Gears of War: Jacinto’s Remnant (9 page)

“Look, I’m passing this on because I promised I would,” Marcus said. “Dad says Maria can stay at the estate anytime. He’s worried about her being here alone. He’ll hire someone to keep her company. And he’s got access to all the top doctors.” Marcus stopped dead. The quiet embarrassment on his face said that he knew his father meant well, but that Dom’s answer would be no. “Sorry, Dom. You know my father. He thinks science can fix anything.”

Dom looked away and found the pan of rice suddenly of great interest. Gestures like that choked him up instantly. The Fenix family estate was a huge empty mausoleum of a place, intimidating and magnificent, and Adam Fenix was a bit too much like his home, a man with no idea how to be anything other than distant and focused on his work. But there was a kind father in there trying to get out, desperate to do the right thing; he just didn’t seem sure how regular people showed that they cared.

“That’s really,
really
generous, Marcus.” Dom felt his voice cracking. “Your dad’s a good man. Tell him thanks, but Maria needs to be
here
. You know. The bedrooms are …”

He didn’t finish the sentence. The word was
shrines
. Dom understood that completely, but it still freaked him out. He’d done it himself. He didn’t want to touch his father’s workshop; he could still see them all in it, tinkering with some engine—Carlos, Marcus, Dad, Mom wandering in with sandwiches. But he walked away from it, because that was how you made yourself accept that they were never coming back. Maria walked into the kitchen and gave Marcus a big deliberate smile, but her eyes were dead. As always, though, she looked beautiful—perfectly groomed, hair immaculate, full makeup. That gave Dom hope that she’d mend, because she hadn’t let herself go. Shit, it was just over a year; how could anyone finish grieving in that time? He was expecting too much. But he just wanted to see her pain stop.

And then I’ll have nothing left to do but look at my own
.

“Have you seen your dad?”

Maria’s voice sounded hoarse and thick. She had a habit of plunging straight into topics now, as if she’d been having a conversation in her head that had just leaked out. Marcus accepted a peck on the cheek from her, blinking as if he’d noticed.

“I haven’t seen him since I got back,” he said. “He’s pretty busy.”

“You’ve got to spend time with him.” Maria took firm hold of Marcus’s hand. “Promise me.”

“I’ll see him.” Marcus nodded, looking embarrassed. “I promise.”

“Come on, sit down, both of you,” Dom said, shepherding them toward the living room. It had to be her medication. She seemed much more spacey today. “Let’s have a drink while the dinner’s cooking.”

It was good wine. Dom didn’t know much about vintages, but the Fenix family was rich,
seriously
rich, and this stuff was twenty-six years old—older than him. Whatever it was, it had cost a fortune; the chicken was swimming in something that had probably cost a week’s wages. But with rationing, money was ceasing to mean much. The chicken was a rare treat, not because he couldn’t afford it on a Gear’s pay—shit, they were getting paid on time, even now—but because the Locust had trashed farms and food factories, disrupted freight traffic, all the little invisible things that put food on the table of a big capital city.

“Animals,” Dom said, holding the glass up to the light while he racked his brains for another neutral topic of conversation. The wine looked more brick-red than ruby. Marcus always said that showed it had bottle age.

“Animals are smarter than us. We get a power outage or some factory gets blown up, and we fall apart. We need so much
stuff
. Animals—they just get up in the morning, find food, and carry on. No piped water supply—we drown in our own sewage, but animals just stay
clean
. If they’ve got white fur, it
stays
white. Imagine the state we’d be in if
we
had white fur.”

Marcus looked as if he was going to say something, but just did a slow blink and nodded. He’d stopped himself at the last moment. Whatever it was he’d been planning to say, it probably had the word
death
or
kill
in it, and he never used either in front of Maria. It was one of those little silent clues that told Dom what really went on in Marcus’s head.

“That’s what shaving’s for,” Marcus said at last.

“You okay, honey ?” Dom topped up Maria’s glass. She was looking distinctly distant now. “You didn’t get much sleep last night.”

“I remembered to take my pills.” The doctor had prescribed antidepressants. “I’ve got to go out later. Just a nap, and then I’ll go out. I go out every day when you’re not here. I have to.”

