Elves Invasion

46

“Why the lie, Grace? Why even bother pretending that the Hive is in control?” Toshi had asked her.

“You know what I’ve learned in all my years of building and growing this city?” she asked in return. Toshi shrugged, not interested in playing guessing games. “Ninety-nine percent don’t care how the lights get turned on or how the water gets cleaned or how we make the streets safe—just as long as everything works.” She smiled at him, almost wistfully, and Toshi was reminded of one night over thirty years ago when they’d stood and talked under the stars. He couldn’t really say who had kissed whom, but he remembered being happy for a while. It hadn’t lasted long. “The lie is for the other one percent who couldn’t bear to live under a human dictator. It’s a mercy, really.” Her eyes hardened in the same way that had driven him to break things off with her all those years ago. “The lie is so I don’t have to kill that one percent.”

“Grace the Merciful,” he said bitterly.

Half her face pinched into a condescending smile. “No one mysteriously disappears in Bower City. People aren’t being bullied or silenced. They have jobs, rights, wealth, and great schooling for their kids. There’s no crime, no poverty, and no sickness. No one wants that to change. They don’t want to know the truth, and if you told them, what I’d be forced to do to quell any uprising would be your fault.” She brushed his shoulder like the lover she used to be, and he recoiled. She dropped her hand. “Leave the lie alone, Toshi.”

When she left she didn’t even bother to close the door behind her. And why should she? Privacy was an illusion.

Toshi hadn’t wanted to believe her. He thought that there had to be malcontents—people who wouldn’t be bought out by the perks of perfect living. So far, he hadn’t found anyone. After two days of talking in code with family and friends, he was leaving the restricted zone more frustrated than when he’d entered it. He’d thought that if ever there were a place to find rebels, it would be there. He couldn’t have been more wrong.

The people in the restricted zone didn’t care one way or the other if the Hive controlled the city or if Grace controlled the city by controlling the Hive. They just wanted to be a part of it.

His father’s advice was given in Japanese. The closest equivalent in English was “don’t rock the boat.”

Toshi spent a day in his family’s apothecary shop, trying to feel out customers to see who would rise up if they knew that Grace, and not the inscrutable and invincible Hive, had kept them poor and sickly. He’d asked hypothetical questions that were met with blank stares and embarrassed laughs. They lived in a world where it was acceptable, even normal, to curse the Hive, but beyond curses all anyone seemed to want was to be accepted by them—to be ushered past the checkpoints and into the shining city by the sea.

At night, Toshi sat with his dying mother. He could see the cancer in her growing by the second, thinking how easily he could pluck it from her body. Like picking spilled seeds off the floor. But he wasn’t allowed to do that.

Toshi asked his mother why she didn’t want change. She placed her shriveled hand next to his smooth one and smiled up into his eternally young face. “You are not sick. You will never be sick,” she said.

And that was enough for her. It seemed to be enough for most in the restricted zone. As long as they had the hope that their children would live charmed lives in Bower City, they didn’t want change.

Toshi jumped a trolley and hung from the bar, glaring hopelessly out the window. The clean streets glittered at him smugly and the legions of fit people mocked him with their healthy bodies and pretty, smiling faces.

Grace was right. They would probably fight him—not her—if Toshi tried to change anything. That was the genius of what Grace had done. Her victims were far away and somebody else’s problem. The punishment was to be locked out of Bower City, and so everyone wanted in.

He got off the trolley and walked the last few blocks to the Governor’s Villa. Grace hadn’t even hinted that she was going to throw him out or demote him in any way. Still, Toshi was certain now that he had no hope of ever learning how to grow willstones. Grace would never trust him with that. If the formula for growing willstones was ever leaked it would end Bower City’s stranglehold on magic and therefore its dominance in the world.

But, as Toshi considered it, he realized that he’d never had a chance of becoming Ivan’s second. Grace had stopped trusting him enough for that when he saw the hardness in her eyes and ended their brief romance. She knew that if he didn’t love her she couldn’t control him, and Grace would never allow anyone she couldn’t control to know the secret of willstones. He wondered what Grace had on Ivan.

Toshi went inside, but he didn’t go up to his rooms. Instead, he went to find Ivan. He wove through the myriad rooms and down passageways that led to other buildings. The fa?ades of these buildings were made to look like they were separate, but behind them, nearly all the buildings in the governing area were connected. They all led back to Grace.

Toshi found Ivan in the power relays. The windy, stadium-size room was humming with the electricity being generated by the three dozen crucibles and witches who were transmuting energy for the city. They each stood in their niche in the marble walls, suspended in a gentle column of witch wind, their faces underlit by their glowing willstones. They looked like lovely floating statues. The mechanics grouped below them and monitored their bodies, making sure they didn’t transmute to the point of taxing themselves. Salt and herbs were strewn on the floor. A banquet of food was ready in a niche to refuel them when they had completed their shift. Out of respect, the food was always presented spilling out of a cornucopia.