I don’t understand some of the terms Kaede uses—corps, employees—but I decide to ask her about them some other time. I’m sure I’ll gradually get more info about the Colonies out of her. For now, I still want to know more about the people I’m working for. “And then you joined the Patriots?”
She flips her hand in a nonchalant gesture and stretches her arms out in front of her. I’m reminded of how tall Kaede is, how her shoulders line up with mine. “Fact of the matter is, Razor pays me. Sometimes I even get to fly. But I’m here for the money, kid, and as long as I keep getting my cash, I’ll do whatever I can to help stitch the United States back together. If that means letting the Republic collapse, fine. If it means the goddy Colonies taking over, fine. Get this war over and the US thing going. Get people living normal lives again. That’s what I care about.”
I can’t help feeling a little amused. Even though Kaede tries to seem uncommitted, I can tell that she’s proud to be a Patriot. “Well, Tess seems to like you well enough,” I reply. “So I guess you must be all right.”
Kaede laughs in earnest. “Gotta admit, she’s a sweet one. I’m glad I didn’t kill her in that Skiz duel. You’ll see—there’s not a single Patriot who doesn’t like her. Don’t forget to show some love to your little friend now and then, okay? I know you’ve got the hots for June, but Tess is head over heels mad for you. In case you couldn’t tell.”
That makes my smile fade a little. “I guess I just never really thought about her like that,” I murmur.
“With her past, she deserves some love, yeah?”
I put my hand out and stop Kaede. “She told you about her past?”
Kaede glances back at me. “She’s never told you her stories, has she?” she says, genuinely bewildered.
“I could never get them out of her. She always sidestepped it, and after a while I just gave up trying.”
Kaede sobers. “She probably doesn’t want you to feel sorry for her,” she finally says. “She was the youngest of five. She was nine at the time, I think. Parents couldn’t afford to feed all of them, so one night they locked her out of the house and never let her back in. She said she pounded on the door for days.”
I can’t say I’m surprised to hear this. The Republic’s so lazy when it comes to dealing with street orphans that none of us ever got a second glance—my family’s love was all I had to hang on to in my early street years. Apparently, Tess didn’t even have that. No wonder she was so clingy when I first met her. I must have been the only person in the world who cared about her.
“I didn’t know,” I whisper.
“Well, now you do,” Kaede replies. “Stick by her—you two are a good match, y’know.” It makes her snicker. “Both so damn optimistic. I’ve never met such a sunshine-and-rainbows pair of slum sector cons.”
I don’t respond. She’s right, obviously—I’d never dwelled on the thought, but Tess and I are a good match. She understands intimately where I came from. She can cheer me up on my darkest days. It’s as if she came from a perfectly happy home instead of what Kaede just told me. I feel a relaxing warmth at the thought, realizing suddenly how much I’m anticipating meeting up with Tess again. Where she goes, I go, and vice versa. Peas in a pod.
Then there’s June.
Even the thought of her name makes it hard for me to breathe. I’m almost embarrassed by my reaction. Are June and I a good match? No. It’s the first word to pop into my mind.
And yet, still.
Our conversation fizzles out. Sometimes I glance back over my shoulder, half hoping to see a hint of light, half hoping I don’t. No light means that the tunnel doesn’t run right under all the gratings in the city, visible to those walking by above. The ground also feels slanted. We’re traveling deeper and deeper underground. I force myself to breathe evenly as the walls narrow, closing in around me. Goddy tunnel. What I wouldn’t give to be back in the open.
It takes forever, but finally I feel Kaede come to an abrupt halt. The echo of our boots in the water sounds different now—I think we’ve stopped in front of a solid structure of some sort. Maybe a wall. “This used to be a rest bunker for fugitives,” she mutters. “Near the back of this bunker the tunnel continues on, right over to the Colonies.” Kaede tries opening the door with a small lever at one side, and when that fails, she taps her knuckles softly against it in a complicated series of ten or eleven taps. “Rocket,” she calls out. We wait, shivering.
