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Gehenna is a military grade prison fifty eight miles north east of Unity Hall, set deep underground. It has a daily rotating roster of two hundred guards and as far as they know—no blind spot. Gehenna, as his father insinuated two months ago in that open broadcast to the Shepherd rebels, is where Jack should be right this moment. Gehenna, for all intents and purposes, does not exist.
“It’s suicide.” He tells David, not bothering to hide the derision in his voice. Six months, living out of tents and off army rations and never more than two miles between the two of them, and he’s still thrown sometimes by how staggeringly stupid this golden anointed cocker spaniel could be. Except, of course, it’s never really stupidity. It’s God whispering in his ear; David takes risks that would have gotten another man riddled through with bullets, hands out good deeds like coins at a Roman triumph, and he comes out on top every time. Jack thinks it’s immensely unfair. Jack is immensely grateful.
“It’s either this, or we let Vesper Abbadon die.” David replies. There’s no condescension in his voice; he’s calmly relaying facts. Jack almost wishes that David would condescend to him—it’ll make physically squeezing some sense into him a viable option, and it’ll feel less like kicking a puppy and more like disrespecting a commanding officer. That, at least, Jack has some experience with. “Silas is going to execute him in a week. It’s the only way.”
“So let him hang.” He bites back. He’s cleaning his rifle, oiling up the interior so that his next fifty shots fly straight and true into his next fifty frontal cortexes. “Let the crows peck out his eyes and let them string up his innards for décor, for all I care. We’re killing tyrants, not saving them.”
David does that thing where he stares, mouth opening slightly as if he can’t believe the world could harbour such darkness. He doesn’t like using the k-word, or the t-word. He wonders how David can be shocked at anything that comes out of his mouth at this point; he wonders how anyone can be that good. Jack smiles, and makes sure to show his teeth.
“I’m surprised, though.” He carries on. There’s a bitterness in his own voice that he doesn’t like; princes aren’t bitter, princes aren’t envious creatures. But then again, he’s not a prince. Hasn’t been for quite some time. “Does God approve? Having sympathies for a murderer? It's a bad bargain, don’t you think, swapping out a messiah for the Bloody King of Carmel?”
David doesn’t like the m-word, either.
“It’s not that. I’d hang him myself, if it was my choice.” He pauses. He picks his words carefully. “Vesper Abbadon has connections. He has gold.”
Jack grins, at this, heavy-lidded and smug. His little cocker spaniel, all grown up.
He has a hazy memory, aged and disproven by years of a starker reality, of his father leading him by the hand through the winding halls of Altar Mansion, low gravel voice soft in the hanging silence, while golden light filters in from outside.
Before this country had a king, it was nothing. Stone Age clans at war.
That sounds more like his mother than his father, and the memory of his father’s hand around his—that sounds like a memory that should belong to Michelle. Nevertheless, he remembers it; the sun glinting off his father’s oil black hair, the chirping of birds outside, the hanging stairs rising beyond his periphery like a garden of fable. Before this country had a king, before this country had a king. It’s sickeningly idyllic.
“And on the mountain, God spoke to me.” Silas says to him. He’s five, and he pays complete, rapt attention, little fists clasped at his chin, his stomach pressed against the antique couch. “He bade me look out, across this ruined land, with a king in every corner, and a gun in every hand, where men of faith feared to walk the streets. I had a vision, there. Of a nation united, every man for each other instead of only for himself. Ice cream trucks, hospitals, banks that take hours to explain a holding account, taxis trying to kill you on the streets… I saw it all, and God said it would be so. And so it was.”
Silas doesn’t use little words, and Silas doesn’t speak slowly. Silas doesn’t believe in dumbing down history.
The sunlight glints from outside, lighting his father’s hair. For a moment, the light refracts, white, and Jack thinks, Daddy has a halo.
They are thirty miles from Gath’s eastern border, nestled in a forest in Arcadia that the locals don’t patrol because the locals are poor and starving and barely have the resources to keep the raiders away. Jack’s rifle sits snug between his shoulder blades, his mouth tastes like last night’s gruel, and he is one of about ten men huddled around the rough-hewn wooden table, pouring over the map.
Gehenna is highly guarded, David is saying. There is only one way in.
There’s a smudge of soot on his forehead; gunpowder, maybe. Jack’s fingers twitch in his lap, and he remembers his mother wetting the tip of her thumb, to clean away the dirt of playgrounds and beaches from his cheeks. He looks around the table. Every man here—Dakin and Jackson and Sinclair and Avery and that one-eyed fuck who speaks mostly Arcadian whose name Jack can never remember—looks wan and pale, the blood bled from their faces by the dying grey light. Only David even looks alive; colour in his cheeks, hair like yellow gold, conviction bleeding through his words. A technicolour projection in a dusky world. Jack wonders if it’s something in the blood; some chemical reaction that says, yes, this one is blessed.
