“Too direct.”
“A single line of accounting, the wrong number in the right place, to discredit the regime,” Ildie said.
Gerald stopped pacing. “Maybe.”
Another meeting. As if nothing had happened. As if they could still go on.
“Major was the best of us,” Clare murmured.
“We’ll just have to be more careful,” Ildie murmured back.
“He made a mistake. An elementary mistake,” Gerald said, and never spoke of Major again.
The village a mile outside the city had once been greater, a way station and market town. Now, it was a skeleton. The war had crushed it, burned it, until only hovels remained, the scorched frames of buildings standing like trees in a forest. Brick walls had fallen and lay strewn, crumbling, decaying. Rough canvas stretched over alcoves provided shelter. Cooking fires burned under tripods and pots beaten out of other objects. What had been the cobbled town square still had the atmosphere of an open-air market, people shouting and milling, bartering fiercely, trading. The noise made a language all its own, and a dozen different scents mingled.
Despite the war and bombing, some of the people hadn’t fled, but they hadn’t tried to rebuild. Instead, they seemed to have crawled underground when the bombardment began, and when it ended they reemerged, continued their lives where they left off as best they could, with the materials they had at hand. Cockroaches, Clare thought, and shook the thought away.
At the end of the main street, where the twisted, naked foundations gave way and only shattered cobblestones remained, a group of men were digging a well into an old aquifer, part of the water system of the dying village. They were looking for water. Really, though, at this point they weren’t digging, but observing the amount of dirt they’d already removed and arguing. They were about to give up and try again somewhere else. A whole day’s work wasted, a day they could little afford when they had children to feed and material to scavenge.
Clare helped. Spit on her hands, put them on the dusty earth, then rubbed them together and drew patterns in the dust. Pressed her hands to the ground again. The aquifer that they had missed by just a few feet seeped into the ditch they’d dug. The well filled. The men cheered.
Wiping her hands on her skirt, Clare walked away. She was late for another meeting.
“What is the pattern?” Gerald asked. And no one answered. They were down to four.
Ildie had tried to cause a scandal by prompting a divorce between the RLP Premiere and his popular wife. No matter how similar attempts had failed before. “This is different, it’s not causing an affair, it’s destroying one. I can do this,” she had insisted, desperate to prove herself. But the targets couldn’t be forced. She might as well have tried to cause an affair after all. Once again, too direct. Clare could have told her it wouldn’t work. Clare recognized when people were in love. Even Republic Loyalists fell in love.
“What will change this path? We must make this better!”
She stared. “I just built a well.”
Marco smirked. “What’s the use of that?”
Fred tried to summon enthusiasm. They all missed Major even if she was the only one who admitted it. “It’s on the army now, not the government. We remove the high command, destroy their headquarters perhaps—”
Marco said, “What, you think we can make earthquakes?”
“No, we create cracks in the foundation, then simply shift them—”
Clare shook her head. “I was never able to think so big. I wish—”
Fred sighed. “Clare, it’s been two years, can you please—”
“It feels like yesterday,” she said, and couldn’t be sure that it hadn’t been just yesterday, according to the clock her body kept. But she couldn’t trust that instinct. She’d lost hours that felt like minutes, studying dust motes.
“Clare—” Gerald said, admonishing, a guru unhappy with a disciple. The thought made her smile, which he took badly, because she wasn’t looking at him but at something the middle distance, unseen.
He shook his head, disappointment plain. The others stared at her with something like fascination or horror.
“You’ve been tired. Not up to this pressure,” he explained kindly. “It’s all right if you want to rest.”
She didn’t hear the rest of the planning. That was all right; she wasn’t asked to take part.
She took a piece of charcoal from an abandoned campfire. This settlement was smaller than it had been. Twenty fires had once burned here, with iron pots and bubbling stews over them all.
Eight remained. Families ranged farther and farther to find food. Often young boys never came back. They were taken by the army. The well had gone bad. They collected rainwater in dirty tubs now.