Afterwards, November 2021

Silvia sits yoga-style on her seat, a laptop balanced on her thighs. She has removed her Birkenstocks and set them on the floor beneath her. Hugh is across from her, drinking stale coffee from a paper cup and scrolling through Instagram on his mobile. It is just after four in the morning and, besides the two of them, only a handful of people remain in the waiting room, most slumped in their chairs or asleep on the floor. The lighting overhead is stark and unrelenting, the kind of light that seems not to cast shadows. Depending on where one stands, the walls are either beige or pale yellow, and the seats, arrayed in ranks of four throughout the room, are upholstered in brown vinyl. Everything in the waiting room is some shade of beige or brown: the walls, seats, carpet, doors. Anesthesia colors—to dull the wits of worried people. The wall-mounted television is tuned to an African wildlife show, though the volume is muted. At the nurse’s station, two women in blue scrubs converse quietly, their voices the only sound in the oppressively still room. Suddenly, one of the nurses bursts into laughter; then she appears to catch herself, covering her mouth with her hand. Hugh turns and glares at her; Silvia looks up from her laptop, then reaches over and touches his knee.

Since he arrived at Great Easton Road Hospital, Hugh’s anxiety has vented itself mainly as anger—toward the doctors, the nurses, the two Sikstand officers who showed up to question him, anyone suggesting he calm down or take a seat. He figured out a long time ago that, if he lets his blood sugar run low and focuses his thoughts appropriately, he can become angry instead of anxious. In situations like this where he can’t afford to shut down, it’s a helpful strategy. But it doesn’t endear him to many people.

Earlier tonight, after he hailed a taxi to the hospital, his first call was to Silvia. Her manner was cool at first; but after hearing Maggie had been attacked, she offered to meet Hugh at the emergency room. He knew he didn’t deserve her help, and it felt weak to reach out the way he did. But if having Silvia around would help him advocate for the old man, he’d have called her a thousand times over.

Now, feeling Silvia’s hand on his knee, he turns to her. “We should just go,” he says. “The nurse said he’ll be out all night, and we need to get some sleep, yeah?”

“Okay,” says Silvia. “That’s fine.” She doesn’t look as tired as he feels, just concerned, and unwaveringly vigilant.

“I mean, I wanted to be here if he woke up, you know?”

“Right,” says Silvia, her eyes locked on him.

“But we’re not doing any good just sitting here…”

Silvia edges forward in her seat. “If you feel like you need to stay, we can stay…”

Hugh laughs wearily and shakes his head. “If it were me lying in there, Maggie would’ve gone home by now.”

“You think?”

“Not because he doesn’t care,” Hugh says. “That’s just him, yeah?”

“Right.”

Hugh picks up his mobile. “I’ll get us an Uber. We’ll do two stops.”

“Good, thanks.”

While Silvia packs up her laptop and charger, Hugh orders their ride, then walks to the nurse station to confirm they have his mobile number. On his way back to Silvia’s seat, he drops his paper cup in the rubbish bin.

Outside, the late-November air is refreshingly cool after the stultifying atmosphere of the waiting room. Hugh and Silvia descend the hospital steps to the curb where everything—the sidewalk, the grass, the shrubbery—is frosted pink by the sodium street lamps. Traffic on Great Easton Road is light, the tires of passing cars hissing on the damp asphalt. Stepping into the hush of the pre-dawn city, Hugh finds himself reluctant to speak, as if a word could shatter the quiet like a crystal goblet. They go to the curb; Silvia zips up her fleece while Hugh finds a Gauloises in his pocket. He is about to light it when their car comes into view. As the SUV pulls up, Hugh pockets his cigarette, opens the car door for Silvia, then slips in after her. The driver glances over her shoulder.

“Two stops?” she asks.

“Right. Morton Mews, then West Gursey.”

The driver nods; the car pulls away from the curb.

After they have been underway for a minute or two, Silvia turns to Hugh and asks, as if it is only now appropriate to venture such a question, “Did they say if he’ll be able to paint again?”

Hugh’s expression darkens. “They didn’t say for sure. I guess it depends on whether he gets surgery for all the fractures. It’s possible he could lose some function in the fingers. Either way he’s gonna have a lot of rehab. I’ll know more tomorrow.”

“How unbelievably cruel…” Silvia says. “To do that to an artist.”

Hugh nods somberly and looks out the window.

“Hugh?” Silvia asks after a moment. “You think maybe you should go live somewhere else for a while? Maybe move in with Dory?”

Hugh looks at his lap, then nods.

He remembers Dory telling him that you gotta take this shit seriously, then how a week later, he’d delivered Hugh’s new pistol to the flat. Standing in the kitchen, Dory demonstrated how to load and insert the magazine, chamber a round, line up the sights, and pull the trigger. “Just like that,” he said. “There’s a safety built into the trigger,” he explained, “so you have to pull on it directly for it to go off.” Then he showed how to carry the gun—loaded and cocked, but with the hammer down. “Then all you gotta do is cock the hammer and squeeze.”

When Hugh took the gun in his hand, he felt a shiver run through his entire body, as if the pistol were electrified. He hid the Glock in his bedside table, covering it, for reasons he couldn’t explain at the time, with a blue washcloth. He knew that stashing the gun in a bedroom drawer made it useless for defending himself anywhere but at home, but he wasn’t ready for anything more.

Cock the hammer and squeeze.

All that feels like ancient history now.

“Hugh?” asks Silvia, rousing him from his thoughts.

“Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe I could live with Dory for a while,” he says. “I gotta think it all through.”

She nods without taking her eyes off him.

The Uber is now turning onto the V4, accelerating as it merges into traffic. Cool air rushes in the open window. As they head north through the ragged neighborhoods of Oskin, Hugh stares out at the store fronts and their security doors spray-painted over with graffiti. Now Silvia turns toward him, the light of passing cars reflected in her eyes. “You said back at the hospital you’re pretty sure Propago did this…”

“Yeah…”

“But you never mentioned that to the detective?”

Hugh looks away from her. “Nah. I can’t prove any of it’s connected, you know? The car, my bank cards, Maggie. And I worry the Sikkies will just back off if they think Propago’s involved.”

“Wow.”

“I gotta be super careful with telling them anything…”

Silvia sighs. “I know you’re thinking this through—but I’m freaking out that these people will come for you next.”

Hugh forces a smile, though he’s certain his fear must show through.

“I’ll be careful,” he says. “I just need to work it out, yeah?”

Eventually, the car exits the V4 onto Downing Road. Three blocks down, it turns right onto Stanfield Street toward Morton Mews. The driver glances at the map on her mobile then back at Hugh. “Drop you at this end of the mews?” she asks.

“Yeah, that’s good,” says Hugh.

As the car makes its way down Stanfield, and Hugh sees that their time is running out, he turns to Silvia. “I was a total idiot when you stopped by the flat.”

She purses her lips. “It’s alright…”

“You just caught me off-guard, and I had a full-on panic attack, you know?”

Silvia nods, then reaches over and pats his arm reassuringly. “I get it,” she says.

But he is certain she does not get it—that she neither forgives him nor fully appreciates his genius for saying the worst possible thing in critical moments, and how that tendency fills him with self-loathing.

“We showed up for Maggie,” Silvia adds. “That’s the important thing.”

As she says this, the car slows to a stop outside The Spotted Pig where the rusty metal pig hangs in darkness above the entrance. The pub’s windows are closed; the outdoor tables, chairs, and propane heaters are all gathered against the wall and secured with a cable and padlock. The air outside the vehicle smells of ashtrays and stale beer.

As Hugh steps from the car, he turns to say goodbye, but Silvia reaches out and takes his arm.

“Maybe I should crash here tonight,” she says. “Tommy’s got a deposition in the morning and I don’t want to wake him up. I’ll be super quiet when I leave. I promise.”

“No, that’s fine,” he says. “You feel safe here, though?”

“Not really,” she laughs. “But I think it’s better if I don’t go home.”

Now, as Silvia informs the driver of the change in plans, Hugh lights a cigarette. It is nearly 5 AM and dawn is only a couple hours away. The mews is dark except for Mrs. Geedy’s porch light, which casts a meager radiance over the cobblestones. The two walk in silence, both of them looking warily from side to side. When they reach number 15, Hugh drops his cigarette butt in the flowerpot and fits his key in the front door. The overhead fluorescent light is off now, and only a radium green exit sign shows in the darkness of the foyer. A copy of yesterday’s Record sits on the linoleum floor, rolled and rubber-banded. Without a word, they mount the wooden stairs and let themselves in the flat. As Silvia removes her jacket, Hugh flips on the light and engages the deadbolt, turning it clockwise once, then twice. When he takes off his own coat, he sees Silvia looking around the living room as if encountering it for the first time.

“I always loved this flat,” she says.

“Yeah,” he replies, almost in a whisper. “It’s a good space, yeah?”

“It is.”

Before he can ask if she needs anything before bed, Silvia turns and walks down the hallway to her bedroom. He calls goodnight after her, then switches off the lights and heads to his own bedroom. In his dresser drawer, he finds a bottle of CBD tincture and takes a dropper-full, following it with a melatonin tablet—a combination his therapist once recommended for sleep. It tends to leave him groggy in the morning, but he’s willing to deal with that for a few hours of quality shut-eye. He plugs his mobile into the charger cord on his nightstand, then undresses and slips into bed. Before turning off the light, he opens the drawer of his bedside table, pushes aside the blue washcloth, and takes the Glock in his hand. The gun is heavier with a full magazine, the gray polymer cool to the touch. He shifts the firearm from hand to hand, feeling its weight in his palms, then returns it to the drawer. He looks at it for a long time, lying there in his nightstand, hidden away like a Penthouse magazine. He begins to chastise himself for not having the courage to carry the gun, but realizes he couldn’t have gotten to NCA in time to protect Maggie. Then, with a start, it dawns on him that he acquired the gun to save himself—and then, only if he can lay his hands on it.

Now, beginning to feel the effects of the CBD, he closes the drawer, eases back on his pillow, and turns off the lamp. The room has not been dark for more than a minute or two before he hears strangers’ voices in his head, and shapes begin to form behind his eyelids, twitching and lurching like shadow puppets.

They’ve requested an ambulance.

Ambulance.

Ambulance.

Hugh covers his head with his pillow, to blot out light and sound, to smother the phantom images parading before his mind’s eye. Then a clearer picture forms—Maggie’s face, swollen and purple, covered by an oxygen mask that fogs and clears and fogs again. Above his right eye an angry gash has been stitched together. His hands, lying at either side, are wrapped with gauze, gray-blue fingertips extending from the bandages.

Slammed a door on his hands.

Bands.

Stands.

Hugh hears laughter now, then a door slam, and the crunch of tiny bones—dry twigs snapping underfoot.

Deliberate act.

That’s a fact.

He rolls onto his stomach, then to his back again, trying to focus on the slow expansion of his ribs, the rise and fall of his diaphragm. He counts backward from 100 and feels his mind at last easing into sleep.

99

98

97

As his mind drifts at last into oblivion, he sees, or imagines he sees, a figure at his bedroom door—pale against the darkness, utterly still.

96

95

A second later, a weight settles on the mattress beside him; his torso pitches toward the depression. The skin of his forearm grazes bare, warm flesh; he reaches blindly for it. A hand meets his hand, and he grasps it.

Lips touch his forehead, his eyelids, his cheekbones, his mouth.

He might be awake now, though he cannot tell if his eyes are open or closed. A hand draws the covers back; cool air touches his chest and stomach. Then she is next to him—the flesh of her body pressed hard against his. And he knows the smell of her neck, the texture of her hair, knows the arms around him. He reaches out to embrace her, but she rolls onto her side, then raises herself up, her hair hanging loose about her face. For the first time, he can make out her features in the darkness, her eyes peering down into his, her lips parted. He sees her strong, naked body above him—her neck, shoulders, breasts, stomach. She is studying his face, and even in his dream-state he feels the intensity of her gaze. She brushes her hair back from her cheek as if to see him more clearly. Then, holding his gaze with her eyes, she slides one leg over the top of him so that she sits astride his hips, her face over his face. She kisses him again, longer and more earnestly than before.

When at last her hand moves down his chest, along his stomach, to where their bodies meet, he says to himself or to her—he cannot tell if his voice is audible—I’m sorry.

I’m so sorry, he says. And then he is lost.

Book VI, Chapter 26

Eason Rint, November 2021

A telephone rings across the street, or down the hall, or on a nearby table—vaguely at first, then louder until at last Hugh rolls over and opens his eyes. It appears to be mid-morning at least, and the sun is bright in his bedroom window. His mobile is ringing and vibrating on his nightstand. The bed is empty beside him.

His eyes are still blurry from the melatonin he took last night, and he cannot make out the number on his screen. He answers anyway because he is expecting an update from Maggie’s doctor. CT scan results, maybe. Or news on his hands.

“Hugh Warding?” says a male voice, vaguely familiar. “Hope I’m not catching you at a bad time.”

Hugh sits up in bed. “Who’s this?”

“Eason Rint,” says the man, absurdly upbeat. “With The Propago Foundation. Do you remember that we spoke a while back?”

Hugh cannot think how to respond. Adrenaline floods his body.

Back.

Pack.

Stack.

“I’m following up on the results of our research,” says Rint.

Hugh swings his legs out of bed and sits upright, mobile close to his ear. “Results?”

“Yes,” says Rint. “We have mixed news, I’m afraid. We were able to track your lineage as far back as the 18th century, but I’m sorry to say that the inconsistency you identified—involving Arno Warding—turned out to be a dead end. Looks like you’re figan through and through, which is a mark of distinction in its own right…”

“Really…”

“Yes, indeed,” Rint continues. “So, while I know this isn’t the news you’d hoped for, it is 100-percent conclusive.”

“It is.”

“Yes, it is.”

“That’s interesting,” says Hugh, now gathering his wits. “Because I actually think you’re full of shit. The Ministry never shared my information with you...”

Rint laughs as if there’s been a simple misunderstanding. “I realize this must be disappointing...”

“You don’t know shit about my claim, and I’m moving ahead with it.”

Now Rint sighs. “Perhaps I didn’t fully explain the nature of our work, Hugh. We do a different sort of work from the Ministry—more what you might call supplemental research. We look at past as well as present connections—friends and family, that sort of thing.”

Hugh’s throat tightens.

“For example, we acquainted ourselves with your coworkers at Bar Bruka, Oliver Lindberg, and your school chums Louis Gergits and Charlie Nult.”

Silence.

“We were also delighted to see that your uncle Maghil Warding is having some success with his artwork, though his recent injuries might prove an obstacle. I do hope he’s recovering.”

“You motherfucker.”

“Great Easton is an excellent hospital, though…”

Though.

Snow.

Doe.

“Naturally, we got to know your situation better, Hugh. Bank accounts and so forth.”

“You just keep talking, you fucking flogger,” shouts Hugh. His tightening vocal cords make his voice sound thin and frail. “I’ve got friends in B-Opps and they’d love to come see you.”

Hugh is about to unload more invective when Rint cuts him off, now speaking more pointedly. “I understand you’re disappointed, Hugh. We can, of course, continue with our research, if you like. We haven’t completed our review of the Spalding family—though I see that Dorian has a successful training business on Danby Close…” After a brief pause, he adds, “Or you could withdraw your claim and there would be no reason for us to continue…”

Hugh does not reply. His chest is weighted by an anvil.

“Good then,” chirps Rint after a pause. “We await your decision.”

The line goes dead.

Hugh sets his mobile on his side table and looks desperately around the bedroom. His heart thuds in his chest, his ears ring. He checks the time on his mobile—10:47. Silvia would have left nearly three hours ago, and he slept right through it.

Rint never mentioned her—thank god—though she could still be at risk. The others, though…

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

He goes to his closet, slips on a t-shirt and joggers, then sits on the bed and calls Silvia, reaching her voicemail after just one ring.

“Hey,” he begins, then falters. He realizes he has no idea what to say after last night. “Um, hope you got to class okay. Look, Sil, things got dicey just now. The guy from Propago just rang me and he’s threatening my friends and family if I don’t drop my claim. I gotta figure out how to handle this, but please be super, super careful, okay? Eyes open everywhere, okay? And call me when you get a chance. Alright.”

Next, he rings Dory, catching him on the way to the metro station.

“Hugh, you alright?” asks Dory. “How’s Maggie?”

“He was stable when I left the hospital at 4 this morning,” Hugh replies. “But, look D, I got a call from the teep at Propago this morning.”

“Seriously? That’s fucking cheeky.”

“They know the names of my friends, and they’re saying if I don’t back off the claim, they’ll go after them, too.”

“Yeah?”

“He mentioned you, and he knows where your studio is.”

“Well that’s fuckin’ brilliant, isn’t it?” replies Dory.

“I’m really sorry, D. This is all on me.”

“Nah,” says Dory. “You didn’t do anything wrong, Hughie. It’s this system and these motherfuckers who think they own all of us.” He sucks in his breath. “I hope they come after me. I do.”

“Dory…”

“No, jim, I’m fucking sick of taking it from these people. Let ‘em come. I’ve got friends, too, you know? I know some beezers who’d just love a chance to get it on...”

“Wait…”

“No, if that weasel calls you again, Hugh, tell him for me that I’ll keep the door open, yeah? That’ll be the shortest fucking day of his life, I swear to god.” By now Dory is yelling into the telephone and Hugh can’t get a word in edgewise. “If these fuckers wanna take a shot at me, let ‘em come. All I gotta to do is make a couple phone calls and we’ll start a fucking war.”

“No,” says Hugh. “I’m dropping the claim. This isn’t worth it. Don’t start anything, okay? I’m just gonna back off.”

Now Hugh hears wind in the microphone and voices in the background. “Look, I’m gonna lose my signal,” replies Dory. “But listen to me, Hughie. Don’t back down, alright?”

“This whole thing was a bad idea...”

“Nah, you had every right to check this shit out. Now you do what’s right for my boy Hugh, alright? I got your back.” Before Hugh can respond, the call drops and the line goes dead.

Hugh looks helplessly at his telephone, then around his room and at his unmade bed. The adrenaline from Rint’s call has left him shaky and disoriented. Last night, surreal even at the time, in the starkness of morning feels like the invention of a fever dream. Less and less certain if Silvia even came to him, he inspects the bedding for any sign of her—the rumpled pillow, the comforter thrown back. He lowers his face to the pillow and, in an instant, detects her—at once vague and strangely present—the faintest hint of sandalwood and musk. Then, with his face still close to the bed, he sees a dark strand of her hair on the pillow case and, for the moment at least, his doubt is pacified.

Several minutes later, when he is in the kitchen making coffee, he receives a text from Silvia.

Got your VM, she writes. I’ll be safe. You take care.

His heart sinks.

For a moment, he debates whether to ask what exactly ‘you take care’ means, especially in light of last night. But then he feels a surge of anxiety coming on and decides it’s best not to ask right now. Maybe she was in a hurry and got the tone wrong. Maybe, for once in her life, she’s at a loss for words.

He can’t focus on that right now.

A Confession, November, 2021

At just past 10 the next morning, Hugh is taking his cereal bowl to the kitchen sink when someone knocks on his door. Before he can unlock the deadbolt, he hears a key turning in the lock. A second later, the door swings inward and Silvia appears, dressed in workout clothes.

“Hey,” she says, slightly out of breath. “I was in Gloven for yoga and figured I’d swing by so we could finish our talk—if you’ve got a few minutes.”

“No, yeah, fine,” replies Hugh. Then, gesturing at his torn gray joggers, “You should’ve let me know you were coming. I’d have put on proper pants.”

Silvia sets her backpack on the dining table and goes to the sofa. “I actually think I’ve worn those pants,” she laughs. Then, as she sits, she unfolds the orange throw and drapes it over her lap. Her cheeks are flushed, her hair damp with sweat and pulled back into a loose ponytail.

Hugh goes to the chair opposite her and sits down. “Hot yoga?”

“Oh my god, yes,” she laughs. “I’m drenched.”

He hesitates briefly, then asks, “How’s the new flat?”

“It’s nice,” she says, brushing a fleck of lint from the throw. “It’s very much a guy’s flat, you know? But it’s close to campus so I can walk to class.”

“Yeah. Good.”

Silvia looks toward the window, then back at Hugh. “Anyway, I wanted to finish our talk, you know? But not on the phone.”

“Right.”

“And I don’t have class this morning so I figured I’d pop by to make sure you’re watering my plants.” They both laugh. After a moment, Silvia continues. “I know I moved out in a huff and I wanted to say I didn’t handle that well…when we’ve been friends for so long, you know? And then I hear all you’ve been going through and I feel like shit…”

Hugh glances at her, then looks away.

“It’s just that you really hurt my feelings when you called me a hypocrite, ‘cause I don’t think you realize how much your opinion matters to me. It felt like you don’t get me at all—like you actually believe I care about Tommy’s money. And you know me too well to think that…” She pauses and hugs a knee to her chest. When she looks toward the window again, Hugh sees a glaze of tears in her eyes.

“I was an idiot to say that,” Hugh says. “And it wasn’t fair to call you a hypocrite. I was just hurt ‘cause you seem so disapproving of my claim. And then I lost my shit when you said I’m not satisfied being feegie and all that.” He thinks for a second. “I was also feeling weird about you going to meet Tommy’s parents, yeah? ‘Cause if that got serious I’d be out of a flatmate and my best friend.” He shakes his head and laughs. “Which is a bit ironic, now.”

Silvia wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. “That’s for sure,” she replies. “The stupid thing is, I was looking for a reason not to meet his parents. Can you believe that? I was still debating it when we argued, and I was sort of hoping you’d talk me out of going. But when you called me a hypocrite, I got defensive and went just to spite you, which sounds incredibly immature, I realize.”

“No, it doesn’t…”

“Then things just sort of moved forward, you know? And all of a sudden I’m living with him, and he’s getting super serious…”

“Is he?”

Silvia draws a breath, then rises from the couch. “Do you have any seltzer?”

“Top shelf in the fridge,” he says. “Help yourself.”

A minute later, she returns to the couch with a glass. She sits back down and takes a drink while surveying the living room. Hugh follows her gaze—to the front door, the bookshelf with sagging shelves, the linen curtains, the dining table where they used to eat together.

“What’s going on with Tullia?” she asks, brushing a strand of hair from her cheek.

“Now there’s a change of subject,” laughs Hugh. “Not much to say, really. She hasn’t been by the bar in a while.”

“But you still fancy her?” she asks.

“A little, I guess. What about you and Tommy?”

Now Silvia’s face grows unexpectedly pale; she looks up at the ceiling and then back toward Hugh with an expression he can only read as trepidation. She takes a deep breath and squares her shoulders, then replies, “I know you’re asking about Tommy to be polite, but you get that I’m conflicted about that, right?”

“‘Cause he’s a yazzer?”

“No,” she says,“‘Cause I’m hung up on someone else—but the guy isn’t into me.” Her lower lip begins to tremble and she covers her mouth with her hand. “Oh fuck,” she says. “This is so hard.”

Hugh goes to sit beside her on the couch, resting his hand on her knee. “Ah, Sil. That’s rough.”

Silvia laughs darkly, dropping her hands to her lap. She looks at Hugh incredulously, then wipes her nose with the back of her hand. “I’m talking about you,” she says. “And don’t pretend you didn’t know that.”

In an instant, Hugh becomes aware of his hand on her knee and the heat of her leg beneath his touch. Before he can remove his hand, she places her hand on his.

“Don’t freak out,” she says.

“I’m not…”

Silvia turns her body to face him, her eyes locked on his. “But, my god, Hugh. How many signals am I supposed to send before I just assume you’re not into me?”

“Signals?”

“Oh my god,” she replies. “The little looks. Staying home on weekend nights just to watch TV with you. Asking you to dance on my birthday…”

Hugh shakes his head. “I’m so bloody thick.”

Now Silvia smiles grimly. “That’s been the hardest part,” she says, her cheeks now streaked with tears. “You’re not thick at all. You just weren’t interested.”

Hugh starts to speak, then catches himself. When Silvia moves closer to discern his expression, he surprises himself by leaning forward and kissing her. She stiffens, then pulls away, her eyes wide.

“That wasn’t a pity kiss, was it?”

He opens his mouth to reply but she cuts him off.

“This is real for me, Hugh. I don’t want a pity kiss.” She straightens herself up on the sofa and pulls the orange throw closer. “I can’t handle the idea of being the pathetic flatmate you kiss ‘cause you feel sorry for her.”

“I wouldn’t do that,” swears Hugh. “I used to think a lot about…” His voice trails off.

“About what?” she asks.

“The same thing…”

“Me?”

He nods. “When I first moved in. A lot. But then I worried it would blow everything up.”

“Why would that blow things up?” she asks.

He sits back in his chair, runs his fingers through his hair, and laughs. “‘Cause you’re this totally brilliant law student from a good family, with her career all mapped out. And I’m the orphan bartender with OCD issues. Then, when you told me you’re seeing this successful yazzer lawyer, it made sense to me. I mean, it totally crushed me, but it made sense.”

Silvia’s expression softens and she leans forward again, placing her hand on his. In that single gesture, he feels all at once his mother’s touch, and that of the nice woman at his parents’ funeral, and the desperate burden of his loneliness. His eyes blur with tears.

“Maybe it seems that way,” she replies. “But it’s so much more complicated, right?”

“I’m not sure,” he says.

“What if you just fancy someone because he’s kind and smart and he’s been through some stuff that makes him really soulful? And you don’t care how much money he makes. What about that?”

Suddenly, the voice in his head awakens.

That, it begins.

Pat.

Rat-a-tat-tat.

Starting to grow light-headed, Hugh replies, “I get that,” but the words come out sounding hesitant. The change in his tone seems to alarm Silvia, who is now staring at him pleadingly.

“Do you get how hard it is to tell someone you love him when you’re not sure he loves you back?”

Hugh looks toward the window to hide his winking eye.

“Hugh?” she asks. “Can you say something please?”

Please.

Weeze.

Freeze.

He inhales deeply now, to ease the tightening in his chest, to beat back the encroaching panic. “I think I fucked it up,” he whispers from the storm now blowing inside him.

Silvia springs from the sofa and stands over him, her eyes flashing. “Oh my god. Why would you say that, Hugh? Because kissing me when you don’t feel the way I do would totally destroy me?”

Hugh wants to say no, that she has misunderstood him, that he wants nothing more than to be with her, unburdened by this crippling self-doubt. But the panic has overwhelmed him now. Nothing comes out of his mouth—and Silvia has begun to sob into her hands. He studies her contorted face, the green irises of her eyes, the pupils wide, the eyelashes dark and wet. He hears her whispering, Oh my god, oh my god, but a fierce wind is drowning out her voice.

God, begins the refrain in his head.

Sod.

Shod.

Stop, he commands himself, but the voice only grows more censorious.

Fuck.

Pluck.

You suck.

Silvia has stopped crying now; her hands hang at her sides. She continues to look at him but there is an unfamiliar hardness to her eyes. After a long silence, she glances at the door, then back at Hugh. He buries his face in his hands to hide his twitching eye.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers to the darkness behind his palms.

When, after an interminable moment, he looks up again, he sees that Silvia has already gone to the door and opened it. As she steps onto the landing, he feels his index finger straighten involuntarily, then dab at the corner of his mouth.

Chapter 24

Strangers, November, 2021

Hugh is just completing an order of espresso martinis when his mobile vibrates in his pocket. His manager has forbidden restaurant staff from using private phones while on duty, so he lets the call go to voicemail. For a second, he wonders if it might be Silvia, calling after two weeks of stony silence to say she forgives him for panicking at the worst possible moment. But he knows it’s not; she seems to have given up for good.

Who wouldn’t give up?

When his phone rings a second time, he steals a look at the caller ID; it’s Maggie, which means he’s probably at the pub and feeling chatty, or in need of a few euros. Hugh forwards the call to voicemail. He has just begun to mix a vodka martini when Maggie calls a third time. Again, he declines the call, but this time asks Oliver to cover for him so he can make sure everything’s okay. Wiping his hands on a bar towel, he hurries out of the bar and down the hallway, to the employee toilet where he phones his uncle.

Maggie answers on the first ring.

“Hughie,” he whispers. “Two jimmies been followin’ me around.”

“What do you mean following you?”

“I saw them watchin’ me at the pub, and when I walked home, they followed me back here.”

Here.

Mere.

Fear.

“They followed you home? You’re sure? You’re not just pissed?”

Maggie exhales heavily. “I’m not pissed ‘cause I got outta the pub when I saw them eyeballin’ me. Now I think they’re in the buildin’, maybe.”

“Did you call the Sikstand?” asks Hugh, now whispering though no one is in earshot.

“I’m not callin’ the Sikkies,” says Maggie. Then, before Hugh can respond, his uncle whispers, “Wait, I think someone’s outside my door…”

“What? Like knocking?”

Maggie does not respond.

“Don’t answer the door, Maggie!”

Still no response.

Hugh hears scraping as Maggie’s mobile is moved, then his uncle’s barely audible voice. “I think they’re fiddlin’ with the lock…” he whispers.

“Call the Sikkies, Maggie!”

Silence.

“Fuck, Maggie!” screams Hugh. “I’m calling the Sikkies right now! Grab a knife or something and lock yourself in the studio and hide until they get there! Okay? You hear me? Go get safe! I’m calling now!”

“I’m goin,’” whispers Maggie. “Tell ‘em to hurry.”

His hands trembling, Hugh hangs up and dials 999, reaching a dispatcher almost immediately.

“Someone’s trying to break into my uncle’s flat,” he shouts, his words tumbling out in an unrecognizable staccato.

“Okay, I can help you,” says the dispatcher, a woman. “What is your uncle’s name and the address of the emergency?”

“Maghil Warding. Seventy-two Barling Street, NCA—flat 3B.”

