I pressed tightly against a tree. Be careful, Collie. Don’t let him know you’re a pilot.
The storm had been a stroke of luck. After we’d escaped the battlefield hours before, we’d flown the Firedove as far as its fuel tank would take us. Nothing was as distinctive as a Firedove’s roar, but under the rumble of thunder and wind it seemed unlikely we’d been heard.
In the gathering darkness, we’d landed in a nearby field and hidden the Dove in a dilapidated barn. The barn’s condition hinted that we might still be in the Western Seaboard. I peered into the lashing darkness, wishing I knew for sure.
Yet even if we were still in our home country, it might not be ours for much longer.
Cold rain darted down my neck, but my shiver was from revulsion as I recalled bombers, tanks, soldiers: all supposed to exist only in history books. That morning Gunnison had attacked the Western Seaboard. All of our Peacefighter pilots, myself and Collie included, had flown into battle. We’d lost.
This day – March 18th, 1941 AC – would live in infamy for ever.
I straightened with a jerk as the farmhouse door opened. Collie and the farmer shook hands, then Collie jogged through the rain to the auto, not even glancing towards my hiding place. The whole country was on the lookout for “Wildcat”. My photo had been front-page news for days.
A few minutes later, we were cruising down the road, rain streaking against the windscreen. I shrugged off my wet jacket. “What happened?” I said. “Where are we?”
The faint glow from the dashboard showed Collie’s features – his broken nose, his strong chin and full lips. His sandy hair was damp; he swiped a hand through it.
“Western Seaboard still,” he said, shifting gears. “He was listening to the news on the telio. Nothing about you, for a change. Gunnison’s attack has distracted everyone.”
I studied him anxiously. “And?”
Collie blew out a breath. “It’s bad, Amity. His troops are still advancing. Now towns are surrendering without him even having to do a thing.” He grimaced. “Hell, I think half the country wants him to take over, no matter how crazy he is.”
Gunnison was crazy, all right. In his speeches he talked about using “the power of astrology” to “maximise Harmony and weed out Discordant elements”. I sat motionless, recalling his henchmen, the Guns, arresting a woman. Blood had run down her battered face as she was shoved, sobbing, into a Shadowcar and taken away – just for having the wrong birth chart.
My brother could be taken too, if he was discovered.
The rain beat against the roof. “Thanks, Dad,” I said.
Collie glanced quickly at me. “Don’t say that.”
I sighed and dropped my head back against the seat. I’d learned only hours before that my father had thrown the fight that put Gunnison in power. I knew in my heart it was true.
Collie was watching me. “Hey,” he said. “Come here.” He reached his arm out. After a beat, I slid across the seat towards him. He pulled me close against his side and kissed my hair.
“Don’t do this to yourself,” he murmured. “No matter what, Tru was your dad. You’ve got to let it go.”
I wanted to relax into Collie’s warmth but couldn’t. “How can I? It changes everything.”
His arm tensed. The windshield wipers swished back and forth a few times. “Why?” he said. “Just because you found out he did something bad?”
“Something bad,” I echoed ironically. “This goes a little beyond that, Collie.”
“All right, but…he was still the same person.”
My throat was tight. “No,” I whispered. “He wasn’t. I wouldn’t even have been a Peacefighter if it wasn’t for him. If he was capable of doing this…then I never really knew him.”
Collie started to speak and stopped, his expression conflicted. We drove through the rain in silence. The worst thing, I thought, was that I’d never know Dad’s reasons. He’d been dead since I was thirteen.
The night before his fatal plane crash, I’d found him drunk in the kitchen. He’d said I was braver than he was – that he thought I’d be a Peacefighter too one day.
I’d perched stiffly on a kitchen chair, longing to really understand him…and ashamed that Peacefighting wasn’t what I most wanted to do. I wanted to be a transport pilot. I knew I’d never, ever tell him.
Dad had mentioned his mother, a former Peacefighter who’d died when I was three. “Oh, she had no idea,” he snorted.