David is speaking. “—get myself captured, and then Silas will—”
“What?”
Silence falls like a cloak. They are all staring at him, including David. It takes Jack a moment, to realize that it was he who had spoken.
“Jack,” David says slowly. “We talked about this.”
“No, we didn’t.” He says. “You said, we’re saving Abbadon, we’re going to Gehenna, and I said fine. You said we need his gold, and I said fine. You didn’t say a fucking thing about getting yourself captured.”
“There’s no other way in,” David says, and there it is—explaining basic math to a child. One plus one equals blood in that hair, an open-eyed death. “Silas will put me in there, it’s the only one that’s secure enough. I’ll grab Abbadon and then—”
He stands, suddenly. His knee hits the bottom of the table, and it lifts off its leg before slamming back down, a few shotgun magazines clattering to the ground. His voice is remarkably calm.
“David, outside.”
Technically, Jack outranks David. Technically, David is good at taking orders.
Outside, the air is crisp. Fall is settling in, the wind blowing through the naked branches, leaves crunching under their feet. Jack knows every tree within a ten mile radius, knows the position of every mine they have planted down to the centimetre, and he still doesn’t feel safe. He hasn’t slept through the night in months.
“Don’t do this.” He almost doesn’t recognize his voice when it comes out. There’s a drag there, under the surface, and his father’s voice comes to his head—never be afraid, never sound afraid, never be anything but an unmovable object, except when you are an unstoppable force. He grips his hand hard, and he steels himself. “It’s suicide. It’s suicide.” His voice breaks.
You don’t owe me anything, words spoken in a church, when there had still been blood under Jack’s nails. Words don’t settle debt.
David is watching him, eyes calm. “Jack,” he says. “There’s no other way.”
“Let me go.”
The words surprise him. He’s never been the self-sacrificing type, but there’s a weight in his chest as the idea takes root—he thinks of his father’s men surrounding him, hands on his head and on his knees. They’ll toss him in a dungeon, pour ice water over icy skin, hold his head down in the water until he speaks. Where is he? How many men does he have? Who are his allies? Where is he? It feels like an anchor. It feels like— “I’m a traitor too, same as you. He’ll put me in Gehenna.”
David says, very softly, “Jack.”
The summer palace at Pella has an access to a beach—a real one, not the man-made fiction at Altar Mansion—with grainy sand and white crested waves breaking over the shore. In the distance, the sea fades from a clear azure to a blue tinted grey, veined with white foam. Rocks rise, in their jagged terrible shapes, in the distant sea. There are cliffs to the left, where he had once dared Michelle to jump off. He remembers her white arms, flashing in the sun, as she leapt.
At night, the sea air is cool in a stifling summer, the rustling of the distant leaves and the steady breaking of waves the only sound to punctuate the silence. The moon peaks from behind wispy clouds, limning the rocks into human figures. A woman waiting for her sailor to return, a dog with a wagging tail, the demure ducked head of a dove; he makes up these stories, picks the right word for the right time, and Michelle laughs or gazes, depending.
On this same beach, when he was eleven, the Austerian diplomat’s son, two years older, kissed him when they crawled up the beach, dripping wet and laughing. Their teeth knocked against each other, and they were children still, but Jack had always been quick. He didn’t miss the pull in his stomach, and later, when the diplomat smiled at him, knowingly, from across the state table and the boy refused to meet his gaze, he knew.
Jack was eleven, but he knew exactly what to say, and exactly how to say it. When the Prime Minister of Austeria gifted his father with the 1848 Broadwood Grand, and asked him if he wanted anything else—
Well.
The diplomat and his son never ran in quite the same circles again. Last Jack heard, the son was working in a mine.
There are few things he remembers as vividly as that summer palace; his father’s suit trousers rolled up at the ankles, his sister building her careful sandcastles, his mother’s wide-brimmed hat, throwing her pale shoulders into shade. The surf between his toes, running, running, to catch up to his father, and always too slow. When he dreams, in his single tent, huddling in his raggedy bedroll, he dreams of the sun glinting off a golden head not his mother’s, a man’s laugh that isn’t his father’s, warm eyes that don’t belong to his sister. He dreams of a single butterfly, settling, settling, on the fine-boned knuckles of a hand he has lately seen curled too comfortably around the hilt of a gun.
He wonders how David can fit himself so cleanly into memories that predate him by years, folding and bending and curving into the crevices of his past, grace in every miniscule detail.