There is a ten-second pause before the dispatcher speaks again. “Alright, I’ve dispatched a unit to your uncle’s building. They should be there in a few minutes. What is your name, sir?”

He tells her.

“Okay, I’m going to need you to stay on the line, Mr. Warding,” says the woman. “I need some information from you. Can you stay on with me?”

“Yeah,” replies Hugh, looking around the restroom, then at himself in the mirror. The color has drained from his face; his eyes are wide and his pupils dilated. “Tell them to hurry,” he begs. “They were outside his door…”

“They will hurry, Mr. Warding. Was your uncle safe when you spoke with him?”

“Yeah, but they were trying to get in his door. I told him to go hide in his studio with a knife or something.”

“Does your uncle own a firearm?”

“No.”

“How many people were at his door? Do you know?”

“He said two. They followed him home from the pub.”

“Did he describe them to you?”

“No. Shouldn’t someone call to check on him?” Hugh’s pulse is racing now and the tightness in his sternum has spread through his ribs and around his chest. Darkness invades the margins of his sight. “Ah, fuck…” he groans.

“Sir? Are you okay?”

“I get panic attacks…”

Attack.

Snack.

Crack.

“I know this is stressful,” says the dispatcher, the cadence of her voice slowing. “Try to breathe, okay? Take deep breaths. I’ll stay on with you.”

“Shouldn’t you ring my uncle?” he asks again. “So he knows help is coming?”

“It’s better not to call right now,” she says. “A ringing phone could alert the intruders to your uncle’s location. They should be there any minute now. Just stay calm with me, okay?”

“I’m trying…” He goes and squats beneath the hand dryers mounted on the wall. Breathing. Breathing. His left eye begins to wink uncontrollably. He rubs his cheek and forehead with the back of his hand. For a time, the winking stops.

“I have your phone number as 21 77 89 02 55. Is that right?”

“Yeah.”

“What is your uncle’s telephone number? Do you have that?”

Hugh is about to look Maggie’s number up in his contacts list when the dispatcher interrupts him.

“Mr. Warding, our field unit reports they are at your uncle’s building. He’s in flat 3B, is that correct?”

“Yeah. Third floor. Stairs are on the right inside the lobby…”

“Stay on with me…”

Another pause.

Breathing. Breathing.

“Are you with me, Mr. Warding?” says the dispatcher.

“I’m still here. Have they…”

“Hold on,” interjects the woman. “They’re with your uncle…”

“Oh, god…” says Hugh, exhaling.

“They’re requesting an ambulance.”

Walk to Work, November 2021

Nearly a week has passed since the black Peugeot followed Hugh—and more than two since Silvia moved out. Dory has texted twice to update him on the gun search. Three-hundred fifty euros cash, he announced, and Hugh will be the owner of a used Glock 19 with 50 rounds of ammunition thrown in for good measure. Dory even texted a photo of the gun, graphite gray with dings and scratches visible on the barrel and grips. Seeing the pistol almost convinced Hugh to back out of the deal because he couldn’t imagine owning something so lethal. But then he recalled the panic that had gripped him in the tobacco shop, and he texted Dory a thumbs up emoji. That was yesterday, and now, for reasons he cannot readily articulate, he’s grown more comfortable with the decision to arm himself. He can’t say if he’ll ever have the nerve to carry the weapon, much less use it. But just the idea of owning a firearm has him feeling a little safer, even, at times, audacious

Now, at just after ten on Monday morning, he is on the hunt for caffeine. Rush-hour in Gloven has largely passed; traffic is light on Stanfield Street, and only a few people are on the sidewalks. Outside Poule Rousse bakery, gray and blue pigeons strut among the roots of a plane tree as they search for bread crusts. As the city warms in the sun, the ionized air from last night’s rain gives way to the smell of dog urine, stale beer, and diesel exhaust. Hugh passes Poule Rousse, briefly eyeballing the chocolate croissants in the window, and goes to The Magic Bean next door. Once inside, he moves past the bulletin board with fliers thumb-tacked, shingle-like, on top of each other, and queues up at the counter. After a brief wait, a barista with jet-black hair and a nose ring greets him. She’s new at The Bean and he can’t remember her name.

“Morning,” says the woman. “Grande Americano, yeah?”

“Yeah, brilliant,” he replies, reaching for his mobile.

“I served you yesterday,” the woman announces with a smile. He can’t tell if she’s flirting or just trying hard; so he smiles and says he remembers her as well. She enters his order on her keypad, then turns the card-reader to face him. He activates his Apple Pay and holds his mobile against the reader.

After a moment, the screen reads, Transaction Declined.

The woman frowns at the card reader. “Try again?” she says. “This thing’s been actin’ up lately.”

Hugh tries a second time and, again, the transaction is declined. Now he feels his cheeks begin to burn. He wants to tell the barista that he got paid recently and has seven or eight hundred bone in his account, but he just stares helplessly at the card reader.

“I’m really sorry,” mutters the barista. “Do you have a card you can use? Or cash is fine…”

“Bollocks,” replies Hugh. “I don’t have my wallet…”

“No worries,” she says. “It’s on the house, yeah?”

She gives him a reassuring smile, then turns to prepare his coffee. A moment later, she hands him his cup.

“I’ll leave you an extra big tip tomorrow,” he promises.

Stepping back out onto the sidewalk, he scans the street for suspicious cars and, seeing none, heads back to his flat. Just a week earlier, he walked around Gloven like he owned the entire district, but now that confidence has all but vanished. He’s even taken to riding the metro more often because being underground makes him feel safer than on the sidewalk, which he realizes makes no sense whatsoever. None of it makes any sense. He’s a fit 27 year-old fellow, not lacking in courage, who can look out for himself just fine. But he can’t shake this new sense of menace that follows him like a shadow at sunset. Looking back, there had been no overt threat of violence when the car followed him, and that’s what made the experience so unnerving: the infinite range of possibilities, from a simple misunderstanding to, in his most paranoid fantasies, a hitman with an AK-47 in his lap. In the days after he was followed, he tried to convince himself there was no connection between the car and Propago, that the Peugeot’s repeated appearances had been an odd coincidence. Gloven is one of Bressen’s smaller districts, after all, and he sometimes sees the same people several times a day. Maybe, he told himself, the Peugeot driver was running errands that afternoon, to the dry cleaner, grocery store, chemist. Maybe the Vorhol registration plate meant nothing, and the silvered windscreen was just some car owner’s idea of stylish.

But that narrative never held water.

Now, as he reconciles himself to the reality of being watched, his outlook has grown dark to the point of paranoia. At work the other night, he caught himself scanning the bar for dodgy-looking characters who might be watching him. Later, on his metro ride home, he convinced himself a man in a green tracksuit was following him, so he hopped off the train just as the doors closed at Renwick Street station—two stops early. Then, with his pulse pounding and his eye clenching, he sprinted up the escalator, through the turnstile, and out onto the sidewalk. Then he walked the rest of the way home. The next morning, feeling sheepish about his Ethan Hunt-style escape from the train, he assessed the situation more calmly and decided he simply noticed the man in the track suit more than other people, and that he hadn’t been followed at all. The experience did, however, remind him that bad guys can take the train just as easily as drive a black Peugeot, which only added to his worries.

Nothing about his life is the same as a week ago, and now he’s running out of CBD tincture, which is enough to bring on a panic attack by itself. The Magic Bean barista must have seen the scared-animal look in his eyes and figured it wasn’t worth having a customer melt down on her shift.

When he arrives back at the flat, he settles on the couch to drink his coffee and regain his equanimity. He leans back, sets his feet on the coffee table, and sips from his coffee. All of Silvia’s furniture is still here. When he asked if she planned to remove it, she said Keep it for now, as if there might be something to anticipate after now. At some point when he was at work, she came by and took many of her personal items: the cluster of amethyst crystals she kept on her bedside table, the Chinoiserie jewelry box her mother gave her, and the photographs she’d hung in the hall. She left her favorite blanket for some reason—maybe because orange doesn’t go with Tommy’s decor. The blanket sits where she always kept it, folded and draped over the arm of the sofa. Stripped of its feminine touches, the flat now looks sparse and unwelcoming.

After a few more sips of his coffee, he picks up his mobile to check his bank balance.

€843.21—as he expected. Which means ApplePay wasn’t working at the Magic Bean, or their wifi was acting up. Good. Reminding himself to take his wallet when he heads out again, he settles in to read the news.

Later that same day, after showering and dressing for work, he slings on his backpack and heads outside for his commute to work. On the stoop, he lights a cigarette, slips on his earphones, and begins walking. The sky is a drab gray now, the sun a thin, white wafer behind the cloud cover. At the western horizon, Tertahar Hill looms above the city like a ruined castle, and on its eastern-facing slopes the first shadow of dusk has settled When he arrives at Mission Gate station ten minutes later, he goes to the turnstile and swipes his metrocard, but the paddle doors don’t open. Irritated, he backs up and checks the card reader.

Add Travel Funds.

Muttering under his breath, he goes to a ticket machine and queues up. After the woman before him completes her transaction, he dips his metro card, then his debit card, and requests a 20-euro increase to his balance.

A second later, the display flashes, Insufficient Funds.

“Ah, come on,” he yells at the machine, then removes his earphones and shoves them in his pocket.

He tries the transaction again, and again his card is rejected. Now he tries his Visa credit card but, after a brief, tantalizing delay, the display reads, Transaction Declined.

“Bugger this thing…” he yells, striking the machine with the ball of his hand.

A man behind him in the queue calls out, “You ‘bout done beatin’ up the machine, jim?”

Hugh shoots the man a surly look, then steps out of the queue and leaves the station. Out on the sidewalk once again, he orders an Uber; seconds later the app requests an alternate form of payment.

Buggerty fuck truck.

All out of options, he resigns himself to walking—which means he’ll be late, and his manager will dress him down yet again. It will take him at least 45 minutes to walk from Gloven through Mistauth and Old Town to Bruka; all that distance visible on the sidewalks. Thinking over his route, he decides to avoid the more crowded thoroughfares, going south through Mistauth until he reaches the river. From there he will follow the right bank, skirting Old Town to the north, until he reaches the Bressen Bridge, then cross into Bruka. Now walking briskly, he texts his manager to explain the situation. Next, he rings his bank to check on his debit card. After several prompts, he reaches a woman on the account security team. Upon hearing his story, the woman asks him to hold, then returns after a few minutes. “There appears to be an administrative hold on your account,” she informs him.

“Administrative hold?” he asks. “What’s that?”

“They’re account freezes, usually related to a law enforcement action or a tax lien.”

“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” he exclaims.

“Have you been notified about anything like that?”

“Absolutely not. Nothing. And I use this card for everything.”

The woman asks him to hold again while she speaks with her supervisor. A click. Muzak. “Good news,” she says when she returns. “My supervisor approved a partial override while we look into the hold. It’ll just take her an hour or so to process. After that, you’ll have access to your funds, but the size of any transactions will be limited—no deposits or withdrawals over 500 euros. We’ll let you know what we learn.”

“So I’m not on a terrorist watch list or something?”

“Not that I can see,” she laughs.

By the time Hugh hangs up with the bank, he has crossed into the northern precincts of Mistauth where the elegant limestone townhouses date back to the 18th and 19th centuries; everything here is cleaner and better maintained than in Gloven—no vape shops or convenience stores, no stinking water in the gutters. Even the trees look healthier. At the corner of Milton Avenue and De Gaulle Place Hugh pauses on the curb to ring his Visa card issuer. The agent, this time a man, tells him there’s an administrative hold on this card as well.

“I don’t get this,” complains Hugh. “They can just freeze my payment cards and not explain why?”

“They don’t have to tell us anything,” explains the agent. “They don’t even have to say who flagged the account. But I can tell you it’s usually the Sikstand or Revenue and Customs, and they don’t care if they mess up your life, you know?”

“So what do I do?” asks Hugh, on the move again and slightly out of breath. “I mean, I’m having to walk to work because I couldn’t buy a bloody metro ticket…”

The man tells him he’ll add a notation for the security team to reach out in the next 48 hours, but that’s the best he can do.

At this point, Hugh can see the stone embankment of the Bressen River two blocks to the south, which means he’s still 20 minutes from work. He can save a minute or two by crossing the river at the Vastan Bridge and following the left bank to Bruka. The right bank is much nicer, though, especially near Old Town, and he’s already certain to be late, so he makes for the Bressen Bridge, planning to cross into Bruka there. With nothing left to do but walk, he lights another Gauloises, slips his hands into his coat pockets, and heads for the river.

Book V, Chapter 22

Ubie, November, 2021

Train rides can be strangely soothing, the way the thrum of steel on steel gently jostles the nervous system. That’s a good thing, because Hugh’s nervous system can use some jostling today, after yesterday’s problem with his bank cards. Then, after work last night, he tried to buy a six-pack, and the old lady at the Korean grocery rejected his state-issued ID. She said her computer showed it as invalid. After all that drama, he didn’t sleep well and woke up feeling out of sorts. In fact, he hasn’t slept a full night since Silvia moved out.

Now he’s on his way to West Gursey, where he almost never goes. But Cosa opened a pop-up store there, and he’s been wanting to buy one of their limited edition graphic tees. So after tending to some chores around the flat, he caught the 7 train around half-past noon.

Before he left, he placed a call to the Registration Bureau, which straightened out his ID problem; and his debit card seems to be working again. But his credit card is still frozen, and now he’s braced for some other complication to appear out of the blue. When he told Dory about his bank card trouble, his friend announced, “Oh they’re definitely fucking with you now.” Then, apparently not appreciating how fragile Hugh’s nerves have become, Dory added that Brucie thinks Propago intimidation tactics will escalate until Hugh backs away from his claim.

“Escalate how?” asked Hugh.

“How do you think?” replied Dory, which nearly set off another panic attack.

When, after fifteen minutes, the train pulls into University West Station, Hugh exits the car and makes his way through the turnstiles and up the escalator to the sidewalks. He’s never much cared for this part of the city. The University of Bressen occupies nearly the entire western half of the Gursey district—a sort of city within a city—and has never felt particularly welcoming. Now, as he heads down Abbot Street, a four-block stretch of bistros and coffee shops along the campus’s western edge, he finds himself in a sea of university blue—university placards, signs in the store windows, t-shirts and sweatshirts on the swarms of coeds. Overhead, light-blue banners on the street lights announce the university’s 900th anniversary.

Farther down Abbot Street, he comes to the intersection with High Street, where, just a block to the east, he can see the steep, gray roof of Erdish Hall. He used to pass Erdish Hall with his mum sometimes, on their way to her office on the main quad. In the fall, the quad’s walkways were always littered with chestnuts from the enormous trees. All the buildings there had the names of great thinkers inscribed on their entablatures like a news crawler—Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Cicero.

Back then, Hugh was awe-struck by the campus; now the place just makes him sad.

After walking a few minutes, he checks the directions in Google Maps. He’s only 60 meters away, apparently, so he continues south until the blue dot shows he’s arrived at his destination. There is no Cosa pop-up in sight, though, just an empty storefront with a “Coming Soon” sign for an Adidas store. He looks up and down the street to see if he missed something. The vacant space sits between a shop selling antique botanical prints, and a vegan cafe overgrown with wisteria; nothing to the north or south looks like a Cosa store. He is about to go inside the cafe to ask for directions when a woman calls out to him from behind.

“What’re you doing in Ubie?”

He turns to see Silvia standing a few meters away, squinting in the sunlight. He is not unhappy to run into her, though he is disconcerted and unprepared. The way she is squinting suggests a bemused smile, though he doubts she’s happy to find him here. She’s wearing the tan cardigan he gave her for her birthday last year, with jeans and her favorite Birkenstocks. Her hips are cocked under the weight of a backpack slung over one shoulder.

“Oh, hey,” he says guardedly. “I was just looking for a Cosa pop-up store. It’s supposed to be right here.”

Silvia points at the empty store-front. “It’s gone. They closed a few days ago.”

“Shit,” he mumbles. “Google says it’s still here.”

She shades her eyes from the sun. The ambiguous smile is gone, but she does not appear cross. “How are you?” she asks.

“Alright. You?”

“Busy,” she says, “but fine.” She looks him over, then asks, “I’ve got a little time before my next class. Want to get a coffee?”

“You sure?” he asks.

“It’s fine,” she says. “How much can we argue in 15 minutes?”

With her hand on his arm, Silvia guides Hugh across Abbot Street to a bistro with half a dozen tables outside. They take an open table by the sidewalk and, when the server appears, order espressos. As the server goes back inside, Silvia removes her mobile from her backpack, glances at it, then places the device on the table. Hugh watches her hands as they move, the blue fingernails, chipping in places, the gold rings on her thumbs. He sees the tattoo inside her right wrist, of a red cap flanked by two daggers. She told him once the tattoo symbolizes freedom from tyranny, though it struck him as an unusual choice for a pacifist. He can feel her sizing him up from across the table, but he looks away; sometimes her gaze makes him fumble for words—those green eyes flecked with gold, so intense and unblinking.

After the server has gone, Silvia leans forward and repeats her earlier question, now more emphatically. “How are you?”

Hugh looks down at his silverware.

“Fine,” he replies. “How’s school?”

“Hold on,” she laughs. “What’s up with Tullia and Maggie and the genealogy thing?”

“That’s a lot of ground to cover.”

Silvia leans back from the table and crosses her arms, awaiting his response.

Now he begins fussing with his silverware, nudging his spoon to lie parallel with his knife. “It’s pretty fucked up, actually.”

“What happened?”

As Hugh is preparing to respond, the server brings their espressos and places them on the table. Silvia stirs sugar into her cup and takes a sip, then stares at him expectantly.

Hugh drinks from his espresso, debating how much to tell her. Then, prompted by a sudden and unexpected desire to unburden himself, tells her everything—about the call from Eason Rint, being followed by the black Peugeot, his cards being frozen. She listens raptly.

“Dory showed me a B-Opp post that says Propago’s like a private security force for yazzers,” he tells her, then nudges his knife a centimeter to the right.

Silvia’s expression turns grave. “Oh my god, Hugh. Why didn’t you tell me any of this?”

He slumps back in his chair and laughs sullenly. “You didn’t seem so eager to talk.”

This silences her for a time. “I realize I’m not really entitled to an opinion,” she says eventually, “but it doesn’t seem like you should be going through this claim alone. These sound like bad people, Hugh.”

“Dory thinks I should take this to the Arons Institute and maybe get their help.”

Silvia finishes her espresso and places the cup on its saucer. “You could do that if you knew for sure who’s bothering you—and if there’s grounds for a civil case. But you’re just speculating at this point. Plus Arons goes for cases with the potential for a class-action suit or a lot of media attention.” She turns her espresso cup slowly in its saucer. “What about going to the Sikstand and, like, filing a complaint against Propago?”

Hugh laughs. “Not a chance.”

Just as Silvia is about to speak, the college belltower tolls the Westminster Quarters, followed by two resounding bronze clangs. Silvia checks the time on her mobile. “Shoot. I have to get to class. Can we keep talking about this? Can I ring you tonight?”

“I’m working tonight,” he says. “But try me tomorrow if you want.”

When she reaches for her wallet, he tells her he’ll pay for the coffees.

Now she thanks him and rises, her hands lingering on the back of her chair. “Maybe we can talk about our argument, too?”

“Yeah,” he replies. “Of course.”

“Good,” she says, then shoulders her backpack, and walks away.

Hugh watches her go down the sidewalk and disappear around a corner. He wonders if she has a point, that he should go to the Sikstand and hope for the best—but then thinks of his parents and Delia, and decides he’s better off staying away. Besides, anyone with the ability to mess with his ID must have some kind of connection with the government—assuming it isn’t the government itself causing all this trouble.

In no hurry to leave, he finishes his espresso, pays the server, and sets out for the metro station empty-handed.

Vorsen, November 2021

It’s nearly ten o’clock before the morning sun against the curtains rouses Hugh from an uneasy sleep. By 11:00 he has showered, dressed, and made his trip to The Magic Bean for an extra large Americano. He is still groggy and hungry and a little jittery from too much caffeine when he places his call to the Ministry. When Callista answers, she asks for his eight-digit case number, which he recites from memory, then she goes about accessing his file.

“Okay, Hugh,” she says after a moment. “I’ve got your claim in front of me. How can I help?”

He gets right to the point, phrasing his question as neutrally as possible. “I was wondering if the Ministry ever shares information about claims like mine.”

“Share?” she asks. “You mean outside the Ministry?”

“Right.”

“No, no,” she replies. “We wouldn’t do that unless you signed a waiver. And I don’t see one on file.”

“Wow. A guy called me a week ago and knew a lot of details from my claim.”

“Is there any chance he could have gotten the information somewhere else? Perhaps someone you told passed the information along?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Do you mind saying who it was that called?” she asks.

Hugh hesitates briefly then tells her.

“Propago?” she says. “I have no idea why they would know about your claim. I didn’t even know they do genealogical research.”

“No?”

“No. They’re a PAO, I think.”

“A what?”

“A political action organization,” she replies, “lobbyists. As far as I know, they do political work for the founding families. I can’t imagine why they’d contact you about your claim.”

Hugh is about to thank her for the information when she continues, “You know, I was just scrolling back in your file, Hugh, and noticed that you’re tagged on an inactive account. Were you aware of that?”

“Inactive?” he asks. “What account?”

“It’s registered to Amelia M. Warding.”

“That’s my mum,” he says. “She had an account?”

“It looks like she completed an AIM application in June, 2006. It’s cross-referenced here with your profile.”

“What’s an AIM?”

“An ancestry inquiry filed on behalf of a minor. It’s when a parent or legal guardian opens a file to modify or correct a child’s ancestry record,” she replies.

“What else does it say?”

Callista takes a moment before replying. “She opened the file on June 6, 2006, and registered for access to BACchus. It doesn’t look like she submitted a claim or anything. ”

“Not Figan Finder?” he asks.

“No, but remember Figan Finder didn’t exist back then. She may have done figan research onsite because she came to the Ministry several times, apparently.”

“Does it say what she found?”

“No, it doesn’t.”

Hugh sucks in his breath.

“In any case,” continues Callista, “there’s no more activity after that. ”

“That makes sense,” Hugh replies. “She died a month later.”

After ending the call, he remains on the couch, his long legs crossed, his hands resting in his lap. The morning sun has thrown a square of light on the coffee table before him, and in the slanting rays, dust motes dance idly. He gazes distractedly at the table, the dust floating like snowflakes, at Silvia’s St. Tropez coffee-table book bathed in sunlight.

…when a parent or legal guardian opens a file.

He considers what Callista’s disclosure means to this research, how it changes the narrative of his childhood. Then, when several minutes have passed, he rises and goes down the hallway to his bedroom where he opens the louvered doors of his closet. Shirts, jackets, and trousers hang neatly on white plastic hangers. Trainers, loafers, flip-flops, and boots lie in pairs on the hardwood floor; a wicker basket contains his dirty laundry. Above him, a shelf is stacked with plastic bins and cardboard boxes. He drags a wooden chair to the closet and steps up to inspect the boxes.

A clear plastic bin with stacks of spiral notepads visible inside is marked School.

Laptop and Tech, reads the writing on a Nike shoebox.

A reddish accordion folder is marked Important Papers.

Disregarding all of these containers, he identifies on the far end of the shelf a cardboard box sealed with brown shipping tape. He reaches over and takes the box down. Handwriting on the top reads, Mum and Dad. He recognizes the writing as his own—blocky and methodical, from 2008 when he organized mementoes from a past that felt already remote. Stepping down from the chair, he sits on the side of his bed and peels the tape off the box. He folds back the cardboard flaps, removes a layer of yellowed newspaper, and finds beneath it a perfume bottle in a plastic sandwich bag—Coco Eau de Parfum, a birthday gift from his dad to his mother. Hugh salvaged the bottle from his parents’ dresser the day Maggie and he cleared out the flat. For an instant, he is tempted to open the perfume and smell it, the way he did after his mother died—pitiful and sniffling—but decides against it. Setting the bottle aside, he sorts through an assortment of his parents’ belongings: his mother’s checkbook; a red and blue striped necktie in a brown paper sack; a ceramic sugar jar from Umbria containing his mother’s jewelry wrapped in tissue paper; three ticket stubs to the PSG/Bressen-United game. Near the bottom of the box he finds the At-a-Glance 2006 planner his mother kept by the telephone in the kitchen.

He takes the planner out and begins leafing through it, starting with January. Throughout each week he sees notations in his mother’s compact cursive.

Dentist, 4 PM.

Change AC filters.

Dinner with F and M.

OB/GYN 1:30.

Nothing notable appears in January. February and March look much the same. He flips forward to April, May, then June. Notations of every sort. Most he can decipher; none strike him as important or unusual. June 6th—the day his mother opened a file at the Genealogy Ministry—is blank. She must have opened the account over the phone, he decides, which wouldn’t have required a calendar entry.

He continues reading, eventually coming to Wednesday, June 14th, where a notation in pencil reads, 2:30 Min Gen.

On Thursday, June 22nd, he finds a second Min Gen notation, then another on Monday the 26th.

Three visits.

After that, nothing.

Hugh thinks for a second, then flips the page to July and locates, almost automatically, Wednesday the 12th—the day of the accident on Halendana. There, his mother had hastily written La Forêt! in smudgy blue ink.

He inspects her notations for the days after July 12—days she’d never live to see. She had a Zumba class scheduled for the following morning, and a stylist appointment that Friday evening. What must the women at the club have thought when the lady with pink trainers missed Zumba? That she’d sprained her ankle or come down with a cold? How did they find out she’d died? Maybe someone emailed The Record article about a crash on Halendana Hill, and then, over time, what began as an upsetting rumor became reality and, eventually, old news.

News

Blues

Shoes

He looks around the room—at the open closet, the window with sun streaming in, the bed with his bulky, blue comforter—and for a moment he loses himself in a familiar speculation: What if his parents had chosen a different restaurant for their celebration? What if they’d gone to a bistro in Old Town for example, and returned home safely? It’s a rabbit hole he knows well, and which Dr. B taught him to avoid.

This is where you landed, his therapist used to say.

The question is where do you go from here?

Hugh turns his attention back to the planner and, after reviewing the first two weeks of July, notices a notation he overlooked earlier. On the 5th, his mother wrote, S Vorsen, 8 PM.

Instantly, a frisson passes over him.

Vorsen.

The name sounds familiar, but he can’t place it. He takes his mobile from his pocket and Googles the name.

Vorsen.

For several minutes, he pores over the search results, then rises from the bed. On his way back into the living room, he dials Dory. When his friend answers, Hugh announces, “My mum knew about the Godor connection.”

Chapter 20

Protection, November 2021

The floor beneath his feet is black rubber matting. Above where he sits on a black bench, the exposed ceiling, air ducts, metal beams, and electrical wiring have all been painted black. Tyga’s “Taste” is thrumming so loudly on wall-mounted speakers Hugh can feel it vibrate in his chest cavity. Dory’s studio isn’t much bigger than a cafe, though the mirrors and dark ceilings give the impression of a larger space. The heavy bag hanging in the corner, the medicine balls, padded benches, squat racks, dumbbells, barbells, and kettlebells are as black as the ceiling, and meticulously organized. All the plates, dumbbells, and benches bear the white Spalding Body Transformations logo.

Across the studio from where Hugh sits, an attractive middle-aged woman in plum-colored lycra is completing a set of kettlebell squats in front of a mirrored wall. Dory stands close by her, his legs bent at the knees, his feet shoulder-width apart. As the woman thrusts upward for her final rep, she puffs her cheeks out and groans.

“Good,” encourages Dory. “That’s good.”

When the woman finishes her squat, she hands Dory the kettlebell and smiles with relief.

“Lovely set,” he says. “Time for a stretch?”

“I wish I could,” she replies, “but I have to meet some people for lunch.”

The woman hugs him, then slips into the changing room with her gym bag. Dory places the kettlebell on a rack by the wall, then goes to a nearby shelf of electronic equipment and turns down the music. He makes his way over to Hugh and takes a seat next to him. His black t-shirt is damp at the stomach and armpits. Sweat beads on his brown scalp and forehead.

“When’s your next session?” asks Hugh.

Dory wipes his head with a towel. “I’m done for today, jim.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Gesturing at a cooler against the wall, Dory asks, “Fancy a water?” He rises and retrieves two bottles, offering one to Hugh. Just then the woman emerges from the changing room, now wearing a white fleece jacket over her workout clothes. As she approaches the two men, Hugh sees that she is older than he first assumed—maybe in her mid-60s—but remarkably well tended to, with clear, smooth skin and plumped-up lips. She goes directly to Dory and, when he rises, kisses him on both cheeks. “See you Thursday?” she says.

“Thursday,” confirms Dory.

Dory and Hugh watch the woman go, both of them silent. After the studio door has closed behind her, Dory winks at Hugh. “That was Antonia March.”

Hugh’s eyes grow wide. “Yeah?”

“Signed on two weeks ago, and she’s already referring her friends to me.” Dory laughs uproariously. “They’re all getting my special rate.”

“Your special rate?” asks Hugh.

“For the really rich ones,” says Dory. “Two-fifty an hour. Yazzers feel more important when they pay a lot.” He takes a drink from his water bottle, then eases back into his chair and towels off his head for a second time. “So I looked up this Vorsen your mum knew…” he begins.

“I didn’t say she knew him,” interjects Hugh. “Just that she made contact somehow.”

“Yeah, yeah. I didn’t recognize the family name at first, you know?”

Hugh says nothing.

“So I checked Wikipedia. They’re a big fuckin’ deal, Hughie. ”

“Richest family in the Godor clan.”

“So this jimmy—Sebastian Vorsen—he’s not political?”

“No,” replies Hugh. “He’s like a cryptocurrency investor or something. It’s his dad and brother who are in politics. His father Brombold was a senator, and his younger brother Baron took over the father’s seat when he retired. Sebastian sounds like the family fuck-up…”

Dory laughs. “But he’s a rich fuck-up—and a massive anti-vaxxer. Totally eccentric.”

