Bannock and gang brands at the Governor's table - Part 20

Boyer is forced to reveal the mark she was given on the Beast in a high stakes conversation with the Gov

Boyer sat at the long table alone. It rose from the floor when she walked into the room like a phantom emerged from a mist. It was already set. It had one placemat fully set and there were numerous dishes prepared. She could smell Indian spices, Thai curry, deep fried meat. There was golden brown bannock, fresh vegetables and fruit. Her mouth watered instantly.

How long since she had eaten and what? A protein bar on the EV before the attack. The day felt like a year.

“Please have a seat,” a voice behind her startled her. A household droid stood with a tray. On it was a glass of water, the contents of the glass perfectly still as the droid walked toward her. “Would you like anything besides water to go with your meal?” the droid asked.

“Coffee. Immediately,” Boyer said.

“Coming right up,” the droid said as he placed the water beside her plate. He pulled out her chair, waited for her to sit down and placed a napkin on her lap. “Please help yourself, while I get the coffee.”

Boyer didn’t even wait until the droid was out of the room. She reached for the bannock first and grabbed a fresh roll of warm bread. Its outside was crips like a pastry and the inside melted in her mouth. She took a big bite and as she chewed grabbed a bowl of fruit preserves as she spread a generous cube of butter onto another roll that started to melt instantly.

She closed her eyes and smiled.

“Would the elders at Maskwacis approve?” the Governor stood at the opposite end of the table.

She looked at him, her reverie disrupted.

“It’s amazing how such a simple mix of whole ingredients can so please the palette,” he said. “We used a recipe that’s been on these lands for thousands of years. Corn, nut meal, flour made from ground plant bulbs. Salt.”

“And anything tastes good with melted butter,” she said swallowing. “Don’t know if they had that a thousand years ago.” She took another bite. “You know,” she said, wiping her mouth with the back of her wrist, “this was the first meal I shared with the Bishop. My first meal of freedom.”

“My personal chef has perfected it, I think.” Boyer grabbed the plate of bannock and shoved it along the table toward the Governor. The flat white dish spun like a curling rock toward him and landed within an inch of where his placemat would be if the house droid had set one for him.

Boyer admired her accuracy. “Eat some before I finish it all,” she said.

The Governor asked for the butter and she slid it along the table toward him. The edge of the butter dish clinked against the outer rim of the bannock plate. Another perfect shot. She dipped her bread in the preserves, raised it in the air, and kept eating.

She pulled the biryani rice and a red curry dish toward her and started to spoon out portions. Now the Governor groaned with delight as he bit into a warm roll.

“You know, your Bishop once offered me this bread. He used it for communion.”

Boyer looked up from him, a spoonful of red curried chicken on her lips. “He liked to use it instead of those dumb little wafers,” she said as she sipped the warm sauce.

“I told him I wasn’t Catholic, that I thought it wasn’t Church practice,” the Governor said, a look of amusement on his face came with the memory.

“I think I know what he said,” Boyer replied as she blew on a steaming forkful of biryani.

“Christ still gave his life for you.” They both stopped, the Governor with the warm bread near his lips, Boyer with rice near hers. They had said the words together. Boyer took a bite of her food. The Governor put down the bread.

“So, what did you do?” she asked.

“I ate it,” he said. “Not so much as communion or a sacrament, I think. But as fellowship. With the Bishop.” He picked up the bread again, broke off a piece and took a small bite. As he chewed he said, “I’ve always wondered what that meant.”

Boyer waited for him to speak further on it, but he offered nothing else. There were many directions she could go. Men and women who came to New Eden and met the Bishop often had a similar question—as their history with the Church or with their view of theology collided with his practice of offering the body of Christ to anyone who came to seek whatever they sought at the famous Phos off of Highway 611 in one of the most unexpected places.

But the Gov wasn’t here to talk transubstantiation or the differences between the Catholic and Protestant view of the sacraments. She could tell that much. So she reached for some fried chicken and waited.

“You can eat a lot for such a slight frame,” he said.

“I’ve learned to eat when I can, as much as I can. Your next meal is never guaranteed.”

“Well, I hope you’re enjoying it. We were able to pull data on your most-ordered meals. These, statistically, are what you’ve ordered most for your meal plan since you moved behind the walls.”

“My quota doesn’t allow for this much animal protein though.”

“I can change that.”

“Oh, I wasn’t asking for that.”

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“I know,” the Governor said. “You have too much integrity. But consider it done. I’m not unkind.”

“And then I’ll be in your debt, is that what?” she asked.

The Governor laughed. “Take a W. I’m freely offering you more protein. No strings attached.” He looked up toward the ceiling and said, “Increase her protein quota.” There was a subtle chime in acknowledgement, almost lost to the ever present hum of the ventilation system high above.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Your survivor instinct. It’s so strong,” he said as he touched at the crumbs on the table that had fallen from the buttery crust of the bannock. He poked them with his index finger. “I watched the footage from the ambush. You were calm. Smart. You seemed unafraid.”

“They were just kids,” she said, battering away his flattery.

“You couldn’t have known that when they were masked. When they had AR-15s pointed at your head.”

“I’ve been in worse situations,” she said.

He touched the crumbs that dotted his finger to his tongue. “I read your file. I believe you. And I saw the mark on your hip.”

Boyer put down her fork, the clink of the metal against the tabletop pronounced. “In my file?” she asked, but she knew there’d be no record of that in whatever information the Corridor had on her.

“Last night, while you bathed.”