“About what?” I’d asked in a small voice.
And he’d stared at me as if he’d forgotten I was there.
“Nothing,” he said. “Times change, don’t they? She knew what it was like for her, but not for me. And if you become a Peacefighter, all you’ll know is what it’s like for you. No one can judge your actions unless they’ve been there. Got that? Nobody.”
“Dad…you can tell me anything.”
His smile hadn’t reached his eyes. “Maybe someday. When you’re a Peacefighter too. It’s the only thing worth being, Amity…I always knew that.”
The headlights streaked through the rain. I felt made of glass: he’d been talking that night about throwing the civil war Peacefight. What words could he have possibly used to explain?
Collie still seemed tense. Abruptly he took his arm from my shoulders. He pulled us off onto an overgrown dirt road and killed the engine. High overhead, stars were caught in the pine trees’ dark, prickly branches.
He exhaled and stroked the steering wheel up and down. “All right, look…I’m just driving aimlessly here. We need to decide what we’re doing.”
I nodded and pulled a weary knee to my chest. “How are we doing for money?”
Collie’s hands slowed and then stopped. Finally he gave a small, sour smile. “We’re fine. More than fine.”
“What? How?”
Twisting towards the back seat, he snagged his flight jacket. He drew a brown envelope from the inside pocket and opened it, angling it towards me.
Cash. Lots of it.
I quickly took the envelope from him and flipped through the bills. “How much is this?”
“Almost ten thousand credits.”
My gaze flew to his. “The Tier One fight,” I whispered, and he nodded.
I’d been told to throw it. I’d pretended to agree. It had been a set-up to try to kill me. After I went on the run, Collie was told to throw the fight instead. He’d fought fairly, but still lost in the end.
The result had given Gunnison the right to extradite all so-called Discordants from the Western Seaboard. My brother Hal had been named one. He was still in hiding in a neighbour’s house, if he hadn’t been discovered yet.
The envelope felt cold in my hands. I stared at Collie. “But…you tried to win that fight.”
“Sure, but they didn’t know that.” Collie took the envelope back and rifled through the bills, his expression bitter. “Hendrix called me into his office and paid me just after I landed.”
“And you took it?”
His head snapped up. “Of course I took it. What was I going to say? ‘No, I refuse, you’re all corrupt’?”
When I didn’t answer, Collie dropped the envelope and gripped my fingers. “Amity…come on,” he said in an undertone. He stroked my hair. “I hate it too, but we’re going to need money. How do you think I bought the auto?”
The wind whispered through the pines. I sighed and rubbed his palm with my thumb, circling his Leo tattoo – a souvenir from his life in the Harmony-obsessed Central States.
“Okay. Yes,” I said. “You’re right.”
Wordlessly, Collie cupped his hand behind my neck and kissed me. For several heartbeats I took refuge in the feel of our lips together. When we drew apart he rested his brow against mine.
Neither of us spoke. Finally Collie cleared his throat. “So…I was thinking we should head for the coast, maybe up around Puget.”
“Puget? What’s there?”
His eyebrows rose; he gave a short laugh. “Well,
there’s getting the hell out of the country before Gunnison takes it over, for one thing.”
I frowned. I leaned back against the seat’s cracked vinyl and rubbed my forehead. “Collie, no…the main thing is to get hold of those documents again.”
He stared at me. “Amity…”
“They still exist – they have to!” I’d told him already how I’d trusted a police officer with the documents after my arrest. “Can’t your contacts do anything?”
The contacts who’d helped Collie escape the Central States were shadowy figures to me. A guy named Mac Jones was the only one I’d met; he and Collie had talked in The Ivy Room the evening my team leader, Russ Avery, was murdered.
That night I’d broken into Russ’s house and found out everything I believed in was a lie. A date book, newspaper clippings, notes in Russ’s handwriting about his thrown fights – it was all there. Later, I’d discovered documents in Madeline’s office safe that implicated the World for Peace at the highest levels. Everything led back to Gunnison. It was enough to bring him down, if we could just get hold of it again.
