The call comes in the middle of dinner, and Father's face is stern when he returns to make excuses.
"You didn't finish your roast," Mother says gently.
"It's a riot, darling," Father says, and Lance drops his fork on his wineglass. The paper-thin crystal shatters with a musical cling. He tries to pick up the pieces and cuts himself. The maid shushes him away and clucks in distress over the stains on the pristine linen tablecloth.
"Blood and wine not come out," she mutters under her breath, softly enough that Mother doesn't hear.
"I wish you'd let us keep at least some of my father's heritage," Mother says, but she's smiling indulgently. "Let me look at that."
She holds onto his hand and Father leaves. Lance's mouth is dry, and he wishes he hadn't spilled his wine all over the table.
Father returns three hours later. "They're still at it," he says when Lance asks. "I'll go back. Genotech are tamping it down."
"What was it about?" Lance asks.
"A war between gangs, it seems, but they're killing guards and pretty much anyone who gets in the way."
"I'd like to go along," Lance says quickly, before he loses his nerve. Father raises an eyebrow.
"I don't--"
"I have been thinking about writing my thesis on jurisdictional strife between the police force and Genotech patrols," he fudges. He doesn't have to cross his fingers behind his back; he has thought about it. At least once.
"Really?" Father says, taking his coat. "That's a fascinating subject. Very well. But it will be grisly."
"I know," Lance says.
He keeps his hands folded in his lap the whole way, to hide the trembling. When they get closer and he can hear the sirens and see the smoke rising towards the evening sky, he pinches the soft flesh in the fold between his thumb and index finger, hard.
'Grisly' doesn't cover it. Even father looks a little sallow and pinched when they start hauling out the bodies.
"They'll bury them in a mass grave," he tells Lance. "At least two hundred inmates are dead, most of them nameless non-citizens."
"What was Genotech doing here?" Lance asks when a patrol of stone-faced soldiers in Genotech's black and green uniforms march by.
Father doesn't look up from the file he's flipping through. "They're looking for an inmate, a specific one. Seems they lost one of their prototypes a while ago, and he turned up here." He closes the file smartly. "Have you done much on identification of bodies yet?"
"Some," Lance says. "Did they find their prototype?"
"Doesn't look like it. He might be dead, of course. Since Genotech have an interest in this, they'll have a presence during the investigation, especially in the identification process. It'll make things move a little slower than usual."
It's a perfectly lovely evening. The prison yard has a hedge of pink-white tea roses, probably Hume's Blush. If the air wasn't filled with noxious smoke, he could identify it by the scent. The firemen and police officers who are sharing the gruesome task of cleaning up after the massacre are lining up the corpses along the hedge. Lance follows his father down the row, and he promises himself not to look, and looks anyway.
After a while, they all start looking the same; every bloody face turned serene in death, with their unfocused eyes and half-open mouths and cheeks drained of colour. So Lance almost walks right past him.
He does, in fact. Walks right past, but then something catches his attention, maybe just the familiar angle of a cheekbone glimpsed in the corner of his eye. Maybe God himself poked him in the side and said, "Look."
He looks.
His father doesn't make trouble when he wants to leave. "It's painful," he just says, and Lance nods soundlessly, because he can't say more than two words without his voice breaking, and even that is like cutting his own throat from the inside. "You take the car, son," Father adds, "I'll catch a ride." And he pats Lance on the shoulder, gently and sympathetically. "God forbid you should ever get used to this."
He wanted to scream when he saw JC. He kept it inside, kept it tamped down with all his strength, through asking his father about the car; even as he negotiates the teeming masses of grim-faced professionals, he keeps it down. When he is far enough from the prison that the pillar of black smoke is the only thing he can see of it, and he's pulled over to the side of the road, he finds that the scream has withered and died, and all he can produce is a faint wheezing.
Standing frozen by the row of bodies, he stared and stared, because he knew that this was the last look, and he stared even when firemen carrying more bodies jostled him to the side, and he stared when his father tapped him on the shoulder and asked if he was all right. He stared when he nodded.
He wanted to close JC's eyes. There was something obscene about dead eyes; the way they gave the face new expressions, accusing ones Lance had never seen on JC in life.
He broke a rose off the hedge when he left, but he didn't dare lay it on JC. It's on the seat next to him now, and he regrets it, regrets chickening out. Everyone was busy; no one would have paid attention to some fresh-faced law student poking around the bodies. The rose would have fallen off JC's body anyway when they moved him, been trampled underfoot and forgotten.
When he comes home, his mother hugs him. "You look like death warmed over, sweetie," she says and gives him some brandy. "It must have been horrid."
"Yes," he says. His mouth is numb, but he doesn't think he slurs the word as much as he thought he might.
"You didn't know any of the guards, did you? They said on the radio that several were killed."
"No," he says. "I didn't know anyone."
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