Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

It is as if no sound at all accompanies the muzzle flash, and Elizabeth Beaufort is not upon the tiled stones of Rue de Saint-Ghislaine, but somewhere else entirely, having her picture taken. 

On graduation day, clutching a diploma in her mother’s heels and rented robes, she held her eyes open so she would not be caught blinking in what might be the most important photograph of her life, at least as far as her family was concerned. The afterimage that the camera burned into her eyes cast an aurora into the cloudy skies.

Again she is wrapped in those plasmic curtains of light and memory, and she does not blink while falling, right onto the vernal snow-mush and the hard street. When the blank shock erasing all thought recedes for a second—waves on a shore, a ceaseless respiration—she finds that her hand has clutched her side and distantly—on some tremulous horizon—her own voice is gasping out, “I’m okay, I’m okay…” 

She’s not. But she’s not in control of what’s unfolding around her, within her, from her. It all just… is. And it is wet under her hand, like—like pressing a palm into a cool damp mold of sand, and leaving a five-fingered puddle. 

“Fuck this…” She recognizes the voice of Eugene, tinged with rage and despair. 

“Gene! Tend to Lizzy, now!” The bear-growl of Titus. 

Eugene rushes to her side. He’s always had a warmth about him towards her and his grip radiates through her, but it’s only when his own hand presses down over hers upon the hole in her gut that the pain comes. She almost bites her tongue. She can’t scream.

Every flutter of movement in the scene is freckled like film grain. Across the road, the cruel drunken gaze of the Krenel strikebreaker lusts over the victory. He breathes in deep, not steadying his rage, but relishing the scent of gunsmoke. The blood that she’s losing should be boiling, steaming in the snow, but it cannot stop her getting colder by the second. She musters up her deepest loathing, wishing the very sun would reach across space to touch this spot with a fiery finger and turn the mercenary clad in capital’s white chitin to ionized air. Her head buzzes with hate yet she is thinking of her comrades too, of their struggle and what lies beyond it, on distant shores. The mercenary’s hate, by contrast, is habit-formed and lazy, a slimy glue of disgust and supremacism formed over synapses that have witnessed bleeding bodies like hers over and over. And she does not have the sun, but he has his gun. She cannot burn him with her hate, the way he chills her with his. It is a despicable equation.

But there are two men still standing between her and her killer. Has it come to this, helplessly praying a couple of RCM officers’ rogue sense of justice overcomes their imperative to defend the propertied and powerful? 

Detective Du Bois swivels his head to stare agog at her slumped form. Just a moment ago he’d been stammering excuses in her defense. His cheeks and nose are flushed with shame and inebriation, and his guilt-stricken, runny eyes have blown-out pupils. Likely there isn’t a single chemical pathway in his body he hasn’t recently tampered with.

The muscles of his face cycle through minute spasms. He’s got that stiff jaw and vocal slurring, and Elizabeth has certainly seen nerve-damaged expressions before, writing up worker’s comp briefs. If he hadn’t been a cop, she’d have taken this amnesiac drunkard aside and given him a step-by-step guide on filing for disability benefits. He looks at her like he knows this. The anguish that cracks through his uncontrollable neuropathic mask makes her feel as if she is in the presence of someone terribly familiar. As if another face momentarily rises out of murky depths and usurps his.

DuBois shoves his hand into his inner coat pocket, extricating a lump the shape of a bottle. It is a bottle. And for a split second Liz and everyone else there surely are thinking the same thing: he’s going to down the booze. No matter how stupid such an act would be, it’s exactly what they’ve all come to expect from him, from a week of watching him stagger about Martinaise. The preconception is so strong, that it’s hard to notice the cloth tongue coming out of the mouth of the bottle.

Sad eyes. Terribly sad, burning, aching eyes. Party eyes.

He’s flicking a lighter. The garishly colored, booze-infused rag ignites.

And yes, she was aware that Evrart had schemed up a way to dangle the detective’s lost firearm just out of his reach for as long as possible, but she never imagined a cop would give up on the gun and improvise a spirit bomb, much less avenge her with one.

The wind turns, and it lilts:



VIVE LE SON.

A searing parabolic stroke of fiery ink through the air of Rue de Saint-Ghislaine signs the scab leader’s death-warrant. 

The plaza erupts, and Liz holds her eyes open even while consciousness drips out of her body and she slumps further down into the muck of the street. The heat of the blaze engulfing Kortenaer blows over to her shaking form, and despite the stench of human barbecue, that warmth lends her a moment to hope that she cannot truly be… dying. Ending. 

Then a series of shots ring out and the damned disco cop with sad eyes, he’s lurching backwards with a limp arm—after throwing the bomb he must have known he’d fall—his partner Kitsuragi is lunging to aim at the beetle-faced Krenel sniper—crack! once more, and blood gouts from the eye hole of the mask! What a shot!—and then the scab leader is forcing his singed arm up and—crack!—DuBois tumbles, inelegant but for a moment when his flailing body is arched like a dancer, framed by the sky.  

Liz clutches her stomach with numb wintry hands, cheek to the stones. The light is fading. 

—

In this hour, the sky is a tapestry of silvered clouds and towering shafts of sunlight.

Revolution has not yet begun, but the sweet rain and the salt-spray both smell of it, where they mingle on Jean Abadanaiz’s cheek. Much to the chagrin of the bourgeois, their pleasure-promenade of Martinaise has lately been mobbed with worker’s council chapters who exercise their lungs and wits along the seawalls, briskly strolling in scattered flocks of five or seven, so they may prove too much effort for the lazy gendarmerie. They flap their newspapers open and recite, still walking, news from Graad and Samara, proud-backed and eyes glitteringly sober. Even the gulls squabbling above could be hotly debating dialectics. New weather rolls in from across the Insulindic, and so do the airships.

Jean is privy to secret knowledge about a personage smuggled in the hold of one of those ships, and so he scans them with cautious intrigue, though it is not his duty, supposedly, to directly interfere with either support or hindrance. Primarily, his duty is as a lookout. 

So says a page-long telegram nestled in his breast pocket, written needlessly in cipher, this time an inverse of the Last Dolorian Trick, which needed a code word to decrypt, and then it had to be read in another language every other line… It really did not need doing, but the writing of the letter must have agitated the sender so that only puzzlecraft could calm his nerves. If it were a hand-penned letter, Jean can imagine the paper being cut through along the most emphatic slashed lines. 

“So that is where we are at with this hen—she’s flown the coop! Let her not find an uncontested roost in Revachol! We need your ideological rigor more than ever, as there is enough anarchic sentiment in the city for her and her secret circle to avail themselves of, which surely delights the astute among the bourgeois, because a little flash-in-the-pan bombing campaign will let them move in to restore order in the eyes of the populace. These venturesome Dobrevist conspirators are great bedfellows to the ‘political authority’ they claim to repudiate for that very reason. A true dialectical case of opposites attracting!”

The interisolary aerostatics Jean has his eyes on disembark at noon in the industrial harbor, as there is far more cargo than human passengers in these ships. By royal decree, immigration into the Suzerainty of Revachol has been prohibited to any who disbelieved in or were opposed to all forms of organized government, yet the dockworkers exert their capacity for malicious incompetence while interfering with inspections of cargo, and this behavior is overlooked because the workers are for the moment holding off from striking. They know the desperation of the crown: the sugar and apricots must flow. 

Oftentimes, the people coming out of cargo holds take up work right there on the docks, or they’re passed through a series of safe apartment blocks into the heart of the city, an effort partly facilitated by the anarchists and partly by unscrupulous petite bourgeoisie who are scrambling to staff their shop floors to accommodate the endless appetites of the wealthy strata for novelty: new hats, new coats, new pocket watches, new kitchen tools specialized to exactly one foodstuff… pigs feasting before the slaughter. It is just as Mazov predicted; they cannot help but engineer their own downfall—the Law of historical materialism made manifest. 

But as to the specific impact on Revachol of the firebrand who cleaved the Graadian movement in twain, there is no divining that from theory alone. 

A seabird at the edge of the pale beats its wings, and on another isola, the wind turns.

—

Elizabeth does not wake. Just… realizes. 

She is still aware. Bizarrely, what she is aware of is the stones, the streetlamps softly whirring and clicking like the reel of a silent black-and-white movie, the icy air, the contortion of a body around a wounded center.

It is a dream, it must be, and she does not lie in a bed of snow mush, but in a hospital or even a room in the Union headquarters. She could be comatose, trapped in a memory. Usually when she realizes she’s dreaming, she startles right up in her bed. The esoterically fascist self-help books Jean-Luc leaves around the offices call the ability to stay asleep while aware of the dream, “oneirological rigor”. It unfortunately makes her think of rigor mortis.    

Elizabeth firmly discounts the idea she is dead—at first. The argument forces her to consider terrifying alternatives even as she tries to knock them down. The dead do not experience anything. If it is possible to close one’s eyes and no longer see, to fall asleep and no longer be aware, then why would those faculties be restored to her when blood no longer circulates to her eyes or her brain?

