Beating Heart Cadavers (17 page)

A loud ringing sounded and Fields dove back against the counter to hide herself, but a moment later she realized that it was the phone. It rang persistently for several minutes as she watched it, her chest heaving both from the surprise and the knowledge that Mason would not answer it. As it continued to ring, she slowly got up, her hand untangling from Mason's as she did so, and moved towards the door. Someone would surely come by the house and discover the professor there: she should have left hours ago.

As she reached the back door and pulled it open, the phone clicked to the answering machine. She hesitated momentarily, thinking that she should have unplugged the device to keep people from leaving messages that Mason would never receive, but then the caller's tinny voice spoke into the quiet kitchen and she found that she couldn't remain inside for a moment longer.

“Ah, I see I haven't reached you,” the man said. “I had something rather important to discuss with you, if you wouldn't mind calling me back at your earliest convenience. My name is Jim Selicky and I ...”

The door pulled closed behind her with a snap, though, cutting his message off mid-sentence; it wouldn't matter what he had to say to Mason now anyway.

Ch. 23

Caine sat in the kitchen alone. The only sound was coming from the coffee machine as it spewed out a series of noises in its refusal to work, and he stared at the empty pot vacantly, wondering if it would ever fill up again. Probably not, he thought to himself, trying for once to be realistic. Perhaps he would have to start drinking tea.

He abandoned his empty mug and made his way upstairs to the bedroom. His clothes were kept in the bureau on the far wall – or supposed to be kept, he corrected himself, taking in the sight of his strewn shirts and pants littering the room's surfaces – because he had had all of his wife's clothes moved into the large closet. Their old house hadn't had one quite big enough, and something about finally seeing her belongings in a space the right size had initially filled him with a sense of pride, as though at least one good thing had come from him taking the job as ambassador. But the feeling had vanished long ago, and now staring at the closet only brought a hollowness to his chest that he couldn't fill in again. He had given her a closet with enough room for her sundresses and shoes, but he hadn't gotten her a heart transplant, nor even the chance to say goodbye to her son before she died in fear for his well-being.

He moved to the closet and pulled open the door. Nothing had changed inside of it since he had last looked in, and the clothes draping from the hangers were still as they waited for a person who would never put them on again to return. Caine stepped further inside until he was standing submerged in a rack of clothing, his face pressed into a lavender sweater where her perfume still clung. It seemed impossible to miss someone as much as he missed her, as though he had lost every limb and sense and function but for the pain that went along with the loss, and there was nothing to be done to fix it but die himself, but he was both too much of a coward to go through with it and too frightened of what would happen to his son if he should do so.

He should have given Mari his heart, he realized. He should have had it removed and transplanted into her so that she could have lived and taken care of their son. It would have been more useful to him there than it was to him now, and she would have been far more useful than he was in getting Simon back. Mari had never needed the title and rank that he had always had for people to listen to her or in order to get things done. She would have gotten Simon back if it meant marching up to the institution in West Oneris and carrying him out herself.

Caine pressed the sweater further into his face and sank to the floor. The carpet was covered in her shoes, and he sat atop them without caring about how uncomfortable it was. He thought that if he imagined hard enough, he might be able to trick himself into believing that he was burying his face into her shoulder rather than an empty garment, the way he liked to trick himself into believing that she was lying next to him at night, unseen through the heavy darkness.

Something creaked on the landing, but Caine paid it no mind. It wasn't Mari, and it wasn't Simon, and in his misery he couldn't draw either of their faces to his mind. Perhaps he would forget them altogether soon, and only the pain of their absence would remain with him for the rest of time, like photographs of their faces that had faded from an overexposure to the elements.

“Matt?”

A muffled voice came from the empty nursery and Caine slowly lifted his head to listen for it to sound again, wondering if he was simply hearing things out of loneliness again. Just as he was resigning himself that it was true, though, the door to his bedroom opened and someone stepped inside. They paused halfway into the room, looking around at the mess, and though their form was almost completely hidden by the rack of clothing that fell from the ceiling to nearly the ground, he only needed to see the pair of mountaineering boots to know who it was.

“Lad?”

Caine had barely looked up when she came to the closet doorway. From where he sat on the floor among his wife's shoes and sweater, she towered over him easily, and the sharp angles of her face were thrown into shadow from the failing light.

Caine scrambled to his feet.

“What're you doing here?”

She looked at him for a long moment, her expression unreadable, and when she spoke her voice was abandoned of all emotion.

“Mason's dead.”

She turned and left the room as quickly as she had come, not unlike the apparitions that he often had of Mari, and she was halfway down the stairs when his shock wore off enough to allow him to follow. As he entered the kitchen after her, she was lighting a cigarette by the sink.

“What're you talking about?” Caine asked, his voice quick and hoarse. “He's not – how?”

“He was murdered,” Fields said as impassively as ever. “By your friends.”

“My – what?”

“The Spöken came to his house. They shot him between the eyes.”

“But – no,” Caine said, shaking his head in disbelief. “They wouldn't – why?”

“Because they're evil, Matt – something that you haven't seemed to figure out yet.”

“The Spöken wouldn't just kill him – not unless there was a reason –”

“He was helping a Mare-person,” Fields said evenly. “Apparently that's a crime worthy of death now. You ought to know: you're the ambassador.”

Caine straightened.

“I had nothing to do with this, Lad. You know that. I work for the government –”

“You work for the Spöken,” she said, breaking into his excuse. “Don't try to pretend otherwise.”

