Extract from What Divides Us

Madeleine Richards

CHAPTER ONE

The dirt was soft and pliable with the last rains of June, and it sifted down onto the coffin gently. Lana watched from the sidelines as her colleagues and friends lay the first shovelfuls down, feeling all the worse for not being brave enough to do it herself. 

It was early in the morning, while the air still had that wintery bite to it that accompanied the end of Spring and beginning of Summer and the grass still glinted with dew. The bottoms of her trousers were damp with it, the toes of her boots slick from walking from path to field. The city thinned around the funeral building, a cool block of slate erected amongst the emerald backdrop, tombstones functional only and sprouting from the earth in an unending abundance. 

From the graveside, Lana could see the faded spray paint on the side of the building, a remnant of a forgotten time. It was the Venus sign, floral imagery unfurling from it across the brick. It had clearly been scrubbed at, the colours faded into the crevices, brush strokes streaking along its emboldened face. 

The sun was rising from the distance, just over the top of the rickety city walls. The full face of it was almost mocking. Her skin was warm, growing tight over her skull as it became hot and pink. It would turn a red colour as the day continued. 

Even if she wanted to take a step out of the sun, she couldn’t. New governmental policy dictated that during a soldier’s funeral, military personnel in attendance were to remain stationery throughout, hands behind their backs, feet shoulder-width apart. It was a way of showing respect to the person who had been lost. An incomparable pain compared to what they experienced in their death. 

Lana did as she was told for once, aware enough of the consequences of Melissa seeing her be disobedient, as well as the looming thought of Grace somewhere here, her spirit or soul or whatever it might be. 

She let herself, fleetingly, imagine what Grace might say if she were here. ‘This is depressing,’ was a likely statement. 

Grace  was never the type to enjoy funerals, especially not once the new mandate had come out. She’d even skipped a few, at risk of being punished herself. But Grace was fearless in a way that Lana wasn’t. 

That difference never felt starker than it did today. There would be no hope for her if she took down the door of her mind and let it spill out. It would be too much. Instead, she focused on facts, the world around her, examining the world the way she had been entrusted to see it. 

For instance, she knew that the funeral complex had three exits to it, and a fire door at the back of the building. People were no longer cremated, but at one time they had been, and the fire door was to permit people to escape if something went wrong. She also knew exactly how to escape through the skylight with only a stack of chairs and the blade she kept strapped to her inner thigh. 

Her mind began to wander. Bekah had told her some months ago, peeling through an old, dog-eared encyclopaedia, that in the old world, funerals used to be conducted in churches, which were old buildings that had tall spires and curious images depicted on wooden crosses. 

There were no remnants of those old religions in the West, not anymore. 

Lana, aged twenty-three, had never lived in that world. The war began before she was born, and reached its climax in her early life, leading to the severance of their old country into three separate states – the East, the West, and the military strip between them, a grand expanse of land where most of the fighting to this day took place. She only knew the world they existed in now, where people like her, people born into these bodies, inevitably went through the Change, whether they wanted to or not. Her life, by virtue of this very fact, had been split in two also. A life with pain, and a life without.

She had never considered herself a particularly emotional person. She didn’t cry when her mother abandoned her to the orphanage; she didn’t cry when the girls she bunked with flushed her childhood blanket down the toilet, clogging it until water spilled over the rim of the porcelain bowl; she didn’t even cry when her commander slashed her face with a knife that  left her with a permanent facial scar. She would never let them see her tears. 

And she remained true to that even now. She cried in private, under her bedsheets, ignoring the frantic knocks of Bekah. She just let the languid burn of whiskey drag her in and out of fitted sleep, permeating through the room with its scent, clinging to what felt like her bones. 

It had been a week since it happened, and Lana still wasn’t sure she was fully conscious. Even that morning, when Bekah knocked, Lana felt she had drifted to the door in her dream. 

‘It’s time,’ Bekah had whispered. 

Lana had replied: ‘I know.’ 

She stepped into an outfit chosen by Melissa, its tight neck threatening to choke her. 

