The French rebels were nicknamed Jacques, usually spelled Jax.
“I—I don’t know,” stammered Chevie. “The fever comes and goes. Antibiotics are what I need, that’s all.”
Suddenly Clover Vallicose was in her face. “Antibiotics? There are soldiers dying for the Blessed Colonel right now. Lying on foreign slag heaps, watching their life’s blood splash onto unhallowed rocks, and you think their medicine should be diverted into your worthless veins? Is that what you think, Savano?”
Chevie ground her teeth to keep herself from collapsing. “No, Sister. Of course not. Heroes of the Empire should always take priority. Any one of us cadets would be proud to lay down our lives for them.”
Witmeyer laughed, then finger-ticked an imaginary box. “Straight out of the manual, but well remembered under pressure.” She nodded at the cadet. “Now get ready, Cadet; the director is waiting.”
Chevie shuddered. She could not help it.
Director Waldo Gunn.
A hero of Box’s War, awarded the Empire Cross. For thirty years the director had endured working undercover in Provence. Director Gunn was a true believer and a master assassin—who resembled nothing more than a diminutive, kindly grandfather.
Look at the hands, the other cadets whispered as he passed in the corridor. They are darker than the rest of his skin, stained red by Jax blood.
Chevie had only seen Director Gunn in person as he strode the academy corridors on Box’s business, surrounded by committee members and his personal guard, a phalanx of pistoning legs and swinging arms.
I have never seen his hands.
Forget Director Gunn’s hands. Get dressed, Cadet, Chevie told herself. Your life is at stake.
Chevie hurriedly zipped up her regulation navy jumpsuit and high boots, tugging on a peaked cap emblazoned with a golden Boxite Youth Academy symbol. She stepped smartly past Vallicose and into the dorm.
The Thundercats marched Chevie Savano down the academy’s long corridor, their boots drawing creaks and groans from floorboards that had long since sprung their pegs. The dormitory’s other cadets were concealed behind drawn curtains, and the only significant sounds besides boots and boards were the occasional whimper of someone with night terrors and the background drone of Colonel Clayton Box’s collected speeches, which were piped through the sound system twenty-four hours a day.
The corridor was a hundred feet long, the length of what had once been four joined but separate terraced houses on Farley Square in Bloomsbury. Through the sash windows Chevie saw the steel edges of the Blessed Colonel’s pyramidal mausoleum, and the crimson laser glint from the all-seeing-eye mounted on its peak.
Like Sauron, thought the second Chevie, who was hiding inside the mind of the first one. Traitor Chevie, as she had named the mind disease that was determined to get her killed.
Sauron?
What is a Sauron?
The door to Director Gunn’s office was conspicuously plain, in stark contrast to the wall in which it sat. The wall was decorated with a heroic mural depicting the second round of Boxstrike, when the United States, the British Isles, and mainland Europe were brought forcibly under angels’ wings. The style was typical of the Empire, with muscled figures in profile, and fans of crepuscular sun rays. The door was a simple wooden panel, adorned with nothing more than faded blue paint.
This door had been Director Gunn’s only modification to the building when he took office. A door transported from the guesthouse in France where Waldo Gunn had poached Jax information and personnel for all those years.
How many now dead men have touched that doorknob? wondered Chevie as she paused before knocking.
Witmeyer poked her with a gloved finger. “Are you nervous, sweetie? Is that it?”
Chevie bit her lip and nodded. It was true, she was more nervous than she could remember being. In fact, she was bordering on frantic.
I am at war with myself, she realized. How could a person win that fight?
She flexed her fingers to stop their shaking, then once more reached toward the door.
“Enter, Cadet,” came the commanding voice from within.
The director knows I’m here, thought Chevie. It’s true what they say: Waldo Gunn has the sight.
Sure, the sight, sneered Traitor Chevie. Or a camera over the door.
Chevie curled her fingers into a fist, then stuffed it in her mouth to stifle the sob. They would execute her in the yard if she could not control herself. They would ask for volunteers from the ranks of her own class to shoot her.
Remember DeeDee.
Deirdre Woollen, her dearest friend since first grade, had been hauled out of class, interrogated for two days, and then executed. And all because Deirdre had been discovered unsupervised in the director’s study while the war maps were on display.
