Chapter Thirteen

Drew Ashling, Lightbringer:

The really big problem with Martha’s philosophy is that it doesn’t work. Even if you never think of violence, you might still get mugged. But by telling us that our circumstances result from our thinking, everything we experience becomes our fault, and now it’s not only bad, but also a source of shame, because we brought it on ourselves. The positive thinking dogma is a way of controlling people. If you believe it’s your fault, you won’t look to anyone else.

Nick opened his eyes to find himself in a basement in restraints—each wrist in a manacle and the manacles attached to a ring in the ceiling, at a height that had him on his knees, his hands up over his head.

The last thing he remembered was approaching the underground entrance to a house that Mikey said was the current safe house for the Lightbringers cell—then, a sudden blow to the head.

He scrambled to his feet. He saw two men in the basement with him, both wearing the distinctive garb and iris implants of the Double Double Gang. They got up when they saw him awake. Immediately, one of the men—a skinny black man with a tall Mohawk—kicked his legs out from under him, taking him back down to his knees. “Well, let’s do this,” he said to his partner, who was a bald white guy with vivid orange iris implants.

By now, Nick knew about half of what was going on. Mikey had betrayed him; the gang had been sent to hurt him. The only question was who was behind it. Surely not Drew—Miss Goody Two-Shoes herself.

“That goddamn big black man?” Nick asked, his voice hoarse with rage. “He set this up?”

“No talking,” the bald guy said. The skinny guy went over to where a crowbar and a baseball bat leaned against a wall.

Nick had little time, but he knew what to do. He closed his eyes and summoned the wolf within him. Helpless he might be, but no one was going to break him—not ever again. He breathed harder and faster than he needed to, until he panted, to kick up his adrenaline, a natural painkiller.

The skinny guy noticed his heavy breathing and gave him an odd look as he stepped back.

The wolf inside Nick called up the memory of every vile act he’d ever committed—every rape, every beating, every moment of torture—and wrapped it up into a big ugly ball of sickness.

The bald guy picked up the crowbar and his friend picked up the baseball bat and then they both turned toward him, their mouths in firm lines.

Nick let his sickness explode outward at his captors in screaming hysterics. His whole body shook as he screamed. Spittle flew from his mouth. “Hurt me!” He threw himself forward and backward against his chains.

The men hastily stepped back, their jaws dropping. “What the hell?” the bald guy said. They stared at their convulsing captive.

“Come on! Don’t be fucking pussies!” Nick’s eyes bulged out at them. “Do your jobs! Beat me!” The wolf inside him laughed and laughed.

They stared at him.

Nick writhed within his chains and giggled.

The skinny man raised his eyebrows. “What? This seem messed up to you?” he asked his friend.

“Yeah. But Mikey said to hurt him.” The other guy hesitated, but he took a firmer grip on his crowbar, raised it, and struck a vicious blow to Nick’s chest.

It hurt. Nick howled and flailed. He hurled his reaction at them like a weapon, his eyes fixed on them.

“Again! Again!” he screamed. “More!”

Both men stared at him with disgust on their faces.

He didn’t look away. He took in their abhorrence and relished it. He was revolting. He was full of a kind of sickness they couldn’t imagine. They thought they were bad guys, but they had lines they wouldn’t cross. The wolf within him didn’t.

The bald guy took another swing, then another, while the skinny guy just stood there. He weighed his baseball bat in his hands but he was afraid to use it, Nick could see that.

Nick laughed when he wasn’t choking and gagging from the pain of his ribs cracking. He threw himself toward his attacker with his arms open wide, to expose as much of his chest to the blows as he could. He howled and writhed as if in ecstasy.

Apparently, the bald guy had had enough. He turned on his heel and flung the crowbar away. “Jesus.”

“Yeah,” the other guy said. “What the fuck?”

“This is sick. I’m not doing this shit.”

“Maybe it’s an act.”

The two men turned and looked at Nick, who laughed again. He knew that he had just won a psychological victory. He was worse than they were.

He was also dizzy from hyperventilating, which made the scene all the more surreal.

He bit his tongue open and spat blood at them. They backed up again. He screamed at them wordlessly, his voice raw. He felt out of control and in control at the same time. It was a state he had cultivated.