Nothing. Then, a dim little rectangle in the wall slides open, and a pair of yellow-brown eyes blinks at us. “Hi, Kaede. Airship was right on time, yeah?” the girl behind the wall says before narrowing her eyes at me. “Who’s your friend?”
“Day,” Kaede replies. “Now you better stop all this crap and let me in. I’m freezing.”
“All right, all right. Just checking.” The eyes search me up and down. I’m surprised she can see much of anything in this darkness. Finally, the little rectangle slides shut. I hear a few beeps and a second voice. The wall slides open to reveal a narrow corridor with a door at its other end. Before either of us make a move, three people step forward from behind the wall and point guns right at our heads.
“Get in,” one of them barks at us. It’s the girl who just opened the wall’s peephole. We do as she says. The wall closes behind us. “This week’s code?” she adds, cracking her gum loudly.
“Alexander Hamilton,” Kaede replies impatiently.
Now the three guns are pointed at me instead of Kaede. “Day, eh?” the girl says. She blows a quick bubble. “You sure about that?”
It takes me a moment to realize that her second question is addressed to Kaede instead of me. Kaede sighs in exasperation and smacks the girl’s arm. “Yes, it’s him. So knock it off.”
The guns lower. I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding. The girl who let us in gestures for us to walk toward the second door, and when we reach it, she slides a little device similar to the one Kaede had across the door’s left side. A few more beeps. “Go on in,” she tells us. Then she juts her chin at me. “Any sudden moves and I’ll shoot you faster than you can blink.”
The second door slides open. Warm air pours over us as we step into a large room full of people bustling around tables and wall-mounted monitors. Electric lights are on the ceiling; a faint but distinct scent of mold and rust lingers in the air. There must be twenty, thirty people down here, and the room still feels spacious.
A large projection of an insignia decorates the room’s back wall, one that I immediately recognize as the abbreviated version of the official Patriot flag—a large silver star, with three silver V stripes below it. Smart to project it, I realize, so they can pick up and move out quickly if need be. Some of the monitors show the airship schedules I’d seen while onboard the Dynasty. Others show security cam–like footage streaming from officers’ rooms or wide shots of Lamar’s city streets or video from the flight decks of airships right in the warfront’s skies. One even has a short rotation of morale-boosting Patriot propaganda that reminds me a little too much of the Republic’s ads; it says BRING BACK THE STATES, followed by LAND OF THE FREE and then WE ARE ALL AMERICANS. Still others display views of continental America littered with multicolored dots—and two of them show world maps.
I gape at this for a while. Never in my life have I seen a world map. I’m not even sure if any exist in the Republic. But here I can see the oceans that wrap their way around North America, the cut-up island territories labeled SOUTH AMERICA, a tiny archipelago called the British Isles, gigantic landmasses called Africa and Antarctica, the country of China (with a bunch of little red dots sprinkled right in the ocean around the edge of its land).
This is the actual world, not the world the Republic shows to its civilians.
Everyone in the room is watching me. I turn away from the map and wait for Kaede to say something. She just shrugs and slaps me across the back. My wet jacket makes a squishing sound. “This is Day.”
They all wait in silence, alt
hough I can see the recognition light up their eyes when they hear my name. Then somebody wolf-whistles. That breaks the tension—there’s a chorus of snickers and laughs, then most people go back to whatever they were doing before.
Kaede guides me through the mess of tables. A couple of people are gathered around some diagram, another group is unpacking boxes; a few are just relaxing, watching reruns of some Republic soap opera. Two Patriots sitting in front of a corner monitor are tossing challenges back and forth as they play a video game, racing some sort of spiky blue creature across their screen by waving their hands in front of it. Even this must’ve been customized for the Patriots, as all the objects in the game are blue and white.
One boy snickers as I walk by. He has a shock of dyed blond hair spiked up into a faux hawk, dark bronze skin, and a slight hunch to his broad, hulking shoulders, as if he’s permanently ready to pounce. A chunk of flesh is missing from his earlobe. I realize it’s the same person who wolf-whistled earlier.
“So. You’re the one who ditched Tess, huh?” There’s an arrogance about him that annoys me. He looks me over in disdain. “Don’t know why a girl like her hangs with a con like you. A few nights in the Republic’s prisons squeeze all the air outta your chest?”
