The Amber Columns (The City of Dark Pleasures Book 2) (11 page)

“All men have large families.” I drop his handkerchief on the floor. My nose seems to have stopped bleeding.

Trenoweth Portero stands and takes a step back from me. “Guards,” he says calmly. The terminal on the wall beeps three times before the door at the end of the hall bursts open and four male armed guards appear, running. They form a protective circle around the Chairman and his son, their weapons pointed at me. I’ve never seen male guards before. In contrast to the slender sternness typical of female guards, they’re large and brutish looking, their eyes covered by protective goggles. The effect is terrifying.

“I’m not armed,” I say weakly. “I’m no—”

“Take her.”

Two guards break away, grabbing me by the arms and hauling me upright. One of them holds me while the other binds my hands behind my back. They drag me behind the chairman and his son as they stride along the hallway, back through the heavy door.

We emerge into a large and opulent reception hall. Several passageways and doorways lead in various directions. I twist my head around, trying to memorize details. I need to figure out a way out of here. I could get lost in the massive house and never be heard from again.

“The blue room, I think,” the Chairman says. Hamel chuckles thickly as the guards pull me across the slippery marble floor and through another set of doors.

As my eyes adjust to the light I see we’re in a bedroom, though where the hallway and reception room were ornate and grand, this room seems purely functional. Almost like a doctor’s office – a white sheeted bed, a couple of chairs, a simple dresser. The floor is dark wood, the walls grey.

The guards push me face forward onto the bed. I roll over quickly and curl into a protective ball, keeping my eyes on the men.

“Do you know what loyalty is, O’Mara?” The chairman asks as the guards take their places by the door, two on each side. “What absolute obedience is?”

I don’t answer. This isn’t going how I thought it might. This is something I never thought of even in my worst nightmares.

“No? You don’t?” the Chairman takes a seat in a plain, straight-backed chair. “Let me demonstrate. Gentlemen?”

The guards jump to attention.

“My son is going to fuck this woman while we watch. And when he is done with her, each of you can have a turn if you wish. After that I’m going to choose one of you to take her to the humming ruins and kill her. Any questions?”

I search the guards’ faces below their goggles. Their lips are still, set as stone. Not one of them reacts.

“I have a question!” I say, clutching at the one thing I know. Finish the interview.

The Chairman turns to me, an amused expression on his face. “Go ahead.”

“Why are you doing this?”

He leans back in his chair, crossing his legs in front of him. “Remember what I said earlier, about surveillance? About how much it takes to maintain a position as much as mine? It takes time also. Time and patience.” He pauses, looking up at his son, who watches me like a predator. For a moment he seems to get lost in thought. “Loyalty…” he says.

I squirm on the bed, rolling up into a kneeling position.

“You’re loyal, aren’t you, my son?”

“Yes,” Hamel says without hesitation.

“Tell Miss Tanner what you did to earn the right to use my name.”

“I killed your third wife, Father.”

“And when did you do that?”

“Yesterday morning. Shall I tell her how I did it?”

I’m gasping, my heart beating against my ribs like a hammer. “Help!” I say desperately, searching the guards’ faces against for any sign of emotion. “Help me!” None of them move.

Trenoweth makes a gesture and one of the guards approaches me with a gag.

“No….no!” I try to get away but only succeed in falling off the bed, cracking my chin painfully on the floor. The guard lands on top of me, wrenching my head back as he pries my jaws apart and ties the thick gag into my mouth.

“That’s fucking hot,” Hamel says, licking his lips.

No one bothers to lift me off the floor. I struggle to my feet, intending to charge someone, but the guard deftly cuffs one of my ankles to the leg of the bed.

“I don’t think she needs the details, son,” the Chairman says. “But perhaps you’d like to tell her the name of the first child my dead third wife gave me. The worthless and disloyal traitor I’ve waited all this time to punish for his betrayal.”

Hamel snorts out a cruel laugh. “Tully,” he says. “Tully Portero.”

I try to scream behind the gag, tugging at the cuff on my leg, but I lose my balance and end up on the floor again.

“Tully Portero,” the Chairman says. “I gave him my name because I loved him. And how did he thank me? Do you know, O’Mara? Do you know what my own son did?”