The men turned away again.

“I don’t care if it’s an act or not,” the bald guy said.

“What are we gonna do?”

“I’m done. We did enough. I don’t want to look at him for another second.”

“Fine with me, man. Fine with me.”

The men left without a backward glance.

Nick laughed hysterically. He threw himself against his chains and howled at the walls until he was able to come down from the adrenaline high. Then he sat still, chuckling sometimes, until the dizziness subsided.

This was what fully indulging the wolf inside got you. The strength to endure anything. An unbreakable will. Dominion over others. Winning even when other people thought you were losing.

He knew that the pain was going to get much worse as he cooled down and got stiff and the adrenaline wore off. It was nothing new to him. He settled down to wait out the rest of his captivity.

“Goldfinger?”

John’s head snapped up at the sound of the soft voice. It was Chloe. He stood up hastily, not sure how to react. He had disabled his mask when he went topside, so she could see his real face for the first time. It was too late now, or he’d turn it back on.

Then he really thought about where they were. “Chloe… you shouldn’t be topside.” He gestured toward her eyebrow piercing, her purple dreadlocks.

She shrugged one shoulder. “The exit I used is really close to here. Anyway, I’m safe, aren’t I? I’m with you, right?” Her tone of voice was half smile, half accusation, and her look was knowing.

She sat down on the bench and stared up at him until he sat down as well.

His heart had stopped, it seemed. He had to look away. His mind felt like a line of dominoes toppling over one at a time. Chloe knows. But she’s here. I don’t understand.

They both sat in silence for a bit. Then Chloe sighed deeply and spoke. “So, yeah, everyone knows now.”

John couldn’t speak.

“I was really, really mad at you, at first.” She spoke shyly, while playing with the end of a dreadlock.

It was hard to imagine Chloe being angry at anyone, and it reminded John of being chastised by his own sweet mother. And somehow it seemed perfectly natural when he found himself apologizing to the denizen it was his job to bring in or dust. “I’m sorry. I really am. For what happened.” He turned toward her. “I didn’t request those fire weapons. I never would have done that.”

“I know. I believe you.” She looked at him calmly. “And on all the rest of it—you were just doing your job. And it’s not your fault, really. You believe what you believe about the world. If I was you, if I had grown up the way you did, if I felt the way you feel, I would be on your side, too.”

It could have been condescending, and if anyone else had said it, it might have been. But Chloe’s tone was matter-of-fact.

“Drew said that there aren’t any bad guys,” Chloe went on. “Just confused or ignorant or wounded or broken people. People who wouldn’t be confused or ignorant or any of those things if they had a choice, if they could fix it. And a lot of the time, they can’t. But she thinks you probably can.”

John waited. For the first time, he found himself entirely in the perspective of the Lightbringers, and he looked at himself through that lens. From here, it was clear that he was in the wrong, that the side he worked for was the wrong side. It was so jarring as to be dizzying, to feel his perspective swing a hundred eighty degrees.

“I think you’re one of the honest ones, aren’t you?” Chloe’s voice was suddenly hesitant.

John didn’t know what she meant. He tried to parse her question, but it fell apart in his mind. “One of the honest whats?” he asked.

Chloe just nodded once. She sighed and resumed chewing on her dreadlock. “I thought you probably didn’t know. And I thought you should. I think you deserve to know.”

Tension rose in him. He waited.

She turned toward him, and John saw that she was ready to break it to him gently—whatever it was.

“A lot of the DAA is corrupt,” she said, her tone kind. “They take money from the underground bosses in exchange for not taking them to prison. A lot of DAA agents aren’t really trying, you see? They’re just pretending.” She paused, searching his face for a reaction.

John didn’t see.

Taking bribes to overlook underground behavior was, of course, forbidden. And Martha had designed the audits, which other government workers ran like clockwork, to catch exactly this kind of corruption. John had heard rumors of corruption and bribery from time to time, but the auditors always either cleared or dusted the subjects of those rumors soon enough.

Or so he had thought.

For the first time, he wondered what it really meant when someone was “cleared” during an audit.

He took a deep breath. He felt impossibly naive. “How much…” He had to stop and clear his throat. “How much of the DAA is corrupt?” For one excruciating moment, he feared that he was the only idiot in the entire agency actually trying to do his job.

