9

Legion

Malka Older

Brayse pushes open the door without knocking, and the two women inside, who had been locked in quick conversation, turn on him, their eyebrows identically clenched above furious eyes. Unusual: his familiar face and aura of desirability are enough to make most people happy to see him, especially when they’re sitting in his green room about to come on his talk show. He’s only here, taking time out of his prep routine to try to make them feel more comfortable, get any of the celebrity-meeting jitters out off camera, for fuck’s sake.

Brayse focuses his attention on the younger woman, dark braid naively long down her back. She’s his guest; he recognizes her from about a week ago when she accepted the Nobel Peace Prize along with five others. They tried to remain nameless, which shows how innocent they are in this intrusive age; it didn’t last long. She’s still requested he avoid using her name, as if that mattered. “Welcome, we’re so pleased to have you here. I’m Brayse Merittson,” And I’m not afraid to say my name. “I’m looking forward to speaking with you on set shortly.”

He holds his hand out and she evades it with the gesture that had become common during the pandemic, so she’s one of those. Brayse puts his hand away and returns her nod, making sure to widen his smile as he turns slightly to include the older woman in the conversation (such as it is).

“Is there anything I can tell you before we start? Do you want to talk about what we’ll discuss, or . . .”

“All of that was covered in the contract,” the older woman says. “Go away.”

Brayse smiles, though neither of the women is looking at him now. “Sure, sure. I’ll go read the clause in the contract that someone else negotiated instead of”—neither of them is paying attention to him anymore, either; they are talking to each other in their own language, right over or maybe under him—“getting to know the person I’m about to interview on some kind of friendly basis,” he pulls out of the doorway, closing the door behind him, probably totally unnoticed, “then maybe enjoying a cup of coffee and putting myself in a good mood for the show. Sure. Fantastic way to get the interviewer on your side.” He shakes his head, walking back down the corridor. “Jer,” he says to the air in front of him, tapping the part of his wrist screen that opened intercom to his assistant, “find me the contract provisions for this one for me to review, ta.” He turns into his office, which is about half the size of the greenroom—the show sometimes booked bands or other groups—but he stocks much better alcohol than they offer the guests. He pours himself a shot of tequila and goes through the bullet points that legal prepped for him.

There aren’t, actually, many provisions about topics he can’t ask about; why didn’t they just say that? Especially the lawyer or manager or whoever it was who dismissed him so brusquely. Wasn’t that her job, to talk him through this? Protect her client so her client didn’t have to protect herself?

Well, if they couldn’t even bother to smile when he greeted them, fry ’em. This interview was supposed to be a score: the first given by anyone verifiably connected to Legion, the first since the Nobel Prize was announced. Now it looked like it was going to be a slog. Brayse’s job, as he sees it, is to entertain his viewers while being both aspirationally witty and accessibly likable. He prefers to be on the same team with his interviewees, but it’s not strictly necessary. And maybe Legion should face a little criticism, after all the adulation. He sips the remainder of his drink and heads to the studio, stretching his smile muscles and exercising his voice box as he goes.

The glass-walled streaming studio is a few feet underwater, allowing for natural light and cooling. For a long time Brayse had thought that was what the word streaming derived from, until he said so once and his producer, Lana, laughed at him and told him that it was much older than that design. But she’s old, so of course she would know something like that.

Brayse settles into his chair, specially designed for him the way he likes it—if guests prefer more lumbar support they just have to lump it—adjusts his scarf, and settles into his on-air face. The countdown light flashes. He lets his mind run gently through what’s coming up, but thinking of his guest he sees again that hard stare from her and her manager when he entered the room, as though they hated him. What the fuck did he ever do to them?

The show starts with a quick memetage of current events, different every day, although some would repeat over the course of a week or a month as stories developed, and there is always one related to the current guest. The meme team puts it together, along with the prefabs for Brayse’s use throughout the show, and he mostly ignores it. With nothing happening in the studio the EYES, too, sit quiescent on their strategic perches, but Brayse knows that, despite their inert appearance, they are always recording. He’s used to it, and keeps his face intent, alert, the man the audience would want to see unobserved.

