Chapter 24: The Key — The Key of Oslov

Volume 1: A Serviceable Boy

Chapter 24 The Key

Chapter Notes

I’m posting more often now since this story is finished and I’m just revising as I go. So many thanks to everyone who’s left comments and kudos; I really love sharing this world!

Chapter Notes

I’m posting more often now since this story is finished and I’m just revising as I go. So many thanks to everyone who’s left comments and kudos; I really love sharing this world!

The Security complex stretched for nearly a mile in the subterranean bowels of the Sector, a four-story well of sound-muffling concrete and hissing fluorescents. Though it was as well heated as everywhere else in the city, it somehow felt cold. Each checkpoint took you a little farther from the realm of daylight; Gersha had never been lower than the second level, and he’d been glad to get away.Today, his Councillor’s robe and grim demeanor sufficed to get him through the first two checkpoints. At the third, an apologetic sentry asked to scan his hand-chip. Not many employees walked the long passages between the guard stations, but they spoke in hushed tones, and Gersha tried to shake off the sensation that they were staring at him. After all, he had a perfect right to be here.“I’m expected,” he told the red-uniformed, gray-templed sergeant who controlled the gate at the fourth and last checkpoint, a rifle dangling conspicuously across his breast. “Look him up—Egil, Ranek, interrogator second-class.”Where the other guards had been flustered, this one moved slowly and deliberately, meeting Gersha’s demands with an impervious gaze. “I’ve put in a call to Interrogator Egil, Fir. You’re welcome to wait.”“I’ve been waiting all day.” Pent-up frustration choked Gersha, and he made his voice a whiplash of superiority like Verán’s. “I’m on the Int/Sec committee, lad. I have jurisdiction down here. I could have you reposted.”The sergeant blinked, weary but unmoved. “You need an interrogator posting or a form K-378 to pass this point. There’s a bench, Fir Councillor.”“What’s the problem?” a pleasant tenor voice asked from behind them.Gersha wheeled to find Ranek approaching from the corridor he’d just traversed. After so many hours of fruitless waiting, the sight of his friend nearly made his knees buckle.The next moment, he went taut with fury. He was a sleepless mess, and Ranek looked rested, spruce, almost happy. Something burned behind Gersha’s eyes as he asked, “Where the hell were you?”—almost not caring that the Drudge soldier was a witness to his loss of control. “And where the hell is he?”Ranek took Gersha’s arm and led him gently to the bench, out of the sentry’s earshot. “Didn’t you get my message?”“What message?” Gersha fought for the icy composure he usually wore in the Sector, but shudders rocked him from head to toe. A childish voice inside him kept saying, Please, no . . .Ranek’s relaxed, reasonable dark eyes met his. “I should have messaged sooner, Gersha. Your boy’s been fully cleared.”It was too much, too soon—so much more than he deserved. Gersha’s vision blurred, the concrete walls seeming to melt as his rage did, leaving his mind blank. Soon he would feel relief, but now he was only stunned.“Really?” he asked, not daring to believe it. “The investigation’s closed?”His friend smiled warmly. “There was never an official investigation, and we found no questionable sympathies or connections. His reading’s an odd hobby, nothing more.”As if from a distance, Gersha heard himself say, “Where is he?”“That’s what I just messaged you about. He’s at home waiting for you.”He was there. He was really there.When Gersha tapped at the closed door, not daring to breathe, a voice said, “Come in.” And there was Tilrey—limp and supine in bed, as if he really did have the flu, but raising his head in greeting.Gersha’s knees did buckle this time. He knelt beside the bed and pressed his forehead to the edge of the mattress, hiding his face, not trusting himself to retain anything like dignity.He hadn’t made the bed this morning. Had Tilrey noticed the blankets in disarray? But that wasn’t important, just a matter of pride, and pride had gotten him into this mess.He grasped upward blindly and found Tilrey’s hand. I don’t care who you are when I’m not here. I don’t care what you read. I just want you.Fingers ghosted over his hair. “Are you okay, Fir—Gersha?”The tears came then. Gersha clutched the boy’s hand, pressing the knuckles to his lips, and let his shoulders shake until the tension eased enough for him to say, “I’m sorry.”“What are you sorry for?” Tilrey’s other hand tangled itself in his curls, pulling his head back. “I’m fine, Fir. Just a little wiped out. Come sit up here.”Old habits die hard; Gersha wiped away his tears and composed his face before he obeyed.Tilrey did look normal, aside from his hair being unwashed and his normally pale skin a shade grayer. Drawing Gersha back against the pillows with him, he moved gingerly, as if his bones had abruptly gone brittle. “I’m the one who should be sorry, Fir. I should have told you—”“No!” They were not going down a road that would leave Gersha feeling even guiltier, and anyway, Tilrey’s hoarseness suggested he lacked the stamina for sustained conversation. Gersha wrapped his arms around the boy carefully, not wanting to hurt him. “I’m responsible,” he said into Tilrey’s ear, trying not to let his voice wobble. “You were never obliged to tell me what you do in your spare time. If it troubled me, I should have come directly to you, but I—I was afraid. I abrogated my duty.”The only answer he received was Tilrey’s face pressed tight against his collarbone. With a smothered sob, Gersha grasped the boy’s larger frame with a fierceness that surprised him, drawing comfort from the solid armature of bone and muscle, until Tilrey’s slight squirm made him loosen his grip.