16: The Grand Plan
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Nine and a half minutes later, three people walked into the meeting room.
Taira, looking somewhat rushed and less put-together than usual, was no surprise. Nor was Madame, though Lissa couldn’t help noticing with some amusement that she looked perfectly composed even though she would’ve had just as much difficulty as Taira in meeting Lissa’s deadline.
(If Taira was making smart, sensible decisions when boldly challenging and embarrassing her much older and more powerful political opponents, then the truth had to be that she wasn’t challenging them at all. They were in this together.)
The third member of their group was somewhat of a surprise. At first, when Sila walked in with the pair, Lissa figured that he was simply escorting them as he had her, and might make them coffee. But within seconds, she realised the truth. There was an unmistakable manner between Madame and her most loyal children, the ones who stayed in her service long after growing up. Lissa had seen it in her guards and servants and it was just as clear in Sila, her spy in Herron Industries, it seemed.
“Lissa!” Madame called warmly, like this was a social visit. She strode across the room to give Lissa a kiss. “And how have you been, dearie?”
“Oh, the usual,” she said. “Unravelling conspiracies. Enjoying coffee.” She sipped her coffee. “Shall we talk?”
“Absolutely, but let’s do so on the move.”
“Out on the street? With this subject – ”
“The street is more discreet than an office meeting room, believe me,” Taira said, glancing at the walls, and Lissa quietly revised her earlier assessment of the possibility that the room was monitored. Perhaps it was bugged. “Come on, let’s get out of here before the office workers get antsy. There’s a very high stakes situation happening.”
Lissa didn’t think that any of them were in danger while Taira and Madame were both there, but that could rapidly change if their conversation was heard. She finished the coffee, left the empty cup rudely on the table (without a coaster) and strode out the door, not looking at the guards.
As they entered the street, Madame turned to Sila. “Keep a perimeter, will you, dear?” Sila nodded and slowed his pace, falling back behind them.
“A perimeter?” Lissa asked.
“He’ll warn us if anybody comes anywhere near earshot,” she explained. “Don’t worry, he’s well-trained. You’d be surprised at just how many important meetings happen during leisurely strolls around the city. Meeting rooms and private residences are easy to bug; bugging the streets is somewhat less practical. Of course, it does mean keeping an eye on your own outfits to make sure that nobody’s bugged you, but dear Taira and I are well practised at such things and since you weren’t on Herron Industries’ radar until after putting on that getup, I daresay that we’re safe.”
“And you trust Sila?” Lissa asked.
Madame gasped in mock offense. “All of my boys are angels, Lissa dear, of course!”
Lissa, with a sudden boldness born of impatience, rolled her eyes. “I meant because he’s a Taipay,” she said, “and with all of this – ”
“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that. Sila is a Zero.” She laughed at Lissa’s look of surprise. “I know! Unusual level of charisma for such low blood, right? I always look for charisma when I’m turning Zeroes. It makes them so incredibly useful.”
Lissa could understand that. Most large Bee organisations, and presumably Taipay ones too, had a handful of Zeroes employed in close quarters with the higher-ups. It streamlined things socially when you could be certain that your personal assistant wasn’t going to try any position jockeying or status games, as a blood equal might. “And I daresay they’re probably very grateful to you,” Lissa said cynically. “Without you to shelter them, they might end up in a factory or something somewhere. Certainly helps with loyalty.”
Taira looked shocked at Lissa’s dangerous lack of respect, but Lissa was beyond caring. And Madame merely laughed. “This is what I like about you, Lissa dear. You’re good at seeing to the heart of matters. Maybe we should’ve simply explained the situation to you at the outset and avoided all this stress.”
Lissa looked to her sister. “Speaking of explaining the situation,” she said.
Taira nodded. “It’s hard to know where to begin.”
“Begin with this. Have I been dancing on your puppet strings this whole time?”
“We never intended to involve you,” Taira said. “But things went sideways with the serial killer, and when you took such an interest, and we were having problems with Holland, it all just… was the perfect opportunity.”
“I still can’t believe that the humans caught on to the murderer being one of us so quickly,” Madame said. “The incompetent fool has been disciplined, don’t you worry.”
“Should’ve just hired a human,” Taira said. “Like I said from the beginning.”
“There was no way we could’ve trusted a human assassin to keep his mouth shut. If my girl had’ve been halfway competent, it would’ve looked like a human killer. But, well, we all choose badly sometimes, I suppose.”
“And then you tried to bury whatever the hell you were trying to accomplish there by scapegoating Benny,” Lissa said, “until I got in the way.”
“Which could’ve been a complication, but we prefer to turn such things into assets,” Madame said.
“It wasn’t until you confronted me about Holland that I saw what you were going to do,” Taira said, “and we simply planned accordingly.”
“I didn’t even know what I was going to do then.”
Taira smiled. “I did.”
Lissa suppressed the urge to wipe that smile off her face. “And so you used me as a tool to slaughter a bunch of innocent Taipays in the name of Abby supremacy.”
