Chapter 16: Lily, Rosemary & The Jack of Hearts

Yearend.

Sparks from the bonfires raced toward the stars. Lily was ten days past seventeen, childhood scrawniness shifting to fluid, athletic grace. Striking, someone called her once; it made her feel dangerous, so she liked it.

She was drunk. Whole of Omaha Base was drunk. Starred and striped flags cracked at the end of their poles.

The southerners’ flag had no stars — just three little gold things. It hung off the side of the command building. They’d just signed a treaty and they’d brought liquor, so that made two more reasons to celebrate. They kept calling Omaha Base ‘loo-a-vuhl’, like that was supposed to mean something, and they laughed when she didn’t get it.

Lily’s cup was empty. Director Josef Castor, leader of the five Union cities, refilled it. His salt and pepper hair was slicked back. He smelled like oil and money.

When she lost her balance he steadied her arm and didn’t take his hand away. His boots gleamed. His eyes were hungrier than she was, and he smiled like a knife blade.

“How you’ve grown,” he said. “You remind me of your mother.”

She looked nothing like pretty, dark-skinned Johanna, dead in the ground these six years, but Lily smiled and thanked him anyway.

It didn’t occur to her to step back when he leaned in. By the time she registered what was happening he’d already gripped her chin in his rough hand and forced his mouth down to hers. He tasted drunk, and dangerous. He let her go and smiled that sharp smile again.

And she ran.

—

She ran.

Dispatches, mostly, up to the command building. Castor’s building. She had to put them in his hands directly, and she knew what he’d do if she let him. It was as plain as the lines on his square face.

A map of the old States hung over his head in a glassless frame. Red ink outlined new borders.

“I have a job for you,” he said, and she wondered if he meant a courier job or the kind of work her mother had done alongside the mending and cleaning. “A package, to Utah Base.”

Lily asked what she’d be delivering.

The smile dropped off Castor’s blunt, handsome face. “A package,” he repeated. “If you’re not up to it…”

He had no grounds to treat her like a child after what he did at yearend. Lily was about to tell him so, about to turn the job down, but he offered her a week’s worth of food coupons up front. She hadn’t eaten in a day and a half.

“Get it there by tomorrow morning,” Castor said, producing a nondescript canvas-wrapped square the size of her two fists.

He tucked the ration tickets into her pocket, and his hand followed them down, and she stood there and said nothing. He could make it so she never worked again.

—

Five weeks. Ten deliveries.

He’d been giving her gifts, like a warmer coat and vouchers for meat, eggs, milk. He put his hands on her but never under her clothes. She didn’t stop him. She needed to eat.

Once, Lily had found her mother crying. She’d said, “I’m not ashamed of what I do to feed you. It’s just so hard.”

Lily was older now. She knew which part had been the lie.

This time Castor hadn’t paid her in advance. She went to see him with lead in her stomach.

He was sprawled out at his desk, coat unbuttoned. She distrusted the way his eyes raked over her.

“I won’t need your services for a while,” he said, as he tucked her payment into her back pocket. “But we could make a different arrangement.”

“I don’t do that kind of work—”

Castor jerked her forward, tried to pull her into his lap. There was a tearing of cloth and she was free, running. No one could catch her, especially not an old man going soft in the middle.

The door bounced off the wall as she threw it open. Castor screamed after her that she was a whore like her fucking mother, and his words snarled at her heels like a pack of Coalition hounds.

—

Lily ran post, now, since dispatches went to the command building. To his desk.

Lots of messages from the southerners to their comrades on Utah Base. Lots of manifests and requisitions. The materiel officer had a kind face and made no sudden movements. She ate twice a day and broke even each week.

Distance running was her only talent and her only joy. She wasn’t smart, wasn’t pretty, wasn’t good with her hands, but she could tear through the bleak, wild country at a matchless pace: Omaha to Utah, a hair shy of thirty miles, in just under three hours.