“I work with the Spöken, maybe – but only because we're both trying to take care of the Mare-folk –”

“I think your definition of 'taking care of' differs a bit from mine.”

Caine halted, unsure of how to respond. His head was reeling in a way that he couldn't correct, and the idea that his former professor was dead could not quite sink in. He moved to the coffee pot, jabbing his finger at the button and fiddling with the water reservoir pointlessly as he did every morning in the hopes that it might begin working again, but it only spewed out another cacophony of sound before failing to work again.

“I never wanted anything to happen to Mason,” Caine said, forcing his voice to be firm and even. “You know that.”

“It doesn't matter what you want. It matters what you do.”

“This has nothing to do with my job!” He slammed his hand on top of the coffee maker, cracking the plastic top in his anger. She always found a way to turn things around to make them his fault, when all he had ever done was try to help. “This has to do with the Mare-folk, and if we could just get rid of them, then Mason wouldn't have been helping them at all –”

“Why do you hate them so much? They're not affecting you. They're not doing anything to hurt you –”

“Everything that's gone wrong in my life is because of them,” Caine snapped. “What happened to Mari, what happened to Simon –”

“The Mare-folk could have saved Mari,” Fields said. “I could have saved her – and you know that.”

“You could have saved her?” Caine said, barely able to restrain his disgust. “You offered to sneak her up to the Wastelands and have one of those Mare-doctors stick a metal heart in her – that's not
help
, Lad!”

“She would have survived.”

“She would have been a Mare-person,” Caine hissed, the idea too revolting to say aloud properly. “She would've … she would've been ...”

“Would have been what, Matt?” Fields asked, cocking her head to the side. She seemed to grow calmer the more that Caine grew upset, and her tone was making his ability to restrain himself come further undone. “Alive?”

“Fuck you, Ladeline,” he said. “Being a Mare-person is worse than being dead – they're dead on the inside: their bodies just haven't realized it yet.”

“So you've said.”

“And you obviously don't agree,” Caine returned. His hand was wrapped around the handle of the coffee pot as he tried to dispense some of his rage into it rather than onto her, and yet he wasn't certain if he was more angry or stricken by the fact that the person he had known for nearly twenty years had turned out to harbor such unfathomable ideas. He missed Mari with everything within him, and he would miss her forever and just as strongly, but no amount of grief could ever waver his stance that giving her a metal heart would have killed her more than death ever could.

“No, I don't agree. They're still people, Matt, and there are plenty of dead Mare-folk up in Hasenkamp whose hearts have been harvested and still function perfectly well that could go to Onerian citizens –”

He shook his head. She said it with such affinity, and yet he believed her no more than he would have if she told him that there was nothing harmless about the gun she always carried inside her jacket.

“Why don't you just admit it?” Fields asked him. “You could have saved her, and you chose not to – and that's what upsets you.”

“That's not true. That's not – I – she – I –” He continued to shake his head, wondering how it was that Fields couldn't see what was so clear to him. “I loved her more than anything.”

Fields' eyes turned cold.

“Except for your ideals, apparently.”

“This has nothing to do with my ideals!” he shouted. “It has to do with
your
ideals, and what
you
think is right, and how
you
think things should be – and it always has! The only difference is that this time I'm not listening to you or agreeing with you blindly, and you can't stand that!”

“Stop pitying yourself: it's clouding your sense. Ratsel's playing you – he has been all along. He took Simon from you, and now he's bartering with you for his return when he has no plans to let you have him back –”

Caine raised the coffee pot and then slammed it back to the counter-top, no longer able to contain his frustration with her. The sound ricocheted around the room.

“I'm not going to risk my son's future by protecting beating heart cadavers
– and
I don't care if I have to track down every one of them and kill them with my bare hands so long as it gets done!”

He slammed the coffee pot down again repeatedly, the glass banging against the counter-top with heavy force, and he was finally able to speak the words that he had had no one to share them with for so many months.

“You don't understand how it's been, Ladeline! You don't understand what it was like when they took Simon away, and when Mari got sick, and when she died and you weren't here! And I can't trust you anymore because I can't rely on you, and I can't fix this anymore because I let it get too far – and I can't – get – this – fucking – coffee – pot – to – work!” he finished, beating the pot against the edge of the counter as he shouted. It shattered with the final blow, and when the broken glass stopped clinking at his feet and nothing but the handle remained in his clenched fingers, his bloodied hand shook in place, quivering as much as he was.

Fields continued to watch him quietly for a moment, her colorless eyes quivering as she looked him over, seemingly trying to find a trace of something recognizable beneath his black uniform and unshaven face, and then she stooped down to reach into her bag. Pulling out something heavy and metal, she put it on the counter between them and pushed it towards him.

“The Mare-folk aren't the beating heart cadavers, Matt – you are.” Her voice seemed even lower given the way his was still echoing around the kitchen, and even his jagged breaths rose above the sound. “You're the one whose heart is beating even though you're already dead, and if you think that killing the Mare-folk will change that, then go ahead: this is how. But if you think that you'll get Simon back if you give Ratsel what he's looking for, then you're wrong. He's not going to give him back. He never was.”

She collected her bag and swept to the door, her presence like cold metal that had pressed itself against his skin. When she reached the hallway she paused for just a moment and looked back, and her voice was clipped when she spoke.

“And just so you know, the coffee pot's not broken,” she said. “You just have to change the fucking filter.”