She doesn’t really like to play with abstractions, but a certain theory came up in her studies of Mesque nihilism, and she isn’t sure she ever properly grasped it: why does it feel like anything at all to be oneself, when one’s brain could, according to all known science, pilot one’s body without needing to produce that inner experience? Everything the body does can be explained by chemical and physical reactions, but where does thought get involved? There are so many parts of the body controlled unconsciously, like the heart and the stomach, so why and how does a thought choose whether you will raise your left hand or right, walk to the grocery store or read a book, go home with that girl at the bar or not? 

Well, suppose it doesn’t. Suppose your consciousness is more of a passive observer than a player. A random byproduct of the brain. You do not choose to act, you experience the brain choosing.

It is both pessimistically materialist and anti-dialectical, proposing an element of the universe affected by that which is external to it but itself exerting no responding influence. 

In the original theory, the random byproduct that is the mind should be destroyed by a cessation of the brain. But in another interpretation, this epiphenomenon is not a byproduct of but a stowaway in the brain, and did exist before and after, mistaking itself for a human during the time it clings to the brain. Out of habit, this ghost of the universe might continue to imitate a bodily consciousness for a little while after the brain ceases, but before long, the persona that this phenomenon assumed would dissolve. 

It would be a terrible surrender to accept this explanation right away. She has other arguments to present.

The next point: of course the Union wouldn’t leave her out here! In the worst case scenario, the Union has been completely exterminated by Krenel. It is true that a corpse can be left in Martinaise to rot for days on end, but right here, where it would at least inconvenience the local businesses? That squawking bookseller might be obsessed with black magic, but surely she’d complain about a black body scaring off the clientele. Garte wouldn’t tolerate another incident…

An even more horrifying possibility presents itself: if capital’s vengeance had once more made landfall upon the whole of Martinaise… and there was no one left to find her. No, that couldn’t be… just because of the strike? But the streets, cracked from history’s bombings, do not forget what happened once and could again.

—

Jean Abadanaiz counts thoroughness among his virtues. 

As an early adopter of Mazovian theory in Revachol, he has diligently read through Kras Mazov’s body of work, has even requested to be sent essays that he deduced must exist through allusions made to them in the texts available (Mazov obliged months later with copious self-effacing commentary attached, which he must have obsessively compiled due to perceived shoddiness of his earlier writings). The first mention of Julia Dobreva that Jean read came from Mazov, in an opinion piece published in V Buduschye, that social democratic newsletter Mazov had such a tumultuous stint with. During Mazov and his inseparable evangelist Nilsen’s rise to global prominence, this new character stepped onto the stage, not exactly in tandem with them, not in opposition, but surging forth from an off-kilter direction to collide with them. Her notoriety began with the factory maid riots in Mirova and the panic that they sowed amongst not just the wealthy, but the masculine ranks of the proletariat who had denied these women a place in their trade unions. 

“The charlatan bourgeois—including many reformists on the Left—who have no compunctions about worker-patriarchs selling their women and children to wage slavery in the factories, turn around to accuse the Communists of seeking to possess women in common! We have already responded to this error, and shown that within bourgeois society, even in the guise of equality, woman may be owned, loaned, possessed by all except herself. But strangely, our friends the gentlemen socialists, who shuddered at the Community of women, also recoil at Dobreva’s dynamite faction responding to their exclusion from male unions with these savage attacks on factory machines. They seem to believe these women should wait for the men to negotiate on their behalf more palatable conditions for their exploitation. They also seem to believe the attacks are random, lacking class consciousness, although anyone who puts down the spun tales in bourgeois rags, and engages the women personally, is immediately convinced otherwise. In spirit if not in name these are Communist women, up in arms against being made common property of capital itself.”

While commentary on what were then current events in Mirova was unsurprising, that remark about knowing the “dynamite faction” personally is strange and goes without elaboration. 

Not long after the quelling of the riots, the matter of of sex-integrated unions became unavoidable amongst the social democrats, some even pushing for anti-discrimination legislation. Dobreva, far from touting victory, railed against this. She had no aspirations of reformism, even within the labor movement. The thought of the State enforcing this reform upon the unions galled her further. When major unions were voting on integration, she insisted the women’s councils formed during the riots not be subsumed.

“Women, do not be deceived by such promises! If an organization’s leadership is ready to concede that you have the right to join their rank and file, it would certainly seem that your collective power has won out over theirs. They cannot afford to ignore you any more, so they bargain. But clearly, you are in a position of strength now, without needing to join their ranks. Will you be as powerful within the masculine bureaucracy? Why put your trust in an organization that was capable of excluding you in the first place?

“They ‘permit’ you to join their unions, when you needed no permission to form your councils. If they truly recognized the correctness of your position, they would be restructuring themselves into councils and seeking confederation with you! In your dealings with these craven authoritarians, never wait for permission to act. Act as if you are free already.”

This incurred quite a backlash, and she was branded as a ‘gender separatist’ in popular socialist newspapers, including V Buduschye, and the impromptu council structures that she so vehemently defended mostly dissolved into the unions after all. Her anarchism became even more entrenched by this defeat. She found herself utterly at odds with society and with formal organization, speaking only in the language of black powder.

Or was she? In some of her essays, despite her support of propagandists-of-the-deed, she seemingly chafed against the culture of clandestine operative networks and longed for mass organizing. Perhaps she was bound to chafe at anything.

When she stood trial for that sensational bombing affair, that exposed the subterranean interrogation facilities of Graad’s secret police, it was Kras Mazov who wrote a scorching, urgent defense: a proletariat so impotent as to let her hang—certainly if she was innocent, but even more if she was guilty—“might as well hang itself”. His unflinching support struck a chord with the masses, and soon the same newspapers that scorned her were portraying her as a romantic heroine. Almost overnight, this divisive figure became a martyr-to-be for an unprecedentedly united socialist movement, and the Graadian government scrambled to diffuse the situation by commuting her sentence to exile in the remote taiga. While she was being escorted from the courtroom to an armored police-wagon, a mob overwhelmed the detail of officers and carried her off. In the wake of this humiliation, no attempts were made to re-arrest her. 

Within a few weeks, Dobreva could be found regularly attending and speaking at meetings of Mazov’s Workers’ Alliance, soon to be reorganized into the Communist Party of Shest and Graad. It appeared she was not ungrateful to the one who campaigned so furiously for her life, yet she never formally declared herself a member of the Party. Like an alley cat, she simply let herself in, but she was not exactly an outsider; until recently a large faction within the organization had been sympathetic to her. 

Mazov does not tend to critique her with particular vitriol: “The self-described anarchic tendency expressed by these most ardently idealistic proletarians and their romantically inclined intellectual helmsmen, is a truly human cry for freedom, piercing the veil of political hypocrisies and the vacuousness of reformist leadership. The worker’s Party responds to this outburst of feeling with positive direction.”

It is Nilsen who seems to hold a grudge, but Jean does not know when and where this began. As of late, that grudge seems chiefly inspired by the distress caused by Julia’s abrupt departure from Graad, in the wake of that disaster of a congress in Mirova.

“Kras is in ill health these past weeks,” the man wrote in an earlier letter. “I have no doubt it was brought on by stress and our comrade’s inclination towards rumination and psychological martyrdom. He is convinced that something could have been done differently, despite my repeated assurances that a rift of this nature was inevitable. I am led to believe there was a private conversation, in which words even more hateful than the public accusations must have been exchanged. He refuses to reveal them to me. All I know is they have spoiled his appetite, and it is a struggle to provide nourishing meals that don’t offend his delicate senses. I don’t mean to imply rudeness on his part, it is almost worse that he is so apologetic about the whole thing.”

This cannot be the whole of the matter, because Nilsen’s antipathy predated the whole affair and (in Jean’s private estimation) had a clear role in driving that wedge in the first place. Certainly of all people, Jean Abadanaiz would know; for months leading up to this point, he’d been publishing critique after critique of the growing Revacholian anarchist movement at the behest of the Commissar of Revolutionary Education (or however he was styled right now within the Party) because although the workingman had no nation, Nilsen calculated that the words of even a black Vacholiere would have more traction amongst the proletariat of Insulinde (although Dobreva, residing in the same isola as Nilsen and Mazov, was being consistently translated and distributed in pamphlet form throughout Revachol).

But having played a part in these tensions did not mean Jean himself was wracked with guilt like Mazov; he willingly wrote those articles, and agreed with them. The poor masses deserved to be uplifted by truly scientific thought, not just slogans and ideals. Mazov laid bare the mechanisms of the economic reality they lived under and in so doing armed the laborer for the coming confrontation against capital. Championing the Mazovian position was nothing to be ashamed of, even if it sparked controversy. Jean had a talent for translating complex theories into layperson’s speech without stripping them of their nuance. This was how he had first come under the wing of Mazov’s great proselytizer, and there was no denying his admiration for Nilsen as a theorist. In the propaganda campaign for Mazovian thought, Jean wrought his own steely arguments even if the timing and topics were guided by Nilsen.

The responses from the Revacholian libertaires did not cause him much concern. Their ideals, while admirable, were extensions of Dolorian humanism, and expressed themselves through abstractions such as the ‘rights of man’. This was irrelevant to Mazovian thought and its critique of political economy.