She was a Jax spy, they’d whispered in the dorms. Gathering intelligence.
DeeDee a spy?
Chevie had been shocked.
Shocked because DeeDee was dumber than plankton, Traitor Chevie whispered in her ear. DeeDee was your friend, but she couldn’t gather enough intelligence to spell c-a-t. Deirdre Woollen probably got herself turned around while searching for the bathroom, and Gunn shot her for it.
It was true, Chevie knew, but she couldn’t allow herself to think it, in case she talked in her sleep.
Sister Witmeyer knuckled Chevie’s skull. “You have been summoned.”
Chevie found the courage to grasp the doorknob and turn it, and as she walked into the office, she heard Traitor Chevie in her mind.
You better let me out of here, Cadet, because if you don’t, neither of us is leaving this room alive.
Please, thought Chevie. Please be quiet.
The director’s office was long and narrow with a red carpet stretching down the center like the tongue of some gigantic animal. Director Waldo Gunn was a fan of the art of homodermy—a special type of taxidermy—and the stuffed and preserved corpses of notable academy martyrs lined the walls. Chevie knew that the waxy, rouged cadavers were a testament to the dedication of these graduates, but secretly she thought that she would rather be burned to ashes and forgotten forever than end up as a lifeless sentry in this room. Chevie kept her eyes front and tried not to feel the frosty gaze of the Empire’s heroes on her shoulder blades.
The director was seated at his desk, and from ten feet away Chevie could smell the aroma of must and garlic that traveled with him like a personal cloud.
Being a committee member had its privileges, among them smelling however the hell you felt like.
He stinks, said Traitor Chevie. Somebody power-hose that guy.
Director Gunn had been tapping a stylus on a Boxnet tablet, and he suddenly stopped, almost as though Chevie had spoken aloud.
Oh no, thought Chevie. Oh no.
Director Gunn seemed elfin behind the large desk, with his too large head and pinhole blue eyes peering out above a faceful of gray beard.
“Did you speak, Cadet Savano?”
The voice was curiously low. For some reason, Chevie had always expected it to be higher.
“No, sir, Director. I don’t think so. Not that I know of.”
Gunn sighed. “‘I don’t think so’? ‘Not that I know of’? These blurtings of yours are why you stand before me today.”
“Exactly, Director,” confirmed Witmeyer, who, along with her partner, had followed Chevie inside.
“Umfh, Director,” muttered Clover Vallicose.
Chevie started, surprised to find the Thundercats at her shoulders.
Silent assassins.
Gunn leaned back in his antique chair with its turned-down armrests.
“Come closer, Chevron. Stand before me.”
Chevie walked forward in a daze, her progress halted by the bang of her thighs on the desk’s rim. She noticed her own
photograph displayed on the tablet’s screen. The director had been reviewing her file.
Gunn sighed again. “You showed such promise, Savano. Such aptitude….But now…”
The director set down the pad and intertwined his tiny, hairy fingers in his lap.
Hobbit! shouted Traitor Chevie in her head. Hobbit. HOBBIT. HOBBIT.
It was silent, but somehow deafening. Chevie felt a line of sweat trace her brow.
“I am aware, Director, that the past few months have been disappointing…”
“Disappointing?” huffed Clover Vallicose. “Catastrophic.”
“All of these bewildering outbursts,” continued Waldo Gunn. “These strange terms. FBI, what is the FBI?”
“I…I don’t know, Director.”
“And yet you used these letters to describe our academy.”
Chevie couldn’t even remember this specific outburst, though the letters did seem familiar.
“And in history class you shouted, ‘Tell it to Oprah!’ What is OPRA? The Oriental People’s Republican Army, perhaps?”
Chevie shook her head helplessly. “It’s not me, Director. I don’t say these things.”
“Oh, you say them. The question is why.”
“She’s a spy,” said Vallicose bluntly. “A Jax spy sent to sow confusion.”
Chevie flashed back to how DeeDee’s face had looked before the bullet struck her. She had seemed a hundred years old.