“You’re hurt,” he whispered.Tilrey shook his head, face still buried in Gersha’s tunic. “Just a little stiff. No one laid a finger on me.”“Just questions? Just talking?” The boy’s hair brushed his lips, and he held his breath for the answer.“Just talking.”Thank all the possible gods. He’d believed Ranek, of course he had, but you could never be sure about what happened in the bowels of Int/Sec. Gersha had seen for himself how little power he had there.“I’d never have forgiven myself if anything happened to you.” He ran his hand gently down Tilrey’s back, tracing the ridges of muscle, and suddenly it seemed impossible not to confess. “I—I slept in your bed while you were gone. I imagine you noticed.”The boy’s laugh was a faint rumble against his skin. “Thought it smelled a bit like you, Fir. Can’t say I mind.”“I searched your things, too. I’m sorry.”Before the words were even out, Gersha knew how Tilrey would respond, and sure enough, the boy only shrugged as if he’d expected as much. “That’s your right, Fir. Everything here’s yours.”“No!” Gersha felt his fingers tightening. He needed Tilrey to know he wasn’t like the others—not anymore, anyway. He needed to elicit something other than that tone of wry resignation. “I promise never to come in here again without your permission. I want you to have privacy in this room; I want you to feel safe. You have as much right to that as anyone else.”For a long moment, Tilrey just breathed against his skin, and Gersha wondered if he’d overstepped a line, disobeyed a code. Then the boy’s finger flicked his collar almost playfully, and Tilrey murmured, “That’s lovely, Fir. Very high-minded. But I hereby give you permission to sleep in my bed whenever I’m not in it.”“And when you are in it?”Another deep chuckle. “Even more then.”Relaxing, Gersha stroked Tilrey’s hair, the other hand pressed to the small of the boy’s back. Tilrey’s skin under the thin shirt was warm, and he stretched and said sleepily, “That feels good, Fir.”They rested against each other, blood pulsing warm beneath their clothing, two bodies that knew each other by heart. And Gersha cursed himself for believing, even for an instant, that there could be vital things about Tilrey he did not know.“That will never happen again,” he said, slipping his hand gently under Tilrey’s shirt to stroke the taut, silken skin of his abdomen. “I will never not trust you again, love. I swear it.”Magistrate Linnett sat on the edge of the bed, regarding their entwined bodies with dry amusement—or perhaps regret. It could be hard to tell.“You look lovely together,” he said, “just as I always thought you would. Two angels, light and dark. What a pity I’m not really here to see it.”Tilrey knew he was dreaming, one of those shallow dreams in which you remain aware of your position in bed. He could feel Gersha’s arms around him and the throb of his still-aching muscles (goddamn box), and he knew these sensations were real.Yet so was Linnett, for now.“I betrayed Oslov today, Malsha,” Tilrey said, knowing no actual words were issuing from his lips. “For the first time in my life, I spoke real Dissidence to a Dissident. He calls himself a patriot, but I don’t think his colleagues would see the difference. Soon I might expose your pet traitor. What do you think of that?”In the way of dream-people, Linnett did not seem to hear any of this. He reached over Gersha and pulled up Tilrey’s shirt to run his hand down Tilrey’s spine, letting it rest in the hollow just above the curve of the buttocks. “You are the key. Do you know that?”“The key to what?” Tilrey leaned into the touch; it was familiar, and he had a dim sensation that this dream was half memory. This had happened before. In a moment, Linnett would launch into one of his monologues.“The key to Oslov, you sweet little fool. Look at us. We live in the same apartments as all our peers, we wear the same clothes, we follow the same rules. Whyberg built a society where all needs are met, where luxury and waste barely exist, where no one has anything to aspire to except getting to the next Level. Here you are at the top Level, and look around you. Are you impressed?”“It’s not that bad,” Tilrey said dreamily. “Better than living in a box.”Linnett’s voice sharpened. “Or exactly like living in a box. Notice how every wall and piece of furniture in this city is white—the color of nothing? This way of life is perfectly rational, it’s the reason for our survival, and it’s killing us—Upstarts and Laborers alike. Without waste, without want, without envy or aspiration, we have no reason to live. We need something to dream of, something to adore, something always just out of our reach.”The dream-Linnett’s hand slid down to cup Tilrey’s ass, tender and possessive at once. “And you are that thing.”“I am?”“Not for everyone, of course. But for men of my Level, this—” he gave Tilrey a squeeze— “is riches. This—” a pat— “is the currency we pass back and forth. This is the motivation to excel. That’s why I say you’re the key, all you kettle boys. You’re one of the last remnants of our feudal past, when not everything was detestably rational. You’re so much more important than you realize.”Yes, they’d really had this conversation, years ago. Back when such talk and touching still brought humiliated flushes to Tilrey’s cheeks—which was, of course, exactly what Linnett wanted.But now the words had a different ring, a darker one. Now Tilrey wondered if he could be the key to something else, something Linnett hadn’t foreseen.You weren’t given a real choice, Egil’s voice whispered somewhere in the background of the dream. And then: Gersha is in love with you.Tilrey was floating in the upper realms of sleep now, the sensation of Linnett’s hand fading as he approached full consciousness, but he still remembered how the monologue had ended:“You’re a fantasy, and everyone needs a fantasy. With a strong enough dose of reality, Oslov might just come tumbling down.”