“I saw that.”

“And you’re sure your mum made contact with these Vorsens?”

“I don’t think there are other Vorsens…” says Hugh.

“So she got really close.”

“She did.”

For a moment, the two men do not speak. Hugh drinks from his water and looks at his reflection in the mirror on the opposite wall. Eventually he turns to Dory. “You remember I told you about my parents’ funeral?”

Dory nods.

“Well, there was this lady there, a friend of my mum’s, and she took me aside and said all this stuff about how my mum had plans for me, and how I should learn more about where I come from…”

“Yeah?”

“I think she knew my mum was looking into our ancestry.”

“No shit,” says Dory, shaking his head. “That long ago.”

Now Hugh drinks from his water and sets the bottle on the mat by his feet.

“And you remember how there might’ve been a second car on the road when my parents died?”

“Right…”

“And the Sikkies never seemed interested in it?”

Dory considers these statements for a moment and then, as a picture forms in his mind, frowns. “Holy shit…”

“Maggie used to wonder why they never bothered to track down the other car, you know? Why they just assumed my dad got distracted or something? It never sat right with me, either, but I was just a kid...”

“Right. Yeah, of course.”

Hugh looks up at the matte-black ceiling, then continues speaking as if in a trance. “My mum went to the Ministry three times, starting on June 14th,” he begins, his words following one after the other slowly and emphatically. “She had a meeting with Vorsen on July 5th. One fucking week later my parents drive off a mountain road.” Now he brings his eyes back to Dory. “And then, when my claim starts heating up, I get a call from this Eason Rint out of the blue, and a few days later I’m being followed around town by a car with Vorhol plates, right? How am I not supposed to make a connection?”

“No, right…”

“You know what’s fucked up?” Hugh continues. “For all the shit you see in this city, it never, ever occurred to me my parents might have been murdered? Never once. I still can’t wrap my head around the idea that someone would go after a couple harmless feegies over an ancestry claim.”

“I doubt the yazzers saw your mum and dad as a couple of harmless feegies,” replies Dory coolly. “They probably saw them like somethin’ out of World War Z, you know? The first few zombies to show up at the wall. Just before they get fuckin’ swarmed.”

Hugh laughs defiantly. “Good,” he says. “Then that’s what I wanna do, then—swarm the walls, and ram this claim down their yazzer throats yeah? Do it for my mum and dad.”

Now Dory’s expression turns grave, and he leans forward in his chair, elbows on his knees. “That’s fine, jim, but you gotta watch yourself. You know what I’m sayin’? You gotta take this shit seriously.”

“You saying I should back off?”

“Nah,” says Dory, his eyes smoldering. “You keep going, but don’t be naive about it, yeah? Never forget these jimmies are for real, yeah?” He is speaking more quietly now, his voice low and solemn. After studying Hugh’s face for several seconds, he asks, “You want me to get you a gun, Hughie? You know I can, yeah?”

Hugh sits back and groans, then runs his fingers through his hair.

“Just to be safe…” continues Dory. “You’ll probably never have to use it.”

“How much would that set me back, you think?”

“A few hundred bone, maybe?”

Hugh thinks for a second. “Yeah, that’s probably a good idea.” Then he adds, “You know how to use one?”

“Jim, I’ve had a .45 semi ever since the Delia thing. I can teach you in like ten minutes.”

“You don’t have a permit, though, right?” asks Hugh.

“Me?” says Dory, all astonishment. “They’d never give me a permit, jim. Big black jimmy with radical politics? No fucking way. And if I were you, I wouldn’t bother applying for one, either. Even if you qualified—and you wouldn’t—it’d take like six months to get through all the clearances, and then they’d have your fingerprints and psychiatric profile and all kinds of shit.”

“Alright,” says Hugh. “Let’s do it.”

Dory reaches for his mobile and taps out a text. When finished, he leans back in his chair and asks, “You hear anything from Sil?”

“I did,” replies Hugh. “She said she’s gonna keep living with Tommy.” He kicks at the rubber flooring with his toe. “But she’ll keep paying rent until the lease runs out.”

“No shit? I was sure she’d come back when she simmered down.”

Hugh had expected her to return as well. But now he’s resigned to the reality that he provoked her at the worst possible moment, when Tommy was pressing for a more serious relationship. She’s probably gone to meet the Payne-Havissoms by now, and won the whole family over. Silvia has that uncanny ability, a certain unflappable confidence, at once mystifying and enviable, that enables her to get along with people of every social rank. Yazzers never seem to treat her disdainfully, but she also fits in at the rowdiest pubs in Gloven. It’s her super power, he used to tell her, though he never expected it would lead to her living in West Gursey with a gantling lawyer.

In his more despondent moments, he reminds himself what Silvia told him back in June—that the founding families still don’t believe in marrying outside their class. And, no matter how entranced Tommy may be with her super power, Silvia’s still a feegie and their romance isn’t likely to last. But that’s a sad, desperate sort of hope; so he tells himself to move on, to respect the distance she’s established, and hope for a change of heart. He hasn’t even told her about the black Peugeot or Propago, or that he’s apparently kicked a hornet’s nest by filing this claim. And she’s not asking.

Now Dory leans forward and pats Hugh reassuringly on the knee. “She’ll come ‘round, jim. Tommy’s alright, but he’s no Hugh Fuckin’ Warding, yeah?”

Hugh smiles unenthusiastically, “I got more than Sil to worry about, anyhow.” Then, as he rises to leave, asks, “You don’t think I’m being paranoid for getting a gun?”

“Nah,” replies Dory. “You’re being practical.”

Propago, October 2021

The universe has a plan, Hugh’s mother once told him.

He can’t remember the context.

She was more religious than his father and bought into the idea, pedaled by the priests at temple every Tuesday, that no event is random, and the universe tends inexorably, though often incomprehensibly, toward harmony. He understands why she might have found that perspective comforting; he summons it as well sometimes, when nothing in life adds up. It is reassuring, after all, to think his anxiety and compulsions fit into some divine plan, that his parents died and his childhood imploded for a reason.

Now his genealogy claim looks like it’s tanking, as well.

And he’s looking for some cosmic plan to emerge from the wreckage.

He cannot imagine that Silvia, as furious as she obviously is, will allow Tommy to help him find a match. When she flipped Hugh off and stormed out of the living room this morning, the universe all but announced his claim is a goner—and that presents all sorts of new, deeply unpleasant challenges. How could he look past the fact that Silvia, one of his closest friends, willfully torpedoed his claim and a shot at an entirely different future? Relationships don’t usually survive those sorts of blows.

Since their row, he’s spent much of the day stewing over these considerations. Now, as the time approaches 4:00 PM, his mobile rings, the screen displaying, No Caller ID.

In no mood for a sales call, he answers warily.

“Have I the pleasure of speaking with Mr. Hugh Warding?” asks the caller, male, with a center-city accent, extremely polite.

“Yup”

“Excellent,” says the man. “Mr. Warding, my name is Eason Rint. I’m a senior researcher with the Propago Foundation here in the City. Are you familiar with Propago?”

“Can’t say that I am,” replies Hugh. “But, look, jim, I’m just heading out, so maybe another time, yeah?”

The man laughs. “Sorry to ring at a bad time,” he says. “I was calling about your claim with the Ministry of Genealogy…”

Hugh stiffens. “Who’d you say you’re with?”

“The Propago Foundation,” repeats the man. “We’re a private, nonprofit foundation dedicated to safeguarding Bressen’s unique cultural heritage—which has become a monumental task, what, with the global economy and the EU, and all.”

“Go on…”

“In the simplest terms, we support enterprises we believe further our mission, whether in the private sector, education, or politics. In particular, we support Bressen’s commitment to tracking ancestral lines, and we sometimes assist in genealogical research with…potentially significant outcomes. Does that make sense?”

“Not really.”

This seems to amuse the man, who chuckles softly. “I apologize, Mr. Warding. Sometimes our work is difficult to explain. Let me try to be clearer: We show that you filed a claim with the Genealogy Ministry asserting that you are, in fact, descended from the Godor family.”

Hugh is about to ask how Propago knows all this when Rint continues.

“We’d like to help you find a genetic match, Hugh, and then assist with the claim until it’s approved.”

“You can do that?”

“Yes,” replies the man. “We can.”

Now Hugh’s skepticism resurfaces. “I don’t get why you’d want to help me out.”

Here the man’s voice becomes softer, more earnest. Bressen’s founding families are, he tells Hugh—a national treasure, with bloodlines dating back to the time of Julius Caesar. Julius Caesar! And if a rightful member of the Godor clan has somehow been misidentified, well, then, it falls within Propago’s mission to return that person to the fold.

“That sounds great,” replies Hugh, particularly struck by the idea of a fold to which he rightly belongs. “Except I could never afford what you’re talking about.”

Rint chuckles again—though the laugh sounds vaguely patronizing. “We don’t charge for this sort of thing—not in special cases like yours.”

“What’s special about my case?”

Rint lowers his voice as if someone might be eavesdropping. “Let me be frank, Hugh. If your ancestral lines trace back to one of the great families, we owe you our services. Do you understand me? As compensation for all the families have done over the centuries. We are funded by the founding families, so, in a prospective sense, you’re already entitled to our services. ”

“That’s incredible,” replies Hugh. “I thought my claim was dead.”

Now he glances at the time and remarks that he has to get ready for work. Rint says, no problem at all, and that all he needs is to confirm some details over the telephone and then he can get to work looking for a match.

“Then we’ll take it from there, providing updates along the way, of course—until the Ministry renders a final judgment. How does that sound?”

“This would all be confidential?”

“Of course.”

So Hugh agrees to work with Propago, and Rint, in turn, asks Hugh to walk him through his research—from hearing about Mossey’s story to discovering the dovetailing profiles of Gaius Willsom and Arno Cauthen. Hugh explains how he took the DNA test and provided the results to the Ministry, only to see the project stall after that. “I thought I had someone who would help me find a Godor,” Hugh says, “but that’s not going to pan out.”

When Hugh finishes talking, Rints whistles under his breath.

“You’ve accomplished quite a lot on your own.”

“Yeah,” says Hugh. “It’s taken a lot of time.”

“So, as a next step,” continues Rint, “we’ll have one of our researchers confirm your findings and write a full report—the Ministry likes a good write-up—and then we’ll work on identifying a Godor family member willing to provide a DNA sample. That’s a bit tricky, as you can imagine, given their natural suspicion of outsiders, but it shouldn’t be insurmountable. I’m sure we have some Godors on our donor list.”

“What happens after you submit the claim?”

Rint sucks in his breath. “Oh, I imagine the Ministry will verify our findings and issue a ruling. Assuming we can find a DNA match, I would expect a fairly quick decision in your favor.”

“Brilliant,” says Hugh. “I really appreciate the help. I wish I’d known about you jimmies a couple months ago.”

He thanks Rint and hangs up. Then, still buzzing with excitement, he has an impulse to call Silvia and tell her that he won’t need Tommy’s help—that the universe delivered after all, and they can put their argument behind them.

But he decides to hold off.

Let her come around on her own.

Chapter 18

Pint at the Pig, November 2021

A week after Silvia moved out, she has come by the flat only once, to pack some clothing while Hugh was at work. She texts with him solely to answer the occasional question—about the rent bill, or where she left the laundry softener. Hugh, meanwhile, has told her nothing about the call from Propago—not as a punishment exactly, but because she never asks about anything these days. He’s also waiting to see if she intervenes with Tommy and his offer to help find a DNA match.

Hugh’s had three panic attacks since Silvia moved out, the first when he came home from work and found the flat as quiet as a tomb. Then came another, and another. He began taking CBD drops to manage the anxiety and loneliness; he made a point of staying busy by working out, paying bills, doing the laundry, or running errands. The CBD helps for sure, though he’s having to take an entire dropperful every four hours just to keep the attacks at bay.

Then, today, when he stopped to buy Indian takeaway for lunch, he noticed a black Peugeot idling across the street, its windows tinted silver. The car only caught his attention because he’d never seen windows like that, and he didn’t give it a second thought. But then, on Fornish Street when he stopped to light a cigarette, he saw the vehicle again, this time passing him slowly. The Peugeot didn’t set off internal alarm bells, however, until it appeared a third time, idling outside the chemist where he’d gone to buy BandAids on his way home. At this third sighting, a wave of electricity moved up his spine and over his scalp like a spreading shadow. He made a point of checking the registration number, just in case he might need it later.

VH-778-GDT

The fourth sighting occurred when Hugh was about to cross Canal Boulevard, and he saw the Peugeot across four lanes of traffic. It seemed as if the driver knew he’d been spotted, because the car turned the corner and disappeared—not in an obvious hurry, but like a cat slipping between fence pickets. By then Hugh’s paranoia had reached a point of near-panic, and he decided to return home by a different, more circuitous route. So he headed down Mission Gate Road, where he watched for the car while pretending to look at window displays.

Then came his retreat into the tobacco store, and panic-stricken flight out the back door and into an alley.

Now, as Hugh races toward the end of the alley, he hears the tobacconist call, “Hey!” one last time. He ignores the man and keeps running until he emerges onto Blackellyn Lane where the sidewalks are crowded with rush-hour commuters. Here he slows from a sprint to the trot of an anonymous commuter hurrying home from the train station. One block down Blackellyn, the lane abuts Boulevard Skantántis, with its antique street lamps and giant chestnut trees. He stops to light a cigarette and is surprised to find his hands trembling. Sensing he may have finally lost the Peugeot, he heads north on Boulevard Skantántis to Stanfield Street. By the time he’s walked three blocks down Stanfield, the Gauloises has calmed his racing pulse.

When, at last, he comes to the corner of Stanfield and Morton Mews, he pauses outside The Spotted Pig, debating whether to stop in for a pint or head straight home. Just then, a voice from behind him shouts, “Hugh!” and then even louder, “HUGH!”

Turning, Hugh sees Dory, calling to him from one of the pub windows. Hugh waves, takes one more look around the intersection, and slips through the front door. The pub is full to capacity tonight, with every booth and table occupied and a crowd milling in front of the beer taps. Moving sideways through the throng, he maneuvers past the bar and over to the window where Dory sits with a pint of stout.

“Didn’t know you were out,” says Hugh.

“Wasn’t goin’ to be,” replies Dory. “Had a last-minute cancellation.”

“That’s too bad.”

“Nah,” laughs Dory. “She pays either way,” Then he looks Hugh over from head to toe and whistles softly. “You look like shit.”

Disregarding this last remark, Hugh takes a seat, setting his mobile on the table. Just then, a server comes by their table, a lank, sharp-nosed woman with a long-stemmed rose tattooed on her throat.

“Evenin’ Hugh,” says the server. “Pint of Young’s?”

“Yeah, Evie,” he replies. “That’s good.”

“Whiskey sider?”

“Please.”

The woman gestures at Dory’s glass. “You good, Dory?” she asks.

“I’m good, Evie,” replies the big man. “But don’t be a stranger, yeah?”

As the server returns to the bar for their order, Hugh eyes the street while Dory studies him bemusedly. They remain this way until Evie returns with Hugh’s order. Then, as Hugh downs his whiskey, Dory asks, “You lookin’ for someone?”

Hugh continues gazing out the window for a second more, then replies. “Nah. Just some car was following me everywhere I went today. I had to slip out the back door of a tobacco shop to lose him. Then I got chased by this gordo keener who thought I stole his cigars.”

Dory’s face tightens. “Followed?” he asks. “Was it a Sikkie car?”

“Don’t think so,” replies Hugh. “It was unmarked. But I saw it four times.”

“Could you see the driver?”

“That’s the thing,” says Hugh, his eyes roving the floor. “I couldn’t see who it was. Whenever I looked at the windscreen, there was a reflection or something—like he had film on the inside of the window. But that’s how I knew it was the same car, ‘cause of that silver glass. Plus I saw the reg plate.”

“So it wasn’t a Sikkie car?” persists Dory.

“How would I know?” snaps Hugh. “Maybe they have unmarked black Peugeots with special windscreens. Who the fuck knows?”

Dory backs off now and drinks from his stout. After a moment he ventures, “Any idea who it was?”

“I’ve got one idea,” begins Hugh. “Remember when Sil moved out?”

“Yeah.”

“Later that same day I got a call from this foundation offering to manage my ancestry claim for me.”

“They called you out of the blue?”

Hugh nods again. “I should’ve checked them out first, but I got so excited I told the jimmy everything.”

“What does that have to do with who followed you?” asks Dory.

Hugh looks out the window. “The reg plate of the car was from Vorhol.”

“Okay…”

“And the foundation is headquartered in Vorhol.”

Now Dory’s expression turns grave and he shakes his head slowly. “So you think the man who called you was trying to find out how far you’ve got with the claim?”

“Yeah,” says Hugh. “I think so.”

“And now someone’s tryin’ to scare you off.” Dory thinks for a moment, then leans closer to Hugh. “Tell me about this foundation.”

Hugh drinks, wipes his mouth with his sleeve, then, feeling stupid for having so blindly trusted Eason Rint, tells Dory everything he knows about Propago.

The big man’s face twists up. “They offered to help you find out if you’re a yazzer?” He pushes back from the table, his arm muscles tensing inside his hoodie. “Yeah, fuck that.” Taking his mobile in hand, he asks, “How do you spell Propago?” Before Hugh can reply, Dory waves him off. “Never mind. I got it.”

Dory scrolls through something on his mobile, then, after a moment, sits back and announces, “I’m gonna check with Brucie. He’s probably heard of them.” He taps out a text message and sets his phone down.

“Brucie thinks everything is a yazzer conspiracy,” Hugh laughs.

Dory squints his eyes. “Brucie knows a lot of shit, Hugh. And just ‘cause some of the stories don’t make sense to you doesn’t mean they’re not true, yeah?”

For a time, the conversation pauses as both men drink and gaze around the pub. Then, just as Hugh is about to change the subject, Dory’s mobile whistles like a bird; he picks it up and reads the text. “Exactly what I thought,” he exclaims.

“What?” asks Hugh.

Dory hands his phone to Hugh. On the screen is a post from the blog of dissident group B-Opp: “How a Private Foundation Became the Clans’ Enforcer.” Hugh begins scrolling through the article, pausing at various points to read more closely.

“Fuck,” he mutters.

He hands the mobile back to Dory, who begins reading aloud from the post.

“The private foundation was established in 1877 with grants from the Abra, Poliu, and Odríassis clans to preserve so-called traditional Bressen values. By the 1970s, however, Propago had expanded its operations to include private security, surveillance, and, by some accounts, racketeering, extortion, and intimidation—all in furtherance of clan interests. Due to its close affiliation with the founding families and Sikstand leadership, the Foundation conducts its clandestine operations with almost complete impunity. In its 2022 Global Crime Report, INTERPOL implicated Propago in the death or disappearance of 21 figan and immigrant Bressenians over a five-year period.”

Hugh sighs and shakes his head. “They’re on a fucking INTERPOL list and I had no clue?” he mutters. “That’s bloody humiliating.”

Dory smiles cynically. “Those stories don’t get reported inside Bressen. Censors pick them up first.”

“I was so excited that someone offered to help, you know?”

“I get that.” replies Dory. “But these jimmies are bad news, yeah? You need to watch your back, Hughie.” He continues to scan the article, then sets his mobile on the table with a disgusted grunt.

After a moment, Hugh announces, “I’m gonna call the Ministry tomorrow and see what they say about Propago.”

“Alright,” says the big man. “But watch what you say, yeah?”

“No. I got you.”

Having resolved this much, Hugh considers his dilemma and asks, “So you think that was them tonight?”

Dory shrugs his shoulders. “Dunno,” he says. “I fuckin’ hope not.”

As the conversation resumes, and the succession of pint glasses continues into the night, the subject transitions from the black Peugeot and Sikstand complicity to more mundane matters like work and weekend plans. Just after ten o’clock, when they have been talking for nearly three hours, Evie stops by the table to cash them out. As she runs Hugh’s debit card, Dory announces, “I’ll talk to Brucie tomorrow—see what more he can tell me, yeah?”

Having settled up, the friends make their way to the door and out to the sidewalk. The evening air has grown crisp, and aside from a Pakistani bodega and a by-the-slice pizzeria, most of the storefronts on Stanfield Street are dark. The sidewalks are empty, as well, except for two women, loud and drunk, attempting to hail a taxi.

“Looks clear,” says Dory. “You want me to walk with you to your flat?”

Hugh declines the offer, then gives his friend a hug. Before heading home, he takes a long look up and down Stanfield Street and then along Morton Mews. The mews is dark except for a porch light or two; there are no idling cars or pedestrians in sight. Feeling wobbly-legged from all the beer, but considerably less anxious, he lights a Gauloises and sets off for home.

Dead Ends, July, 2021

The day after he told Silvia about Gaius Willsom, Hugh called the Genealogy Ministry to begin the claim process. Several days later, he spent an hour on the phone being interviewed by a Ministry analyst, during which he shared every detail of his research. Then came a lengthy email exchange, and, eventually a request that he submit to a DNA test so that his genetic profile could be compared to that of an Edmiston-registered member of the Godor clan. He ordered the test from a lab the analyst recommended, shelling out nearly 400 euros. A week later he received the test kit containing an illustrated instruction booklet, two plastic tubes, and a cheek swab in a sealed pouch. Twenty-two days after swabbing the inside of his cheek and returning the sample to VSF Biosciences, he received the results in an email. The report was two-pages, with four columns of letter codes and a smattering of botanical-sounding terms like “locus” and “allele.” There was no introduction or conclusion, just columns of data. None of it made any sense.

“It’s prepared for scientists, by scientists,” Callista explained when he called the Ministry. “Just forward me a copy and I’ll pass it along.”

“What happens after that?” Hugh asked. “They’ll run it against a Godor profile?”

“No, no,” she replied. “We don’t have that kind of information in-house. You’ll have to find someone who’s willing to submit a DNA profile to support your case. Then our people will make the final determination on a match.”

“I have to find someone?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m afraid so.”

“I don’t know any yazzers,” he grumbled. “What if I can’t get someone to provide a sample?”

Several seconds passed before Callista responded. “Then there wouldn’t be anything more we can do. We need that second DNA profile to establish a match.”

Since receiving that unfortunate news, Hugh has been considering his options. He could post an appeal for a donor on Facebook or Twitter, but quickly nixes that idea—way too public, with no way to screen out fraudsters. A classified ad in The Record wouldn’t be any better. Eventually he decides that, even if he doesn’t know a Godor, he might turn up someone in his friend circle who does. So, with no other option available, he texts Tullia—not to ask for help exactly, but to open the door for her to offer.

He has no idea how she’ll react to such a request, or if she’ll reply at all. Wisely or unwisely, he told her about his claim several weeks ago—shortly after he told Silvia, when Tullia came by the bar. He left out most of the key details because he didn’t know if he could rely on her discretion. He told her enough to arouse her curiosity, though, and kept it piqued by sharing updates here and there. Tullia particularly liked the story about Hugh’s great-grandfather fighting for the Greys, and asked if she could pass it along to her parents. All things considered, she responded fairly enthusiastically. He did notice, however, that when he told her he’d filed an official claim, her face grew suddenly taut, as if she were torn between happiness for Hugh and wariness of him. At the time, he didn’t fault her for that reaction. He’d had a similar reaction in primary school when a kid he’d helped learn spelling went on to beat him in the spelling bee.

We all root for the underdog—right until he threatens to steal our bone.

His text to Tullia takes Hugh a half-hour to compose.

hey. since you asked about the dna thing…i got my report back, but the mg is telling me I have to find a godor to do a test as well. and of course i don’t know any. might have hit a dead end. you coming by the bar this week?

He sends the message after breakfast and Tullia responds early that afternoon.

Trip was good, she writes. We’ll probably be in this week if Iris can get free. Bummer about the report thing. Gotta love the ministries!

She ends the text with a clenched-teeth emoji.

He replies with a thumbs up emoji, then pockets his phone.

He tells himself not to be angry, or to see Tullia’s reply as a rejection. It probably didn’t even occur to her to offer help. Yazzers are accustomed to receiving assistance, not offering it. With her clenched-teeth emoji, however, comes an impasse for which Hugh has not even an inkling of a solution. Days pass. Then weeks. For all of August, September, and the first half of October, he vacillates between just asking every friend or acquaintance if he or she, by any chance, knows someone from the Godor family, and giving up the chase. As the weeks pass, he tells himself he hasn’t surrendered yet, though he can sense his attention drifting away from DNA reports and Edmiston-registered Godors, back to the more familiar rhythms of a feegie bartender.

Then, in mid-October, as luck—or inspiration—would have it, he conceives of a plan. Not a highly promising one—more of a last-ditch effort, really. And approaching the person he has in mind comes with complications. So he takes a couple days to let the idea simmer. When time yields no greater clarity on the matter, he decides you only live once, and makes the call.

Chapter 16

Tommy, October 2021

Hugh first met Tommy when Silvia cajoled him into joining them for a pint—to put faces to names, she said. Hugh refused at first because he never fancied meeting new people and had no interest in spending an evening with a lawyer who made more in a month than he did in a year. On top of that, Silvia had recently come clean that Tommy With the Hyphenated Name was, as Hugh suspected all along, a bona fide gantling, complete with a trust fund and a family estate in Kasabresan. That development only made Hugh less inclined to meet the new boyfriend.

But Silvia persisted, as she always does, and Hugh eventually gave in.

The three met at a pub chosen by Silvia, in West Mistauth, diplomatically located halfway between Tommy’s flat in Gursey and Hugh’s in Gloven. As Hugh approached the pub that night, he spotted the couple through the window, seated cozily in a booth, and he almost turned around and went home. But Silvia saw him through the window and waved him in. When Hugh arrived at their table, Tommy stood and offered his hand, which Hugh gripped assertively but with little warmth.

“Hey, mate,” said Tommy with a big smile. “It’s a pleasure.”

Tommy’s hand wasn’t over-large, nor for that matter was Tommy himself. In fact, the gantling didn’t stand much taller than Silvia, but his shoulders were broad, and he had a lean, athletic-looking build. He wore his wavy blonde hair short on the sides, longer on top.

Square jaw. Unusually tan. Casually but not interestingly dressed.

The conversation began awkwardly, with Silvia describing Hugh as her flatmate and best friend, and Tommy laughing and nodding, though clearly a bit skeptical about the platonic thing. He turned out to be a pretty good guy, though, with no yazzer airs about him and a surprisingly good command of Bressen-United trivia and craft beer. Within minutes, Hugh found himself liking Tommy more than he’d planned to.

Since that night, Hugh has seen Tommy a number of times, typically when the lawyer stops by the flat for a night out with Silvia. Whenever Hugh finds himself alone with Tommy, he strikes up a conversation about Bressen-United being poised for a better year, or how Barbier’s ankle was healing, which always makes Tommy’s eyes light up; and then they slip into an easy but purposely shallow conversation until Silvia shows up.

Silvia’s relationship with Tommy, having lasted from June into October, strikes Hugh as comfortable but not particularly torrid. Silvia speaks fondly of her gantling boyfriend—about how sensitive he is, and how he always asks what’s on her mind. And the two have the law in common, of course, which is no small thing. But their romantic trajectory has been fairly flat.

Until today.

It is a cool, overcast morning in October, and Hugh has just returned from buying a large Americano at the Magic Bean. When he opens the flat door, he finds Silvia at the dining table, in a sweatshirt and blue pajama bottoms, studying. Hugh has just hung up his coat when Silvia abruptly announces, “Tommy asked me to meet his parents this weekend.”

Hugh makes a point of looking shocked, then sets his keys on the kitchen counter and goes to join her at the table. She looks reasonably composed, but something in her expression suggests she’s been stewing for a while.

“Well, he’s pressing the pace, isn’t he?” laughs Hugh.

“That’s intense, right?”

“It is. You gonna go?”

“I don’t know,” she says, leaning back in her chair and rubbing her palms on her thighs. “It feels rushed, you know?”

“Is it like a special occasion?” he asks.

“Not really,” she replies. “He just said he’s eager for me to meet his parents ‘cause he thinks they’ll really like me. He says I shouldn’t be nervous ‘cause they’re super casual and welcoming.”

“Ah.”

“He’s such a decent guy, you know? And I don’t want to say no ‘cause it will crush him. But it feels rushed.” Now she places her hands on the table and stares at them.

“He seems like a decent jimmy,” ventures Hugh. “But you shouldn’t let him rush you if you’re not into it, yeah? I mean, the sword cuts both ways.” He isn’t entirely sure what he means by this last metaphor and doesn’t try to explain. It takes some effort not to appear shaken by Tommy’s invitation. The idea of Silvia dressing up and playing high society with the Payne-Havissoms already has his rib cage tightening like a blood pressure cuff. But he also knows that Silvia, the fiercely dogmatic third-wave feminist, won’t appreciate being hurried into meeting the parents. In fact, if Tommy pushes too hard, he could scare Silvia away entirely, which wouldn’t bother Hugh at all.

Or at least much.

Silvia tugs on the drawstring of her sweatshirt and furrows her brow. “I mean, I don’t mind meeting his parents—I just don’t want him to take it the wrong way, you know? Maybe there’s a way for me to go without giving him the wrong impression.”

“Good luck with that,” Hugh laughs. “Guys aren’t so good with subtlety.”

Silvia nods. “He’s been really patient so far. Which I really appreciate.”

Hugh acknowledges once again that Tommy is a good sort, and that he seems to have the silver spoon thing under control, which comes out sounding like a backhanded compliment. His wording doesn’t seem to bother Silvia, though, who continues to tug on her drawstring, lost in thought.

Now Hugh elaborates, adding that Tommy doesn’t seem as selfish as other gantlings he’s met, that it’s admirable, for example, how he volunteers at the clinic, and helps people in other ways.

