Locklands (The Founders Trilogy, #3)

by Robert Jackson Bennett

They say politics is the art of distributing pain. And scriving, of course, is the art of distributing intelligence.

Fight the battles before you, not the ones from so long ago.

<I’m just shoving this big, dumb piece of shit around in the water,> said Clef’s voice. <Pissing off some porpoises. And some seagulls. Ugh…bastards! They keep crapping on me—I can feel it.>

Having to control every aspect of this unfathomably complicated vessel never seemed to bother Clef that much. The only thing he ever complained about was having to also run the latrines.

I know who I am, she thought as her wife’s thoughts poured into hers, because I know you.

<You’ve got five minutes,> said Berenice. <Then I want you up there. We need to get cleared for entry as fast as possible!> “Ten minutes. Got it.”

Empires are simple to run, she’d said once. One person, one throne, one vote. But Giva is goddamn hard. And how, Berenice had asked, is that to be a comfort? Because power and cruelty are easy, Sancia had said. What we’re making takes a shitload of work. So we must be doing the right thing.

<But I like Clef,> said Diela. <He makes jokes. Which no one else around here seems to do anymore.

“Put Clef in a murder machine,” said Berenice. “Why didn’t such an idea occur to us earlier.”

<Is it so wrong,> said Berenice desperately, <to want to keep you all for myself?>

“Keep saying that,” Sancia said. “Keep wishing it. Whisper it into my ear. Whisper enough, and maybe it’ll come true.”

Robert's already got me in my feels

<She was very pretty,> Sancia admitted. <But I’ve never seen someone with yellow hair. That was weird as hell.>

We have evolved past the need for blondes

<Kid,> sighed Clef in Sancia’s ear. <If you could hear the mad shit your wife is suggesting…>

are you the crazy scientist wife or the crazy thief wife

<If Clef survives,> said Claudia. <If Clef survives, yes,> said Berenice. <I can hear you, assholes,> said Clef in her ear.

If I miss, he thought, Ber is going to be so pissed.

What a thing it is, she said, to witness the changing of the world…

Clef looks upon the face of his daughter, his firstborn. Her features still pale and perfect, though her mouth is purpled and bruised from the sickness. My butterfly, he thinks. My little butterfly.

NOT THE BUTTERFLY

His heart is a lock, and his thoughts are the key.

<We’re stuck at the top of the world with an army at our heels, and nothing but a mad, broken hierophant for company.>

<Well,> said Sancia. <Anyone want to use the first of all hierophants as a footstool?>

“Things like Clef and me do not have homes,” he said. “When you outlive civilizations, the conceit gets a little moot. You could say that we were once people, and thus had homes and lives, and this is true—but it is a little like the glass out there on those flats. In some places it has returned to sand, but in others it is thick and hard, and resists any cracking or crumbling. Is it then still sand, or is it glass? Does it remember being sand? Or does it matter after such a transmutation?”

<I…I don’t know how to lose you,> said Berenice. <I can’t imagine it. So I don’t.>

robert i will be sending you my therapist bill

“Valeria.” “The guardian angel of childhood,”

BRUH

“Time changes us all,” said Crasedes quietly. “At first it made me alien. Then it simply made me tired.

“Just kill me now,” she said. “I’ll be another name for you to mourn, you dumb bastard! But I wonder if you’ll ever find your way out of that grief either!”

<A minute with you,> said Berenice, <is salvation enough.>

hello?????????????????????

Just before her boots touched the deck of the ship, Berenice looked up, her face cast in the blues and grays of the starlight, and said something. It was too far for Sancia to hear it, but she knew the words. “I love you too,” Sancia said.

“Yeah.” Her face crumpled. “I love you, Clef.” “I love you, too, little butterfly.”

i'm about to walk into speeding traffic

Goodbye, Sancia, he whispered. And good luck.

“Find me,” whispered the hosts in Berenice’s ear as they held her. “I will wait for you, somewhere over there. And then, if we’re lucky, somehow you can find me, and maybe someday we will have that drink, after all of this.”

“Finally. There you are.”