The Trade of Queens

skylights. Another gang found themselves unloading wagonloads of machine tools, lightweight precision-engineering equipment to stand beside the forges and heavy presses left behind by the artillery works. Something important was coming, that much was clear. But what?

*   *   *

“What is this—hovel?” demanded the tall woman with the babe in arms, pausing on the threshold. She spoke hochsprache, with an aristocratic Northern accent; the politicals in their striped shirts, burdened beneath her trunk, didn’t understand her.

Heyne shrugged, then turned to the convicts. “Leave it here and report back to barracks,” he told them, speaking English. He watched as they deposited the trunk, none too softly, and shuffled away with downturned faces. Then he gestured back into the open doorway. “It’s where you’re going to live for a while,” he told her bluntly. “Be thankful; this nation’s in the grip of revolt, but you’ve got a roof over your head and food on the table, and guards to keep you safe.”

“But I—” Helena voh Wu stepped inside and looked around. Raw brick faced with patches of crumbling plaster stared back at her; bare boards creaked underfoot.

The other woman was more practical. “Help me move this inside?” she said, looking up at him as she bent over one end of the trunk. The boy, free of her hand, dashed inside and thundered up the stairs, shouting excitedly.

“Certainly, my lady.” Heyne picked up the other end of the trunk and helped her maneuver it past the other woman. It gave them both a polite excuse to ignore her hand-wringing dismay.

“Is there any bedding? Or furniture?” she asked quietly.

“Probably not.” They finished shoving the trunk against the inner wall of the front room, and Heyne straightened up. “The previous tenants shipped out a week since, and stripped their houses of anything worth taking. The matter’s in hand, though. We’ve got plenty of labor from the politicals in the workshop. Tell me the basics you need and I’ll put in an order for it.” He looked around. “Hmm. They really stripped this one.” Walking through into the kitchen, he tutted. “Complete kitchen set, table and chairs, pots, a stove if we can find one. Beds”—he glanced over his shoulder—“for three of you.” Walking to the back, he stared through the grimy window into the yard. “Chamber pots. Let’s check the outhouse.”

Outside in the sunlight, Kara spoke quietly. “I know we’re refugees, dependent on the generosity of strangers. But Helena can’t be the first like this…?”

Heyne glanced back at the terraced house and shook his head. “No, she isn’t. Most people go through something like it, sooner or later; but they get over it eventually.” He looked back at the outhouse. “Good, they left the toilet seat. My lady, I know this accommodation is not up to your normal standards, but the fact is, we’re beginning again from scratch, with barely any resources. We’re lucky enough that Her Majesty negotiated a settlement with the revolutionaries that gives us this compound, and resources to … well, I’m not sure I can talk about that. But we’re welcome here for now, anyway, and we’re not going to starve.” He turned and headed back through the kitchen door, glanced through into the front room—where Helena was sitting on the trunk, rocking slowly from side to side—and then climbed the creaking staircase to the top floor and the two cramped bedrooms below the attic.

The young boy was still crawling around the empty south-facing bedroom, jumping up and down and making-believe in some exciting adventure. Heyne tested the windows. “The glass is all here and the windows open. Good.”

“How long will we be here?” Kara asked bluntly.

“As long as they want to keep us.” He shrugged. “You don’t want to go back home, my lady.” His eyes lingered a moment too long on her stomach. “Not now, maybe not ever.”

“But my husband—”

“He’ll make it out here.” Heyne’s tone brooked no argument, even though his words were spoken with the voice of optimism rather than out of any genuine certainty. “Don’t doubt it.”

“But if we can’t go back”—she frowned—“what use are we to them?”

Heyne shook his head. “Nobody’s told me yet. But you can be sure Her Majesty has something in mind.”

*   *   *

Stumbling through workdays like nothing he’d ever seen before, walking in a numb haze of dread, Steve Schroeder had spent the weeks since 7/16 waiting for the other shoe to fall.

There was the horror of the day’s events, of course, and then the following momentous changes. Agent Judt sitting in one corner of the office for the first week, a personal and very pointed reminder that he’d accidentally turned down the kind of scoop that came along once in a lifetime—a chance to interview Osama bin Laden on September the twelfth—and then the consequences as the scale of the atrocity grew clearer. Then the surreal speech by the new president, preposterous claims that had no place in a real-world briefing; he’d thought WARBUCKS was mad for half an hour, until the chairman of the Joint Chiefs came on-screen on CNN, gloomily confirming that the rabbit hole the new president had jumped down was in fact not a rabbit hole at all, but a giant looming cypher like an alien black monolith suddenly arrived in the middle of the national landscape—

And then the India-Pakistan war, and its attendant horrors, and the other lesser reality excursions—the Israeli nuclear strike on Bushehr, the riots and massacres in Iraq, China’s ballistic nuclear submarine putting to sea with warheads loaded and the tense standoff in the Formosa Strait—and then the looking-glass world had shattered, breaking out of its frame: the PAPUA Act, arrests of radicals and cells of suspected parallel-universe sympathizers, slower initiatives to bring forward a national biometric identity database, frightening rumors about the military tribunals at Guantanamo that had so abruptly dropped out of the headlines—

One day, after a couple of apocalyptic weeks, Agent Judt wasn’t there anymore. And when a couple of days later the president had his third and fatal heart attack and there was a new president, one who spoke of known unknowns and unknown unknowns and seemed to think Dr. Strangelove was an aspirational role model, there was a new reality on the ground. The country had gone mad, Steve thought, traumatized and whiplashed by meaningless attacks: 9/11 and strange religious fanatics in the Middle East had been bad enough, but what was coming next? Flying saucers on the White House lawn? Not that there was any White House lawn for them to land on, anymore. (WARBUCKS had promised to rebuild, once the radiation died down, but that would take months or years.)

Two weeks after the attack, Steve went to see his HMO and came away with a prescription for Seroxat. It helped, a bit; which was why, on his way home from a day shift one evening, he was alert enough to realize he was being followed.

Downtown Boston was no place to commute on wheels. Like most locals, Steve relied on the T to get him in and out, leaving his truck in a car park beside a station. He didn’t usually pay much attention to his fellow passengers—no more than enough to spot a seat and keep a weather eye open for rare-to-nonexistent muggers— but as he got off a Green Line streetcar at Kenmore to change lines something drew his attention to a man stepping off the carriage behind him. Something familiar about the figure, glimpsed briefly through the crowd of bodies, triggered a rush of unease. Steve shivered despite the muggy heat and hurried across the tracks behind the streetcar, heading for his own platform. It can’t be him, he told himself. He spooked and ran. He looked around behind him, but the half-recognized man wasn’t there anymore.

What to do? Steve shook his head and hunkered down, waiting for the C Line train to North Station.

He knew something was wrong about five seconds after his train began to squeal and shudder away from the platform; knew it from the hairs on the back of his neck and the slight dip of his seat as the man behind him leaned forward, putting his weight on the seat back. “Hello, Steve.”

He tensed. “What do you want?” It was hot in the streetcar, but the skin in the small of his back felt icy cold.

“I’m getting off at the next stop; don’t try to follow me. I think you might like to have a look at these files. There’s an email address; mail me when you want to talk again.” A cheap plastic folder bulging with papers thrust over the seat back beside him like an accusing affidavit. He caught it before it spilled to the floor.

“What if I don’t want to talk to you?” he asked thinly.

The man behind him laughed quietly. “Give it to your FBI handler. He’ll shit a brick.”

The streetcar slowed; Steve, too frightened to look round as the man behind him stood up, clutched the folio to his chest. Jesus, I can’t just let him get away—