Arch-Conspirator(17)

The worst part about him was seeing my father in him. I wished that I couldn’t. They didn’t share genes, but he had Oedipus’s gestures, surprisingly delicate for a man so prone to brutality. Sometimes he even sounded like my father—the intonation on certain words, the soft way he said goodbye to Eurydice.

But there was an artifice in him that was never in my father. He knew I was standing there. That he chose not to acknowledge me right away was a power play.

Sitting in one of the two chairs opposite him was a guard, wearing his uniform. He looked like every other guard I had ever seen, tall and broad and masculine, his eyes finding me with a level of focus that made me feel shifty and strange. After a moment I recognized him as the guard who had arrested me.

I sat in the chair beside him and waited.

“I wish to hear your account first,” Kreon said, and he nodded to the guard beside me.

“Uh…” The guard looked from Kreon to me. “After the explosion, everyone vacated the square—I was running there like everybody else, you know, to help with whatever was going on—I wasn’t even on duty last night, I was just, you know, trying to do what needed to be done—”

“Get to the point, soldier,” Kreon said.

“Well, as I was running past the square I noticed there were no guards, and then I saw something moving, and at first I thought, you know, the body maybe wasn’t as bodylike as everybody thought, somehow—but then I saw the girl.”

“The girl.”

“Her.” The guard nodded at me.

“You saw her,” Kreon said, “doing what?”

“Well, she was sort of leaning over him—the body, that is, so I guess I mean she was leaning over it—and she was holding something.”

“Something.”

“An Extractor—one of the older ones, big and clunky, long needle at one end—”

“You’re certain of this?”

“Well…” The guard shifted a little. “I mean, you can ask her.”

“I intend to,” Kreon said. “First, however, I would like to know exactly what you saw, in the dead of night, from across a street.”

“Well I saw something silvery—the moon was bright—and I ran toward her, and when I was closer, you know, I saw exactly what it was, and I remembered the rules about that body and so I grabbed her.”

“All right,” Kreon said. “You are dismissed.”

“I wasn’t even on duty,” the guard said.

“So you’ve said.”

“Okay. I just—I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I wasn’t about to not do anything, on account of—”

“You’re dismissed, soldier.”

The guard gulped a little, wiped his palms on his trousers, and stood. He gave me an apologetic look, and then walked out of Kreon’s study. Kreon stared at me, one eyebrow raised a little, like he was waiting for me to speak. I met his eyes and waited.

“Niece,” he said. “I didn’t know you knew about explosives.”

“I don’t, Uncle.”

“So you just happened to be in the square, violating my edict, at the exact moment that someone set off an explosive in the Electran District.”

I tilted my head. Smiled.

But before I could make my reply, Haemon opened the door to the study. His eyes went straight to his father, and then he gave me a cold look, as if he had never been my co-conspirator.

“I apologize, I didn’t know this meeting was already underway,” he said, level as a balanced scale. “I had hoped to speak with you beforehand.”

I swallowed down the burning in my throat. Haemon must have been worried that I would become an informant to save my skin. He was here to defend himself, to call me a liar before I got the chance to talk about who set the explosion. I sat up straighter. It was a good thing I wasn’t going to marry a man who had no respect for me at all.

“I suppose,” Kreon replied, equally cool, “you are here to castigate me for ruining your betrothal?”

Just as Kreon had grown up with Oedipus, Haemon had been brought up under his father’s watchful eyes, raised to be a worthy successor. Mimicry of Kreon was in his posture and his manner and his expressions.

“A loyal son doesn’t berate his father,” Haemon said.

“Indeed,” Kreon said. “And so?”

“I came to ask you what you intend to do.”

“You don’t already know?” Kreon looked at me again. “A traitor attempted to kill me. He came close to succeeding. And so I made an example of him. I made an edict, and I made it publicly. In it, I outlined particular consequences for aligning yourself with traitors. Sparing her those consequences would make me a liar.”

“And it’s better to be an honest man than a merciful one?”

Kreon’s voice was like flint when he replied.

“Let me explain something to you, because you are too young to know it yet.” He folded his hands on the desk and leaned toward me, toward his son. “This city is my household. I am the head of it. It is a house of people constantly on the edge of starvation, who begin to deteriorate from the moment they are born. If I intend to protect them, I do not have the luxury of indulging defiance. Defiance leads to instability, and instability leads to extinction. I have built a strong wall around this house. It is not made of stone, it is made of rules that mitigate damage, and it has been the great work of my life. What do you think would happen, if I allowed a crack in my wall?” He looked at me. “Let me tell you what would happen, because it has happened before, again and again, reaching back through history: the crack will widen and the wall will crumble. And when it does, people will die.”