That also means that when his wrist vibrates to let him know he’s on he can ease into the figurative spotlight, rather than animating suddenly as though someone had flipped a switch. “Welcome,” Brayse says, to millions of unseen watchers. He is intimate and alluring, he prides himself on it. He doesn’t have to overemote, unlike his predecessors in the days of poor resolution and distant screens; he’s as close as they want him to be, or closer. “In this hour”—day or night, depending on where people are watching from live or if they catch the recording—“we have quite an important matter to discuss, as we present the first interview with one of the architects of the controversial Legion app.”

There’s a snort in his ear from Lana. “You didn’t like her, huh?”

Brayse hates it when she chitchats at him during the show, but she refuses to give up her access (as if he would ever, ever go off the rails; as if she could stop him if he did; as if she’s in charge of him) and this time, instead of irritation, he represses a smirk. Lana might catch it, but fuck her. The audience might be influenced by it without noticing, which is all to the good for the dynamic he wants to set up.

Three of the EYES swoop down to hover by the doorway and offer multiple perspectives on the guest’s entrance, but the rest stay on Brayse, where they belong, and he knows at least some of his viewers are watching his bright, even teeth smile instead of the small, dark woman who walks in and takes her seat.

“Welcome, welcome,” he says. “We’re so pleased to have you on and hear about Legion. Especially since the Nobel Peace Prize, I know you’ve had a lot of attention, and we’re looking forward to the inside story of the innovation that has affected so many people.” He shifts his gaze, just slightly, so that his smile will connect with the EYES, the viewers, instead of with her, since she doesn’t seem to care about it anyway.

She doesn’t know to do that, keeps her eyes fixed on him, and he calibrates her skill at engaging with the audience down another notch. Don’t overdo it, Brayse reminds himself: winning plays well with the audience, bullying less so. Unless he can really convince them that it’s deserved, but they didn’t see that look in the greenroom, and Legion has been getting an awful lot of great press, even if some of his audience are probably (and rightly) suspicious of it.

“First,” she says, with the precision of a nonnative speaker (And why doesn’t she rely on an auto-interpreter? These people are so precious), “I must stress that our Legion is a collaborative project. No individual is responsible, certainly not myself.”

Brayse hates this false modesty, so he goes hard sooner than he had planned, and he does it smiling and nodding. “I’m sure that being thought of as responsible for it could be a dangerous position, as it’s still very controversial. There are a lot of people who aren’t so pleased with the idea that—”

She interrupts him, which is annoying but probably worse for her than for him, in the eyes of the viewers. “Our Legion is not for pleasing people. In fact, it is so that we do not need to care whether people are pleased, ever again. And our Legion is why it is not dangerous for me to be known, just disingenuous, because we should all get the credit.”

He chuckles, ready to respond with something, but she goes on. “At the beginning it was dangerous, yes. Very.” She throws a prepared vid into the stream, or maybe her lawyer/manager does from offstage, because Brayse doesn’t notice her fiddling with anything. “At first we were unknown, so our risk was the same as everyone else’s. Which was of course very much higher than today.” There are a few monitors shining in Brayse’s peripheral vision, marked to be invisible to the EYES, so he can see what the viewers see, and without turning his gaze to watch directly he catches glimpses of what she’s showing them. He expected gore, bruised faces, and other aftermath of violence, but it looks like dataviz instead, colored dots appearing, swirling, compounding. “But then, there was press, there were media attacks and bot rallies. People learned what we were doing, while our community was still too small to be effective. There were . . .” She pauses, swallows. It’s masterfully done, in the midst of that calm discussion and the coolly parading dots representing abstract numbers; is it real, or is she better at this than he thought? “Gaps. Times when no one was watching, places no one could reach in time.”

“How terrible,” Brayse murmurs, because he has to, obviously. He shoots a quick look at the monitor, hoping the movement will be unnoticeable, but it is still showing impersonal dots, now diminishing to a sporadic line.

“Now, however, we are enough. We are always watching. We are protected and avenged.”

The triumph in her voice won’t play well. Brayse softens accordingly; he can be accommodating and helpful, garner admiration, and still win. “Tell us about the Nobel Peace Prize. Has it changed your life?”

