Hearts of Oak Read online

  “It was a disaster,” muttered Alyssa.

  “To be fair I only had a few days’ experience of fiddling with the programs.”

  “I know, which is exactly why I shouldn’t have let you talk me into trying it.”

  Iona considered this. “You wanted to talk to Weston because you thought I was the Portamen . . . Portomut—”

  “Poramutantur,” corrected Alyssa.

  “Thank you—you thought it was me, didn’t you? And you came to me for tuition because—”

  “Because I wanted to see if you gave yourself away, yes—look, don’t be offended. I’m investigating all the human survivors of the crash. When I first met Victor I treated him as a suspect too.”

  “Isn’t that a rather dangerous method of investigation though? If I was this creature—”

  “You’d have tried to kill me. But I’d have used this.” Alyssa produced from her coat pocket a tube that was roughly the length and width of a wine bottle. Half the tube was filled with electronic components, the other with a sharp and chunky spike. It looked like the spike shot out of the tube when activated. “This is to trap it with when I find it. But I can’t use it until I’m sure because, well, it would kill an ordinary human.”

  Iona felt tense as she looked at the spike and remembered how Alyssa had always had her hands in her pockets. “And you’re sure it’s not me now.”

  “Oh yes,” said Alyssa cheerfully as she put the tube back in her pocket. “So anyway, Weston’s memories of his death were all corrupted so to help him along—”

  “You brought him to the newspaper offices.”

  “Yes, that went badly. When he realized he was supposed to be dead and therefore should have been cremated, he very calmly sat down and finished the job. The whole building went up with him.”

  “That’s when we went to ground,” Victor said. “We worried the fire might be traced back to us.”

  “How did he start the fire?” asked Iona.

  “You know when you rub two sticks together very fast?” said Alyssa. “Well, that—but with his hands.”

  * * *

  The king’s entourage surrounded him as he prepared to leave the tower—twenty-five of them standing two deep, giving him about two meters of clearance on all sides. These ones could be trusted, he told himself. They came into his chambers every day: they had ample opportunities to kill him if they wanted to, yet they never had. He felt sure they would protect him.

  The king didn’t make small talk or eye contact with his attendants. In recent days he had become very conscious of how he appeared to his subjects. He didn’t want to offend or patronize them. Maybe they would interpret his silence as aloofness and grow to hate him for that reason. Maybe they all hated him already. Maybe the only reason they hadn’t killed him was they felt too afraid.

  The king stole a glance at the faces around him. They seemed dutifully impassive. He could read nothing in any of them.

  The king sighed. “Come on, let’s make a move.”

  The party stepped forward in unison and out of the front door.

  The king emerged to find there was still a small crowd holding vigil outside the tower (didn’t they have anything better to do?) and they responded to his appearance with astonishment. They followed him even when his attendants told them not to. And they were joined by others. The king heard shouts of encouragement and hollered felicitations. He hadn’t come out here to seek their love or adulation. He just wanted to walk down the street.

  * * *

  Iona emerged from the mouth of the mine shaft with Alyssa alongside her. From the old mining site it was only a short walk to the wall at the edge, and as Iona walked toward it she looked past the trees and up at what she’d always thought of as the sky. After all, it had a sun in it and clouds and sometimes it rained. But it struck her now there was no place where the wall ended and the sky began. The dome above their heads gave the illusion of day and night but it was not the sky.

  “How big is this cage?” said Iona.

  “That’s a question that doesn’t have a straightforward answer,” said Alyssa, “because the inside is bigger than the outside.”

  Initially this didn’t make sense to Iona—but then it did. “We’re always expanding the city, and yet the wall is always the same distance from the city limits.” There was about half a mile of woodland in between, and as far as she could remember, there always had been.

  “The interior responds to your activity and expands to give you all the space you need.”

  It took them about ten minutes of walking to reach the window. There were citizens standing there as usual and Alyssa wanted to keep out of earshot, so they hung back a little. To Iona the nature of the figures had always felt like an abstract question, a dinner party conversation about religion, forgotten the next day. It was not something that affected her day-to-day existence—or so she had always thought.

  A figure appeared at the window and looked out impassively. Alyssa recalled her own theory that the window looked into a sort of parallel city and the figures were their counterparts. But now she saw this was quite, quite wrong. Embarrassingly so.

  “Are they the native species here, then?” said Iona.

  “Presumably,” Alyssa replied. “I didn’t get to talk to them before they caught me and put me in here.”

  “How did I not realize we were in a prison before now? I mean, I know we’ve forgotten all this stuff but—how can you see the walls every day and not remember—”

  “The cage makes you think everything’s normal. Stops you from questioning things. Stops you from trying to escape. You thought the citizens were real people because that was easier to believe than what was really happening to you, and the citizens acted like they were real people because they thought that was what you wanted.”

  “Then why’s it stopped working?”

