Chapter 7 - The Trial of Silence
The transition of the Sterling estate was not loud; it was surgical.
By two AM, the tactical units had begun to withdraw, their heavy transports rolling down the driveway with their lights blacked out, leaving behind only a thirty-man permanent garrison from the Meridian Security Directorate.
The socialites were gone. Kane had been escorted to an unmarked sedan that would take him to a federal processing center in Baltimore, where an assistant US attorney who had been on Julian’s payroll since 2012 was waiting with a fifty-count indictment that would keep Kane in an orange jumpsuit until his seventies.
Holloway had already begun drafting his resignation letter on an ancient mechanical typewriter Julian’s men had provided him, his tears smudging the ribbon ink on the cotton paper.
In the grand library—a two-story room lined with four thousand volumes of English history and Virginia law—Julian sat in a high-backed leather chair before a roaring fire.
He had changed out of his canvas trousers. He was now wearing a charcoal cashmere sweater and tailored wool trousers, his feet resting on a low stool. On the small mahogany table beside him sat a cup of black tea and a set of watchmaker's tweezers.
Across from him sat Cynthia.
She had been washed. One of the female medical personnel had taken her to an upstairs bathroom, stripped her of the soiled silk robe, showered her with cold water, and dressed her in a coarse gray prison-issue jumpsuit without pockets, buttons, or drawstrings.
Her hair was wet, plastered to her skull like seaweed. Her face was gray, hollow, the skin around her eyes sunken and dark.
"Why the milk, Cynthia?" Julian asked.
He was not shouting. He was not looking at her with anger. He was looking at her with the cool, intellectual curiosity of an entomologist examining a beetle under a glass slide.
Cynthia stared at the fire. Her lips were cracked, bleeding slightly at the corners.
"She looked like her," Cynthia whispered.
"Like who?"
"Her mother," Cynthia said, her voice a dry, rasping wheeze. "The woman from Austria. In the photograph in your workshop. Lily had her eyes. Those big... stupid... round eyes. Every time she looked at me, she looked like she was waiting for me to be nice to her."
Cynthia’s hands twitched in her lap, her fingers clawing at the rough fabric of the jumpsuit.
"I hated it," she spat, a sudden flare of the old, aristocratic venom breaking through her stupor. "We were the Sterlings! We had the governor at our Christmas ball! We had three hundred years of blood! And Caroline brought you here... this... this mechanic. This nobody who smelled like kerosene and spoke like a servant. And then that child... she looked at my clothes like they were dirty. She didn't want my dolls. She just wanted to sit in that shed with you and listen to those clocks tick."
Julian took a slow sip of his tea.
"So you took the food away," he said.
"I didn't starve her!" Cynthia shrieked, leaning forward until the operator standing behind her chair pressed a heavy gloved hand onto her shoulder, forcing her back down. "I just... I disciplined her! She was willful! She wouldn't eat the crusts! She spilled things! A child who spills things must be taught that things have value!"
Julian set his teacup down on the saucer with a soft, clean *clink*.
"The chocolate milk," Julian said, "cost three dollars and eighty cents a gallon. The glass you threw at her head was an antique Waterford crystal, value: approximately seventy-five dollars."
He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees.
"My daughter’s life," Julian said, his voice dropping into a register that made the flames in the fireplace seem to dim, "is valued by the Iron Meridian at four hundred and eighty billion dollars. That is the insurance reserve of our sovereign syndicate. That is the combined gross domestic product of three European nations. That is the price of forty-two tactical battle groups."
He looked at her hands.
"You threw seventy-five dollars of glass at four hundred and eighty billion dollars of future, Cynthia. That is not discipline. That is bad arithmetic."
He raised his right hand.
Thorne stepped out of the shadows by the bookshelves.
"The facility in New Mexico is ready, Sovereign," Thorne said.
"Describe it to her," Julian instructed.
Thorne turned his mechanical eye upon Cynthia. The blue diode pulsed once, a tiny lens whirring within the titanium housing as it recorded her biometric response.
"The facility is located forty miles north of Socorro," Thorne said, his voice completely devoid of inflection. "It is an underground seismic monitoring station decommissioned by the Department of the Interior in 1984. It has no windows. The interior temperature is maintained at sixty-two degrees Fahrenheit year-round. There is no internet access, no television, no radio, and no telephone communication."
Cynthia began to shake again, her breath coming in ragged, terrified gasps. "No... no, you can't... Julian, you can't put me in a cage..."
"It is not a cage, Cynthia," Julian said. "It is a workshop. You will be provided with forty gallons of chocolate milk each week. You will be provided with forty crystal highball glasses. And you will be provided with three hundred square feet of hand-scraped Virginia walnut flooring."
He stood up, walking toward the library doors.
"Every time you spill a glass," Julian said, his hand on the door handle, "you will clean it with a toothbrush. When the floor is clean, you will receive your dinner. If the floor is not clean... you may sleep on the horse blanket Thorne’s men have relocated to your quarters."
"Julian!" she screamed, lunging out of the chair, only to be caught by two operators who lifted her off her feet as if she weighed no more than a bag of laundry. "Julian! Caroline! Father! Help me! Somebody help me!"
Julian walked out into the corridor, closing the heavy oak doors behind him.
May you like
The screaming inside was instantly muffled, reduced to a faint, rhythmic vibration that died away beneath the steady, reassuring tick of the grandfather clock standing in the corner of the hall.
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