Shara glared at him. “What are you proposing to be? My batsman? My secretary? Would you degrade yourself in such a manner?”
“Degrade?” He looked back across the sea. “Degrade … You do not know the meaning of the word. You do not know what they did to me in there. It is unspeakable. Now, to carry water, to serve food, to fight, to kill—whatever my future holds, I am numb to it. I am numb.” He said it again like he was trying to convince himself, and he turned to stare at her, pale and haunted. “Ask something of me. Ask.”
Though his face was scarred and filthy, Shara felt she could see through to him, and she understood that in some twisted manner he was asking her to tell him to die, for her permission for his death, because he could no longer imagine doing anything else.
Shara looked back at the shrinking Dreyling cliffs. And she then did something she would never do now: she bared her heart, and told him the truth, and made a promise she did not know if she could keep. “I ask you, then,” she said slowly, “to know that this is not good-bye for you. One day I will help you come back to your home. I will help you put together what has been broken. I promise I will bring you back.”
He looked out at sea, his one eye shining. And then, to her complete shock, he knelt to the ground, gripped the railing, and burst into tears.
*
“You’re positive you won’t reconsider?” says a voice.
“I’m positive I haven’t been allowed to consider it,” Mulaghesh’s says voice back. “Your damn council didn’t even give me the chance.”
“They can’t even vote, though!” says the voice. “The assembly was incomplete! You only have to exert some influence, Turyin!”
“Oh, for the seas’ sakes,” mutters Mulaghesh, weary, intoxicated. “Have I not exerted enough tonight? I will do as I am told, thank you, and they told me very clearly to fuck off.”
Shara enters the kitchen to see Vohannes Votrov, now clad in his usual white fur coat, standing before Mulaghesh, who eyes him sourly over a brimming glass of whisky. Votrov’s cane beats an impatient tap-tap against the heel of his boot.
“I thought we were locking down the embassy and admitting no visitors,” says Shara. “Especially this one.”
Vohannes turns and grins at her. “So! Here is the triumphant warrior, fresh off of her conquest. What an epic night you’ve had!”
“Vo, I honestly do not have time for your supposed charms. How did you get in?”
“By liberally applying my supposed charms, of course,” says Vohannes. “Please, help me—we must convince Governor Mulaghesh here to get up. You’re all letting a phenomenal opportunity float by!”
“I will not,” says Mulaghesh, “lift my ass one inch off of this chair. Not tonight.”
“But the city’s in mad shambles!” says Vohannes. “One half can only get to the other by walking all the way around the walls! I know that Bulikov does not have the resources to begin to reconstruct the Solda Bridge with any speed.”
“Don’t you own most of the construction companies in the city?” asks Shara.
“Well, true. … But while my own companies could begin to make headway, it’d be nothing compared to the exertion of the polis governor’s office … or the regional governor’s office. …”
“And why would we want to do this?”
“Do you think you’d have nothing to gain,” asks Vohannes, “by rendering all of Bulikov dependent on your planners and developers?”
“And we’d have to work with all of his companies, too,” says Mulaghesh.
“Merely a pleasant bonus,” says Vohannes.
“Literally, a bonus,” says Mulaghesh.
“Dozens of people are dead tonight, Vo,” says Shara. “I know you have your mission, your agenda, but can’t you show some modicum of decency? Shouldn’t you be mourning for your people?”
Vohannes’s grin sours until it’s a vicious rictus. “I hate to be the one to tell you this, Ambassador,” he says acidly, “but this is far from the first disaster to befall Bulikov. What about when Oshkev Street, destabilized by a random cavity from the Blink, abruptly collapsed, bringing down two apartment buildings and a school with it? We wept and mourned then, but what good did that do us? What about when the Continental Gas Company fumblingly tried to install a line in the Solda Quarter and started a fire that couldn’t be put out for six days? We wept and mourned then, but what good did that do us?”
Shara glances at Mulaghesh, who reluctantly shrugs: No, he’s not making this up.
“Disaster is our constant companion in Bulikov, Ambassador,” says Vohannes. “Grief and decency are mere decorations that hang upon the real problem: Bulikov desperately needs help and reconstruction. Real reconstruction, which we cannot do ourselves!”