  “Because I’ve disrupted things, perhaps? I’m sure it’ll reassert itself in time. We all need to keep remembering what’s real. Don’t give it a chance to take over your mind again.”

  “But shouldn’t we get out as quickly as—”

  “We will get out after I’ve found what I’m looking for,” said Alyssa impatiently. She turned back to the figures at the window. “Poor idiots. They’ve no idea what they’ve trapped in here. Or what it’ll do to them if it gets out.”

  * * *

  The king and his entourage had arrived at the Point of Return. He noted several officers from the Bureau of Order had been stationed by the door. The doors were closed. He walked up the steps and his entourage parted to let him through. The officers seemed very surprised to see him and they looked to each other for cues on what to do.

  “What’s this?” the king asked one of the officers, whose name badge read MILNER. She saluted him.

  “We’re stationed here until the man who attacked you has been put in the furnace,” said Milner. “There’s some concern that people might take their anger out on the body.”

  “Would it be a problem if they did?”

  “Well, we’re concerned that—”

  “Doesn’t matter—look, just let me in.”

  Milner looked uneasy. “We were told not to let anyone in—”

  “Yeah, but I’m not anyone, I’m the king.”

  “—including you.”

  “What?”

  “They said, ‘Not even the king.’”

  “That’s outrageous. Who said that?”

  The door opened and Saori emerged. “Your Highness. We thought you’d still be resting.”

  “I’m fine. Has she got this right? I’m not allowed in there?”

  “Nobody is allowed in—”

  “I’m the king.”

  “The situation in here is delicate—”

  “I know it is—let me in.”

  “Why?” said another voice: the voice of Clarence. He slipped through the gap between Saori’s legs and peered up at the king.

  “What are you doing here?” asked the ki
ng.

  “I’m overseeing the disposal.”

  “Did you tell them not to let me in?”

  “I only thought it would distress you—”

  “What are you hiding from me?”

  “Nothing. What are you doing here?”

  “I’m going to do this myself. Feed him into the furnace myself. So I know he’s really gone.”

  Clarence laughed.

  “Don’t laugh,” said the king. “I didn’t see him die. I want to know he’s gone—I want to see him before he’s burned and I want to burn him.”

  “Don’t you trust me to handle it?”

  “I don’t want you doing everything for me.”

  “You can’t do it all on your own.”

  “Look, this is the only way I’ll feel safe—I’m seeing, like, threats everywhere now and the only way I’ll get back to how things were is if I—” The king became conscious that he should not have this argument in front of the bureau’s employees. He looked up and addressed Saori. “I’m coming in and I’m doing this.”

  Saori nodded. “As you wish, Your Highness—but just wait here while I sweep the building for potential threats, please.”

  * * *

  Iona and Alyssa had parted ways because Alyssa was going down to the city to collect another corpse, a citizen who had died under curious circumstances. After the Weston fiasco she thought it best to do it herself rather than send a citizen. Iona paused at the edge of the mine and looked back at the city, and a thought that had been nagging at her for a couple of hours now fully unfurled itself in her mind.

  Iona had worked all her life as an architect and teacher of architecture. Her colleagues were architects or teachers or both. The people she taught went on to become architects, planners, and builders—those were the three subjects offered at the school and most students did a mix of them. Other people worked in the city’s timber industry—planting trees, felling them, and sawing them up for building purposes. The mining industry, digging for stone, was smaller but still significant. There were also decorators and furniture crafters, the skills for which were learned on an apprenticeship basis.

  Nearly everyone Iona knew fell under one of these categories. Further to this she could make a fair estimate of how many people were employed in making new buildings. All the other people she encountered in her daily life worked in government or service jobs, running the city—and having designed so many government buildings she had a good idea of how many people worked in them. She added all this up.

  Whichever way she cut it, she had no idea what at least half the population of the city did. Did they just do nothing? What were they for?

  More broadly, what was the city for? Did it just exist to grow bigger? Or was it for something else?

  8

  “WHY DOES HE EVEN get a ceremony?” the king said as he strode through the Point of Return, Clarence hurrying along at his feet, his entourage following at his back.

  “Your Highness,” said Clarence in a low voice, “I advise discretion—the gentleman’s friends are waiting at the front.”

  “Ha!” said the king, pointing at his own head. “I’ve got a bruise right here that says there was nothing gentle about him.”

  “In answer to your question, the ceremony will be minimal, but we need people who knew him to act as witnesses. It’s all procedure.”

  As they reached the front, one of Ward’s friends stood and bowed to the king. “We’re deeply sorry for the actions of—”

  “I’m not interested,” snapped the king without looking at her. Ward’s friend dropped her head and looked away, as if worried the king might punch her on the way past. Before walking on any farther he turned to her and asked: “Why did he do it?” He said it calmly but pointedly.

  “I . . . I don’t . . .” She plainly didn’t know but wanted to say something that was, somehow, useful.

  “Did he ever talk about me?” said the king.