They wound their way to the church in the outskirts of the city together, walking in the cool summer morning. The hearse drifted past them, her coffin in the back, and Lana fought to keep herself standing, wishing that her hand could be wrapped around Bekah’s for some solidarity. 

She stared into the middle distance with dead eyes and wished it was her they were burying. Felt she would have deserved that more than Grace did. She remembered those last moments, the last moment she saw Grace alive. Remembered the feeling in her throat as she screamed her name.

Bekah told her there was nothing she could have done, but Lana wasn’t so sure about that. If she had only been more vigilant, more on edge, more alert, maybe Grace would still be here. 

She had been to more funerals than she could count; it was part of the job. She had the procedures memorised and the art of mournful staring well practiced. She felt like her mother when she considered it like that – something that could be cultivated. Sometimes, those funerals did matter. Sometimes that collective grief dampened the room as a rag, spreading through people, even for days afterwards. Others, not so. She was able to maintain her composure through both.

But, standing along the front line of the crowd, eyes fixed on the immense hole in the ground that would be the ultimate culmination of Grace’s life, she became acutely aware of the way her vision blurred unnaturally. She wouldn’t cry. Not as Melissa stood to her left with her lips screwed shut and her grey eyes steeled forward. She was staring at some fixed point on the horizon, at the mossy engravings on another tombstone. 

This wasn’t supposed to happen. 

She stared at her boots and listened to the treacherous rain as the heavens seemed to split open. Her body betrayed her, and a tear streaked down her face, dropping from her jaw. It intermingled with the rain. She needed to control this, but she hadn’t been trained for it. In her chest, there was a deep, cloying discomfort, and she wanted to dig her nails into her sternum just to feel something other than the immense weight pulling her shoulders down.

Warm fingers touched the back of her hand, and she turned sideways to Bekah. They looked at each other for a moment, and it was only against Bekah’s height beside her that Lana realised she was hunched over. She elongated her spine and rolled her shoulders. Neither of them moved, and Lana did not permit her hand to open, so Bekah withdrew, knotting her hands back behind her back. Melissa’s eyes shifted to Lana, passed over her indifferently. 

Acting was hard, but it was a central part of her job. Constant. Like an illness that she just couldn’t kick. Even in front of Bekah, she couldn’t show her devastation. She knew if she did, she would not be able to keep herself together. She would collapse under the gravity of it. 

Grief was complicated, and it was something she could not comprehend in its basic sum of parts. The whole of it stood in front of her, bare, and expected her to take all of it in. And she stared back at it, like she was looking at the face of God themself, and waited for her fate, clearly unaware that this was punishment enough. 

God, she needed a drink. 

“Grace was commendable in her service to the Western Military, and it is on her mother’s order that we award her a posthumous medal for her service.” Commander Malia presented the medal to Melissa, who took it with no more than a word of thanks. She tucked her hands around it as though protecting it and brought it to her chest, her hands wrapped in a sort of reverence. 

Grace would have laughed in Commander Malia’s face. She didn’t need a medal for dying. 

Lana knew Melissa’s pain, the sort of pain one only felt for family. She hated to admit it; it was something she could not tell even the woman she loved most. On this day, under the heavy rain, Lana was not just watching the funeral of a friend, some compatriot that she knew from afar. The bonds of blood were not so easily severed, not so quickly buried, something she was more conscious of than ever with the way Melissa’s grey eyes wavered as their gazes caught, fleetingly, over the grave that housed the last remaining member of their family. 

CHAPTER TWO

The city was not much louder than the fields had been. The only noise that Lana could hear from the front of the Spire was the humdrum of chatter inside the building, enjoying Grace’s wake. Enjoying. She wanted to laugh, only the weight of grief had borne down so hard on her that she was quite sure she couldn’t move. 

She stared down at the amber bottle she had picked up from the bar – a complimentary drink, like this was some kind of business event. The ongoing noise, the constant conversations around her, the abject hysteria of the whole thing, had all become too much, some twenty minutes ago, and she had slumped down onto the bench outside in a daze, suspended somewhere between past and present, unable to step through the liminality. 

