After the Rain | Page 3

something dead or something deadly.
She ran as fast as she could across the street, pounding hell for leather
to her front 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.