Chapter 126: Parliament of One
"...We read the letter."
Leo’s voice came on the channel, deep and level, then he added two more words.
"All of it."
The static wandered through the gap while Nia went still in the operator’s chair, and Tikki’s claws set slowly into the quilt beside my thigh, and underneath all of it, from the corner of that channel where Nora lives, came nothing at all.
[Nora’s gone quiet... That’s new... terrifying actually...]
"Twenty soldiers..." Leo said.
"Yeah."
"They were trying to save people... they were fixing it."
"I know..."
-Kzzzt-!
"Did you look for another way?"
"For about ten seconds, I did..." I said, because he’d earn the truth at its exact size or nothing. "And that was all the patience I had against the most sure-fire way of getting one fifty million ... That’s the whole story."
The fire popped somewhere behind him while he stood inside the pause.
"Would you..." His voice came, still deep and unhurried, but there was an unmaskable caution in it, "Would you do it again?"
The soft version of the answer was right there, at the tip of my tongue, dressed in enough grief to pass any inspection on that channel except his, but doing that to Leo today would’ve just been a second letter.
"Yes..." so I said, "In a heartbeat."
The words went out over seventy kilometers, while my ears went hot around the headset, while Nia watched me say it with steady green eyes and no surprise anywhere in them, because she’d already collected her copy of that answer in private, in a bedroom full of morning light.
-Kzzzt-!
"You know what I keep coming back to?" Leo said finally, his voice no longer holding that deepness.
"Leo..."
"I’ve lost to you before, Nikki... Stood up in parliament, made my case, got outvoted, then walked your plan like it was mine... That’s the deal. Our ideals... mine, Nora’s, big sis’s, Nia’s and Mr. Norton’s... and even yours, everything we believe in... get to lose standing up fair and square. That’s the one thing they must get."
His voice held level the entire way through, and that level pressed down harder than any roar he could’ve ever produced.
"You didn’t even let us lose, Nikki."
I closed my eyes.
"And don’t tell me it was a field call," Leo went on, before I could reach for it, because of course he’d already walked that argument alone at some fence at three in the morning. "A letter isn’t a field, big bro... A letter’s just you, alone in a room, making a call that wasn’t yours to make, according to the rule book you made."
The field-authority defense sat right there in my drawer, technically true and completely hollow, and I left it where it was.
"You’re right... It was exactly that." I said.
"Then next time, I lose to your face... Before. Not after."
"You will."
"Good."
I thought that was the end of his piece, and my lungs had already started refilling, when his voice came back one register lower.
"One more thing... For the record."
The fire popped again behind him.
"When I got to the part about the river... the first thing I did, before anything else, was check which way it ran... and when I realized west won’t be affected by it... I was relieved. Good thing, I thought, the river goes south..."
Nobody on either end put a single word into that.
"I checked ours before I grieved theirs," Leo said, flat, laying it down slow. "So I’m not standing on some pedestal shouting down at you, Nikki... I’m standing close enough to smell it. I’m just not wading through it like you..."
-Kzzzt-!
"The rest of this happens when you get here... Face to face. Not through a radio..."
"...Deal." I nodded.
Footsteps crossed their end then, footsteps that had stopped halfway to somewhere else earlier and now came back, and Kara took the mic.
"Before I say what I came back to say... everyone should hear what I did that night."
"Kara-"
"I made them leave."
She said it plainly, and then she kept going.
"Nobody wanted to... Nora fought me on the roof, actual fighting, both fists in my jacket... and Mr. Norton stood outside the sick bay door for ten minutes crying, and I’m the one who had to say it out loud, to his face, that the letter was the last order of a man who’d earned one and then dragged him by the collar... Then I climbed down that rope in the dark behind the three of them, and we drove west, and I’ve been carrying every meter of that drive for five days, Nikki."
My throat closed around nothing while she took one breath and kept rolling.