I pushed away what else I’d discovered: Madeline’s betrayal of me and her affair with my father. She’d been like an aunt to me, growing up.
Collie’s jaw was stone. He hadn’t spoken. Outside, a night bird gave a long, plaintive call.
“You…don’t want to try,” I said slowly.
“No. I don’t. And if you’re sane, you won’t either.”
“You can’t mean that! Gunnison’s busy taking over our country right now – everyone who’s already in hiding will be in even more danger! What about Hal?”
Collie winced at my little brother’s name. All I could think of was the look on Hal’s face as Ma and I had closed the trapdoor over him. The tiny room under a closet was in the home of someone I wasn’t even sure we could trust.
“I know,” Collie said roughly. “But, baby, there’s nothing we can do about it.”
“But—”
“Listen to me! It is over, all right?” He kissed my hand and clutched it. “Either that cop tried to help you, or he turned the evidence in. Either way, it’s been destroyed – probably shoved in a furnace the second he handed it over to someone.”
The news of what I’d found had broken days ago, mangled beyond belief. I started to reply. Collie gently put his fingers over my mouth. His eyes were dark green in the shadows, locked on mine.
“The whole world thinks you killed another pilot to cover up taking bribes,” he said. “No one will believe a word you tell them. It’s like I’ve said all along – Gunnison’s going to win, and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop him.”
A weight pressed on my chest. I stared out at the dark, dripping trees.
“I hate it as much as you do,” Collie said in a low voice. “But the only thing we can do now is escape. Grab a steamer to somewhere – the European Alliance, maybe, or up to Alaska. Amity…being happy together, living a long life together…that’s all we can do to fight this. And it’s not a small thing.”
My heart clenched. Collie turned me to face him; he caressed my cheekbone with his thumb. I could feel his skin’s warmth, the slight roughness of a hangnail.
“You can’t always be a hero,” he whispered. “Sometimes just surviving is the best that you can do.”
CHAPTER TWO
May, 1941
The train stopped with a hissing lurch.
Though I’d thought I didn’t care where we were going, I found myself craning with the others, trying to see over the tangled press of bodies in the boxcar. Bars of sunlight broke up the gloom, showing people’s greasy heads and rumpled clothes.
I glimpsed a station platform that seemed abandoned. It was May but snow still dusted the ground. The plain wooden building looked as stark as a gallows.
Beside me, a girl named Melody shivered and rubbed her arms. She’d tried to talk to me these past few days, offering up information about herself even when I barely responded. She’d been a student, she told me. She had no idea why she’d been found Discordant.
“I guess my stars were just wrong,” she’d said, sounding sad; resigned. As if she really believed, like Gunnison said, that astrology held the answers for a Harmonic society.
She hadn’t asked about me. Everyone already knew, or thought they did. Apparently my trial had been required viewing. When Gunnison’s men had first herded us all into the boxcar, I’d seen dread on people’s faces as they recognized me.
“But…but if we’re going where you’re going, then…” one woman had stammered, and then fell quiet, her face leaching of colour.
Now the only sounds in the boxcar were worried whispers and the distant mutter of Guns talking outside. I stared at the slats that sliced across the barren landscape. That wall was the only possible escape route. People had tried already, of course – tried until their hands bled – but the flat metal bars were immovable.
There’d been a time when I’d have tried too – when nothing could have kept me from straining and pulling with the others. Though only one person, I’d have thought I could make a difference.
Now I knew better.
I still wore the leather flight jacket I’d been captured in. Gently I touched the folded square of paper nestling in one pocket. My muscles tightened. I ran my finger over its soft creases.
Ma. Hal. I brought their faces to mind, savouring every detail. I prayed that Hal was still safely hidden – that he and Ma were both all right. I knew I’d probably never see them again. The thought numbed me.
Stay safe, I begged my family silently.