But Dobreva herself threw her hat in the ring, saving face for the old guard of Revachol. The venerable Parquier wouldn’t have deigned to acknowledge a woman as a superior theorist to himself, but his dear disciple Desmarais was a fervent admirer of Dobreva’s, and might have petitioned her for help— provoking much jealousy in the old coot, Jean was sure, even though they were doing him a favor. 

She broke down one of Jean’s essays in a way he could not ignore, and in so doing, attacked Mazovianism, whether Dobreva intended to feud with its founder or not.

Was she right that Mazov’s theories wound themselves into a deterministic knot that could only envision historical progress as a single path? How could a method of freedom be so mechanistic? Was it incumbent upon the proletariat and peasantry of Graad to wait for revolution while the country industrializes? Must the occupied territories in the Suzerainty of Revachol submit to being “developed” by a harsh colonial master?

(She knew of the condition of the colonies from books and essays, not from Semenine sun on her skin. Still, Jean knew books and essays could stir feeling; had they not changed his world?)  

“Inevitability cannot be proven. It is clear the world is made and remade by material conditions, but we do not look down at this perfectly turning mechanism from above. We are in it, we are of it. We must act accordingly—conscious of immeasurable possibility extending from us. This is not idealism, but science. Is it not the mathematicians who have said, that when a seabird at the edge of the pale beats its wings, on another isola the wind turns?”

One might have expected Mazov to take the floor, but since he stayed out of it, and Dobreva was challenging Jean’s own text, Jean Abadanaiz would have to prove his mettle as a Mazovian against her. And so began a series of thrusts and ripostes published within a few days of each other in respective newspapers, in which the Graadian wildcat unleashed her pent-up frustration about the Party structure, disparaged the idea of the state guiding economic transition during social revolution, and excoriated all that she deemed ‘authoritarian’. Every idea she slashed open, Jean would stitch up and reinforce. He did not sling unnecessarily petty insults, nor did she, but the exchange certainly had its barbs. The first exchanges left Jean smarting that this woman clearly saw him as a proxy mouthpiece for Nilsen due to her prejudices against the Party leadership in Graad as an international “authority” (a portent of her official split). Was it not she who sought to reach across the Pale to intervene in Revacholian affairs? 

Copies of Dialogue of Dobreva and Abadanaiz started appearing in working class social clubs, sold for half a reál, or greatly discounted if an outdated version was handed over in exchange. Since neither the Revacholian Communist Party’s official mouthpiece nor the libertaires’ papers reached out to the other to jointly publish, Jean had sleuth out where these pamphlets were coming from—a crew of opportunistic youngsters with access to a press because someone’s uncle owned a print shop. Clever little bunch. Had it not been for the Mirova schism, Jean might have sent a letter—a personal one, not a published article—to his co-author about it, and whether she would like to exclusively publish through a children’s cooperative.

Hell, she might as well meet them for herself soon—the aerostatics have already landed, by now the unaccounted-for cargo might be surreptitiously disembarking. The male immigrants usually passed themselves off as crew and got their papers from the débardeurs, so perhaps she has donned masculine garb to slip away and rendezvous with her contacts. 

But there are Communists among the dockworkers too, ones willing to pass on what they’ve seen. 

In the here and now, Jean leans his shoulder against one thick and mighty harbor gate, right next to the slight gap between them. From his trouser pocket, he pulls a newspaper and pen; one’s lips being seen to move without a visible interlocutor avoids a bit of suspicion if one appears to be trying to solve a cross-word. Even so, it would still be risky to loiter for too long. He’s fastidious enough to have a well-pressed suit and shined shoes (both by his own hand), so he doesn’t exactly pass for a dockworker, even with his cuffs rolled up and half his shirt untucked. A man, particularly a man of his color, is apt to choose what his way of showing dignity will be, and for Jean Abadanaiz, it is being sharply dressed. 

Presently there’s a soft rapping of knuckles against metal, and a voice hissing, “Comrade, that’s you, right?”

Jean taps his pen idly to the paper. “Right.” His contact is a heavyset crane operator who regularly attends meetings if there’s going to be a moving picture show. That projector in the Jamrock headquarters is one of Jean’s triumphs, the expenses quickly justified when it became clear how many workers will dally for free entertainment, although dalliance does not inherently make for dedicated membership. 

Agitated, breathless words spill out through the crack. “Well, there’s news, there sure is news, but I don’t like it. I’ll tell you now, I’ll tell anyone, I weren’t part of it. You won’t tell them I agreed to this, will you?”

The notion of Party discipline penetrates certain minds as if through a sieve, Jean thinks, while trying to interject with, “Easy, easy, what are you prattling about? Specifics, if you please.”

“Their woman did come out of one of the airships, like you said she would, and I thought it weren’t no harm to keep an eye out like you asked. But I’m not a snitch or a sneak. They’ll have me locked in a can all night for that!”

“They? The anarchists?”

“Yes, and what’s more, they’re shutting down the shipyard! No warning, all walking off the job on the spot!”

The tremors of change beyond the gate can almost be felt under the soles of Jean’s boots. A regular hum penetrating through the pavement is stuttering, stalling. Occasionally, Jean looks with envy upon the ability of this new generation of collectivist anarchists act in concert. Of course, any flocking instinct is prone to peer pressure, and does not substitute for democratically centralized process, but it certainly isn’t chaos, any more than are starling murmurations. He asks, “Why? Because you saw her?”

“Someone else must have! I wouldn’t have snitched!” 

A situation is clearly spiraling out of control. “Comrade, if you’d stop assuming I already know something you’re trying not to talk about, and explain what’s been happening in the harbor…?”

The docker on the other side of the gate takes a deep breath. 

“But... I am! Beg your pardon… it’s bedlam at the moment. Someone—but it weren’t me!—spread the news that this Dobreva gal got into the city illegally, through the harbor. The way it came across, she’d already been sniffed out by the authorities, so the other dockworkers in our Party got to gossiping about it, not too kindly. Apparently she’s a traitor in their estimation, but I don’t know about that, I don’t keep up with the foreign news. But what I do know, that they don’t, is that she’s only just arrived! I’m confused; I ask, did they catch her that fast? Now they’re confused. Suddenly the libertaire muscle busts in on us, say we snitched her out, and start flipping our tables! We don’t know anything about that! She’s already caught, right? But she hasn’t been! The anarchists are still trying to smuggle her to the safe houses, but our boys are blabbing about her in broad daylight and sooner or later, foreman hears—”

Jean’s hand quavers. He elects to channel the fury into the point of his pen and abruptly stab it through the newspaper. From the outside it might appear he was thwarted by a very difficult puzzle. When he speaks, his tone is nearly companionable, through a false smile. “What a pack of... utter... imbeciles.” 

Rumor; the ineradicable pestilence! Whether it was deliberately seeded or began by accident, a malformed idea had a way of multiplying. 

“What’ll we do, comrade?” the docker hisses. “Tell me this wasn’t part of the plan, at least. Whatever she’s done, we can’t rat out a fellow revolutionist to the police.” 

“Nom de dieu de merde, you’re right… she must think I’m the one who set her up! You couldn’t hand them a better narrative. Go back in right away and tell every card-carrying Party member they’re to walk off on the spot—”

The weight of that letter in Jean’s breast pocket is just noticeable enough as he whirls to face the docker, a little imbalance between the two sides of the jacket. He has been instructed not to intervene, only to observe. In this case, what exactly does that mean? Someone has already meddled with Dobreva’s arrival in Revachol. Should he offset their impact, or is it in this very matter that he is being trusted to hold back?

Nilsen never tolerates a slight against Mazov. If Dobreva has crossed the pale to turn the proletarians of Revachol against Mazovianism, then the movement’s most zealous prophet may have schemed retribution. But if so, Jean has been kept ignorant of the full shape of the plan. A test of loyalty? Of the leadership skills he was once so assured that Jean Abadanaiz possessed?

“Insulinde would do well under your guidance. Few have so aptly grasped the nuances of Mazov’s theories—and been able to translate them into everyday speech. Revolutionaries like you are the very archetype of the advanced stratum of workers, that which must be molded into a proper vanguard.”

Jean shuts his eyes and grounds himself with a few athletic cycles of breath, deep inhale through the nose and then a fierce exhalation from the mouth. He must make a decision, the way a gymnast must commit to the motion of a handstand or a backflip. It is hesitation that injures.  

“If our party members don’t walk off as well, the Communists will be scabs to their strike. So get back in there and tell everybody who’s with us that a work stop is imperative. Besides, if she’s going to start drawing crowds in Martinaise, we must show our numbers too. And if you get any word about who might have started the rumors about her, pass it along to me. Have you got that?”

On the other side of the gate, a furor of voices has already begun to rise. Boots clang against metal walkways. Someone is shouting implications about the testicle size of those who have not yet left their posts. A responding jab rings out about the employment of mothers in disreputable professions. Jean pulls back from the harbor gates, as if they are about to fall on his head. Well, if they do, metaphorically speaking, he and the Communist Party must still be standing as the dust settles, like in one of those fantastically death-defying movie stunts.

And it would be a shame to see St. Julia of Anarkhia deported this soon after arriving in the city. A victory should not be won so cheap.

