As Christopher placed his backpack on the floor, he heard a voice behind him. “Christopher?” the voice said weakly.
Christopher turned. It was Maria. “Hey,” Christopher said. “I was looking for you before. They told me that you’d gone out.”
“Yeah,” Maria told him. “There was something I needed to do. Something I needed to get.” She paused. “For you,” she finished.
“You didn’t need to get me anything,” Christopher said. “You’ve done enough for me already. I know I might have sounded ungrateful—”
“I needed to get you this.” Maria cut him off. “Whether it’s something you want or not.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You will if you come with me,” Maria told her son. And he was her son. She may not have been his mother, but he was her son. That was immutable. He was her son and somehow she loved him more now than when he was born and she got to hold him in her arms. She loved him more now than when she’d fought the world to find him, only to sacrifice her happiness for a long-shot bet that he could escape the War. Her love for him had caused all the greatest pains in her life, but she cherished that love and the pain that went with it. And the pain wasn’t over. She knew that. “Will you come with me?” she asked Christopher.
“Sure,” Christopher told her, “but we don’t have a lot of time. I have to get ready.”
“I know,” Maria said. “I know you think you have to do this, and I’m not going to try to stop you anymore. I promise you that we have time for this.”
“Okay,” Christopher said, and followed Maria down the hall.
Brian shook Reggie’s hand. They were standing near the door to the warehouse. Brian was about to leave, to go get in position, to make sure that he could see all of the explosions at once. “I’ll see you back here in the morning,” he said to Reggie.
“See you back here in the morning,” Reggie echoed back to Brian. The plan was to reconvene at the warehouse in the morning to assess the Uprising’s success so they could determine the next steps. If everything went well, they would simply disperse and wait to see if all of their destruction actually did the job.
“It’s been quite a ride,” Brian said to Reggie, thinking back to when he used to work with Joseph, before Christopher, before Maria, before Reggie, before everything. He felt old. In the world they lived in, he was old. He once wondered what it all meant—the War, the rules, everything—but that was a long time ago. He’d seen enough. Now he only wanted to see it end.
“Don’t judge the ride until it’s over,” Reggie answered. Brian nodded. Then he turned and walked out the warehouse door and into the coming night.
Sixty-two
After Brian left the warehouse, the rest of the rebels split up into pairs, each pair leaving the warehouse together. Everyone had their assignments. Some of the pairs would split up later, when they got closer to their ultimate objectives. Addy and Evan would stay together through the night, as would the three pairs tasked with surrounding the Intelligence Center and the three pairs tasked with going inside. They left the warehouse in shifts to avoid a noticeable mass exodus. Once outside, each pair headed toward their ultimate destinations through their own specific means. Addy and Evan left early. Their plan was to walk over the Manhattan Bridge and then catch a cab uptown. They had keycards and everything else they needed to get to the roof of the building where they were supposed to spend the night in silence. Christopher hugged Addy and Evan before they left. The three of them didn’t say anything to each other. None of them had anything left to say. Reggie and Addy hugged too, both of them knowing that they had inadvertently teamed up to make this Uprising happen, that they had teamed up to turn Christopher into the person he had become. “For Max,” Addy whispered into Reggie’s ear as they embraced.
“For Max and all the others,” Reggie whispered back.
Christopher and Reggie were the last pair to leave. Reggie wanted to see everyone else off first. When everyone else was gone, Christopher and Reggie slung their backpacks on their shoulders and started walking toward the subway. With all the other pairs already gone, the warehouse was quieter than if it had been empty. It wasn’t empty, though. Three people were still inside, silently watching Christopher and Reggie. Those three would barely speak another word until morning. They would silently wait for the return of their son. Each of them was used to waiting.
The backpacks that Christopher and Reggie carried were heavy. Christopher could feel the straps of his digging into his shoulders. He walked behind Reggie when they left, letting Reggie lead him through the dark Brooklyn streets. Christopher looked at Reggie’s backpack, trying to see if it was possible to guess at the backpack’s heft. Christopher couldn’t see it. They were walking through the streets with their guns and their gas canisters hidden from the world by an eighth of an inch of canvas. Nobody looking at them would suspect anything out of the ordinary. No one would know the kind of destruction that they were planning. “You think the backpacks will look suspicious on the subway?” Christopher called up to Reggie.
Reggie turned back to him and smiled. “It takes a hell of a lot more than a couple of big backpacks to look suspicious on the subway.”
“It must seem right to you,” Christopher said, speeding up so that he was within whispering distance of Reggie, “to end it here, since you grew up here. It’s like coming full circle.”
“It’s seems right to end it,” Reggie said, “circle or no circle.”
“I guess if it was a true circle, it wouldn’t end.”
“Let’s worry about the philosophy later, Chris. We’ve got shit to blow up.”
They turned another corner and came to a stairwell leading down to the subway. Reggie stopped and let Christopher go first, doing one last scan of the surrounding streets before following Christopher underground. The subway station was mostly empty. Only a handful of people were waiting on the platform. They glanced up as Reggie and Christopher descended the stairs but then looked away again, back down at their books or their feet or whatever it was that they were looking at before Christopher and Reggie arrived. Christopher followed Reggie toward an empty part of the platform.