She looked at him and tried to appear calm. She breathed deeply through her nose. She had been careful, discreet, as private as she could be about her body, but she knew there’d likely be cameras recording her every move. The only way to not completely cower at the Governor’s total control over the citizens of the Corridor, especially in the spaces he lived or operated, was to lean in. To acknowledge the breach of privacy, the uninvited intimacy, would be to be crushed by it.

Boyer stood, her chair scraped back loudly against the floor. She lifted up her shirt, exposing her midriff. She pulled down the waist band of her pants to expose the curve of her left hip. A dark scar marked her brown skin. Two horizontal lines with shorter, perpendicular lines intersecting them. Train tracks. Above them a star.

The Governor looked at her hip, then at her. She didn’t blink. A wave of anger passed over him. “Where did this mark come from?”

“Why do you care?” Boyer asked, her heart racing.

The Governor slammed his fist on the table. “Where did you get it?”

Boyer slowly sat down, afraid like she had not been in a very long time.

“I demand to know when you put this mark on your body!”

“It’s how they marked us,” Boyer whispered, barely audible. She often thought she had moved past the horror, but it could return suddenly, violently in a flash of memory, like hands that appeared out of nowhere and gripped her by the throat.

“How? Who?” the Governor pressed. The vein on his forehead was thick as a slug. If Boyer threw the bitter knife with as much accuracy as she slid the dish of butter she could send a trail of his blood across the table, splatter the curry, the preserves.

“Men. On the Beast. It was the train my mother and I took north from Guatemala.”

“Oh,” the Governor said, his anger suddenly absorbed by surprise.

“They marked us and other women and girls. Burns, tattoos, ink. El camino del cielo.”

“The road for… sweethearts?” he asked, gently.

“Yes. It had two meanings. It was a cruel joke to describe the hell path they would send us on.”

The Governor put his hands on the table. “I’m sorry.”

Boyer laughed. Surprised at his sudden change in demeanour and the look of shame that suddenly took over.

“Really?”

“I am,” he said.

“Surely you knew about this from my file, that we came before the borders closed, when 46 was still in power. That the way we came would have been on the Beast. That I landed near Maskwacis because the bike gang that bought us had clients that had a thing for young girls.”

“Of course I knew this, but I misinterpreted the tattoo.”

“For what?” Boyer asked, dumbfounded, but sensing a shift, an opening.

“In a recent security report–” He stopped.

She waited, but he said no more. “Are they back?” she asked, quietly.

He squinted at her, calculating. “It’s obviously nothing to worry about. I’m sorry to reopen this deep wound.”

Boyer let it go. She was on thin ice. She couldn’t make sense of what was happening, the strange and dangerous position she was suddenly in with the Governor.

“What is the other meaning?” he asked.

When he asked the question her feet suddenly rushed with a familiar sensation. Her feet felt cold as ice, but they also burned. “The way of glory,” she said. “Camino means road. Cielo, sky.”

They stared at each other from opposite sides of the table. Two people from two different worlds. All the evil and harm they’d inflicted, experienced, witnessed filled the space between them.

When she felt the sensation, she always thought of the story of David, of the angels in the treetops. Move toward the danger, I am with you. It always gave her reassurance.

“Before I go, I want to ask you about the boys that attacked you, from the Surge. Did they share any information?”

“What kind of information?” Boyer asked. She reached for a plate with chocolate covered strawberries to avert his penetrating gaze. Her hands burned with the sensation now. When she took the strawberry she noticed a rim of light flicker around her fingers, a slight shimmer of gold and green.

The Governor was looking out the window. “Information about their movements, attack plans, how they organize, their aims?” This was the war-weary general who had long been fighting a battle no one was sure that he–or anyone–could win.

“They took me into a tunnel network after their friends took out the drones. I got a glimpse of how they took them down from the EV. Some sort of netting.” Boyer put her hands in her lap, under the table. They burned like she’d just been outside in the cold with no gloves, then put them in a tub of hot water. “It all happened pretty fast. They pilfered the EV for anything they could find. The weapons, the first aid kit, protein bars. They seemed pretty desperate if you ask me. The protein bars and batteries might as well have been crypto.”

“What do you mean?”

“Extremely valuable, hard for off-grids to access.” She looked around the room. “Outside the walls this opulence is unknown.”

“Nothing else? No indications?” The Governor asked. His eyes on her now.

She looked at him, calmly. There would be no going back. Did he see the surveillance footage from the return trip? Had he seen the USB Foxtrot and Joyride hid in the kit when she medicated, the same USB hidden in the crucifix around her neck that he had touched last night with his own hands? Was this a test?

She took the sensation on her feet, on her hands as reassurance. It reminded her of the experience in the Phos just hours before, the memory that was almost knocked out of her through the unexpected events of the last few hours: the attack, the arrest, the mansion. “Nothing,” she said and bit into the strawberry. “What would they have told me?”

The Governor stood up. “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess I’m a hopeful optimist. Maybe they dropped a clue about the whereabouts of their General.” He looked out the wall of glass toward the night sky. “We thought he was dead.” He rapped his knuckle on the table and took a step. “We’ll get it out of them soon enough.”

“The Games?” Boyer shuddered.

“Yes, the Games.”

“And what about Mars, will you send them to the red planet like they asked?” Boyer did her best to sound neutral, was unsure if she succeeded.

“Do you have to ask? I’m a man of my word.”

He stepped toward her and picked up a strawberry. He bit into the berry and a piece of the hardened chocolate fell onto her leg. The Governor reached down and picked it off her thigh. “We’ll need you to stay close, for the show.”

“Why?”

“I spoke with the showrunner and she said that you’ll be ratings gold. They want to use you as a memory drop for their episode.”

He licked the chocolate off his finger. “Stay safe out there, Boyer,” he said and walked out of the room.