I was only 29 years old when President Daniel Ki was assassinated. At the time I was a Compensation Claims Officer in Columbus, working in a small department within the War Office. The war of Southern secession had only just begun.
Not coincidentally, the earliest days of the war were also some of the most prolific lawmaking and nation-building years in American history, rivaling only the years during which the capital was relocated inland from storm-ravaged Washington, D.C.
It was during those early wartime years when the federal government succeeded in passing the Clean Fission Act, restarted the Eastern and Western Seaboard Decommissioning Initiatives, laid down the first thousand miles of the Sunbelt Transit System, and greatly expanded the overfill suburbs around Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, and Lexington. War is movement, my father likes to say.
At the time, the department I worked at was located about two miles east of the Executive Building, where my father worked in an office down the hall from President Martin Henley’s briefing room. He used to call me up from time to time, usually to discuss some compensation claim I had recently approved. I remember one such meeting, early on in the war.
On my way to see him that day, I passed the Threat Map in the lobby of the Executive Building. On that morning, a portion of the southern fortification was pulsing the black-and-red color that indicated an attack had taken place. By my count it was the third such attack in three weeks. I learned later that it was another homicide bomb, aimed at the more vulnerable defenses of the capital’s outer wire. No insurrectionist has ever managed to penetrate the Blue Square itself, but it is an unfortunate reality that there have been many cowardly attacks against the outer wire, attacks that have taken the lives of many brave guards. We lost four guards that day.
When I reached my father’s office, I saw that he had been reading my latest compensation decision, regarding an Alabama claimant who alleged Incidental Property Damage from an Un-Oriented Drone.
I watched him skim the pages of my report, looking over the assessment of facts, the reasons for judgment, and the compensation amount. His face was, as always, unreadable, serene. He asked if there had been any collaterals. I said there were none, but that the man had lost all his belongings, and was forced to seek shelter in the camps near Atlanta, which were known to be poorly managed by the insurrectionist government.
“I thought we had a policy on Un-Oriented Drone damage,” my father said.
“We do, but I made an exception in this case,” I replied. “It’s the second time his house has been hit.”
“Struck twice by lightning? So either he’s a liar or he’s got terrible luck. Seems like either one shouldn’t be enough to prompt a violation of policy.”
I came to reply, but he’d foreseen my argument, and preempted me. “The amount doesn’t matter,” he said. “Every compensation claim is a statement. When you compensate a UOD strike claim, you take responsibility for a crime committed by your enemy. It was the insurrectionists who destroyed the server farms. They’re the reason we have no more control over the drones. Do you see them handing out compensation claims for UOD strikes?”
I argued that the claimant’s residence was in a strategically important area near the Tennessee line, and that by paying his claim we could help shift the perception among some Southerners that the federal government was unsympathetic to the plight of those living under corrupt insurrectionist rule. My father smiled.
“Tell me,” he said. “Do you have an opinion about whose cause is right in this war?” he asked.
“Of course,” I said.
“And how much would I have to pay you to get you to change your mind?”
Eventually I came to accept my father’s reasoning. I knew, despite how many soldiers he had lost in the war, he held no grudges against the people of the South. Let us not forget that it was his decision, made against the fierce objections of many federal politicians, to assign refugee Southern patriots to guard the Blue Zone’s outer wire, a job they perform with supreme courage.
CHAPTER SEVEN
A faint evening rain fell over Camp Patience. Back in Sarat’s childhood home the rain used to make a sharp sound as it hit the shipping container’s roof. But here in the camp it was a whispered admonition, a soft shh against the tattered tents.
Sarat listened. She lay in her cot, her mother and sister asleep nearby. Through the window flap a soft line of silver moonlight illuminated her sleeping sister’s face.
Their mother once said they were two birds hatched from the same egg, the same bones and blood inside them. And although Sarat had read one of Gaines’s books on genetics and now knew that wasn’t entirely true, she still liked to believe it. Whenever she got to thinking about why Dana’s skin was light and hers dark, or why Dana’s hair fell straight and bright and hers, before she shaved it, was fuzzy, she told herself that these things didn’t matter. What mattered was bones and blood.
She watched Dana sleeping, her face cast in alabaster light. She did a thing she’d done since they were little children: she held her breath, manipulated it until it synchronized with her sister’s, until their chests rose and fell in time. She lay still and breathed as her sister breathed and listened to the whispering rain.
At around four in the morning Simon stumbled through the door. He tried to move quietly but he was drunk and in the dark he stubbed his foot against his bedside locker. At the sound of his muffled cursing, a light went on in the back of the tent. Martina got out of her bed, as did Sarat and Dana.
“Go back to sleep, for Christ’s sake,” said Simon, struggling to get his boots off.
“Where were you?” asked Martina. “You haven’t been home in four days.”
“The hell it matters where I was? There a sign-in sheet I didn’t know about?”
Sarat could smell the reek of Joyful on him, could see he was that aggravated kind of drunk where even your own skin feels itchy as wool. She’d seen a lot of men at Patience get that kind of drunk.
Martina walked to the front of the tent. She reached for her son and grabbed the pendant she saw hanging around his neck. It was a bullet casing pierced near its top with an iron nail—the symbol of the Virginia Cavaliers. In the South every rebel group had its own symbol: coiled snakes or Texas oil drills or words drawn in barbed wire. The Virginia Cavaliers had a bullet with a nail through it.
Everyone already knew. For months Simon had been out with the rebels along the Tennessee line, sneaking in and out of Patience through the inlets near the northeastern border. And for months both he and his mother had simply pretended it wasn’t so. But on this night there was no use pretending.
“How can you go and do the one thing you promised me you wouldn’t do?” Martina said, looking Simon over like he was someone else’s son.
“Do I look like I blew myself up?” Simon replied. “I didn’t do a damn thing.”
“You’ve gone and joined them,” she said. “Joined the same ones who blew up that permit office in Baton Rouge, the ones who killed your father.”
At the mention of his father Simon’s face crumpled. He snatched the necklace from his mother’s hand. “You killed him,” he screamed. “You killed him with all your nagging about going north, going north. He was happy where he was, happy in his home, but you pushed him to do it. It was you who killed him, nobody else.”
She slapped him across the face and at the sight and sound of it Sarat and Dana were jolted but Simon did not move.
“What kind of child says something so cruel to his own mother?” Martina said.