Today, his Councillor’s robe and grim demeanor sufficed to get him through the first two checkpoints. At the third, an apologetic sentry asked to scan his hand-chip. Not many employees walked the long passages between the guard stations, but they spoke in hushed tones, and Gersha tried to shake off the sensation that they were staring at him. After all, he had a perfect right to be here.

“I’m expected,” he told the red-uniformed, gray-templed sergeant who controlled the gate at the fourth and last checkpoint, a rifle dangling conspicuously across his breast. “Look him up—Egil, Ranek, interrogator second-class.”

Where the other guards had been flustered, this one moved slowly and deliberately, meeting Gersha’s demands with an impervious gaze. “I’ve put in a call to Interrogator Egil, Fir. You’re welcome to wait.”

“I’ve been waiting all day.” Pent-up frustration choked Gersha, and he made his voice a whiplash of superiority like Verán’s. “I’m on the Int/Sec committee, lad. I have jurisdiction down here. I could have you reposted.”

The sergeant blinked, weary but unmoved. “You need an interrogator posting or a form K-378 to pass this point. There’s a bench, Fir Councillor.”

“What’s the problem?” a pleasant tenor voice asked from behind them.

Gersha wheeled to find Ranek approaching from the corridor he’d just traversed. After so many hours of fruitless waiting, the sight of his friend nearly made his knees buckle.

The next moment, he went taut with fury. He was a sleepless mess, and Ranek looked rested, spruce, almost happy. Something burned behind Gersha’s eyes as he asked, “Where the hell were you?”—almost not caring that the Drudge soldier was a witness to his loss of control. “And where the hell is he?”

Ranek took Gersha’s arm and led him gently to the bench, out of the sentry’s earshot. “Didn’t you get my message?”