Once I’d have believed that Collie would help them. At the thought of the man I still loved – though I wished I didn’t – a wrench of pain left me hollow. Surely none of this had actually happened?
Yet it had.
A gust of wind blew snow into the crowded boxcar; it skittered at our feet. People were still murmuring, wondering why we’d stopped. The smell of sweat and urine hung in the air.
Melody started to say something. Then her eyes widened and she clutched my arm.
“Listen!” she whispered.
The whine of approaching engines. I tensed as I strained to hear. Were they autos? No, they were higher in pitch…
We all jumped as a pair of Guns appeared outside in long wool coats and fur hats. The Harmony symbol was a dark wound above their hearts.
One of them unlocked the slatted wall’s padlock. They heaved together and the wall rattled open. You’d have thought, after so many days, that we’d have rushed them – tried to clamber right over them and escape away over the fields. Nobody moved.
A Gun made a face as the smell hit him. “Filthy Discordant animals.”
An older man, still dignified despite everything, glared at them. “We were only given a single bucket,” he said in a clear voice. “So who exactly are the animals?”
Anger leaped over the Gun’s face. He raised his pistol and I flinched with the others, wishing feverishly that the man had kept quiet.
The other Gun grabbed his comrade’s arm.
“Not these,” he said. “Let them find out there’s something worse than a lousy bucket.”
The Guns motioned us out of the boxcar. There were no steps to help with the sheer height. My limbs felt stiff after days in the cramped space; I staggered as I dropped to the ground.
The air was cold on my clammy skin, but it briefly felt good. And now I could see other Guns, standing nearby cradling rifles. Several sat on snowmobiles, revving their engines. The vehicles’ sleek lines and grilled fronts looked like they belonged to a different century than the clattering, steam-belching train.
We’d seemed such a crowd in the car, but as everyone emerged I could see there were less than thirty of us – men and women of all ages and colours, with grimy skin and rumpled clothes. Gazes fell away from each other. A sense of shame hung over everything.
During the journey people had listened to each other’s stories with fascinated dr
ead. This one was “pure” Discordant with a faulty birth chart; that one had declaimed Gunnison and been made Discordant on the spot. Gunnison wasn’t choosy. Pretty much anyone he didn’t like was a threat to Harmony.
The grey-haired man who’d spoken up was the last off the train car. He hesitated, eyeing the high drop. One of the women in our group started forward. Before she could reach him the Gun who’d drawn his pistol on us stretched a hand up.
For a split second I had a sense of the world being sane again – and then the Gun grabbed his arm and yanked.
The man pitched forward with a startled cry and fell hard onto the ground. The Gun kicked his prone form viciously. “That’ll teach you to mind your manners, Grandpa,” he hissed.
Stony-faced, the older man struggled to his feet. His nose was bloody. The Gun scanned us, lip curling. He waved his pistol northwards, where a snow-covered road sliced across the fields.
“Walk,” he said.
The fields wound through a steep valley. The snow hadn’t melted at all here; we slogged through it for what seemed hours. In places there were deep drifts and wetness bit at my calves.
On the train people had tried to guess where we were. Once we’d left towns behind, all anyone had known for sure was that we were heading further and further north – surely not far enough for Alaska.
Where was this place? The upper Yukon? The Inuvik Territory?
The cold knifed into you, clutched at your bones. My leather jacket wasn’t fleece-lined; it felt as if I was wearing nothing at all. As we trudged in a long, straggling line, the snowmobiles roared along beside us, sometimes darting ahead and then racing back. One of the Guns did a figure eight, whooping and calling to his comrades.
Melody struggled by my side. I didn’t know why she stayed so close to me – maybe because we were the same age, nineteen. She wore a dress with a light wool coat over it. Stockings. Boots that had probably been perfectly adequate for city sidewalks kept cleared of snow.
One of the girls was crying. A matronly woman had her arm around her. To my shame, as my gaze lingered on them I felt mostly jealousy over the older woman’s long fur coat.