“I’ve never ridden on a subway before,” Christopher confided to Reggie as they waited for the rush of air that would herald the train.
“You’ve got a lot of firsts left in your life, Christopher,” Reggie answered, but the last part of his sentence was drowned out by the sound of an oncoming train. They got on the train and found seats. Christopher mimicked everything Reggie did, taking his backpack off and resting it on the floor in front of him between his knees. Then he leaned back in his seat, feeling the ground rumble beneath him and wondering how the hell he’d gotten to where he was. That’s when he remembered that he’d neglected to ask for the first woman’s name.
Christopher had recognized the woman. He must have recognized her. Strangers’ faces made him nervous. Hers didn’t. Her face made him feel safe. She had soft, wrinkled skin and curly gray hair. “Who are you?” he had asked her, like an asshole, when Maria led him into the little room. The woman didn’t speak at first. She only stood there, staring at Christopher like she didn’t remember how to talk.
“She was your mother once too,” Maria told Christopher, standing behind him to make sure no one stood between Christopher and the woman, “before I took you away from her.”
Now it was Christopher’s turn to lose the ability to speak. The woman nodded her head. “It’s true,” she said. “I was with you when you spoke your first words.” Her voice trembled. “You used to call me Mama.”
Christopher didn’t have a clue what to do or say. He turned back toward Maria, hoping she would guide him, hoping she would tell him how he was supposed to react to this, hoping she would tell him why she was doing this. “Do you remember her?” Maria asked Christopher.
Christopher didn’t know how to ans
wer Maria’s question. He didn’t remember her, but whatever it was that he felt, it was deeper than memory. It was the same way he’d felt when he first collapsed into Maria’s arms. It was the feeling that he belonged to the world. Christopher turned back toward the woman, back toward his second mother. “How did you get here?” he asked her.
The woman motioned to Maria. “Maria found me,” she said. “She brought me here.”
“She was easy to find,” Maria said. “She’s been part of the Underground for over ten years now.” Christopher looked at the woman. She didn’t look like a rebel.
“Why?” Christopher asked the woman. “After everything that happened?” And everyone in the room knew what Christopher meant. After Maria killed her husband and stole her child, why would this woman join the people that helped Maria do it?
The woman stepped toward Christopher. She extended her hand, slowly, toward Christopher’s shoulder as if silently asking him if it was okay for her to touch him. Christopher inched forward, stepping into her hand so that her hand was resting on his shoulder. He could feel the woman’s muscles relax when they touched. “It was the only way that I could think of to get closer to you.” She stepped closer to him now, bending her arm, wrapping her hand around his neck. “I heard all the rumors. I heard them calling you the Child. I heard them using your name—your real name, not the one I gave you. Nobody knew who I was. Nobody knew that for the most wonderful eight months of my life, I had been your mother. I wanted to be close to you again. I wasn’t mad at anyone for what Maria did when she took you from me.” She shook her head. “I was mad at first, but then I realized that what she did was right.” Her voice got even softer. “I should have realized it sooner. I was going to let them turn you into a monster, like the rest of them. I wanted to make that up to you. I thought that by joining the Underground, I might be able, in some small way, to keep you safe.”
“Safe was never really an option for me.”
The woman’s eyes welled up with tears at Christopher’s words. “I remember how much you loved music when you were a baby. You used to clap your hands when I played certain songs, and you’d laugh. I remember thinking that maybe, if things were different, you could grow up to be a composer or a musician. I used to daydream about seeing you all grown up and playing in an orchestra or at a jazz club.” She paused, lost in thought. “Do you still love music?”
Christopher searched his brain for any memory, any inkling he might have to show that the child this woman was describing was still part of him. Did he still love music? Did he love anything? “I will,” Christopher said to the woman, making a promise to her and to himself. “I’m sorry if knowing me ruined your life,” he finally said to this woman who raised him for eight months seventeen years ago and who lost her husband and spent the rest of her life on the run because of it.
The woman pulled Christopher into her arms. “You didn’t ruin anything. My life didn’t even start until I met you.” Then she looked past Christopher. “Thank you so much for giving me this, Maria.”
They rode the subway for a while. Christopher stopped counting the stops at ten. “This is us,” Reggie said when they reached Forty-second Street, breaking Christopher’s trance. Reggie stood up and swung the backpack over his shoulder. Christopher mimicked Reggie’s movements. Once they stepped out of the train, Christopher looked down at his watch. It was almost an hour before midnight. “You ready?” Reggie asked Christopher before they climbed back up onto the streets of the city.
“I’m ready,” Christopher affirmed and the two of them walked up the stairs.
Brian stood on the roof of his designated building and stared out over the city. He took the cell phone out of his pocket. It was a prepaid phone, impossible to trace to any person. The lights of the city shimmered around him. They went on for miles in every direction. To the south and the east, the lights stopped only when they hit the black ocean, and even then he could see the lights of the boats floating offshore. To the west and the north, the lights never stopped.