Chloe shrugged. “I don’t know. A lot of it, is all I know.”

John looked at the ground. Thoughts tumbled through his mind too swiftly to manage. He knew his expression was forlorn, and he didn’t have the energy to try to change it.

Then he felt white-hot anger flare. He had been lied to, misled, used. He had tried so hard to do what was right, and it hadn’t meant anything to anyone. Decades of his life wasted trying to do the impossible and pointless.

He was so dismayed that he simply stood up and walked away.

John, the ever obedient. John, the fool.

He let his feet choose his path. He was blind with anger and embarrassment. For the moment, those hot emotions chased away the despair.

Maybe he would have known if he hadn’t worked in isolation and undercover for so long. He’d had partners, before, but even then it was just the two of them working together. They’d reported in to their manager, and the rest of the time they’d spent undercover.

And yet… the denizens and tourists of the underground had talked of the DAA many times in his presence, and always with anger, frustration, fear, disgust, or hatred. The DAA was the enemy. That was certain.

As he walked, he convinced himself that not all of the DAA could be corrupt—not if they were consistently known as the bogeymen of the underground. But if Chloe was telling the truth—and John thought she was—then there were DAA agents who were above the law. Just not the ones John had worked with.

He wondered whether he had dealt only with the lowest level of the underground—the scum. He tried to imagine what the shape of it looked like. What percentage of the denizens were in bed with the DAA? Was it the majority, or the minority?

Had he been given assignments designed to keep him from noticing the corruption? He was a feeler, after all…

The whole thing sickened him. The fear that he had spent his entire life in a futile effort—manipulated and misdirected—weighed on his chest, so heavy as to be suffocating.

Then it dawned on him that he had just walked away from Chloe, who had gone to this trouble to find him and tell him the truth, and he stopped still. Now it was too late to go back and apologize—she would have left again.

He couldn’t even sigh. His body was locked up too tightly.

He resumed walking, his mind a blank.

“Dammit!” Gaylen paced, his fists clenched. “I can’t believe it. I can’t.”

Drew sat with her back against a wall, looking as calm as ever. “Gaylen, I’m telling you this because I think you need to know that there are no bad guys.”

“No bad guys?” Gaylen stared at her incredulously. “They used fire on us. John’s people. He lied to us. He burned you! Me! They killed Mercy!”

Drew closed her eyes for a moment. “I’m not saying they didn’t make an evil choice. What they did was inhumane. But you have to be careful about writing people off as ‘bad.’ When you do that, you stop seeing them as human. And then anything you want to do to them becomes acceptable. That’s when you start committing evil acts of your own.”

“Aren’t you angry with them for what they did?”

“Sometimes, yes. Mostly, I feel sorry for them. They’re in a dark place. They don’t know what they’re doing. They’re trapped by their own blind spots, by the things they don’t understand about themselves and the world.

“It’s important to know that they can’t help it. They have found themselves where they are because of their personalities, their past experiences, their capacities for thought and conscience, their education. If you had all the same factors, you’d believe the same things. You’d make the same choices.”

“I would not. In the same circumstances, I would choose something different.”

“No, if you were the same person as them, with the same personality, you would choose the same things.”

“Well… yes, I guess so. If I were literally them, I guess I would do what they’re doing, since… that’s what they’re doing.” Gaylen stopped pacing and sat down. “How is this useful? Isn’t it their personality that makes them bad? So saying I’d be bad if I were them is really just saying that they’re bad. Which is where I started.”

Drew chuckled. After a second, Gaylen did, too.

Drew went on, “No, I didn’t say that their personality makes them bad. Their personality makes them choose the way they do. But they can’t help it, because they can’t help who they are. Not yet.

“No one chooses things that he believes are evil, unless he has himself convinced that the evil is for a good purpose. Everyone aims for the good. They’re just confused sometimes about what the good is or what acceptable tactics are.”

“What about the socios?”

Drew nodded. “Fair enough. Some socios embrace evil deliberately, though most of them just rationalize their behavior. Either way, it still isn’t helpful to think of them as bad. They have grown up psychologically disabled. It isn’t their fault that they are the way they are.

