The ceasefire has lasted two weeks; a week more than Josephine had, with sour cynicism, predicted. Foolish optimists are mouthing the word Armistice.
Josephine is adrift in the exhaustion-greyed crowds of Olympus Mons, waiting for the piano-wire tension to break, one way or another. She finds sleep, as she has for several years, in the bottom of bottles: Martian rum or Tellurian laudanum, whichever comes easiest to her shaking hands.
The Revolutionary Committee on the Past's Addressable Wrongs are in ascendancy, and everything she first believed in lies eclipsed by the shadow of the guillotine. But Josephine is not — not yet — scrutinised in doubt. The Flag of Blood, they call it now themselves, proudly; and loudly laud the hands that dyed it red, hers among them.
The war has bled everything so dry that there's no candle, even, in the room above the speakeasy, just the dark. The same room, for old times' sake. For the sake of using the memory of old times as a knife, drawing it across herself again and again to elicit the same old paroxysms of self-loathing.
She doesn't answer the first few knocks on the door, first because she doesn't hear them, then because they mix into drink-dissolved memory, and finally because she is tired and drunk and doesn't care. But the polite one-two and long pause between repetitions keeps on, so she stumbles, bootless and disheveled, to open up and refuse. Whatever it is, refuse. Unless it is, finally, the irrefutable wages of making so many enemies, on her own side and otherwise: a knife in the belly, or a black bag over the head followed by a 'tribunal', or simply fists and feet until her tired body gives out.
It's none of them. It's worse. It's a memory and a nightmare and worse than those, too: Rose, Navy Rose, as exhausted as the rest of the world, the furrows of a history of pain carved in once-smooth skin at her brow and the corners of her eyes. None of the ease in her frame that she possessed in their impossibly remote youth.
Her eyes are still clear.
Josephine last saw this face unconscious, carried off a war-prize frigate by gaoler-surgeons on a stretcher, fevered atop an uncoverable welter of oozing gore and stinking pus. She staggers and stammers against the doorframe, hands shaking as though palsied with worse than a ruined sot's cowardice. She's rehearsed this meeting more times than she's slept, more times than she's eaten, more times even than she's lifted a cup of oblivion.
She doesn't hear, if Rose says anything, turns and stumbles urgently for her meagre valise, for the thing she needs, the thing she's kept for this, the—
there. Beneath a worn shirt with a long knife-slash stitched, from which the blood nearly washed out. Wrapped in oilcloth, maintained as carefully as any part of her own military kit. If her own mouth is forming words, she can't hear those, either, as she turns to find that Rose has followed her into the dark of the room, and thrusts it into her hands.
She never expected this to happen outside her own imaginings. It's the passing-off of a burden that bent her spirit to the ground. It's the assumption of a fear so great it drives her to her knees. She shuffles, so, to the edge of the rough and narrow bed; lifts leaden arms and bows throbbing head to pull her shirt off over it, leaves the garment around her wrists, twists her shaking fists into it and presses them to the sheets; bends to likewise press her face beneath them, back bared and opened to her due.
The Cat o'Tails clatters to the floor, dropped, and she flinches. Flinches again at a palm spread, soft and open, across her shoulderblade.
At the first splatter of a tear, fallen on her waiting skin.
