After the Rain | Page 5

the siege began, Valentine's mother came home in tears.
"What is it, Mata?" Valentine said, as soon as her mother came through the door. "Are you hurt?" Her mother had come home hurt more than once in the month, bandaged or splinted or covered in burn ointment or hacking at some deep chemical irritation in her throat and nose and lungs.
Her mother's eyes were swollen, as they had been the day she'd been caught by the gas and they'd had to do emergency robot field-surgery on them. But there were no sutures. Tears had swollen her eyes.
"New trenchbuster missiles on the eastern front," she said. "The anti-missiles are too slow for them." She sobbed, a terrible terrifying sound that Valentine had never heard from her mother. "The bastards are trading with the EU and the Americans for better weapons, they say they're on the same side, they say we are lawless thieves who deprive them all of their royalties -- "
Valentine had heard that the Americans and the EU had declared for the other side, while the Russians and the Koreans and the Brazilians had declared for the city. The war gossip was everywhere. The old people didn't pinch her cheeks when she brought water, not anymore -- they told her about the war and the enemies who'd come to drive them back into the dark ages.
"Mata, are you hurt?" Her mother was covering her face with her hands and sobbing so loudly it drowned out the tantrum Trover threw every night the second she came through the door.
Her shoulders shook. She gulped her sobs. Then she lowered her wet, snotty, sticky hands and wiped them on the thighs of her jumpsuit. She hugged Valentine so hard Valentine felt her skinny ribs creak.
"They killed your father, Vale," she said. "Your father is dead."
Valentine stood numb for a moment, then pulled free of her mother's hug.
"No," she said, calmly. "Popa is digging away from the front, where it's safe." She'd expected that her mother would die, not her father. She'd known that all along, since her mother stepped out the door of the flat talking of heroism. Known it fatalistically and never dwelt on it, never even admitted it. In her mind, though, she'd always seen a future where her father and Trover and she lived together as heroes of this war, which would surely be over soon, and visited her mother's memorial four times a year, the way they did the memorials for the comrade heroes who'd been martyred in the revolution.
The death toll was gigantic. Three apartment buildings had disappeared on her street, with no air raid warning, no warning of any kind. All dead. Why should her brave mother live on?
"No," she said again. "You're mistaken."
"I saw the body!" her mother said, shrieking like Trover. "I held his head! He is dead, Vale!"
Valentine didn't understand what her mother was saying, but she certainly didn't want to hang around the flat and listen to this raving.
She turned on her heel and walked out of the flat. It was full dark out and there was snow on the ground and wet snow whipping along in the wind and she didn't have her too-small winter coat on, but she wasn't going to stay and listen to her mother's nonsense.
On the corner a man from the city said she was breaking curfew and told her to go home, or she'd end up getting herself shot. She shivered and glared at him and ignored him and set off in a random direction. She certainly wasn't going to stand on that corner and listen to his lunacy.
There were soldiers drinking in a cellar on another street, and they called out to her, and what they said wasn't the kind of thing you said to a little girl, though she knew well enough what it meant. Now she was cold and soaked through and shivering uncontrollably, and she didn't know where she was, and her father was --
She began to run.
Someone from the city shouted at her to stop, and so she pelted through the ruins of a bombed building and then down one of the old streets from before the revolution, one of the streets they hadn't yet straightened out and rebuilt. The enemy hadn't bombed it yet, and she wondered if that was because this was the kind of dark and broken and smelly street they wanted the city to be returned to, so they'd left it untouched as an example of what the defenders should be working towards if they wanted to escape with their lives.
Down the street she ran, and then down an alley and another street. She stopped running when she came to a dead-end and her chest heaved. Running had warmed her up a little, but she hadn't had much