Page 2 of Ashes & Aether

“Enough.”

Everyone goes still while Pike decides whether I’m amusing or insolent. Finally, he leans back.

“Give me one.”

I take a slow breath. “There’s a pharmaceutical depot outside Enfield. Unit fourteen. Unit twelve was on the emergency register, but unit fourteen was used for overflow.”

Pike raises an eyebrow. “What’s in it?”

“Insulin, antibiotics, steroids, and morphine,” I reply. “Unless someone reached it first.”

His smile disappears. “And you know this how?”

“I read the spreadsheet.”

“Where is it?”

I tap my temple.

Pike’s gaze moves over me with more interest. I’m thirty-four, wearing dirty clothes, my hair hasn’t been styled in months, and my nails are chipped. Whatever Pike usually desires from women, I don’t seem to inspire his appetite. Thankfully.

“If you’re lying, I’ll feed you to the aliens,” he says after a moment.

“I’m not.”

I’ll wager Pike is used to pleading. He probably sees the lack of it as courage. But I’m not brave. I just feel like we’ve all been dead since the first spaceship dropped down from the sky, and we’re just on borrowed time.

Pike sends six men to Enfield. Five return with the medicine, the sixth doesn’t make it. Pike gives me a room, a ration card, and a position with no name. It takes me less than a week to find out which guards sell information, which of his stores are being emptied too quickly, and which of his commanders can’t count without moving his lips.

At dinner, the guard who normally checks Pike’s drink is missing with a fever that may or may not be an infection. No one volunteers to take his place. Pike looks down the table, and everyone finds a reason to look elsewhere.

I lift his glass, smell the wine, and take a small sip before putting it down in front of him. Cheap Bordeaux. Safe enough, unless you have sensitive taste buds.

The man sitting to my left is looking at me with his eyes bugged out.

“Be the person who tastes wine first,” I tell him. “No one kills the taster.”

Pike laughs and drinks.

Just like that, I’m in. Now I’m allowed into locked rooms, around conversations few get to hear. I listen, I remember, and I make myself useful to Pike, then to the men he calls rivals, but treats like colleagues when ammunition is low.

Now I know all five. I know what they want. Gareth Pike wants fear, Edwin Vaughn wants luxury, Anthony Hargreaves wants gratitude, Michael Rook wants safety, and Duncan Morgan wants obedience.

I start a list.

By month seventeen, people have stopped asking who appointed me. Pike thinks I work for him, Vaughn thinks I report on Pike, Hargreaves believes I am grateful for his protection, Rook believes he’s frightened me into honesty, and Morgan thinks my knowledge makes him safer. They’re all right often enough that I’m kept comfortable.

I move between their territories with letters of passage bearing all five seals, negotiating exchanges of fuel, medicine, prisoners, and soldiers. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between the latter two. I don’t have my own soldiers, don’t carry heavy guns, don’t own any buildings, and sleep in whichever compound needs me next. Each man trusts me because I have no apparent wants other than survival.

I become the person they summon when lorries disappear. I know which roads flood, which bridges are still intact. When a water filtration plant fails, I find chlorine and convince both men involved that it was their idea. People start calling me Secretary, though no one defines the secretary of what.

The title gets me a chair at negotiations. I remember who promised grain, who received morphine, who diverted a shipment before it arrived. The men with rifles argue over maps they can’t read, and I tell them where their own borders are.

It’s not noble work. A ration agreement feeds one compound by starving the other, and medicine goes to soldiers instead of children. Soldiers have guns. Children do not.

Winter kills nearly as many people as the aliens, but I stay indoors. Each compound has its own rules. At Pike’s, I’m allowed below the compound because I know where all the electrical cables run. At Hargreaves’ I account for every vial of medicine. Rook gives me access codes because he changes them too often to remember. Morgan lets me write the duty rotations after three soldiers fell asleep on watch right before an attack.

I accumulate access in tiny pieces. A key there, a schedule here, a forgotten password memorized. No one notices.