At the Edge of Waking by Holly Phillips Page B

thinks, remembering all the friends and rivals who have died—routed from the border in the south. The invasion has begun. Our hero squints to see the losing face of the coin against the mounting sun. The tree and moon of the vanished kingdom has been smoothed into clouds by generations of uncrowned monarchs’ hands.
    “One toss,” our hero’s sister says across the echoes of the retreating van. “If it comes up moons, I’ll go.”
    A knot of dread squeezes bile into our hero’s throat, but he does as she asks. She is the only person in the world he will obey, not because she rules him, but because he trusts her when he does not himself know what is right. This is often the case these days. Maybe there are no more rights left. Maybe there are only lesser wrongs. He props his head on his fist and flips the coin, catching it in his cupped palm. Moons. He makes a fist before his sister can see, and feels as if he is clenching his hand around his own heart. It’s a dreadful duty, a calamity whichever one of them goes, but he would rather be lost than lose her. Before she can pry his fingers open, he tosses the coin high into the golden light and catches it again with a flourish.
    “Kings,” he says. She looks at him, stricken, heart-sick, and he is glad of his lie.
    Walking north along the river our hero has the road to himself. No one will evacuate in the advent of this war. It is the last war, the death of the independent state, and in any case, Russia and the West have between them closed the borders: there is nowhere to go. Despite the years of infighting and politics, of failing idealism and the gradual debasement of his figurehead’s throne, our hero still reflects with nostalgic pride on the romanticism and ruthless practicality of the mercenary army-turned-government he and his sister had fought for, legitimized, defended. They had been conquerors and puppets. They had driven the unlikely alchemy that transformed an imposed dictatorship into the last true democracy in the world. They had been used and pushed aside when they were no longer useful, but they had been loyal. This seems odd to our hero as he walks north along the blue river. He has always put his loyalty in the service of necessity, hidden it behind a guise of practicality, and now he has to wonder what moral force, what instinct of worth has shaped the meaning of need. What need—whose need—sends him north, leaving his sister behind to wait for the end alone? He loves her more than ever, and hates her a little for believing his lie and letting him go.
    Walking in the sunshine intensifies his hangover thirst. He feels gritty and unkempt, with a sour gut and a spike through his temples, but his worn army boots hug his feet like old friends, and it is good to be on the move, good to have a destination and a goal. He hopes the security service doesn’t give his sister too much grief when they realize he is gone.
    There is little traffic after a year of oil embargoes. There are pedestrians, a few horse carts, peasants working their fields with mattock and hoe. Peasants who will watch the invasion on satellite feed, who will email reports to relatives in Frankfurt and London and Montreal, who will tell one another with pride and a languorous despair that they are sticking it out to the end. A young man wearing a billed cap with the logo of an American sports team dips his hand into the bag slung across his back and casts his seed with a sweeping gesture, a generous, open-handed gesture that answers the question why with a serene and simple because. He pauses between casts to raise his hand to our hero passing on the road. Our hero answers with an abbreviated wave and turns his head away, afraid of being recognized, afraid of being seen with tears in his eyes. Settling into the mud of the ditch between the river and the road lies the burned-out carcass of an army jeep, and there it all is, the present, the future, the past. A blackbird perches on the