Subdued
For many years John Preston awoke each morning to white walls, white windows. The spotlessness of the city was like the purity of his own strength. Passing from the Nether through the gates marked the route from brutality to illumination, from darkness to light.
His own home reflected the simplicity of Libria's peace. Yet sometimes he glanced at the vacant bed beside his own. He remembered Viviana, now an image faded to white and gray. A sense offender incinerated to ashes.
Preston expected to sleep well the night he brought his partner to justice. This time he recognized the signs of emotion in someone so close to him that the smallest gestures were almost too familiar. From two barely-inflected spoken words, Preston realized that Errol Partridge was feeling. He reversed the mistakes that had prevented him from seeing his own spouse's transgressions and performed his duty to Libria.
Preston's hands were clean and his thoughts were clear. Still he dreamed of Partridge's fatal poetry, and of Viviana's forbidden kiss.
In the morning, Preston clumsily destroyed the interval that should have restored his balance. He held the skipped dose responsible for the odd familiarity of Mary O'Brien as well as for his compulsion to keep her perfume from combustion. Mary's secret room, hidden behind a wall of white, was swathed in the red-gold-violet of violent passions.
Preston never returned to the Equilibrium facility to obtain his missed prozium. He slept off the dose and dreamed again of Partridge, waking in a sweat as if his body and not that of his partner had been cast into the fire for incineration. The next morning Preston tore the white film from his window and beheld the sunrise in bursts of orange-gold, a rainbow over the city in colors he could smell, taste...feel.
The reactions were strong enough to terrify him. He fled to find his morning interval. To blunt the colors. To silence the poetry. A single dose would have muted both his spouse and his partner. In an instant Preston chose not to silence them.
Then he began to understand. He understood even more when he went through Partridge's belongings and found the photo of his partner with Mary O'Brien. He knew that he had scented her perfume, the elusive fragrance caught on hair ribbon, not only during the brief moments of her arrest when he held her, but earlier, on Partridge's skin. He knew that it was not only Mary he had sought in that bottle, in that satin, in the flesh.
"You always knew," Partridge had said to Preston when he found him in the Nether. It was so dark inside the church despite the shafts of light that fell onto the pages of the deadly book. And Preston had always known, though he could not say so to himself until much later. Not until he catalogued the obvious, missed clues. The unregistered confiscated items, the unscheduled travel into the Nether. The way Partridge looked away when they discussed the Underground. The way Partridge studied other clerics when they practiced combat. The way Partridge regarded the sky in the evening on the way back to the city, when the light turned from white to gold.
And the way Partridge gazed at Preston, which Preston thought perhaps he had imagined, until Tetragrammaton archive recordings showed him again and again. The color in his cheeks, the shadow beneath his eyes. "What you feel for Mary could only be satisfied by folding yourself into her," guessed Jurgen when Preston found the Resistance, but Jurgen was wrong. Preston scarcely thought of Mary until he understood that she had loved his partner. Then he hungered for her, and desperately wanted to save her, but not for himself.
When his new partner, Brandt, caught him taking EC10 contraband from a sense offender's lair, Preston replied to Brandt's inquiry with Partridge's words about the evidentiary team: "Sometimes they miss things." When he drove beyond the city gates with a dog in his trunk, he used Partridge's excuse of passing into the Nether on enforcement business. When he lay in bed dreaming of his wife, she would become Mary O'Brien and he would become Errol Partridge. In dreams they would live in a world of color that Preston had never imagined while Partridge was alive and could have shared it with him.
"I assume you dream?" Partridge had asked minutes before his prodigious young partner took his life. John Preston would never be condemned for that crime, though crime he now knew it to be. Brandt had asked whether he and Partridge were close, and he wished he could tell him yes. Mary had asked whether he understood what it meant to have a friend, and he wished he could tell her what they had had in common -- not merely sense crime, not merely grief.
Only by shedding more blood could he pay for the blood of his partner. A heavy price, he thought as he dressed to go to Father; I pay it gladly. The memory of Partridge's words filled him with fervor. The required white suit, white boots, white scabbard all served to hide the shades inside him.
When his task was complete, the city would no longer be white.