“I am no spy, Director,” she said. “I may be ill. A tumor, maybe, or a virus, but I am no spy. I love the Empire. I would die for the flag.”
A huge Empire flag hung on the wall behind Gunn, perhaps the most recognizable image in the world: a gold circle, and inside the circle a 3-D box, the lower rear horizontal and forward right vertical rendered thicker to form a cross.
This is all wrong, thought Traitor Chevie, brain-shuddering at the very sight of the image.
Director Gunn spun the pad absently on the desktop, puffs of mildew rising from his sleeve.
“You love the Empire, Cadet?”
“Absolutely, Director. With my body and soul.”
“And do you know the Empire, Savano? Do you realize the sacrifices this empire has demanded of the faithful?”
History questions, thought Chevie. I have a chance.
“I do,” she said. “Chapter and verse.”
Director Gunn hmmed. Cadet Savano had set herself a challenge.
“What do you know of the Blessed Colonel, Clayton Box?”
An easy one.
“Colonel Box. A god who came among us to scorch sin from the earth.”
Gunn waved a testy hand. “Yes, yes, yes. Any child with a cereal box knows this. You are a cadet. What is your understanding of the Revolution?”
Chevie frowned; this was a loaded question. Director Gunn was asking for her take on the Revolution. He wanted her to summarize, and summaries often included opinions, and opinions could get a person killed.
Chevie spoke slowly, taking her time, trying to ignore the hulking Thundercats breathing beast-like in each ear, waiting for the order to pounce.
“The world was in chaos. The empires of man were vast and cruel. Millions of souls perished through ignorance, cruelty, want.”
“But more important than the perishing?” said Gunn in a voice that seemed too deep for his miniature frame.
Take it easy, Bilbo, thought Traitor Chevie. I’m getting there.
“More important than the dying bodies were the lost souls. People were dying in vast numbers without enlightenment. God decided that He could no longer suffer this, so He appeared on earth in the form of Colonel Box to build a New Albion that would be a shining example of virtue to the world.”
“And how did the colonel plan to build this New Albion?”
“He recruited his disciples, the first Thundercats.”
Traitor Chevie couldn’t swallow this. It’s a spiel. A hoax, a joke. The whole world is being conned. Box was a rogue soldier. I remember the file.
The effort of keeping these blasphemies inside forced beads of sweat through the skin of Chevie’s brow.
“For thirty long years, Colonel Box and his disciples went into the catacombs below London, where they communed with the souls of the faithful and slowly built the colonel’s machines. When they returned from the underworld on Emergence Day, Colonel Box ordered his men to launch the first missiles at the Houses of Parliament, Windsor Castle, and the naval port of Portsmouth. Most of the government and monarchy got their just deserts in less than an hour, and it took little more than a day for Colonel Box to arm his legion of London poor folk and take the capital. Within a month, Britain was completely given over to the colonel. The reign of man was at an end. Colonel Box set the arms factories in Sheffield to building the great ballistic missiles that the colonel had designed, and in under a year, after the second round of Boxstrike, the earth once more belonged to the righteous.”
Traitor Chevie brain-snorted. London poor folk? Criminals, more like.
Director Gunn nodded; so far, Chevron Savano was on track. “The transition period was not without its hiccups, was it? Some problems are too small to be solved with missiles.”
“No, sir. There was opposition. Those who denied the colonel were publicly hanged all along Swingers’ Row by…”
Chevie’s train of thought ground to a halt.
Gunn was on her like a grizzled tomcat on a cornered mouse.
“Publicly hanged by who?”
Chevie could feel the Thundercats shifting at her shoulders.
Who? Who was the hangman?
“Surely you remember, Cadet. After all, the entire war is known as the Hangman’s Revolution. A little irreverent, perhaps, but cleansing was essential. The Hangman is one of our most honored saints. Beatified by the colonel himself. His portrait is on the wall in front of you, for heaven’s sake.”
Listen to this guy, said Traitor Chevie. He believes his own bull. Box granted sainthood to an executioner. That’s like a monster pinning a medal on a troll.
Chevie gazed at the portrait, hoping for inspiration, and an image flashed in her mind’s eye. The wiry man from the painting but holding a tattooist’s needle, the cracks in his nails traced with ink. She gave voice to the image without thinking about it.