At first Silvia just smiles and nods her agreement. After a moment, though, she looks up and asks, somewhat truculently, “What do you mean ‘other ways’?”

“Oh, you know,” he replies, “just that he’s always eager to help out, yeah?”

She leans farther forward now. “Like how?”

How.

Wow.

Now.

Hugh crosses one leg over the other and grips the toe of his boot, distractedly bending it back toward his shin. He looks at the ceiling, then back at her, only to find her gaze more penetrating than before.

“He just offered to help me out with something,” he finally volunteers. “And I really appreciate it.”

Silvia draws herself up in her chair. “Tommy offered to help you with something?”

“Yeah,” says Hugh. “My claim.”

“Your claim? How is he helping?”

Seeing no possibility of retreat now, he considers his reply, then plunges headlong into his Rubicon. “I mentioned that I’d taken a DNA test to support my claim but that I’d run into a dead-end finding a match. So he said he’d try to help out.”

Silvia cocks her head incredulously. “You just happened to mention that to him?” In an instant, she has gone from curious to accusatory.

“Yeah,” says Hugh, now bristling at her tone. “‘Cause he showed interest in my claim, and I needed the help.”

With his every word, Silvia’s expression grows sterner. “You asked him without checking with me first?” she asks. “Why would you do that? I told you it’s been super awkward for me that Tommy’s family is…you know…clan. That’s one of the big reasons I’ve been reluctant to get more involved. And now you step right in the middle and ask for his help with the very issue that’s weird for me?” Here she pauses, slowly shaking her head. “Why didn’t you ask if I’d have a problem with that?”

Hugh hesitates. “I guess I was worried you wouldn’t approve.”

“It’s not about me approving, Hugh,” she says. “It’s about you respecting the boundaries I put in place with Tommy and his family.” Now she appears to reconsider his previous statement and circles back. “Approve of what?”

He frowns, keeping his eyes on her. “Of it all, to be honest—me asking Tommy for help—even me filing the claim in the first place.” He uncrosses his legs now and sits with his hands under his thighs.

Silvia looks over toward the window, her jaw clenched.

“Keepin’ it real, Sil?” he continues, “You radiate disapproval whenever I talk about my claim—like I’m embarrassing myself by even looking into it.”

“That’s complete rot,” she snaps.

“Well, that’s how it comes across.”

“And Tommy agreed not to tell me any of this?” she asks. “That’s fucking great. He’s already lying to me.”

“Only ‘cause I made him promise, yeah? Don’t be angry at him. He was just trying to help me ‘cause I ran out of options.”

Now Silvia presses him for details—about Tommy’s reaction to the request, why Hugh kept it from her, and what has transpired since they spoke. The more he tells her, the more agitated she becomes, until eventually she goes off like a loaded gun. “Why are you so fucking obsessed with the founders, anyway?” she shouts. “Chasing Tullia Bruggen around town, drooling over her Cartier watch, filing this fucking claim. Are you that insecure with who you are? Is being a regular person just not good enough for you?”

And there, in one contemptuous retort, is proof he was right all along. Silvia never really approved of his claim. On top of that, she just revealed that she can be as insincere as the next person.

In a flash, Hugh’s sheepishness turns to hurt, and then to rage. Without pausing to consider the consequences, he shoots back blindly. “Yeah—there you go, Sil. Like you always do—acting like the queen of the world, telling everybody how to feel and what to do. Meanwhile you’re dating jimmy fucking gantling with the perfect haircut—like nobody notices you’re a total hypocrite. Absolutely fucking classic.”

As he speaks, Silvia’s face grows as still and pale as a marble bust. When Hugh finishes, she stares at him from across the table, her lips parted, her eyes unblinking. In the ensuing silence he imagines he hears his heart thudding in his chest; a second after that, he feels the familiar tightening of the muscles around his eye.

“At least I know who I am,” says Silvia at last, her voice dropping an octave.

“Well aren’t you fucking special,” he mumbles.

Now Silvia shoots up from the table, thrusts her middle finger at him, and storms down the hallway, slamming her bedroom door behind her.

Hugh remains at the table for several minutes, staring at the floor; his eye is now clenched tight, and his hand is fighting a compulsion to dab at his mouth. Conversations with Silvia can go sideways quickly. He’s seen it happen before, though not quite like this: They get into a conversation about politics, or class, or anything, really, and she grows testy at some point, as if he stumbled upon a sore spot. Eventually she hits him with a zinger about needing to take his blinders off (or something like that), and Hugh turns defensive at the implication he is naive or uneducated. Then the conversation slides perilously downhill until one of them backs off and apologizes.

He’s never called her a hypocrite before, though; and she’s never stormed off like that, or flipped him the bird. That’s new territory.

After a minute more, Hugh rises from the table and goes down the hallway for a shower. When he emerges from his bedroom an hour later, he finds that Silvia has left the flat. At 3:00 that afternoon, he receives a text message from her.

I’m going to stay at Tommy’s for a while.

The Family Tree, June 2021

The next morning, Hugh settles down at the dining table to start his research. It’s a cool June morning; the windows are open and a flock of starlings are chirping loudly in a tree across the mews. Silvia left for classes an hour earlier and he’s got the place to himself. With his laptop open and a takeaway grande Americano for fortification, he finds the Figan Finder login page on his browser. Using his new credentials, he logs in and, after reviewing the directions, types Hugh Thomas Warding in the search bar.

A second later—just as Callista F. said it would—Figan Finder serves up his profile like a plate of steaming pasta.

Hugh Thomas Warding

Birth: 04/07/1994, 01:37

Sex: Male

Nationality: Bressen

Patrilineal: Warding (Fg)

Matrilineal: Marston (Fg)

POB: West Gloven Medical Center

Father: Tipton Caudwell Warding (D) 07/28/1959 - 07/12/2006

Mother: Amelia Marston Warding (D) 05/15/1962 - 07/12/2006

Mother’s Maiden Name: Amelia Katrina Marston

Siblings: NA

Marital Status: NA

Education Completed: SU6

Primary: Thompson-Merrill Primary School

Secondary: Gloven Secondary School; North Campus Augustus Secondary School

Post-Secondary: Bressen Professional College. NG

Many of the fields link to images of actual documents, including his birth certificate, census data, previous addresses, old school photographs, pictures of his family members, and more. A pop-up window informs him that, with a Silver subscription for only €19.99 a month, he could dig into people’s legal histories, parking tickets, arrests, and lawsuits. Gold-level access would serve up his credit record and other financial data.

Now he drinks from his coffee and begins exploring his profile. Nothing embarrassing shows up, at least, in Bronze-level. His parents’ profiles provide similar but more extensive data, including their death certificates and obituaries, which he avoids. He finds Maggie’s profile as well and wonders briefly what details Gold access might serve up on the old man, but he figures he knows most of the dirt. Next he narrows the search focus to his patrilineal ancestry, eventually finding a link to his paternal grandfather, Albert Payne Warding. Grandpa Berty died of a heart attack two years before Hugh was born, so he knows him only from photographs and family stories.

Berty’s profile contains all the usual information, including an assortment of photographs, one of which Hugh recognizes from his living room wall back in Gloven. The black-and-white image shows a handsome broad-shouldered man leaning against an old Citroën. How that picture found its way into the Ministry database he has no idea, but then nothing seems private in Bressen. Seeing his grandfather standing alone by the car reminds him that Isla Kennison, Berty’s wife and his paternal grandmother, died young from breast cancer. It’s a hell of a family tradition—losing one’s parents early in life.

Hugh decides to check out Berty’s mother, Ulla Tort Warding, otherwise known as Mossey, the family historian who launched this goose chase. Mossey’s younger pictures, from maybe the 1920s or 30s, show a plump young woman with curly dark hair and black, pencil-thin eyebrows. She was born in 1895, died in 1968. Her profile is noticeably sparser than Berty’s, underscoring the reality that people who lived before the Internet would have left fewer traces. Even so, Hugh manages to find Mossey’s census data and her birth and death certificates.

Now Hugh switches back to his male ancestors, clicking on Mossey’s husband, Eugene Andrew Warding, born 1891, died 1943. Eugene died fairly young, during the German occupation of Bressen, which leads Hugh to wonder how exactly he died and if he’d been involved in the war. His death certificate lists his parents (Arno and Eleanor), his address (Tatsall Street in Oskin), his mother’s birthplace (Bratton Avenue in Campus Augustus), and more. A coroner by the name of C. M. Mansfield filed the certificate, noting he had done so “without an examination of the dead body having taken place” due to “wartime conditions.” In the lower-right hand corner of the certificate, where Mansfield made his sworn statement, inapplicable details have been crossed out with a typewriter to read as follows:

… (b) that I examined the dead body and investigated the circumstances of this death, and I further certify from the investigation (complete autopsy) (partial autopsy) (incision) and examination (c) that, in my opinion, death occurred on the date and at the hour stated above and resulted from (natural causes) (accident) (suicide) (homicide) (undetermined circumstances pending further investigation) and (d) that the causes of death were:

In the space provided below, the coroner typed, “Multiple gunshot wounds to the torso,” and under that, in parentheses: “Execution by Wehrmacht firing squad, 12-January-1943. Account of subject’s death provided by reliable witnesses.”

This provocative detail leads Hugh to dig deeper until he finds a newspaper article from 1947 titled, “Murdered Greys Leader Left Inspiring Legacy.”

For an instant, his brain trips over the words Greys Leader. He opens a second browser window and searches Bressen Greys. Sure enough. He sits back in his chair and runs his fingers through his hair.

His great-grandfather died fighting for the Bressenian resistance.

He has no recollection of a war hero in the family. Maybe his mum told him once, and it didn’t register because he was so young, and World War II never really interested him in the first place. Knowing his mother’s fondness for family history, she would have said something; so the story of Eugene the resistance fighter must have sunk into oblivion along with many of his pre-accident memories.

He turns back to The Record article for more details. Eugene Warding was born south of the city, near Mudo Milar (farm country back then); his father was a doctor and his mother a librarian at the local dombok. He graduated from secondary school in Oskin, then earned a certificate at Odra Forita College of Pharmacy in east Vastan. He married Mossey late in life, and she bore two children: Albert (Berty) and Clarissa, who died in infancy. Eugene operated a small apothecary in Oskin until a German bomb destroyed his building during the invasion of 1940. A few months later, he sent his wife and son to stay with relatives in the hills, and then volunteered with the Greys. He put his chemistry training to use as a maker of improvised bombs. When he and some others blew up a German barracks in Old Town, an informant gave them away. On a cold night in January 1943, the Germans found him hiding in a warehouse, marched him and his compatriots outside, and shot them. He was 52 at the time.

The article describes Eugene in implausibly heroic terms. One witness to the execution claimed that Eugene chanted his Murma-Sattme as the Germans shouldered their rifles. That part sounded made up.

Hugh sits back and stretches his shoulders. Great story, for sure, but nothing about Eugene Warding sounds like he could be a lapsed founder. Now Hugh sees that he has a few minutes left before work, so he decides to dig one generation deeper before logging out. There he comes across his great-great-grandfather, born in 1860, who answered to the name of Arno Cauthen Warding. The database lists Arno’s birthplace as Mistauth but doesn’t provide a hospital name or a birth certificate. Nor can Hugh find any primary or secondary school records for him, or much of anything until his medical licensing documents from 1890. Arno—Dr. Warding, it turns out—earned his medical degree at Tothe Minsa on the west side, a figan university still in existence. After 1890, his records are limited to census data, which list him as living in Mudo Milar. His death certificate from 1941 shows his residence as Pavin Corners, Oskin. His cause of death is listed as “acute myocardial infarction.” Arno lived to be 81, a good run even by modern standards. Luckily for him, he didn’t live long enough to hear his son had been shot by the Germans.

Arno’s wife Eleanor, the librarian mentioned in the Record article, has a similarly sparse profile. Eleanor Pierce Warding, born in 1867, died in 1918. Maiden name, Eleanor Louise Pierce. Parents, Stuart Andrew Pierce and Marian Rosehill Pierce. Cause of death, complications from influenza. Hugh is about to close Eleanor’s profile when he notices that her birthplace is listed as Amsterdam, New York, USA. Yankee blood in the family hardly counts as a distinction, but it does add some international flavor, and it’s definitely news to him. For his part, Maggie won’t appreciate hearing he has American blood in his veins; he’s always complaining that yanks can’t tell good art from their own assholes.

Now with a fairly complete picture of his ancestry from the mid-19th century to the present day, Hugh logs out of Figan Finder and heads down the hall to shower.

Later that afternoon, on his metro ride to work, he rings Dory to share the highlights of his research.

“Your grandfather was in the Greys?” shouts Dory over a bad cellular connection. “That’s brilliant, Hugh. I love that.”

“It felt good.”

“And a yank grandmum on top of that.” Dory whistles softly. “So maybe you have people in the States, yeah? Ain’t that some shit.”

Hugh laughs. “Turns out Amsterdam is in northern New York state. I guess people there made a lot of money in the fabric mills business.”

“Hmm. But no yazzers?”

“Nah.”

“So that’s it, then?”

“Seems like it,” says Hugh, though he’s not entirely sure what he expected to find in a Figan database. Just then his train begins its descent into the River Tunnel and the call drops. With his signal lost for the time being, he pockets his mobile and stares outside at the darkness rushing past his window.

Chapter 14

A Breakthrough, June 2021

It’s just past noon, and already the city has begun to stink in the summer sun. On Ambrose Avenue, heat rises in waves off the asphalt, and outside the fro-yo shop Le Yaourt, an old woman in a hijab hoses rancid yogurt from the sidewalk into the gutter. Hugh slept late this morning and skipped breakfast as he hurried to the gym. Now he’s heading home from the gym, stepping over the rancid yogurt water as he hunts for a post-workout bite to eat. After traveling three blocks down Stanfield Street, he comes to a Carrefour Market where he stops in for a chicken caesar wrap.

Now as he walks and eats, he thinks over his work in the ancestry database and what his next move might be—if he has any moves left. This sort of research project has never been his strong suit, and he finds his initial burst of scholarly energy already waning. Back in secondary school he dreaded writing English papers because finding the right source materials and then selecting quotes to use in his paper always fired up his anxiety. Too many interconnected parts. Genealogical research presents many of the same challenges, except that with English papers he was overwhelmed by the sheer abundance of source materials. Figan Finder, on the other hand, feels like a huge city of dead-ends.

As he turns the corner onto Morton Mews, he decides to ring Maggie when he arrives home—to catch him up and maybe get some fresh perspective. Once back at the flat, he changes, tosses his workout clothes in the washing machine, and settles on the couch with his mobile.

“Old man,” he says when his uncle answers. “You wearing shoes today?”

“I am,” replies Maggie, evidently not amused.

“Your neuropathy better then?”

“You call just to ask about my feet?”

“Nah,” says Hugh. “Wanted to catch you up on the ancestry thing.”

“So catch me up.”

Hugh describes his research on the Ministry website, ending the account with his discovery of Eugene Warding’s death certificate.

“Well ain’t that somethin’…” says the old man.

“Mossey ever mention that?” Hugh asks.

“Oh, yeah,” replies Maggie. “We knew ol’ Gene had been in the Greys, but I don’t recall hearin’ he died that way.”

“She never told you?”

“Might have,” replies Maggie. “But she was sort of a tragic ol’ moof, you know? And she was pissed so much of the time you never knew what was real anyway.”

“Makes you sort of proud, though, right?” says Hugh. “To have a hero in the family?”

“It does, indeed.”

Hugh shifts his mobile to the other ear, then asks, “Did Mossey ever talk about Eugene’s father? Arno Warding?”

“Arno?” asks Maggie. “She told me some. He was a doctor in Oskin.”

Hugh hesitates. “Did you know he married an American?”

Maggie makes a soft popping sound with his lips but says nothing.

“Maggie?”

“I heard ya.”

“She was from New York. Died young, in the 1918 influenza epidemic.”

“Lovely.”

“Anyway, I couldn’t find much on Arno,” continues Hugh. “Nothing, really, from his younger years. Then I found some documents from his medical licensing, and his death certificate.”

“Hmm.”

“I think I might have hit a dead end on all this, you know?”

“You think that, do you?” asks Maggie.

He can’t tell if Maggie is relieved by this development, or disappointed that Mossey’s story didn’t pan out. “All our family members are in Figan Finder,” he continues. “And they all check out as feegies. I don’t know how you’d ever figure out if someone changed teams along the way. Plus the farther back I go, the less information there is. How would you ever find someone who’s not listed, you know?”

Maggie remains silent for a minute, his breathing soft and regular in the speaker. “You try looking any of our people up in that yazzer database?”

Hugh sighs. “Maggie, if I found them in Figan Finder, then they wouldn’t be in the yazzer database. That’s the point, yeah? You’re in one or the other.”

At this, Maggie chuckles. “That’s not what I’m sayin’, Hughie. I mean you should get all our family names and dates goin’ back as far as you need—a hundred, maybe 200 years—then you check ‘em against people in the yazzer database, yeah? See if maybe they line up somehow.”

“Check them against what people in the yazzer database?” asks Hugh.

“People who have the same birthdays as ours, or who died on the same day. Or maybe you check other records like graduation dates—that sort of thing. See what lines up.”

At first Hugh doesn’t respond because he is considering if Maggie’s idea is even practicable, given what he’s seen so far.

“You mean like cross-reference birthdays and stuff?” Hugh asks.

“Exactly,” says Maggie.

“Hadn’t thought of that. I’ll give it a try.”

“You do that,” replies Maggie. Then he grunts irascibly and hangs up.

Hugh checks the time on his mobile, then sits back and thinks about Maggie’s recommendation. He decides to focus his efforts on his male descendents born after 1800. If no matches turn up in BACchus, he’ll end the search. For this next round of research, he’ll have to work between two databases; and he’s not familiar with BACchus yet. When he logs in to the founder database a few minutes later, he finds it contains a great deal more information than Figan Finder, much of it relating to religious ceremonies, professional accomplishments, and philanthropic efforts. The BACchus interface and search functions, however, are outdated and clunky, taking Hugh a solid half-hour to figure them out. After he gets his bearings he sets up a process for cross-checking the significant dates of his male ancestors against the founder database. To get started, he logs into Figan Finder and finds the birthdates of each male relative after 1800, writing them on a notepad for reference.

Tipton Caudwell Warding, July 28, 1959

Albert Payne Warding, November 11, 1920

Eugene Andrew Warding, March 22, 1891

Arno Cauthen Warding, April 17, 1860

Finlo August Warding, December 17, 1837

Next, he logs into BACchus and, just to be sure he doesn’t skip an obvious step, searches for each of his ancestors by name, which turns up nothing. He then conducts a search by birthdate, starting with his father and moving down on the list. With the ruling families accounting for less than a half a percent of the city’s population, the odds of a yazzer sharing a birthday with his ancestors seem pretty slim.

Even so, his first search uncovers a match: His father shares a birthday with a woman from the Abra clan, Livilla S. A. Gaurier, still alive and living in Kasabresan. This gets Hugh wondering if he’d ever passed her on the street, or if she and his father crossed paths—maybe celebrated their birthdays at the same restaurant one year and had a good laugh over the coincidence. Probably not. Not in Bressen, at least.

He goes through the same exercise for Albert Payne Warding and gets zero hits.

Eugene Warding turns up none, as well.

Arno the family doctor, however, matches not one but two founders born the same day. The first is a woman, whom Hugh dismisses straightaway. The second is a man from the Willsom branch of the Godor clan, Gaius Penrose Godori Willsom. The Godor name means little to Hugh, though he remembers seeing it on a wall at the natural history museum.

He makes a note to follow up on Gaius Willsom, then moves on to his great-great-great-grandfather Finlo Warding. No matches there, either, leaving Gaius Willsom as the only match in Hugh’s entire 221 year timeframe.

Now returning to Willsom’s profile, Hugh finds it fairly robust for someone born in the 19th century. His birth certificate shows he was born in Brukasa, on the northwestern edge of Old Town, near the river. His father is listed as Philip Augustus Godori Willsom (born 1837, died 1908), and his mother as Sabina Nimian Kestri Willsom (born 1840, died 1913). No occupation is listed for either parent. Gaius gave his first Murma-Sattme in 1865 at the Temple of Mars Athána in Old town. A school index from 1878 shows him as graduating from The English School, an elite academy, also in Old Town. His graduation photograph, the only picture provided of him, shows a handsome, clean-shaven young man wearing a black suit and extravagant silk cravat. He is meticulously groomed, though not particularly handsome. Were he dressed in modern clothing, he could be any number of rich young men Hugh serves at Bar Bruka.

Hugh scans the profile for more information: nothing to speak of beyond the announcement of Gaius’s graduation from The English School in 1878. The Edmiston Registry (registry number 67128-4A-1) lists him as having died in 1888, at only 28. A death notice from The Record provides scant detail: “Mr. Gaius P. G. Willsom of Old Town died this past Tuesday while swimming alone off the coast of Marbella, Spain. He was 28.”

BACchus provides no death certificate or further details of his death. He never married, as far as Hugh can tell, or had children, or even held a job.

Sad story there.

Having a fairly good picture of Gaius Willsom, Hugh switches back to Figan Finder to see how Arno Warding’s life events line up. He’d found a birthplace for Arno—Mistauth—but no birth certificate, church records, or school graduations; nothing until he earned his medical license at the age of 30. After that, the available data is limited to census entries containing his occupation, address, and the names of his wife and children. Then, a death certificate.

Hugh turns the page of his notepad and begins diagramming key events in the two men’s lives:

April 17, 1860—Arno born in Mistauth (no birth cert), Gaius born in Brukasa (birth cert and Record notice)

1862 Gaius first entry in census

1865 Gaius gives first Murma Sattme (church)

1872 Gaius mentioned in newspaper article about father (newspaper) and in census

1878 Gaius graduates English School (school)

1882 Gaius listed in census

1888 Ed Reg lists Gaius as deceased (no death cert)

1890 Arno med degree

1892 Arno practicing med in Oskin, shows him married to Eleanor (census, church, licensing)

1932 Arno listed as retired (census)

1941 Arno dies, Pavin Corners, Oskin (death cert)

Hugh reviews his work: the dates span 81 years, with good documentation available for Gaius through the 1888 death notice; then, starting in 1890, fairly good documentation for Arno. Between those dates, a two-year gap exists in which no documentation appears for either man. The shared birthday is promising, for sure, as is the lopsided distribution of data for the men’s lives—abundant information on Gaius’s early life and then on Arno’s later life—but that hardly amounts to a smoking gun.

There’s something odd about Gaius’s death notice, it occurs to Hugh. Here is the scion of a founding family who, according to the notice, died tragically at an early age. Wouldn’t that have caused more of a stir in high society? Where’s the obituary? The funeral announcement? When Hugh opens a second browser window and searches for additional information on Gaius Willsom’s death, he finds nothing.

He sits back and thinks, eventually daring to ask himself,

What if Gaius didn’t really die?

What if his family reported him as dead because they’d disowned him—as Maggie suggested?

Now growing excited, he turns back to his notes and reviews the timelines for Arno and Gaius, eventually pausing on one particular entry.

1892 Arno practicing med in Oskin, shows him married to Eleanor (census, church, licensing)

That’s four years after Gaius drowned, and two years after Arno earned his medical license in 1890. Hugh turns the page of his pad and checks a related entry.

Eleanor Louise Pierce from Amsterdam, New York.

Eyes wide, he runs his fingers through his hair, then picks up his mobile and places a call.

Silvia answers slightly out of breath. “Hey,” she says. “I’m just heading to my study group. What’s up?”

“I’m doing my family research and had a quick question.”

“Okay.”

She doesn’t sound at all eager to hear more, but he forges ahead.

“Back in the, like, 1880s would it have been a problem if a yazzer guy wanted to marry an American?”

“For sure,” replies Silvia. “That would’ve been a huge issue. The families are all about maintaining the purity of their bloodlines. I mean, they care about that now—and they would’ve been ten times more uptight in the 1880s.”

“Yeah,” says Hugh. “That’s what I figured.”

“Why are you asking?”

“Oh, I just found something chiggy in my research,” he says.

“Tell me.”

He hesitates—because she’s hurrying to study group and because lately she’s greeted his research updates with forced enthusiasm. Sometimes it even seems like she has to fight the urge to smirk. He keeps her informed because she’s his best friend, and he values her opinion, but more and more he finds himself divulging only the most important details. It doesn’t feel good to hold back from her—and he actually understands why a social justice keener like Silvia would disapprove of his project. At the same time, he hopes that someone who grew up with two parents and plenty of money might understand why he’s pursuing this. Failing that, it would be nice if her fondness for him could override her moral indignation.

When Silvia presses him again to tell her what he found, he decides to fill her in. After sharing the major details, he adds, “I’m thinking maybe this Gaius Willsom got involved with a yank from New York,” he continues, “and his parents cut him off. So he changed his identity to figan, married his American, and became a family doctor.”

“That’s really interesting,” says Silvia. “But do you think the Edmiston Commission would have based his date of death on just a notice in The Record?”

He knew there’d be a “but” coming somewhere.

“Here’s how I see it,” Hugh responds. “It was like a game of telephone, right? A powerful yazzer family fakes their son’s death by sending a death notice to The Record, and when the newspaper asks for more details, they throw their weight around and tell them there’s nothing more to know. Four years later, when the Edmiston Commission starts up, they’ve got so many yazzers to research that they don’t bother digging any deeper. After that, Gaius Willsom drowning in Spain just becomes one of a gazillion obscure facts in the database—and nobody’s gonna ask about it.”

“Huh. Maybe that could’ve happened back then,” she says. “But not these days.”

Just as Hugh is about to thank her for the input, half-hearted as it is, he glances back at his notepad. “Oh, wow,” he murmurs. “I just noticed something.”

“What?”

He inhales with a hiss. “Gaius’s father was named Phillip Augustus.”

“Right.”

“Check this out,” he continues. “Arno’s father is Finlo August.”

Now Silvia’s voice drops to a whisper. “Holy shit.”

His thoughts are racing so fast now Hugh can hardly speak. “I never actually thought I’d find something…”

Dory, June 2021

It’s nearly 9 PM. Dory should arrive any minute. Hugh is lying on the couch with his mobile in hand, scrolling through Instagram. An end-of-the-day calm has settled on the flat; the sun has nearly set, and an early cricket outside the living room window is announcing nightfall with an incessant cree-cree. Hugh has been lounging there for about ten minutes when the door buzzer sounds. He goes to the security panel to let Dory in, then returns to the sofa to slip on his boots. When he opens the flat door, he sees his friend mounting the last few steps.

“How many of those do you have?” laughs Hugh, gesturing at Dory’s sweatshirt with its bold Spalding Body Transformations logo.

“Sod off,” says Dory. “It’s marketing.”

Taller than Hugh by only a couple centimeters, Dory outweighs him by at least three and half stone, all of it muscle. He keeps his scalp and face smooth-shaven, to emphasize, he once joked, the classic shape of his head. His small, intense eyes are set far apart; his nose is broad and flat, like a boxer’s.

Now, as Dory follows Hugh into the flat, they see Silvia enter the living room, purse and keys in hand.

“Dory is in the house,” she calls out.

“Sil!” shouts Dory. “Seein’ your blonde prince tonight?”

Silvia goes to Dory and hugs him. “Just for a pint,” she says. “We’re checking out a place in Mistauth that Tommy heard about.” Then, with a smile at them both, she hurries out the door and down the stairs.

After Silvia is gone, Dory turns to Hugh, “Seriously, Hugh, when’re you gonna break that shit up, Hugh?”

Hugh laughs but doesn’t reply.

“I mean, Tommy’s alright, but you know Sil’s just killin’ time, yeah? ‘Til you get your head out of your ass and make a move.”

Glancing at the door to make sure Silvia is gone, Hugh lowers his voice, “I told you. That’s not happening.”

“She tell you that?” asks Dory. “Or you tell yourself that?”

Here Hugh takes the opportunity to change the subject. “I got a good story for you,” he says, going to the couch and sitting down.

Dory follows him. “From Maggie?”

Hugh nods. “It’s batshit crazy, and I’m not saying I’m going to do anything about it…”

With this disclaimer, he tells Dory about Maggie’s tale of founder ancestry. As he talks, he makes a point of emphasizing how unlikely the story is to be true.

When Hugh finishes, Dory sits back and runs his hands over his head, the way he does when thinking hard.

“Jim, that’s fuckin’ insane.”

“Totally insane,” affirms Hugh.

Dory asks what he’s going to do next.

“I dunno,” he answers. “I mean, what are the odds something like that could be overlooked for so long, right? Plus how would you ever find out?”

Dory sits up and crosses one leg over the other. “Hugh, this is Bressen. If any place has that sort of information, the government does.”

“You think I should check it out?” asks Hugh.

“Oh, hell no,” laughs Dory. “I’m just sayin’ you could probably find out if you wanted to.”

“But you think I shouldn’t?”

Now Dory smiles, and Hugh senses he is toying with him. “Doesn’t matter what I think. Just remember that this city is up tight on this kind of shit, yeah? And poking around at the ministries might open a Pandora’s box you don’t want open.”

Hugh nods.

Running his hand over his head again, Dory adds, as if he can’t resist, “But, personally? I’d stay far away from that shit. Even if you found out the story’s true, that club doesn’t want new members—and you don’t want to be a member, anyhow.”

“No, yeah, that’s right,” replies Hugh.

Now Dory rises from his chair, “You ready to roll?” he asks.

And Hugh, once again uncertain about whether to proceed with researching Maggie’s story, nods and rises.