—

It has not yet become morning, though the star-splattered sky (as is usual above Revachol, some of the “stars” moved too much, or moved too little, did not rise and fall with the constellations) has got that mysterious hint of color banding off at the edge of the horizon. Elizabeth can see the horizon out between the buildings, when before it was indistinguishable, black as asphalt. Nautical dawn has finally come. 

And that’s strange, isn’t it? All night, she could not see the lights of La Delta, as if the night swallowed the glittering kingdom of commerce and into its absence poured the great sea. Perhaps it’s just the disadvantaged angle from which she lays.

Perhaps this is a turning point: dawn would mean more feet on the streets, and surely, surely then, someone will see her! (And her worst nightmare could be disproven. The only plausible reason she would still be lying here...)

She frets about her future being inexplicably invisible while decaying into bones right here in front of the Whirling-in-Rags. Then, just as keenly, she starts to fret about being scooped off the street and lowered into dark soil, never to see the sea and the stars again. What an outrage that the dead cannot advocate for themselves… And she would gladly take up the work pro bono if she knew any way to extend herself back into the living world.

With no choice but to be patient, the remains of Elizabeth Beaufort continue to wait. 

It is quiet at first, mistaken for the birds prematurely chirping for morning, but somewhere in Martinaise, someone is whistling. It starts out tuneless, then finds its musical intervals and pulls off a jaunty, sing-song bar. Then stillness for another long moment, aside from the ever-present vibrations of the city and slosh of the ocean.

Elizabeth struggles to peer, with fixed staring eyes that cannot focus, at the silhouette approaching from the street-lamp-lit mist; a squat and bulky frame. She soon realizes it’s probably an oversized coat. The figure is swinging a fuel canister at its side in thin figure-infinities, and has a listing to its posture, head tilted to one side, balancing the heavy can. 

Pursed lips chirp out the same first stanza of a song, and then the early bird switches to singing, in a girlish but nasal and tone-agnostic backcountry Vespertine accent, loud enough in the stillness of the morn, hushed enough that there’s a begrudging respect conveyed. 

“Oh, all along the city streets, all along the city streets…” 

The girl halts in upon the perimeter of the battle scene. The chunky toe of her boot scuffs against the charred residue where Raul Kortenaer burned and died. At this distance, the other object in her hands, that she’s holding in a reverse claw grip, ready to shove it back up her wide brown sleeve, is a paintbrush. 

The dockworkers are all familiar with a graffitist who tags the sea cans. The art ranges from innocuous to very provocative; occasionally it’s gang symbols, which could mean a group staking ownership over the contents, or an ironic joke on the artist’s part. One time, a container was splattered with red oil on the bottom and a pair of feet in Valentijn Klomp Spring ‘50 Collection pumps painted to give the appearance that someone—the bourgeois, perhaps? the blue of the underside of the shoe might imply the Moralintern as well—has been gorily crushed beneath the corrugated metal. Evrart Claire delighted over several of these creations, but his attempts to recruit the artist for Union propaganda were thoroughly rebuked. An incident occurred, which Liz wasn’t at all involved in; all she knows is someone, somehow, lost their pants. In a game of cards? 

The incorruptibly anarchic street artist turns out to be a face Liz vaguely recognizes, too. She’s seen this girl loitering around Martinaise, this pallid thing with eyes done up like soot smears, in frumpy clothes that remind Liz of the unfeminine affectation of her gardener’s frock—which makes her think this rumored SKULL member has played the role of lookout too, except she wants to be noticed by the right people. To intimidate? To recruit? Or to mess with people’s heads, make them feel watched.   

Since the battle, no more RCM officers have arrived to cordon off the crime scene and preserve the evidence. The only two fool enough to venture into the district chasing after a case with the hanged merc are either dead or nursing their injuries in seclusion. It seems it falls on the local lumpen-artist to paint her outline around her body either.

Her body. What a weird thing to think. Habeas corpus. Death is known to unravel time, while habits plunge us in and out of the present and the past, in between memory and reality. One moment you’re sobbing over a casket, branded like an animal, the next you’re in a darkened hall, hand on a door ajar to say goodnight like always. You remember not to go in the next night. Then one morning, you forget yourself and pour two cups of coffee. Every time, a bit of you breaks off and floats away.

A snowflake lands in her eye. She tries to blink. That’s not how this works anymore. Okay. It’ll melt. But it doesn’t, not on her cold form. That’s not how this works anymore.

Forget all of those horrid morbid thoughts from before! She’s not dead, that’s absurd, all she has to do is twitch her finger to show it! Maybe a vagabond like the graffitist would leave a corpse alone (she hadn’t done anything to the hanged mercenary either), so proving she’s alive is crucial. She attempts to isolate her pinky and force it to curl against the ground.

Surely it’s working! The girl in the puffy coat walks closer, crouches at what could be a conversational distance. It’s just a little strange that her eyes are not fully focused in Liz’s direction, and so is the way she hangs her head low, fiddling with the paintbrush. 

Damn it, don’t be high… Like I’d expect the only person awake (alive) in Martinaise at four in the morning to be sober, but please…!

The girl tilts her head towards the sky next, lips half-parted, eyes almost shut. “Ah, ghostie,” she drawls, exhaling crystallizing condensation, “shall I dip my brush in you?”

Elizabeth—the universe remembering being Elizabeth—wants to scream. Surge up like the reanimated dead from island legends, seize the graffitist by the shoulders with clammy hands, and shake her. Am I real!? Do you see me!? 

“I reckon cytoplasm would do nicely for paint,” murmurs the artist, dragging a finger through the bristles of the brush. “Maybe it’d glow in the dark—but only out of the corner of your eye. When you look right at it, poof! It’s gone.” She has a sardonically bright cadence to her voice, mocking at the world, but the undercurrent of agitation seems authentic, as she runs her finger back and forth over the brush with quicker and more aggressive motions. “Everyone who’s afraid of madness will pretend they never saw it, so they will go mad, as it eats and eats at them. Did I really see a ghost? Everyone who already thinks they’re mad, though? They’ll be able to tell it’s real.”

It’s so hard to tell if she’s talking to herself, or really intends to address a spirit lingering in the square, the way DuBois interrogated the hanged man’s body. Liz kept her ears sharp to everything that went on in the yard behind the Whirling, and she started to think that cop was deliberately fucking with her, just so that her report back to Evrart would make a fool of her. But he seemed completely sincere when rambling later about his occult visions, his cop mambo-jambo. 

One of Elizabeth’s aunties is a true practitioner of the mambo-jambo of the islands. She’s got a little altar in her apartment and seeks guidance from the spirits called Laws, who can grant favor or curse you or even possess you by riding on your shoulders and conjuring dreams. Little Liz did not like the idea of someone sitting on her head. A boy at school did such a thing to her in the yard and caused her such distress she pretended to be ill for a week to avoid encountering him again, so she could not grasp the spiritual dimension of being ridden by unfathomable gods. Study of a different kind of law lay ahead of her in life, although it could be said that sort also permitted one class of people to ride around on the backs of another. 

It is like the epiphenomenon, isn’t it? The Mesque conjecture was that spirits did indeed ride bodies—and that it did not matter. Literally, did not affect matter. These were useless, vestigial Laws. 

So which one, right now, is she? 

“Blood, though.” The sardonic artist’s sudden pronouncement interrupts the silence. “Blood’s a different pigment entirely. If I can’t make my masterwork out of this, then my name’s not Cindy the fucking SKULL.”

It’s not much help, but Liz notes this anyway. First name, Cindy; middle name, the fucking; last name, SKULL.  

Cindy stretches out the hand gripping the paintbrush and hovers it very close to Liz. Her fingers… wait, they’re shaking. From the cold? 

Her voice sounds different, like her throat is clenched. “Right here. It was right here, I reckon, before it washed away. Or a little to the left…”

The brush silently passes through Elizabeth’s jaw and cheek.

The lie that she’s been telling herself evaporates. She sits up, aching all throughout her… her nothing. There is nothing. Nothing laying on the street, nothing below her perceived eye level, no chest or arms or legs. 

There are no bodies left on the street from the battle, and the blood indeed has washed away. Only a scorch mark from the fire remains.

“I told that piggy, I told him ‘the streets will run red’,” Cindy the SKULL declares. Now it’s a true monotone, and her jaw is quivering. “And so they did.” 

Regardless of what she is, spirit or ghost or phenomenon, Elizabeth can still move like she’s got a body, so she tilts her head and leans a little closer to inspect that look on Cindy’s face. Her eyes are wide, almost bulging, her nose is flared, her lips are tight. 

The girl is positively choking on whatever it is she’s loath to let out. With all that smudged black makeup around her eyes, the glimmering of moisture stands out even more starkly. It reflects the nearby streetlamps, so the center of her pupil is a searing pinprick of light, a peephole into an inner explosion that the whole shell of her body is keeping contained. Could be that she is on something, because it’s hard to tell in the dark if that really is a yellowed tinge about the eyes, the tell-tale trace of pyrholidon.

In a plaintive, warbling voice, Cindy begins once more to sing.

“Oh, all along the city streets, all along the city streets… a-go the proletarians and the well-fed bourgeoisie… one starves to skin and bones… one works… the other owns…”

Elizabeth does not know the song, but it’s unmistakable in its origins. It’s a Commune song. If she had breath, it would have caught in her throat.