He wonders what that beach looks like now—with one child in exile and another for the rope, he thinks, Silas probably hasn’t found much time to vacation. Jack thinks of David on the beach, cargo pants—how plebeian—rolled to his knees, smiling. He thinks, what is David Shepherd to me?
He thinks of the diplomat’s son working in the mines, coal dust tarring his lungs the same colour as Jack’s soul. He thinks, words don’t settle debt.
“Jack,” David says, voice soft. “Jack, there’s no other way.”
What is David Shepherd to me?
He doesn’t sleep that night. One Eyed Fuck is on first watch, he is on fifth. Jack’s feet are cold; this is a far cry from the bed he’s used to, stuffed with down and covered in silk, with a willing body on it to sweeten sleep. Instead, there’s a rock under his head, and his stomach is grumbling. He gets up.
His feet find themselves, by muscle memory alone, heading towards the supply tent, the centre of their guerrilla operation. Around him, the men are snoring, and in the tent itself, a candle is burning.
He ducks inside. “Those cost, you know.”
David starts, at the table. By night, the stress is beginning to show. Shadows under his eyes, a nick on his chin from where he had cut himself trying to shave. Knives had never been his specialty. Jack grabs a chair, and straddles it, sitting down at the table.
“No they don’t.” David says.
Jack shrugs. “Not coin, maybe, but you always smell like animal fat for a week after candle-making. It costs me peace of mind.”
“Only because you didn’t want to get your hands dirty.” David says, a hint of a smile curling at his mouth. Jack smiles, doesn’t take his eyes off the map. “Candle-making too menial a task for the Crown Prince?”
“My hands are meant for a higher purpose.” Jack murmurs. He puts a finger down, at where valley meets river. “They’ll see you coming.”
“I know.” David says. “I don’t want to startle them into shooting.”
There is silence. Jack imagines bullets riddled through that torso, a wordless scream choked off in his throat. Jack looks up, and sees David watching him.
“Are you afraid?”
David’s hands twitch, on the table. In Jack’s dream, a butterfly had perched on his index finger, orange wings bright in the morning sun. “Yes.”
So even the blessed can feel fear. “No word from—” Jack points upwards, into the unfathomable cosmos.
David smiles. “Can’t exactly call Him up.” He sobers. “Before… before your coronation, there was silence, too. Silas put a glass of whiskey on the table, and asked God to knock it over if he was listening.”
“I don’t imagine God took too well to being asked to perform parlour tricks.” He considers. “But then again—”
David makes a gesture—what can you do? “That’s the point, isn’t it? You never know. You never know until it’s done, and the dust settles, and you’re standing on a stage or in a ruin. Whether He’s for you or against you. Sometimes I’m afraid to open my eyes in the morning, just in case today I’ve lost His favour. It’s like I’m living on borrowed time.”
“You’re not.” The words come out of him like bullets, faster than he can comprehend. David looks up, meets his eyes. Jack blinks, once, twice. He swallows. “You won’t.”
David laughs. “I imagine Silas thought that too before—”
“You’re not Silas.” He speaks fast, before he loses the courage. Before he loses heart. “You’re better. You’re good. You’re frustratingly good, and sometimes I think you want to get yourself killed, and you’re dumber than a pile of bricks—” David laughs, disbelieving. “—and I—”
He breaks off. The words die in his throat. His heart falters. “You’re not him.” He finishes lamely. David is watching him, and there is something careful in his eyes, like he’s waiting for the other shoe to drop. Jack drops his gaze, and pulls the map closer to the two of them again. His voice comes out gruff.
“Run it through again.”
For a moment, it looks like David wants to say something, before he dutifully bows his head. “Here is the extraction point they’ll use. Here, you’ll be in the trees, you’ll be my over-watch. And here—”
“And if they approach from the east?” He drills him. Every possibility. They have to cover every possibility.
“Sinclair will cover it, and we just have to change directions here.” David answers, without missing a beat. “And when they ask, I won’t say a thing. I won’t say anything until Silas himself comes to question me—”
“You think you can handle it?” Jack’s voice is thin. He is thinking of the water, of the cloth over the mouth, of the questions. Where is he? What kind of weapons does he have? Who have pledged him support? Where is he? “They won’t be gentle.”
Smiling, David taps the side of his head, and points upwards. Unwillingly, Jack smiles. David pulls the map closer. “They’ll take me by the western route across the border. There are safe-houses here, here, and here, and when we get to this point…”
He is having trouble listening. The light glints off a strand of hair that is beginning to curl around the nape of his neck, which his knife-hacking has missed. David’s lashes rest, heavy and thick, on the upwards curve of his cheekbones, hallowed shadows darkening the hollows of his eyes. In Jack’s dreams, butterflies light on his hair, lighter than air. A living crown.