Chapter 12

The Ministry, June 2021

Several days later, Hugh overcomes his doubts and decides to move ahead by inquiring at the Ministry of Genealogy. He’s been held back not just by concerns about Dory and Silvia, but also his paranoia over how much of his private information he’ll see in the Ministry database. On a subtler level, though, he’s been reluctant because he grew up viewing founders as a different species of humanity—remote, money-obsessed, cloaked in mystery. How might he react, then, to finding his entire figan identity was built on a faulty premise, and that he actually belongs to this different species, extremely rich, yes, but completely alien to him—and hated by at least a quarter of the population? For an orphan who’s struggled for a decade and a half with existential loneliness, calling into question his already shaky identity feels stupidly masochistic.

Eventually, though, he sits down with his laptop and Googles the Ministry of Genealogy. He selects the top search result and lands on a website with stock images of people playing tennis, drinking wine, sailing boats, all of which makes him think he’s come to a travel agency page by mistake. But there sits the official seal of the Ministry, in the upper lefthand corner, and beneath it the slogan, “It is in the roots, not the branches, that a tree’s greatest strength lies.”

He checks the dropdown menu and selects “Research Your Roots,” which takes him to a “Resources” page with descriptions of various online tools, the most prominent of which is BACchus, “the official ancestry database of Bressen’s founding families.” There’s also the Figan Finder database and an assortment of other tools for more specific searches on real estate, finance, and criminal history.

Unclear how to proceed, Hugh types prove founder ancestry into the search bar, which directs him to a list of unhelpful links on an FAQ page. Next, he modifies his search to include, founding family and then, aristocratic, but finds nothing helpful. The problem, he quickly decides, is that the Ministry has two main genealogy databases—one for the founding families and one for figan citizens—but he can’t see a way forward for someone who doesn’t know which group he belongs to. He grabs a pen and writes down the Ministry’s customer service phone number, thinking a human might provide better guidance.

Next he rings the Ministry and, when prompted, pushes 4 for “Research Assistance,” finding himself listening to an English-accented woman droning on about the virtues of genealogical inquiry.

Whether you’re calling to learn more about your ancestry, or to better understand Bressen’s unique commitment to recording genealogical data, you’ve come to the right place. Equipped with the most sophisticated resources in the world, the Ministry connects today’s Bressenians with their past while illuminating their present.

He’s been on hold for a few minutes when a woman with an actual south-side Bressen accent introduces herself as Callista F. and announces they are on a recorded line.

She asks for his name; he provides it.

“Okay, Mr. Warding. How can I assist?”

“I’m interested in researching my ancestry to…you know…illuminate my present.”

“Of course,” she says, unamused. “Did you happen to look over the online resources we have available for family research?”

“I did.”

“And which sounds right for your needs?”

“That’s where I need some help,” he says. “I’m not sure which database would have what I’m looking for…”

“No?”

“No.”

“I see,” she says. “Are you from an immigrant family, perhaps? Because we’re launching a database for our immigrant citizens in 2025.”

“No, no,” he replies. “My family is from Bressen—going a long way back, I think.”

“Ah, okay. Then if you’ll provide me with your full legal name and birthdate, I can get you started.”

“Hugh Thomas Warding; April 7, 1994.”

He hears fingers tapping on a keyboard. Then, after a minute, Callista F. announces, “I’ve got you right here—father, Tipton Caudwell Warding?”

“Uh huh.”

“Mother, Amelia Marston Warding?”

“Right.”

“So you should find everything you’re after in Figan Finder. If you like, I can register you for access, or you can register online. Bronze access is free to the public. Silver and Gold access involve a subscription fee.”

“That’s the thing,” he says. “I think I might need both databases.”

“Why is that?” she asks.

“It’s a little complicated,” Hugh replies. “Family legends and that sort of thing. But I want to make sure I’m thorough, yeah? It’s for my uncle.” He adds that last part to humanize himself but realizes he probably sounds silly.

Now Callista laughs. “Oh, I totally understand. All families have their stories, right? I’d recommend starting with what you know for sure, which is that your ancestry is figan.”

Figan.

Weegan.

“Right,” he says, “but what if I’m registered wrong in the first place? I’d need both databases to figure that out, yeah?”

“That’s your choice, of course,” Callista replies. “But it’s highly unlikely you’re registered incorrectly. Bressen has the most extensive genealogical resources in the world.”

“Can you tell me about the yazzer database?”

“BACchus,” replies Callista, “is our oldest database. It’s been online since 2001 but its roots go back to the 19th century, with the Edmiston Register. And for centuries before that, Bressen tracked the founding family bloodlines through the BCA—the Bressenian College of Arms. It tracked heraldry and genealogy for centuries before the Ministry was formed. Then it got folded into the Ministry back in the early 1900s.”

“What’s the Edmiston thingy?” he asks.

Callista explains that, in 1892, the Senate commissioned a register of every living member of the founding families. Researchers were able to trace the oldest of the clans as far back as the first century, meaning, she said, that Bressen is home to the oldest verified bloodlines in the world—older even than the Grimaldis, Habsburgs, or the British Royal Family. Data from the register later provided the foundation for BACchus, with dozens of additional data sources being added over the years.

“Interesting,” says Hugh. “So I think I need access to them both.”

Callista says that’s absolutely fine and that the two databases are priced the same. She takes down Hugh’s email address and tells him he’ll receive his login credentials within the hour. Before ending the call, she gives him her direct extension and explains that she’ll be his point of contact for future inquiries. Then, 45 minutes later, Hugh receives an email from the Ministry of Genealogy congratulating him on his decision to explore his ancestry. At the bottom of the message are his login credentials followed by a Latin phrase:

Respice Adspice Prospice.

And beneath it the English translation:

Examine the past, the present, and the future.

A Funeral, July, 2006

Details of the accident came in fragments. Much of the information Hugh pieced together from snatches of telephone conversations between Maggie and the Sikstand investigators. Once or twice, he caught a look at documents Maggie forgot to put away, though he later wished he’d never seen them. In fact, Maggie showed more curiosity about the circumstances of the car crash than he did, which Hugh later attributed to his shock from the loss. In an unexpected twist, the shock of his parents’ death swept away his anxiety and OCD, and for several weeks after the accident, he suffered no panic attacks at all. Instead, he existed in a sort of twilight world, where feelings of any sort seemed to have died inside him. It was not until he moved in with Maggie that the anxiety returned, and with it the endless tics and compulsions. The voice nattering in his head was the worst part, though, with its constant rhyming. When his anxiety came back, that voice returned with a vengeance; but that was later.

For the first two weeks after the accident, Maggie lived with Hugh in Gloven, spending his days poring over the Warding family finances, planning the funeral, dealing with the Sikstand investigators, and packing for Hugh’s relocation to North Campus Augustus. To his credit, the old man never drank during the day and went about his tasks with grim determination. He kept a close eye on his nephew during that time. Hugh could tell from the look in his eyes, though, that Maggie was as scared of being a guardian as Hugh of being alone in the world. Neither of them knew how to interact with the other. Maggie dealt with Hugh as one might handle a kettle of boiling water; and Hugh avoided Maggie altogether. When his uncle made any request of him, Hugh would grudgingly comply, with no effort at civility. Even in those earliest weeks after his parents died, he looked forward to the day he could be free of the old man.

The accident on Halendana Hill seemed to perplex the Sikstand, or at least challenge their attention spans. At first, investigators speculated that Hugh’s father had been blinded by the brilliant sunset and missed a turn on the steep hill. But it was later determined that, by 9:15, when the restaurant manager said Hugh’s parents left, the entire southwestern slope of Halendana would have been nearly dark. The pavement may have been slick from the rain, it was speculated, or maybe a deer darted out of the pine forest onto the road. After the accident, Maggie occasionally referred to an official inquest; and it was a copy of that inquest report that Hugh discovered lying on his mother’s desk one afternoon. It was there, in six paragraphs of 12-point Times New Roman type, that he saw his deceased parents described like a pair of dummies in a crash simulator.

Tipton Caudwell Warding, aged 47, died instantly from blunt trauma to the skull.

Amelia Marston Warding, aged 44, died from crush injuries to the chest and pelvis.

With the toxicology analysis completed, the Sikstand were able to rule out intoxication as a factor: neither victim’s blood alcohol level exceeded the legal limit of 0.5 mg/ml per litre. Hugh knew, of course, that his safety-conscious parents never would have driven drunk, and the mere implication infuriated him. All the Sikstand could say for sure was that, at approximately 9:22 PM, a 2004 Renault Clio, registered to Tipton Warding and traveling at approximately 56 kilometers per hour, veered off the Halendana Road near marker 12.6, rolled 120 meters down a steep ravine and wedged itself between two large trees. Both driver and passenger were killed immediately. Sikstand investigators did not believe anyone witnessed the crash. Though the report referenced a second car on the road, it declined to speculate if the car had been involved. Constantly frustrated by the Sikstand’s lack of thoroughness, Maggie complained that they probably never even tried to find the second car. When the investigation ended, the report concluded that the accident had likely been a result of distracted driving—Hugh’s dad might have changed the radio station or looked sideways at the wrong instant. Hugh dismissed that conclusion as well; his mum would have never let his father be distracted, especially on that road.

Whatever the cause, the Pombresan Borough Council installed a guardrail on Halendana Road just a month after the accident.

The memorial service took place a week after the accident, at Wilkins & Beheun Funeral Home, a shabby storefront operation in north Gloven. The turnout was respectable: about three dozen people all told—some from DHL and some from the university, where Hugh’s mum worked as a benefits administrator. Three members of his father’s darts league showed up to pay their respects, as did a handful of women from the fitness club where his mother took classes on Tuesday and Thursday. Immediately following the service, a few of the mourners met at a pub around the corner on Hanover Street, to drink a pint in honor of the deceased. For the first few minutes, Maggie guided Hugh around the pub, introducing him as “Tip and Amelia’s boy.” One of his hands rested on Hugh’s shoulder, the other held a glass of whiskey. The people all nodded as if they knew Hugh and gave him the look adults reserve for the children of tragedy, a mix of concern and pity—the look that says, This poor jimmy doesn’t stand a chance.

After Maggie finished marching him around, Hugh found his way to the bar, where he spun himself lazily on a barstool and drank Coca Cola. At one point, perhaps a half-hour later, Maggie ambled over and sat next to him. He’d dressed up, in a brown tweed sport coat, a narrow black tie, and a white shirt that hung loose about the neck. He hadn’t shaved, but he’d showered, at least; and with his hair combed back, and the deep lines on his forehead stretching from temple to temple, he looked surprisingly wise, though the glint in his eye suggested he was already half in the bag.

After he sat down, Maggie smiled buoyantly, as if he’d forgotten the occasion for the get-together. Then he studied Hugh for a moment and leaned in close. “How about a beer, Hughie? You’re ol’ enough, yeah?”

Hugh briefly considered the offer, then said, “Yeah, sure,” because his parents allowed him the occasional beer at a football game or a birthday party. He only hesitated because his mother wouldn’t have liked him drinking at a funeral.

Maggie waved the barman over and ordered a half-pint of Thomson’s for Hugh and another round of whiskey for himself. Then he squeezed Hugh on the shoulder and said, “There you go, jimmy. Bottoms up,” and he wandered back to the fireplace where he’d been chatting with three men Hugh didn’t recognize.

About ten minutes after that, when Hugh had drunk half his beer, a pretty middle-aged woman in a blue dress caught his eye from across the pub. She’d been standing with a group of his mother’s work friends and every now and then would glance meaningfully at him. He was in no mood to talk to more adults, however, so he avoided making eye contact. At one point, the woman must have decided the time was right, so she excused herself from her group and made her way over to him. She had an honest, unenigmatic quality to her—round, dark eyes, auburn hair braided Bressen-style behind her head, a sturdy figure. When she stood before him, the woman offered Hugh the standard sympathy smile, and he forced himself to smile back. Then he looked away as if they’d concluded their exchange—to say, You really don’t need to check on me. But the woman was undeterred.

“Hugh?” she said, her cheerful face hovering in his line of sight like a harvest moon. “You don’t know me, but I worked with your mum at the university.”

“You’re Ava, yeah?” he replied.

“I am!” she exclaimed. “How did you know?”

“Mum talks about work a lot.”

The woman laughed. “Well, I hope she didn’t complain about me too much.”

“You’re her boss?”

She looked at her feet as if he’d wounded her feelings. “I was, technically. But we were more like friends.” With that, her eyes began welling up. “We got to be really close, actually.” The next thing Hugh knew, big, sooty tears were trailing down Ava’s cheeks. He considered saying something consoling but was too wrung out. So he watched and waited as she searched for a tissue in the pocket of her dress, then wiped her eyes and cheeks. She didn’t speak right away, but she kept her eyes locked on him, as if he might run off when he got the chance. After a second, she said, “Your mum told me so much about you, Hugh.”

He forced out another compulsory smile.

“She told me about your pet lizard and how you held a funeral when it died.” When he tried to look away, she lowered her head to catch his gaze. “That’s a lovely thing to do—and so compassionate for a boy your age. I hope you never lose that quality.”

“Thanks,” was all he could think to say. Then he finished his beer and slid the glass toward the barman, as he’d seen his father do. Ava shot a disapproving look at his beer glass but said nothing about it.

“She was so focused on your future,” she continued. “Did you know that? She talked constantly about her plans for you and how you’d maybe go to university someday. She said you’re smarter than any boy she ever knew, and that you have such good judgment. She said once you make up your mind, there’s no stopping you.”

“All mums say that stuff,” he mumbled.

“Maybe so,” said Ava. “But your mum was very clever herself, and I don’t think she was exaggerating just because you’re her boy.” She reached over and put her hand on his forearm; he could feel its warmth through his shirt sleeve. “She saw so much in you, Hugh. She was even exploring…where you come from. All about your family and your history. She thought it was important for you to know about that.” She gave him a searching look with her dark, round eyes, but he looked away again, toward the window.

“I know all that stuff,” he said. He knew, after all, that his mother was interested in their family history. Every now and then, she showed him a photo on her laptop of some ancestor from the last century. It didn’t interest him much, but he always tried to show enthusiasm because it meant so much to her.

“Maybe so,” replied Ava. “But she seemed to think there was…” Her voice trailed off. “More to know.” Then she smiled, wiped her cheeks again, and said, “I hope your uncle helps you learn more about yourself—that’s really important in life.” Her face grew unexpectedly grave at this point, and something in her expression made Hugh’s chest tighten.

Mean that.

Bean that.

“Thanks,” he said.

Ava started to leave, hesitated a second, then turned to him and asked, “What was its name?”

“What’s name?”

“Your lizard. The one that died.”

“Pagos,” he replied. “He was a bearded dragon.”

“Ah!” said Ava. “That’s a wonderful name for a lizard.”

He told her he’d named the lizard after Loistávis, whose name was Pagos Abra before he became Consul and the Senate granted him his title. “I like history stuff,” he confessed, feeling suddenly ashamed of his earnestness.

Now Ava laughed exuberantly, her smooth, white chin tilted toward the ceiling. “You are a clever boy!” she cried out. “My boys would have named him something from Star Wars, but you pick a consul from a thousand years ago. That’s brilliant.” She gave him one, final look of approval, reached out and patted his arm, and left.

Hugh watched her return to her friends, wine glass in hand, the red braid coiled at the back of her head. She was nothing like his mother, but then a great deal like her. Perhaps it was a maternal thing—how she looked at him with intensity but not judgment, how her hand felt warm on his arm.

Right then he got a crushing, lonely feeling, and his ribs tightened up again.

Clever boy.

Clever roy.

Eventually the spasm of loneliness eased and, since no one seemed to care, he waved to the barman for another half pint. He was just taking a sip when Maggie sidled up to him again. His cheeks were redder than the last time he came by, and there was a surprising brightness to his eyes. “You ready to clear out, Hughie? I could stand a bite.”

Hugh nodded.

“Who was that ripe little masie you were talkin’ to?” he asked, scanning the pub.

“She knew Mum from work,” Hugh said.

“Ah.”

“She said Mum talked about me a lot,” he went on. “She knew that Pagos died.”

Maggie raised his eyebrows.

“My lizard.”

“Ah,” said his uncle.

“She said I’m clever.”

Maggie smiled. “You like hearin’ that, yeah?”

“All mums say that stuff,” he replied.

“Oh I dunno, Hughie,” he said. “Your mum was as clever as they come—and it takes one to know one.” Then he slapped his hand on the bar and added, “Let’s go fin’ some dinner.”

Chapter 10

School Day, May 2012

“Hugh-boy, d’ya check the post?”

Maggie’s voice came from inside his studio where he’d been painting since 5:30 or 6 that morning. He never bothered to say, good morning or how’d you sleep, or much of anything pleasant in the morning. Maybe he didn’t know how to be that civil, or he’d forgotten how. Hugh had been living with Maggie for five years by that time and was no longer fazed by his uncle’s abrupt manner, or by anything Maggie did or didn’t do. Seated at the harvest table in the kitchen, Hugh briefly looked up when he heard Maggie’s voice, then resumed eating his muesli. He almost always ate a bowl of cereal before school, most of the time alone.

“Yeah,” he replied. “It’s here.”

Now he heard Maggie’s feet treading on the newspapers he used to cover his studio floor. A second later, the old man came into the kitchen and stood opposite the harvest table where Hugh was eating. The table was long and narrow and battered by the years, its top cluttered with art books, potted plants, dirty dishes, and jars of ballpoint pens and colored pencils. Briefly scanning the tabletop, Maggie leaned forward and snatched up a stack of mail at Hugh’s elbow. He examined each of the envelopes, then threw all but one into a rubbish bin. This last envelope he tore open, then pulled from it a pale-blue check. He looked the check over, folded it in half, and tucked it in his shirt pocket.

“Don’t drink it too fast,” said Hugh.

“Just eat your breakfast,” replied Maggie, turning to go.

Hugh lifted another bite of muesli to his mouth, pausing with the spoon at his chin. “I’m serious,” he said. “There’s nothing to eat around here.” And, as far as a 17 year-old was concerned, there wasn’t, except for the food Maggie liked—tins of sardines, German black bread, a brick of cold Leberkäse, none of which seemed remotely edible.

Maggie glared at him from across the table. “What’s the matter, Hughie?” he asked with a leer. “Wake up in a pissy mood?”

Hugh gave him his best go bugger yourself look, then thrust the spoonful of cereal in his mouth and crunched it with exaggerated enthusiasm. Maggie had on his usual paint-spattered clothes. His white t-shirt hung loosely on his angular shoulders; at the hollow of his neck, strands of gray chest hair poked up toward his Adam’s apple. He snorted and headed back toward his studio.

“By the way,” Hugh called after him. “You owe me 30 bone from last week.”

Without turning, Maggie shouted, “I’ll deposit the check and you’ll get your scaper.”

“It’s all my scaper.”

This stopped the old man in his tracks. He reached into his shirt pocket with a dramatic flourish, unfolded the check, and waved it at Hugh. “You see your name on this, Hughie boy?” he said. “That’s my fuckin’ name there… ‘Payable to Maghil A. Wardin’… not to jitter-boy over there who’d just smoke it with his jimmies.”

This last remark was a low blow, even for Maggie. Not because the subject of Hugh’s anxiety was off limits—both of them suffered from panic attacks, after all—but because, if Hugh wanted to smoke weed, or have a pint down at The Plough, or do much of anything fun, he had to rely on the generosity of his friends, which cost him scarce social capital. Few things were worse in secondary school than being known as a mooch, and Hugh blamed his questionable social standing—and an assortment of other problems—on Maggie.

“You wouldn’t get any of that Ministry scaper if it wasn’t for me,” Hugh muttered. “It’s supposed to be for dependent care, old man, not so you can play big dog at the pub.”

This was by no means a new criticism. Hugh often dropped a snarky aside when the Ministry check arrived—to get a rise out of the old man. Now he could see Maggie’s eyes trained on him from under eyelids lined with broken capillaries. “At least my friends say thank you every now ‘n then, yeah? That’s more ‘n I get from you…”

“I bet they thank you,” laughed Hugh.

Maggie looked poised to reply but then turned and went to his studio. When he’d disappeared around the corner, Hugh heard him mutter, just loud enough to hear, “Entitled bloody chudge,” and slam the door.

A few minutes later, Hugh rose from the table, placed his cereal bowl in the sink, and slipped on his backpack for the walk to North Campus Augustus Secondary School. Graduation was only three weeks away, a terminus he viewed with both relief and apprehension; NCASS wasn’t the sort of place you got nostalgic about. Like most students there—lower-class figans like him and newta kids from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Syria and other places—he just wanted to get secondary school over with. Few NCASS graduates would continue on to university; Hugh’s immediate goal was to start earning money so he could move out on his own.

Since his parents died, he’d grown nearly a foot taller and filled out in the chest and shoulders. The acne on his forehead had mostly cleared up, and the peach fuzz on his lip and chin had developed into a scruffy beard. Between his beard and the dark hair he wore down to his shoulders, he’d cultivated a Keanu Reeves vibe that seemed to go over well at school. On the chubby side as a 12 year-old, he now tended toward gangliness, which prompted him to start lifting weights twice a week at the borough community center. At NCASS, where social taxonomies were cut and dry, long hair meant you were either a weed smoker or a metal head, or both. But Hugh didn’t fit neatly into either pigeon hole. He started smoking weed shortly after he moved in with Maggie but found he had to limit himself to a couple hits or risk setting off his anxiety like fireworks. Nor was he a metal head, really—he favored old school Seattle grunge over Euro-Metal. His Keanu Reeves look attracted girls, for sure, but usually the wrong types—black-haired goths sometimes, or izzies, the hard-partiers who never seemed to have parents at home. Girls like those expected him to be edgier than he really was, and then ghosted him when he turned out to be a history keener with cool hair. The girls he fancied—the smart, pretty ones like his mum—tended to date jocks or boys with university ambitions.

After Hugh had been walking down Pembroke Street for a few minutes, he turned onto the NCASS Esplanade, a long parkway of crabgrass and ragweed between parallel strips of crumbling asphalt. He’d walked half a block along the esplanade when he spotted his friend Louis Gergits just ahead and called out to him. Seeing Hugh jogging toward him, Louis turned squinting in the morning light, and waited for him to catch up.

As Hugh approached, Louis asked, “You get it finished?”

“Yeah,” replied Hugh. “You?”

“Nah. Fell asleep halfway through.”

A short, pudgy kid in jeans and a Pokemon t-shirt, Louis was teased at school for the way he walked on his toes. He and Hugh had been friends since they met in first-year algebra and Hugh offered to help with some of the trickier homework assignments.

After a minute of walking together, Louis asked, “You probably got it done in like 10 minutes, yeah?”

“Nah, Lou,” laughed Hugh. “It took me at least 15.”

Louis shook his head and muttered something about failing the class.

“Just ask for an extension,” suggested Hugh. “She’ll give it to you.”

Louis kicked at an empty Coke can on the sidewalk. “I know she will, but my dad is up my ass about not finishin’ my homework—says I must have narcolepsy or somethin’ and that I’ll never hold a job down.”

“That’s harsh,” laughed Hugh.

“It’s fuckin’ harsh, yeah?”

By this time, the NCASS building had come into view, a drab cinder-block complex, expanded haphazardly over the decades and surrounded by asphalt parking lots, athletic fields, and chain link fencing. All along the esplanade students of every description were making their way toward the school’s front entrance. By the curb outside the school, at least a dozen yellow school buses were releasing their human cargo one by one, then roaring away in clouds of exhaust.

Louis sighed as they approached the entrance. “Fuckin’ Nack-Ass,” he muttered. “I won’t miss this shithole.”

“Oh, yeah you will,” replied Hugh, eyes dead ahead.

“The fuck I will,” insisted Louis.

“What, Lou?” asked Hugh. “You think things get easy after this?” He chuckled sardonically then gestured at the school the way an estate agent might at a house for sale. “Ten years on this’ll look like paradise, yeah? Two of us’ll be washing dishes at Niedermeyers’, talking about the good ol’ days at Nack-Ass when we didn’t have bills to pay.”

“Maybe you will,” countered Louis. “I’m gonna make a shitload of scaper and get the fuck out of Bressen.”

“Yeah?” laughed Hugh. “You gonna be a highly-paid mattress tester?”

Louis smirked and raised his middle finger at Hugh.

A moment later, as they crossed the street to the school, they found themselves surrounded by a horde of backpack-wearing students, all jostling their way to the front door. Mounting the steps to the entrance, Hugh poked Louis in the arm “Don’t fall asleep in class,” he chided.

Louis stepped through the front door, glanced back at Hugh, and shouted, “Blow me,” then disappeared into the throng.

Then, when professors realize they’re evaluating AI-generated essays and tests, they’ll delegate grading, and eventually teaching altogether, to the bots. Think of the efficiencies gained: Before long, colleges will save millions offering courses entirely taught by chatbots. Eventually, when classes are 100-percent online and robot-taught, we can repurpose college campuses as data centers.

Sure, experts warn that Gen Z is the first to show lower cognitive skills than the generation before it. The “neuroscientists” making these claims point to declines in memory, attention, executive function, and overall IQ—a result, they say, of the Edtech tools that became popular around 2010. And, sure, teen mental health has wandered off Hacksaw Ridge since our last unregulated experiment with smartphones and social media. Kids aren’t having sex, either, apparently—at least not with each other. But even if this is all true, AI can fix it. Cognitive off-loading can relieve those over-burdened teen minds; and porn chatbots are just what the doctor ordered for rebuilding sexual confidence cratered by PornHub.

We need to focus on the future here. Parents are justifiably concerned their kids might graduate without having critical AI skills, because, you know, having ChatGPT identify key themes in Wuthering Heights (asking for a friend) requires advanced training. Parents aren’t worried their kids will graduate as uneducated morons possessing zero soft skills; they’re worried they won’t find jobs feeding data to their new Large Language Model overlords. Integrating AI into every aspect of campus life is, consequently, imperative: AI in the classroom to, well, do the learning for kids. AI in the bathrooms to evaluate how much toilet paper to use. AI at the cafeteria to choose between sushi and chicken tenders. The efficiency gains are endless.

I, for one, am super stoked about this techno-utopia coming to campus. Now if my wife would just get on board.

Smoke on the Water, July 2006

“Our friend seems to have a great deal of nervous energy,” said Mrs. Ample, right in front of Hugh as if he were a potted plant.

Amelia Warding nodded, smiled at Hugh beside her, and patted his thigh reassuringly, the way mothers do. “I think certain group situations bring out his anxiety,” she said. “But he has lots of ways to burn off energy at home—playing football with his friends, mostly, and riding his bike.”

Lorraine Ample, Hugh’s counselor at Thompson-Merrill Primary School, sat forward with a creaking of her chair springs. She put on her reading glasses and began examining a document Hugh assumed was a list of his various meltdowns in class. Fortunately, Mrs. Ample, referred to by school delinquents as Mrs. Jubblies, was known as a well-intended woman whose greatest fault was sometimes hugging students so tightly they nearly suffocated against her huge bosoms. Fortunately for Hugh, mental health check-ins with Mrs. Ample, however much they could feel like an inquisition, usually proved harmless, if not pointless.

“Hmm,” said Mrs. Ample. “His teachers indicate Hugh is very creative. Have you considered finding some sort of creative outlet for him?”

“Well, he reads quite a lot,” ventured Hugh’s mother. “Though I don’t suppose that’s what you have in mind…”

This caught Mrs. Ample’s attention, and she turned to Hugh with more creaking of her chair springs. “What sorts of things do you enjoy reading, Hugh?”

Hugh sat up straighter now, glanced at his mother, and answered, “Mostly stuff about old wars—famous generals and battles—but also about animals.”

“Well, that’s excellent,” she said.

“And my mum has me read books she likes…” he added, which seemed to discomfit his mother, who now interjected.

“Hugh’s dad and I are great believers in the importance of reading,” she began. “We encourage him to read one book a quarter outside his school work. Last quarter he read Pride and Prejudice. Now he’s working his way through the James Herriot books.”

“Wonderful, excellent,” said Mrs. Ample. She removed her glasses, thought for a moment, and added. “But I also wonder if Hugh mightn’t benefit from a creative endeavor that both channels his energies and calms him.”

“Like art? Or music?” asked Hugh’s mother.

“Exactly.”

Hugh knew right away that his mother would suggest an old-school option like water color painting or cello lessons; but he also knew better than to argue with two adult women at once. So, after their appointment had concluded, when he and his mum were buckling themselves into her Renault, he offered a preemptive suggestion.

“You know, Mum, Gerry learned to play the guitar with Guitar Hero,” he said. “How about that?”

His mother fit the key in the ignition and started the car. “Is that a school program?”

“Nah,” he replied. “It’s a video game.”

She looked ahead as the car warmed up. Sitting beside her, Hugh studied her face to anticipate the eventual response.

Now she turned to him. “I don’t know, Love,” she began. “A video game?”

“Can’t we at least check it out?”

She shifted the car into reverse and, as she began to back out of the parking place, gave Hugh an encouraging smile.

On their way home, they stopped at Cosgrove’s, an old figan department store in East Gloven. There, on the second floor in the Toys and Games section, they explored such creative outlets as William’s Musical Adventure and Mario Teaches Violin, which even Hugh’s mum agreed were more punitive than calming. After nearly 40 minutes of browsing, and a fair amount of cajoling, Hugh prevailed and, ten minutes later, left the store with Guitar Hero in hand. As they emerged onto the sidewalk, his mum looked down at him and confided, “Let’s not mention to your dad how much this cost. Okay, Love?”

The minute they returned home that evening, Hugh set about assembling the game in his bedroom and even learning the Opening Licks numbers—the songs with easy chords for beginners, like “Iron Man” by Black Sabbath, “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll” by Joan Jett, and “Smoke on the Water” by Deep Purple. For weeks after that, he spent most evenings holed up in his room, practicing guitar licks until his shirt was damp with sweat, or until his father poked his head in the door and told him to get to bed or else.

At one point, a couple weeks after Guitar Hero made its appearance, his father asked for an update on how well the game was helping with his anxiety. Mr. Warding had just come home from work and opened a bottle of beer in the living room, when he called down the hallway, “Hughie come in here a second.”