She blinks at him. “No. What could it change?”

“Well, you’re here,” Brayse says, with his considerable charm, sweeping his arm around the glass bubble of a studio, the center point of attention for all those millions of watchers.

“But not because of the prize. You, and all the others, were asking us to talk to you long before that. If anything, the prize came because we were so popular. No, Legion changed my life.”

Right, right, nobody cares about being famous, that’s why they’re all desperate for it. “Tell us about that. How did it change your life?”

Again, she looks at him as though the question makes no sense; then her face changes a little, as though understanding. “Maybe you’ve never been afraid? Felt unsafe?”

Brayse flushes on-screen for the first time in years. “I’ve gotten death threats,” he says, chagrined at the edge to his voice, and forces himself to smile, look into the cameras of the nearest EYES. “Nothing to worry about, really, but I’ve been in a few ticklish situations.”

Lana snorts in his ear, which is totally unfair: sure, she’s seen all of the death threats and knows that show security has pronounced them all extremely unlikely to be based in reality as we know it, but she wasn’t there that time at the bar when the big man had pushed against his chest, repeating, I know who YOU are, I’ve seen you. Or at the after party when he’d dumped out his drink, afraid one of his rivals had poisoned it.

“Hm,” says the woman sitting beside him. “If it was nothing to worry about, it doesn’t sound like you were really frightened. But, if you were, then you can easily imagine how it would change everything to not be afraid anymore.”

He can’t. “So was it this fear that led you to develop Legion? Perhaps a specific experience you had?”

She turns a look on him, the same severe look that she and the older woman pinned him with in the green room. “That sounds prurient, Brayse,” she says, his name sounding overly familiar, or maybe that’s condescension. “Almost as if you get some pleasure from imagining me being hurt.” He’s too stunned to answer her, and is grateful that most of the EYES are directed at her intent little face instead of his. Hopefully Lana has the sense to keep them there. “Will it make you feel better about our winning the Nobel Peace Prize if you believe we suffered for it? Or do you just enjoy seeing people get hurt?” The EYES aren’t the only streaming cameras in the room. Brayse’s gaze is sucked as if by a vacuum to the Legion pins on her shirt, all of them watching him.

She sits back. “Perhaps it is not that. Perhaps you just have the mediatic desire for cause and effect.”

Brayse lets out his breath, wondering if all the Legionnaires watching are doing the same, releasing him from their unwavering crosshairs, deciding maybe he’s not the enemy after all. “It just seemed logical,” he says cautiously, and then pulls himself together. “What I mean is, we all want to know how this world-changing idea came about. If my guess was wrong, why don’t you tell us?”

“Nothing happened to me,” she says. “Nothing more than what happens to everyone. People called at me on the street, leaned into me when they were talking, touched my shoulder, my waist, my back, my leg, my cheek, when I didn’t want them to, hugged for too long, complained when I didn’t talk to them.” Her eyes bore into him again. “Are you thinking that is nothing to change the world over?”

He thinks it’s rhetorical at first but she waits. Lana is winding up her growl on his earphones and his own honed fear of dead air is screaming at him, but he doesn’t want to fall into her trap, he’s already struggling far more than he should be, so instead of comforting conversational noises he decides to go slow and snide. “I wouldn’t say thaaaat,” he drawls. “But surely, with all the critically urgent problems facing the world . . .”

“I was supposed to be solving critically urgent global problems,” she spits, sounding angry for the first time. “Yes! I have degrees in engineering and marine biology. I was part of a special program working on aspects of climate change. I worked with social scientists and climatologists, we had a government grant. My time was supposed to go to that. All of the intellectual and organizing power that was put into Legion was supposed to do that. I was supposed to do that. But you”—he doesn’t flinch this time, but it’s because she’s not talking to him, she’s sweeping her gaze across all the EYES—“you just couldn’t not hurt people, could you? Murder after murder after murder. Attack after attack. And so instead of quietly sitting in a lab, finding incremental and hard-won solutions to the extremely critical problem of saving our oceans, which is where I would rather be, I have to sit here and explain to you all not why killing people is wrong, because if you don’t know by now there is no point,” her eyes have come back to him, and he sweats beneath his tailored shirt, “but how we will prevent you from doing it again, or avenge ourselves if we are too late to prevent.”