I shake my head frantically, wishing with my whole self that Tully had killed this monster instead of whatever it was he did.

“My sweet, handsome fifteen year old son seduced one of his stepmothers.”

I flinch. He must be lying.

“Oh…interesting.” Trenoweth leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “I would have thought Tully might have shared that bit of information with you. Since the two of you are so close.” He turns and looks at his guards. “Which one of you wants to undress her?”

After a moment, one of them steps forward, removing a small knife from his belt. I curl up again, pressing myself against the bed.

“Hold still,” the guard says in a low voice. “If you struggle, I could cut you,”

Is it defeat that makes me go slack? Or self-preservation? Maybe I wouldn’t recognize the difference. Maybe, in our damaged world, there no longer
is
a difference. The guard tears the button of my skirt open, cutting it to get around the shackle. Then he shreds my shirt, tossing it away, leaving me in bra and panties. He leans back for a moment, looking at me, then, almost as an afterthought, he slips off my sandals and tucks them neatly under the bed beside me.

I see my reflection in his goggles – a pale, thin, almost naked girl cowering like an animal. I avert my eyes and focus instead on his chin, noting how smooth it is. He must be quite young. Or he’s a Cull. The thought makes me feel like gagging.

“Sentinel, create a time decay video and audio recording of the next hour and upload it to the secure encrypted file.” The chairman smiles as the wall terminal beeps. Several camera on-lights flare up around the room, like glowing red eyes. “My lost son will enjoy watching this, I’m sure. As I’ve enjoyed watching his suffering all these years. I’d almost given up ever finding anyone he cared about enough to make my complete retribution worthwhile.” He stands and walks over to me, reaching down and grabbing my hair, pulling my head back to look up at him. “But look at you. I can see why he fell for you. She’s lovely, isn’t she Hamel?”

Hamel steps forward and stands beside his father, looking down on me appraisingly.

“I prefer my meat bloody,” he says.

I turn from his fists.

Death is darkness. Darkness and pain, with a soundtrack of inconsolable sobbing. Maybe that’s the angels. Angels are supposed to cry; I’ve seen them in the ancient graveyard at the edges of the city.

Angels…

“Tully?” It comes out wrong. There’s something askew with my mouth. It feels bloated and fat, like a fevered dream. “Tully…”

“I can’t do it…” his voice is deep and cavernous. The wrong shape, the wrong texture. Everything is wrong.

“Tully…?”

“I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.”

He is sobbing. His voice is too heavy for an angel. Too rough. Like the jagged branches of a fallen tree. I don’t think it is Tully either.

“He’ll kill my children…I can’t…”

Lucidity flows through me like an electrical current. All free men have large families. Men with children they love are easier to control. My father died trying to save my brother’s life. Fathers will do that. They will do almost anything.

One eye opens. There’s something wrong with the other one.

He’s kneeling a few feet away, his hands on his knees, his head hanging, tears dripping onto the rubble beneath us. A high pitched humming starts, pulsing louder, though it doesn’t become painful to me. The guard lifts his black gloved hands and covers his ears. He must be only seventeen or eighteen then. The sound in the humming ruins becomes harder to hear the older you get. I can still hear it but it’s not painful like it was when I was a teenager.

“How many…?” I slur, he turns his head towards me as I struggle to speak. “Children?”

“Three,” he says. “And two more on the way.”

I close my eye. Sleep seems preferable to being awake for my own murder.

“I love my wives,” he says in the darkness. And then he sobs. “I’m sorry.” He sobs and sobs. It’s a pitiful, heartbreaking sound.

The humming stops. It will start again in ninety seconds.

“C’mere…” My mouth tastes metallic. Blood, I think.

He shuffles over on his knees.

“How bad…” I have to take three painful breaths before I can complete my question. “How bad am I…hurt?”

“Bad,” he sobs. “I’m sorry. He made us do it.”

I can only see his knees, his hips, his armored body. The darkness around us is profound. He has small lights on his vest. They shine in my eyes.

“Come down…”

He bends over me. I see the faint green glow of his night vision goggles.

“Off…” I say, and I must wave my hand in the direction of his face, because he clicks something on the goggles and lifts them onto his forehead.