Brian checked his watch. He counted the targets again. There were ten in all. The Brooklyn Bridge, the George Washington Bridge, the Manhattan Bridge, the Williamsburg Bridge, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, the Flatiron Building, the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, the Arch in Washington Square Park, and Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. Brian could actually see most of the targets from where he was standing. Even if he couldn’t see the targets themselves, he knew that he’d be able to see the explosions. He looked at his watch again. Eighty-four seconds had passed. The city was quiet and beautiful. In less than ten minutes, Brian would have to dial the code.
Christopher and Reggie headed east on Forty-second Street. They were aboveground for only a single block. Reggie pointed up into the sky at one of the skyscrapers towering over them. “That’s it,” he said. “That’s the building.”
Christopher looked up, almost getting dizzy from the height of it. He tried to count floors, starting from the bottom and counting up. He wanted to see if he could figure out which five floors they were going to burn. He lost count at around twenty.
They didn’t go straight to the target building. The plan was to enter the building underground, traveling through a service tunnel leading from one of the buildings adjacent to their target. Jared assured them that the adjacent building’s delivery entrance would be open and unguarded. He’d pulled the necessary strings to make that happen. When Christopher and Reggie reached the delivery entrance to the second building, Reggie pulled the pistol out of his backpack, holding it low to conceal it from view. It wasn’t that Reggie didn’t trust Jared. At moments like this, Reggie didn’t trust anyone. Reggie burst through the delivery entrance, leading with his gun, but the room on the other side of the door was empty. He surveyed the room, spotting the staircase in the corner heading downward. “There,” Reggie said to Christopher, pointing to the stairs.
“Should we arm ourselves first?” Christopher asked. His heart was already pounding. He tried to calm it by slowing his breathing. He knew that he needed to save energy for the trek up the stairs. Reggie nodded. The two of them swung their backpacks off their shoulders and placed them on the floor in front of them. Christopher unzipped his and pulled out his handgun and the pieces to the automatic rifle he was carrying. He began to assemble the rifle. He could do it quickly now. He’d been practicing over and over for the past few days. He was even faster than Reggie. When he finished, he shouldered the backpack again. The backpack was lighter now. The only material of any weight left in it was the gas canister. Christopher put the handgun in the holster he had attached to his thigh. Then he lifted the rifle into the air. For a moment, he felt powerful, but he fought the feeling. He didn’t want to feel powerful. He’d settle for brave and would have to hope that would be enough to pull him through the night.
A moment after Christopher was done Reggie stepped up next to him, identically outfitted. “Let’s move,” Reggie said. The two of them headed for the stairs, ready for anything.
The service tunnel running between the buildings was dimly lit. Half the tunnel’s lights seemed to be turned off, leaving the tunnel a pallid gray color. The floor was concrete and the walls and ceiling were a dusty white tile. As far as Reggie and Christopher could tell, the tunnel was empty. They couldn’t see anything but footprints in the dust on the floor and torn pieces of paper littering the ground. They moved through the tunnel fast, knowing that there was no cover—no place to hide—until they made it to the other end. They could hear their own footsteps echoing through the tunnel as they went. It was impossible to walk lightly while carrying that much weight. Christopher’s heart was thumping in pace with his footsteps. It didn’t matter that they were in a tunnel underneath New York City; for a few seconds, those footsteps were the only sound in the world. They needed to get to the security control room beneath their target building. From there, they’d be able to trip an alarm requiring eve
ry floor of the building to evacuate. Then, while almost everyone else in the building was headed down the stairs, Reggie, Christopher, and the others would head up. The only other people left in the building were the psychopaths left to guard the Intelligence Center during the emergency.
At the end of the tunnel, Christopher and Reggie came to another door. Through that door was the building that housed the Intelligence Center. They would be there in moments, only thirty-seven floors below their target. They paused outside the other door again, not sure what they were going to face on the other side.
“We go through fast and quiet,” Reggie said to Christopher. Christopher could see the sweat glistening on Reggie’s forehead. He had never seen Reggie sweat before. “I’ll go first. If you don’t hear anything, wait five seconds and then come after me. If you hear something”—Christopher knew that by something Reggie meant gunshots—“wait until I open the door and let you in.”
“And what if you don’t open the door?” Christopher asked.
Reggie shrugged. “Then you’re on your own. You’ll have to find your own way in.” Reggie didn’t wait for a follow-up question. He stepped toward the door, opened it, and without a sound slipped to the other side.
Christopher counted five seconds in his head like he was a kid playing hide-and-seek, all the while praying for silence. One one-thousand. Two one-thousand. Three one-thousand. Four one-thousand. Five one-thousand. He didn’t hear anything, so he stepped toward the door and pushed it open.
Reggie was already on the other side of the room, his back pressed up against the wall. He had his rifle slung on its strap over his back and was holding his handgun. Past Reggie was another hallway. Reggie put his finger to his lips so Christopher knew to be quiet. Then he waved Christopher over to him. Christopher sped across the room, trying to move silently the way he’d seen Addy and Max move. Seconds later, he was standing next to Reggie. Each step brought them closer to the security control room.