Anniversary Day (6 page)

Not that he was so fond of election season any longer. Something he never thought he’d admit to anyone, particularly himself. He used to love running for office, the glad-handing, talking to the voters. Hell, he even liked manipulating the media while they manipulated him right back.

But he’d been mayor for six years now, and it looked the job was his for life if he wanted it, thanks to the political machine he’d installed throughout Armstrong. That meant elections weren’t that much of a challenge any more. Even the fundraisers had become pro forma—the mayor shows up, the mayor asks for money, people donate money, the mayor passes the money to the proper candidate, and the proper candidate wins. End of story.

He used to love the challenge of politics, but politics would not be a challenge again unless he ran for Governor-General of the Moon—and that particular title held less actual power than his position did. He could have more of an impact as mayor of Armstrong on everything from Moon politics to Earth Alliance regulations because he controlled the largest port on the Moon, not to mention the largest city here, the most cosmopolitan city outside of Earth.

Eventually, everyone came through Armstrong—usually on their way somewhere else, but they came through. And stopped. And spent money. And got a little taste of the city.

His city.

And the first thing they saw when they left the arrival terminal in the Port? A floating sign with his image, saying that Mayor Arek Soseki welcomed them.

People remembered that.

They remembered him.

And he hoped they didn’t remember that he had been mayor during the bombing. He saw Anniversary Day as the anniversary of the greatest failure in his career. To date, no one had caught the bomber.

The Chief of Security for the Moon, Noelle DeRicci, thought that a suicide bomber had set off that bomb. Even if DeRicci, who had gotten her job as a result of her performance during and after that bombing, was right, it made no difference. While the officials of the City of Armstrong thought they knew who was behind the bombing, they weren’t certain.

And certainty mattered, particularly in cases of terrorist attacks.

Soseki shook off the thought, made himself focus on the crowd, which watched him with rapt attention. How could they be interested when he didn’t give a damn? He had become very good at faking enthusiasm, which also disturbed him. A part of him was still idealistic enough to believe that he should care about all aspects of his job, even the distasteful ones.

Like fundraising.

He was helping corporations buy his councilors, and he didn’t care so long as those same corporations dumped money into the city. Not as much money as some of the cities on the moons of Jupiter—cities owned outright by Aleyd or Fortion or other corporations—but enough to keep Armstrong in the black for a decade or two.

As long as he was mayor, he wanted Armstrong to remain one of the greatest cities in the solar system. Hell, if he had his way, it would become
the
greatest city. Maybe it didn’t have the history of Paris, Dubai, or New York, but history wasn’t everything.

Commerce was.

And that was the theme of this speech.

The theme of every speech this week, really. Every speech this year.

He really didn’t remember half the things he said here, but the crowd was clapping, people were buttonholing him, and he was posing for vids and pictures, glad-handing, like he had done since he ran for head of his neighborhood association at the ripe old age of sixteen.

And finally, it was done. His invaluable assistant, the dapper Hans Londran, put his small frame between Soseki and the last of his admirers, saying some nonsense about the mayor being tired.

Soseki wasn’t tired, at least not physically. He was just tired of the constant talk about nothing.

He let Londran and the security guards flank him as they headed out of the back room into the restaurant proper. This was on Soseki’s orders. Most politicians snuck in and out of venues like common criminals. Soseki went through the restaurant, grinned at the patrons, shook a hand or two, and then waved as he headed out the front to the limo, paid for by the city, and always at his disposal.

He ran a finger over his palms, making sure his chips were protected and the SkinSoft covering he wore wasn’t bunched up. People wanted to think they were shaking his actual hand, not touching some kind of pseudoskin covering that protected him from everything from germs to rapid-acting, touch-sensitive poison.

The door opened, he smiled, and patrons at white-cloth-covered tables started shouting his name.

This part of his job never got old. He shook hands, grinned, greeted a handful of people he knew, and bustled out the door in a blaze of lights. The limo had touched down on the sidewalk—the only non-emergency vehicle in Armstrong that could—and one of his guards opened the door for him.

He was almost there when a hand brushed his sleeve.

“Mr. Mayor?”

He turned but didn’t see anyone except Londran and the guards, all frowning at him.

“Mr. Mayor?”

That wasn’t a stranger’s voice. That was Londran’s and he looked concerned. Why would anyone look concerned, especially after the meeting had gone well, the money donated was within expectations?

“Mr. Mayor?”

Then he realized what was going on. He hadn’t moved from the entrance to the restaurant even though he thought he was walking across the sidewalk. He should have been to the limo by now. He should have slid inside. He should be careening through Armstrong’s streets, heading to the next meeting, working on the next crisis.

But he wasn’t.

And he wasn’t even sure if Londran was repeating himself or if the phrase had been caught in a loop in his own mind. He should have answered by now. He should have asked, “What?”

He usually asked “What?” when Londran used that tone. But Soseki couldn’t move his mouth or his legs. And his arm ached.

No. It didn’t ache. It was cold. He was cold. Chilled, like he hadn’t been since that conference of Earth Alliance mayors held in, of all places, Alaska in the winter.

The chill was moving from his arm, down his chest, reaching for his heart. And, for the first time that day, for the first time in weeks—no, years—he actually felt afraid.

That chill didn’t dare reach his heart.

Because when it did, his heart would shatter. He would shatter.

And everything would stop.

Ten

Miles Flint pulled his aircar into the protected underground parking facility beside the Armstrong Wing of the Aristotle Academy. His daughter Talia sat beside him, arms crossed, staring out the window as if she was seeing something new.

