“I took the entire afternoon off yesterday to go to the auction, and Commander Sutton has already had to fill in for me at the commanders’ meeting this morning. She’s had to do that too much lately, mostly due to Bullstow and Unity business.”
“That’s what she’s there for. You have to learn to delegate more, Lila. It’s unhealthy to try to handle everything yourself.”
“Unhealthy? I’m getting health tips from a man who just ate an entire plate of bacon?”
“It was only a few pieces. I’ll work it off in the gym later. I always do.”
“That’s not your doctors’ concern, and you know it.”
“Let’s go play with the little ones just for an hour,” he said, changing the subject. “You haven’t been to the park in ages. Shiloh will be there. Claire might have arrived as well.”
Lila smiled at the mention of Shiloh. She used to visit him often when her father still resided in Bullstow. He had been shaped in the same mold as his father, even taking after Chairwoman Randolph in some rather fortunate ways. He’d taken their intelligence, their shrewdness, their serious nature. Barely older than Pax, he had every intention of becoming prime minister, just like his father. He’d already started his two-year internship with the New Bristol and Saxon High House, and after he finished, he’d cast his lot in the senate elections, allowing his brethren to place him in a city where his particular skillsets would be of most use. He’d spend the next decade working his way back to the New Bristol High House, and perhaps even Saxony one day, though Lemaire had managed it in only five years.
Lila had to take advantage of what little time they had left.
As for Claire and the youngest of her father’s brood? Lila hardly cared, if she had to be honest. Half-siblings on your father’s side drifted away from your awareness, just like old friends from university. You occasionally saw one another and caught up, but usually they had their lives and you had yours.
Unless someone tried to mess with them, of course. Then you might have been best friends for life.
Lila followed her father reluctantly, her dwindling time with Shiloh fresh on her mind. The pair turned on a cedar-lined path and strolled toward the southern area of the compound toward Bullstow’s elementary school, where the youngest sons of the senate were housed and educated. Lila hadn’t walked by it in several summers, and that was a shame, for summer was the best time to visit. The high school principal always charged the graduating senior class with creating some new contraption for the elementary students to play on every year. Part of the project involved speaking with the younger children and taking their needs and wants into account as the seniors planned and designed the equipment.
It was supposed to teach the seniors a fair number of life lessons: how to take your constituents’ opinions into consideration, how to listen more than you speak, how to reach a consensus with so many hands stirring the pot, and how to ensure your work always secured the safety and happiness of the next generation. But mostly they learned that you couldn’t please everyone and that children had the attention spans of gnats, just like the masses.
And like most things, it had become a contest over the years.
Shiloh had helped build his class’s project, since he’d taken the relevant math, art, and shop classes. It’d been up for months, and Lila hadn’t had a chance to stop by and see it. She’d only seen pictures, proudly slid over the table when he and her father came to dinner.
Lila had a feeling pictures hadn’t done it justice.
They both heard the park before they saw it, surrounded by the hulking high school, junior high, and dorms. Screaming, squealing, and crying erupted in their ears.
Where there was screaming and crying, there must be Father’s Week.
Lila paused at the line of shrubs around the park and checked her watch, a long list of excuses sliding through her mind.
“Oh no you don’t. You promised,” her father said, already searching the crowd for his children. His Saxon children, anyway. The ones from Unity and other states did not always come for Father’s Week, due to the distance.
Given his happy face, Oskar Kruger and the oracles had retreated from his mind.
Lila wished she had the same off switch.
Sighing, she gave herself over to her father’s mood, promising to stay for an hour.
An hour might have been too optimistic, though. Children screamed down slides or chased one another across the playground, kicking balls or bouncing them. Strollers lay abandoned in the grass, overturned and forgotten on the edges of the melee. Diaper bags lay scattered among them. Senators bounced among the chaos, encouraging it and swapping supplies with one another. They’d abandoned their coats and breeches for soft t-shirts and worn jeans, all so they could chase the children around the park, some with hands raised to the sky as though they’d been turned into monsters, growling and picking young ones up under their arms. Others tossed children over their shoulders, holding them like sacks of flour while the child giggled and smacked their father’s back. The same men who gave stirring speeches on the floor of the High Senate, the same men who had been so charming at the last highborn party, every one of them turned into absolute goobers during Father’s Week.
Those who weren’t busy in the melee treated bumps and bruises or hurt fingers and toes along the edges of the fray, or changed the diapers of the tiniest children, the wiggling crawlers chewing their fingers and staring vaguely around
them while the men worked. It was easy to tell the first-time fathers, so gentle they might have been handling fine china.
There was plenty of experience here, and they soon learned better.
Not all the senators were so enamored of the little ones, though. One senator had made a potato gun, and a crowd of girls and boys had lined up to fire it. Other senators had spread out among a sulky row of teenagers on the grass. The teens refused to get dirty with their younger sisters and brothers. Instead, they tapped on their palm computers, ignoring everyone around them, including their peers and fathers and uncles.
Lila had spent many an hour during Father’s Week the same way. Except instead of being sulky, she’d been poking at Bullstow’s defenses, ignoring her younger half-siblings while she played on a different sort of playground. She’d only been sullen when her father, knowing exactly what she was up to, made her put down her palm, stay in the park, and interact.
He didn’t really care with whom.
With so many children, he had to turn his back at some point, though, and she’d be off seconds later, chasing a decent signal with more gusto than the senators chased after the toddlers, running deeper in Bullstow, breaking into buildings and offices she had no right to be in.