After the Rain | Page 5

she decided that he'd had a hard day too. Mata and
Popa weren't home when they got there, so Valentine made dinner --
more cold cereal and some cabbage with leftover dumplings kept cool
in a bag hung out the window -- and then, when they still hadn't
returned by bedtime, Valentine tucked Trover in and then fell asleep
herself.
#
One month after 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