“Wait,” she said. When the page finished loading, Addy scrolled down until the center of the screen was almost entirely filled with a picture. It was the first picture ever posted on the site. It was a picture taken at night but with enough light to see every detail. It was a picture of Christopher, holding a gun, aiming it at a man standing in the open window of a dark building on the edge of the desert. It was a picture of Christopher taken the moment before he shot the man who nearly shot Evan. The picture was somehow taken from over Christopher’s shoulder so that you couldn’t see much of the man in the window except for his gun and his silhouette. But you could see Christopher. Nearly half of the picture was taken up by the side of Christopher’s face. You could see his pores. You could see the sweat dripping down his forehead. You could see the smudges of dirt already on his face. You could see in his face that he was about to pull the trigger.
“How the hell?” Christopher began to ask.
“Kevin took it from the car,” Addy said. “He’s got a really great zoom lens. It’s great, isn’t it?”
“Scroll down,” Christopher ordered.
She scrolled down so that Christopher could see the caption Dutty had given the picture. The words below Christopher’s picture read: BE YOU WOLF OR LAMB, THE CHILD SHALL LEAD US ALL. “Do you want to read what Dutty wrote?” Addy asked Christopher.
“No,” Christopher answered, to her surprise. “Is this on the Internet? Aren’t people going to see this? What’s going to happen when people see this?”
Addy didn’t understand Christopher’s reaction. She thought he had come around. “That’s why we’re celebrating. We want people to see this. We’re not celebrating what happened last night. We’re celebrating the fact that everyone knows what happened last night and everyone knows that you were part of it. That was Dutty’s plan. That’s how it all starts.”
“But what about regular people? What about my parents? What about the police?”
“You can’t hide a revolution in the darkness. If you try, it’ll die like a flame without oxygen.” A deep voice spoke from behind Addy and Christopher. Christopher turned to see Dutty standing there. Dutty put his hand on Christopher’s shoulder. “That’s how they’ve kept us down for generations, for centuries—they’ve made us afraid, not only of each other but of the world too.”
“And this helps somehow?” Christopher asked, looking at his own picture again on the screen. He barely recognized himself.
“People need a point of light to follow,” Dutty said to Christopher. “You’re that point of light. But they can’t follow you if they can’t see you.”
“Yeah, but the people trying to kill me can’t find me if they can’t see me either.”
“Have a beer,” Dutty ordered Christopher. “Talk to your people. We can talk more about this some other time.” Christopher was too confused to respond. So he walked into the kitchen and grabbed a beer. Then, beer in hand, he turned back toward the room. He thought about going to Evan, but Evan seemed to be fitting in so well, Christopher didn’t want to ruin it. Instead, he began to walk through the building’s rooms alone.
They still looked at him, all those people who merely wanted to touch him and introduce themselves to him. They still watched him without speaking to him. He walked from one room to the next. Each room was the same, the people in small groups trying their best to look happy and unafraid. A few of them smiled at Christopher as he walked by, but none of them talked to him. The faces of the people melted into each other. Christopher thought he recognized some of the faces from either the battlefield or the first night that he met Dutty, but he couldn’t be sure. Then he spotted the one face that he was sure he remembered: the face of the old black man whose hand he shook on that first night. Suddenly, even though he couldn’t remember the man’s name, he remembered what the man had said to him.
Christopher walked up to the man. He was sitting alone in a chair in the corner of one of the rooms. The old man smiled at Christopher when Christopher got close to him. “You said to me that you knew my father,” Christopher said.
The old man nodded. “I did say that and I did know your father.”
“I forgot your name,” Christopher confessed.
“You heard a lot of names that night,” the older man said, excusing him. “Mine is Brian.”
Christopher thought back to his father’s journal, trying to remember all of the names his father had written in it. Christopher had read the whole thing cover to cover at least three times since it was first dropped into his hands. Then it dawned on him. “You were his intelligence contact.”
Brian nodded and laughed easily. “Until they took him away from me. I liked your father. He tried to be a good person. He sure as hell wouldn’t have wanted any of this for you.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t suppose he has much say in the matter.”
“Do you want to know more about him?” Brian asked.
Christopher shook his head. “Not really,” he answered. He wasn’t in the mood to hear old stories about the War. “Not now.”
“Then what do you want to know about?” Brian asked him.
Something in Brian’s voice made Christopher think that this strange old man didn’t really fit in with Dutty’s people. He had an air of skepticism that set him apart from everyone else here. “What are you doing here?” Christopher asked him.
Brian leaned toward Christopher, who was still standing in front of him. He glanced around them before he spoke to make sure no one was listening to their conversation. “Reggie asked me to keep an eye on you.”
