WE WAIT FOR THE LIGHTS to come on again. As ever lately, I feel the thousand pinpricks of eyes on me, the way people look at me as if I were different. As if I had a grotesque deformity, only in reverse.
I tell Solon I’m heading out for a walk.
It’s true that my blood and DNA run in their veins now, and that’s why they will live past the next spring. Who can blame them? But I didn’t ask for this. It was Wash who was supposed to be the leader, not me. I just wanted to hang around with Donna forever if possible.
These days I have had the oddest sense that I am in a movie she is watching, and assessing myself through her eyes, my words and actions shaped by her imaginary gaze. She would tell me that I had finally got what I wanted, a new society, Utopia, and I had made my bed, and now I had to sleep in it.
And what if we do pull it off, and the Doc is signed? How long do we have to set up the city-state of Newest York before they send in the marines?
One thing at a time. One lie woven into the fabric of the truth and then another, and I’ll be clean.
What about Theo? What if I can’t convince him to toe the line? I have a brief sickly feeling that Chapel will silence him permanently. Then my mind rejects it. The Resistance can’t save us with one hand and kill us with the other, can it?
Once, I started a journal. The problem was that it was impossible for me to figure out to whom or for whom I was writing it. So everything came out wrong. I would find myself writing in some high-flown style, like people whose diaries have been published, historically and culturally relevant people. Important people, or rather, “important” people. It didn’t really suit trips to Starbucks and pickup basketball. And I found myself hiding things. Stupid things I did and said, masturbation, rejections, whatever. Which was odd, because I never expected anyone to read it except me. I thought maybe I was crafting a persona for my future self to take at face value. But eventually I realized that I actually did see other people reading the journal in the future, as though I were going to be important, or “important,” or famous down the line. I was burnishing my credentials for those imaginary people, making a résumé for eternity. The idea was ridiculous, of course, since I knew that people who end up being famous or important don’t write adolescent journals with an eye toward posterity. And as a Buddhist, I saw the whole thing was preposterous, a hanging-on to a past that manifestly didn’t exist for display to a future that didn’t exist. It got me twisted in my head in a neurotically recursive way that Donna would point out was very me.
But now I think maybe what I am doing here will be important. It will be something for the history books. It is history. And that makes me a historical figure, I guess. What does that mean to me? Does it make me happy? I will need to figure that out.
Night has risen, and I can see an almost-round silvery moon above the blocky patchwork of building silhouettes. I hear a commotion from the Security Council chamber. Maybe the lights have come on. But no, the corridor is still dark. Then, angry shouts, screams, a sharp report of gunfire.
Something’s wrong.
It can’t fall to pieces now—not when we are so close—
I head back inside and toward the Council chamber, jogging and then running as the level of noise rises, the sound of a hornets’ nest.
I round a corner, and suddenly I am falling, sprawling to the floor, tasting a cocktail of worn institutional carpet and blood. The orbit of my eye sings out in pain. I gather myself and look up and—
A vulpine tween face looks down at me from behind the business end of a machine gun.
It’s one of the feral kids from Plum Island. But it can’t be. He must be dead; he must be far away.
For a moment, I wonder if I am in a cell somewhere in the lab and I have hallucinated everything since, and then the reality of the corridor and the sounds beyond anchor me in the here and the now.
“Hi, Jeff!” says a girl, willowy and blond like the boy. “Remember us?”
So they’ve come to kill me.
But the boy lifts his gun. “You better come with,” he says.
“For your own safety,” the girl says, and giggles.
I push myself to my knees, spit the blood out of my mouth. “Why?”
“Because the poo-poo just hit the fan,” says the girl. “You’re in big trouble, Jefferson. Don’t you know it’s wrong to lie?”
Down, around, down, down, into the guts of the building, as deep as it is tall. Out of the clad interiors of bureaucracy to the raw concrete and grit of the organs that used to keep the place going. And still, from above, I can hear a hornets’ nest buzz.
The boy sees me listening. “Know what that is? They’re looking for you. Gonna tear you apart if they find you.”