Hugh was in his room reading All Things Bright and Beautiful at the time. Hearing his father calling, he arose from his bed and trudged down the hallway to the living room. There he found his dad tilted back in his blue recliner, his trainers on the floor below him. “Hugh Boy,” said his father, “That guitar game helpin’ with your nerves at all?”

Hugh’s mother stood in the kitchen preparing dinner and turned to hear her son’s reply.

Considering the question, Hugh realized he hadn’t thought much about his anxiety lately, which he took as a good sign—and he told his father as much.

“No panic attacks?” asked his dad.

“Nope.”

Then Hugh’s father laughed and said, “Well maybe ol’ Mrs Jubblies was right,” at which Hugh’s mother shot him a disapproving look.

“And I beat Gerry’s score last night,” added Hugh for emphasis.

“Yeah?” replied his dad with a grin. “Well, that’s just icin’ on the cake, isn’t it?”

That exchange took place in early June, and Hugh’s placid state of mind persisted through the end of the school year and into July. Then arrived July 12, a Wednesday scarcely one week into the dry season, when, to everyone’s astonishment, the skies grew suddenly dark and rain came down in torrents. Hugh had been playing football with some neighborhood friends and got soaked to the bone on his return home from the rec center. After he’d changed into dry clothes and gone to the kitchen for a snack, his mother came in with a mysterious smile on her face.

Hugh swallowed a mouthful of his peanut butter sandwich and asked, “What’s up?”

“Your dad got some brilliant news just now.”

“Yeah? A promotion?”

“Better,” said his mother. “He got a promotion and a big raise—or actually a double-promotion ‘cause they made him a Senior Operations Manager.”

“That’s brilliant, Mum. He deserves it.”

“He made dinner reservations at La Fôret tonight so we can celebrate,” she said. “So don’t make any plans with your friends.”

“A Frannie place?” complained Hugh. “I hate Frannie food, Mum.”

At this, his mother’s expression soured. “Don’t use that word, Hugh. It’s disrespectful. And La Fôret’s a lovely place at the top of Halendana Hill. It’s got amazing views of the city. You’ll love it.”

Hugh knew he shouldn’t resist going to dinner, but his petulant self had, for the moment, seized the steering wheel of his 12 year-old brain. He’d been planning to practice “Smoke on the Water” on Guitar Hero that night and compare scores with Gerry; dinner at a French restaurant 40 minutes outside of town threw a wet blanket on his whole scheme. On top of that, he’d eaten French food twice in his life—at a Gursey restaurant called Normandy—and came away unimpressed both times. He had no interest in heavy sauces, waiters in black vests and bow ties, and menus where every entry was fromage this or bourguignon that.

“French food makes me wanna gerb,” he whined to underscore his point.

Apparently, his mother didn’t appreciate this line of reasoning, nor the fondness he’d developed for south-side slang, so she left the kitchen unceremoniously, calling over her shoulder, “You’ll find something you can eat…”

Hugh understood Bressen geography well enough to know that a drive up the Halendana Hill would take them through a dense pine forest and a number of steep, hairpin turns, so he tried a different line of attack.

“You know I’ll get car sick on that road,” he called after his mum.

Now halfway down the hall, she stopped with her back still to him. “We’re celebrating your father’s promotion…” she said, all amusement now absent from her voice.

Sensing maybe he’d gone too far, he tried the empathetic route. “I know mum, and I’m really excited for him, yeah? But you’d have more fun without me complainin’ about a stomach ache and hating all the food. You could stay and drink wine and talk about whatever…”

“Okay,” she said after a pause. “You’re on your own, then. But I’d better hear you congratulating your dad the minute he walks in.”

Hugh promised that he’d smother his father in praise, then retreated to his bedroom to call Gerry.

Many years later, Hugh came to view that day in July as a series of omens, missed by his younger self but painfully obvious in retrospect: how it rained cats and dogs in the first week of the dry season; and how, after his parents left for dinner, he bit into the chicken sandwich his mother made and tasted a trace of her scented hand lotion on the bread. And then, an hour later, when he took a break from Guitar Hero, he noticed the evening sky. He didn’t usually pay attention to the western horizon outside his window, but that night the sunset stopped him in his tracks. Dramatic cumulonimbus clouds lumbered across the twilight sky—great, roiling, purple-tinged clouds—and where the sun’s rays touched them from beneath, they glowed a brilliant orange, like embers in a fireplace. Uncharacteristically, Hugh stood at his bedroom window for several minutes and watched those clouds slide slowly from east to west. It felt like standing on a beach, bidding farewell to a departing armada. That unsettling sensation of being left behind stayed with him even as he resumed playing Guitar Hero. Then, once again, he lost all sense of time.

The doorbell rang around 10:30. It was only then he realized his parents were at least an hour late. But even as he broke himself away from his game and made his way down the hallway, it did not occur to him to be concerned. Life hadn’t yet taught him to be wary. When he opened the door, however, he found not his parents standing there, smelling of wine and Sole Française, complaining they’d forgotten their flat key, but two Sikstand officers in black uniforms, accompanied by an old lady.

The first of the Sikstand officers stood right in the doorway, tall, square-jawed, with impassive eyes; the other, a much smaller woman with a blonde ponytail, stood behind him as if she’d prefer to be anywhere but 32-C Bannerston Street. The old woman behind them, stolid and gray-haired, eyed Hugh with clinical indifference. The first officer stood so near the threshold that, when Hugh opened the flat door, he was met with the smell of cigarette smoke and a close-up view of a holstered pistol.

Hugh said nothing at first—he just stared up at the first officer, wide-eyed with fear. Then the officer knelt down to Hugh’s level and began talking about a terrible accident on Halendana Hill and how he wished he didn’t have to deliver this news.

After the officer’s first few sentences, Hugh heard very little. Blood throbbed in his ears, his eyes blurred, his knees began to tremble. With every passing second, he felt some terrible force pulling him deeper and deeper inside himself until the three people in the doorway had been reduced to wavering silhouettes.

At some point, the officer directed Hugh back into the living room. Hugh sat down; the old woman sat down; the two officers remained standing, with the shorter one taking notes on a little pad. The female officer asked if Hugh had any adult relatives living in Bressen, to which he replied that he had an uncle, Maghil Warding, who lived in North Campus Augustus. He did not disclose that his uncle drank too much, bathed only weekly, and lived in a converted tobacco warehouse in the dodgiest part of NCA. When the officer asked for Maggie’s telephone number, Hugh went to his mother’s desk and found it in her Daily Planner.

A few minutes later, the old woman, who introduced herself as being from the Child Protection Agency, took Hugh into the dining room to explain with an unpleasant, croaky sort of voice what would happen next. He watched her pale lips moving against her oatmeal-colored teeth and realized after a moment that she, not the officer, was the source of the cigarette smell. The woman explained that a judge would assign guardianship to an adult, most likely his Uncle Maggie, because he was Hugh’s only relative and, barring any unforeseen developments, Hugh would probably go live with Maggie. She talked for a fairly long time, but the longer she went on, the more it felt like she was addressing Hugh from a distant boat while he slowly sank beneath crashing waves.

Chapter 8

Legal Guardian, July 2006

An hour after the Sikstand arrived, Maggie showed up looking faded and threadbare. For several minutes, he stood in the living room talking to the Sikstand officers, his shoulders slumped, his face drawn. Hugh sat next to the CPA woman at the dining room table, half-listening to his uncle’s conversation with the officers. Every now and then one of them would look his way with a poor little bugger expression and whisper something he couldn’t hear. Occasionally, Hugh caught snatches of the conversation.

Car wedged between two trees…

Toxicology report.

Don’t know yet.

As the discussion wound down and everyone prepared to leave, Maggie came into the dining room and gave Hugh an awkward hug that seemed to require all his effort—the only one Hugh could remember receiving from his uncle—a halting, one-armed gesture that seemed as much for the benefit of the CPA lady as for Hugh. I’m not as pathetic as I look, it seemed to say, though Hugh knew better. When Maggie’s face drew close to Hugh’s ear, his uncle whispered with a breath sweet and stale from alcohol, “Go get some sleep, Hughie. It’s been a bitch of a day.”

Then the voice inside Hugh’s head answered to no one,

Day.

Pay.

Hey.

Hugh rose from the dining table and headed for his bedroom, not out of obedience, and not because he could imagine sleeping, but because he had nothing with which to resist Maggie’s request—no energy, no force of will, no emotion at all. In the dim light of the hallway, he watched the white cotton of his socks moving along the hardwood floor where, just hours earlier, his mum had admonished him for not wanting to go to dinner. In his bedroom he found the lights still on and his Guitar Hero controller on the floor where he left it when the doorbell rang. His game was paused on the screen; the rock star with spiky white hair stood frozen in front of the audience. The mid-game score was frozen as well, in a box on the left side of the screen, everything just as it had been before the Sikstand arrived—so perfectly suspended in time Hugh could have hit play in his imagination and slipped back into the world of five hours earlier—before his mother poked her head in his room to say goodbye, before any of it. As quickly as the thought occurred to him, though, the illusion vanished and he grew suddenly wobbly in his legs and lost any notion of where to put his feet, or how to breathe, or what to feel. He didn’t bother undressing—he just turned off the lights and lay on his bed.

A few minutes later, he heard the Sikstand officers saying goodbye to Maggie in the living room, then the CPA woman offering bits of advice to Maggie.

Keep him busy.

Remember he’s probably in shock.

“Right,” said Maggie, as if he were carefully processing her advice. “Right.”

The front door closed with a click, the hallway light went out, and the flat fell silent except for the sound of Maggie shuffling to the kitchen in search of alcohol.

For a long time, Hugh lay awake on the bed, feeling like every emotion, every thought, had been sucked out of him like the guts from a dead fish. Then a surprising and defiant idea took shape in his mind: Maybe this is as bad as it’ll get. A person could survive pain like this—the sort that leaves a life drab and bitter, but doesn’t kill you. He was doomed to be an orphan, it turned out, but he could exist, drop out of school, find a laborer job somewhere, and rent a cheap flat in SoMi, down by the river. There might even be a small inheritance from his parents: a life insurance policy or a savings account. Maybe he could go on assistance; the State looked out for widows and orphans, people said, and he wouldn’t need much to get by.

But there was no way in hell he’d go live with Maggie.

No bloody way.

Outside his bedroom window, the city sounded like it always did—as if no one knew that the parents of a 12 year-old boy died on Halendana Road a few hours ago. The traffic on Bannerston Street moved by with a windy rush. Two men argued outside a pub. A truck accelerated from the signal light, paused, ground its gears, and roared away. Everything just kept going, the entire city one enormous mocking automaton.

Here’s a moment to step back, Hugh could hear his therapist saying, to distance yourself from the situation and evaluate your feelings.

So he tried to imagine holding his own head in his hands—like Hamlet with the skull—inspecting it for damage. But all he felt was empty and dead and terribly fragile—tired but not sleepy, and wary, as if something awful were crawling toward him in the darkness of his room.

There’s a sandwich in the fridge, Love. We’ll be back around 9:30.

His mum had stood in that empty doorway just a few hours earlier, her face smooth and round, her freckled chest rising and falling as she breathed.

As she breathed.

Behind her in the hall, his father hurried by with the car keys in hand. G’night, jim, he called over his shoulder. Ring us if there’s a problem.

When the Sikstand interrupted his Guitar Hero game, the doorbell sounded electric and tinny.

Dee-ding.

Dee-ding.

Just some colored wires and a brass bell.

Now the Sikstand officers were gone and the flat was quiet, but Hugh could still hear that doorbell ringing in the darkness of his mind, and when it did, all his defiant notions of finding a job and renting a flat came crashing down around him. A horrible darkness moved in from the corners of his bedroom until the air felt thin and unbreathable. The deepening darkness seemed to swallow him, the flat, the entire city; an invisible weight settled on his chest, slowly forcing the breath from his rib cage.

Ring us.

Ring us.

Ringy dingy ding us.

The walls crowded closer and the room folded in upon itself until the door to the hallway became a tiny black rectangle leading to a dark hallway and then a dark living room where an old man with paint under his fingernails nursed his whiskey. Beyond Hugh’s room and the flat and the gutters of Gloven, the Bressen river crawled westward to the Atlantic ocean, gray-black and sluggish as a tumid snake. Faceless buildings stood shoulder to shoulder, all in shadow; trees swayed and rustled against the night sky, and on the black river flowed into the vacuum of space.

As the tightness in Hugh’s chest intensified, he started to panic that his lungs, as desiccated as corn husks, had given out. Then his right hand leapt involuntarily to his face and dabbed at the corner of his mouth. A second later it happened again.

Ring us.

Ringy dingy ding us.

Step away from your body for a moment, Dr. Banerjee once told him. Analyze your sensations. What are you feeling?

I can’t catch my breath. I’m scared.

Okay. Remember how we practiced? Now breathe in slowly for four seconds. That’s excellent. Hold for seven, exhale for eight. Good. Feel the rib cage slowly expand and contract. Calm your breathing.

Now, as Hugh’s breathing grew deeper and more purposeful, the pressure on his rib cage relented, but still the voice in his head droned on, Ringy dingy ding us.

At last, prompted by sheer desperation, he did as his father once suggested: He shouted “Stop!” out loud.

And the voice stopped for the time being. He drew a deep breath to gather himself, but when he exhaled, a sob burst spontaneously from deep inside him, and he cried piteously, wretchedly—chest heaving, tears streaming down his cheeks—until at last the sobs attenuated to whimpers and then to silence. Finally, when all the terror and sorrow had poured out of him, he could hear himself breathing in the darkness of his bedroom, as if he had chanced upon his own tragedy; and there he lay for the next several minutes, staring silently at the ceiling.

Eventually, he closed his eyes and tried to sleep; but behind his clenched eyelids he saw himself wandering the streets of Gloven, searching for his parents as if they might be found living different lives in a far corner of the neighborhood. As long as he searched, though, the only face to emerge from the darkness was that of the Child Protection lady, with her pale lips and yellow teeth.

A moment later, Maggie appeared at the bedroom door, glass of whiskey in hand, and asked in a hoarse whisper, “You alright, Hughie?” Hugh propped himself up on an elbow; he could see his uncle’s silhouette in the gray light of the hallway and how the old man looked broken by the terrible new burden he bore. Seeing him standing there, it occurred to Hugh that, when his father died, Maggie lost his only sibling and the one person on Earth who cared whether he had enough money to pay rent, whether he sold another painting or passed away alone, puking blood in his flat.

Hugh nodded automatically, though he doubted Maggie could see him in the dark.

“I know you get anxious sometimes,” Maggie said after a moment.

“Uh huh.”

“Panic attacks?” his uncle asked.

Hugh sniffed his nose. “My dad tell you that?”

Pushing his hair back from his face, Maggie took a drink from his whiskey glass. “He did tell me, ‘cause he knows—knew—I get ‘em, too.” Then, with a tired laugh, he added, “Aren’t we a fuckin’ pair?”

It seems everyone is spouting moral-sounding platitudes these days, as if we’ve become preachers from an ill-defined and irritatingly trite religion. John McWhorter has written extensively about the rise of what he calls Electicism, a latter-day, secular religion that has risen from the ruins of civic and religious institutions. But, since he first identified the phenomenon among fringe groups, I’ve noted a similar posture assumed, and language used, by mainstream, average folks.

You might argue that we talk about the virtues cited above precisely because we crave them, and miss them, in our lives—as if by summoning an idea we can reintegrate it into society. I’d buy that argument if I saw any meaningful trend toward, for example, civility among those who most volubly invoke its decline. Lest you assume I’m dog whistling about woke progressives, I’m not—entirely. Folks in the middle (like me) and on the right do their own preaching, just about different virtues, like faith, virility, patriotism, and even moderation. “Make America Great Again” has become almost holy writ among Trump loyalists, signaling as it does that our president knows both how to return America to greatness and what greatness looks like.

The thing is, when we wave our flags, post our signs, and flaunt our bumperstickers, we imply that we’ve mastered the virtues we reference and are impatiently waiting for everyone else to get on board. It all feels so one-directional. So self-satisifed and preachy.

I grew up a preacher’s kid, so I’m familiar with sermons and prayers and old-school religion. When my father led his congregation in prayer, he generally spoke in the first-person plural: “God, grant us the strength…” or “Lord, forgive us our sins…” I can’t recall him ever using accusative verbs as cudgels the way we do today. He included himself among the sinners he addressed, acknowledging his failings and asking for God’s forgiveness. He spoke this way in public and at home with his family. When he preached, he referred to ancient wisdom, and to theologians who studied that wisdom, to impart a message. Even in his pulpit, before hundreds of congregants, he didn’t hold forth as an example to be followed; he spoke humbly, asking a higher power to guide us all in our actions.

Let’ face it, no one appreciates being preached at. Most people, I believe, are genuinely humble and reasonable and, when acquainted with their failings, generally acknowledge them. When bombarded by coded claims of someone else’s moral superiority, however, those same folks are likely to dig in and fight back. The real enemy is not each other, but certainty—certainty about the rectitude of our own beliefs, and certainty that the other side is irredeemably benighted (and potentially dangerous). We’re all deep into a 21st-century religious war—and not just between the far left and far right. Where once armies battled over interpretations of holy texts, we now arm ourselves with played-out ideological shibboleths. Peace, love, inclusion, and kindness on the left. God, guns, manhood, and country on the right. Without the moderating influence of shared cultural institutions, we’re left to adjudicate everything for ourselves—often on social media or at the end of a bullhorn.

I don’t have an easy answer for this mess except, perhaps, to recommend my father’s use of the first-person plural. There’s something disarming about “us” and “we,” particularly in the context of exchanging views. We are all imperfect. We could be more open to considering opposing views. We can move past this. Doing so, of course, requires believing an American collective still exists, or could, and that we haven’t so atomized as a culture that there’s no coming back. I don’t personally believe we’re beyond saving, but, hey, I’m just a preacher’s kid.

Carrollton Street, June 2021

After a distracted walk back to the North Toran station, Hugh finds himself seated on the blue leatherette seat of a nearly empty metro car, his legs crossed, earphones in but no music playing, his gaze directed at the train tracks outside his window.

This is the 9 train to Old Town Station with stops in…

The car lurches forward from the platform, then gains speed as it rumbles northwest toward Bruka. Hugh glances at his mobile to check the signal strength. Three bars. He decides to call Dory, to tell him Maggie’s story and kill some time.

His friend answers on the third ring—abruptly, with a question, as he tends to do.

“You at work?”

“Nah,” replies Hugh. “Had to go to Mudo beforehand, so I stopped by to see Maggie.”

“Yeah? How’s he doin’?”

“Better. He sold some pieces lately, so he’s chuffed.”

“Brilliant,” says Dory. “Good for him.”

…there’s clan blood in the family, way back.

Way back.

“So what’s up?” asks Dory.

“Oh, Maggie told me an insane story…” Hugh begins.

“Yeah?”

Hugh opens his mouth to continue, but loses his nerve.

“Shit—I’m gonna lose my signal,” he stammers. “You going to the Pig tomorrow night? I’ll catch you up then…”

“Yeah,” affirms Dory. “Definitely.”

Hugh says brilliant and see you later and hangs up, relieved not to have spoken impulsively. The conversation could have gone sideways quickly. It’s been more than two years since Hugh joined Dory at a pub in Mistauth and his friend confided that the Sikstand had ended its investigation into Delia’s attack. When Hugh asked how that could be, Dory just shook his head and mumbled that raping a girl’s apparently okay if you’re a yazzer. The two friends then proceeded to drink late into the night, with Hugh listening and nodding as Dory’s anger seemed to metastasize right before him—into something darker and more corrosive than even rage. That night seemed to be a turning point for Dory, when the upbeat Bajan immigrant developed a raw edge, and his resentment against the ruling class, until then limited to the occasional pub rant, became actual defiance. That was when Hugh first heard Dory refer to joining B-Opp, because, he said, only armed resistance could drive the yazzers out.

“Maybe so,” replied Hugh at the time. “But B-Opp?”

At that, Dory’s eyes narrowed into slits and he said, slowly, as if Hugh might miss his meaning, “She’s. My. Little. Sister.”

Dory’s retort felt like a punch to the chest—catching Hugh so off-guard he couldn’t muster an articulate response. Instead he looked at his pint glass and waited for the moment to pass. And, though Dory’s expression eventually softened, his sudden flash of anger left Hugh wondering how well he knew the man sitting beside him. It was a troubling revelation, to glimpse a friend’s soul in turmoil and come away riven by doubt.

He eventually came to terms with Dory’s rage, learning to recognize its trigger points and appreciate how it colored his view of the world. Though his own tragedy looked nothing like Dory’s, they had both run terrible gauntlets—and mostly survived. That sense of parallel tragedies bonded Hugh even more deeply to his closest male friend, but also required a certain alertness to Dory’s frame of mind. Given all that, it would have been stupid to blurt out that Hugh might have yazzer blood in his veins.

Really stupid.

If he decides to look into Maggie’s story—if—he’ll need to think over how to tell his friend. The story will probably end up being rubbish, anyway. Besides, Silvia is the better person to confide in, even if she can be so strident on class issues. Training to be a public interest lawyer will do that to a person; though, as far as he can tell, she was a social justice crusader even before law school. Apparently it’s in her DNA to fight for the people she calls disenfranchised or marginalized—basically anyone with a grudge against the State. As high-minded as she can be, though, Silvia is also loyal, which means she would at least hear Hugh out. She understands, better than anyone since his former therapist, how the loss of his parents left him unmoored; she would appreciate how discovering ancestral roots might fire his curiosity.

The train has now left Campus Augustus, and the row houses and apartment blocks along the tracks have given way to an undulating wall of oak and beech. Hugh tries to read the news for a while, then, taken suddenly by an idea, checks the hour on his mobile and glances at the metro map overhead. Five minutes later, when the train stops at Carrollton Street station, he exits the car. On the platform, he checks the signs and makes his way through the turnstiles and out to the street.

He’s only been to this part of town once before, when he was a kid and joined his mother on an errand. She made the trip reluctantly, as he recalls, when she couldn’t find her favorite moisturizer anywhere else in town. She never felt comfortable around rich people, so she avoided places like Carrollton Street where retail clerks looked straight through people like her. Hugh doesn’t remember the area very well, only that the cobblestone streets were narrow and the storefronts fastidiously maintained.

As Hugh makes his way from the metro station around the corner to Carrollton Street, he forces himself to view his surroundings with objective curiosity. Slowly his memory of the place returns to him—how, as they walked, his mother’s hand tightened around his, and how she lowered her eyes when yazzer women passed them on the sidewalk. Now, more than a decade and a half later, he sees the street as if no time has passed: the red awnings, the logo flags above the entrances, the pristine white woodwork of the storefronts, the BMWs, Mercedes, and Bentleys parked along the street, all clean and waxed. He tells himself not to be cowed by the wealth, to act like he’s on his way to Balenciaga for another pair of €900 trainers.

After walking westward for several minutes, he passes a cafe where three wealthy-looking men about Hugh’s age are seated under an awning, drinking coffee. There is an easy diffidence about them—as if they have unlimited time to linger over a business lunch, with no expectation of returning to the office. As Hugh passes the cafe, one of the men catches his eye. The fellow has wavy brown hair combed back from his face and meticulous, arching eyebrows that make him look mildly startled. He has one leg crossed over the other, and, from where it pokes out beneath the white linen tablecloth, his foot is visible, clad in a sleek suede loafer. As Hugh passes, the fellow looks up from his conversation and, with an expression that Hugh immediately reads as condescension, smiles.

Hugh pretends not to notice, looking instead at a Loro Piana store across the street.

Sod off, you smug flogger.

Twenty meters past the cafe, he slows down to look at a Hugo Boss display window, but really to say to Eyebrow Man, I’ve got a right to be here.

It is wholly out of character to do this sort of thing, to hop off the metro and take a pointless stroll on Carrollton Street—Yazzer Central— just to kill time before work. He doesn’t like to window shop, after all, and, if he had money to spare, he bloody hell wouldn’t spend it here. But Maggie planted this earworm of a story in his head; and now he is left to deal with its bizarre compulsions.

Alexander McQueen

Louis Vuitton

Van Cleef & Arpels

Piaget

After strolling for another five minutes, Hugh approaches the western terminus of Carrollton where the street ends abruptly at a park with a fountain and animal-shaped topiaries. He stops for a minute, checks his mobile, and decides to circle back to the metro station. He’ll pass the three men at the cafe again, which gets him wondering why gantlings always look so condescending.

In his memory, the pink-shirted man at Bar Bruka—the one who called him a bosa dog—smiled with the same condescension.

Bosa? Who even uses that word anymore?

Pink-Shirt Man clearly despised Hugh just for being a feegie. But, looking back now, the man at the cafe did not appear so openly hostile. He could have just been bored with the conversation and looking around when Hugh came along. Then, when he and Hugh made eye contact, he might have smiled reflexively. Or maybe he sensed some vague affinity between them—their age, dark features, or something more nuanced.

Looks are funny things—so fleeting, so pregnant with meaning.

One night, maybe a year ago, when Hugh and Dory were out drinking, a tall black man entered the pub and passed their table. Dory was sipping from his beer and, when he looked at the man over the top of his glass, he nodded. It was so subtle, Hugh might have never noticed except that he happened to have his eyes on Dory at the time.

“You know him?” Hugh asked, gesturing at the man.

“Nah.”

“How come you nodded at him?

“It’s just a thing we do,” replied Dory.

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“Black jimmies,” he said. “When we’re someplace where everyone else is white, yeah?”

“Huh.”

“It’s like sayin’ ‘I got you’.’”

Hugh remembers feeling wounded by the realization Dory would never nod like that at him. At the same time, he was fascinated by the idea that two strangers could share such a fundamental, almost instinctive bond. He’d never experienced a connection like that, and the thought of it both encouraged him and left him with a longing he couldn’t shake off. Ever since that night, he has looked for other signals between strangers—at the pub, the gym, even on the sidewalks of Gloven—the way a person’s body language changes when he meets someone cut from similar cloth.

Three blocks down Carrollton Street, on his way back to the metro station, Hugh passes the cafe again, now from the opposite side of the street. He looks for the man with the arching eyebrows, but his table is empty and a server is clearing away the coffee cups and water goblets. He pauses for a moment to check the time. Then, having traversed the entire length of the shopping district, he slips his mobile back in his pocket and makes his way toward the metro station.

Chapter 6

Permission to Proceed, June 2021

The early shift at Bar Bruka passes quickly, with a large birthday celebration keeping Hugh busy most of the night. When he arrives back at his flat building, he hums a nursery rhyme on the way up the stairs, then fits his key in the deadlock. As he steps inside, he sees Silvia entering the living room, laptop in hand, with her earphones on. He can see her hair is damp and, when she walks past him, he smells her toothpaste.

“Hey,” she says, seating herself on the couch.

Hugh sets his keys on the counter, then goes to the chair across from her and sits down. “I thought you were going out with Tommy tonight?”

“I did,” she replies, removing her earphones and placing them on the coffee table with her laptop. “But we just got a pint after my clinic because I have to study.”

“Huh.”

“How was work?”

“Crazy busy,” says Hugh.

“Hmm.”

“Hey,” he adds after a minute. “Get this.”

Silvia sits up and twists her hair into a ponytail, then rests it on her shoulder.

“I went by Maggie’s today and he told me an insane story…”

“Yeah?”

“He said someone way back in my family was from one of the founding families but got kicked out or disowned or something.”

Now Silvia turns toward him, eyes wide. “Seriously? How far back?”

“He didn’t know,” Hugh replies. “Maybe a hundred years. My great-grandmum told him about it when he was a little boy.”

“Wow. Any idea which family? Or, like, what happened?”

“Nah, he didn’t know anything else. Just what his grandmum told him.”

“Did anyone ever look into it?”

“No. He said he wasn’t that curious about it—can you believe that?” He laughs. “Bloody typical of Maggie not to say anything until now and then use it just to make a point, yeah?”

Silvia asks what point Maggie was making.

“He was after me again about quitting bartending,” replies Hugh. “And I said something about Wardings not having a great history when it comes to making money. So that’s when he pops this story out—I guess to inspire me or something—like earning potential is a genetic thing. I don’t know.”

Silvia chuckles. “Well, that’s one way of looking at it.” She gives him the sort of probing look his therapist used to direct at him, and asks, “So what do you think about that—what he told you?”

Her expression makes him pause, as if her question weren’t merely conversational but a sort of test, with a right or wrong answer. “I don’t know,” he says eventually. “I’m still processing it, yeah?” Then, after a moment more, he adds, “It’s chiggy, right? Like finding out I might have been adopted or something.”

“Even though you knew your parents?”

Hugh looks down and nods. “Yeah. Because even though my mum and dad were proud people, there wasn’t this strong sense of where we came from, you know? I mean, my mum looked into our family tree a little, but I never got a feeling of actual family history. Which isn’t right ‘cause feegies go back as far as anyone here.” He shakes his head slowly. “It’s like just getting by in life flattens out your perspective because you’re so focused on paying the next bill you never look up, or back, or anywhere but getting through the week. You get this amnesia about all the other people before you, your ancestors. And it makes you feel so alone, you know?”

Silvia hugs her knees to her chest. “You think that comes from just getting by? Or maybe losing your parents when you were young?”

“I dunno,” he replies. “Dr B. said I buried a lot of my early memories. Maybe that has something to do with it. It also probably comes from living with Maggie for so long.”

“He’s not interested in the past?”

This makes Hugh laugh. “If you had his past would you wanna remember it?”

“No, I guess not.”

“Anyway” continues Hugh. “Maggie’s story is probably rubbish. I mean he heard it from an old lady with a piss on when he was eight years old, and who’s to say he remembers it right? Or that she had the details right in the first place? And if it were true, I think Maggie would’ve told my mum, and then she would have said something about it for sure.”

