Chapter 19.
In which we find out why Chiba Xolotlan is on the Kill List.
Previously, on Jupiter Ruins Everything: Deimos Zaragoza has returned home to Ganymede to put a complex bloody revenge plot into motion, and he finally secured a spot in Pyroxene Triangle, the city’s most expensive enclave—the better to ingratiate himself to his plutocrat targets. Before he even moved in, he won the respect and appreciation of all his wealthy neighbors by stopping a terrorist attack (which he set up in the first place), and got a brunch invite from the doddering old media mogul Chiba Xolotlan, who is on his Kill List for something that happened in Deimos’s childhood, shortly after his mother’s murder… .
The last chapter is right here. Remember that you can always consult the Cast of Characters or The Lore document if you need a refresher, or start the story at Chapter One!
No one tells a fifteen-year-old kid how to talk to a reporter. No one tells them they don’t have to answer their questions, they can slam the door in their face, tell them to get the fuck out.
“Tell me about your mom, kid,” says the brash reporter who’s talked his way through our front door. Chiba Xolotlan is younger and slimmer and has a lot more hair in this greendream whirlwind tour of the past. He stinks of cedar. “Bet you’re real sad.”
“My mom was,” I said, chest suddenly very tight and heavy. How do you sum up your mom in a sentence, in five, in five thousand? How do you tell the truth when everyone else is telling lies? The cheese-and-meat smell of sympathy casseroles is cloying; neighbors have brought eighteen of them in the 24 hours since it happened. Everyone wants to tell us how sorry they are, but everyone wants to leave as soon as possible. “The best mom.”
“So you didn’t know anything about what she was up to?”
I make a confused face, and he starts writing something down. That’s when he sees Klotho, hiding in a doorway behind me, and says “What about you, kid? You any less slow than this galoot here? Tell me about your mom.”
And even though I’m not strong enough to defend myself, I can certainly defend Klotho. “Get the hell out of here,” I say, making fists and holding them up.
“Whoa, whoa,” Chiba says, laughing, backing up. “It’s fine, kid! I got all I need. Real sorry for your loss.”
The door shuts, and we are alone. And I am crying. And Klotho doesn’t know why I’m crying, but it starts them going too.
#
In his article I am quoted as saying that mom spent a lot of late nights at the office—that she’d suddenly started buying us a lot of expensive presents lately—that she’d been associating with questionable characters—and a bunch of other stuff that wasn’t true and that I certainly never said.
But nobody tells a fifteen-year-old kid how to go to a media outlet and demand a retraction. Challenge a reporter’s story. Tell the world it’s all lies.
So I just sit with it. Sick to my stomach, hating myself for having allowed this to happen, holding Klotho when they cry at night because they miss our mom. Feeling like I can’t cry, because if I do I’ll start them again, and my focus needs to be ensuring my poor fragile sibling’s psychological safety. Which has always been a challenge, one that my mom made superhuman efforts to surmount, and barely managed to, and now she’s gone, and I’m not her.
#
The stories don’t stop there. Chiba Xolotlan is low-key obsessed with my mom. Every day he finds a new angle on the Scrapper Double-Cross Slaying, or the Metalman Mafia Murderers or whatever scary name the rag editors are tying out.
Mom was corrupt, they say. Stealing. Scheming. Got what she deserved, they imply.
He doesn’t interview us again, but I see him around: at mom’s funeral, hanging around the Lithospheric Extraction Collective’s scrapperspace.
I don’t know this now, but later I’ll learn that mom’s murder was massively convenient to many nefarious interests. The negative narrative Chiba spun around the crime served the plutocrat’s agenda: anti-cooperative, pro-surrender. It was violent enough to galvanize public attention, and the story he told painted the instruments of working-class power as corrupt and criminal.
I can’t prove it, but I am confident that Thyone supplied him with that story: that my mom was part of a thievery ring within the cooperative leadership, that she and a handful of others were stealing from their comrades, that she got in a heated argument with another one of her greedy conspirators and they killed each other in a firefight.
At that point in the war, the cooperatives were some of the last heavy players who still opposed surrender, and those stories helped turn the tide against them.
On the strength of that coverage, and the public opinion shift it helped along, a plutocrat gave Chiba editorial control of a mid-tier rag.
On the strength of the information he had access to in that position, and the not-entirely-ethical ways that he deployed it, he acquired enough capital to purchase an upper-tier-but-struggling rag.
You get the dreary, dreary story. He grew a media empire as mighty as a tree, but the seed it grew from was my mom’s murder.
#
“Why are they all lying?” Klotho asks me one night.
“I don’t know,” I say. I’m seated on the floor, struggling with a mountain of urgent documents I can’t begin to understand. Bills due. Debts called in. Oblique threats. I shove the eviction notice under the couch.
The casseroles are all gone. The calls from friends have stopped. The place stinks of rice I burned.
Klotho plops down on my lap. Kids at school have been extra cruel. I hold Klotho close, and rub their shoulders and calm them as best I can, and I know I should say nice kind soothing things but all that comes out is: “I hate them.”
“It’s wrong to hate.”
“I hate hate hate hate them all and I wish I could fucking kill them.”
Klotho slaps my arm lightly, laughing. Parental. Much better at being the big sibling than I am. “It’s wrong to hate and it’s wrong to wish harm on people and it’s wrong to say fucking. Mom says.”
I’m a coward and an idiot and a galoot but even I am smart and strong enough to stop myself from saying And look where all of that got her.
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[ Like all the imagery for Jupiter Ruins Everything, this image is a collage made from old posters that are in the public domain, NASA imagery from the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes (hence, also in the public domain), and sometimes my own photos. I’ve made these collages myself. Which is why they are not good. But hopefully establish a vibe? ]