Of course she wasn’t. They drove into this parking structure every single morning. It was the protected part of the Academy’s parking, for VIPs and others who wanted the highest level of security for their children.

Flint’s car had the six different kinds of identification the Academy required, and he still had to stop one floor down from ground level to show the palm of his hand, letting one of the identification devices read the chips embedded in his skin and his DNA. Talia also had to stick her hand out of her window and let the system examine her.

She hated it, but she had done it.

Which led Flint to believe she wanted to go to school this morning more than she was admitting.

Even though they were already an hour late. Talia claimed illness at first, and then when Flint threatened to run a diagnostic, she backed off her claim. Just said she didn’t feel up to it.

When he pushed, she stopped talking to him altogether, something she hadn’t done in a while. When he first brought Talia to Armstrong, she had resisted school more than anything else.

It turned out that her mother had enrolled her in an accelerated school in Valhalla Basin. Talia had found the public schools in Armstrong easy. She hadn’t been challenged, and Talia needed to be challenged.

So Flint enrolled her in Aristotle Academy, the best school on the Moon, and certainly the best system of schools in the Earth Alliance. Out of the more than two hundred Aristotle Academies scattered throughout the system, the Armstrong Wing had been consistently rated in the top five, and often held first place. After a few weeks, Talia’s complaints about going to school vanished.

Until this morning.

“It’s just stupid,” Talia said as Flint pulled the car to the parking area near the underground entrance.

Those were the first words she had spoken since he told her she was going to school no matter what. She had flounced around, gathering her things, glaring at him, and stomped to the car.

He had done a lot of research on raising a teenager since Talia came into his life, but he was still surprised when that research was right. Sometimes Talia was just plain difficult, for no reason that he could see.

“What’s stupid?” Flint asked.

“Anniversary Day,” Talia said. “They’re going to make us listen to dumb speeches, and then everyone’s going to talk about what they did on Anniversary Day, and how they cried or how they knew someone who got hurt or how they were scared when the Dome sections came down. It’s stupid.”

Flint did his best not to nod or mutter
ahhhh
, although he was tempted. So that was what bothered his daughter about school. Four years ago, she had been living happily with her mother, believing the lies her mother had told her.

Four years ago, Talia had been a normal (if unbelievably bright) child, living with her divorced mother, in the house she had grown up in. Now Talia’s mother was dead, and the day she vanished, Talia learned that not only had her mother lied to her about almost everything, Talia wasn’t who she thought she was either.

She was a clone of the child that her mother had had with Flint. And Flint hadn’t abandoned them like her mother had told Talia. He hadn’t even known about Talia.

Clones had no respect in the Earth Alliance. They weren’t even considered human without proper legislation. When Flint found Talia, he had gone through all the procedures to make her his child under the law—his
human
child.

Still, neither he nor Talia told anyone she was a clone, and they almost never told anyone about her past.

“Are you supposed to participate?” Flint asked.

Talia still stared out the window, but she nodded.

Flint had hunch she didn’t want him to see the emotion on her face. She hated seeming weak to anyone, which he would have said was something she got from him, except that he hadn’t been around her in her formative years.

He waited for her to tell him more and when she didn’t, he let out a small sigh. The problem was exactly what he thought it was: she didn’t want to talk about her past. Not just because she didn’t want her classmates to know about it, but because she was still ambivalent about the memories it brought up.

She really didn’t know if she should acknowledge how much she missed that life, considering it was based on a lie. And she didn’t want to acknowledge how much she loved her mother, considering what a horrible person her mother had turned out to be.

“Just tell them about Valhalla Basin,” Flint said. “Be brief and don’t talk about much more than school there.”

“I don’t want to,” Talia said with great venom.

“Then pass,” Flint said. “Don’t participate.”

“If I do that, I’ll fail. It’ll have a huge impact on my grade.”

So it was easier to be sick. He wished he had known that before checking her in. She had taken a smart way out.

“Then fail,” Flint said, a little reluctantly. He wanted her to do well at school, but not at the expense of her own identity.

She looked at him. Her eyelashes were wet and stuck together, but that was the only evidence of tears on her face.

“But Daddy,” she said, and his heart lifted. She almost never called him that. “It’ll ruin my grade.”

“I know,” he said. “That’s okay.”

She looked at him, then frowned, clearly working over the angles in her mind. “Can you give me something that says you don’t want me to participate?”

“No,” he said, almost without thinking about it. “This has to be your decision.”

“Why?” Her voice went up slightly.

“You’re going to spend your whole life choosing when to tell people who you are and when to keep that information to yourself. You’re supposed to learn things in school. This seems to me like a valuable lesson.”

“You take all the fun out of things,” she said.

He shrugged a shoulder and let himself smile. “That’s my job.”

She leaned over, kissed his cheek, and got out of the car. “Thanks, Dad,” she said as she slammed the door shut.

Then she ran in front of the vehicle to the side door. She put her palm on the entrance, and the doors slid open. She stepped into the school and the doors closed behind her.

He sat there for a minute, feeling a little stunned. Of course, he always felt a little stunned at this parenting stuff. It seemed so easy from the outside and from the inside, it was fraught with tiny but important decisions.

On this day, he made his daughter happy and he got her to school. He supposed it couldn’t get better than that.

He sighed and headed out of the parking area. He wasn’t sure what he’d do today either. He hated Anniversary Day as well, but for different reasons. He wasn’t a celebration kinda guy. Not that this was a celebration, exactly. It was more of an acknowledgement.