Anne Winchell - The Last War

“Sorry to disturb you,” he said.

Klaus kept stirring, but he turned to face the newcomer and Nalia couldn’t help but frown. Her father hadn’t looked at her a single time. She had thought maybe he was working on a complicated recipe, but if he could look up at his friend, why not his daughter?

“There’s someone new, escaped from the Western World and just made it to NeoLondon. We think she’s a member of their resistance league, but no one knows how to tell.”

“They use similar codes,” Klaus said, the spoon in his hand slowing. “Nalia.”

He paused and finally looked at her. She tried to look humble and helpful and everything he would want in a child. She was already resigned to spending the day in the kitchen, stirring soup for hours on end while new people were arriving all the time just down the hall. It was disappointing, but there would be plenty of time to meet everyone. It was important that there be enough food to go around, after all, and as her father often said, the cook is the foundation of any establishment.

“Nalia, I want you to go talk to the newcomer. You know the codes as well as I do, and you’ve already been a tremendous help in here.”

“Really?”

She couldn’t help the incredulous smile that sprang to her lips. She did manage to wipe the knife off before dropping it. Klaus smiled at her, the first time in a very long time, and she held her head high as she took off the battered apron she wore when working and glided into the living areas to meet the Westerner.

Kaela tried not to let her experiences in the slums taint her general impression of the Eastern World, but it was hard. This was the first time she had been here and, aside from the government building and a quick ride through downtown, all she had seen were rundown brick buildings and brightly clad peasants. Not peasants, she reminded herself. In the Eastern World, they were known as the lower class. If there was a slang name for them, she had yet to hear it.

Everything about the slums was broken. There wasn’t even a functioning walkway—people had to walk at street-level where dust and filth accumulated. The buildings weren’t even tall enough to have a walkway, most petering out at five stories. The downtown had been more like a real city, with walkways on the higher levels and transportation on the lower levels, and Kaela had to tell herself that even the Eastern World considered this a slum. She shouldn’t be assuming that everywhere in the East looked like this.

Kaela glanced around and made sure no one was watching as she slipped inside a building. Raven had chosen it earlier in the day, saying it was ideal for their headquarters. Since then, she had been out gathering information and meeting the leaders of the movement. She had thought she was discovered when the people at Grader’s Inn—which Raven insisted was the main base of the resistance—hadn’t asked her any of the coded questions he had coached her on. But after a while a young girl came out, Nalia, and once Nalia accepted her, the rest of the place opened up. She didn’t know who Galley was yet, but she had several people she had identified as possibilities.

Kaela opened the door to the small room they would be sharing and stared. Raven had been busy. Three computers were placed around the room, wires running haphazardly between them. One screen looked like it had profile pictures of many of the people she had seen, and another screen showed the room itself as if through her eyes. She looked at Raven in confusion and, out of the corner of her eye, saw the screen shift to Raven as well.

“Camera in the lenses I gave you,” he said apologetically. “Picture only, no sound. I know I should have told you, but if you knew about it, you might give it away.”

Without a word, Kaela went into the bathroom and removed the contact lenses. She was furious that he had planted a camera on her without her knowledge. He had deeply invaded her privacy and she resented his presumption that she wouldn’t be able to act naturally knowing what she looked at was being filmed. He had seen everything she had seen. Kaela flushed, trying to remember what she had looked at.

Raven had given her the lenses because light-brown eyes in a darker-skinned person would seem suspicious to some of the Easterners. He said it had something to do with a propaganda film that came out, and a lack of education in the slums. And she had believed him completely, putting in the contact lenses to darken her eyes without a second thought. She glared at the contacts, now sitting in a small container of liquid, then realized that he could probably see her glaring. She stormed out of the bathroom prepared to yell at him. He was sitting on the floor, busy at a different computer.

“You had no right—” she began, then stopped. He had pulled up profiles of many of the people Kaela had mentally tagged as possible díamonts. Had he been reading her thoughts as well?

“I know. But I’ve already gotten information on most of the people you met. It’s a lot faster this way. Who else looked suspicious?”

Kaela took a breath and tried to relax before sitting next to him and looking at the profiles to see who he had missed. She was upset by the violation of privacy, but he had done it for a good reason and he seemed at least a little apologetic. Plus, it meant that she wouldn’t have to retell everything that had happened.

Kaela found the missing subjects and was surprised when Raven discarded some of them immediately. As they talked about her experience and the steps she could take to locate the díamont, she began to wonder about how Raven knew this area so well. And why, after going to such lengths to destroy research on díamonts, he had hesitated when asked to kill the result of that research. She kept trying to get him to talk about something more personal than the job, but had no success until she mentioned that she had told Nalia she was from old Portland.

“Why Portland? I just said to name somewhere in the Western World.”

“I’m from Portland,” Kaela said. “No need to lie more than necessary.”

He was silent and for a brief moment, the mask of smooth composure faded and she saw a young man in torment. She took his hand without thinking.

“What happened in Portland?” she asked softly. Her own memories of the place were not kind, at least her last memories there. His appeared to be no better.

“No, nothing,” he said. He shrugged. “It’s just—I grew up in Portland too.”

“Oh,” she said. There didn’t seem to be anything else to say, so she stroked his hand comfortingly. His skin was surprising smooth and she fought a sudden urge to tell him everything. He looked so kind and approachable and she knew that he would understand, that he wouldn’t condemn her for her actions. She had never spoken about what happened to anyone, even though it still haunted her.

“Something happened to me in Portland,” she said, half hoping that he wouldn’t hear her, or that he wouldn’t want to know more. She must have sounded pathetic because he scooted closer to her on the floor and wrapped his arm around her shoulder. She leaned into him and was grateful for the support.

“I killed someone.”

She waited for him to tense and pull away and judge her like everyone else did. He did tense, but his grip tightened around her. He didn’t seem too surprised, but then again, he knew that she carried a real gun on the moon base and he knew that she had been prepared to kill him.

“What happened?”

She blinked and looked up at him. His face was full of concern and sympathy, not scorn or condemnation, and she realized that no one had ever looked at her like this before. No one—not even Atheus when he found her at the scene of the murder—had asked why she had killed the man. In Kaonite court, motive didn’t matter. Murder was murder. She had never been able to explain to anyone that she wasn’t a killer, that she had only killed the man because of what he had done, what he’d threatened to do. Despite what she assured Atheus and herself, Kaela knew that she would never be able to kill anyone else. Maybe in the heat of the moment, with adrenaline blotting out her sense of morality, maybe then she could kill someone. But she had met real killers and none of them ever had any sense of wrongdoing. None of them could understand her.