Twenty-eight
They were putting a lot of faith on the signal runners. They had backups in case one of them got caught, but getting caught wasn’t the only issue. The issue was also that no one had any idea what one of the signal runners would say if he did get caught. They were only kids—kids who didn’t even have a stake in the outcome of the Uprising. No one could blame them if they got caught and leaked everything. All any of them got out of the deal was the promise of a safe place to stay for a few weeks and warm food to eat. Still, that promise was enough to make them more loyal than most adults. That’s why the rebels needed to use them in the first place, because the radios and phones weren’t safe anymore after Zé Carlos flipped. He told them everything he knew about the Uprising. Luckily, he didn’t know as much as he thought he did. Sure, they had to start from scratch after he flipped. They had to make a whole new plan—a better plan—but Zé had no idea that they were coordinating with the others. He didn’t know that Rio was only one city in a master plan to take down the whole world in one night. He didn’t know that the Child was behind it all. If he had known all of this, he could have destroyed the Uprising. That’s how fragile it was. Luckily, nobody ever trusted Zé that much to begin with. You can’t buy loyalty with money. But with the street kids—the signal runners—you can buy loyalty with the offer of a warm bed and hot food and a few kind words. The kids want to be loyal. They’ve just never had anyone to be loyal to except each other.
Simone sat back in her little box of a home and stared out the open window. Anyone looking into her window could see Simone’s face, but she kept her gun hidden from view. She wasn’t afraid of being seen. She mixed well with the tens of thousands of other faces inhabiting the windows of the shantytown at any given moment. Simone’s home was halfway up the hill, right in the heart of the shantytown. She was about as close to a literal version of a needle in a haystack as any human being could ever get. She’d paid real money for her shanty, but it was worth it. She was on the second floor of a four-story building, one made out of concrete instead of the corrugated metal and old wood used on the edges of the shantytown. Her building had running water on the first floor and a working toilet. A few of Simone’s neighbors even had working electricity. Simone didn’t, but she didn’t need it. She was happy waiting in the darkness. At night she watched the hordes o
f people visible outside her window going about their lives. She often compared the War to the ongoing battles between the rival drug gangs in Rio. As far as Simone could tell, the only difference was that the warring drug gangs had a product.
Simone heard a knock at her door. “Who is it?” she called out. If the person knocking gave the wrong answer, she wouldn’t be able to stop him from coming in, but she would have a second to jump out of her window and run. She wouldn’t be able to get away, but at least she would die running.
“Han Solo,” a boy’s voice shouted from the other side of the door. He was supposed to yell “Boba Fett” as a signal to Simone if something was wrong. Simone had told the boy all about Star Wars. She’d turned it into an epic bedtime story. She even promised to let him watch the movies if everything worked out. She could still hear the boy’s excitement when he said the name “Han Solo.” Simone thought that he might be more excited about the prospect of watching Star Wars than he was about the food. She didn’t know if she was going to be able to keep her promise to him. Even if she survived, she had no idea what was going to happen to the shantytown after the Uprising, let alone what was going to happen to the shantytown’s parentless children. Hiding an Intelligence Center in a shantytown seemed to Simone like a cruel joke. They must have known that destroying the Intelligence Center would mean destroying so much more. It gave her all the more reason to hate them.
She slipped her rifle under a tattered rug she kept near the window and walked to the door. When she opened it, Bené stood outside, alone. “Come in, quick,” she said to him and ushered him through the door. Bené was smiling. He always seemed to be smiling. Simone had no way of knowing if he was really always smiling or if he only smiled when he was with her. “What have you got?” Bené reached under his shirt and pulled out the neck wallet that Simone had gotten for him. It was brown canvas, almost the same color as Bené’s skin, and was impossible to see through his T-shirt. He fumbled inside it and pulled out a handwritten note. “Who’s it from?” Simone asked as Bené handed her the note.
“Mr. Costa,” Bené told her.
“Good,” she said to Bené. “You did good.” Simone heard the chop, chop sound of a helicopter flying by outside. It wasn’t anything to be concerned about. The helicopters flew by rather frequently. They were meant to scare the drug lords into keeping their behavior in the shadows. They didn’t care about the drug lords as long as the violence didn’t seep out of the slums. Still, Simone wondered if those helicopters were going to pick sides when everything went down.
“What’s it say?” Bené asked her as she unfolded the letter.
Simone smiled at him. “It says that Bené is the fastest boy in all of Brazil and that all the girls sigh when he runs by them.” Bené blushed as Simone silently read what the letter actually said. The attack would begin at three a.m. that night. Simone looked at her watch. It was eight o’clock in the evening. She would have to wait only seven more hours. She would try to get a little sleep first.
Because of the increased surveillance since Zé betrayed them, the rebels were attacking from the north. The signal runners would help to coordinate the attack so that everyone moved in choreographed fashion. They’d learned that the extra surveillance was to the south and the east where the entrances to the Intelligence Center were. Since there were no doors to the north, there were no guards there either. So no guards but, since there were no doors, the rebels would have to use dynamite to blow holes in the wall. Simone was to stay in her location. From there, she was supposed to provide cover for the guys planting the dynamite and then for the ones running into the maelstrom through the newly exploded openings in the walls. If it even looked like anyone was trying to stop them, she was to shoot. Two other sharpshooters were providing cover from different angles, from different spots in the shantytown. Mr. Costa didn’t add any details about whether her shots were supposed to be warning shots, shots to disarm, or shots to kill. He didn’t have to. She knew. And she never missed.
