A New Normal - Chapter 4

A few days had passed since Belle Hamer walked across the fitting room. Cassandra had thought about it each morning since — on the tram, at her bench, during the quiet stretches between the days when her hands were idle and her mind was not.

She did not understand why the woman had cried. Belle Hamer had not been sad. Cassandra had watched her face carefully, searching for something she could identify, but it was impossible. Her brain twisted itself trying to find how one could cry and laugh at once. Sadness and laughter were separate responses to separate conditions. She was certain of this. Yet Belle Hamer had done both at once. She had much to learn about people. She was beginning to understand how much.

She was sitting in her office across from Na'la, a cup of tea cooling between her hands. Na'la had brought it the moment Cassandra arrived, along with a second cup for herself, and had settled into the fitting chair opposite the worktable with one leg drawn up beneath her and her glasses pushed into her hair. Between them, the morning light came through the arched window and fell in a long rectangle across the floor.

"So," Na'la said, lifting her cup. "How are you handling everything?"

Cassandra considered the question. "Work is going well so far," she said.

Na'la waited, her cup paused halfway to her mouth. When nothing else came, she lowered it.

"The work," Na'la repeated.

"Yes," Cassandra said. "The layout of the prosthetics are rather intricate. I've been studying Raiden's calibration notes and I believe there may be an inefficiency in the standard wrist assembly."

Na'la stared at her. A smile pulled at the corner of her mouth, slow and incredulous, and she set her cup down on the arm of the fitting chair.

"I meant," Na'la said, a laugh threading through the words, "how are you. Not the wrist assembly. You. Are you sleeping all right? Are you eating properly? Do you like it here, do you feel comfortable? That sort of thing?"

Cassandra looked at her. The question, she realized, had not been about prosthetics. She turned it over, searching for the correct response, and found that the machinery required to produce one was unfamiliar to her. In the regiment, "how are you handling everything" meant "is your equipment functional and are you fit for duty." The answer was always the same: yes. She did not think that was what Na'la was asking.

"Forgive me," Cassandra said. "I'm doing well. Ashenmere has treated me well so far."

Na'la took a sip of tea and studied Cassandra over the rim. "So, Cassandra," she said, setting the cup on the arm of the fitting chair, "how exactly did a girl your age end up in the war?"

Cassandra held Na'la's gaze. 

"I was an orphan," she said. "I was in institutional care for as long as I can remember. During the first year of the Conflagration I was transferred into military custody. They had assigned me to a regiment in the northern theater, and I remained in service until the armistice."

Na'la's cup stopped halfway to her mouth. "How old were you? When they transferred you."

"I don't know," Cassandra said. "I have been told I should be around seventeen now, which would have made me approximately ten at the start of the war."

Na'la set her cup down very carefully. She didn't say anything for a moment. The workshop sounds filled the silence — the tap of a calibration hammer through the wall, the murmur of a technician explaining something to a client in the fitting room next door.

"Ten," Na'la restated.

"Approximately," Cassandra said.

Na'la's hand dipped into the pocket of her cargo trousers and came out with a cigarette and a box of matches. She put the cigarette between her lips and struck a match, and as the flame caught and she inhaled, she said through the smoke, very quietly, "Damn."

She held the cigarette between two fingers and tilted it toward Cassandra.

"You mind?" Na'la asked.

"I don't mind," Cassandra said. "Colonel Hawthorne always smoked near me. I'm accustomed to it."

Na'la's hand paused with the match half-struck. She looked at Cassandra.

"Hawthorne," Na'la said. She lowered the match. "Colonel Jean Hawthorne."

"Yes," Cassandra said. She met Na'la's eyes and held them.

Na'la set the unlit cigarette and the match down on the arm of the chair. She leaned forward, her elbows on her knees.

"Raiden told me you were apart of The 42nd Combined Regiment," Na'la said. "That was Colonel Jean Hawthorne's regiment."

"That is correct."

On the workshop floor beyond the office wall, someone was testing a hydraulic line — a thin, rhythmic hiss that pulsed through the plaster.

"Are you related to him?" Na'la asked.

"No," Cassandra said. "Why do you ask?"

Na'la tilted her head. "Your name is Cassandra Hawthorne," she said. "His name was Jean Hawthorne. Same surname. Same regiment. I'm just putting pieces together."

Cassandra took a sip of her tea. "The Colonel gave me his name," she said, lowering the cup. 

Na'la sat back in the fitting chair. She was quiet for a moment. Through the arched window, the morning sun had shifted enough that the rectangle of light on the floor now touched the base of the fitting chair, warming the leather where Na'la's boot rested.

"I'm sorry," Na'la said. Her voice had softened. "About what happened to him. I'm sure he went out on his own terms. From everything I heard about the man, he wouldn't have gone any other way."

Cassandra's gaze dropped. It moved from Na'la's face to the teacup in her hands, to the surface of the tea, still and dark. She looked at it for a long time. Her thumb rested against the rim of the cup, motionless, and her shoulders had drawn in slightly.

"Yes," she said quietly.

Na'la waited. The workshop sounds settled around them — the tap of a calibration hammer through the wall, footsteps in the corridor.

"You knew of him?" Cassandra said eventually, her eyes still on the cup.

"Who didn’t?" Na'la said. "Every officer in the northern theater knew who Jean Hawthorne was. You couldn't avoid the stories."

Cassandra looked up. "I wasn't aware there were stories."

Na'la tapped ash into her empty teacup. "The Ashfall Line," she said, smoke curling from the corner of her mouth. "Were you there for that?"

"I was there," Cassandra said.

"Half a company. No artillery support. Three days." Na'la shook her head. "That story came through every regiment in the north within a week. Officers were talking about it like it was something out of a ballad. The Colonel who refused to give ground because he said the position was holdable and then proved it." She tapped ash into her empty teacup. "Was it true? The part about him staying in the forward trench the whole time?"

