Ruthless: Path of Conquest

After James’s arm had fully regenerated, he returned to the Fisher Kingdom.

It’s nice to be back, he thought, though this time he’d only been gone a matter of hours.

He saw his apartment and sighed. Before he continued home, he had another task to accomplish. He went around finding key members of the committees that reported to him.

He was particularly concerned with speaking to people whose committees had been lined up outside his door that morning. With security threats increasing over time, James thought it would no longer make sense for everyone to go to him with random problems all the time. Between that and invaders, he would have no rest if things continued that way. And people would start to doubt the efficiency of a monarchical form of government. He believed that most issues could be resolved within the various groups he’d formed anyway.

So, depending on the committee and its existing dynamics, James either selected a representative or asked for the committee members to do the work of selecting a representative from each. That individual would meet with James and the other committee representatives each week in the Community Center. And in the meantime, he gave each committee some authority to act on its own behalf.

The Agriculture Commission would have broad authority to make decisions about which crops to farm, when to plant, et cetera.

The Building Commission would get broad approval from James about when and where to build—which, in practice, meant they would indirectly get approval from Mina—and then they would take care of any logistics themselves. James agreed to assign a few Mole People to assist them in choosing building sites that would be stable and not fall in on the underground dwellers’ heads.

He made a similar arrangement with the Sewer Committee.

There were parallel discussions. James was very fortunate that he could easily find where people were on his land.

He had a very different conversation with Ari Christopoulos, one of the members of the Child Rescue Commission, in preparation for his meeting with Yulia later.

And he already knew the Hunters were competent to act on their own and wouldn’t trouble him unless they actually needed his help bringing down some inordinately difficult prey. Dave Matsumoto had already reported to him that their coordination and teamwork were improving.

So the day wound down, and the Fisher King’s responsibilities decreased just a bit. And his Kingdom became that extra amount more like a pre-System country. He couldn’t be certain yet whether that was a good or bad thing. Right now, it was a no-apparent-choice thing.

He had no particular ideological commitments, so he was simply sticking with what he knew worked.

James returned home, bathed, ate dinner with his family, and played with the children. While he bathed, he sent telepathic messages back and forth with his various nonhuman allies, including Samuel the former Alligator Monarch. James’s powers indicated that the monster had awoken.

What a monstrous recovery speed, he caught himself thinking. He wondered if he would have recovered as quickly if his internal organs had been similarly brutalized. Then again, he had never suffered injuries quite that desperate himself as far as he recalled. His Orientation experience had been extremely violent at times, but he had only approached death a few times, and none of them had been quite as violent as what he had done to Samuel. If James had lost any fight that badly, he wouldn’t have been given a chance to recover.

During the evening meal, James was only half-awake. He needed rest. But he nevertheless recapped the day’s events to the family and tried to be his usual energetic self. When James discussed the duel with the Alligator Monarch, Mina rolled her eyes.

“I tell him to be careful, so of course he goes out wrestling alligators.”

Everyone laughed.

After dinner and play, he put the children to bed and read a bedtime story to them from a book Abhi had picked out. He was the only one old enough to really appreciate the details of a story.

Collected Adventures of King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table. James wasn’t clear if the book was one that Abhi had brought out of his old home, or if it was something the family had recovered from one of the other ruined buildings, but whatever the origin, he admired the taste. The book was even illustrated by a contemporary member of the Wyeth family in rich colors.

“I used to love these stories,” James said. “The name people call me, the Fisher King, is actually from one of these legends originally. Or maybe the System influenced the way these stories were written somehow. Anyway, Abhi, you can pick which story I’ll read to you all tonight.”

“Okay.” Abhi flipped through the pages until he came to an illustration of a man colored all in green. “This one!” he said.

So James sat down in a rocking chair that had been salvaged from one of the wrecked apartments, and he began reading them the tale of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.”

Abhi initially asked him lots of questions, while Indira pointed at the pictures, and Deepam and Junior just made satisfied gurgles and smiled when James looked at them. Gradually, all of them quieted as James’s smooth voice soothed them and the story proceeded.

As James got near the end, he realized the children were all breathing fairly steadily.

They’re asleep, he thought, slightly surprised. I would’ve thought they would want to hear the end of the story. But he was sleepy himself. He rose and saw one pair of open eyes follow him.

Little Abhi remained half-conscious, his eyes only half-closed.

“What’s the end of the story?” he asked, almost slurring his words. “The Green Knight, what happened?”

“I’ll finish it,” James said, placing a hand on the boy’s hair to try to keep him calm.

Then he resumed his seat and read the last few pages of the story. When he rose this time, Abhi was dead asleep. James wasn’t certain of whether he had actually heard the ending or not.

It doesn’t matter. I’ll read it again tomorrow or next week. This is a good book.

Finally, as his last order of business, he sat down for his meeting with Yulia.