“Thought so,” I say. His eyes are vibrant gold. “Tully is your brother. Your full brother.”

He’s trembling so violently it’s like a small earthquake. “They killed our mother. They’ll kill my children.”

It’s a dilemma I might never face. Would I kill an innocent stranger to save my own children? He must have still been a boy when they married him off, when he started his collection of wives. As my nerves awaken I have an idea of what kinds of violence he took part in while I was unconscious. I suppose I’d be justified in killing him, if I had the strength.

“Leave me…going to die anyway.” Probably better for both of us, if I do. As for Tully…I can’t help him. I thought I could, but I can’t.

“Go,” I whisper. “Tell them I died on…the way here.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know what to do.”

I let him sob. There’s something soothing about it. But when the humming starts again, he tenses, pressing his hands over his ears. Perhaps he’s not much older than Tully was when he was cut. I think to say something, but find I can’t look at him anymore. Though it hurts to move, I turn my head away.

A few moments later, I hear his footsteps retreating. The humming stops. A restful silence replaces it.

Darkness falls. And I fall with it.

Chapter Eleven – Tully

Where would I have ever learned about love? From a nineteen-year-old harem wife who only wanted to hurt the husband she didn’t love? Who didn’t love her? I sometimes fantasize that he did feel some remorse for sending me away, later maybe, when he found her lifeless, bloodless body alongside that of their baby daughter. But remorse isn’t love. And whatever drove her to murder their child to spite him wasn’t love either. Not for me anyway. I got caught between two people for whom love was a foreign word. As the years trudged past I have come to realize she never loved me at all. She was just using me against him.

I never considered, after all he made happen to me, that his revenge was incomplete. I thought of him all the time but I never imagined that he thought of me.

How wrong I was.

After three days of not hearing from O’Mara, I got the unexpected news that my license had been reinstated. All I needed to do was check at the licensing office. That’s when I was instructed to view a short video.

It was the first message my father has sent me in nearly fifteen years.

Two male guards stood in the office, one on either side of the door, preventing me from leaving, from running out of there, to where I don’t know. They were there to force me to watch the whole video. I could see by the red lines that it was a time decay video, one that defragments as it’s being viewed so it can only be watched once and never copied. Trenoweth Portero got one opportunity at this particular masterpiece of torture. He wouldn’t leave anything to chance.

“Open your eyes!” one of them said, pushing me back into the chair in front of the view screen. The female clerk sat nearby, frozen behind her desk.

“The Chairman sends his regards,” a guard said to her as they left.

I was as frozen as she was, cold with shock, paralyzed with horror, my heart breaking up, sinking like a ship in a storm.

“Do you think she’s dead?” I said, at last.

“Yes,” the clerk said. But at least she had the decency to be crying as she showed me out.

And then I knew my lesson on the nature of love was far from complete. Maybe it never will be. You know things are bad when you’re grateful for things like time decay video. At least I’ll never have to watch it again. Even if I could have used it as evidence against my father I don’t think I’d have the heart to see it again. Love took my heart and will not let it go.

Love.

Love is running. Running in the dark, damp, pestilent tunnel that runs under the river. Love is running though you can barely see, or breathe.

We found her.

I got the message on the third day and I was running for a drop passage to the river tunnel before I even took a breath. Love makes you run after a hope so faint it’s like an ancient, distant star.

I encounter Bray in the tunnel, running the other way.

“They found her with some ferals in the ruins.”

“Ferals? Culls? Is she alive?”

He nods, gasping, and I silently give thanks, to whom I don’t know. Feral Culls I guess. Their protective instinct must be just as strong as mine.

“They’ve been nursing her, apparently, I don’t know how bad it is. One of them is carrying her back right now. I ran ahead to tell you.”

I grasp his shoulder, gratefully. “Go and organize a drop passage up to the clinic. I don’t care how much it costs.”

He nods grimly and runs past me, in the direction of the Pleasures. I lean over in the dim glow of the buzzing light, hands on my knees, choking on everything that’s churning inside me. I need to cry with relief but I don’t have time. I turn back in the direction of the processing sector, veering into a darker, smaller and infinitely more putrid tunnel at the edge of the river. This is the little known way into the humming ruins. It rarely gets used because, well, who likes walking through puddles of shit?