Fuck this. Peace prize or no peace prize, he’s not going to let this half-grown girl push him around on his own set. “How very sad that you couldn’t follow your dreams. These murders you mention. Did they happen to someone you knew?”

She meets his gaze but answers with a touch of irritation. “Does it have to be someone I know to change my life? Or do I only need to recognize that person as someone I could have been? Or do I only have to recognize that person as a person?”

“It’s terrible, of course.” Brayse is straining to keep his voice mellifluous, isn’t sure if he’s overdoing it. He reminds himself that most of the viewers will be on his side. “But when we speak of global problems, and surely the Nobel is intended to be a global prize, well, at the end of the day, doesn’t Legion really only affect a certain segment of the population?” Some undefined shift in the quality of the silence in his earpiece makes him wonder if his producer might have a different view.

The young woman cocks her head at him. “Really? Doesn’t the Nobel often go to people who barter a peace between two small groups of people? I suppose calling it war makes a difference. But that’s not the more important point. Can you really believe that this change wrought by Legion doesn’t affect everyone?” She throws another vid; this one at least has faces. Some of them are easily recognizable: Fenella Verity, Luisa Poirier, Özge Tayler, Norentina Pék. Others have identification halos: Chief Justice of the Albanian Supreme Court; Founding Executive, Gravaspeck Corporation; journalist; aid worker; caregiver; inventor; therapist; mother; programmer; chef. “All of these people,” she says, “had an experience, which . . .” She keeps talking, but Brayse loses the thread a bit when he notices that these faces—yes, this vid is more appealing, it’s still just a bunch of random faces, okay?—have replaced his own on all the playback screens, which means that Lana gave the vid override to every streaming channel. Ugh. Definitely on her side. But of course she is.

“Some of them had their careers, their goals, their lives, endangered by a specific person who found ways to threaten them with impunity. Until Legion. For some of them, their activities were circumscribed by unsafe commutes. Others had been attacked and were, quite rationally, too terrified to participate in life. Some were attacked in their homes, and could not work or study because they had been driven onto the street or into precarious living conditions. Without Legion, none of these people would be where they are. We, all of us would be missing their contributions.” Brayse is somewhat skeptical of that counterfactual, because how could they know? But she’s still talking as the vid switches back to—yep—dataviz. He manages not to roll his eyes. “If that’s too anecdotal, we can see the correlation between Legion reaching critical mass in a country, and productivity and quality of life ratings both improving dramatically.”

She’s still talking, but Brayse is distracted by the sight of a diver outside the glass walls of the studio. That happens occasionally, but it’s pretty rare. As usual, this one is staring inside, as if they had come down to look at him instead of at whatever ocean life is still surviving out there. He has to quell an urge to wave violently at them to move along, and schools his smile into place again. “All very admirab—”

She interrupts him, again. “But of course, Legion does not only affect people indirectly. It affects people very directly as well. It affects everyone who would have been attacked, bothered, annoyed, insulted, injured, or killed if Legion wasn’t standing with them.” Brayse wants to look at the Legion buttons on her blouse and won’t let himself. “But it also affects the people who would have attacked, bothered, annoyed, insulted, or injured others if they weren’t afraid of who might see and who might answer. Those people’s lives are changed too. Surely you will agree with me that change is for the better?”

Her eyes are fixed on him with unseemly steadiness. That insanely intense look can’t be playing well. “Of course, it’s a wonderful thing, we all agree, and that’s why the Nobel is so well deserved.” He clears his throat, moving on to punch a few holes in this ridiculousness. “So if we put cameras everywhere, on everything, will we end all crime?”

“It’s not about the cameras.” Isn’t it though? He wants to scream it. How did the Nobel committee fall for this? “It’s about the community. The cameras just offer that community access.”

He raises an eyebrow. “So they should give me the Nobel Prize next year?” That might have sounded a little sour, so he ups the charm. “After all, I have cameras here too, and”—gracious smile, aimed at the EYES—“an amazing community in my audience.”

