reMix

Chapter Twenty-Eight Exit Music

“Madame?”

Lady Clare said nothing, did nothing and kept doing both. She was hoping that if she kept it up for long enough the voice would eventually go away.

It was raining, which wasn’t unusual. Maybe if the roof slates hadn’t been drumming with raindrops the size of pigeons’ eggs, and maybe if the Seine hadn’t once again broken its banks to flood her courtyard, Lady Clare Fabio might have taken notice.

As it was, she rolled over in her vast Third Empire bed and tried to pull the chenille cover up round her ears, protecting herself from the staccato crash of the rain.

“Get up.” The voice that addressed her was insistent. Polite as all sin but irritating in its refusal to let her go back to sleep. Which was a pity, because Lady Clare could practically feel unmetabolized alcohol sloshing around in her veins. And she didn’t need to look at the Courvoisier bottle on the bedside cabinet to know how much she’d drunk. The time lapse in her head between movement and pain told her that.

“Go away,” Clare muttered and pulled up the chenille throw over her head, curling herself up into a foetal ball.

“Madame, you have to get up...”

“There’s no ‘have to’ about it,” said Clare crossly. “You know who I am? I’m the Minister of—”

“I know,” said the voice sadly. “Minister of the Interior, aide to His Highness...” The words trailed away into exasperated silence. Exasperated because he was too polite to state the truth, that she was turning into a prematurely aged, drunken, terrified woman.

Surprised, Lady Clare poked her head over the edge of the covers. There couldn’t be too many men left in Paris who’d bother about being polite to one of the Prince Imperial’s disgraced lackeys.

Because that’s what she was, or would be soon enough. The whole of the Third Empire to protect and she hadn’t even been able to look after her own daughter. No wonder the city was holding its breath, waiting for the Prince Imperial to surrender. Focusing her pale blue eyes, Lady Clare blinked. The guards officer looked twelve, swathed in the folds of a khaki greatcoat.

Neatly cut soft brown hair flopped over a high forehead. He had the snub nose of a Gascon and clear brown eyes. He looked younger than LizAlec, which wasn’t surprising: practically everyone looked younger than LizAlec except her.

“Turn around,” Lady Clare demanded.

The boy looked blank.

“I sleep naked,” Lady Clare announced flatly. “And I may be older than your mother but that’s not the point...”

Stammering an apology, the boy swung about and stared at a point on the far wall, his whole body rigid with embarrassment.

“I’m not offended,” said Lady Clare tiredly, climbing out of bed and looking round for her old Kenzo dressing gown. Giving up the search, Lady Clare pulled the chenille wrap around her shoulders and kicked open the French doors to the balcony of her bedroom, stepping out into the rain and tossing the wrap back inside.

No one could see her. The balcony faced into the courtyard, which was deserted like the rest of the house. Apart from the young guards officer she was the only person there, and he was still staring hard at the wall. Lady Clare didn’t need to look behind her to tell that, she just knew. She recognized him now, from the shuttle launch the other night.

He had one of those wide-open faces and a dog-like innocence in his eyes. He’d throw himself under the hooves of a Black Hundred Cossack if she ordered it and not even know why. And she would do it too, Lady Clare realized with a shudder, she would sacrifice him if she had to.

Rain washed over her, freezing her body. God alone knew what was in the water but she was pretty much certain nanites would be there, tiny and invisible. Not that they could hurt her or the house. She was flesh and blood and nothing but, not a single implant. As for the Hotel Sabatini, the walls were sandstone and the roof was raftered with old oak and covered with dark Brittany slate.

“What’s the hurry?” Lady Clare shouted over her shoulder but could not make out the boy’s muttered answer. “Oh for God’s sake,” she said crossly. “Come here.” She pointed at a spot on the carpet, just inside the room and out of the splashing rain. “Keep your eyes shut if it makes you feel better...”

She wasn’t being fair to him but so what. And anyway, he’d keep his eyes shut, he was the type. Lady Clare shook her head fiercely, drops splashing around her like water from the coat of a spaniel. Lady Clare Fabio smiled and turned to find the boy watching her curiously.

Maybe he wasn’t the type, after all.

“Your coat,” Lady Clare told him, holding out her hand. The cloth was soft, woven in fine wool and lined with Italian silk decorated with baroque flowers, the kind of pattern you found stuccoed to villa walls in Calabria. The boy’s family had money or they’d had it once. The coat’s cut might be military but the quality definitely wasn’t, not even for the guards. It looked one thing, but was really another. Appearance and reality, the hobbled twins. She’d always lived between them both, preferring to hide in the gaps that S3’s demimonde provided.

“So why are you here?” Lady Clare demanded struggling into a small black dress — Dior — one of dozens. Usually she also wore sheer nanopore stockings, not to cover up her skin but just to soft-focus the slight imperfections. But she was out of clean pairs. Actually, she was out of everything except black Dior dresses and matching footwear.

“The Prince Imperial...” The boy stopped and then struggled to start again. Whatever it was he wanted to say, he wasn’t finding saying it easy.

Lady Clare lifted one foot and slipped on a black court shoe. It would be worse than useless within minutes, its wafer-thin leather disintegrated to misshapen rags, but it was what she had...

“Paris,” the boy said hesitantly, approaching the problem from a different direction.

“Paris is falling,” announced Lady Clare, saying the unthinkable for him. “The Third Reich has run out of patience, the press are bored. Half of them have taken a night schooner to England to watch London get washed into the sea. Besides, C3N might have ceramic-cased vids with graphite hard spheres and built-in ComSat capabilities but they’re fuck-all use if lightning storms stop their camerajocks from managing long uploads. If the Reich’s going to take Paris, then it might as well make the push now...”

“Someone gave you the news?” The boy sounded surprised.

“No,” said Lady Clare sadly. “It’s been coming for days.”