“The tattooist,” she blurted. “Anton Farley the tattooist. He was the hangman.”
Gunn jumped to his feet, slamming his palms on his desk.
The director’s hands are red! Chevie saw. Red with Jax blood.
“Farley the tattooist!” he roared.
Roared? Really? said blasphemous Chevie. That’s more like a bleat.
“Shut up!” said real-world Chevie. “Just shut up.”
Gunn fixed her with his blazing eyes. “Shut up? You would…Do you know who I am?”
“Hobbit!” shouted Chevie. “Hobbit…Hobbit…HOBBIT!”
The Thundercats moved, each grabbing one of Chevie’s shoulders.
I have so had enough of these guys, thought Traitor Chevie, the silent killer, the betrayer.
If the Thundercats had been expecting resistance, they would have fared better; but Cadet Chevron Savano had only proven to be a middling combatant at best. And, in any event, the particular moves she used now had never been taught in the academy.
Chevie took Witmeyer first, spinning under the Thundercat’s outstretched arm and jabbing her kidney with four straight fingers. Continuing the pirouette, Chevie bent Vallicose’s knee with a powerful kick, then turned back to Witmeyer, who seemed bemused to be in intense pain. Chevie grabbed the warrior nun’s splashback visor and yanked it downward until their faces were level.
“Hi,” said Chevie, in a tone that was somehow more shocking than the assault, then she punched Witmeyer in the nose. Chevie could never put the Thundercat down with
force alone, but pain was distracting Witmeyer, which gave Chevie a chance to snag her weapon and cover Vallicose as the warrior nun reached for the buzz baton on her hip.
“Leave it, Miley,” Chevie ordered, flicking off the pistol’s safety. Then she nodded to Vallicose. “You too, Gaga.”
Inside, Cadet Chevie was wailing in terror.
What?
Did the Traitor teach me to fight?
How else could I have attacked Thundercats?
The Traitor has damned me to hell.
Miley?
Gaga?
Of course the most dangerous person in the room had been forgotten, as her brain erroneously assigned him the role of least dangerous person in the room. This had been the secret of his success in France. Director Gunn scrabbled onto the desk, hefted his tablet computer, and bashed Chevie across the skull.
Cadet Savano toppled in angular sections, and as unconsciousness drew its slow curtains across her senses, the last thing she heard was Gunn’s sarcastic voice.
“My most feared Thundercats laid low by a helpless girl. Perhaps you two are not as formidable as you think, eh, Moley and Googoo?”
Ha, thought Traitor Chevie. Moley and Googoo? Hobbit be stoopid.
Then both Chevies were lost in the dark.
A guy walks into a bar and says to the barman: “Gimme one whiskey for myself and ten billion for all my possible alternate selves.”
—Professor Charles Smart
ORIENT THEATRE, HOLBORN, LONDON, 1899
Now our story migrates, following the curve of Professor Smart’s wormhole, emerging in the Victorian Era, where three million souls fuss and sprawl on the banks of the Thames, Fleet, and Lea. Where the sky is black with Machine Age pollution that would choke a Pompeii donkey. Where life is cheap and death is gratis. And if this prose seems overly soused in bleakness, let me remind you that we have not even touched on the great slums, where rendered fat is considered a culinary delicacy and the chief distraction for the legions of red-knuckled, soot-faced orphans is a brisk game of rat-hunt.
But we will not tarry in these quagmires of deprivation, for our tale entices us elsewhere. We follow the riffle of crow tail feathers across the patchwork rooftops of Soho and Mayfair toward Holborn, dipping through the majestic spans of its viaduct and hovering above a chalked sidewalk that proclaims in footstep-smudged capital letters that the grand reopening of the Orient Theatre takes place on this very day. In truth, the phrase grand reopening seems a trifle hyperbolic given the dilapidated state of the building beyond, but exaggerated claims are the essence of theater, are they not? The public demands embellishment. Superlatives only, if you please. Sopranos are incomparable. Comic turns are invariably sidesplitting (only clowns can offer mutilation as an endorsement), and magicians are occasionally magnificent, often incredible, and without exception great.