They pulled up some comfortable chairs that Mina had brought back from the Dungeon and placed in the living room. Sitting side by side, they each waited silently for the other to speak.

This is so weird, he thought. Does it feel weird for her too? We’re running a government, and our family is at the center of it. It’s still so surreal that this is how things are working out.

“I don’t know how to get this started,” Yulia finally said, clearly slightly embarrassed.

“Why don’t we take stock of where we are?” James said. “We’re meeting about the Child Rescue Commission, right?”

She nodded.

“Then we have a lot to be proud of. We’ve been very successful and done a lot of good. You’ve helped save the lives of a lot of children.”

“Yes, I am very happy about that.” Yulia smiled broadly, visibly growing more comfortable.

“I actually sent a message to my flying monsters earlier, and they helped me add up the numbers. A hundred and seventy-nine children. That’s the count.”

Yulia sucked in a breath. “Wow. That’s incredible.”

“I hope you’re proud. It was your idea.”

“That makes me very proud,” she said. “But it reminds me that I should get to the reason I wanted to meet with you—what I wanted to discuss.”

He waited.

“I, hm. I should update you on how we’ve been doing so far first. We matched every child with a family or a couple, although by the end, some of them were unmarried couples. There hasn’t been any trouble with that so far.”

“I’m sure there will be some eventually, but when that happens, it won’t be your job,” James said. “I’m thinking about people to constitute a police force when we need that. Which will be soon. We have too many people now to get along without at least a small one.”

“Yeah, I figured we would have that eventually.” She shook her head as if she was still surprised that they were discussing how to form a government and new society, rather than waiting for the preexisting government to come back into force and bring its version of law and order back into force. “But, um, more in my line of responsibility. I was wondering if—that is, I’m a little worried. If we have more kids coming, we might run out of families to take care of them. A couple of the others and I were discussing if we need a permanent building or something and people on rotating shifts looking after children.”

“What are people doing about the kids so far, when they’re working?” James asked. “We don’t have schools anymore, right?”

“Since the flow of new children slowed down, some of us have been spending the day taking care of groups of kids sorted by age. People can do that, because the Hunters distribute food to everyone, so we don’t all have to go out foraging for ourselves.”

James simply nodded. That was what he had discussed with the Hunters when he was laying out responsibilities initially.

“What I’m wondering is—well, a few things. I don’t know if we can sustain this with more children. With more kids, this would be very demanding.”

“That’s not something you have to worry about,” James said. “I intend to make the Child Rescue a larger group and shift the purpose toward education. Probably change the name. It can’t be Child Rescue if that’s no longer the main purpose. And Child Welfare has a lot of negative associations for people who interacted with similarly named organizations before the System.” He shook his head. “We’ll come up with something. Anyway, people will probably take care of their own babies for the most part. But the kids who are old enough should be in school, or at least learning something. The curriculum will naturally start to be different with the world so different, but I don’t see any reason why they wouldn’t learn reading, writing, and arithmetic at least. We’ll probably put a much greater emphasis on physical education than we did when I was in school—but that’s something I’m going to work out with some people who are into education. Teachers, professors, historians, a lot of professionals. We’ll do our best to get a decent system in place for this.”

She looked at him curiously. “I thought you were going around earlier trying to give away responsibilities.”

“I was, but new ones will present themselves, too, whether I like it or not. And until I find out how to displace that responsibility onto someone else—” They both laughed. “Seriously, though, if there’s something that we know is important, someone has to do something. Like you, worrying about saving hundreds of children you’d never met before.” He smiled at her warmly, and after a moment she smiled back. “I think education is one of those things. It’s made a big difference in my life. I think it’s been a big deal for you, too. I think of it as something that’s important whether we want to deal with it or not. People in many different places and times have used it to take control of the youth. Bend their minds one way or the other. If no one does anything with it, someone will slip into that vacuum and offer their services.”

Yulia’s expression turned slightly suspicious. “And what are you going to be doing with it?”

“Well, don’t look at me like that,” he said, his expression playful. “Of course I’m just going to make sure that our schools are teaching true and useful information. Along with trying to establish a sense of community responsibility and respect for other people, whether human or otherwise, and their rights.”

“I think, um—I think I’m glad that I’m done with school,” she said, eyebrows raised very high.

“Gosh, I guess I’d better sell it better to the public.”

They both laughed.

“Yeah, I think so. How is this going to work, though? You’re changing the mission, but we’ll still need to take care of children who get rescued and match them with families?”

“Not exactly,” James said. “There’s no easy way of saying this, but I don’t think there will be much need for people to look out for future children being rescued.”

“What do you mean?”

“The monsters stopped finding new kids. You probably noticed that the flow slowed down to a trickle.”

She bobbed her head up and down as he spoke.