She kept expecting to hear Grace’s voice, perhaps to scold her for being antisocial, perhaps to complain about the buzz in the air. She had been drinking since they got back to the Spire, and her vision blurred at the edges, taking the pain away. 

People muttered to one another, and their eyes burned into her face. She didn’t bother to look up; instead, she looked ahead of her to the buildings across the street. White light brightened the windows through net curtains, designed to dim and hopefully obscure the people within the buildings. 

The intermittent bombings had come to an end following the treaty two years ago, but they still clung to the ghosts of the warfare, not only in the desecrated suburbs or the ramshackle walls around the border of the city but in the way people held themselves, as if to shrink slightly smaller. 

Lana wondered if the East felt it the same way, or if their loss was a deeper one – a hardness in place of what was once soft, a quietness where there was once questioning and consolation. She knew nothing of the men on the other side of the war – she didn’t care to. It only complicated matters. 

She heard the clicking of Melissa’s heels before she saw her approach, though she didn’t bother to turn her eyes until Melissa was standing immediately left of her peripheral. ‘Can I help?’ she asked, aware of the slur in her voice, the haziness to her senses. 

‘I was wondering where you had gone,’ Melissa said. Any hope Lana had that she’d said that out of concern evaporated when Melissa continued, ‘A little antisocial, don’t you think?’

A few eyes shifted their way, but Melissa paid them no mind. She had her target in sight. 

‘I just needed some fresh air,’ Lana said. 

Melissa considered Lana with a long look, an indecipherable emotion distant in her grey eyes. Those eyes stopped having an impact on Lana long ago. Lana drained the dregs of her beer and set the bottle to the side. 

‘I’ll repeat myself,’ Lana said. ‘Did you need something?’

Though people continued to talk distantly around them, Lana became aware of a stillness in her chest, unresponsive to Melissa’s intimidation.  

‘We just haven’t had the chance to speak after what happened to Grace,’ Melissa said. ‘I thought we could catch up.’

Lana eyed her. ‘I’m not sure why we’d need to do that.’

There were so many people around, so many watching their exchange, so many who would be more prepared to have a conversation with Melissa. And yet, her slate eyes were trained on Lana, possibly the only person in the city that didn’t want to have this conversation. ‘Well, our last conversation wasn’t very productive,’ Melissa said. 

The echoes of their last conversation reverberated through her mind, and Lana pushed it back before it had the chance to cling hold, to rattle her all that much. She raised an eyebrow. ‘I’m not sure if productivity was what I had in mind that day,’ she replied. 

Again, the memories loomed, and she felt the sting in the back of her eyes in a way that threatened to usurp her last remaining portion of reason. She thought about rain clouds congealing in grey overhead, blood dried into the crevices of her skin, her lips chewed raw, salt on her tongue. She thought about a thickness in each blink, the tightness in her throat. She thought about Melissa’s callous words, about her seeming nonchalance. 

There was a lot she wanted to say, a lot she threatened to shout in the middle of this street. She wanted to call Melissa a coward. She wanted to tell her that she was evil. But she didn’t.

Though those words remained unsaid, Melissa’s eyebrow twitched like she could read Lana’s mind. A small smile appeared on her mouth, polite enough to anyone around them. ‘I can understand that,’ Melissa said. ‘I have to say: productivity has been far from my mind also. I don’t think I’ve ever felt grief like it.’

Heat rose to Lana’s cheeks, and she cleared her throat. She stood up, abandoning her bottle to the side, and approached Melissa, dropping her voice low enough that nobody else would hear what she said next. ‘Careful, Mom. Wouldn’t want anyone to think you had a favourite,’ she said. 

Their eyes met briefly, their faces far enough apart that Lana saw thunder grow on Melissa’s face, saw the minute twitch of her jaw. She smiled and took a step past her, letting their shoulders connect. She pushed through the movement and Melissa stumbled back, righting herself almost immediately. Voices grew hushed but nobody intervened. Lana was sure Melissa’s face forbade them to. 