The girl switches on a headlamp, and we feel our way farther in the dark until we come to a metal door. She pushes it open. Some Coleman lanterns and flashlights point out spare things in the blackness.
Peter is cradling Brainbox’s head on his lap, his pants leg soaked with blood. His shirt pressed to a bloody wound in Brainbox’s side.
“I found him like this,” he says.
“Who did it?” I ask.
“Your friend Chapel,” says a familiar voice.
I turn and squint. And there is Kath. Every bit as real and beautiful as the day she died.
“Surprised to see me?” she says. I can’t muster up an answer. “Of course you are. You thought I was dead, right? That’s why you left me alone on a fucking slab, right?”
“Yes, I thought you were dead,” I say.
“Well, I’m not.” She smiles. “Good news for you, I guess, since I’m gonna get you out of this shitstorm you created. Somebody busted you, pal. And people aren’t too happy with you up there.” She gestures up toward the hornets’ nest.
“You know,” I say.
“Yeah, I know,” she says. “Looking forward to a nice vacation in Saint-Tropez. But first we better go. Sounds like Theo has done his job up there.”
“Theo told them.”
“Yep.”
“You helped him?”
She shrugs. “I guess. I dunno. Was that wrong? I think your buddies in the Resistance—nice name by the way, good marketing—were going to kill him.”
My mind is tumbling on the details, a lock not quite opening. And as ever, unbidden, the consciousness of Kath’s beauty, undoing sense.
“Chapel,” says Brainbox from the floor. “He has the football.”
Peter looks up at me, distraught. “He keeps saying that. He’s delirious.”
“I’m not delirious, you idiot,” he says. “The codes. He’s got the codes for the nukes.”
“What nukes?”
“I don’t believe it,” says Peter. “He wouldn’t… he wouldn’t…”
“So I guess that explains why the Resistance gave a shit about us, right?” Kath smiles an impish smile, the look of the always-let-down.
The enormity of it hits me. Chapel’s recruiting of likely pawns—like me—planned from the beginning. A convenient posse of dupes to get him where he needed to go. His insistence on hiding the truth from the Harlemites. The use of the UN and the Gathering as a distraction.
Playing to my idealism and my vanity.
I feel a thousand feet deep in the truth, crushed by the pressure. Worst of all—my conceit, my need to dream up a future. Above, all of that is falling to ruin. One part of Chapel’s story wasn’t a lie—they will crush one another stampeding to the exit for the old world.
But first, they’ll kill me. And my friends.
Was there a Resistance at all? Or had that been a little drama arranged to get us back to the city and maneuver us to the prize? The answer has gone wherever Chapel has gone.
I lean over to catch my breath. Collapse to my knees.
From Brainbox, the most unlikely of sounds. A laugh.
I wonder if, finally, the membrane of his sanity has parted.
“Don’t worry,” he says.
“What’s not to worry about?” says Kath.
“Chapel can’t fire the nukes,” he says. “Not without this.”
He holds up a device that looks like an overlong cell phone or a slender satellite phone. Glossy black numbers.
“The biscuit,” says Brainbox. “Wired to the dead-man’s switches at NORAD.”
“Sneaky, Brainbox,” says Kath.
Brainbox musters a shrug, even in his blasted state.
“But the briefcase is gone. He’s got the codes,” adds Peter.
“So do I,” says Brainbox.
“How?” I ask.
“Helps to have a good memory.”
“Brainbox, are you saying you can stop a nuclear war?”
He smiles again. “Or start one. That is… if I make it. I’m afraid Chapel shot me in the guts.”
Silence.
“Well, this is fun,” says Kath. “Now, if you don’t mind, I think we better leg it out of here ahead of the lynch mob. Sooner or later, they’re going to find us. There has to be a security exit to the FDR Drive, right?”
“Chapel—”
“Will have to wait,” says Kath. “First we survive.”
She’s right. Peter and I help Brainbox up, and we stumble through the darkness, looking for a way out.