Dom didn’t have a clue what she was talking about, and hoped it was the medication talking. He wasn’t sure if she felt hemmed in by this house and its memories and needed a break from the four walls, or if she just went for a walk to stretch her legs.

“Yeah, you’re too sleepy to go out now.” He stroked her hair. “Maybe the doc needs to look at your dose again.”

“Have a nap if you feel like it,” Marcus said. “You don’t have to entertain me. We’ll wake you up when dinner’s ready.”

Maria leaned back in the chair and fell asleep in minutes. Dom crept over to her to check, listening to her breathing; yes, she was definitely out of it.

Marcus got up slowly and gestured to the kitchen.

“It’s just a year,” Dom said, closing the door behind him. “I’m pushing her too fast.”

“Anything I can do. Just say.”

“Yeah.”

“And stop blaming yourself.”

“She’s the one with the blame problem. She’s still saying that if she hadn’t sent the kids to her folks’ for the day, they’d be alive now. She thinks she let the grubs get them.”

“Shit, Dom …” It wasn’t as if Marcus hadn’t heard it before. But it always seemed to upset him to be reminded of it, and he looked as if he was about to offer some insight. “Ah, forget it. Explaining to someone why they’re not to blame doesn’t actually help. They have to work it out for themselves.”

Dom assumed it was all about Marcus’s mother. When she went missing, he was sure that Marcus felt responsible, in that weird way that anxious kids often did.

“I need you to see something,” Dom said. “I feel bad showing you, but I have to show someone.” He beckoned Marcus to follow him, and led him upstairs to the bedrooms. “I don’t even know why I’m doing this, but…

maybe it’ll make more sense to you next time I come out with some crazy shit or other.”

Dom opened the door of Sylvia’s room. Marcus just peered inside, going no further than the doorway.
So it hits him that way, too
.

Nothing had been changed since the day that Sylvia—two years old, born the night Dom had taken part in the raid on Aspho Point—had been collected by her grandparents for a day out. Her stuffed toys were still on the windowsill, minus the green striped caterpillar she insisted on taking everywhere. All her bedding, the clothes in the drawers, even the clothes in the laundry basket hadn’t been moved. Maria just cleaned around it all.

Marcus drew a deep breath and stepped back. He might have said
shit
to himself. Dom wanted him to understand what haunted him when he tried to sleep. If Marcus couldn’t make sense of it, then nobody could. Dom shut the door and then opened Benedicto’s room.

Marcus leaned against the door frame as if he expected the paint to be wet, and just scanned the room again, halted at that invisible barrier. It was hard not to follow his eyes; they were almost unnaturally pale blue, so they always drew Dom’s focus. Marcus started blinking a lot. Even if he’d been the chatty kind, he probably wouldn’t have had much to say about this. He drew back after a minute or so and wandered across to the window on the landing.

If he was anything like Dom, then it would have been the tiny pair of thrashball boots on the bed that finished him off.

“Yeah, I just can’t go in there,” Dom said. “Not even Bennie’s room. Maria spends hours in one room or the other. Now, is it me who’s nuts for not being able to go in, or her for not being able to get rid of it all?”

Life had to go on, war or no war, and Maria’s folks wanted as much time with the kids as possible. Bennie—

four, Dom’s heart and soul—had been really excited about seeing their new apartment. They had a cat, a stray that had shown up out of nowhere, and Bennie wanted to play with it.

“Nobody’s nuts,” Marcus said. “Everyone finds their own way of coping.”

“I shouldn’t lay all this shit on you.”

“It’s okay.”

Marcus could usually make Dom feel that things really were okay, but some situations were beyond that. They went back to the kitchen, listened to the radio news channel in silence, and then served dinner, all three of them somehow managing to keep up the illusion of enjoying the event. Maria seemed a little brighter. No, it wasn’t an illusion. It was an affirmation. Dom had to see it that way. He believed that if he tried hard enough, if the state put enough effort into it, then the war would end and life could begin to get back to normal, even if it took five years—ten, maybe. But it would come.