"He stayed," Cassandra said. A faint warmth had entered her voice, barely perceptible, but present. "He said if the soldiers were going to hold, they needed to see their commanding officer holding with them. So he stayed. He didn't sleep, so none of us did."

"That sounds like him," Na'la said quietly. She took another drag. "And the Greyvale Offensive? The two divisions that collapsed?"

"The 9th and the 14th," Cassandra said. "They pulled back without coordinating. We were exposed on both flanks."

"And Hawthorne held."

"He held," Cassandra confirmed. Something had loosened in her posture. She was leaning forward slightly, her elbows closer to the worktable, her hands wrapped around the cup instead of gripping it. "He pulled the regiment into a defensive square and held it for eleven hours until the 9th reorganized and came back into the line. He was calm the entire time. He gave orders as though death had not been waiting for us." She paused. "The men believed him. I believed him."

Na'la looked at her. The cigarette burned between her fingers, forgotten.

"There were officers who hated him, you know," Na'la said. "Because he made them look like what they were. Idiots in uniforms with power in their head. But the ones who understood — they talked about him with something close to awe."

"He was..." Cassandra began. She stopped. Her eyes moved to the window, to the light on the floor, and then back to Na'la. "He was a remarkable man."

"That's not a small thing," Na'la said softly. "A man like that giving you his name."

"No," Cassandra agreed. "It is not."

The hydraulic hiss from the workshop had stopped. In its place, the quieter sounds of the clinic settled around them — footsteps in the corridor, the receptionist's voice greeting someone in the waiting area, the faint metallic tap of a calibration hammer two rooms away.

"Was he good to you?" Na'la said. It was not a question.

"He was the only person who ever was," Cassandra said.

Na'la crushed the cigarette against the inside of the teacup. She watched the ember die. When she spoke again her voice had been stripped of the warmth it carried just minutes ago.

"The Conflagration took good men and bad ones and it didn't care which was which," she said. She turned the dead cigarette in her fingers. "I lost people too. I know it's not the same, but I know what it's like to carry someone who isn't there anymore and not know where to go."

She was quiet for a moment, then she lit a second cigarette. 

"I enlisted in the first year. Eighteen years old, fresh out of a factory town where the plant was cutting shifts and the recruitment office was handing out signing bonuses like festival candy. I thought it would be four months. Six, maybe. Everyone said it would be over by winter. I’d come back to my folks home and we’d celebrate Christmas." A short breath through her nose. "Seven years later I was a Captain writing letters of condolence to mothers whose sons I'd ordered into positions I knew they wouldn't come back from."

She took a drag. The smoke curled around her glasses and dissolved into the morning light.

"Did you ever have to write those letters?" Na'la asked.

"No," Cassandra said. "I was never the one who wrote them."

"No," Na'la said. "You were the one they would have written them about." She let that sit for a moment. "You were a child on the front line. If you had died out there, some officer would have sat down and tried to explain to — who? The orphanage? A filing cabinet in the War Office? — that a girl was killed holding a rifle she shouldn't have been carrying in a war she had no business fighting in." She tapped the ash. "At least the mothers I wrote to had someone who loved the boy. At least there was someone on the other end who cared enough to grieve."

Cassandra's chest tightened. She thought back to the times she would watch Jean's hands folding a letter by lamplight, his handwriting small and careful on the thin paper, how he would sit for a long time before he began writing, staring at the blank page as though the words he needed were hiding somewhere he could not reach. She had watched him write dozens of those letters. She had never thought about who would have written hers.

"Colonel Hawthorne would have written mine," she said.

Na'la looked at her. The office was very quiet.

"Yes," Na'la said. "I imagine he would have."

Outside the window, a tram passed on the street below, its wheels grinding against the rails. The sound reached them faintly through the glass, and then it was gone.

"People used to talk about the Conflagration like it meant something," Na'la said after a while. "Like it was a test of character, or a trial by fire, or some grand reckoning between good and evil." She paused. The cigarette burned between her fingers. "Politicians still stand up in the Assembly and talk about sacrifice and duty and the defence of democratic values. They put medals on boys and girls who can't sleep anymore and call it honor. They call people like you heroes."

She looked at Cassandra directly.

"Do you feel like a hero, Cassandra?" Na'la asked.

"No," Cassandra said.

"No," Na'la agreed. "Neither do I." She exhaled. "The Conflagration wasn't a test of anything. It was animals tearing each other apart over territory, dressed up in flags and anthems so we didn't have to look at what we actually were. There was nothing noble in it. Nothing redemptive." She tapped the ash. "Just the killing, and the waiting between the killing, and the letters of condolence you write afterwards to people who will never forgive you no matter how carefully you choose the words."

"This job," Na'la said, her voice level and tired, "is the closest thing I've found to making any of it mean something. Every arm I build, every leg I fit, every hand I calibrate — it's repentance. It's me saying sorry because I don't have the words to say it any other way." She rolled the cigarette between her fingers. "But it doesn't balance. It never balances. I could work here for the rest of my life, I could fit a thousand arms on a thousand people, and it still wouldn't come close to accounting for what I did. What I ordered done." She was quiet for a long moment. "The math doesn't work. It's not designed to work. You just keep doing it anyway because the alternative is sitting in a room and staring at the wall, and I tried that for a while and the wall didn't have much to say."

She crushed her cigarette against the inside of the teacup. The ember hissed and died.

"Sorry," Na'la said, still not looking at Cassandra. "I didn't mean to go off like that. That was—" She pushed her glasses back down onto her nose and rubbed the bridge with her thumb. "That was more than you needed to hear on a Tuesday morning."