“What message?” Gersha fought for the icy composure he usually wore in the Sector, but shudders rocked him from head to toe. A childish voice inside him kept saying, Please, no . . .

Ranek’s relaxed, reasonable dark eyes met his. “I should have messaged sooner, Gersha. Your boy’s been fully cleared.”

It was too much, too soon—so much more than he deserved. Gersha’s vision blurred, the concrete walls seeming to melt as his rage did, leaving his mind blank. Soon he would feel relief, but now he was only stunned.

“Really?” he asked, not daring to believe it. “The investigation’s closed?”

His friend smiled warmly. “There was never an official investigation, and we found no questionable sympathies or connections. His reading’s an odd hobby, nothing more.”

As if from a distance, Gersha heard himself say, “Where is he?”

“That’s what I just messaged you about. He’s at home waiting for you.”

He was there. He was really there.

When Gersha tapped at the closed door, not daring to breathe, a voice said, “Come in.” And there was Tilrey—limp and supine in bed, as if he really did have the flu, but raising his head in greeting.

Gersha’s knees did buckle this time. He knelt beside the bed and pressed his forehead to the edge of the mattress, hiding his face, not trusting himself to retain anything like dignity.

He hadn’t made the bed this morning. Had Tilrey noticed the blankets in disarray? But that wasn’t important, just a matter of pride, and pride had gotten him into this mess.

He grasped upward blindly and found Tilrey’s hand. I don’t care who you are when I’m not here. I don’t care what you read. I just want you.

Fingers ghosted over his hair. “Are you okay, Fir—Gersha?”

The tears came then. Gersha clutched the boy’s hand, pressing the knuckles to his lips, and let his shoulders shake until the tension eased enough for him to say, “I’m sorry.”

“What are you sorry for?” Tilrey’s other hand tangled itself in his curls, pulling his head back. “I’m fine, Fir. Just a little wiped out. Come sit up here.”

Old habits die hard; Gersha wiped away his tears and composed his face before he obeyed.

Tilrey did look normal, aside from his hair being unwashed and his normally pale skin a shade grayer. Drawing Gersha back against the pillows with him, he moved gingerly, as if his bones had abruptly gone brittle. “I’m the one who should be sorry, Fir. I should have told you—”

“No!” They were not going down a road that would leave Gersha feeling even guiltier, and anyway, Tilrey’s hoarseness suggested he lacked the stamina for sustained conversation. Gersha wrapped his arms around the boy carefully, not wanting to hurt him. “I’m responsible,” he said into Tilrey’s ear, trying not to let his voice wobble. “You were never obliged to tell me what you do in your spare time. If it troubled me, I should have come directly to you, but I—I was afraid. I abrogated my duty.”

The only answer he received was Tilrey’s face pressed tight against his collarbone. With a smothered sob, Gersha grasped the boy’s larger frame with a fierceness that surprised him, drawing comfort from the solid armature of bone and muscle, until Tilrey’s slight squirm made him loosen his grip.

“You’re hurt,” he whispered.

Tilrey shook his head, face still buried in Gersha’s tunic. “Just a little stiff. No one laid a finger on me.”

“Just questions? Just talking?” The boy’s hair brushed his lips, and he held his breath for the answer.

“Just talking.”

Thank all the possible gods. He’d believed Ranek, of course he had, but you could never be sure about what happened in the bowels of Int/Sec. Gersha had seen for himself how little power he had there.

“I’d never have forgiven myself if anything happened to you.” He ran his hand gently down Tilrey’s back, tracing the ridges of muscle, and suddenly it seemed impossible not to confess. “I—I slept in your bed while you were gone. I imagine you noticed.”

The boy’s laugh was a faint rumble against his skin. “Thought it smelled a bit like you, Fir. Can’t say I mind.”

“I searched your things, too. I’m sorry.”

Before the words were even out, Gersha knew how Tilrey would respond, and sure enough, the boy only shrugged as if he’d expected as much. “That’s your right, Fir. Everything here’s yours.”

“No!” Gersha felt his fingers tightening. He needed Tilrey to know he wasn’t like the others—not anymore, anyway. He needed to elicit something other than that tone of wry resignation. “I promise never to come in here again without your permission. I want you to have privacy in this room; I want you to feel safe. You have as much right to that as anyone else.”