Then suddenly Cindy snatches up the fuel canister beside her—Liz had nearly forgotten about it—and lurches to her feet. Each note punches its way out of her throat. “One shall consume the other, sing us a song, sing us a song! Come…” She thrusts out her hand, palm open, still holding her brush. “… dance the Revachole…” And then she lifts the canister and tips it, until fire-red oil sloshes onto her hand and wrist. A terrible grin spreads across her face. “Sing us a song, of the bomb!” 

Elizabeth screams, all at once in a frenzy, CINDY! STOP!

And much to her shock, Cindy does. Freezes on the spot. The red oil drips, drips, forming a puddle on the ground. 

Then her whole body slumps, the feverish tension unwinding, and her arm drops to her side, still wet and stinking with hydrocarbon fumes. 

“Yeah, that’d be proper art,” she whispers, curling her scarlet-stained fingers tightly into a fist. “They’re always watching—they’d see it. But nobody else would. All that noise and it’s gone quiet again. Why the fuck is it so quiet?” 

She is silent and swaying for a little bit. Then, in an attempt to return herself to the here and now, Cindy the SKULL loudly sniffles, but it comes out as a shrill little sob. Hearing her own voice break like that cracks the shell further, and the girl curls forward, hugging her chest with her dry arm, quivering. Abruptly, she gags and clutches at her throat, emotions and anti-radiation drugs on the verge of spilling the contents of her stomach on the street.

Listen to me, says the voiceless Elizabeth, throwing out her intangible hands towards this trembling girl who’s sick with rage. Listen to me! 

And what does she have to say, after she and an amnesiac cop who mistook himself for a communist and who knows how many others have been gunned down in the street?

It rises from the abyss within her, a message like a tidal wave scraping the sky before smashing down upon the shore: 

THIS TIME, WE ARE GOING TO FUCKING WIN. 

As if touched by electricity, Cindy snaps upright and holds both her brush and the dented old fuel canister high above her head, snarling at the false stars, those that move in their unnatural patterns and resist the coming dawn. 

Once again, she sings, not particularly tunefully, but righteously strident and piercing. She cavorts, she skips like a gleeful child, stamping her boots in the snow mush. 

“There is the boss to steal the wage, there is the cop to fill the cage; there is the judge to sign the page for the kingsmen to quell the rage—workers, we know ‘em well, we’ll send ‘em all to hell! Butchers in uniforms, sing us a song, sing us a song! Come dance the Revachole, sing us a song of the bomb!”

With the last stamping of her feet, she grips the canister more securely and tosses a ribbon of red oil onto the street, before attacking it with her brush, dragging the puddle out into savage lines.

As she paints, she repeats the last phrase of the song, but while the melody of the song is the same, she’s singing in Suresne, and it doesn’t sound like that thick regional Vespertine accent comes through at all. Her intonation is higher, the notes strangely sweeter: “Mort à la bourgeoisie, vive le son, vive le son, dansons la Revachole, vive le son de l’explosion!”

Elizabeth wavers, immaterial, and then… she feels it in what used to be her feet, the itch, the urge…

To dance. 

She spins on invisible tiptoes, and becomes an eddy of wind tossing loose grains of ice, ruffling Cindy the painter’s messily cropped hair. Like a spool of thread, with each turn, she unravels, but it doesn’t hurt, and like a bell, the melody keeps on ringing—

—

The seaside district of Martinaise is used to the clanging of bells, but it has become a cacophony as the docks grind to a halt and criers take to the streets. The rally is not just the dockers now, but all sorts of workers, particularly the ones that have been tucked away unseen in all the parts of Martinaise that are polished and pretty for the visiting Wild Pines managers. Seamen leaving behind the pristine sailboats they’d been manning on behalf of their wealthy owners, cleaning staff abandoning the resorts and cafés, construction workers leaving their work on the facade of the mysterious electrical building down by the boardwalk.

Ironically, it is the need for beauty in the seaside district favored by the bourgeois that allows such a rush of proletarian activity to sully its streets. Too many gendarmes on every corner are not as reassuring as they are a reminder that around any corner could be a foreign anarchist... with a bomb! So there is not nearly enough law enforcement to contain the rally before it reaches an unstoppable mass.

One day we will take these streets and not give them back, Jean Abadanaiz realizes, from where he is perched upon the ornamented base of a lamp-post, trying to see over the crowd to the figure at the center of everyone’s attention. 

The woman being helped atop a motor carriage wears common but not shabby clothes: a black skirt and white shirtwaist blouse, with thick heeled boots. From the way she moves, how the fabric falls over her breasts, no corset. Could the tales about her rioting factory maids burning undergarments be based in truth after all? She has red hair pinned up into a bun, notwithstanding flyaway wisps criss-crossing her face. Revolutionary red—it certainly suits her! Jean recalls a certain full-color cartoon of her depicting her head totally ablaze; otherwise he only saw her likeness printed in black and white. Red was traditional to the labor movement, though more recently the colors of ink and page have become the respective colors of anarchists, and their furious negation of all that oppresses and divides mankind, and of communists, waving banners of brilliantly unifying peace from the future beyond class society. This very crowd has a mix of all three colors in attendance, and they are all jostling against each other.

Those few photographs he’d seen showed the famed anarchist in profile, and she had a good profile, with a fine and slightly aquiline nose, but there was a side always facing the camera and one always hidden. Like the moon, is Jean’s errant thought. Out in public, though, she does not care to hide her left cheek, with its puckered, ravaged flesh, the half-destroyed upper lip, the scarred eyelid that she colored with dark makeup. Even at this distance from her, one can make out the disfigurement, even if there is a dignified completeness in her features that cruel caricatures had never conveyed. But the gist of those illustrations was true—the famed firebrand is branded by fire.

The wind is at her back as Julia Dobreva plants her feet on the carriage roof and extends her hands to the throng. 

Her raw and strident voice is accented but still fluent, sing-song in the way of the zemlyaki communities. “Comrades of Revachol, I greet you all! The brave-hearted working people of Graad salute you as well!” 

A roar in response, the flapping of mostly the red or black flags, although some white ones too. 

She nods to the section of black flags down below, many of whom are locking arms to hold back anyone trying to approach her impromptu podium and pull her down. “I have been asked to address this gathering, and I have only a little time before my first arrest by your gendarmerie—first of many, I should hope, rather than being expelled!”

The playful voix-de-ville delivery of the line hits its mark, and the crowd erupts with jeers, cleverly swallowing the pre-existing boos and shouts from detractors—mainly the Communist Party faction, for whom she is the face of the schism in Mirova. They falter in their own heckling as it seems to add to the swell of support for her. Her eyes do not linger on them, but she must have been paying them heed, for her timing is impeccable. Once all attempts to disrupt her have been thrown into disarray, Julia Dobreva sweeps her hand across the crowd as if to grasp the invisible strings of their gazes and pull them all in her direction. 

“So I will be quick! Quick to fill your ears with such fearsome, terrible ideas, that threaten to split the streets below us! The idea that all of us here, every man, woman, and child, has the right to eat when hungry, to sleep warmly and safely when tired, to play and take joy in life instead of being crushed by endless drudgery! If we labor, to do it freely, and for none to own and hoard what we create through our common toil! On this, we surely can agree!

“Yet here, as much as in Graad, the workers starve and tire! Meanwhile, the aristocrats and bourgeoisie exert total control over the world built by the hands of labor. They demand our tolerance of the intolerable, because the State protects their so-called property, and with it the right to fatten and idle and amuse themselves while we struggle to endure! Working people, do we not grow weary of our masters?”

And now, when she opens her hands out to the crowd, she directs their attention behind them all, to Martinaise’s crown jewel statue of Filippe III, rearing up above the assembled workers as if to crush them beneath his horse’s hooves.

“When you suffer and struggle to put bread on your family’s table, do you still believe yourselves lesser than the mad monarchs who squat upon their hoarded wealth? And for that matter, do you believe yourselves greater than all the peoples that the Suzerainty has shackled to their gluttonous machine of empire? Because that is how the parasites will trick you into believing you must stay loyal to them, for the sake of their glory and power! 

“Out there in the harbor, you break your backs carrying in the spoils of wretched conquest. But today, you refuse! In this moment where you break from your daily drudgery and have a little time to think freely, let yourself ask the questions they would rather suppress! Who are your brothers and sisters, truly? Is it the royals and their appointed indotribes, the whole State and its functionaries, engineered to maintain a total rule over the rest of us? Is it those command every part of your lives and keep you barely afloat, or let you sink into poverty and squalor and death when you are no longer of use? Or can you find kinship instead among the toiling hands in Semenine who bleed for the sugar that you barely can afford? Or with the wage slaves of the quarries who cut Iilmaraan marble for Revacholian palaces? When Safran peasants pick apricots and they pass through Revachol’s harbor, who receives the supposed blessing of immortality? You workers, and every worker across the colonies, you are all pawns to be discarded and forgotten, while they erect statues of themselves, knowing they will die like all men do, but avenging themselves upon us with an immortal curse of class society. Until! Unless!”

Her playful demeanor has burned away. She is nothing less than the fury of a meteor, this blazing anarchist zealot who descended to Revachol from the sky. But she seems just as enrapt by the sight of the crowd as they are of her. 