I take a step toward him and grin cheerfully. “With all due respect, I don’t see the Republic tacking up wanted posters with your pretty face on them.”
“Shut up.” Kaede pushes between us and stabs a finger into the other boy’s chest. “Baxter, shouldn’t you be getting ready for tomorrow night’s run?”
The boy just grunts at me and turns away. “Still don’t understand why we’re trusting a Republic lover,” he grumbles.
Kaede taps my shoulder and keeps walking. “Don’t mind that trot,” she tells me. “Baxter’s not the biggest fan of your girl June. He’s probably gonna give ya some trouble, so just try to stay on his good side, yeah? You’ll have to work with him. He’s a Runner too.”
“He is?” I say. I wouldn’t have expected such a muscular person to be a fast Runner—but then again, his strength might help him reach places I can’t.
“Yup. You bumped him down the hierarchy of Runners.” Kaede smirks. “And you once messed up a Patriot mission that he was on. You never even realized it.”
“Oh? And what mission was that?”
“Bombing Administrator Chian’s car, in Los Angeles.”
Wow—it’s been a long time since I faced off against Chian. No idea the Patriots had planned an attack at the same time. “How tragic,” I reply, searching the faces in the room after Baxter’s mention of Tess.
“If you’re looking for Tess, she beat us here. She’s with the other Medics.” Kaede gestures toward the back of the room, where several doors line the walls. “Probably in the med ward watching someone sew up a wound. She’s a fast learner, that Tess.”
Kaede leads me past the tables and the other Patriots, then stops in front of the world map. “I bet you’ve never seen anything like this.”
“Nope.” I study the landmasses, still boggled by the idea that so many societies are functioning beyond the Republic’s borders. In grade school we’d learned that the parts of the world not controlled by the Republic are just crumbling nations struggling to get by. Are this many countries struggling to get by? Or are they doing well—maybe even prospering? “What do you need world maps for?”
“Our movement here has spawned similar ones across the globe,” Kaede replies, crossing her arms. “Wherever people are pissed at their governments. Kinda morale-boosting for us to see it on the wall.” When she sees me continue to analyze the map with a concentrated frown, she runs a quick hand across the middle of North America. “There’s the Republic we all know and love. And that’s the Colonies.” She points to a smaller, more broken-up spread of land sharing the Republic’s eastern border. I study the red circles denoting cities in the Colonies. New York City, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Nashville. Do they glow like my father said?
Kaede goes on, sweeping her hand up north and down south. “Canada and Mexico each keep a strict demilitarized zone between themselves and both the Republic and Colonies. Mexico’s got her own share of Patriots. Then here’s whatever’s left of South America. This all used to be a huge continent too, y’know. Now it’s Brazil”—she points to a large, triangular island far south of the Republic—“Chile, and Argentina.”
Kaede cheerily points out what the continents are and what they used to be. What I see as Norway, France, Spain, Germany, and the British Isles used to be part of a larger place called Europe. The rest of Europe’s people, she says, fled to Africa. Mongolia and Russia aren’t extinct nations, contrary to Republic teachings. Australia used to be one solid landmass. Then there are the superpowers. China’s enormous, floating metropolises are built entirely over the water and have permanently black skies. “Hai Cheng,” Kaede interjects. “Sea cities.” I learn that Africa wasn’t always the flourishing, technologically advanced continent it is today, gradually filling up with universities, skyscrapers, and international refugees. And Antarctica, believe it or not, was once uninhabited and completely covered in ice. Now, like China and Africa, it houses the world’s tech capitals and attracts a fair share of tourists. “The Republic and the Colonies have such pathetic tech in comparison,” Kaede adds. “I’d like to visit Antarctica someday. Supposed to be gorgeous.”
She tells me the United States used to be one of those superpowers. “Then came the war,” Kaede adds, “and all their top thinkers literally fled for higher ground. Antarctica caused the flooding, y’know. Things were already going downhill, but then the sun went haywire and melted all the Antarctic ice. Flooding like you and I couldn’t even imagine. Millions dropped dead from the temperature changes. Now that must’ve been a spectacle, yeah? The sun reset itself eventually, but the climate never did. All that freshwater mixed up with seawater and nothing’s been the same since.”