She doesn’t even give that the reaction pause it deserves. “You have cameras, yes; but will your audience fight for you?”

Brayse turns to the EYES more openly this time, grin widening. “Well? Will you?” Will they? Are they out there punching the air, or maybe looking for Legionnaires to prove something to?

The woman is looking at him severely, as if she can see what he’s imagining. “It’s true that our Legion improved a bit on existing technology. We took a tool of the oppressor—surveillance—sometimes offered as a sop to justice, as in police cameras, and adjusted it to work for us. But when people focus on what we’ve done with technology, they miss the point. Most of the work we have done is in building our community and our anger. We support each other, help each other, we find outlets for our anger and teach each other how to use it. The cameras are, are, the medium that lets us connect,” she is gesturing urgently with her hands as she talks, “lets us translate the power and need of our community in the fractured places where it interacts with violent, unfair, oppressive societies.”

He can’t remember his next talking point, which never happens to him. The diver has been joined by another, both peering into the well-lit studio. “So,” Brayse tries. It’s too early for this one, but he can always double back. “What’s next for you? That is to say, for the whole team at Legion?”

“Perhaps I’ll get back to saving our oceans,” she says, and then, when he stares at her, she cracks a smile. “I jest. Legion has changed the world, yes, but it has changed some parts of the world more than others. There are still countries that block us”—Of course they do, he thinks, what did you expect? And why shouldn’t they?—“and others that discourage our community in a myriad of ways, or attempt to minimize our communications. We are working on advocacy as well as legal challenges to make our Legion available and accessible to everyone. The Nobel Prize will of course be very helpful for that.”

“And coming on shows like this, naturally.” Brayse says it very smoothly. His earbud buzzes with silence. The woman across from him nods.

“Naturally,” she agrees. “That’s why I’m here. We are also working on a few extensions to, or specific applications, for the Legion model. For example, we are developing a function that will allow volunteers to watch your drink.”

“Your drink.”

“Can you imagine? Not having to watch your drink constantly when in a public place.” She lifts the glass of water by her chair, turns it, puts it down again with a smile, and goes on before he can comment. “Not having to finish a drink before going to use the bathroom.”

“I thought a colleague poisoned one of my drinks once,” Brayse feels compelled to say. He gives it the tone of a humorous anecdote.

“Had they?”

“Had they what?”

“Poisoned your drink.”

“I don’t know, I tossed it out.” He feels a bit silly, but flashes the charm at the EYES anyway.

“If you’ve been worried about the integrity of your drinks ever since then, you will find this upgrade useful,” she says seriously, and his face heats again. She really imagines he uses Legion?

“It was a very specific circumstance,” he says.

“Then you can imagine how much of a relief it would be for people among whom it is general. Really, I think it will be marvelous! We are also looking at options for dark places.”

“Dark . . . places . . . ?”

She straightens in her chair, setting up for a serious talk. “As you know . . .” This is going to be boring. His eyes drift to the walls. The divers are gone, and he relaxes a little. “. . . works through our community watching. We see, in real time and in remotely held recordings, the perpetrators. We see exactly what they do.” His eyes come back to hers, and she is doing that look again, the strong one, and he hates it. “Usually we see the full escalation. There is no hiding it, no argument. And with not one, or two, or three witnesses but thousands or tens of thousands, it is much harder to ignore, argue away, twist. It’s a technique we learned from the civil rights movement, from iterations from in-person bystanders through digital technology.” She pauses for breath. “But of course, if there is less visibility, our strength is diluted. If it is too dark to make out the attacker’s face, for example, or to trace the precise unfolding of subtle aggressions into devastating ones.” She tosses another vid. Brayse keeps his eyes resolutely on her face, but in his peripheral vision he gets a nauseating sense of undefined movement, pulse, obscured violence. It’s far more disturbing than the gory vids he had expected, but, he tells himself, maybe that’s just because he’s not watching directly. “We’re experimenting with high-powered lights on the buttons, with dye packs that can mark any attackers, and so on.”

