June 14th 2013, 12:14 PM
Catherine sat on her bed next to a suitcase full of her important stuff and watched the servants strip the room. Rooms. Wing. She’d never realized just how much space she took up until now.
The actual conversation with Prudence had been astonishingly short. Apparently it had been arranged for her to move in with her godmother as a prelude to moving out of Novapest; not that she had any problems with it, but she would rather have liked to be consulted. Her life was whirling by without her really saying much about it.
… The servants. She wondered idly when they’d just become ‘the servants’ to her; other than Elgolian, who was powered, all the faces were new, or if she knew them she didn’t know the names. When had she stopped the basic courtesy of learning names?
Oh. Yes. Lizzy. It all came back to her, didn’t it? Catherine would have problems - Novapest would have problems - without her, but she’d worked her way into all of them, made them so much worse.
She still remembered it, very clearly. Lizzy, age twelve, with blood on her hands in the playroom that no one ever visited any more, Lizzy saying, “Helen did it.” Her eyes turning to Julius, and he broke under them and fell back to the Law of Family, and said, “Helen did it,” and then both of them turning to Catherine…
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And Catherine had said, “Yes,” and had stopped learning the names of the servants, and Helen had become Ilderia, and had started having to earn everything she was given, until the time came that she turned on the people who weren’t her family any more...
There were a lot of respectful mutters, and Catherine looked up from her musing. One of her brother’s remote bodies was waiting in the doorway. Those were… new-ish; he hadn’t had them when she left for college.
“Catherine?”
“Yes?”
“Can we talk?”
“Of course.”
They walked away to where they could speak privately. Catherine was giving her brother worried looks; she wasn’t surprised to see that he was doing the same.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I… wanted to know if there was anything you had to say to me.”
“Oh.”
She paused. The only thing she could think of was really stupid, and yet she still felt she had to -
“You put Lizzy in stasis, right?”
“Yes.”
“Sabotage it. Sabotage the hell out of it. If anyone tries to open it, they should find a frozen corpse.”
Steelmind said nothing.
“I mean it,” said Catherine. “This is entirely serious, not at all a joke, life-or-death.”
Steelmind looked troubled. “I know she’s responsible for so many of our problems, but… there’s no way father would have wanted this.”
“No,” said Catherine. “He wouldn’t have wanted any of this to happen. You’ve got to learn to look beyond him.”
“That’s going to be very hard.”
“I know.”
She sighed.
“Good luck, brother. I still love you.”
“I love you too, Catherine.” He embraced her. “Good luck in your new life.”
“Thank you,” she said. “Be good.”
“I’ll try.”