Empire Games Series, Book 1(3)
Kurt arranged the flowers in the empty niche before the headstone, his neck bent. He did this every season, and would continue to do so as long as he was able to. Greta, his one true love, had died while he was still in his fifties. He didn’t expect to ever remarry: for a man in his position it was too risky. But he still had their son, Franz, and Franz’s wife, Emily, and their adopted offspring. He thought of his adoptive grandson, River, and this curious gawky girl with the perpetually stunned-looking dark eyes and restless mind, her talent for deadpan impersonation. “She was a”—he stumbled—“a sort of actress.” Fingers fumbled with a flower stem. “It was all an act for Greta. A role she played. Wife and mother, for example. Just as, before she came to the United States, she was a sergeant in the, the special police, assigned to the Dresden administration. That’s where we met: Dresden, Germany, in ’66.”
“Grandma was a secret policewoman?”
“Ssh! Not so loud.” He’d popped the batteries from their cell phones as they entered the graveyard, and there were no visible cameras here, nothing but the thin whine of an Air Force drone circling high overhead. But you could never be sure you were unobserved. “That’s what she was when I met her, before we crossed the wall to the west. Now”—he placed the last flower in the grave holder, covering his hand as he palmed the coin-sized geocache hidden there—“it’s best if we don’t remember this. At least, not in public.” He straightened up, head still bowed, a hollowness behind his breastbone as he stared at his wife’s gravestone. “I think you are old enough to know the truth. But it’s a family thing. Not for outsiders. You can talk to me or your father about it, but nobody else: it’s not safe.”
“I got that.” Rita nodded vigorously, then fell quiet, caught up in his silence. He took a deep breath, trying to clear his mind. Here was where he ended, emotionally. To the left of Greta’s plot there was another strip of ground, turf undisturbed. He’d join her there eventually, he was sure. He’d sleep the final sleep on an alien shore, unable to go home to a nation that no longer existed.
But there was a cold breeze tugging at his coat, and after a minute the girl began to stamp her feet, clutching her hands under her armpits, and he realized it was unfair of him to expect a coltish tween to indulge his chilly grief. So Kurt straightened and walked back toward the path. He checked his watch with a start. “We’d better go straight home,” he told his granddaughter: “it’s past five.”
“Mom will want help with dinner. Will she be mad with us for being out so late?”
“Not this time, I think.” Kurt checked himself. “But we should still go, before the curfew.” Police and Department of Homeland Security operatives would be on high alert tonight, as on all seasonal holidays. A revenge strike for the previous year’s nuclear attack seemed long overdue, so tensions would be high. And for Kurt, a curfew violation and subsequent investigation would invite risky attention. “Just remember the truth about Grandma. And remember to keep it to yourself, or there could be bad consequences.”
“Grandma was an illegal,” Rita whispered under her breath, so quietly that Kurt failed to hear her as they headed back toward the graveyard gate. And again, with her lips barely moving as she tested the fit of the idea: “Grandma was a spy…”
Hurrying to keep up with Kurt’s lengthening stride, Rita smiled in delight.
Trade Show
SEATTLE, MARCH 2020
Rita awakened to the eerie warble of her phone’s alarm, followed by NPR cutting in with the morning newscast. (Oil hitting a thirty-year low, $25 a barrel: a Republican senator calling for a tax on imports from other time lines, to prevent global warming.) She rolled over on the sofa bed and grabbed for it, suppressing a moan. It was five o’clock in the morning, pitch black but for the faint glow of parking lot floodlights leaking into the motel room. Today was Friday: last day of the trade show. Tomorrow they were due to pack everything up and head home. But today—
Today was their last day on stage demoing HaptoTech’s hardware while their boss, Clive, worked the audience for contacts and (eventually) sales. Last day of mandatory stage makeup and smiles, last day of booth-bunny manners, last day performing their canned routines under the spotlights. Last fucking day. Hoo-rah. The end couldn’t come soon enough for her. HaptoTech sold motion capture gear for the animation industry: kits for digitizing body movements so they could be replayed in cartoons and computer games. Unlike most MoCap rigs, which were suits you wore or pods you strapped on, HaptoTech’s consisted of tiny implants, injected under the performer’s skin. Supposedly this gave more precision and better inputs on musculature. What the brochure didn’t say was that the implants itched.
Rita sat up and stretched, trying not to scratch. Her muscles ached from yesterday’s workout. She’d taken the folding bed in the motel suite’s day room, happy not to arm-wrestle with Deborah and Julie over the twin beds next door. Deborah snored when she slept (and complained when she was awake), and Julie talked too much, oversharing her religion enthusiastically. Rita had agreed to double up with them only because it was that or no contract for the trade show gig, which paid just well enough to make it worthwhile. Clive was a cheapskate, but even a cheapskate paying her by the hour was better than no contract (and no money). But by day 4 of a week of twelve-hour shifts, she was well past second thoughts and into thirds, if not fourths.