Read Online At the Edge of Waking by Holly Phillips - Free Book Online

machine gun mount and sings its three note song. It is an image with all the solace of a graveyard.
    Our hero walks off his hangover and an old vitality begins to well up through the sluggish residue left by weeks, months, of dissolution. He has relaxed into the journey, and the bolt of adrenaline he suffers when he sees the checkpoint ahead feels like a sudden dose of poison. His stride falters, losing the rhythm of certainty, but he does not stop or turn aside. The checkpoint has of course been sited to give the illegitimate traveler minimum opportunities for escape. He has papers, but he is afraid of being the victim of love or hate. He tells himself he is only afraid of being stopped, but does not believe his own lie.
    The soldiers are young, volunteers in the new New Army, dressed in flak jackets and running shoes and jeans. One of them is a woman. She is younger than our hero’s sister, with blond hair instead of black, brown eyes instead of blue, but she has a solemn, determined self-sufficiency our hero recognizes with a pang, though his sister is much more casual about her courage now. She is more casual about death, both our hero’s and her own, and he suspects she has learned to think historically while he still sees the faces of the living and the dead.
    Young woman, he thinks at her in a stern Victorian uncle’s voice, you are becoming historical, which is a joke that would make her smile.
    “Where are you going?” the young sergeant asks.
    “North,” our hero says.
    “Away from the border.”
    This statement is indisputably true. The peacableness with which our hero answers the young people’s hostility is not.
    “Yes,” he says mildly, “I have business there.”
    “Business.” The sergeant’s sneer is implicit behind the mask of his face. The bland, deadly façade of a brutal bureaucracy comes naturally to the nation’s youth, they have been raised to it. It was the look of freedom that had been, briefly, imposed.
    Our hero does not respond to the sergeant’s echo. His mouth grows wet with a desire for vodka, and he has a fantasy, rich though fleeting, of walking into the shade of the soldiers’ APC with his arm around the young woman’s shoulders, hunkering down to pass a bottle around, to educate and uplift them with stories of the Homecoming War. That would be so much better than this. He unbuttons his shirt pocket and takes out his identity papers. The sergeant ignores them.
    “We know who you are,” he says. “What business can you have away from the capital at such a time?”
    This is not an easy question to answer honestly. Our hero does not want to lie, yet claiming an urgent war-related mission in the face of no vehicle, no companions, no standing in the government, is impossible. After too long a silence, our hero says, “I am going to the old capital. It is my ancestral home. I will fight my war from there.”
    He looks deeply into the sergeant’s eyes, and for a moment he thinks the old mystique has come alive, the old ideals of courage, nobility, adventure rising between them like a bridge of understanding, or of hope. But this young man was bred with disillusionment in his bones, and the moment dies.
    “Give me your papers,” the sergeant says with the blunt and sullen anger of disappointment. “I will have to call it in.”
    As if she is summoned by his need, Colonel Vronskaya appears with a blast of fury for the recruits and a bottle for our hero. She embraces him with a powerful cushioned grip like a farmwife’s, and then stands with her hands clenched on his shoulders to study him in the strong spring sun. She is not handsome at close quarters, Martiana Vronskaya. Her eyes are too close-set, too deep-set, too small for her flat, spider-veined face. Our hero leans into her regard, reassured by the familiar hard and humorous clarity of the old New Army, practical, piratical, and oddly moral in her amorality.
    “Jesus fuck, you seedy son of a bitch,” she says,