As if fucking watching people all the time weren’t enough. “That seems like a significant step for you, doesn’t it? It’s one thing to watch, and another to stain someone’s skin. You’re moving from witnessing to acting.” She opens her mouth and he beats her to it, with some satisfaction. “But then, members of Legion do act, don’t they?” They are at the point in the interview where he can toughen a bit, it’s strategic, a choice. “In fact, you’ve been accused of vigilantism, even of mob violence.”

“The witnessing of our Legion doesn’t stop,” she says. Fuck, the divers are back, a small gaggle of them now, peering in. One of the EYES swoops around to take a look at them; some B-roll to remind people how fabulous the studio is, he supposes. “Any action taken by our community is likewise recorded and available. We hold ourselves accountable.”

“And some of your members have been convicted of assault themselves, haven’t they?”

“Some have,” she agrees. “But in each of those cases, the convictions were reduced due to the element of defense involved—”

“It’s not self-defense if you thump someone who’s in a fight with someone else!” His outrage about that breaks through his calm, but Brayse hates that argument, that silly sneaking justification.

“I didn’t say ‘self-defense,’” she responds, calmly, and Brayse hears Lana snicker in his earpiece. “But it is community defense. When someone is attacked out of nowhere, for no reason, and you help them to fight off their attacker, that is defense. Wouldn’t you help someone being attacked?” Depends on the someone, but saying that out loud won’t help him, and he bites it back. “In a just world with just laws none of them would have been punished, and if you doubt that you can watch the vids for yourself.”

“But this is why these other countries are blocking you, isn’t it? Because you take the law into your own hands.”

She is looking at him now as though she recognizes him, as though she knows him in some way beyond his public persona, which is impossible and a trick of her expression but he hates it anyway. She doesn’t know him. She barely even sees him. “We take our defense into our own hands.” Of course all those people in Legion are looking at him too, through her accoutrements. “If the State wants a monopoly on violence it’s also required to defend its citizens, all of them.” It’s not impossible that someone in that massive group might recognize him: might have seen him off-screen somewhere, might have seen him do something personal, secret, might have . . . participated. “Yes, there are countries that oppose us. They don’t want to be shown up for how they have failed, for years and decades and centuries, to protect their own. And of course there are always those who will fight any shift in power, decry any change. But since Legion began, not one person has been hurt by us who didn’t hurt someone first.”

“An eye for an eye then, is it?” Brayse asks. He can be cutting now, still time to pull everything into a feel-good package later. “Two wrongs making a right?”

“Legion,” she says, putting her finger down on the table between them. “Does. Not. Make. It. Right. It makes it harder for people to do wrong, but only because they are afraid of what might happen to them, or ashamed when they see their evil reflected in a million staring eyes. Maybe with time this will become more ingrained, that is what we hope. But Legion cannot fix the wrongs that have been done.”

She hasn’t answered the question. “Are you saying it doesn’t feel good when you see a mob beating up someone who—”

She cuts him off with a tut. “How I feel doesn’t matter. You were speaking of the law; shouldn’t laws be upheld? There is a long tradition of self-defense exceptions to laws against violence, and of people being allowed to defend their property and assets, sometimes to an extreme degree. This is communal self-defense, this is community enforcing the laws that most States have chosen to treat as secondary or unimportant. There is no incitement on Legion, no rallying speeches or instructions on how to make bombs or anything. Just witnesses. Witnesses who sometimes arrive to witness personally, to embody their presence. If they arrive to find the crime continuing, a person being attacked, of course they will try to stop that harm from being perpetrated.”

“That all sounds very good, but you cannot deny that Legion has changed the way people act, how they relate.”

“Of course it has! That’s what it’s meant to do. That’s why we were awarded the prize.”

Brayse inclines his head; it doesn’t matter, his viewers will know what he meant, they will be just as angry about this unnecessary change as he is.

What more can he say? He’s already done the What are you doing next?, which should have come more toward this end of the interview, but he got so muddled in the middle. “You say that you’re not the only one responsible for Legion, that there are many of you. How does that work? How did it start?”

