FOR THE FIRST TIME, it all made sense. It was too late to do anything about it, but I finally understood.
“What are you jabbering about?” Chancellor Maddox asked.
“Omega,” I said. “It didn’t happen the way we were told.”
“I don’t know what you were told, so I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I think you do. The Brown Shirts always said some country on the other side of the world started it. They fired off the first missiles and our country had no choice but to retaliate.” I was talking slowly, forming my thoughts even as I spoke the words. “But that wasn’t it at all, was it? There wasn’t any other country attacking us. You fired the first missiles. You made Omega happen.”
Chancellor Maddox smiled her condescending beauty-queen smile, all white teeth and perky dimples. “Don’t be silly. Why would you even think that?”
“Because you just said, ‘and this time we’ll get it right.’”
“So what? That doesn’t mean—”
“You gave the order. You started a nuclear holocaust just so you could have more power.”
“Oh please, this is nonsense—”
“I don’t know how you did it, but somehow—”
“I have no idea what you’re talking ab—”
“—you persuaded the generals or whoever had access to the missiles to go along, to fire them when and where you wanted. Here we’re all horrified about what you’re going to do to New Washington, but you’ve done this before, haven’t you?”
I could feel the stares of my three friends, their eyes darting between me and the chancellor. Maddox, too, studied me a long time before speaking.
“I didn’t build the bombs, if that’s what you’re saying,” she finally said. “And if you think I have regrets, I don’t. It was the smartest thing I ever did.”
I was at a loss for words. We all were. Over the course of the last many months, I thought I’d witnessed every possible kind of evil. But to think Omega was planned by a single individual—a lone member of Congress—was more than I could comprehend.
“How’d you survive?” I asked.
“Easy. I just happened to be away from Washington that day. In an underground bunker. Unfortunately, the vice president was on a campaign trip to Iowa and also survived; I hadn’t counted on that.”
“You assumed you’d be the highest ranking member of Congress left—maybe the only one. You didn’t think you’d have to wait twenty years to become president.”
A brittle smile scarred the chancellor’s face—a crack in a plaster wall. “All good things come to those who wait.”
I had a sudden flash of the mother I never knew—the woman who was doused with so much radiation, she gave birth to my deformity, then died shortly thereafter. I thought of all the Less Thans who’d died over the years from acute radiation syndrome. All because of this one vain, vile, power-hungry woman.
“Why?” I managed.
Chancellor Maddox looked at me as though the answer was so obvious it didn’t need to be voiced. “It was in our best interests.”
“To destroy the world?”
“To save the world. Everything that was great about us was slipping away. And if I hadn’t done it, if I hadn’t done something, we were doomed to failure.”
“You killed billions of people.”
“‘The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.’ Thomas Jefferson.”
“‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the chancellors.’ William Shakespeare.”
She smiled smugly. “Nice try. Don’t you mean ‘lawyers’?”
“Not in this case.”
Chancellor Maddox made a tsk, tsk sound and shook her head. “Oh, I get it. The young people are up in arms. They would’ve known the right thing to do. They would’ve acted properly. But let me tell you something. The world was on its last legs. Overpopulation, climate change, terrorists. The Middle East alone was one giant cesspool. It took someone with vision—with courage—to say, ‘Let’s start over. Let’s go back to square one and make this a decent world to live in.’ No different than God creating the flood. The world has me to thank for saving it.”
“Not the Less Thans,” I said.
“Or the Sisters,” Hope added.
Maddox shrugged. “‘Can’t please all the people all the time.’”
She said it with such giggly innocence—like it was just another beauty-pageant answer—that the life went out of me. Nothing we said or did had any effect. The woman was incapable of reason.
She grabbed a walkie-talkie from the oval table and positioned her thumb over the orange button.
“How close are we?” she asked into it.
“Whenever you’re ready, Madame President-Elect,” a staticky voice replied. “Just say the word.”
She gave us a look like You see? There’s nothing you can do.
My friends and I exchanged a horrified look. “I thought you weren’t going to launch the missiles until the same time as the inauguration.”
“That was the original plan, but you know what they say: It’s a woman’s prerogative to change her mind. And I’m in the mood to get this over with now.”
She was in the process of bringing the walkie-talkie to her mouth when Cat blurted out, “Wait!”
Chancellor Maddox looked at him expectantly.
“You gave us the option,” Cat said. “You said we could choose whether we were executed before or after the attack. Right?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, I choose before. I don’t want to watch another Omega.”
The smile that adorned the chancellor’s face was bright enough to light the room.