street. Should they all be able to voice their opinion on that housing? Sure, probably. But while they’re arguing about who gets which unit, how many are still sleeping beneath a tarp in an alleyway.” She exhales again, her shoulders sagging. “We’re not a perfect system, Emeríann, but we’re trying.”

She looks out over the city, rests down on her haunches, picks at the remnants of whatever this building once was.

“Eitan’s tired. There’s been nothing but war and oppression for the last sixty years. Running from building to building. Walking hunched over. Jumping at every bang. Rationing water down to the sip. That’s just – that’s no way to live. Especially not if there’s the possibility of something creating better.”

And the way she gazes over the land, with that deep longing in her eye and the sadness of a revolutionary who has been in the field for far too long, it’s easy to think that she really means it. I can see where she’s coming from at least. She’s some combination of Forgall and Henraek. A dangerous mix of optimism and victimization. Being cast as the aggressor in her own country, while still fighting for the advancement of said country. It’s enough of a contradiction to make Henraek’s head explode.

Brighid looks over to me. “If you have better suggestions, please, tell me.”

I wish I could give her something but I can’t, because she’s right: tearing down is easy, but rebuilding is much harder.

This is not even remotely the woman who I’d pegged her to be. This is someone who cares. Someone who will fight. Someone, who, as we said at the beginning of the uprising, can actually win.

 

When we get back to the house later, I bid Brighid good night and head up to my room. I sit on the bed for a little while, letting everything process. Brighid might be batshit insane and have zero fear of death, but after everything she said, I’m not so sure she’s the Morrigan I took her to be. I can hear the Tobeigh in her, echoes of similar conversations I had with Forgall. So similar that, despite how much it kills me to say it, I have to reconsider my position on her.

I kneel before the nightstand and pull out the drawer, then pause. Am I really going to do this again, send another letter? I don’t even know if Henraek got the first one, if Melein was able to get it out or was caught in the process of smuggling. If whoever he gave it to was able to get it to Henraek. If Henraek got it and immediately left for Eitan and will miss the second letter.

I’m struck again by how much technology we have at our fingertips yet how far away all of that is for me right now.

Whatever. I can second-guess myself all day, but all that will do is put Henraek one step closer on a collision course with Brighid, put him in a position where he has to make a decision that might be impulsive and will probably be self-destructive. If it’s our destiny to lead this rebellion, to finally liberate Eitan, then I’ll have to trust that Nahoeg will safely guide the letter to Henraek. And if Nahoeg fails us, Henraek and I will just do it ourselves.

I start picking at the rest of the drawer liner. It comes out easy this time.

I was wrong.

She might be what we’ve been looking for.

We’re going to rebuild Eitan.

 

I miss you.