Page 15 of Coldwire
“That sounds promising.” His tone is strained. Dad always gets weird when it comes to Medaluo, when I remind him it’s only natural that Atahua will try to use me as a weapon in their arsenal. He wants to believe that I could be like him, that I could make my own path if only I tried hard enough to resist the rest of the nation’s perception of me.
But in wartime, there’s a world of difference between being fully Medan and half-Medan. Nothing bars Dad from being a senator, but a mountain of debt stands in my way from anything other than NileCorp security. It costs more to attend military school as a ward than as an Atahuan. Go figure.
“I’ll let you know what I get posted on,” I say.
“Lia…” Dad trails off, and I hear his reluctance. He doesn’t like the idea of a final exam posting out in the world beyond the academy’s safeguards. He would have banned me from military academy entirely if it weren’trequired by law to send all wards through. “Come for dinner tonight. We should chat about what you’ve got coming up.”
There’s one reason I’ve worked so hard in school, one final goal I’ve been counting on to reap the rewards. At Nile Military Academy, the valedictorian of each grade is allowed to submit their preference for where they’re stationed within NileCorp’s newbie ranks, and it’s always honored. I’ve had a brutal four years, sure, whatever. But if I make valedictorian, I can join Capitol security in the District of Melnova. I could work my way up to being a part of Dad’s detail, and he would never have to worry about me again, nor I him. Teryn Moore graduated as last year’s valedictorian, and she’s at the Button City base now. I follow her on the feed to get her every update, though she doesn’t post that much. I’m sure being the NileCorp CEO’s niece meant she’d get any posting she wanted anyway, but I already knew that she was going to be the top performer even when she was at the academy. When the grade above stayed overtime in PE, I would linger to watch her on the climbing ropes, nod along to myself to take mental notes on what she was doing well. I bet she aced her final exam posting.
I need to be ten times as good as Teryn Moore if I’m going to invoke the same competency.
“I can’t leave the academy tonight,” I say. It’s a five-hour train from Button to Melnova. “There’s no time to travel.”
“Log out and log back in. You’ll be on campus again before bedtime roll call.”
I wince. Unfortunately, I hate going downcountry enough that I refuse to use the method, even if it’s for a few seconds. Most people vastly prefer the pseudo-teleportation, but I need to travel properly, cross virtual space as though it’s real. It messes with my head otherwise.
“Maybe,” I say. “I’ll let you know. I have a lot of work to do.”
“All right.” There’s murmuring on his end. Freya has stepped into his office to summon him. “I have to go now. Talk later. Love you.”
“Love you too.”
Dad hangs up.
Because he’s a public figure, there are some things about his background that he’s never told me himself—the internet does that work for him. Even while I’m merely hovering over his saved profile, suggested searches appear without prompt in case I’d like to browse further.
Senator Henry Sullivan.
Who is the Federated States senator of Haven?
Henry Sullivan wife death.
I grimace, navigating out of my contacts list. It’s as if he knows what the automated suggestions are showing me because I get a text from him at that moment: a simple waving animation that has his face rendered onto it. He got a whole pack of them made to use when he has to chat with his constituents. He reserves the silly ones for me.
I send back ahehe.
Before me, Dad and his wife had a birth daughter. The baby got sick when she was really young—some form of cancer, though they never publicized which one. Dad took time off from appearances. From the old posts I snooped through on the feed, it had seemed like she was getting better.
She passed away two weeks after her fourth birthday. Twelve months later, the feed announced that Henry and Mallory Sullivan had adopted a daughter—me.It’s important to the both of us that we’re not abandoning our country’sAtahuanchildren because of our war with Medaluo,he’d told reporters, the remark targeted at a recent spate of anti-Medan crimes in Atahua. In that interview, Mallory had been pressed into his side, seemingly there to lend him her support. Every time I watch the footage again, hoping to pick up some new detail about these bygone days, all I can think is that she’s the one who looks like she needed the comfort, her expression subdued.
Mallory Sullivan—my mom, I suppose in technicality—was born Mallory Meng. Unlike Dad, who largely looks Atahuan despite hishalf-Medan background, Mallory had two Medan parents who immigrated to Atahua before the cold war started.
Mallory died in a car accident a year after I was adopted. I don’t have any memories of her, not even the faintest indicator of what she smelled like or how she hugged. She and Dad needed to spend time downcountry to raise me until I was old enough to be granted StrangeLoom credentials and use upcountry—and it took her life.
I blink fast, trying to control the sudden urge to tear up. My display opens a swath of tabs, not understanding my eye movements, and I mutter a curse, closing everything at once to get it out of sight. My vision clears. Only the empty corridor of A Block waits ahead.
Dad loves me, but sometimes I wonder if helikesme, because chances are that he never wanted to be saddled with me without his wife, and now I am his by a sense of duty. A ward of the state, clinging desperately to the identity he gives me outside of it. He’s strict about where I can go and what I can do, and as much as I protest it, I know it’s only because he wants to protect me the way he couldn’t protect his wife and his first daughter. I used to watch him clean the photos of Mallory sitting on the mantel like clockwork each morning. I would linger in the doorway on the anniversary of her death every year when he was lighting a candle for her, not wanting to interrupt. He’d turn around, and he’d beckon me to come have a look.
“Do you miss her?” The conversation is one of my earliest memories, one small fist clutching Dad’s leg because I didn’t want him to walk too far. I must have been six, barely used to my life yet.
“Of course I do. I miss her so much, and it will always hurt a little for as long as I’m without her.” He gave me a candle. “But she would be so happy that you’re here with me. We’ll take care of each other, you and me. Won’t we?”
My dad has lost so much, and I am all he has. I will be good, be the best, be everything anyone could ask for in a daughter, because otherwise what was the point of him sacrificing so much to raise me?
Dad has not required this of me. He doesn’t need to. If I am all he has, he is all I have. His approval is everything to me.
A door slams open above, audible from the ground floor. It gives my pulse another jolt, reminding me where I am and where I am supposed to be getting to. I take a deep breath in. A deep breath out.
