plastic remote sitting on the bedside table looked like something she could use to call the nurse’s station. But she didn’t. Without being sure why, she carefully swung her legs out over the side of the bed and tried to balance her weight as she stood up. She was a little faint, and dizzy with it, but a few deep breaths saw her regain her equilibrium.
Her thoughts moved slowly. Her father’s death seemed like a great, dark mountain, with her standing at the foot of it, looking up and wondering how she could ever scale such a thing, or even move around it. As slow and stupid as the drugs made her feel, she was glad of them.
He was gone, and she knew his loss would soon hurt much worse. Worse than the loss of an arm or even a leg. Her heart had been ripped from her chest. But for now she remained deadened to the pain. That was good. She knew it gave her the chance to get moving, to act before she was paralysed by the weight of it all. That was one of the things she had learned as they crept and sometimes fought their way free in Blackstone’s Texas. Sometimes, no matter how grave the injury or outrage, you just had to move. To stand still was to die. You’d be overwhelmed, ploughed under. Like everyone who had died in that flood on the Johnson Grasslands. They hadn’t moved, or they hadn’t moved quickly enough.
Sofia moved. She quickly stripped off her loose cotton hospital gown and began changing back into the clothes she had been wearing. They were folded neatly in an armchair in the corner of the room, a pair of relatively new Levi’s, a long-sleeved tee-shirt and a black hoodie. She was almost undone by the thought that Papa should’ve been sitting there waiting for her when she woke up. That’s what fathers did. They watched over you. They were there for you when you woke up.
But that way lay madness, she knew. Even with the numbing cushion of the drugs to protect her, Sofia knew not to poke at that wound. It would pain her soon enough. As she climbed into her jeans and boots, listening for any sound of movement outside the room, she began to gather her wits. The fog was clearing from her thoughts, if not her feelings.
Sofia had thought her dead. But no, she was not - not yet, anyway. She had survived the attack, the two police officers had said. As muzzy and clouded as the teenager’s thoughts might’ve been, she was clear-headed on that issue. Her father and Maive had been attacked, not simply run down in some random accident. And Maive had survived.
She would be here somewhere. Sofia remembered that now: Maive was still alive, but very badly injured. Was she in a coma? Was she undergoing surgery? Sofia was sure she’d known the answer to that once, but like a poor student, she had forgotten. It would be frustrating were she not inoculated against feeling anything.
She tucked the white tee-shirt into her jeans and put on the thick, fleecy hoodie. As she concentrated on dressing herself, she remembered. Maive was in intensive care. The nurses had told her that when the paramedics brought her in, after she’d collapsed back at the apartment. Maive was alive, but she was in intensive care. That’s why Sofia couldn’t see her. She recalled asking them if Mrs Aronson would be all right, but couldn’t remember what they told her. Perhaps the nurses had avoided the question. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that Sofia would not be able to see her. Not if she hoped to get away from here.
And for now that’s all she wanted to do. To get away from this hospital, away from this city and back to Texas, where her family had been murdered. And where she could find the man her father blamed for the deaths.
The tyrant Blackstone.
Sofia Pieraro would return to Texas, as her father had promised to, and there she would settle with the man who had taken everything from her. She was done playing stupid games with the
13
DEARBORN HOUSE, SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
A fixer’s work was never done. And a fixer he most surely was - not an aide, not a staff member, not even the Chief of Staff, despite what it said on his office door. Jed Culver was a fixer of small things, like disputes between Cabinet secretaries about who got the corner office, and big things, like existential threats to the Republic. And that’s what he was certain he was looking at here: the death of the American Republic.
It was a hell of a thing, when you thought about it. The Disappearance hadn’t destroyed the United States, even though it had killed pretty much everyone on the continent, save for a few lucky survivors in the Pacific Northwest and up into Alaska. Those survivors were doing the best they could to bind up the massive wound inflicted on the nation, but they were going to fail. America was going to die, and it was all because of one, self- obsessed asshole. General Jackson Blackstone.
Or Governor Jackson Blackstone as he was these days. And didn’t winning the territorial elections back in 2005 earn him the title fair and square?
Culver grimaced. Mad Jack simply demonstrated that the power of the people could be a very sharp, double- edged sword. After all, how could any right-thinking American resist a staunch defender of the nation who fought the good fight against the granola and tofu-chewing hippies of Seattle? Because, of course, your granola-chewing tofu types could never be real Americans, could they?
He leaned right back in his office chair, cheating a little extra room to cross his legs, as he contemplated the photograph he was holding of Blackstone. It was a typical press shot of the former US Army Ranger, in his green dress uniform, bedecked in ribbons and stars, smiling at the camera with the pre-Wave flag of the United States draped artfully behind his right shoulder. He came across as a country grandpa of sorts, eager to get out of the army-issue suit and tie for some fishing by the river. When Blackstone wasn’t angry, he could even sound like your granddaddy, calmly telling you the facts of life with the same patience that one might teach a child how to thread a worm onto a fishing hook. Or throw a roomful of duly elected civilian representatives into confinement for arguing over Oreo cookies.
There was a bit of the Roman in him too, perhaps, something to Jed’s eye that brought to mind the old busts of Pompey and Vespasian. The great leonine head, the long nose and imperial bearing that seemed to fill out his uniform with extra awesomeness. You could understand why people might turn to him during the End Times. The motherfucker had a glint in his eye that whispered of your salvation. Or to Jed’s practised and cynical eye, of Blackstone’s Messiah complex.
He tossed the colour photo onto a pile of more recent, matte, black-and-white photographs that was threatening to spill over the edge of his desk. In the later shots, Blackstone had offset his bald pate with a grandfatherly beard that was slowly going white with age. The Santa Claus look, Kipper called it.
Culver’s special project took up all the available space in his rather cramped office. The desk wasn’t a mess by any means. Jed Culver’s mind was too organised to countenance sloppiness of thought or deed, but it was a mind possessed of an unnatural ability to take in and process vast amounts of information. It was why he had been such a successful attorney once upon a time. Having learned something, he retained that knowledge. But more importantly, he understood it within the context of everything else he had learned. That was the mistake people made, thought Jed: they confused information with meaning. It was all very well to have a so-called photographic memory - he didn’t, he simply had a very well organised and partitioned memory - but unless you could synthesise all of the random bits of information, the data points, the seemingly disconnected instances and episodes and reams of evidence and counter-evidence into a coherent narrative that was firmly grounded in reality, and not what you wanted reality to be, then you were fucked.
A sub-zero gale rattled his office window in its frame, as if applauding this grim, Darwinian opinion. Jed grunted in irritation. He’d jammed a folded wedge of paper in there a couple of hours earlier, Kipper style, to stop the damned thing annoying him. He wondered if they’d had these same problems, of working in an old, antiquated building, back in the original White House.
He dropped down on one knee to search for the missing wedge. For all of his justly famed powers of concentration, rattling windows drove him nuts, and left him unable to think. He found the makeshift wadding behind the floor-length curtain and jammed it back in between the sash and the frame, restoring blessed quiet to his office.