“Right,” says Silvia. “Right.”

“So I think it’s probably rubbish,” he concludes. “What do you think?”

All this time, Silvia has been watching him closely with her frank, green eyes. Now, she looks up at the ceiling and around the room as if visualizing every nuance of his situation. “I think you’re probably right,” she says. “Sounds like one of those myths every family has. They’re fun to pass along, but that’s about it. I mean, honestly, given Maggie’s financial situation, you’d think he’d have checked the story out if he believed it, right? At the Genealogy Ministry and everything.”

“Exactly,” says Hugh. “Except he didn’t think we’d be owed any money ‘cause the jimmy got disowned or whatever.”

“Oh, that wouldn’t matter,” says Silvia with surprising certainty. “If you’re born into a founding family, you can’t be disinherited just because your parents get angry at you. Your legal rights are based on heredity. We studied all that in Trusts and Estates. You’d still be entitled to your share of the pars.”

“The yazzer money from the state?”

“Yeah” she says. “It’s their percentage of the annual budget surplus. Your family could cut ties with you, I suppose, but they couldn’t take away your ancestral rights. That’s against the law.”

Hugh points out that, if that were the case, and he did, in fact, have a yazzer ancestor, he’d have grown up rich.

“The law was probably different back then,” replies Silvia. “All I know is that nowadays, ancestry supersedes everything. But you can always renounce your inheritance,” she adds coolly. “You can do that…”

Hugh laughs. “Like anyone would...”

“Somebody might if they were philosophically opposed to the class system…” She pauses again, looks hard at Hugh, then adds, “Anyway, it’s a good story for down at the pub. Have you told D? I can’t wait to hear his reaction.”

He tells her he hasn’t had the courage to tell Dory. He can see that Silvia is eager to resume her studying, but the gears in his head are still spinning wildly. He watches her as she leans forward and opens her laptop.

Sensing his gaze, she looks up and asks, “Now what’re you thinking?”

This feels like another test question.

“So…” he ventures, “if someone found out they were a founder all along, would they be, like, entitled to some of the pars?” Even as he finishes speaking, he feels the atmosphere grow charged, as if an electrical storm were rolling in.

Silvia opens her mouth to speak, then catches herself. “Well,” she says. “I’ve never actually heard of a case like this, but I’d assume so. At a minimum you’d have a right to your share of future pars payments, but I bet you’d also be entitled to part of the family war chest because you were a founder all along.”

All this time, Hugh has been staring at his feet. Now, without raising his head, he asks, “Like how much, do you think? A few thousand bone, maybe?”

Silvia puffs out her checks, then sets her computer on her lap and begins typing. “Oh, god, it’s hard to say. The families are all different and they have hundreds of members. Plus it depends on if you were awarded a share of the family fiska, which is the big money. There’s layers and layers of super old wealth there.” Silvia studies something on her screen for several minutes, then picks up her mobile and makes some calculations. “I’m just doing simple math based on my class notes,” she begins, “but if you got you a pro rata share of the fiska’s current value, you’d be looking at maybe 7 million euros on the low end, and up to…” now making a few more taps of her index finger, “like, 60 or 65 million if you turned out to be an Abra or Caludas. They’re the richest families. You’d also be entitled to a share of the pars going forward, which would probably be under ten thousand a year.”

With a lurch, Hugh swings his feet off the coffee table and sits forward. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

“They have a grotesque amount of money,” replies Silvia, her expression stern. “They’ve basically been plundering the treasury since like the Dark Ages.”

Hugh forces the smile from his face. “Nah, I get that.”

Now, seeing Hugh turn sheepish, Silvia softens her own tone. “But you should look into it, right? I mean, you’d be crazy not to—even if it’s a million-to-one chance. Then you could use the money for something socially useful, right?” With this, she picks up her laptop and resumes studying. Hugh thanks her for her help, adding that he knew she was the right person to ask. Silvia glances at him over the top of her computer, then back down at the screen. He can’t see her mouth behind the laptop, but decides, if only to reassure himself, that she smiled.

Silvia, June 2021

It’s just past midnight when Hugh arrives at the Mission Gate metro station on the trip home from work. From there, he makes his way on foot through the heart of Gloven, with its narrow lanes and shabby row houses, the sidewalks dimly lit by the old iron street lamps. When he comes to The Spotted Pig pub at the corner of Stanfield Street and Morton Mews, he stops to light a cigarette. The pub is closed for the night; above its door hangs a large pig fashioned from sheet metal, at least a meter long and reddened with rust, its metal bulk illuminated by floodlights. He pauses there to take a drag from his Gauloises, then continues walking down Morton Mews to his flat. The mews is dark at this late hour, and he steps cautiously on the cobblestones to avoid turning an ankle. When at last he comes to the end of the lane, he reaches into his trouser pockets for the house key.

Number 15 Morton Mews is a converted stable house—like almost every other structure on the mews—a compact, two-story brick affair, all white, with a black front door and a wide double door for the horses, also black, and permanently closed. He and his flatmate Silvia live in the upstairs unit, with its window overlooking the mews and a tiny wrought-iron balcony no one dares stand on. The landlord, who lives somewhere in the Vastan district, maintains the property fairly well, though he long ago stripped away most of the building’s 19th-century interior to avoid expensive upkeep. The windows still have the original wavy glass, but the flower boxes typical of mews houses have all been removed. The interior is clean and reasonably up-to-date, though the fireplace has been bricked up, and the beige-walled rooms have a stark, antiseptic quality to them. Silvia found the place on her own—before she met Hugh—and lived there for three months before posting a Facebook ad for a flatmate. By that time, she had decorated the place with help from her parents, who struck Hugh as pretty comfortable for figans—comfortable is how his parents used to describe underclass people with money. They reserved rich for the founding families. While Silvia’s parents struck him as a bit aloof—Mr. Ransor shook Hugh’s hand as if he were tipping a doorman—they had been undeniably generous in furnishing the flat. They bought queen beds for both the bedrooms, a gray sofa with matching chairs, kilim rugs, chrome floor lamps, and framed museum prints for the walls. They even provided appliances for the kitchen—blender, espresso machine, microwave—and all the dishes and flatware.

Hugh moved in a few days after responding to Silvia’s Facebook ad. She had just begun law school at the University of Bressen and wanted a quiet flatmate who wouldn’t distract her from studying. When she interviewed him over the phone, he described himself—only half-jokingly—as a bartender with no meaningful social life, which, Silvia said, suited her just fine. On move-in day, he arrived in an Uber, with just a couple of duffle bags and some cardboard boxes. When Silvia opened the door, she glanced around the landing for the rest of his things. He told her this was all he’d brought.

Hugh met Silvia’s parents the same week he moved in. Shortly after that, they stopped coming by the flat. Silvia explained that they’d had a falling out over her career plans, but he assumed they objected to her new flatmate with the tattoos and man-bun.

Now pausing on his front stoop in the glow of the porch light, Hugh finishes his cigarette and drops the butt into a flowerpot by the door. Silvia hates it when he does this. She says it looks dodgy to have a clay pot full of butt-ends on the stoop, but he reminded her she’d forbidden him from smoking in the flat. Plus he’s careful to empty the pot every few days.

Fitting his key into the lock, Hugh nudges the front door open and steps inside the foyer, where a target-shaped fluorescent fixture hums on the ceiling. To his left is the door to unit one, painted glossy red, to his right a wooden staircase ascending into darkness. He climbs the stairs—eight to the landing, six to his door—reciting a nursery rhyme as he does, to distract himself from counting the steps. He counts most of the repetitive tasks in his life, not because he wants to but because compulsion demands it—brushing his teeth, chewing a mouthful of hamburger, washing the dishes.

Jack Sprat could eat no fat, his wife could eat no lean…

On the upstairs landing, he lets himself inside the flat. The living room is dark except for a floor lamp by the sofa where Silvia is sitting with her feet on the coffee table. She’s wearing a University of Bressen t-shirt and has her favorite orange blanket spread over her thighs, with her laptop open. When Hugh comes in, she sets her computer aside and watches him.

“How was work?” she eventually asks.

Hugh shakes his head. “Total shit show.”

“What happened?”

Hugh drops his keys on the counter, then goes to the fridge for a beer. Back in the living room, he drops into the armchair opposite Silvia.

“I got into it with some gantling douche about his Pappy Van Winkle,” he tells her.

When Silvia asks what Pappy Van Winkle is, he relates most of the story, leaving out how he had whiskey thrown in his face. When he is done talking, she purses her lips in commiseration, then, after a second more, asks, “So, did she come in?”

The question comes somewhat abruptly and, when Hugh tries to judge her expression, he senses not so much curiosity as concern, or even apprehension. Silvia has always been fairly easy for him to read—the way she leans forward from the waist when listening intently; or how she doesn’t quite close her mouth after asking a probing question. Now, sitting there in the glow of the floor lamp, she is doing both, which warns him against making too casual a reply. He studies her face, pleasingly round and olive-toned with a smattering of pale freckles. Silvia’s features have none of Tullia’s angularity, nor her glittery artifice. But, where Tullia’s little deceptions play out in a smile or frown, Silvia’s lack of guile suggests to Hugh a universe of confusions and contradictions swirling inside her. He treads lightly around questions like this—did she come in?—for fear of stumbling upon some hidden wound.

“Yeah,” he replies. “She came in.”

“Did she talk to you?”

He tells her that Tullia did speak with him, though not for very long, and then she left for the clubs the way she always does.

Tucking a dark strand of hair behind her ears, Silvia asks, “So you’re happy about that?”

“I guess,” he says. “But sometimes I think she just wants to show she’s in good with the bartender.”

“You fancy her, though, right?” she insists.

She delivers this last question with such intensity that Hugh finds himself fumbling for an answer.

“I hardly know her, Sil.”

His reply doesn’t seem to satisfy Silvia, who continues studying him expectantly.

“Yeah, I suppose I fancy her a bit,” he concedes. Then before Silvia can react, he adds, “But she’s obviously daft because she thinks I’d be a good dancer.”

At this, Silvia bursts into laughter, and the tension in the room briefly dissipates. She has seen Hugh dance, after all, at the pub when he and Dory got drunk watching a Bressen-United match and then began windmilling to the fight song. He and Silvia have danced together as well, once, after Silvia’s birthday party, when all her friends had gone home. As Hugh was gathering empties from around the living room, a Nora Jones song came on the Bluetooth speaker and Silvia begged him for a dance—for my birthday, she said. So he danced with her, awkwardly, because the song was slow and moody and, when she drew close to him, he could smell her jasmine shampoo. At one point during their dance, Silvia turned to look at the window and, when her nose grazed his cheek, Hugh had a sudden impulse to kiss her. He stopped himself because he knew it was a bad idea to get involved with one’s flatmate and closest female friend. Silvia must have understood that as well, because after the song ended she avoided making eye contact and went straight to bed.

The next morning, she apologized for making him dance. I was a little pissed, she said. He told her it was no problem, that he actually liked it and hoped he didn’t step on her toes.

That sort of awkwardness is mostly behind them now. Hugh’s awful dancing has become their little inside joke. It’s worth a good laugh that Tullia Bruggen, queen of the nightclub scene, should think he has brilliant dance moves. It’s well-timed laughter, as well, and gives Hugh an opportunity to change the subject.

He stretches out his legs, crossing them at the ankles. “So what’d you do tonight?” he asks.

“Studied mostly,” Silvia replies. “I also got dinner with that bloke I told you about.”

“The lawyer from your clinic?”

“Right,” she replies. “Tommy Payne-Havissom.”

“That’s quite the name,” laughs Hugh. “Is it hyphenated and everything?”

She protests that Tommy is a really decent guy—a third-year associate at Holt Winston who volunteers at her clinic; and Hugh, with the air of an older brother, asks if Tommy behaved himself on their date.

Silvia thinks about this, easing herself more deeply into the sofa cushions—hips, then shoulders. “He’s actually a real gentleman. Sort of old school chivalrous.”

“Is he good looking?”

“So you are curious!” she laughs. “He’s…nice looking, you know? A little like Ryan Gosling with a square head. Clean cut. Super polite.”

“Brilliant,” says Hugh half-heartedly. “You found yourself a movie star.”

At this point, the conversation gives way to silence. Hugh drinks from his beer while Silvia leans forward and opens her laptop.

“So what’s her name?” she asks, fingers poised above the keyboard.

“Why? You gonna look her up?”

She nods eagerly.

“Tullia Bruggen,” he says with a sigh. “Two g’s.”

Silvia looks up wide-eyed. “Tullia Bruggen? Really? I know who that is. She shows up on Tattle all the time.”

As Silvia begins typing, Hugh comes over and joins her on the couch. “You read the gossip blogs?”

A blush spreads across her cheeks. “Total guilty pleasure,” she laughs. With Hugh watching, she finds her way to the website, then scrolls through dozens of posts until she finds a photo of two women on a white-sand beach. One of them, deeply tanned in a straw hat, is holding a pink cocktail; the other, wearing a green bikini, appears to be taking the selfie.

“There she is,” says Hugh, pointing to the woman with the cocktail. “That’s the same watch she was wearing tonight.”

Silvia continues to stare at her laptop, her face bathed in its pale blue light. “I had no idea Tullia Bruggen was the woman who’s been flirting with you…She’s like a major socialite, Hugh, and totally gorgeous.”

Hugh says something self-deprecating about Tullia slumming, but Silvia does not respond. She continues to stare at the image, then closes her laptop and sits up.

“But you fancy her,” she says flatly, “so there’s always a chance for love to bloom.” Now she sets aside her orange throw and rises from the sofa. “I should get to bed.”

“I thought we were gonna watch Game of Thrones?” complains Hugh.

“You go ahead,” she replies. “I have class in the morning.”

“See you before you go, then?”

She smiles and turns toward her bedroom. “If you’re up.”

Chapter 4

Maggie, June 2021

It’s been a month since Hugh visited his Uncle Maghil. There isn’t much cause to return to the old neighborhood these days. The trip from Gloven to North Campus Augustus involves a half-hour metro ride and a ten-minute walk, meaning even a short visit with the old man can consume an entire afternoon. Plus, on Hugh’s last few visits, he found Maggie so absorbed in his work he could barely sustain a conversation. Most of Hugh’s secondary school friends have long since moved out of NCA, as well, to find jobs or just escape the place. Were it not for Hugh’s loyalty to his only living relative, he’d just as soon not go back.

Today, though, Hugh’s manager has asked him to visit a restaurant supply warehouse down in Mudo Milar; and the train ride will take him directly through Campus Augustus. Consequently, after finishing his errand in Mudo, and with free time before work, he hops off the train at North Toran and makes his way out through the station onto the familiar sidewalks of NCA. The early June sky is sapphire-blue and perfectly clear; every tree in the city seems to be in bloom, and even the pigeons look more iridescent than usual. From the train station, Hugh follows Lafayette Avenue to where his favorite corner grocery once stood, recently converted into a Bouygues Telecom store that grins over the sidewalk with a giant blue sign. A block farther up Lafayette Avenue, he passes what had been the video arcade where he bought his first pack of cigarettes, now a French bakery. Dory complains endlessly about this sort of gentrification—how rich founders buy up entire neighborhoods, make cosmetic improvements, then raise the rents and drive out low-income figan and immigrant families. Hugh has never viewed urban renewal with the same hostility—it’s not like some neighborhoods couldn’t use a facelift. But seeing his old haunts painted up like Easter eggs, he wonders if Dory has a point.

Turning from Lafayette Avenue onto Barling Street, he’s relieved to see the Madha Forita mission largely unchanged, with its peeling white columns and green copper dome. Even the weedy, pea-gravel courtyard looks the same, and the lilac bushes with purple blossoms drooping over the wrought-iron fence. When he was a kid, local vagrants used to line up in the mission’s courtyard for free coffee and sandwiches. At some point, a priest would come out and walk around greeting people and encouraging them to recite their Murma-Sattmes.

His dad used to say that’s what you get with a civic religion—ATM spirituality. Pop in a prayer and have some priest tell you your problem’s solved.

Those creepy priests are just another reason people of Hugh’s age don’t like the Church: Everything about it—from the prayers in a dead language to the incense that smells like Band-Aids—signals a morally bankrupt institution. His dad used to say that the Red Robes—the six high priests who control the Church’s wealth—were even worse than the founders because they had political power without accountability. And the only thing the Senate feared more than a figan revolution was the Red Robes.

A block past the mission, Hugh comes to Maggie’s building, a converted 19th-century tobacco warehouse that, according to Maggie, no one will ever gentrify because it’s rent-controlled. Very little about the place has changed over the years, the boxwood hedges in the courtyard, the crumbling concrete walkway, the roof tiles overgrown with moss. Hugh turns into the courtyard, walks between the hedges and up the steps, two at a time, the way he used to. He pushes through the heavy double doors and jogs up the stairs, silently reciting, Baa, baa, black sheep.

At flat 3B he knocks on the door—softly, in case Maggie is working. A second later, he hears the old man fumble with the locks. When the door swings inward, he sees Maggie standing there, his hand resting on the knob, looking mildly annoyed. He’s wearing his usual paint-spattered clothes and has his readers pushed halfway up his forehead. But today, for some reason, he is barefooted. His hair and eyebrows are longer and grayer even than the last time Hugh saw him, and his face more drawn, but in every other respect he looks his usual irritable self.

Maggie stares blankly at Hugh, then turns and heads down the hall.

“Grab yourself a beer,” he calls back. “I’m takin’ a break.”

“Can’t drink,” Hugh says. “Gotta work in an hour.”

Hugh follows him down the hall to the main room where his uncle has settled on a green upholstered chair, his bare feet resting on an ottoman. An open bottle of stout rests on the floor by his chair. Afternoon sunlight slants through one of the flat’s tall archtop windows, the center pane of which Maggie has tilted open to let in the breeze. The old man has acquired some new furniture lately, after he signed with an art gallery in Munich and sold some of his larger pieces. The upholstered chair and ottoman are new, as is the cowhide sofa and walnut bookcase against the east wall. The old harvest table still occupies the center of the kitchen, its surface still covered with books, bric a brac, and dirty dishes. An assortment of old tribal rugs covers much of the hardwood floor—all of them with colorful geometric designs, most with the pile worn flat. At least a dozen Windsor chairs of various shapes and colors are stationed around the flat as well, some inexplicably facing the wall, others stacked high with sketch pads and art books.

I have eclectic taste, Maggie used to say.

When he was a kid, Hugh could never remember the difference between eclectic and eccentric; he later decided there wasn’t much of a difference.

“What’re you doin’ in my neck of the woods?” asks Maggie as Hugh clears newspapers from the couch.

“Had to go to a place in Mudo for work,” Hugh replies. His response doesn’t elicit more than a distracted nod. Gesturing at the newspapers on the couch and coffee table, Hugh adds, “These are from last month, Maggie.”

“Haven’t read ‘em yet,” the old man grunts.

Hugh points at Maggie’s bare feet. “What’s this?”

“Doctor says I’ve got neuropathy. Feels better with my shoes off.”

“Neuropathy?” Hugh asks. “Like nerve damage?”

Maggie shoots him a surly look. “Exactly like that.”

“What’s it from? Drinking?”

“I’m gettin’ old,” Maggie snaps. “That’s what happens when your body falls apart.” Now he turns his gaze from Hugh to the open window as if to force a change of subject.

“So how’s your new piece coming along?” asks Hugh.

This question raises the old man’ spirits considerably and, for the next several minutes, he describes how the art market has improved, and just last week he sold a piece for 2,500 euros. “Old dog’s on a roll,” he laughs. Then he leans to the side, pulls out a gallery brochure tucked between the seat cushions, and tosses it to Hugh. “They wrote me up as ‘the Golden City’s most evocative landscape artist,’ whatever that means.”

“So the gallery’s working out?” Hugh asks.

Maggie nods. “I’ve made more this year than the last two combined. I’d say that’s workin’ out, yeah?”

“That’s brilliant.”

“How ‘bout you, Hughie?” Maggie asks. “You ‘bout done pullin’ pints for rich girls?”

“What d’you mean ‘about done’?” shoots Hugh. “It’s my job, old man, not something I do for kicks.”

Maggie waves this objection away with a flick of his hand. “Back in the day, you were all hell-bent on goin’ to vet school,” he says. “That’s what you always said you wanted to do. Whatever happened with that?”

This makes Hugh laugh. “I wanted to be an astronaut when I was, like, six,” he says, “but you don’t see me training for a Mars mission, yeah?” It’s true he had once wanted to be a vet, because he loved animals—reptiles in particular—and imagined himself being the exotics specialist at a high-end practice in Old Town. That particular ambition died abruptly when he discovered that vet school tuition runs upwards of €65,000 a year. About the same time, it dawned on him that upscale customers probably didn’t keep lizards as pets.

“I told you that vet school’s insanely expensive,” says Hugh. “And there’s no way I’d have passed the entrance exams.”

“You’re naturally bright,” Maggie replies. “You’d have to study hard, but so does everyone else.” He appears to ponder the subject further, then adds, “And you can take out loans, Hugh Boy, and pay them back when you’re makin’ good scaper.”

This last remark comes as a surprise. Even as his legal guardian, Maggie never showed much interest in Hugh’s education, other than scolding him when he cut class, and then, after he graduated from secondary school, badgering him into taking a marketing class at Bressen Professional College.

“I’m fine tending bar,” says Hugh, letting his irritation show.

“You mean you’re used to it,” Maggie replies.

“What the fuck’s with you, Maggie?” snaps Hugh. “I come by to say hello and you ride me about bartending? Just ‘cause you’re earning some scaper now and think you’ve got your shit together?”

At first Maggie’s face turns bright red, and he looks ready to lash out, but then his expression unexpectedly softens. He drinks from his stout, then, balancing the bottle on the dome of his belly, replies, “I’m not ridin’ you, Hughie. But it’s not like you ever said, ‘You know, Maggie, bartendin’ is my dream and it’s what I want do with my life.’” Now he looks hard at Hugh and the tobacco-brown irises of his eyes catch the afternoon sunlight, making him look strangely sagacious. “You always told me, ‘I wanna be a vet, Maggie.’ That’s what you said, and I always figured it was my job to remind you what you used to care about. It’s also what your mum and dad would have wanted me to do.” When he finishes talking, he lets his chin slump onto his chest as if the memory of his brother and sister-in-law still pains him.

Hugh doesn’t know how to reply to this, particularly after Maggie brought up his parents like that, so he turns toward the window where the shadow of a tree branch twitches against the lower pane, and he thinks for a moment. Eventually he says, now with a more conciliatory tone, “Well, we Wardings aren’t the big-money types, yeah?”

Hugh figures they can agree on this one point, since Maggie always talked about meager wages being the cost of doing as he pleased. Rather than agree with him, though, Maggie thrusts a knobby finger in his direction and replies, “That’s rubbish, Hughie. You’ve been hangin’ around me too long, that’s all. Bein’ poor ain’t in the family genes—just ‘cause I could never keep two bones in the bank.” Now his eyes shine even brighter, and Hugh can’t tell if his uncle is expressing indignation or self-contempt.

“You caught some bad breaks,” Hugh replies, now becoming protective of the old man, which happens whenever Maggie turns nihilistic. He’s all too aware that the old man’s career never materialized the way he expected—that he has an uncanny knack for spending more than he makes, and drinking when he should be working.

“I caught ‘em ‘cause I was chasin’ them,” Maggie says. “Lots of people in our family done just fine for themselves…”

Hugh nods.

“Your mum and dad had some good years, yeah?”

“Depends how you define good,” laughs Hugh.

“And my old man was a solicitor,” continues Maggie. “Left me and your dad a bit of scaper.”

“Okay…”

“And my grandpa Gene was a chemist—had his own shop before the war.”

Hugh finds none of these examples particularly impressive, which clearly frustrates Maggie. The old man studies him for a moment and then, apparently seizing on a more persuasive tidbit, adds, “You know, Hughie, my Mossey, your great-grandmum, told me there’s clan blood in the family, way back. You never heard that, right? So keep that in mind next time you’re pullin’ pints for gantlings.”

Now, Maggie has mentioned his grandmother Mossey in the past—about how when he was a boy he spent afternoons at her flat and the two of them would pore over old family scrapbooks. She’d talk for hours about her youth in what she called Old Bressen, but never, in all the stories Maggie passed on to Hugh, has he mentioned this.

“Clan blood?” Hugh asks, eyebrows arched. “How’s that?”

Maggie wipes his hands on his thighs and leans forward in his chair. “That’s what she told me,” he says. “She used to drink anisette all afternoon, yeah? And I came by her flat one day when she was dead pissed and chatterin’ like a squirrel, the way she used to sometimes. She told me one of the Warding men way back when was rumored to have been clan but got kicked out or disowned for some reason. She didn’t know the whole story, but you could tell she was proud.”

“You’re daft, Maggie,” Hugh says. “If we had founder blood, the whole family would’ve known about it.”

Maggie snorts dismissively.

“Any idea how far back it was?”

“Mossey didn’t say,” the old man replies. “Long time. I’d guess a hundred years or more. Don’t know. I was only eight or nine when she told me.”

Already, Hugh has begun thinking through the implications of clan blood in his family— and the odds that such a connection could have stayed hidden. “Ah, come on, Maggie,” he says. “You don’t just get kicked out of a founding family. It’s not like a fucking country club.”

“Embarrass your parents and you do—or cheese off the clan elders. There’s probably some yazzer etiquette book they follow. I guess someone got his daddy good and angry.” He takes another drink and sets his bottle on the floor.

“Now that sounds like a Warding,” Hugh laughs. “You ever check it out?”

“Nah. Wouldn’t know how, Hugh Boy. Plus I’m not exactly yazzer material, yeah?” Here he laughs so heartily the flesh of his neck shakes like a wattle.

“Didn’t you want to know more about it?” Hugh asks. “Like which clan, or why he got kicked out? Or anything?” He doesn’t mention that he’s already begun speculating whether clan blood in the family means he and Maggie could get some state money of their own each year.

“Ain’t that curious,” replies Maggie matter-of-factly.

“That’s a pretty big thing not to be curious about.”

“Maybe,” muses the old man, now scratching at something on the back of his hand, an age spot, maybe, or dried paint.

“Don’t they get, like, a government subsidy or something? ” asks Hugh a bit fatuously.

Maggie looks up at him as if only now understanding the source of his incredulity. “You mean could we get some of their government subsidy?”

“I guess, yeah.”

“Nooo…” laughs the old man.

“Why not?”

A flash of irritation moves across Maggie’s face. “‘Cause whoever the jimmy was, he stopped bein’ a yazzer, yeah? Got disowned or whatever. Family cut ‘im off.”

“How do you know it’s that simple? Like what if…”

At this, Maggie’s expression turns sour. “You’re missin’ the point, Hugh. I told you ‘bout it to make a point, yeah? That you’re not necessarily meant to scrape by. That’s all I’m sayin’, but I don’t know every detail ‘cause it’s ancient history, and I’m just tryin’ to make a point.” He settles himself hard against the seat cushions.

“Maybe I could look into it some more…” ventures Hugh.

“Or maybe you could look into goin’ back to school and get out from behind the bloody bar. Maybe do that, yeah?” Maggie shoots up from his chair, mumbling about “tryin’ to be helpful,” and takes his beer bottle to the kitchen where he throws it in the bin with a crash. Then, without another word, he disappears around the corner.

Hugh knows better than to pursue the matter; it will take at least an hour for the old man to simmer down. So, after not seeing his uncle for weeks, and without saying goodbye, he rises from the couch and makes his way down the hallway to the door.

²Founder (v): to experience failure; to be unsuccessful; to fail.

Chapter 1

The Peugeot, November 2021

A voice in his head repeats the plate number three times.

VH-778-GDT

VH-778-GDT

VH-778-GDT

Stop, Hugh Warding says to himself.

And the voice stops.

He memorized the plate number at least an hour ago, but his mind repeats it out of sheer compulsion.

The car is a black Peugeot. Relatively new. Exceptionally clean. VH indicates a Vorhol registration, but that tells him next to nothing. It’s probably not an unmarked Sikstand car, he decides. Their plates usually have an SK prefix, which every kid in the dodgy part of Campus Augustus grows up learning to spot. Nothing about this vehicle looks official: no low-profile shark-fin antenna or emergency lights hidden behind the grill. Just a plain black Peugeot with a reflective windscreen.

He doesn’t know anyone who lives in Vorhol. In fact, he doubts anyone actually resides there; the place is almost entirely office buildings, occupied by lobbyists, contractors, and NGOs—all of them requiring proximity to the capitol. At night the area is a ghost town.

As he watches the car idling in traffic just 50 meters away, it dawns on him that the Propago Foundation is headquartered in Vorhol—just north of the capitol complex at Doma Lage. He noticed their address when he checked the foundation’s website. Until then, he’d never heard of Propago, and he certainly paid Vorhol no mind.

It could be an odd coincidence, of course, that a man from Propago called out of the blue to offer him help finding a DNA match, and a week later Hugh is being tailed by a car with a Vorhol plate. But none of this feels coincidental. No, he’d been rash to speak so unguardedly to a complete stranger, just because the man had an impressive title and Hugh had run out of options in his search. Bloody stupid.

Just then the Peugeot turns right, slides into a column of slow-moving cars, and is gone. For several seconds, Hugh remains stock-still as if the vehicle might suddenly reappear, specter-like, in the red haze of rush hour traffic. Standing there on a crowded sidewalk in Gloven, he has a sudden urge to call the Sikstand and report the car, to recite VH-778-GDT to the dispatcher so she can check the registration in the motor vehicle database and track down the driver—or whatever they do in such situations. But she will probably ask what, exactly, had been suspicious about this black Peugeot, and Hugh will say that it had been showing up everywhere he walked that afternoon—had been parked by the Indian restaurant when he stopped for lunch, and across Fornish Street when he smoked a cigarette before starting home. How did he know it was the same car? the Sikstand dispatcher will ask. Because I saw the fucking VH-778-GDT, he will inevitably blurt out, feeling the cortisol coursing through his body. Swearing at the dispatcher will only infuriate her, though, and make him sound like a lunatic, so he doesn’t call the Sikstand, but lingers there on the curb, in the failing light of a cool November evening, the voice in his head resuming its chant, VH-778-GDT.

