Dead men, drinking bitter rain.
6
realignments
If he's dead, we're so screwed."
Brill's fingers whitened on the steering wheel, but Miriam took Huw's gloomy appraisal as a conversational opportunity. They were coming less frequently today, as the reality of driving across a continent took hold. "Isn't that a little pessimistic?"
Huw closed the lid of his laptop and carefully unplugged the cable from the satphone. He slid them both into their pockets in the flight case before he replied. "It's not sounding good. They got him into the high dependency unit more than seventy-two hours after the initial intracerebral hemorrhage. He's still alive, but he's confused and only semiconscious and, uh, I've done some reading. More than forty percent of patients with that kind of hemorrhage die within a month."
Yul, sprawled across the van's third bench seat, chose that moment to emit a thunderous snore. Elena, who'd been lying asleep with her head in his lap, shuddered and opened her eyes, then yawned. "What?"
"He's not dead yet," Miriam observed tiredly. "He's not going to die of anything nonmedical, not with Olga looking out for him. And he's got the best treatment money can buy."
"Which is not saying a lot."
Brill hunched her shoulders behind the wheel, pulling out to inch past a big rig. "Listen, Huw, why don't you just shut up?" she snapped.
"Wha?…" Huw gaped.
"Hush, Brill, he doesn't know my uncle-his grace-like you do." Miriam glanced in her sunshade mirror and spotted Elena sitting up, clearly fascinated. "Sorry, but he's right. I hope he does pull through, but the odds aren't much better than fifty-fifty. And we ought to have some idea about what to do if we get there and…" She trailed off, diving back into her thoughts.
"I don't want to think about it," said Brill. "I'm sorry, Huw. I should not exercise myself over your words. Many will be thinking them. But I feel so helpless." She thumped the steering column. "I wish I could drive faster!"
"If you get pulled for speeding, and he does recover-" Elena began.
Miriam snorted. "Enough of that, kid. What's more important to you, Brilclass="underline" getting there, or going fast? You don't want to get a traffic stop. Think of the poor cop's widow and orphans, if it helps."
"You are perfectly correct, as usual, milady." Brill sighed. "What other news, Sir Huw?"
"Um." Huw stretched, extending his legs under Miriam's seat and his arms backwards to touch the ceiling above his brother's head. "There's a condition red lockdown. Avoid commercial flights, avoid all contact with the authorities, avoid unnecessary travel, lock the doors and bar the windows. Something about a major battle near Wergatsfurt, and something really bad happening to the Pervert's army. Sounds like my Lord Riordan opened a can of whoop-ass or something. But you'd expect them to sound a little less tense if they'd nailed the bad guys properly, wouldn't you?"
"Not necessarily." Miriam sounded thoughtful. "If there's been an army running wild through the countryside in a civil war, it could take a long time for things to get back to normal. Look at Iraq: They went in weeks ago and it's still a mess, whether or not the President declared 'Mission Accomplished.'" She paused. "Egon could be down, but what about the rest of his vassals? The Duke of Niejwein, this that and the other baron or earl or whatever. It's not over until the council hammers out a settlement that ends the fighting." She rubbed her belly thoughtfully, then paused. "And I need to see a doctor." The test kit had been unequivocal, but the uncertainty over the sex of the fetus remained. "Then get a seat at the table before they decide I'm just one of the chess pieces."
"A chess piece with a posse!" Elena giggled.
"Not funny," Huw chided her.
Her moue mirrored Brill's, for an entirely different reason. "I suppose not," she said. "I was just joking."
"Bored now," Yul mocked, having woken up in the preceding minute or two. "Are we there yet?" he squeaked in a falsetto imitation.
"Bastard!" Elena thumped him over the head with a travel pillow.
"Children!…" Huw shook his head. "I'm sorry," he mouthed at Miriam by way of the mirror.
Miriam glanced sidelong at Brill. "How long have you known these reprobates?"
"Long enough to know they're just acting out because they're over here for the first time." She braced her arms across the steering wheel, slumping forward in evident boredom. "They get dizzy."
"Don't tell me you weren't like this on your first time out?" Miriam thought back to the first time she'd brought Brill over to Boston (her version of Boston-not the curious retarded twin in New Britain). She'd thought Brill was a naive ingenue and a scion of the outer families, not able to world-walk for herself, not realizing Angbard would never have turned her loose in Niejwein without planting one or more of his valkyries on her as spy and bodyguard.
"My first time out was"-Brill looked pensive-"I was twelve, I think. But I had a false identity in my own name by the time I was fourteen. Thanks to the duke. He believed in starting them early."
"Lucky cow." Elena giggled again.
I am trapped on a school bus in the middle of flyover country with a bunch of overarmed and undersocialized postadolescents, Miriam realized, and there's no way out. She sighed. "Starting what early?"
"Starting the doppelganger identities. It's only sensible, you know. He wanted to put as many of us as possible through the right kind of finishing school-Harvard, Yale, the Marine Corps-in case we ever have to evacuate."
"Evacuate." The gears whirred in Miriam's head. "Evacuate the Gruinmarkt?" If that was even on the menu-"Why hasn't it already happened?"
"Would you voluntarily abandon your home? Your world?" Brill looked at her oddly.
"Urn. It's home, right?" The idea resonated with her own experience. "But there are no decent roads, no indoor plumbing, hedge-lords with pigs in their halls, a social setup out of the dark ages-why would you stay?"
"Home is where everyone you know is," said Brill. "That doesn't mean you've got to love it-you know my thoughts, my lady! What you can't do is ignore it."
Miriam fell silent for a couple of minutes, thinking. She'd had a taste of living another life in another world-but it had strings attached, and not ones to her liking, in Baron Henryk's captivity. Then she'd escaped during the debacle at the betrothal, and considered making a run for it when she was in New Britain; thought hard about going native, dropping out, leaving everything behind for a false identity. New Britain had big drawbacks, especially compared to home, but at least it was free of reactionary aristocrats who wanted to turn her into a dynastic slave. And if she'd done it, it would have been through her own choice. But I decided to come back, she realized. I've got a family and while I was busy being independent they got their claws into me.
"What do you need a doppelganger identity for, then?" She paused. "I mean, if all it's for is to maintain a toehold identity in this world…"
"Identity is a lever," Huw said gnomically. "The fulcrum is world-walking."
"But what do you want a lever for?" Miriam persisted.
"So we can move the world!" Brill straightened her back, looking straight ahead.
Then Elena chirped up again: "Are we nearly there, yet?"
In the end, it took them eighty-five hours to make a journey that would have taken a day if they'd been able to fly direct. Eighty-five hours and two changes of vehicle and three changes of plates, driving licenses, and other ID documents-care of certain arrangements the Clan maintained with local contractors.