"So hear this part properly... That night, before you left. I held you because you were coming apart in my arms and there was nothing else in the whole world to do about it... That was for you. It was never agreement... Taking the letter was never agreement. I need you to know that none of it, not the soup, not any of it, meant yes."
-Kzzzt-!
"So... No more letters." Her voice stayed quiet and completely loaded. "No more deciding alone and mailing us about it afterward... And I know, alright, I know I don’t get to forbid you anything, you’re you... I’m forbidding it anyway. Whatever comes next, you bring it to us alive, in your own voice, while the rest of us can still matter."
"It won’t happen again," I said, and then everything I’d lined up leaned over sideways, so I pushed through the wreckage of it out loud. "Look, I’ve... I’ve been building this one since morning, so let me get it out in one piece. Anything that size goes to a vote from now on... Even when I already know how the vote ends... especially then, actually, because those are apparently the ones I can’t be trusted alone with. Point is... you’ll hear it from my own mouth while it’s still a question... No more paper."
And then, for the first time since Leo said the word letter, Nora spoke, small and thick and steady.
"Say it properly."
So I keyed the mic and said it properly, for the record, to all of them.
"No more letters... Next time, we vote."
"Good," Leo said.
"Good," Kara said, softer.
Nora said nothing else at all, and that silence had been her whole testimony, start to finish, and it sat on my chest with its full weight.
The mic moved one last time after that, and their whole room went quiet around whoever was taking it, while beside me Nia straightened in the operator’s chair with her eyes locked on the speaker with her good hand curling closed in her lap.
"Nikki." A gravely voice spoke.
"Sir."
"I closed the door on my own daughter," Mr. Norton said, level and deliberate, every word decided in advance. "I clipped myself to a rope and went over a street full of those things, and I went west... because your letter told me the mathematics were sound. And they were... That is the terrible part, son. They were sound."
-Kzzzt-!
"Thirty years in trauma bays... I have made every hard call that trade required of me, but never once one like that. So I am saying this plainly, with everyone as witness... You will never ask it of me again. Ever. Whatever comes."
"Never... You have my word."
"Good."
A long breath moved down the line, and when his voice came back, the grip on it had eased by one notch.
"She told us what she remembers of that night... Being furious at the air itself. Tikki ramming her shin in the dark, over and over, herding her through her own home." The words caught, and he restarted them slower. "My daughter was already leaving when she put that needle into her own leg... Alone. One working hand... And you were face-down two steps away, because you crossed a city on a broken body to put it inside her reach."
Beside me, Nia’s eyes had gone glassy as she leaned into the desk and found a dial to be extremely busy with, so I studied the dark glass above the set and let her have it, same arrangement as always, two lifetimes running.
"You have given her back to me twice now... Once from a cell. Once from that. So... Thank you. It is insufficient... It is also everything I have."
"She saved herself, sir... I just left the medicine lying around. Your daughter did the last two meters alone, mid-turn, one-handed... You should be insufferable about her."
"I am... I intend to get worse."
A small wet laugh broke somewhere behind him that could only have been Nora, and the channel breathed, both ends of it at once, seventy kilometers of cold air letting go of five held days.
And into all that loosened warm quiet, gently, in the voice she keeps for questions she’s scared of, Kara set it down.
"...Now that everyone’s still breathing."
The static thinned as though the channel itself sat up while Kara continued.
"Nikki, twenty-five days then she needs the next dose... We’ve all spent five days walking around it, so I’m saying it out loud. A hundred and fifty million in the next twenty-five days... What’s your play?"
Nobody answered, and their end gave me its silence in sounds instead of words, the fire popping, a chair creaking under weight coming forward, one long slow breath through a nose...
While beside me, Nia leaned out of the operator’s chair with her elbow on her knee and her eyes on mine, green and steady and completely dry, a woman with a receipt walking around in her bloodstream, waiting to hear which road we were taking so she could start walking it.
Under it all, I took a deep breath and keyed the mic.