To this point, he has tried to look unconcerned by the car’s repeated appearances, to walk as if he were on routine errands, oblivious of his pursuer; but now, as he heads down Huguenot Street, he finds his pace quickening, and the click of his heels on the sidewalk growing as rapid and percussive as a snare-drum. He glances over his shoulder at the intersection behind him, then at the street to his left where traffic crawls along in the deepening gloom.

Nothing.

Good, then.

Another 100 meters on, he turns onto Mission Gate Road. Halfway up the block, he stops by a Vodafone store and pretends to look at mobile phones in the window. Traffic is lighter here, though parked cars crowd the street on both sides. A quick glance to his right. Still no black Peugeot. He continues walking, now with less urgency, looking in store windows as he goes—a gluten-free bakery, a women’s clothing store with feathery hats displayed on styrofoam Greek columns, an old-style tobacconist with a leather club chair in the window. He is about to pass this last shop when he decides to step inside for some cigarettes—and to disappear, at least briefly, from view. A bell jangles overhead as the door swings inward; at the counter a pot-bellied man with a chest-length beard stands to greet him, his bulging midsection pressing against the display case. The lighting is dim, the air hazy-blue and thick with cavendish tobacco smoke.

“Evening, jim,” says the fat man. “How can we help?”

“Pack of plugs,” replies Hugh. “Gauloises Blondes Blue.” As he speaks, he scans the store’s interior as if the car might be lurking under a display table.

The proprietor turns to a rack behind him, runs his index finger across several rows, and reaches for the requested sapphire-blue pack. “Got an ID?” he asks.

“Come on, jim,” mutters Hugh reaching for his wallet. “I’m pushing 30.”

“Sorry, mate. BMMH has been up our ass lately for not carding,” replies the man wearily. “We gotta check everyone now—no matter how old they look.”

Hugh hands over his ID card and the man scans it with his barcode reader, then waits for the ID to clear.

“Twelve bone for the plugs,” says the man.

Hugh hands over a 20-euro note and receives his change. Then, taking his cigarettes and ID card, he turns to leave. As he moves toward the exit, however, he realizes he has only a partial view of the street; a powerful reluctance overtakes him. He pauses at a tabletop display near the door and feigns interest in a crystal ashtray.

“That’s a Baccarat right there,” calls the man from the counter. “Top of the line. You a cigar smoker?”

“Nah,” says Hugh. “My dad was, though.”

“That right? What did he smoke?”

“Swiss Delites,” offers Hugh reluctantly.

“Right,” replies the man. “We don’t carry them. More of a grocery-store brand, if you know what I mean…”

Too distracted to take offense, Hugh turns the ashtray in his hand while keeping the street in his peripheral vision. Then, seeing the price tag of €695, he carefully sets it back on the table and turns to the proprietor. “You got the time?” he asks.

The man checks a wristwatch on his thick, tattooed arm. “Ten past six.”

Hugh looks out at the street again. All clear, and then...

Bloody hell.

A black Peugeot is turning onto Mission Gate, moving slowly toward the tobacco shop, its windscreen silvered by the glow of a storefront. As the car approaches, Hugh can vaguely make out a figure at the wheel, but little else. At 20 meters he can read the registration number. VH-778-GDT.

As his unease mounts, the voice in his head sounds off again, now rhyming obsessively.

GDT.

Cup of tea.

Needle pricks sweep up his spine and along the base of his neck. He backs away from the table display and retreats toward a walk-in humidor at the rear of the store. Stealing another look at the street, he sees the car has stopped just outside, its headlights on, the bonnet glazed with drizzle.

Noticing that Hugh is headed for the humidor, the proprietor calls after him, “We’re running a special on Ashtons. In case you wanna try something nice and mild.” Hugh nods but does not reply. In his ears the rush of blood sounds like a driving wind.

Mild. Mild. Mild.

He feels himself grow light-headed.

Slow the breathing, he reminds himself.

In for four.

Hold for seven.

Out for eight.

As he steps into the glass-fronted humidor, his left eye squeezes into a hard, uncontrollable wink, releases, then winks again. Were he at his flat, or mixing drinks at Bar Bruka, he would take a moment to practice deep breathing and pacify his nerves. But here in the tobacco shop with that car idling outside, his only thought is to vanish into the air like a puff of smoke. Inside the humidor the cool air smells of cedar and leaf tobacco. Racks of cigar boxes line the walls, and in the center of the humidor stands a battered work table on which sit stacks of thick tobacco leaves and a cutting tool. Behind the table, on a gray metal door, a sign reads, Employees Only.

He glances back at the proprietor who is now reading something on his mobile.

Without calculating the risk or even much caring, Hugh tries the latch on the door. It clicks and turns. No alarm sounds; the shopkeeper remains engrossed in his reading. Drawing a deep breath, Hugh cracks the door open and slips through.

He finds himself in a narrow, dimly lit hallway with occupational safety posters taped to the walls. As he makes his way down the corridor, he passes a WC, then a time-clock, eventually emerging into a small room cluttered with shelves stacked with boxes. Against the wall, a metal security door has a sign posted at eye-level: “Turn off the lights when you leave for the day.”

He hurries to the door and gropes frantically at the doorknob.

It doesn’t budge.

Just then, he hears footsteps behind him in the hallway.

He tries the thumb-turn lock above the doorknob.

Leave for the day. Leave for the day.

Hey, hey, hey.

The lock resists, then stiffly turns.

“Hold it right there!” bellows a voice behind him.

Without looking back, Hugh rams the door open with his shoulder and bursts into an alley. Sprinting into the darkness, he glances over his shoulder to see the fat man standing in the doorway, breathing hard, one hand on the doorknob. As Hugh nears the end of the alley, he spins around to look at the tobacconist.

The big man takes a few uncertain steps into the alley and pauses, his chin raised as he peers into the darkness.

For a split second, Hugh considers going back and telling the man why he’d fled—that he didn’t steal any cigars, that he isn’t that kind of person. But instead he turns back around and keeps running.

Book I, Chapter 2

Tullia, June 2021

He hasn’t seen Tullia since she came by the bar two weeks ago. She is back now, stepping off the lift like Cleopatra from a pleasure barge, her eyes roving the room for anyone she knows, or anyone who matters. Her intensely self-conscious entrance is typical for the scions of Bressen’s founding families—gantlings, as they’re called by the figan underclass—as if even walking into a crowded bar has been choreographed by a manners consultant to the aristocracy. Hugh spots her right away, of course—he’s always got his eye on the lift for her next appearance—and watches surreptitiously as she and her two friends go to their booth. The three women walk arm in arm, as if they are one organism, all arms, legs, and haute couture, led by the figan hostess but not really following her.

Bar Bruka, where Hugh has tended bar for three years, occupies a lavishly renovated three-story warehouse on the tony left bank of the Bressen River. For a decade it has been the favorite place for gantlings to gather for cocktails and a bite to eat before heading out to the nearby nightclubs. Hugh has always preferred old-school figan pubs like the Spotted Pig or the Happy Frank—places with low ceilings and a long history. But even a jaded hospitality veteran like him can appreciate Bar Bruka’s special allure. On any given summer evening, VIP customers can enjoy cocktails on the bar’s open-air terrazzo while the sun descends over Tertahar hill. In the light of especially brilliant sunsets, the river itself seems to catch fire, and the gothic spires of Doma Lage, nearly a kilometer down river, look as if great shards of red earth have heaved up from the embankment. The bar’s interior radiates a moody, Mediterranean opulence, with its heavy-gauge copper bartop, booths upholstered in Hermès leather, and the City’s finest selection of whiskey and rye glittering under LED lights.

Usually Tullia gives him a discreet wave when she arrives—to set the hook firmly in his cheek. But tonight she hasn’t acknowledged him yet, so Hugh makes a point of looking occupied by preparing two Kir Royales and then checking his POS monitor for the next order. As he does, Tullia rises from her booth, smooths the fabric of her dress, and walks toward him. Seeing her approach, Hugh smiles a calculatedly restrained smile. A second later, Tullia slips onto a barstool, watching him carefully with her glittery eyes. She’s wearing her honey-blonde hair back in a single braid, and silver eyeshadow that forms a sort of sequined mask around her eyes and brows.

“You didn’t wave when I came in,” she complains.

“Guess I didn’t see you,” says Hugh.

Tullia rests her elbows on the bar and leans toward him, close enough for him to smell her perfume. “You working late tonight, Hugh Warding?”

She likes to call him by his full name, as if it were one word. Huwarding.

“Nah, got the early shift,” he replies. “I’ll be done at 11.”

“What’re you doing when you get off?” she asks.

Everyone else would ask this question out of a specific interest—like getting together later on—but Tullia’s questions are riddled with elision and never clear.

“Just hanging out with my flatmate,” he says, then chides himself for not thinking of a more evasive answer.

“The law student?”

Hugh nods.

“Ah,” replies Tullia, grinning knowingly. “Sounds like a hot date…”

“Nah. Silvia’s just a friend.”

Tullia smirks, then leans even closer to him. As she does, the strap of her blue dress slips off her shoulder, and, where the fabric briefly falls away from her body, Hugh glimpses the white crescent of her untanned breast. Embarrassed, he directs his attention back to the POS monitor. Tullia, meanwhile, slides the strap back over her shoulder, keeping her eyes on him the entire time.

Absolutely classic.

Now, as Hugh rummages in the cooler for some bottles of Heineken, he tries to shake off the image of her naked breast, as if he’d chanced upon a Greek goddess bathing in the woods, and the vision seared itself in his mind. As he opens the Heineken bottles, Tullia eyes his garnish tray, then reaches over and takes a freshly cut wedge of lemon. She puts the lemon in her mouth, bites down, and smiles at him so that the rind forms a garish yellow grin.

“That’s fetching,” he laughs.

Tullia laughs as well and sets the lemon on a cocktail napkin.

Then, without thinking—or maybe thinking too much—Hugh slips the same wedge into his mouth and smiles back at her. They both laugh, the way people do at an inside joke. When he places the lemon peel back on the napkin, Tullia fixes him with a gaze so smoldering he briefly forgets about the order of Heinekens. Gathering his wits, he sets the beers on a tray, signals for the server, and turns back to Tullia.

“You hitting the clubs tonight?” he asks.

She glances at her two friends chatting animatedly at their table. “Yeah. Le Craze, maybe. Or Napoleon’s Tomb. Haven’t decided yet.”

“Not Club 13?”

“Not anymore,” she says, wrinkling her nose. “Their new deejay is tres grave…”

Hugh nods, though he has no idea what tres grave means.

Now Tullia rises from her barstool, draws her shoulders back, and places her hands palms-down on the countertop. Her fingers are slender and long, with polished pink nails. She wears a gold watch with Roman numerals on her left wrist and a signet ring on her little finger.

“I should get back to my ladies,” she says. Then, apparently struck by a notion, she asks, “You ever go to the clubs, Hugh Warding?”

Hugh hesitates. “Not much. Why?”

He shouldn’t have asked ‘why;’ it makes him sound too eager.

“You just seem like you’d know your way around the club scene,” she says. “With those bad-boy looks.”

“I think you’d be disappointed by my moves,” he laughs, then picks up a towel and begins mopping the bartop.

“I bet you’re brilliant.” She says, then drops her hands to her sides. “I should get back to the table. Don’t be a stranger, Hugh Warding.”

“Have fun tonight,” he says.

He continues mopping the countertop as he watches her return to her booth.

He didn’t mention, of course, that he’d gone to Club 13 just a few weeks ago—hoping to run into her. He even asked his friend Dorian Spalding to go along for moral support. At first, Dory refused, because he knows the club scene all too well from having worked security at Le Craze a while back. Dory’s a third-generation Barbadian immigrant, and the clubs aren’t particularly welcoming to people like him, or native-born figans, or anyone with the wrong accent. Eventually Dory agreed, though, which was a good thing because Hugh wouldn’t have gotten in without him. While waiting in the rope line, Dory recognized a Russian bouncer named Konstantin who waved them both inside. While Dory drank and scowled at gantling men, Hugh prowled the club looking for Tullia. He never found her and gave up the search after half an hour. He did, however, recognize at least a dozen regulars from Bar Bruka, none of whom acknowledged him. Frustrated and embarrassed, he found Dory by the bar and made his ignominious exit.

Hugh hasn’t returned to the clubs since that night, but Tullia shows up at Bar Bruka often enough to keep their flirtation on life support. He has no idea why she shows so much interest in a feegie bartender. Dory thinks she’s doing some slumming before Mummy and Daddy marry her off to an investment banker from Old Town. Even knowing her motives might be questionable, Hugh awaits her every appearance with pathetic eagerness. Recently, Tullia asked for his number so she could send him a TikTok video. Ever since then, the two of them communicate once or twice a week, never about anything substantive, and always with lots of ambiguous emojis. Encouraged by this development, Hugh sometimes allows himself to believe she has more interest in him than just slumming, that maybe Tullia Bruggen has a little rebel in her.

For the next hour, Hugh tends bar while Tullia and her friends drink champagne cocktails, take Instagram photos, and pass their phones around for critiques. After a while he notices their cheeks have grown flushed and their body language more histrionic. Eventually, Tullia’s friend Iris hands her black card to the server and waits to be cashed out. Iris tends to tip poorly unless Tullia embarrasses her into paying more, which seems like an assertion of her social rank rather than an act of generosity. A moment later, when the bill is paid, all three women rise and make their way toward the lift. As they pass the bar, Tullia glances at Hugh and waves goodbye. The other two look at him as well but uninterestedly, the way one might regard a curiously colored pigeon. A moment later, all three women step on to the lift and disappear behind the sliding doors.

Don’t be a stranger Hugh Warding.

When Tullia is gone, Hugh turns to his next order. As he’s scanning the shelf for the El Tesoro, a young man in a black sportcoat and pink shirt approaches the bar and sets his glass forcefully on the countertop.

“I need a redo on this drink, mate,” he says, looking not at Hugh but just over his left shoulder.

“Another round?” asks Hugh.

The man fixes Hugh with a belligerent glare and nudges his glass forward. “Not another round, mate. You need to make it over. I asked for a Pappy 15 neat, and you gave me some horse piss instead.”

Hugh looks down at the glass. “Looks like you drank it all,” he replies.

“No, mate. I spit it out in that potted plant over there.” He gestures at the booth where his three friends have turned to watch the exchange.

Hugh draws a deep breath. “I actually remember pouring that drink,” he says. “Pappy Van Winkle Family Reserve 15—just like you ordered.”

“Nooo,” replies the man, obviously relishing the confrontation. “It wasn’t ‘just like I ordered,’ jim, because it wasn’t fucking Pappy 15, it’s swill. And I’m asking you politely to make it right and pour me a new one.”

“Can’t do that, friend,” counters Hugh. “I know I poured the right bottle, and Pappy 15 costs 200 euros a pour.” Then, summoning his deepest reserves of patience, he adds, “But I’m sorry you didn’t like it, so let me comp you a Woodford Reserve or something similar—to make it right.”

This only inflames the man further. He picks up his near-empty glass and thrusts it at Hugh. “Look, you fucking bosa tail wagger,” he whispers, eyes glinting like obsidian,“you take this glass and fill it with Pappy 15 or I’m talking to your manager and you’ll be out on your feegie ass before closing time.”

Hugh feels his diaphragm tightening; a voice in his head whispers, Closing time.

Hosing time.

Over the man’s shoulder, Hugh sees his gantling friends leering expectantly. Hugh’s manager Moira is on vacation—which means she probably can’t be reached. Mitchell, the assistant manager, is probably in his office, but he’s never reliable with customer service issues. There’s a risk, of course, that this man isn’t bluffing—that he is, in fact, a VIP—and refusing him could get Hugh sacked.

As Hugh considers his options, he scans the bar: gantlings everywhere, with feegies serving their drinks and bussing their tables.

Fuck it.

“Look,” he begins, “you know as well as I do that I got your order right. And if I comp you a Pappy, they’re going to dock me the full 200 bone. You get that, yeah? So let me pour you a nice whiskey and I’ll pretend you didn’t just call me a bosa tail wagger.”

This approach seems to defuse the situation somewhat. The man sighs dramatically through his nose, then makes a show of studying the shelves of liquor behind Hugh. Eventually he points to a bottle and says, “Alright, mate. Brownhill 12. Neat.”

Brownhill 12 is a more expensive selection than Woodford but not worth causing a row over. He takes the bottle down, pours the man a generous serving, and slides the glass over to him. As he does, he feels his left eye tightening into a spasmodic wink; he rubs the sensation away with the back of his hand.

Tail wagger.

Bagger.

The man takes the glass of Brownhill and lifts it slowly to his mouth, then, just as Hugh is turning to check his POS monitor, tosses the drink in his face, dousing him from forehead to sternum. Hugh stumbles back from the bartop, swearing and sputtering, his eyes burning from the alcohol. As he fumbles for a bar towel to wipe his face, he hears the man’s friends burst into uproarious laughter.

“Whoops,” says the man with a sneer, then turns and walks away.

Seconds later, the gantling has rejoined his comrades and Hugh is mopping Brownhill Select 12 Year-Old Bourbon Whiskey off his face, shirt, and countertop. As he works, his eye clenches into a hard, unyielding wink, and the voice in his head grows louder and more intrusive.

Tail wagger.

Tagger.

Bagger.

Under his breath, he whispers, “Stop,” and the voice stops. It’s a trick his father taught him long ago, a sort of biofeedback hack to neutralize his anxiety-induced OCD. His eye is still winking defiantly, though, which Hugh hides by looking down and away from the customer tables. Just as he finishes cleaning up and is turning to the next order, the assistant bartender, a tall, freckled Swede named Oliver, comes over to him.

“What an absolute flogger,” mutters Oliver. “You alright?”

Hugh nods and whispers, “Yeah, I’m good.”

Oliver reaches over and takes Hugh’s soggy bar towel off the counter. “You gonna report that guy to Moira?”

“Nah,” replies Hugh. “It’s over now.”

“It’s a Cooper’s hawk,” the rehabilitator said as she inspected its flaccid little body, “very plump and otherwise healthy-looking.” Then, after further inspection, she added, “Oh, his mouth is full of blood. He must have been hit by a car.”

When I first came across the hawk—just two hours before it died—the bird startled me by fluttering from the snow-covered ground to the top of a nearby SUV. Marlo, my Saint Bernard, was just as startled as I; though when I paused to study the hawk for signs of injury, he grew impatient to resume our walk.

In no position to help at that point, I made a mental note of where I’d seen the bird and decided to return later without Marlo. When I did return, I found the bird lying face-down on a heap of snow—strangely composed, utterly still, but clearly alive. By that time, I’d contacted a local wildlife rescue network for instructions and had come with a beach towel and laundry basket to effect my rescue. Once I had the patient swaddled in terry-cloth, I gently placed it in the basket and returned home, my immediate objective to get it out of the cold. Every few minutes I peered inside the basket and saw that the bird was still alive, the white and russet feathers of his chest rhythmically rising and falling. Then, just before I received further instructions from the rehab network, the little hawk stopped breathing.

Later, after leaving the bird with the rehabilitator, I called my daughter Mattie to tell her the bad news. “At least it was warm and safe in the end,” she said. Both Mattie and my wife Barbara are animal lovers like me, having assisted in countless family wildlife rescue efforts.

Years ago, when Mattie’s grade-school teacher didn’t know what to do with a pair of baby snapping turtles a student brought to class, we took the turtlets home, kept them over the winter, and released them in a pond that spring. We’ve stopped the car many times to move a box turtle off the road or encourage a garter snake to slither a little faster. Now a resident of Manhattan, Mattie has been known to stand guard over a stunned pigeon until it rights itself and staggers back to its comrades.

Every time I try to save an animal, though, I find myself questioning whether non-expert human intervention, however well-intended, makes matters better or worse. I tell myself that humans messed up animals’ habitats in the first place, and that we’re all duty-bound to help that turtle get back to safety. But then I think of the little Cooper’s hawk, lying in the snow on that bitterly cold morning, and I wonder if I should have left him there; freezing to death isn’t a bad way to go, they say. Yes, he was warm in the end, and protected from marauding dogs, but what if—and I shudder at the thought—he spent his last minutes disoriented and terrified?

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about human-animal interactions, it’s that animals seldom have a choice in the matter; and human choices are often misguided. We make decisions to adopt or assist animals, I am certain, prompted by uniquely human desires, whether we crave companionship or feel a need to nurture or, in more desperate situations, provide succor.

My daughter and I often laugh about an exchange we once overheard at the vet’s office. A woman clutching a cat carrier hurried in and announced that she’d rescued a lost rabbit in Congress Park, in downtown Saratoga Springs.

“Is the rabbit hurt?” asked the receptionist, clearly bemused.

“No,” replied the lady. “It was just lost.”

When the rescue woman passed by us, Mattie and I managed to peek at the animal, which looked, to us at least, like a wild (and extremely alarmed) rabbit.

We’re all doing our best to help these animals, I realize. Most of the time, we do real good, whether by adopting rescues, bringing wounded animals to the vet, or simply doting on our dogs and cats. It’s in the more ambiguous moments, often involving wild animals (but sometimes involving our own pets, such as when we must decide on euthanasia), that I question if any adjudicator is wiser or more reliably unsentimental than nature herself. As I grow older, I try to imagine how animals—immeasurably more attuned to and enmeshed in their environments than we are—would prefer things go, and then act on that. Then it occurs to me that even trying to imagine an animal’s preference is classic human overreach, and I’m left just as confused as when I first encountered that wounded hawk this morning.

My latest self-owning occurred this morning, after I visited the local Starbucks for a Grande Americano. Coffee drinkers will recognize that almost beatific rapture with which we anticipate our first cup of morning joe; I was in such a state this morning. Marlo, my Saint Bernard—who has become something of a Starbucks celebrity—was resting at my feet, having just consumed his pup cup (a Pixie cup filled with whipped cream, for those unfamiliar with the concept). Minutes earlier, we’d made our usual entrance, with Marlo being doted on by the baristas, making the rounds to greet some regulars, and eventually settling down with me to wait for my coffee.

This routine gives me a ridiculous amount of satisfaction—a feeling that small-town community still exists, even as the world grows more atomized and cynical. Maybe it’s a sign of my age that I enjoy this routine so much. Or maybe, like so many Americans, I’m just starving for some good vibes.

I had just finished giving Marlo his pup cup when an older, bearded guy hurried in the front door and made his way toward the mobile pick-up counter. As he passed, the man made a point of stepping awkwardly around Marlo, whose bushy tail extended slightly out from beneath my table. Then, as if compelled by a rage he could not quell, the man turned to me and sputtered, “You know it’s illegal for dogs to be in here.”

Now, Marlo and I have been frequenting this particular Starbucks for several years. Because I’m such a rule-follower, I asked if it was okay to bring the big boy inside for his first visit. Katy, the wonderful Starbucks manager, answered, “Of course! We love dogs!”

Having this long history with Starbucks, I smiled at the man. “Is it?” I breezily replied. “That’s good to know.”

Apparently unsatisfied with my response, the fellow thrust a finger down at my dog and added, “Especially when they’re blocking the way.” Then he turned with a huff and went to claim his drink.

“Well, good morning to you,” I chirped, thinking this dude woke up on the lumpy side of his Stearns and Foster.

A moment later, I left the Starbucks feeling both wronged and relieved not to be that guy. As I made my way down Broadway, some kind of traffic altercation unfolded nearby, with one driver honking furiously at another. How angry we’ve all become, I mused. How quick to say something nasty or honk the horn.

That was our problem, I decided with conviction, but little originality: We’ve forgotten how to be civil.

You might recognize the sensation I felt in the moment—one of pleasing moral rectitude, as if my view of humanity were from atop a great mountain. Such clarity, such relief not to be a dickhead.

It wasn’t a minute later, however, that some better angel inside my prefrontal cortex pointed out that I’d honked at another driver a week earlier—and just as angrily. I was hungry at the time, cranky, in a hurry. The other driver wasn’t paying attention. There were mitigating circumstances. A few days before that, I got pretty snippy with a guy from Spectrum. Damnit!

Amend that earlier thought, I decided. It’s obvious we lack civility—anyone with a pulse and an American passport would agree. More dangerous than incivility, however—more insidious and corrosive—is that cozy moral certainty I’ve come to feel, all while turning a blind eye to my own peccadillos (or worse). I can easily identify the unhealthy influences: social media echo chambers or news channels that forget to present dissenting views, or whatever. It’s still a really bad look. Which is a drag, too, because moral superiority tastes so good with a Grande Americano.

As I crossed Broadway and headed down Caroline Street, I reflected on how crappy it feels to be called out by my own interior angel. I mean, who wants to be judged like that? By the time I reached East Avenue, however, I concluded something entirely different: It’s when that nattering angel voice grows silent that I’ll really be screwed.

For what it’s worth, though, I still think the guy at Starbucks was a dickhead.

This effort—much to my delight—garnered a score of 9.5 (out of 10) from BookLife, the Publishers Weekly platform for independent authors. Even more surprising, Founder made it to the semifinals round of the BookLife Fiction Prize. So I figure, what the hell, let’s put this baby out there and see if anyone enjoys it.

I’m new to Substack, so bear with me if this project runs into some technical speed bumps.

By the time I returned home from New York City, my wife had mercifully removed the litter box, food dish, and cat fountain—all potential reminders of how empty our upstairs had become in just 24 hours. It’s strange that such reminders should risk causing heartache. After all, Gita, our nearly 20 year-old Abyssinian cat, had come to spend nearly all her time sleeping under a throw on the bed. Her physical presence, while constant, had become so attenuated, so ghost-like, that we no longer expected to find her bathing in sunlight or sitting on the windowsill, gazing superciliously at passing dogs. Weighing only seven-and-a-half pounds in her prime, Gita had recently dwindled to under five, subsisting on packets of chicken bone broth and bits of kibble. But even in her final days, as emaciated as she’d become, she retained that serene beauty one sees in ancient Egyptian statues of her breed: sleek, erect, preternaturally regal.

While I was visiting my daughter in New York, Gita gave those last, unmistakable signals that she was ready to move on from this life. Barbara bravely faced the situation alone, later recounting how, when the veterinarian applied the sedatives, Gita appeared remarkably relaxed and beautiful, stretched out in a plot of sunlight on the bed, a queen to the end.

It’s only after our pets are gone that the most poignant thoughts occur to us. Barbara realized that, until Gita’s death, she’d never been in our house without a cat present—and we’ve lived here for three decades. Phoebe, Chloe, Winston, and Gita all passed their lives under this roof, each cherished as much as any family member. Now, with Gita gone, we go about our daily tasks newly unsettled by the absences she left behind. Barbara catches herself searching for Gita’s morning medicine, only to remember it’s no longer necessary. When I made the bed yesterday, absent-mindedly smoothing out a lump in the duvet, my hands were startled not to feel a tiny, warm body sleeping there—as if my physical self hadn’t yet processed the news that we live in a catless home now. 

We still have our wonderful Saint Bernard Marlo, thank goodness. When he isn’t away at “play school” with 30 other pups, his presence keeps the house—the first floor, at least—properly unruly. But dogs and cats bring different energies to our lives, don’t they? Different satisfactions and different disruptions to routines that risk becoming, as we grow older, sadly rigid. Dogs are creatures of routine as much as humans and, to some extent, invite us to structure our habits even more inflexibly around theirs; a result, surely, of millennia of co-evolution. Cats, on the other hand, move through life like quicksilver, enviably disinterested, imperturbably feline, with little of a dog’s predictability or eagerness to please. So struck were we by our little cat’s manner that my daughter and I used to joke that Gita, tiny as she was, ruled over a shadowy crime syndicate, calmly directing its global operations from a sunny spot on our bed. That fantasy sprang, I think, from our experience of her as equal parts imperious and unrelenting, whether in pursuit of her favorite treats, a good scritching, or the best spot between me and Barbara at bedtime. Having long ago conceded the downstairs to Marlo, Gita came to rule the upstairs with a quiet tyranny only cats can impose. 

This may all explain why, when I returned from New York shortly after Gita died, I avoided carrying my suitcase upstairs. I dreaded not seeing the telltale lump under the covers, or the food dish and water fountain. My homecoming would have been far worse had those items still been present; I’m grateful that Barbara removed them. Slowly becoming habituated to their absence, I still can’t shake the sense that our upstairs is uncannily orderly now, that the bed is too unwrinkled, the runners in the hallway too free of cat litter. Our tiny Empress of the Upstairs reminded us every day that our house—and, by extension, our lives—weren’t always under our control. Acting on the slightest whim, she could ruin a night’s sleep by running wind sprints down the hall at 2 AM, or reduce to ribbons the arm of a newly upholstered chair, or insist on a full-body brushing when I’d just lint-rolled my pants. As much as I grumbled about her indifference to my commands, Gita reminded me just to go with it.

It is that impish and defiant presence I miss the most. As I near my 65th birthday, when Medicare packets show up daily in the mail and my doctor qualifies every remark with, for a fellow your age… I welcome disruptions to any aspect of life that feels inflexible or—gasp—geriatric. We probably won’t adopt another kitten any time soon; Marlo keeps us occupied with his daily walks and constant need for belly rubs. But as we move into this next phase of life, without a cat in the window, or on the bed, or weaving about my feet, I will (with apologies to Blaise Pascal) carry a small but very deep Gita-shaped hole in my heart.

This is All of That.

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