Rook(123)

René laughed without humor. “Oh, I know this.” He stroked her hair just a little. “I should tell you that the Hasard fortune is lost. I do not know what will happen in the city, but I would guess it will take some time, years perhaps, to put our finances back in order. There will be no fee. Not in time.”

“And she says she will have you, anyway.”


“Yes. She does.”

Tom adjusted his bad leg. “A lot has changed since I crossed the Channel Sea.”

“That is so.”

“The Commonwealth won’t recognize it.”

“We could go to Spain,” René suggested.

“They won’t recognize it, either, not with her citizenship.”

“Ah, but it is so much easier to lie about such things in Spain.”

“What would you do there?”

“No bloody idea.” He paused. “It is my new phrase.”

“Our father might have something to say about it.”

“As will Sophia, and as will my maman. We can all gamble on that.”

“Sophie lied to me about our father, when we were in the prison. I would guess this means he’s not well.”

“He is grieving. And he blames his daughter for his grief.”

“I see,” Tom sighed. “And now he’ll go to prison, grieved or not, and we are going to lose the house. Unless we find another Parisian suitor for my sister in the next … what is it now? Five days? I’m afraid I’ve lost track.”

“Three, I think.”

“Right you are. But I suppose everyone involved will object to that plan now.” Sophia almost smiled.

“And what about you, Monsieur? Do you … how did you say, do you ‘sanction’ this?”

Sophia tried to relax her body, to not alert René to just how very awake she was. She waited for Tom’s answer, René rhythmically stroking her head.

Finally her brother said, “Why don’t you call me Tom?”

Sophia rocked with the movement of the landover, eyes still closed, sure she was failing at hiding a little bit of her smile. She was torn between grief for the man who wasn’t there, and love for the two who were. But what were they to do now? René didn’t want to go to Spain. There was nothing for him there. And what about Tom? She wouldn’t be leaving him behind with no house, no inheritance, and the responsibility of their father. Neither Tom nor René would be sacrificing for her. Not if she had anything to do with it.

Then she felt René go tense beneath her. Tom hit the landover roof, and the vehicle slowed. She sat up, wiping her eyes. They were on the cliff road, nearly to the sea, and Cartier had startled awake as well, looking at them all blearily. It took a moment to see what Tom and René had, but when she did, Sophia opened the door of the landover before it had even slowed to a stop and went running toward an open green field. The trees bordering the field had been broken, a line of splintered branches showing a path from the air, and in the grass there was a burn mark, like a long, blackened rut made from a giant wheel. And at the end of this lay … something.

She approached it carefully, a giant chunk of gray, twisted metal, a large tank of some sort, and other parts sticking up and out that were completely unfathomable, all of it showing the warp and stress of intense heat. It was still warm, smoking or maybe even steaming in the cool air, pieces and parts scattered beneath her feet; the grass around burned in a giant ring. She touched the metal gingerly with a finger. This was a satellite, an Ancient machine fallen from the sky, and it was also, she guessed, what had flown over the prison yard when she stood on top of the Razor. What possible use could this thing have been, so high over anyone’s head? And why had it returned to the earth now? She heard the others coming through the unburnt grass, and bent down to pick up a piece of metal near her feet. Just discernable were four small, stamped letters: NASA.

“How many people alive right now have ever seen such a thing?” Tom asked from behind her, sitting down carefully in the debris-strewn grass. He was breathing hard, either from excitement or exhaustion. It had taken his strength to walk that field.

“I don’t know. But I’ve been seeing lights in the sky since the night I went to the Holiday,” Sophia replied.

“There were dozens while you were in the prison,” René said. “Many at once. Perhaps the satellite was much bigger, and now it is broken. Coming down in pieces.”

“Cartier,” said Tom. “Can you run back to the landover and see if you can find paper and a pen? See if the driver has anything …”



René sat beside Sophia in the grass, staring at the smoking machine while they waited for Tom to finish his frantic sketching. René said, “What happens in the past does not seem to ever go away, does it?”

“I suppose not. Or not all of it,” she replied. “But we can always make sure that it doesn’t happen again. Or that it does.”

“Ah. But then we just cannot forget that it happened in the first place, can we?”

She thought about this, fingering her piece of scavenged, Ancient metal. “Is that the real reason you steal the plastic?” she asked. “So that we cannot forget?”

“Yes,” he said. “It is.”

“I will not be forgetting Spear.”