Julia Dobreva’s hands remain reaching for the assembled workers. From Jean’s vantage point, she is equidistant from that royal statue, and he imagines her as a different sort of rider, one who clings to the back of a charging wild animal, not to tame it, but to be carried off by it.

She turns to take in the whole of the district, to see how the thronging working class has transformed its very identity. It is brief, but she halts when her gaze and body are facing the lamp-post Jean is clinging to. 

His breath stutters, and he hides his face behind the pole, hot brow pressed up to cool metal. Why? Impulse, pure instinct. 

Dobreva raises her voice one last time: “World-makers, find within yourselves that spirit of solidarity and join arms! Defend your fellow proletarians against all who would seek to exploit and control them! And act, act upon the real world under your feet! Force dimension upon your intangible dreams of freedom, just as you have done today! What we have built, we can destroy, and we can build anew!”

And then the voice of the crowd drowns her out, cheering turning into howls of outrage, because a group of constables have managed to charge through the mass and rock the motor carriage the woman stands upon. Dobreva stumbles. Several young men and women of the black flag faction surge in response, climbing the other side of the carriage and holding on to their comrade to prevent her being pulled down. Someone smashes the window of the MC and one of the girls on the roof, with startling agility, swings inside. The crowd gasps—the engine starts! It putters, splutters, and then lets out a prehistoric roar as it accelerates down the road. Policemen trip and fall on their faces in a vain attempt to stop it, and are quickly trampled by a whooping, revelrous surge of bodies. The rallygoers start running alongside the car out of pure enthusiasm, while those in its path part to let the anarchists make their escape.

As the bulk of the anarchist and non-Party socialist workers flow out of Martinaise, pursued by the blaring whistles of patrolmen, Jean Abadanaiz remains glued to the spot. The sheer energy of the moment, how quickly it crescendoed, has left him dazed, hugging that lamp-post for dear life, as if the sea would surge up and try to swallow him. He is shaken from this state by a sharp tugging on his sleeve, and he descends to the street so he can be mobbed by his comrades, who are frantically rolling up a large banner to fit it inside of a floor rug, and stuffing white neck-scarves into their pockets. This particular group of men seem to have materialized from the Faubourg headquarters, a closer-knit baker’s dozen of elected Parti communiste de Revachol officials that Jean has a higher degree of trust with, although their titles tend to rotate and mutate every election cycle. 

The deputy minister of defense seems to have assessed the threat level; “They’re saying the Royal Dragoons are coming, we oughta scarper!”

“But it’s her that they’re after, not us,” scoffs their treasurer. “Ours was a counter-protest. Shame on the wreckers! They took a quarter of our membership the very day she walked out on Mazov in Mirova.” 

The communications chairman, stuffing the banner into the rug, huffs out, “It doesn’t matter if we started it, they’ll trawl the streets and take us all in their nets. Especially us stragglers. They’re probably closing in on Rue d’Esperance and we don’t have as much of a crowd to move with now.”

Jean returns to the moment almost as abruptly as waking up, and he snaps his fingers at the group, trying to call their attention. “Doesn’t Cyril still have… where the hell is he… have the keys to that apartment up there in Capeside, the sculptor’s studio, the one on holiday in Messina? You’re still looking after his houseplants? Good, the plan is to stay there instead of getting caught up in the inevitable raid in Faubourg. Whether we’re there or not, they’ll make the usual mess.”

“Like—sandwich crusts! I have been telling you, Jean,” gesticulates the other comrade hefting the rug onto his shoulders, “their inspectors leave those behind on purpose to besiege us with roaches, and mold. This is not our members’ slovenliness; it’s bourgeois biowarfare.”

“Very well, I believe you. Can I help with that, get in the middle where it’s sagging there? All right, mes amis, let’s bring this rug up to our client’s apartment.”

Although the rug scheme probably was a bright idea when someone proposed it, since they’d had comrades constantly harassed on the street by the gendarmerie for openly transporting signs and banners and newspapers, carrying the bulk of it up five flights of stairs turns out quite the chore. It takes a healthy amount of working class muscle and increasingly curt and direct commands from Jean to keep it from swinging around and smacking people back down the stairs on sharp turns. 

Finally, they’re able to lug it into their—hopefully—secret gathering-place. It is indeed an absent sculptor’s apartment, a man from wealth but a fellow traveler of the cause, and he favored minimalism for creativity, tucking a cot in the corner of the room and a couch against the wall and leaving the rest of the floor space open, aside from, of course, the many houseplants. They are quite the exotic and lush collection, with many broad waxy leaves and emerald fronds. When Jean sits back upon the couch, the greenery rustles and tickles in his hair. 

“Whew! What a view!” remarks a comrade.

“Draw the curtains,” Jean orders, although he would like to be able to look out upon the sea and the city as well. “I’ve found one can see much of the district from the islands through binoculars, so you never know…” 

He crosses his ankles, rests his elbows on the back of the couch; an entirely casual pose, but there’s a message encoded in it. Legs tight together, showing how little space he actually needs, but arms spread out to take up more than that anyway. He wants the others standing in front of him, not sitting beside him. Gradually, as natural light in the room is cut off, the other PCR members realize they are being interrogated. 

“Can anybody fill me in, on what happened at the docks?” Jean asks, in green shadow.

“Oh, we weren’t there, we came over from Faubourg when we heard there was a sudden work-stop… and something about anarchists starting a dust-up?” 

Jean maintains his calm tone, but he is carefully watching for suspicious reactions. “We almost came to blows, I think, based on Lionel’s report-back. It could have been worse if that sudden rally hadn’t redirected the pent-up aggression—and if I hadn’t pulled our members out to join in.”

Was Julia herself making those same frantic calculations in the moment the fights broke out? That speech she gave hadn’t addressed the Mirova split at all, and if it had, the affair might have gone a lot uglier. In deed rather than word, she was already refuting the image of her as a bitter sectarian. 

He’s about to directly ask if anyone else knew that she was arriving in Revachol today, but he refrains from speaking. Let them talk about and dissect the day’s events, and let them reveal what they each believe the Party line on the situation to be, before there actually is one. Is that just his indecision, because he can’t fully commit to feeling one way or another about it? As the current Party chairman, he considers that perhaps it’s not his place to let his individual impulses decide their stance on Dobreva’s arrival, any more than he ought to blindly follow the prevailing opinion of the group. 

“If only we could have given our own speech after hers… naw, there wasn’t a chance of nobody listening after they hijacked that car. People love the spectacular, don’t they? It’s like how Nilsen puts it, the emission of a social magnetic field—”

“Comrade Abadanaiz could have tried. Everyone’s reading the Dialogues, people might expect a public debate now that she’s here.”

“Well, it’s too bad Comrade Abadanaiz was feeling shy around the bird, ain’t it now?”

Jean Abadanaiz is aware that among his greatest strengths are his patience, thoroughness, and ability to personally detach from a situation, so that he can wholly encompass it in his mind and apply deliberate, systemic analysis to it. There’s quite a difference between that and being shy, and his comrades have known him to be very brazen and outspoken. He ought to remind them.

So it comes as quite a shock to him when white-hot tingling runs over his scalp and spine, pulsation radiates through the muscles of his limbs, and the lingering stone dust in the air of the apartment seemingly sucks all the moisture from his tongue and throat. 

“Clearly, you haven’t read Rodionov’s Absence Influence and Negative Intervention,” he rasps. “Because if you thought that interrupting the rally was the correct inflection point in this situation, I am worried about your abilities as dialecticians. While you were printing newspapers in Faubourg, I’m the one who has been monitoring the situation all day, and I’m more parched than these plants. Get me some water, will you?” 

Clearing his throat, Jean vacates the couch and ventures through the jungle of potted plants to stand at the window. 

“While we wait and observe, the class enemy is occupied with dousing flashpaper. A rally formed entirely from spontaneity will disintegrate just as quickly. And the same goes for Dobreva’s schism. Do we really want to reinforce it as a complete turning point in history? Or let her expend herself on the old libertaire traditions in Revachol, trying to make a coherent ‘anarchism’ out of them before they fade into historical obscurity? When we do act,” he adds, “it will be, as Mazov puts it, to catalyze the dissolving of the past.”

World-makers, the squawking gulls out above the bay could be saying, Force dimension upon your intangible dreams.

—

The floor hits her so hard that it takes Elizabeth a moment to come to her senses, because the thumping and ringing in her ears are no less vivid.

 She claws her way free of a mess of fabric, then spills out onto a familiar woven-straw carpet. The air is crisp and cold and not at all still against her face, and it wakes her up fast as she pulls it into her lungs. Above her, distorted shapes of ghostly, mesmerizing light are projected on the wall. She recognizes this light as coming from beyond the windows, from neon signs for the shops across the street. This is her top-floor studio flat in Jamrock. She appears to have violently ejected herself from her bed in the throes of vivid dreaming.

No wonder the air is chilly—the window right beside that bed is open and tossing the last valiant charges of winter into the room, always at their worst on the cusp of spring. At first, this frightens her, the possibility that someone unlocked and opened her window, perhaps from the fire escape. Krenel is back, Wild Pines is seeking to tie up loose ends after a squad of mercs they sent to Revachol were liquidated by unruly natives. Maybe someone is hiding in the shadows of this very room!