What is David Shepherd to me?
I—
His throat is dry. David, I—
David looks up, as if seeking Jack’s agreement. He nods, then, and David grins, bright as flame. “Keep going.”
Later, David falls asleep on the table, head nestled into the crooks of his arms. Jack blows out the candle, and lifts David to his feet, slinging an arm across his shoulder. “Come on,” he says softly, and David shifts in his sleep, murmuring quietly.
In David’s tent, he settles him down into the bedroll. It’s thinner than his own. David curls, when he is asleep, long legs curled up to his chest. After a moment, Jack exits the tent, and comes back with his own bedroll. He spreads it over David, and sits down next to the makeshift bed.
In sleep, there is less stateliness to him. He snores just like any of the others, mouth slightly open. Jack’s fingers twitch, and he tucks in the blanket around him.
What is David Shepherd to me?
Words don’t settle debt. David is—
David is sunlight, on golden hair. David is stubborn righteousness with a knife to his throat. David is that boy-scout goodness honed to a knife’s edge. David is brutal, blunt edged honesty cutting through a red sea, David is, David is—
What is David Shepherd to me?
What happened next, daddy?
“A living crown.” Silas says, fingers fluttering around his head, to mimic the beating of paper-thin wings, orange and veined with delicate membranes. This is a different memory, because Michelle is lying by his side, her round little hands clasped to her round little face. They are older this time, and he nudges her knee with his foot. She shoves back. “A crown of monarch butterflies; God’s signal to begin.”
Begin. A single word command, solid feet planted on rubble, a dream of a kingdom rising to the skies; Caesar and Divine, both and neither, in a single man crowned with golden thorns. A kingdom where there was none, a king where there had been warlords, a singularity of purpose worth the lives it had been built on. God says, begin, and Silas begins.
His father speaks like a man with an anchored heart; the good reverend like a heart given a temporary vessel of speech. He has a memory of the reverend’s big hand around his, his other holding Michelle’s, while the two of them skip down the wooded paths at the mansion. For a large man, the reverend is surprisingly nimble with a jump rope.
This is how a kingdom is built, little Jack Benjamin, aged eight, thinks. His father who is godtouched, his mother who is a walking oil painting, and the reverend with his eyes gazing far, far above. He does not yet know why his father keeps counsel with his uncle. He does not yet know that even God needs gold, and guns, and men.
He learns when he is fifteen. In this, he was not so quick.
He is playing chess with William Cross.
His uncle has a tell. His left eyebrow twitches, a tiny spasm in two, three muscles, tops. Jack knows this from their last poker game, when he had won a slick little Aston Martin with a straight flush. Chess, however, is not his game. He’s already lost both bishops, a knight, and his queen, and William is playing circles around him, closing in for a kill that he deems aesthetically pleasing.
“Just get it over with,” Jack groans.
“Patience is a virtue, Jack.” William replies, and makes a move. His last knight is gone.
“Endurance is. Opportunism is. Patience is their ugly cousin.”
“All the same. She has a nice personality.” William grows bored of this torture, and ends the game. Jack’s king topples on the board, ivory clattering against wood. “You’re reckless, that’s your problem. Chess is about strategy, not tactics.”
Jack picks up the king, traces a thumb across his elaborate crown. The set is carved in the form of medieval saints, a long face heavy and sombre, sword in hand. The crown is tall and proud. “To think,” Jack says. “He was God’s chosen king. Power mandated from above.”
William watches him carefully, for a second, and then plucks the king from his hand. He begins to reset the board, quick and precise. In front of the king and his court, a row of pawns with downturned mouths. William begins, carefully, to turn the row backwards, until they are facing the court. Outside, the sun is setting. The dying light settles on eight downward curving snarls, suddenly sinister. “From above, you think?”
Jack holds his tongue.
“The problem with antique chess sets is that they’re stuck in stasis. This world… of swords and shields and battles to the death—it hasn’t existed for a long time, if it had existed at all. An Arthurian idyll, wrapped in nineteenth century laudanum induced nostalgia. If we’re going to be accurate about the state of the world…”
In many ways, his uncle’s speech patterns are as mesmerizing as the good reverend’s. Jack finds that he is holding his breath.
“This one here is a banker.” William says, tapping on the head of a pawn. He moves down the line. “This one manufactures steel and supplies the king’s foreign expeditions. This one, a cloth merchant; uniforms and linen and bandages need to come from somewhere, you know. And here, this one runs a pharmaceutical company. Here, a media mogul, for garnering public approval. An oil baron. A contractor, for public works. And here, of course, you have the last pawn.”