For a long moment, Tilrey just breathed against his skin, and Gersha wondered if he’d overstepped a line, disobeyed a code. Then the boy’s finger flicked his collar almost playfully, and Tilrey murmured, “That’s lovely, Fir. Very high-minded. But I hereby give you permission to sleep in my bed whenever I’m not in it.”

“And when you are in it?”

Another deep chuckle. “Even more then.”

Relaxing, Gersha stroked Tilrey’s hair, the other hand pressed to the small of the boy’s back. Tilrey’s skin under the thin shirt was warm, and he stretched and said sleepily, “That feels good, Fir.”

They rested against each other, blood pulsing warm beneath their clothing, two bodies that knew each other by heart. And Gersha cursed himself for believing, even for an instant, that there could be vital things about Tilrey he did not know.

“That will never happen again,” he said, slipping his hand gently under Tilrey’s shirt to stroke the taut, silken skin of his abdomen. “I will never not trust you again, love. I swear it.”

Magistrate Linnett sat on the edge of the bed, regarding their entwined bodies with dry amusement—or perhaps regret. It could be hard to tell.

“You look lovely together,” he said, “just as I always thought you would. Two angels, light and dark. What a pity I’m not really here to see it.”

Tilrey knew he was dreaming, one of those shallow dreams in which you remain aware of your position in bed. He could feel Gersha’s arms around him and the throb of his still-aching muscles (goddamn box), and he knew these sensations were real.

Yet so was Linnett, for now.

“I betrayed Oslov today, Malsha,” Tilrey said, knowing no actual words were issuing from his lips. “For the first time in my life, I spoke real Dissidence to a Dissident. He calls himself a patriot, but I don’t think his colleagues would see the difference. Soon I might expose your pet traitor. What do you think of that?”

In the way of dream-people, Linnett did not seem to hear any of this. He reached over Gersha and pulled up Tilrey’s shirt to run his hand down Tilrey’s spine, letting it rest in the hollow just above the curve of the buttocks. “You are the key. Do you know that?”

“The key to what?” Tilrey leaned into the touch; it was familiar, and he had a dim sensation that this dream was half memory. This had happened before. In a moment, Linnett would launch into one of his monologues.

“The key to Oslov, you sweet little fool. Look at us. We live in the same apartments as all our peers, we wear the same clothes, we follow the same rules. Whyberg built a society where all needs are met, where luxury and waste barely exist, where no one has anything to aspire to except getting to the next Level. Here you are at the top Level, and look around you. Are you impressed?”

“It’s not that bad,” Tilrey said dreamily. “Better than living in a box.”

Linnett’s voice sharpened. “Or exactly like living in a box. Notice how every wall and piece of furniture in this city is white—the color of nothing? This way of life is perfectly rational, it’s the reason for our survival, and it’s killing us—Upstarts and Laborers alike. Without waste, without want, without envy or aspiration, we have no reason to live. We need something to dream of, something to adore, something always just out of our reach.”

The dream-Linnett’s hand slid down to cup Tilrey’s ass, tender and possessive at once. “And you are that thing.”

“I am?”

“Not for everyone, of course. But for men of my Level, this—” he gave Tilrey a squeeze— “is riches. This—” a pat— “is the currency we pass back and forth. This is the motivation to excel. That’s why I say you’re the key, all you kettle boys. You’re one of the last remnants of our feudal past, when not everything was detestably rational. You’re so much more important than you realize.”

Yes, they’d really had this conversation, years ago. Back when such talk and touching still brought humiliated flushes to Tilrey’s cheeks—which was, of course, exactly what Linnett wanted.

But now the words had a different ring, a darker one. Now Tilrey wondered if he could be the key to something else, something Linnett hadn’t foreseen.

You weren’t given a real choice, Egil’s voice whispered somewhere in the background of the dream. And then: Gersha is in love with you.

Tilrey was floating in the upper realms of sleep now, the sensation of Linnett’s hand fading as he approached full consciousness, but he still remembered how the monologue had ended:

“You’re a fantasy, and everyone needs a fantasy. With a strong enough dose of reality, Oslov might just come tumbling down.”