After the Rain | Page 3

door. Just as she reached for it, there was a much louder thunderclap, one that lifted her off her feet and tossed her into the air, spinning her around. As she spun around and around, she saw the brave red dome of the cine disintegrate, crumble to a million shards that began to rain down on the street. Then the boom dropped her hard on the pavement and she saw no more.
#
The day after the siege began, the doctor fitted Valentine for her hearing aid and told her to come back in ten years for a battery change. She hardly felt it slide under her skin but once it was there, the funny underwatery sound of everything and everyone turned back into bright sound, as sharp as the cine's had been.
Now that she could hear, she could speak, and she grabbed Popa's hands. "The cine!" she said. "Oh, Popa, the cine, those poor people! What happened to them?"
"The work crews opened the shelter ten hours later," Popa said. He never sugar-coated anything for her, even though Mata disapproved of talking to her like an adult. "Half of them died from lack of air -- the air re-circulators were damaged by the bomb, and the shelter was air-tight. The rest are in hospital."
She cried. "Leeza -- "
Mata took her hands. "Leeza is fine," she said. "She made sure we told you that."
She cried harder, but smiling this time. Trover was on her mother's hip, and looking like he didn't know whether to stay quiet or pitch one of his famous tantrums. Automatically, Valentine gave him a tickle, which brought a smile that kept him from bursting out in tears.
They left the hospital together and walked home, though it was far. The Metro wasn't running and the air-cars were still grounded. Some of the buildings they passed were nothing but rubble, and there robots and people labored to make sense of them and get them reassembled and back on their feet.
It wasn't until the next day that she found out that Reeta had been killed under the cine. She threw up the porridge she'd had for breakfast and shut herself in her room and cried into her pillow until she fell asleep.
#
Three days after the siege began, Mata went away.
"You can't go!" Popa shouted at her. "Are you crazy? You can't go to the front! You have two small children, woman!" He was red-faced, and his hands were clenching and unclenching. Trover was having a tantrum that was so loud and horrible that Valentine wanted to rip her hearing aids out.
Mata's eyes were red. "Harald, you know I have to do this. It's not the 'front' -- it's our own city. My country needs me -- if I don't help to fight for it, then what will become of our children?"
"You never got over the glory of fighting, did you?" Her father's voice was bitter in a way that she'd never heard before. "You're an addict!"
She held up her left hand and shook it in his face. "An addict! Is that what you think?" Her middle finger and little finger on that hand had never bent properly in all of Valentine's memory, and when Valentine had asked her about it, she'd said the terrible word knucklebreakers which was the old name for the police. "You think I'm addicted to this? Harald, honor and courage and patriotism are virtues, no matter that you would make them into vices and shame our children with your cowardice. I go to fight now, Harald, and it's for all of us."
Popa couldn't find another word to speak in the two seconds it took for Mata to give her two children hard kisses on the foreheads and slam out the door, and then it was Valentine and Popa and Trover, still screaming. Her father fisted the tears out of his eyes, not bothering to try to hide them, and said, "Well then, who wants pancakes?"
But the power was out and he had to make them cereal instead.
#
Two weeks after the siege began, her mother didn't come home, and the city came for her father.
"Every adult, comrade, every adult fights for the city."
"My children -- " he sputtered. Mata hadn't been home all night, and it wasn't the first time. She and Popa barely spoke anymore.
"Your girl there is big enough to look after herself, aren't you, honey?" The woman from the city was short and plump and wore heavy armor and was red in the face from walking up ten flights to get to their flat. The power to the elevators was almost always out.
Valentine hugged her father's leg. "My Popa will fight for the city," she said. "He's a hero."
He was. He'd fought in the revolution, and he'd been given a medal for it. Sometimes when no