He just didn’t know what it was going to take to turn the tide.

Marcus kept taking a discreet look at his watch, probably trying to work out the best time to call his father. He might even have been working up to it. He never seemed to find it easy to talk to him. Maria picked up the phone from the sideboard and set it down in front of Marcus. “Nobody’s too busy to want to hear from their own son.” Then she started clearing the table.

It was the first time she’d said anything like that in a normal tone—even the word
son—
since E -Day. Dom followed her into the kitchen while Marcus called his dad.

“You okay, baby?”

“He’s got to talk to his dad. They shouldn’t be apart this much.”

So that was starting to get to her: separation, not letting kids get too far from you. “We’ll get through this, I promise.”

“You never give in. That’s what I love about you. You never quit.”

Dom seized the briefest change of mood and clarity. This was how recovery started, the doctor said. “I’d never give up on you.” He took her hand out of the dishes and wiped away the soapsuds. “I need to get you another ring, don’t I?”

Maria’s hands had swollen so much when she was pregnant that she’d had to have her wedding band cut off. She hadn’t worn a ring since. It made Dom feel uneasy, because a guy’s wife
had
to have a nice ring, a symbol that someone loved her more than anything.

She touched the pendant he’d given her. “I’ve got this, Dom. I’ll wear it until the day I die.”

“Yeah, but—”

“What have
you
got? You don’t have a ring.” It was true; rings snagged inside his gloves, and they were a real hazard when handling cables and machinery. “You’ve got to have something. I’ve never given you something to keep with you. We’ve got to have something so that we’re
together.”

She wiped her hands and started looking through the kitchen drawers where most of the household paperwork ended up. Eventually she pulled out a photograph and grabbed a pen.

“Here.” She wrote something on the back of the photo and handed it to him. “Remember this?”

It was a picture that Carlos had taken of them in a bar off Embry Square, just before Dom began commando training. Dom turned over the photo to read what she’d written.

“So you’ll always have me with you,” she said. “Don’t let me go. Keep it in your pocket. Please.”

“You know I will.”

When he put his arms around her these days, he felt as if she was clinging to him for safety. There was nothing harder than picking up his holdall and leaving her behind. He was determined to cherish every minute of the leave he had left, even if it meant stopping her from sitting in those dead, frozen bedrooms.

“He’s busy.”

Marcus’s voice made Dom jump. “Your dad …”

“He got a call to see the man.” Marcus shrugged. He’d put his I-don’t-really-care face on. “His secretary at the uni said she didn’t know when he’d be back. Can’t say no to Prescott.”

“Sorry, Marcus.”

“Hey, got to go. I’ll pick you up when it’s time to ship out, Dom. Take care of yourself, Maria.”

And Marcus was gone, just like that: no hugs, no gradually edging toward the door, just a clear signal that he was going, and he never looked back. He wasn’t keen on goodbyes.

Was anybody these days? Goodbyes had a habit of being permanent. The worst thing, Dom decided, was that he could remember none of his.

CHAIRMAN’S OFFICE, HOUSE OF THE SOVEREIGNS.

All politicians were assholes, but at least Prescott cut the crap and said what was on his mind. Hoffman could find something in that to admire. How long would it last, though ? The idealistic and the outspoken all got ground flat in the end—not that some of them had far to go.
Adam Fenix was supposed to be here
.

And Prescott wants me here because …

The last time Hoffman had been summoned to this level of meeting with Fenix present, he’d been tasked with sabotaging a weapon of mass destruction. The damn grubs must have come up with a new toy. It wasn’t as if they needed it. Maybe they were just getting bored with having to gut every human by hand, and they wanted the planet to themselves sooner rather than later.

“Attorney General,” Prescott said, “what are my options under the Fortification Act?”

The AG, Milon Audley, was past retirement age and looked like he’d seen it all before. “You may use it to declare martial law in part or all of the COG territories. Normally, the vote is carried even if—”

“No voting.” Prescott faced them across a table, not lounging behind his desk or staring out the window as if they were incidental to his plans. “I have the authority to declare martial law without consulting the assembly, haven’t I?”