“We are many. If we could have had twenty, fifty people here to talk to you, that would have been more realistic, but we looked at past occasions when you have had small groups as guests and even two or three does not work as well as one.” Brayse knows that criticism is of the format, not of him or of his show; he still doesn’t like it. “How it started . . . it started quite literally, physically, you know. It started as a way not to have to walk alone, to have physical accompaniment, witnesses even if they weren’t able to defend. And mostly they weren’t.” She looks down at her hands in her lap. Apparently she doesn’t have a vid to illustrate this. “It turns out that two people is better than one, but not by much. Three is not very different from two. We tried adding more and more, but of course it is inconvenient, not feasible, to have such large groups always available whenever someone needs, or wants, to, perhaps, walk to their job or university. Or exercise outside. Or take a bus to an appointment or go out to dinner or visit a park.” She takes a deep breath, as though the memory of those times oppresses her. “And we virtualized it. As I said, at the beginning, it was very bad. It did not make much difference, at the beginning. Because it is not enough for people to witness, it is not enough even to record the witnessing of crimes. The people with power have to care. And the people doing the crimes have to understand, accept, that the people with power care, and will eventually stop them.” Another deep breath. “It took a long time for our witnessing to overflow to the extent that both those conditions were met. But we have finally gotten there.”

It is the smugness when she says that, the utter complacency, that breaks him. Brayse leans forward, faux confidential. “You know,” he says, “in my circles, women don’t use Legion. Or if they do, they turn it off. And if they didn’t, it wouldn’t matter much. Famous people like us,” he says, “we’re used to being watched all the time. We’re used to being criticized for things out of context, unfairly. And mostly, people forgive us. Because we’re famous, and we’re famous for a reason.” He sits back. “But as I said, most women I meet don’t use Legion anyway.”

She looks at him steadily. “You think that. But we see you.”

There is a loud cracking thunk, so sudden that at first Brayse thinks it’s in his mind, a function of the surge of unfair fear he feels when she says that. He swings his head around in the direction it came from and sees one of the divers outside the studio raising their arm and swinging something heavy and metallic at the glass. The thunk this time has more cracking in it.

“Sir?” Someone is tugging at his arm. “Sir? We’re evacuating, this way please.” Brayse gets up, feeling detached from himself, swoopy and disembodied as though he were one of the EYES dancing around the jagged line in the glass. Is it sweating sea water? With a shudder Brayse snaps back into himself and turns to the access corridor. The woman he’s been talking to, who just threatened him, for fuck’s sake, is ahead of him, following someone from crew or security, he doesn’t know.

Is the studio collapsing? What is wrong with those nutters out there? They should make it out, it’s a short corridor to the surface, clearly they have procedures for emergencies, but his back itches with the thought of the ocean smashing through behind him. And what is going on? Are they anti-Legion activists, these divers? And if so, why the fuck couldn’t they wait until she was done with his show to vent their rage? Or—a cold spike through his gut—are they Legion? Are they after him? Through the confusion, Brayse thinks he hears Lana laughing in his earpiece. Was it her? Is she a member of Legion? It had never occurred to him as a possibility. Women in my circles don’t join Legion. And the woman from Legion had told him he was wrong about that. What has she seen? What do they know about him?

They are in the corridor now, dim and upward slanting, not running but hurrying at a quick jog. The woman from Legion is still just ahead of him, and in the faint light he can see her back, her tight ass, and he wants to brush his hand over it, just to show he can. Why not? It’s right there in front of him, he could grab it, give him something to hold onto in this rushing disruption. Maybe she would jump and turn on him, angry, and he could smile like it doesn’t matter, like he doesn’t get scared or flustered even when his life’s in danger. There’s no one around but the security people who are urging him, even now, to hurry, just a little bit further, and they’d never tell. More than their job was worth, and he’d make sure they never worked in this business again, they must know that.

But there on her shoulders are the beady wide-angle buttons of Legion, and on her sleeves, and maybe on her pant seams too, for all he knows. Maybe she’s the one testing out the dye packs. Maybe he would be vilified, maybe he’d look ridiculous. He hesitates, not wanting to give in, not wanting to be caught. And then, before he can decide, they are coming out into the sunlight.