A young girl, aged 21 lays dead in a mahogany streaked coffin. Her cadaverous features seems as if she has smothered on too much powder, a stark contrast to her jet-black locks. A serene look masked on her face as she remains in her state of repose.

Encircling her body is an abundance of velvety and variegated flowers in an appeasing cluster. A pleasant scent of peonies lingering along the dew-kissed leaves.

Weeps of despondant citizens can be heard from miles away as torrential rain hammered the skyline. It's as if the once illuminating sun has knocked over a bucket of dye, painting the sky in a lachyrmose hue. And in the admist of the dolorous grief stands a man who looks peculiarly out of place.

Gilbert Hughes had never cared much for the royalty. Here was a city whose people were thirsty and smoke-choked, forever in the trap of poverty, elderly and infants alike crippled by the city’s lack of healthcare and refusal to provide adequate housing, working themselves into death. And yet its citizens would throw themselves at the feet of a woman whose death was deemed so terrible that it warranted the import of fresh flowers from overseas. He looked over the blooms, vibrant and velvet-skinned. They had lived a better life than any one of these mourners.

The power of propaganda, he thought, trying to fight through the instinctive nausea he felt upon seeing the people around him weep as if Lillian Fredericks was their very own sister. He could not blame rhem: it would be unfair.

They had been taught to grieve. That was the part Gilbert found most difficult to stomach.

From the moment a child was old enough to recognise the royal crest stamped across the ration tins, they were taught thatthe family in the palace belonged to them. That their triumphs were the city's triumphs, their sorrows the city's sorrows.That the health of the crown was inseparable from the health of the nation, as though a monarch's pulse might somehowkeep a factory worker's lungs from filling with blackened fluid.

Gilbert had once believed it himself.

He could remember being seven years old, standing in a queue outside a municipal clinic with his mother, his shoes soaked through from the acid rain. There had been forty-three people ahead of them, and only one doctor on duty. His mother had been coughing for weeks by then, a wet, rattling sound that seemed to shake her entire body. Every few minutes, she would press a handkerchief to her mouth and fold it neatly before tucking it into her coat pocket.

At the front of the queue, a government official had announced that the clinic would be closing early to accommodate the procession celebrating King Edmund's twenty-fifth year on the throne.

Gilbert had not understood what that meant. Not until his mother had lowered herself onto the pavement, one hand gripping his shoulder, and told him they would try again tomorrow.

She had died three days later.

A woman beside him began to sob. She wore a grey factory uniform, its collar stiff with soot, and held a wilted bunch of carnations against her chest. Her hands were cracked and swollen, the nails stained a permanent shade of rust. She couldn’t have been much older than thirty, though the deep lines around her mouth suggested otherwise.

Gilbert wondered how many hours she had worked to afford those flowers. Perhaps she had skipped meals. Perhaps she had sold a heating cartridge, or gone without the medication that kept the tremors from spreading through her fingers.

The royal family, Gilbert thought, would never understand the significance of that.

They had never known what it was to choose between warmth and food. They had never watched a child grow feverish inthe middle of winter and calculated whether a trip to the hospital would leave enough credits for rent. They had never stood beneath the flickering lights of a distribution centre, waiting to be told that this month's water allowance had been reduced by another six per cent.

Above the altar, a vast holographic portrait of Lillian Fredericks shimmered into view. The image was taken from her coronation anniversary, some eleven months before her death. She stood in a gown of silver-threaded silk. A faint halo of artificial light surrounded her hair.

Lillian had been twenty-one when she died. Within three hours, the government had declared a national period of mourning. By midnight, the Ministry of Civic Harmony had begun broadcasting documentaries about Lillian's charitable work: her visits to children's hospitals, her patronage of the National Food Initiative, her campaign to bring clean drinking water to the outer districts.

Gilbert had watched one of those documentaries the night before. It had shown Lillian standing in a refurbished schoolroom, smiling as a little girl presented her with a drawing. The footage had been accompanied by gentle piano music and a narrator who spoke of the princess's boundless compassion.

What the documentary had not shown was the school itself. It had been closed six weeks later, its classrooms converted into temporary accommodation for displaced families. The little girl in the film had lived in one of the city's eastern sectors, where the water ran brown and the electricity failed every other evening.

The girl would be sixteen now, if she was lucky enough.