Both Taira and Madame seemed shocked that she’d figured that much out, but it was pretty obvious, when she considered her sister’s actions. She pressed on.
“You set it up with Holland so that he could head the Taipay population increase, and snuck in a much bigger increase than your ‘opponents’ were expecting. But that was an act, clearly. Madame and her compatriots obviously know exactly what’s going on. You pretended to act in secret, increasing the amount, and convinced the humans to increase their type A population to feed them, and had Holland’s people baiting the sunset to rush out there and increase their numbers the moment the paperwork was officially signed. But Holland was more cautious than that. He and his people didn’t want to move until their future food supply was guaranteed. They insisted on waiting until the immigrants arrived. So you let me rush in to delay him, and invented a whole movement around me to make me out to be a big threat and push him to go now, before my imaginary Bee organisation could nix the whole plan, while you quickly got the paperwork signed. You used me to make him panic and push forward. And there’s only on reason to do that.” She glared at her sister. “There is no impending type A immigration, is there?”
Taira shrugged.
“And I’d guess that you haven’t signed any authorisation.”
“Of course I didn’t,” Taira said.
“And Sila and his coworkers wiped the organisation’s phone records as soon as most of the Taipays were out of the building,” Madame added. “Any raving accusations about last-minute phone calls from Taira and authorisation given verbally with no supporting documents aren’t going to be taken seriously, not when we’ve all seen the ruthless business owner so openly manipulate the poor young politician into his stupid radical expansion plan in the first place.”
“And Holland and his people take the fall,” Lissa said. “And Taira looks like a fool, but she’s young and naive and it’s the perfect segue into the guidance of your party, Madame, where I’m sure she’ll ‘find her feet’ and become extremely successful in an unusually short period of time.”
“Amazing how these things work out,” Madame said airily.
“And ’Pays will starve in unprecedented numbers. Too many new vampires, not enough food. They’ll fight for Zero food, and the Zeroes will hold their own and the Abbies and Bees will of course support the Zeroes’ rights in such a matter, and the ’Pays will start killing off the new ’Pay children in self-preservation. And the population proportions will even out to about what they are now, dictated by the blood supply from the human city, and this will be a bloody and pointless mark on our history, a shameful episode of mass death and destruction that stands testament to what unwise population expansion will do. Because that’s the point, isn’t it? Bees and ’Pays have both been pushing for a big expansion of our populations for decades, but too many of us is a threat to your dominance, isn’t it? Can’t have that. A big, bloody fiasco like this will serve to shut everyone up for a while, with practically no risk to any Abbies.”
Madame laughed. “Whatever gave you the idea that more Taipays and Bees would be a threat to us? We could hold this city with a quarter of the population proportion that we have. We could hold it with twenty Abbies, so long as we carefully guarded against some sort of upstart violent coup. I’d hate to do that, because it would be an unbelievable amount of work and I already feel that I work too hard, but it could be done. This isn’t about some silly primitive thing like holding onto power; do you really think we’d let so many vampires die over something like that? There are better and more subtle ways to control populations on that level. No; this is far bigger. This is about efficiency.”
“Efficiency.”
“Yes. Our society has an advantage over human societies, in its stability, and that stability comes from being anchored in our biology. And it’s a three-tiered system, which is perfect; a higher tier of thinkers and organisers. A lower tier to do the drudge work, and an intermediary tier to fill in any gaps and do middling tasks and mediate between the other two, since most of my kind are somewhat less willing to get their hands dirty with Zeroes than I am.”
“It’s a good system,” Taira continued, “especially when the populations are in proper balance. The problem with it, of course, is that middle tier.”
“The sheer amount of time, energy and nonsense involved in keeping the Taipays and Bees away from each others’ throats is ridiculous,” Madame said. “Every day I go into work and half the meetings are about how the ’Pays need this or the Bees did that, or there was some fight in some random alley between the two bloods because a handful of youths couldn’t agree on whose territory they were in. It’s a waste of everybody’s time, it’s cost so many lives and delayed so many projects through petty drama over the years and it is, quite frankly, an unnecessary complication in an otherwise stable system.”
“And your plan is to, what, somehow heal the rift between ’Pays and Bees by creating and killing off a bunch of ’Pays? If anything, that can only worsen – ”
“That is a rift that cannot be healed,” Taira said. “The peace that you have now is about as good as it’ll ever get. True cohesion is impossible, because the biological rift between you is impassible. Neither of you can take the others’ blood; there is no avenue for connection.”
“It’s kind of revolting, when you think about it,” Madame said. “It feels like it should be unnatural, somehow, the absence of a blood link in any direction. But I suppose we can only work with what nature gave us, even if it’s ridiculous.”
“The rift can’t be healed,” Taira said, “so there’s only one way to eliminate it, and bring true permanent peace to Scarlet City. Do you understand?”
Lissa felt weak. She did understand.
“You’re going to kill them all,” she said, the words bitter on her tongue. “You’re going to kill every Taipay in the Scarlet City.”
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Derin Edala 