I pull out a data stick and flick the light on, ducking to fit under the low, slimy tunnel ceiling. The smell is nauseating. I dread bringing O’Mara back through here, but there’s no other way from the ruins to the Pleasures. And nowhere else to take her. If my father thinks she’s dead then her implant pass will have been cancelled and that means she’ll set off any scanner she passes. There is a back way, through some very sketchy drop passages and stairways, that I can get her to the clinic. A sympathetic doctor had me hack a few scanners there to allow ferals in to be treated occasionally.

It was years ago. That doctor is dead now. And I’m hoping no one noticed and repaired the bypasses I rigged up. Hoping. I’d pray if I knew how.

Ahead of me in the tunnel I hear noises and see dark shapes approaching. My throat tightens when I see that one of the shapes is carrying a lifeless bundle wrapped in a tattered blanket. I stop running and try to gather all the courage I have into this one thing. Can I see her like this and not lose my mind? I need to do it. For her.

“Tully.” The dark figure comes into focus. It’s Spark, a cull I knew years ago. I had heard Spark was living as a woman in the ruins and here’s proof. She’s tall and wiry muscled, with a mane of tumbling black curls framing her brown face. Spark was miserable, pinched with anger and crippled with anxiety as a mutilated male. As a woman, especially cradling the woman I love, she exudes so much beauty and power I feel like kneeling in the muck at her feet.

“Can you carry her?” Spark asks. I reach out and she gently transfers O’Mara’s limp form into my waiting arms. I sway with emotion, looking down on her broken and bloodied face. “McEwen,” Spark says “Go with him as far as the river gate.”

Spark turns and leaves without another word as a very young Cull joins me, heading back towards the Pleasures.

“Want me to carry her?” the kid says

“No.”

“I can carry her. I was the one who found her.”

I want to thank him but I’m barely holding back a scream at this point. We traverse the rest of distance in silence, the wet splashing of our feet in the puddles of slime the only sound.

McEwen turns when we get to the gate at the end of the tunnel. It will open for me but McEwen is probably avoiding scanners. Might have gotten into some trouble in the Pleasures or in the Free city. I don’t have time to find out.

I gather enough breath to speak at last, just as he starts to disappear in the gloom.

“Hey!”

He glances back, his young face lit by the flickering blue light.

“I can’t thank you enough.”

He nods, giving me a little smile. “Keep the faith, Tully,” he says. “This will all be over someday.”

I don’t know what he means by that.

I reach the clinic in record speed, taking advantage of a series of little used drop passages Bray procured who knows how. By the time I reach the hotwired backdoor my arms are numb and I’m nauseous from the ride.

The clinic door swishes open as I arrive. A nurse I know a little looks up from a pile meds she’s sorting.

“Tully! Nope…no…” She tries to stop me.

“A free ride on my machine. Two free rides.”

“We’re not treating ferals anymore.”

“She’s not a feral…three free rides. I’ll do whatever you want.”

She gets that look that citizens get when a servant is reduced to begging. A gloating superior look that I’d like to smack right off her self-righteous face. But my hands are full.

“
Four
rides,” she says. “And you and a couple of other pretty boys can do a show for me and my dorm sisters.”

“Fine. Whatever.” My arms are about to fall off.  She swipes her wrist pass over a scanner and another door slides aside.

“Sentinel, get Doctor Diaz off her lunch break. Emergency, treatment eight.”

The terminal beeps as we pass.

I recognize the doctor who meets us in the treatment room as I lay O’Mara on the exam table.

“Tully, what on earth?”

“She was attacked.”

The nurse becomes helpful all of a sudden. “I’ll go lock the front door,” she says, leaving us. I guess the prospect of watching me play perverted games with male servants is enough to change her mind frame. The doctor is not so easily swayed. She waves a hand scanner over O’Mara’s pallid face.

“This woman is a feral. We d—”

My hands are around her throat in a microsecond, pushing her back against the closed door.

“Tully…” she claws at my hands. “You’ll be executed.”