William picks it up, a little man that holds a dagger instead of a sword. Jack asks, “What’s the last pawn?”
William smiles. “Every king needs a backer. A jack of all trades.”
Jack looks up, gaze sharp.
William settles back to the board. “The bishop is the king’s man, but men of faith can’t be trusted, because how long until their stomachs become as soft as their hearts? Knights are nothing more than thugs for hire, mercenaries who wear their gold sewn into their armour. Always pay better than the other man, Jack, remember that. Nothing is sure as gold. And then—the queen.”
A woman with a serene face, and upturning eyes. A sword sheathed at her side. “Where does the queen’s loyalties lay?”
“With her king.”
He is thinking of his mother, picking out his father’s shirts every morning, picking different napkins and china for every state function, matching her shoes to her lipstick. The woman who makes sure that their blood stays blue.
William shakes his head. “Doesn’t the queen have a family? Parents? Sisters? Brothers? Maybe even family…” fingers trail across the board, to the opposing army of black. “… on the other side? When push comes to shove, and a line must be drawn, where does the queen stand? With the ring on her finger, or with her blood?”
For a while, there is silence.
“In a world like this, who can the king trust?”
A beat. Jack looks up. William’s eyes are a pale, watery blue in the dying light. His teeth are very white. The answer doesn’t need to be said.
With a small thud, William picks up the pawn, and sets it in front of Jack. “He may have allies, if he asks nicely. If he’s willing to march his son up the mountain.” Jack stares. “In a manner of speaking.”
At this, William’s assistant pokes her head through the door. “Sir,” she says. “Mr Cross, it’s the king.”
William stands, buttons his jacket. He glances at his watch. “I’ve got dinner. Tell Silas I’ll call him back.”
William ruffles Jack’s hair as he goes. For a long while, Jack sits still, very still, and slowly, he picks up the pawn.
Jack of all trades, master of none. William Cross has the king waiting on the line for him to finish his caviar and oysters and cigar talk. Jack turns the pawn over in his hand, and thinks of his father’s downturned mouth when Perry tells him that his brother Cross is, regrettably, out. You just missed him, sir. God forbid you tell Silas that the world doesn’t run on his clock—but his father is not a stupid man. Only one man can claim the bad fortune of being out when he calls; and that one man has gold, and guns, and connections. That man has, if he cares to, armies.
Jack is a quick one, and he doesn’t miss a session on kingship when he encounters it, no matter where it comes from.
When he was eight, his father led him through the ranks of the Gilboan army, explaining the insignias on the men’s lapels. And on every uniform, on every helmet, every rifle, every pistol in every boot, is the butterfly that flies proud and high and gold on their standards. Beneath every butterfly, in crisp letters: CrossGen.
His father had signed some papers, then. And he had said: “Get these to William.”
Nothing is sure as gold. And honestly—how many stocks does God own?
He patrols the border of their makeshift camp, ears pricked for any sound—feet crunching dead leaves, the click of a hand turning off the safety on a gun. He is two feet from a mine. He steps sideways, and lights a cigarette, the brief flare of flame a star-point in the surrounding dark.
It’s warm in his mouth, and he takes a long drag. His father didn’t like it, he remembers. He takes a longer drag, pulling the smoke deep into his lungs.
In the tent, David is sleeping sound, warm for the first time in months under both their bedrolls. Tomorrow morning, he will rise, and he will buckle himself into his armour, and he will empty all the shots from his gun except two. They will make their way down the valley, and Jack will lie, along with the others, for four hours or more in the trees, rifle ready, just in case the soldiers they encounter are a bit too trigger-happy for the plan to go ahead. He will watch them take David away, and he may very well never see him come back.
This is what it costs, in blood, to realize a God given promise. God said, begin, and David begins.
“Do it.” David said, feet planted wide apart, steeling himself like a good little soldier. “Come on. Do it.”
Jack is wearing rings. Two on his index, two on his ring finger, both on his right hand. One ring has a large, black, vicious looking stone. There is a roll of coins in his hand.
Six months ago, he had tried to sell them at a pawn shop to buy more supplies, but David had stopped him. It’s too conspicuous, he had said, but Jack thinks that the little cocker spaniel knows they are family heirlooms. Jack thinks, his little cocker spaniel is still a bit too soft.
Jack swings with his right hand; an easy, nonchalant hit that David could have blocked in his sleep. But he doesn’t. The arm gathers force, and when it slams into David’s face, the black stone on his ring tears his lip. David doesn’t make a sound. He doubles over, and before he can blink, Jack steps forward, and brings his knee up. There is a cracking sound; he has broken his nose.
Jack steps back, breathing hard, and lets David reset his nose.