“I spoke with one of your Commission members just because I had a suspicion about why this was happening. The disaster relief guy who used to work for FEMA? And he confirmed what I was thinking. It’s now been several days since this disaster hit. After an emergency like this, any children are already rescued or dead by now. If they didn’t have adults near them when they came back, it’s unlikely they'd have survived this long. So—”

“So we’re giving up on any children remaining, then?” Yulia interjected.

“Yes.” James nodded. “There’s no point in denying it. We are. It’s possible more survived, but it’s unlikely. We have to be pragmatic. I already have dozens of monsters in the sky, but they aren’t finding more kids, and I know there is some limit to the number I can control at once. There’s no other practical path forward, unless we want to wholly devote ourselves to saving people. And if we did that, then we’d sacrifice ourselves.”

“How would we be sacrificing ourselves? Just to keep looking?” Yulia’s voice didn’t sound angry, James noted. Just sad. Resigned.

“There are other projects that these monsters should be taking care of,” James said. “I just fought with a potential invader. Fortunately, it became a one on one duel. If he had decided to rush at our borders with his army, dozens of people might have died. So a lot of the monsters will be spying. Working to detect invaders before they get so close to the border. Others will be working on gathering valuable resources from the territory that we don’t control yet.”

These resources included books. James was hoping to establish the world’s first post-System library. It would be an especially positive thing for the children. And in a world without Internet or even electricity, who knew when and where else they would even have the opportunity to read?

He didn’t want to mention this specific priority to Yulia, though. If she was still imagining finding more lost children, she wouldn’t understand why he wanted to start looking for books. James was certain enough for his own satisfaction that he wasn’t going to find more surviving children by sending his monsters searching in further random directions, and he wasn’t interested in starting an argument or upsetting Yulia any more than he had to.

“I guess I understand,” she said, clearly sad.

She fell silent, but he could tell that she still had something she wanted to say, so he simply waited.

“Is it terrible that I’m sort of relieved?” she asked.

“About?”

“I was just starting to imagine what would happen if this place was overflowing with children. More than we could take care of. And I was worrying about the logistical nightmare. I’m kind of relieved that the child rescue part is over. Does that make me a bad person?”

James shook his head immediately. “No. You’re a great person, Yulia. Most people wouldn’t be thinking about strangers’ children in the first place. Thanks to you, we rescued hundreds of kids. And I’m going to make sure that everyone here grows up knowing that you did that. What you just told me didn’t change what I think of you at all. We all have thoughts like that. What matters in life isn’t what you think about doing when you’re under pressure. What matters is what you actually do.”

Yulia broke out into a smile. “That sounds like a line from a movie. ‘What matters is what you actually do.’ But it does make me feel better.”

“That brings me to my question for you,” he said.

She waited.

“I know you have been doing a lot for the Child Rescue Commission. Whenever you’re not here with me or Mina and the kids, you’re working for them.”

Yulia nodded, a slightly weary expression on her face.

“How are you feeling doing all that?” he asked.

“I’m just fi—no, I guess I’m pretty tired. I’m glad I can help, though.”

He nodded. “That’s about what I’d expect, honestly. I believe it’s too much for any one person to be responsible for a leadership role and what you might call a front line role. I didn’t intend to give anyone both of those kinds of responsibilities at once, but somehow I did that to you. You’re doing too much, I think. You’ll burn yourself out.”

She simply sat there, not saying anything, but James read agreement in her facial expression and body language.

“So I wanted to ask you, do you want to continue being one of the leaders of the group? Or focus on being one of the people who takes care of children? Whether that’s daycare, teaching, or whatever. Or do something else? Or possibly none of the above? If you want to try to be a leader and do additional work, we can keep on trying that, but—”

She was shaking her head, so he stopped. “No,” she said. “I asked you about this in the first place because I was worried about what was happening to the children out there. And I stayed involved to be responsible and—” she hesitated—“and because I like children. I want to work with the kids. Let someone else be the leader.”

“Okay,” James said, smiling slightly. “I’m pretty sure there will be a few volunteers.”

This was what he had expected Yulia to choose.

“You still wanted to be a teacher, right?”

Yulia had gone back and forth between different professional aspirations pre-System, though all of her preferred jobs involved working with children.

She nodded.

“Now that you’ve officially resigned from your role as one of the leaders of the Child Rescue Commission, I have a feeling the governing authority is going to approve you for the job.”

They both smiled.

The conversation moved on to lighter subjects from there. Yulia and James discussed the children. Mainly how Abhi was adjusting. He was still missing his parents, naturally, but he was also behaving more comfortably in Yulia’s opinion. He was coming out of his shell.

Finally, James and Yulia said good night. James joined Mina and Junior in their bedroom, and the entire Robard household went to bed.

All was calm and still for an hour or two.

Then James was awakened by screaming in the night.