She took after her father, Johanna had claimed; he’d also been lean and rangy. Her mother had rarely mentioned him, but when she did it had been with a distracted wistfulness. Lily had his ears, too.

The puffs of her breath were crystalline fog. Her perfectly worn-in boots thumped the permafrost. She ran through the wilderness with the mail sack over her shoulders, down a narrow dirt track. She was alive. She was free.

She never saw the black ice.

It was over before she even felt it. She was dead, she had killed herself.

When her leg snapped it sounded like a stick breaking. Lily thought that was what it was, until she looked down and saw the white gleam of bone and a spreading darkness of blood. Then pain rushed in hot and sharp as a knife. She screamed, hands hovering over her shin.

The other runner caught up. “I’ll send help when I get there,” was all she said. “You can’t keep going.”

Lily begged and clawed at the other woman’s leg. Her bloody fingers slipped away, and her screams were lost in the howl of the wind.

—

She’d dragged herself down the road an inch at a time, and her fingers looked like they’d been chewed up and spat back out.

The town was too small for a name and far, far too small for a healer. She’d clenched a leather strap between her teeth while the butcher twisted and pulled and stretched her leg.

Her mother had wasted away at twenty-six, devoured by a tumor. Lily, however, would die much sooner than that. Sepsis would take her. There was no healing a break like this.

Then Castor’s rider arrived, a Corporal from the garrison astride a rare, valuable mule. He didn’t come himself. Lily was grateful for the small mercy.

He offered transport back to Omaha, antibiotics, access to his personal medic, a roof over her head while she recovered. All she had to do, he said through the messenger, was give him what he wanted.

Lily gave the messenger her answer, her voice as broken as her leg.

—

Her stomach was still flat, but she knew. She’d never bled much anyway but now she’d stopped, and she threw up in the mornings and her whole body hurt.

Lily wondered how it was done. Her mother had known — there had been three before her and one after, all unborn. How many of them had been his?

She wanted her mother. She wanted Castor to close his hands around her throat and end her suffering.

He reached out to refill her cup, and the sudden movement of his hand across the table made her flinch, sending her cane clattering to the floor. She felt nauseous.

“Drink,” he ordered, and Lily complied. She wanted to feel nothing. Soon dinner would be over. They’d go upstairs.

She traced the veins in her wrist with a sluggish fingertip and eyed the table knife.

“You used to have some life in you,” Castor said. “Empty your cup, now.”

Lily did as she was told.

“This is hard for me,” he mused, laughing a little as he poured her some more. “I’m still quite attached to you, in spite of how boring you’ve become. I thought about bringing you with me, but…drink, I said. Now.”

Her stomach writhed and twisted like it was full of snakes. She’d had too much. She was going to be sick.

Maybe it would die.

Lily grasped the cup with both hands and drained it, then doubled over in sudden burning agony. This wasn’t the usual nausea. This was pain, the worst pain she’d ever…

“This is a kindness,” Castor said. “Don’t fight it.”

She was almost relieved when she hit the floor.

—

Lily woke in her grave. Dirt fanned across her stomach. She was fading in and out like a signal on the radio, ebbing like the tide.

“Why do you have to make everything so difficult,” Castor sighed, driving his shovel down at her face—

The shockwave knocked him sprawling across her. Then came a great handclap of sound that shook the ground and sucked the air out of the world. In the vacuum Castor straddled her, closing thick, ugly hands around her throat.

With an odd clarity, Lily’s grasping, clawing fingers understood the pistol shoved through Castor’s belt. They recognized the trigger. She squeezed while it was still attached to him, then tore it free and fired until he was dead weight at last, heavy and empty and touching her—

Lily squirmed out from beneath the corpse, fighting to her knees as waves of nausea rocked her like her mother’s old chair, back and forth, up and down…

She wiped blood out of her eyes, wondering why the world was still red. Then she looked west and understood.

Omaha burned.