He aims for all the places that he himself have experienced, before, when he had been an enemy soldier with potential intelligence to divulge, and there haven’t been any experts around to do the job. Stomach, and sides, missing the major organs so’s to prevent internal damage but inflict the maximum amount of pain. The roll of coins leave a vicious looking scratch in David’s clear skin, but nothing too hard on the head, nothing to cause haemorrhaging or risk concussing a valuable captive. Jack puts his knee in the back of David’s thigh, cramping the major nerve system, and David goes down.
For a moment, there is silence, and then David says, in a voice like choking, “It’s not enough.”
His skin goes cold. His voice is low and flat. “You can barely walk.”
“As long as I can crawl, it’ll be fine.”
There is a knife in David’s boot. He pulls it out, and hands it to Jack.
He is sixteen, and he drives his Aston Martin into oncoming traffic on the grandest avenue of Susa, the capital before Shiloh existed. Two cars skid, comical, across the asphalt, and three more crash trying to avoid his onslaught.
Miraculously, no one dies, but the public outcry is truly a sight to behold. The gathered crowds are already screaming at him when the police pull him, laughing and half-blind with alcohol and a dozen other chemical enhancements out of the ruined car.
And to think, his uncle had really, really, loved that car.
His father is in a meeting, and his mother entertaining some diplomat from Arcadia. What’s more, he has vomit down his front and his hair is clinging to his forehead with sweat and something not-sweat. He will not be varnish on anyone’s sterling image at this particular moment; no, sir. What matters, in the end, is that it’s Michelle who comes to bail him out.
It’s ridiculously suburban rich kid in a rebel without a cause phase, when you get down to the bottom of it.
“What are you doing, Jack?” Michelle asks, from the other side of the bars. She has a princess coat folded neatly over one forearm, curly hair falling over her shoulders like silk. She has a peter pan collar, for God’s sake.
“Waiting for you to pay the fee so I can get home and wash the vomit out of my hair.” He says. There’s blood in his mouth, and his nose feels broken. He doesn’t remember when that happened.
Technically, he’s a minor, so he needs a parent to bail him out. But God’s pets, you know—they don’t run by our rules. The officers are standing behind her, on the far side of the holding cells, as if they’re afraid to come any closer. Michelle holds his gaze, and then turns, slightly, to look behind her. His father would have barked, his mother would have said, “gentlemen.” Michelle, on the other hand, doesn’t say a word. She has their father’s eyes; large and dark and full of fire, without the look of the cornered dog. Jack, they tell him, has eyes you expect to see through helmet slits.
Michelle doesn’t say a word. They leave.
Slowly, she sits, outside the cell. It’s been a year since she had been sick, and slowly, she is gaining back the weight, and there is colour in her cheeks. Her hair is growing, and in the mornings she takes to swimming her daily two kilometres again—but still, Jack’s eyes watch her carefully, waiting for the stuttering in her breathing, the twitch in her fingers before she clenches her fist hard, nails biting into her palm to stifle the pain. He thinks of the cancer as a bullet—something you can dig out, but he knows that it is more of a recurring nightmare, washing over you when you least expect it. Jack waits.
“You smell like someone burnt down a liquor store.” She says, and he huffs out a laugh. “What, those friends of yours drenched you in absinthe?”
“I hope you’re not insinuating that our brave soldier boys are supplying minors with alcohol.” He says, and she rolls her eyes, leans closer and grips one hand around a bar. “It’s cold, Michelle. You shouldn’t be sitting on the ground. You shouldn’t have come.”
She doesn’t answer that, and he knows that she doesn’t want to bring up the fact that neither of their parents want to be seen coming to his aid right now. A sister’s soft heart—that looks good on the front page. But a king is king first, and the queen has obligations to the state. Neither of them will be granted the luxury of the scolding, disappointed parent. “This is a parody of yourself. A bad one.”
He bites his lip. “Are you going to pay my bail or not? If you’re not, tell them my card’s in my wallet. They can have ten grand each if they let me out.”
“You’re going to start bribing law enforcement?” Michelle asks, one eyebrow arching. There is a moment of quiet, and then she leans closer. “Jack, is this… is this about Aarons?”
His nails have been bitten to the quick, so there is a disappointing lack of edge when his hand clenches into a fist. “I don’t exactly need a reason to drink.”
Major Simon Aarons of the 114th platoon, tall and blond with a crooked smile, who lately led a reconnaissance operation to put weathered generals twenty years his senior to shame, had been entertained generously at the Mansion with his comrades. Too generously, some might say.
“Besides,” Jack says. I’ll be discharged, if your father doesn’t have my head first. “He’s gone back to the front, thank God and by the Charter, maybe he’ll get his legs blown off by a mine this time.”