Once all the others had made it inside the Intelligence Center, she was to leave her post and join them. They would need all the bodies inside they could get. Nobody knew what would happen after that. Nobody planned their escape. Government authorities would likely be called in after the attack. That’s why they put the Intelligence Center in the shantytown to begin with—because of the additional security they got from the government out of it. There was more than a decent chance that the government would see the violence and use it as an excuse to tear the whole shantytown down. “What does it really say?” Bené asked.
“It says that there’s going to be a raid tonight, that they’re rounding up children,” Simone lied to Bené. She wasn’t even sure if raids ever actually happened, but she knew that the children talked about them, and feared them, like they were very real. “You need to get out. You can come back tomorrow, but tonight, you need to hide out somewhere else. Can you do that?”
Bené smiled. “I’m the fastest boy in all of Brazil,” he said with confidence. “They’ll never catch me.”
“Please, Bené, for me.” Simone pleaded with the boy to leave the shantytown for one night.
“Okay,” Bené answered. “For you.”
“Thank you, Bené,” Simone said. She grabbed the boy and held him close to her chest and kissed him on the forehead. “You’ve been a great help, Bené. You did so good.”
“Good enough for Star Wars?” Bené asked her.
“Good enough for Star Wars,” Simone answered. Then she kissed him on the forehead one more time and let him go.
Twenty-nine
“Maybe we should go outside to talk,” Brian volunteered after his mention of Reggie left Christopher dumbfounded. Christopher didn’t move. His head hurt. He was trying to process what Brian had told him, but the thick bass echoing out of the computer behind him kept pulsating in his brain, jumbling his thoughts.
“Maybe we should,” Christopher finally agreed.
Brian slowly stood up from his chair. From force of habit, he looked around the room to see who might be watching them. He should have known who was watching them. Almost everyone was watching them. “Don’t worry about them,” Brian whispered to Christopher. “You’re entitled to a little peace.”
Brian led Christopher past Dutty as they headed for the door. “The kid wanted some quiet,” Brian told Dutty as they walked by.
“Okay,” Dutty answered, nodding to Christopher as he passed.
They walked together into the barren wasteland that Christopher had seen out his window. He could hear the cars speeding by on the highway atop the hill above the compound. The sun was sinking, turning the brown dirt beneath their feet to an almost golden color. “So, you must have some questions for me,” Brian said to Christopher. They stood close enough together to talk quietly while still hearing each other over the roar of the traffic.
“Was it Addy?” Christopher asked.
“Was Addy what?” Brian responded.
“Was Addy the one that told Reggie I was here?”
“No,” Brian said, shaking his head. “If Addy were still in touch with Reggie, why would he need me to keep an eye on you?”
“I guess that’s true. But why did Reggie send someone to keep an eye on me anyway?”
“Because you’re eighteen and you don’t know what you’re doing and these people aren’t trying to help you.”
“What are you talking about?” Christopher asked, glancing back at the compound. He could still barely hear the music. “These people worship me. Besides, Reggie just wants me to run away and I’ve decided that I don’t want to die running.”
“It’s good to make decisions. So you’ve decided to lead a revolution?”
“I’m not leading anything,” Christopher told him.
“I know. You aren’t a true leader if everyone is following you but all you’re doing is following somebody else.” It
was a practiced line. Brian had rehearsed it. Christopher could tell. Still, it hit Christopher hard.
“Why are you doing this? It’s not like I was given a lot of choices here.”
“I know,” Brian said softly. “Run away or pretend you’re somebody that you’re not. It’s more options than your father had, but I don’t want to compare you to your father. Instead, what if I gave you another option?”
“Will it mean not running forever and not watching people die in my name?”
Brian shook his head. “No. People are going to die in your name no matter what you do. But I can give you an option where you get to stop running and you get to stop pretending to be somebody you’re not.”
Christopher looked back at the compound. They’d been gone for a long time already. He knew that they should get back soon so people didn’t start getting suspicious. “And what do I have to do?”
“Simple. You come with me, back to see Reggie.”
“And how does that help? I’ve already been there. Reggie wanted me to run.”
Brian nodded. “Reggie knows what it’s like to be a lost eighteen-year-old kid. When he was eighteen, somebody convinced him that running was the best thing that he could do. That’s why he tried to get you to run. But if you don’t want to run, he’s got other ideas. He wants you to understand your own power.”
“What’s that?”
“People don’t trust each other, but they’ll trust you.”
“How is that different from what Dutty is asking me to do?”
“We’re not asking you to lead. We’re not even asking you to pretend to lead. The leadership’s already in place—real leaders with real power.” Brian glanced dismissively at the compound. “All you have to do is help convince them to work together.”
“Because they’ll trust me,” Christopher finished for Brian, not even trying to cover up his sarcasm.
“You don’t understand how deep the hatred goes. It might seem frivolous to you, but it goes back generations. You don’t have to decide now. Think about it. But try to make your decision before Dutty gets your head blown off.” With that, Brian started walking back to the compound.