“The Republic never talks about any of this.”
Kaede rolls her eyes. “Oh, come on. It’s the Republic. Why would they?” She points toward one small monitor in the corner that seems to be broadcasting news headlines. “You wanna see what the Republic is like from a foreigner’s perspective? Here.”
When I pay closer attention to the headlines, I realize that the voiceover is in a language I can’t understand. “Antarctican,” Kaede explains when I glance questioningly at her. “We’re feeding in one of their channels. Read the captions.”
The screen shows an aerial view of a continent, with the text REPUBLIC OF AMERICA hovering over the land. A woman’s voice narrates, and right at the bottom of the screen is a running marquee of her translated words: “—to find new ways of negotiating with this heavily militarized rogue state, especially now that the transition of power to the Republic’s new Elector is complete. African president Ntombi Okonjo proposed a halt today to the United Nations’ aid for the Republic until there is enough evidence of a peace treaty between the isolationist country and its eastern neighbor—”
Isolationist. Militarized. Rogue. I stare at the words. To me, the Republic had been portrayed as the epitome of power, a ruthless, unstoppable military machine. Kaede grins at the expression on my face as she finally leads us away from the monitors. “Suddenly the Republic doesn’t seem so powerful, does it? Puny little secretive state, groveling for international aid? I’m telling you, Day—all it takes is one generation to brainwash a population and convince them that reality doesn’t exist.”
We walk over to a table with two slim comps sitting on it. The young man hovering over one of the computers is the same guy who’d flashed Kaede a V sign on the railroad tracks, the one with dark skin and light eyes. Kaede taps him on the shoulder. He doesn’t react right away. Instead, he types a few last lines into whatever’s on the screen and then slides into a sitting position on the table. I catch myself admiring his grace. A Runner for sure. He crosses his arms and waits patiently for Kaede to introduce us.
“Day, this i
s Pascao,” she says to me. “Pascao’s the undisputed leader of our Runners—he’s been eager to meet you, to put it lightly.”
Pascao holds out a hand to me, his pale eyes fixed intensely on mine. He gives me a brilliant white smile. “A pleasure,” he says in an excited, breathless rush. His cheeks flush red as I smile back at him. “Suffice it to say we’ve all heard a great deal about you. I’m your biggest fan. Biggest fan.”
I don’t think anyone’s ever flirted with me so blatantly before, except maybe a boy I remember from Blueridge sector. “Nice to meet another Runner,” I reply, shaking his hand. “I’m sure I’ll pick up some new tricks from you.”
He gives me a devilish grin when he sees how flustered I look. “Oh, you’ll like what’s coming. Believe me, you won’t be sorry for joining up with us—we’re gonna usher in a whole new era for America. The Republic won’t know what hit it.” He goes into a series of excited gestures, first spreading his arms wide and then pretending to untie knots in the air. “Our Hackers spent the last few weeks quietly rewiring things in Denver’s Capitol Tower. Now, all we have to do is twist a wire on any of the building’s speakers—and bam, we’re broadcasting to the entire Republic.” He claps once and snaps his fingers. “Everyone will hear you. Revolutionary, yeah?”
Sounds like a more elaborate version of what I did in the alley of the ten-second place, back when I first confronted June in an attempt to get plague cures for Eden. When I’d done a crude rewiring of the alley’s speakers. But to rewire a capital building’s speakers to broadcast to the entire Republic? “Sounds like fun,” I say. “What are we broadcasting?”
Pascao blinks at me in surprise. “The Elector’s assassination, of course.” His eyes dart to Kaede, who nods, and then he pulls a small rectangular device from his pocket. He flips it open. “We’re gonna need to record all the evidence, every last detail as we drag him out of his car and put some bullets in him. Our Hackers will be ready to go at the Capitol Tower, where they’ve set up the JumboTrons to broadcast the assassination. We’ll declare our victory over the speakers to the entire Republic. Let’s see them try and stop that.”