He had only said it once, in his life, and that was to Michelle when they were sure she was going to die. She had asked for a secret, a forbidden, forbidden secret, that she can clutch in her hands and tell no one else. She had been too young and untouched for secrets of her own, but she had wanted one, all the same. He had said, in a stuttering voice, I think—I think I like men. In the end, it had felt like sitting in a confessional, waiting for the priest to bless away his sins. And if Michelle, who has inherited her share of God’s love from their father and probably his share as well, can accept him, then surely, surely—
“Jack.” She says, admonishing gently. She picks up his hand through the bars, and presses a kiss to his palm.
Michelle pays the bail—twenty grand, a positive bargain—and they go home. Jack takes a long shower, and an even longer bath, and has a full eight hours in bed before his father comes to berate him for his latest indiscretion. His mother finds him a day later, and says, in her smoothest voice, “the darker the stain, the brighter the gilded cloth after. But you should thank your stars that no one died.” She fixes him with her clear blue eyes. “Tar is one thing, but blood doesn’t wash out.”
His uncle offers, laughing, to buy him a new car.
Eight months later, he finishes his hundred hours of community service, and takes care of the screaming crowds with a few public apologies and a generous dosage of puppy eyes. In an act that is part performed contrition and part desperation to get out of this fucking city, he signs up for the military.
A week before he leaves for basic, he sits in the kitchen of the Mansion with his undercooked and over-buttered eggs. His father is in a rage, yelling in council with the generals about the latest military screw up. On the front page of the papers, there is a large picture of the 114th, Simon Aarons grinning back at him while he eats his eggs. Underneath the picture, the headline: killed in action.
Jack flicks through the business section of the paper to see what his uncle is doing nowadays, and signals the valet for more coffee.
He straps David into his armour.
The blood soaks through the white undershirt within two seconds, and David is deathly pale, one hand clutched to his side. He stands wooden, unmoving, while Jack dresses him.
Over the top, the threadbare knit, and then the reinforced jacket. A bullet proof vest, a thick parka.
“Sit down,” Jack says, and David, gingerly, obeys. Jack wrinkles his nose as he pulls the socks over David’s feet. “Your feet stink.”
David manages to grin. He even manages to lift his foot a little, and wafts it in front of Jack’s face. Lightly, almost gently, Jack bats it away.
He’s going pale, but he’s not going to bleed out. A centimetre to the right, and the knife would have gone into his kidney. A centimetre deeper, and David would be dead of blood loss within the hour. It’s just a flesh wound, Jack thinks to himself. It’s just a flesh wound.
What if the Gilboans don’t get to where they need to be on time? What if they never see David at all? What if some trigger happy fool thinks to end the rebellion right there and then, and shoots him on sight?
I’ll kill them all, Jack thinks, vicious, and tightens David’s boots. He thinks of his rifle, and its bullets firing sure and clean and steady between their eyes, through their throats, blood and brains flowering over the forest floor. He takes a deep breath. The thought of metal makes him calm.
“It’ll be fine.” David says, voice faint. They need to move. Fast. “He spoke to me. He said it’s going to be alright.”
“Yeah?” Jack bites out. “Tell Him to put that in writing.”
His fingers are shaking. On the table next to them, there is a blood stained knife. In the side of David’s thigh, a scar is fading already from the tracker he had put in two months ago, and later stitched up with careful hands by firelight, snapping at David to stop twitching, for fuck’s sake. Jack knows every scar on David’s body, can identify by touch alone what it came from—bullet, knife, or garrotte. God heals the soul, but the flesh is your problem.
David leans down, and his voice is a cracked whisper. “If I don’t come back, you have to get the men out of here. Gath won’t help you openly, but if you approach them quietly, they’ll get them out of here, somewhere safe. And you—Michelle will vouch for you. No one knows you’ve been with me. If anyone can convince Silas, it’s you.”
“That ship has sailed.”
“Jack.” There it is. The Voice. God bristling beneath the farm boy’s words. He hates that. He hates that. He’s spent his whole life with men of faith who liked altercations on mountain tops and a hefty turn of phrase to make nations kneel. Never trust a man of faith, his uncle’s words come to mind. “Jack, promise me.”
He says, calmly, “I promise I’ll get the men out of here.”
David is a man of faith. He’s as faithful as man can be, but more than that, he is good. That night in the church, the reverend had said, you are not the one he wants, and he had known—he had known, before. Before the crown went missing, before he had sat down in his father’s chair, before. He had known. There’s the rub—the cavity in his chest, the absence of any whispering blessing in his bones, it had existed when he had the diplomat’s son banished to the mines, it was growing when he flicked by Simon Aarons’ death like any other statistic. You are not the one he wants.