An assailant fails to materialize out of the darkness while she sits frozen on the floor. Eventually a memory stirs within her, more muffled and distant than it should be given its recency. She’d been feverish last night, struggling to breathe, with the terrible picture show of dead men glued to the inside of her eyelids. She did open the window herself, hoping the noise of the city would drown out the echoing gunshots that would not leave her ears, and soon lost consciousness. 

In the frigid room, her addled mind became convinced she was dead on the streets of Martinaise. Survivor’s guilt forced her to take the place of poor Angus, Glen, and Theo. There, that saves her a therapy session. 

First she shuts the window. Then she tries to re-wrap her hair, because falling out of bed knocked her scarf askew, but her fingers are too cold to tie a knot neatly, and she fights with stray locks until the minuscule frustrations nearly drive her to tears. The step-by-step plan to regain her composure has failed at step two. 

Symptoms of trauma-and-stressor disorder do not care that you have read about them in psychology textbooks. They do not care about numerous tragedies from childhood that should have toughened you up. They scoff at political convictions. Trying to out-think them is bound to make a fool of you.


Figuring the warmest place to be in the sliver of the world she’s allotted is the shower, Elizabeth stumbles into the bathroom and turns on the hot water but not the lights. Darkness is bearable; after all, the killings happened in broad daylight. Huddled up against the tiled corner of the stall, she washes the thought of dried blood off her skin. Trying to forget the dream entirely only worsens the tremors in her heart. For a little while longer, she must pretend it was real so that the ghost in her breast begins to feel safe and alive again. 

Can she still remember the words to that song? “All along the city streets...”

—

Afternoon spills into the bay. Jean Abadanaiz, as he is accustomed to, watches, with the curtains of the sculptor’s apartment parted just a crack. On an average day, the streets of Martinaise are not as heavily policed, but for a few hours there are significantly more constables and even mounted officers passing through. 

Reflecting back on one of his comrades’ theory about sandwich crusts, Jean is drawn to compare the gendarmes, tinier than tin soldiers but bright in their royal uniforms, to ants swarming, not to where a fallen sandwich still is, but where one had been. They pick up the remaining crumbs of the rally, like leaflets and scarves and lost flags. 

Further inland in the winding streets of Jamrock, the crowd may have pacified and begun to disperse, or they could be trying to rile up more workers in the factories. It could have properly crystalized into a protest against the draconian immigration laws, preemptive of Dobreva’s arrest. Was she still leading the pack or trying to take advantage of the commotion to slip away? 

The police down below seemed to grow restless with nothing to sink their teeth into. Local petit bourgeois started emerging from around the district to argue with them. First a throng of proletarians stampeding through the streets, now an excess of uniforms idling around, surely they could see how bad it was for business! How could the gentlemen and ladies return to their shopping, to the amusements of the boardwalk and the centim-arcade? Go and restore order where the chaos still reigns! So eventually the streets are cleared of law enforcement, and the disruption in the regular goings-on of Martinaise finally comes to an end.

One by one, the other Party men also start to fret about families that could be worried for them, or ovens left on in apartments, or missing other planned meetings that the rally disrupted. They’ll stay if Jean tells them they must, but they were more spectators than participants in today’s events, and if the police do decide to blame the PCR and hunt down its leadership then this apartment isn’t a true safe house. It’s just a place to stay off the streets so that a constable doesn’t single you out and decide to take you in.

Jean has known some of the comrades who exiled themselves to the true underground—below Le Royaume. Contact with them is so sparse that he has no idea if the news of the schism has made it to those sunless depths, if there are now strictly anarchist and Mazovian caverns that do not speak to each other, or if the subterranean society has its own factional relationships that the surface must catch up on when the mole-comrades emerge.

Since he doesn’t expect mole-like commitment from these men today, he warns them to be careful out there, but that if they need to, they can go. Eventually, they all do. He even promises that, if granted the keys, he can keep up their arrangement with the sculptor by watering the plants.

What compels him to stay behind is, at first, the chance to rest his feet on the couch, after spending so much of the day standing around. He finds the density of plants soothing, and presumes the communist sculptor filled his studio with them for the same reason. The diversity of flora in the apartment is almost like visiting the Jardin botanique royal across the river, but at the Jardin botanique royal they wouldn’t let a man like Jean Abadanaiz lay down among the tropical plants and soak in the chlorophyll-filtered light.

If he had fully laid down and taken a nap, though, Jean might have missed his chance to glance out of the window again and scan the passersby once more and notice… and he’s certain even before he can prove it’s her, but it is her. That’s the same dress, despite a shawl covering the shoulders. It’s not stylish enough to be one of the middle-class girls, and even at this distance, the way the wind presses cloth to flesh has that shape of… well… a lack of corset.

When he spoke earlier of inflection points, this is exactly the kind he means. Patience eventually awards opportunity. 

Jean pushes through the fronds and waxy leaves and locks the door of the apartment behind him. There’s no hesitation now that he’s confident this is the correct time to act. Compared to the laborious process of getting up the stairs with a whole cadre of communists and a massive rug, he seems to be flying down them. At the bottom floor of the apartment building he takes a moment to adjust his clothes before stepping outside.

Martinaise has recovered its common pedestrian archetypes such as stylishly dressed middle class girls, health-conscious men, and perambulators on the promenade, even if there’s an eerie emptiness to an attentive eye, knowing that a significant number of workers in the district are still gathered somewhere in Jamrock, either brawling with cops or dispersing into pubs. Not all of the banners and flag were carried off, in rugs or otherwise, leaving some to ominously brand the stones with messages like LONG LIVE THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION and HEARTS TO THE LEFT.

Though she had so impressively roared to the gathered crowd earlier that very afternoon, the flame-spitting anarchist slumps over the fence of the seawall, a wide brimmed hat tipped to conceal her face from all but the water. Apace with the waves, her shoulders crest and trough from heavy breaths.

The vulnerability in her pose cannot but tug on Jean’s curiosity.

He approaches the figure of Julia Dobreva with careful intent, heading for the stretch of fence next to her and leans against it, idling by pulling out that reliable cross-word from his pocket. She does not look directly at him, but there is defensiveness in the way her feet shift, preparing to step away from danger.

When he is sure she is paying attention to him, he clears his throat. “Forgive my intrusion, Comrade. I believe I know you. We have had a correspondence, of sorts.”

A finger tilts up the hat, and a piercing, heavily lined grey eye investigates him.

“Why, there you are! I thought I had recognized a face in the crowd earlier—from a photograph, but I doubted myself. You are different in person, Jean Abadanaiz.” 

“I can guess the one,” he muses. “The exposure was unflattering. When reproduced in print, I am black as your flags, a splot of ink on the page. Or ran through with shading lines, like wood grain.” 

“A rough imitation indeed. I see clearly now you are no splot.”

“And you have not the wild and sooty brigand’s face so many popular cartoons attribute to you.” 

“A shame, too!” she scoffs. “I feel my enemies represent me better than I could hope to. I am quite fond of the haggard witch they make of me, face half blasted off by her own bombs.” Julia’s grey eyes read him like a book, catching his unspoken curiosity. “No, that little folktale isn’t true.” And yet she isn’t forthcoming about the origins of her scars, although he does not expect her to be.

She straightens her spine and turns it to the sea, leaning against the railing. Her breathing is still a little harsh, and the rasping of her voice could be the mark of a smoker, and Jean can certainly imagine her carefree and modern, gesticulating with a fag pinched between two fingers. 

Jean allows himself just a bit of probing. “I would guess that since your landing, you have already led the gendarmerie on a merry little chase about Revachol. A smart move to double back to Martinaise. Only a very clever local would have done the same.” 

She tosses her head, chin jutting towards him in pride of her mischief. “We have been on the move, yes, although the erratic movements of a fugitive and those of a spellbound tourist may overlap. I have read history books and newspapers aplenty, but my heart’s knowledge of the city derives mainly from novels. They are mostly bourgeois but I love them all the same. You know there is a sort of mania in Graad about Revachol.”

“I’ve heard the Graadians tie their ties according to the latest Revacholian fashion a full week before we do.”

Julia laughs, head tilting back, and the wind turns. Jean impulsively reaches behind her head to catch the brim of her hat before it flies off in the sea breeze. It lifts off her hair for but a moment, and tugs at his fingers, and then he gently squashes it back down upon her head. 

She hastily catches the hat for herself a split second later. Her lips, with their one twisted corner, are half-parted in surprise.

Jean’s pulse fills his ears, but he maintains his smile. “Beg your pardon—”

She tuts and recovers, though perhaps there is a rosy glow under her skin now? “I had no time to pin it down, that was bound to happen… I have been going from place to place swapping hats and shawls. There was this one with a veil… and then someone found a pretty Samaran rice-paper fan… or passed me a bouquet of roses… a stack of towels to carry as if I were a maid… but if you try too hard to cover the side of your face everyone will be looking for, it becomes obvious. There is a spatial advantage of walking the shore, though, as long as it is one specific direction. That is how I found my way back here. I started along the coast and simply could not change direction, or the distinctive half of me would be in view of the city rather than the sea!”