She strode into the lobby of the Spire, past the hushed whispers, ignoring the hard stares. The adjoining bathroom was quiet when she entered, and her clunky footsteps strained the silence. When she looked in the mirror, she saw the darkened smudge of mascara under her eyes.

She ran the tap until it was warm and splashed it over her face. She hated the power her mother had over her – no amount of mental separation was going to bring her the comfort she desired. Every briefing they had was enacted by her; every broadcast they were forced to watch showed her deliberated words; every political move orchestrated by the very woman who faked her own daughter’s death. 

Warm tap water combined with salty teardrops on her face, and she squeezed her eyes shut with steady palms, though her fingers trembled. The grief came back with a vengeance, forced upwards like a geyser. 

She turned the tap off and heard the door behind her open and close. She knew the footsteps that followed. 

Lana turned towards Melissa, blackened marks spread around her eyes like war paint, and had little time to react before the woman, the person who had remained composed even in the face of her daughter’s death, finally let herself feel. Her hand struck Lana’s cheek in a clap that likely could only be deafened in a soundproof room. 

Lana stumbled back against the bathroom sink and caught herself on the porcelain countertop. The shock stopped the tears dead in her eyes, and she exhaled a laugh, even as her vision sparked. 

‘Did you follow me in here just to do that?’ she said as she rubbed her aching jaw. 

Composure resumed on Melissa’s face; the storm settled. They stared at each other, mirror images. A pink palm formed on Lana’s skin, over the stretched scar on her cheek. 

‘I don’t know what makes you think you get to speak to me like that,’ Melissa said. ‘I’m your superior.’

‘I answer to Commander Malia,’ Lana said. ‘Not you. And I’m not sure if she’s going to be impressed when she finds out her best agent was just smacked across the face.’

Melissa folded her arms over her chest. ‘You’re not going to tell her.’

Lana tilted her head back. ‘How do you know that?’

They stared at each other for one short, sharp moment, and it appeared they had reached an impasse, nobody prepared to move or sway in response. There was no answer; there was no reason why Lana wouldn’t go and tell Malia. Finally, Melissa sighed. ‘I wish you would behave.’

Lana shrugged; she heard that a lot. Instead of responding, she looked down to the floor, her hand falling to her side, her jaw still tingling. Her tight braid pulled at Lana’s scalp when she moved. She reached to the ends and tugged the hair ties out. She mussed her hair at the roots to free her frizzy curls and they settled in soft ringlets around her shoulders. In the background, she saw her mother staring up at the dangling golden light, hip flask paused at her pursed lips. 

‘I’m sure you’ll love having the penthouse to yourself,’ Lana commented. She wiped a hand against her lips, smearing her lip-gloss across the back of hand. 

‘Grace hasn’t lived there in years,’ Melissa replied. 

‘Still, nobody bothering you? You’ve been waiting twenty-eight years for that,’ Lana said. Her mother didn’t get the chance to reply. The door swung open, and a girl shuffled into the area. Melissa arranged herself, hip flask back at her pocket, and smoothed her shirt down. 

The girl stopped in front of Melissa. ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ she said. ‘It was a beautiful ceremony, truly. Grace would have loved it.’

‘Thank you so much,’ Melissa said. “I appreciate that.’

Angelica reached forward and touched a gentle hand to Melissa’s bicep. ‘I can’t even imagine how you must be feeling right now. Losing both of your daughters. I have so much respect for you.’

Melissa did not flinch, not even letting her eyes betray her. The lies came like second nature to her. Lana was surprised that she was able to keep her head straight half the time. ‘It’s going to be a lonely future.’

She could have been sick. Lana washed her hands and dried them on a paper towel, throwing the remnants into the bin under the counter. She walked past Melissa while Angelica fawned over her and dodged into the entryway of the main hall. It was an impressive atrium with gold and black floor tiles and a small chandelier dangling above a central table. People set their bags on the table, just ahead of the picture of her sister. The throng had thickened leading through the grand entrance, and she heard the gentle music, but she could not bring herself to go in. She didn’t know where Bekah had gone, but she did know that the bar was through the door across the atrium, and that was where she intended to go.