  Ward’s friends looked at each other. “Not in any unusual way,” one of them said.

  “What do you mean, unusual way?”

  “Just that he talked about you like anyone else would.”

  “We can’t understand it,” another of the friends added. “He was just ordinary and quiet.”

  The king was about to ask more, but then one of the Point’s undertakers, whose name was Bolton, approached him. “Can I help you, Your Highness?”

  “Yes, you can,” said the king.

  * * *

  The waiting room was through a door to the side of the stage. The king walked through it and found himself surrounded by bodies.

  They lay on wheeled trolleys and shelves, stacked three high. He was well aware of how many people died in the city every day, thanks to the list that came in each letter. But seeing it expressed in words was quite different from seeing it expressed in racks of dead bodies waiting to be burned. Once upon a time they’d been useful citizens and now they weren’t, so the city was going to burn them and put the energy back into itself—the last useful thing they could do.

  Everyone was replaced eventually—except the king. At least he assumed that was the case. He’d never asked. He didn’t want to ask. Just in case it had never occurred to anyone that he could be replaced.

  The waiting room was not wide and the king had to strip his entourage down to four, otherwise it would have been terribly crowded in there. Clarence trotted in with them.

  “Which of these is him?” the king asked Bolton.

  Bolton stepped over to a body and indicated it with an open palm. The king joined her at the side of the trolley.

  “Is this Ward, then?”

  Bolton nodded.

  The king looked the body up and down. He did look ordinary. He could be anyone.

  Clarence leaped up and sat just next to the dead citizen’s head. He craned his neck, moved his face closer to the body, and sniffed the skin in several places.

  The king grimaced. “What the—Clarence, that’s disgusting.”

  Clarence looked up at the king and Bolton. “This isn’t Ward.”

  “What?” said the king. “How do you know?”

  “I was there when he was caught, I remember his smell.”

  “But it must—” began Bolton, then stopped. “Oh my god. It isn’t him.”

  “Then who the hell is it?” said the king.

  “I don’t know,” said Clarence.

  “But you know everyone.”

  “That’s the most troubling thing.”

  “Where is he then?”

  * * *

  “Can you look at what else is in their heads?” said Iona as she walked back into the cargo bay.

  Victor was busy toying with the switches inside one of his cohort of citizens. He looked up. “Like what?”

  Iona was about to speak when she realized the citizen he was working on was Carter. She looked into Carter’s “eyes” and the illusion of a human face flitted across her vision. She tried to hold the face in her mind, see her colleague as she used to, but then she remembered his face was all part of the illusion that had kept her trapped here. If she saw it again that would be a bad sign.

  Victor gestured at Carter. “Is there something you want to get out of him?”

  Iona shook her head. “Not him specifically—in fact one of the others would be better.” She hoped this theory would stand up when she said it aloud. “Right, by my reckoning at least half the people in this city don’t do anything. They don’t have jobs, or at least not that I know of, and I’ve designed nearly every type of office and factory we’ve got.”

  Victor paused a moment while he took this in. “Okay, that’s true.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Makes the city look more . . . like a city if it’s got more people in it, I guess.”

  “Maybe—but . . . they were made to serve us. We’ve been lulled into believing they’re just people like us, and they’ve gone along with that because they thought it was what we wanted. But think ab
out it—if they were built to serve us, what would they be doing?”

  “Looking after us.”

  “And if they know we’re locked in a cage, the best way to look after us would be . . .”

  Victor didn’t take long to arrive at an answer: “To get us out.”

  “And you’ve seen them sitting at home, right? Just sat there facing each other. What if all of them, the ones who aren’t doing jobs, are working on exactly that problem?”

  Victor tapped a screwdriver against the palm of his hand, then he reached into Carter’s hatch. “Let’s find out.”

  * * *

  “What kind of an operation is this?” shouted the king when it became apparent that Ward’s body had entirely vanished from the waiting room.

  “It must have been stolen,” Bolton said.

  “Who’s stealing bodies? I want him found—now!”

  The king’s attendants scattered in search of Ward’s corpse. So did everyone who worked at the Point. This meant Clarence and the king were suddenly alone.

  “Calm down, Your Highness,” said Clarence, which annoyed the king.

  “Why’s everything going wrong all of a sudden? Everything’s going wrong.”

  “It must all be connected. It can’t be a coincidence.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s all happening at the same time.”

  “But that’s what a coincidence is, isn’t it? It’s things happening at the same time.”

  “Trust me, Your Highness. When we find the connection we’ll be able to solve all these problems.”

  The king grunted, then returned his attention to the body on the trolley that was not Ward. “What’s wrong with his face?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Apart from that. There’s just something . . . off about him.” The king grew increasingly agitated.

  “Lie down,” said Clarence.

  “What?”

  “Lie down.”

  “On the floor? It’s all dirty.”

  “Use one of the spare trolleys.”

  “But they’ve had dead people on them.”