There is a strong likelihood, given the wicked glint in her eyes, that she is making all of this up. Once again she diverts and plays to the crowd with humor, even with an audience of just one. Was she ever an entertainer by profession? 

Jean holds his chin thoughtfully. “To the discerning eye, you are very distinctive from any angle. But the agents of the Suzerain must be complacent. They are looking for burns, but they should have memorized your profile…”

As I did, he does not say.

“So I have evaded all the spies and lookouts in the city for now—save one.”

His grin falters. “Don’t say such things of me, Comrade. I was at your rally out of curiosity.” 

She wags a finger, not angry but amused and exasperated, as if to say, stop this nonsense. “Nilsen has asked you to keep an eye on me. I cracked that silly little cipher of his too, you know.”

“Good grief!” Jean hides his face in his steepled hands, a vain effort to conceal his amusement. As a Party man it is unbecoming of him to be cavalier about their operational security, but Nilsen probably deserves to be made ridiculous. Was the code word so easy for her to guess? “Well, how can you accuse me of spying if you are intercepting our messages already! What a hypocrite you are, Julia dear.”

She laughs, but it turns out the incredulous lilt to it is directed at herself. It is surprise at her own reaction to something inconsequential. “The way you say my name. I like it.” 

How disarming of her that she would so readily admit to being momentarily disarmed by him! And cunning of her in that case, to turn the moment of weakness back before he can take advantage. He reflects on his Suresne pronunciation, which employed the same fricative sound that begins his own name. 

“That is not how you say it, is it?” His Graadian is proficient, but he reads and writes it better than speaks it. With just a moment’s pause, he deduces where he erred. 

“It is now, in Revachol.” 

Jean does not immediately reply; he simply wishes to bathe in these words for a little longer. If he believed her to be disingenuous or merely coquettish, it would not have the same effect. He is accustomed to a kind of brittle fawning from women of the Occident; what he sees in this woman’s eyes is a pleasing shine of ambition. She intends to belong here.

He stands up a little straighter, letting conviction swell. They cannot toy with one another forever. “It will not be for long, if you are caught and deported. You must know—and this is why I came up to you in the first place, Comrade—that the debacle at the docks when you arrived was not arranged by the Communist Party of Revachol. That there has been a quarrel in Mirova is no reason to betray anyone to our mutual class enemy.”

The lightness in her own voice is the opposite of reassurance that she believes him. Or trusts him. “So you don’t know how that happened, do you?”

“I swear to you I do not—and I have been trying to find out the truth. But why come to Revachol at all, since you would be hunted down the moment your public presence was known. Unless… you really did mean to conceal yourself under a false identity for a while?” 

Her tight-lipped smile is not as warm as the ones before; even though she has a talent for misdirection, her unease slips through. So is it true that she had a plan she meant to carry out, and has been forced to improvise on the fly, escaping in the pandemonium of a near-riot? If it was to be propaganda of the deed (an assassination? perhaps even the big one?), then Nilsen may have been right, that such acts would spark a wave of repression against the whole socialist cause, at just the wrong time. Is that enough to justify thwarting her? Or would that make them self-deputized constables of the crown? 

“You’re surely aware,” he adds, “that the Suzerain has decreed it illegal for such persons who reject all forms of government to enter la grande ville historique. They are plagued enough by the ones who are home-grown.”

Dans la grande ville historique, dans la grande ville historique… Out of all the many monikers for Revachol, it was one of the most abstract ones that royalists, communists, and anarchists could not help but use even in irony. The place where the great questions of history were meant to be answered, or perhaps the literal embodiment of history itself. 

“All the more reason to be here. Such terrors he has foreseen in cocaine-addled dreams, let them come to pass.”

“More likely you’ll be exiled to the colonies,” he points out. “Like so many other anarchists of Revachol.”

“Whatever happens could start there too. Yes, I would gladly go and find my comrades in the islands!” Her outburst seems honest, not as overly theatrical as before. She squints into the horizon, over the Insulindic Ocean, half her mouth downturned. Then the ironic, playful mood returns. “We shall return on the swell of the waves riding a great fleet of rafts, reenacting the prehistoric Olduvaian exodus.”

So she is an adherent of that theory, the one that posits the islands as the cradle of humanity. How, then, did these original humans disperse into the many isolas? As long as one believes the accompanying theory that the pale did not exist in prehistory, the only barrier the ancestors needed to overcome was the sea. Among a sect of archaeologists, rafts and even crude sails could have been the first great technological revolution, but such material evidence is so hard to preserve. 

Kras Mazov himself was recently engrossed in the literature about that theory. It brings Jean back to that nagging uncertainty about how close Mazov and Dobreva had once been.  

He catches Julia’s gaze as she turns her face away from the sea again. “You could circumvent the law…” he murmurs, half-joking at first, but the idea starts to solidify, “it would be so simple. How? By declaring your support for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, a revolutionary government. Right now, to me. I will vouch for you to any judge. After all, the difference between our ultimate goal is often a matter of semantics—”

She slams her palm against the railing along the sea wall. “Semantics to you! I will live, struggle, and die as an anarchist!”

“You would have died as an anarchist well before now, if not for Mazov. You are too good at martyrdom, as if the ineffable spirit of your utopia will reward you for it after you die. Why limit yourself? If your aims are correct, you should pursue them by whatever means you can.”


“Bullshit! That’s bullshit, Jean Abadanaiz.”

He startles back, silenced by the same coursing, buzzing, electrical sensation over his skin that nearly drove him to an impulsive outburst earlier, with his Party comrades.

“I hadn’t the time to publish my last response in our little Dialogue, and I’ve lost the papers of that draft somewhere in the pale, so let me share some highlights from it. You are entirely too enraptured by your grand historical mechanism, process and inevitability as regimented as a factory line. You know, civilization thinks the world must be made of whatever its most complex technology is. The world was the written word to the Perikarnassians, and it was a series of vessels and catalysts to Iilmaraan alchemists. Soon, everything will be said to be frequencies recorded on strips of magnetic tape.” 

She gesticulates in wide sweeps off in the distance, but the average of her arm’s angles point down towards the boardwalk, where a peculiar and recently-erected building looms, empty scaffolding covering an unfinished facade: Feld Electrical. 

Jean cannot stop the flow of the argument on that one point, but he pins it in a box in his mind for later. “Maybe it is all of those things.”

“Maybe it is! But I object to this idea that the anarchists who act as true in deed and word as they can are seeking some kind of cosmic reward. We acknowledge limitless possibility before us, and we know that nothing is inconsequential, so we force upon the world the consequences of our unrelenting existence.”

“How honorable, how romantic.”

“Romanticism is aestheticized self-perception, which is precisely what we reject. We do not pretend one can be something in one’s mind and not in one’s deeds. We are what we are—we are the part of creation that is in the act of manifesting this idea, our anarchy. It exists and we are it.”

“So you’re saying if you did not do anarchy, then anarchism would not exist. Mazov might describe this form of self-activity—” 

“Ah, vot kak? Zdorovo. Jolly good for him.” Julia hugs her arms to her chest.

“… What happened between you and Mazov?” Jean finally, bluntly, asks. He cannot avoid the question forever. “There was a private argument as well, wasn’t there? If you have been intercepting Nilsen’s correspondences with me, then you know what I know.”

“I don’t. I only read the one after setting out for Revachol. Mid-transit entroponetic crosstalk dropped his encrypted telegram into my radio… a bird crossing an ocean lights upon a bare rock that it somehow knows exists, without having been there before. Jean, have you been through the pale before? It’s not like anything else in the world. It isn’t the world.”

He shakes his head. He has been across the Insulindic to Semenine, but never beyond that.

“Chto ya delayu…?” Julia mumbles to herself, and roves her gaze across the district, brushing red strands of hair out of her eyes. 

Like the snapping on of a light, Jean sees through the pattern of behavior. “You’re waiting for someone, aren’t you? That’s why you’ve come back to the district. Was this contact meant to meet you in the harbor, too?” 

Julia is so careful in her non-reaction that Jean can only guess at the turmoil going on behind those gray eyes. 

He doesn’t need to be told he’s right. “There are anarchists throughout the city who would hide you, but you don’t want to go into hiding yet or this person will not be able to find you. They know to look for you here.”

“Yes, but it isn’t political,” she curtly responds. “And nearly everything is, but for your purposes, this is not.” 

Truce, her stoic expression is pleading through the cracks. Just for this. 


“A comrade left me a key to one of those apartments,” he points, but only with a flick of his finger, not moving his arm at all, just on the chance that someone, somewhere else, is watching them. He bends in close, until they are sharing breath, and reveals the key in his jacket pocket by nudging the fabric open. “From there you can watch the whole district. It’s how I saw you. So if your person comes…” 

Wide-eyed, Julia searches Jean’s face for any hint of deception. “Either you are being too trusting or this is a trap.”

“So it’s a trap, and you will get your wish to visit the colonies and come back on an army of rafts. I know this meeting was important enough for you to take many risks for it. What’s one more?”

“… How honorable, Jean Abadanaiz.” 

Their fingers are faintly quivering as the key is passed between them.