You are not good because God picked you. God picked you because you are good.
David has heart and stomach both of steel—that he can sit here, and beg Jack to cease being an idiot while he’s bleeding all over his bedroll—
There’s nothing soft about him. That stomach will do what needs to be done. That heart will rend this land apart, burn out the unworthy—but never the feeble or the weak—and do what needs to be done, to bring heaven closer to earth.
“If you don’t come back,” Jack says, and his voice is light, and almost laughing. “If you don’t come back, I will slit Silas’ throat, and burn Gehenna to the ground. And next it’ll be Altar Mansion, and then Unity Hall, and Shiloh. After that, I’ll salt the earth. If anything grows here again within the next century, I’d be very surprised.”
I’ll do a better job than all Your fires and floods. If we’re made in Your image, I’ll better it. Jack straightens the strap on David’s other boot. Let him come back, he thinks, and we’ll call it even.
Jack stands. “So you better come back.”
Twenty miles out from their camp, a squadron of Gilboan soldiers encounter David Shepherd, former golden boy, slumped over in the mud, bleeding from a wound in his side that looks two hours old. A shout, the call from a commander, and the soldiers turn David over, until he is lying on his back and completely surrounded. They rip open his jacket, and find the knife wound. The call gets louder.
“Platoon leader approaching,” Dakin says in his ear. “It looks like—holy shit, it looks like—”
Silas walks through the crowd of men, and Jack almost pulls the trigger right then and there, almost puts a bullet through his father’s greying head, right there, while they are outnumbered five to one. Silas puts his foot on David’s chest, and Jack’s hand tightens, white, bloodless. Avery is snapping commands into his ear—that haughty piece of shit; Jack is the one in command here—back down, step off, hand off the rifle, Benjamin, Benjamin—come on—
Through the scope, Jack can see the vein jumping in in the old man’s throat. One squeeze, that’s all it takes, blood all over the ground. Jack thinks of his year in that breeding experiment, and he thinks, it’s such a small movement. Surely no one is going to miss one old tyrant—
On the ground, David’s hand rises slightly. Twitches, really. Perpendicular off the ground. Stand down. I got this.
Jack eases his hand off the rifle.
That night, they sit huddled around a meagre fire.
They have a bottle of homebrew vodka between them—before his disgrace, Jack liked whiskey older than this country, and wines older than his father. Yet divine displeasure from on high falls on us all, and Jack is here, swigging homebrew with the rest of them. By the time the moon rises, Jack is the only one still awake, and sober.
Slowly, he pours out a shot of vodka, and sets it on the ground carefully.
“Knock it over.” He says, to the unresponsive sky. His throat is cold. “Come on. You did it for him. You can do it for me.”
After a while, Jack laughs softly. “Still won’t talk to me, will You?” He takes a gulp from the bottle. It burns, going down. It makes his voice rough. “This isn’t for me. Tell me he’s going to be fine. Tell me what You told him, and I’ll stop bothering You.”
Where is my son? Who is helping you? What are you planning? Where is my son?
Jack spits on the ground. He turns over, and closes his eyes.
The next morning, One Eyed Fuck jams his boot into Jack’s side, and curses at him in Arcadian. Jack grits his teeth, and his pistol is in his hand before he can register moving. The safety is off, and he has the barrel pressed between One Eyed’s legs.
“Do that again and I’ll blow your balls to kingdom come.” He snarls.
“Hey, Prince Charming,” Sinclair says dryly from across the burnt out fire. He gestures to the ground, where the shot glass has toppled over. “He said to stop wasting our alcohol.”
*
Before Gilboah had existed, there had been a giant golden statue of Vesper Abbadon, one hand lifted to the high heavens. In the same spot, on which Shiloh stands, Unity Hall rises to the skies. They had melted down the gold, and traded it for shoes, and homes, and hope.
The day before his coronation, his mother had arranged for the crown to be stolen. When her brother was scrambling to his jet, and Jack had made his staggeringly stupid decision to stand his ground, Rose Benjamin had handed that same crown—crafted from Vesper Abbadon’s golden head—to her husband.
In the end, we all choose the man we want to be. In the end, we all choose grace.
Never trust a man of faith, his uncle had said. Nothing is as sure as gold. When push comes to shove, and a line needs to be drawn, the queen will pick her own.
On the tree top, he had eased his hand off the rifle, and watched them haul David away. Silas had scanned the trees, and for a moment he is sure that he had been seen, before he turned, and walked away.
Wrong, uncle, Jack thinks. Wrong, wrong, wrong.