“This is how it’s going to work,” I snarl. “She dies. You die,
then
I die.” Even I’m surprised at the venom in my voice. And I fully expect the game to be up. All she needs to do is say today’s safe word and the guards will come and haul me away to the cells, and probably in front of a firing squad. Someone will dump O’Mara back in the fetid tunnel to die; and that will be the end of our pitiful little love story.

I can’t stop my eyes from filling with tears. Rage mutates to despair just like that. I let my fingers fall from the doctor’s throat and take a step back.

“Who is this woman to you?” The doctor says. She doesn’t say the safe word.

“Please,” is all I can reply. How can I explain what O’Mara means to me? “I’ll do anything. Pay anything. Everything I own.”

The doctor lets two seconds pass before pushing me aside and returning to the exam table. “If she had an implant it’s been disabled somehow. Sentinel, begin a manual scan. Closed record.”

“Closed records are for citizens only.”

“Override. Voice authentication Diaz seven-seven-two-four-two.”

Something beeps and two robotic arms emerge from the walls, waving over O’Mara’s deathly still body.

“I could lose my license over this,” the doctor says.

“One day, none of us will have anything left to lose.”

She nods grimly. This doctor has been working in the Pleasures a long time. She’s seen the same things that I have. Almost every morning they fish another body out of the river. Citizens. Servants. Ferals who have washed over from the other side. Every one of them gave up on ever finding another way out of this nightmare.

The screen above the exam table begins spewing out results—all the bad news about O’Mara’s ravaged body. My vision blurs as I try to take it all in. The doctor, ever in control of her demeanor, narrates.

“Broken ribs, lung function looks okay, cranial swelling explains the coma state, hairline fracture in the jaw, tibia fracture, moderate…” Her voice trails off.

“What?”

“There’s some trauma,” she says, guardedly. “Internal trauma. It’s not life threatening.”

I exhale slowly through my nose, counting silently to six. “Where?”

The doctor doesn’t answer; instead she peels away the threadbare blanket. O’Mara is naked underneath, her skin a multicolored tapestry of violence and vengeance.

“Internal trauma where?” I repeat.

She looks up at me, finally showing a little emotion. Though maybe I imagine that. “Rectum,” she says tonelessly, and then adds, as though it makes it better. “Men like that don’t like to take the risk of pregnancy. One DNA test and they’re stuck with paternity even if they get away with...the rape.”

I’ve given up trying to hold back the tears.

“Was it a high status man?” the doctor asks. “Someone in the Administration?”

The broken teenage boy inside me bursts to life in all his forlorn weeping glory. It feels like a kind of rebirth to let it all go. The doctor sighs as she continues analyzing the read-outs.

“Her contraceptive implant must have been dislodged in the attack. I’ll attend to that later. Her vitals are surprisingly strong, and I think the cranial swelling is going down. Now that I see the tox emissions I think the ferals must have given her morpha. That’s where you found her, right? In the ruins?”

I nod, holding my hand over my mouth.

“I can probably revive her a little with Narcarret. It would help me if she could answer some questions.” She looks at me, as though I can give permission to drag O’Mara out of the drug induced oblivion she’s in. Maybe she would prefer to stay there. But I nod again.

“Come and hold her hand,” the doctor says. I wipe my eyes and cheeks, joining her by the table, taking O’Mara’s clammy hand in mine. The doctor presses a hypo-pen into O’Mara’s neck.

For a few seconds nothing happens, then O’Mara’s fingers twitch, then curl around my own fingers with surprising strength. Her parched lips part and she moans.

As the doctor steps away, reaching for something, another injection maybe, I slide up and push O’Mara’s matted hair out of her face. Her eyes are already streaming with tears when she opens them. She lets out an agonized whimper.

“Shhhh,” I say. “You’re safe now. The doctor will give you something.”

“T…T…T…”

The doctor returns with another hypo-pen, which hisses as she applies it to O’Mara’s bare thigh. Moments later she’s noticeably calmer, though still barely with us. Her eyes swim around, not focusing on anything.

“Talk to her,” the doctor says. ‘Try to get her to wake up a bit.”

“O’Mara, my love…” What can I say? What possible thing could make her want to be more awake at this moment? “I love you so much. I’ve missed you…” I have to turn my head to dash away tears. When I turn back she’s looking right at me, focusing.