“If a person has the energy and the motivation and the conscience and the knowledge to choose what’s good, then of course, they do. In other words, to put it in our terms, if they’re in the light, their actions will be of the light. But if they lack conscience or the right kind of motivation or the right knowledge, that doesn’t make them bad—it makes them disabled or wounded or ignorant or unwise. It means they’re in darkness. If you can bring them to the light, they’ll start making different choices.”

Gaylen let this sink in. He suddenly remembered Chandi of the dark brown eyes, the old girlfriend he had hurt. He had always felt so bad about that. Now he tried to see it according to Drew’s words.

He hadn’t meant to hurt her. He had just wanted what he’d wanted, and he’d ignored her reactions.

He shook his head. “I did something bad once. And I knew better. At least, I should have. But I ignored what I knew. Doesn’t that make me bad?” His throat was tight as he said it.

“It means you weren’t in touch with your conscience. If you had been, you would have done differently. Now that you’re in touch with your conscience, you’ve never done it again, correct?”

He nodded.

“You weren’t bad. You were just unwise. You lacked awareness. You were in darkness. Now that you’ve corrected that, you’re no more or less bad than you were. You’re just in a different place. Didn’t you ignore what you knew because you wanted something that seemed good at the time?”

He thought about that. “Yes.” It was a reluctant admission.

“So now you know better. You’re the same person, still seeking what’s good, but now with more clarity and wisdom. And that’s preferable to the rest of us, of course.”

It seemed too easy. Slowly, he said, “You don’t understand, Drew. What I did was bad. I mean, it really was bad.”

She shifted a bit, sat up straighter. She leaned forward. “Tell me about it.”

He looked away, his heart beating faster, his hands going clammy. “I don’t want to.”

“Look at me.”

He forced his gaze back to hers.

“I can feel that you’re ashamed. And the only way to undo the shame is to bring this to the light. So bring it out, Gaylen. Expose it to the light of truth. It will melt away.”

“I—I can’t.” He looked away again.

She reached out and touched his face, guiding his gaze back to her own. “Tell me.” Her voice was soft.

He contemplated starting the story, but he couldn’t bring himself to confess this, the most awful thing he had ever done. “I can’t, Drew, please, don’t make me.”

She stroked his face. Her words were both gentle and commanding. “Tell me.”

He took a deep breath. Tears started even before the first words came out. “She was my girlfriend. We were really young. I was twenty, she was eighteen. She started it. She said she wanted me. She took off my clothes. And I wanted her so bad.”

Drew’s gaze was unflinching.

“And when I started… when I… entered her… she went all tense, she said it hurt. It must have been her first time. And I should have stopped. I should have stopped, Drew.”

Drew said nothing. She didn’t blink.

“But I kept going because I… wanted it so…” His voice gave out and he couldn’t speak. He turned away.

Drew reached out again and brought his gaze back to hers. Her face was gentle, her eyes filled with compassion. “Tell me.”

“She closed her eyes, she turned away… her hands were clenched into fists, she was so stiff, and then she started crying… I mean, just a few tears… and I… just kept going until I… finished. And she didn’t say anything. She got up and went into the bathroom for a long time and then she left, took a cab home. And then she wrote me a letter. She said—I remember every word—she said, ‘I hate you. You make me sick. I hope no one ever loves you.’” Gaylen’s stomach was in knots, his face contorted.

Drew put her hands on his shoulders. “If you had known better, would you have done it?”

“I did know! I saw her get tense. I heard her say it hurt. I saw her crying. I knew I was hurting her.”

“Did you really know at the time, at that moment, or did you only know in retrospect?”

Gaylen closed his eyes, focusing intently. He forced himself to remember.

“No,” he said at last. “I saw that something might be wrong, might be bad. I wasn’t sure. I thought maybe she would be OK when she relaxed a little. I did go more gently. I did slow down. I hoped it would be enough.” He looked at her. “But I was stupid, Drew. I should have stopped, told her we didn’t have to keep going. I was older. I had experience. She didn’t.”

“Now that you have seen it in retrospect, now that you understand, now that you know better, would you do the same thing again?”

“Never.”

“Then you aren’t a bad person. It was a mistake. Good people make mistakes. You were blinded by desire and by ignorance. You were selfish at the time, because that’s who you were back then. You couldn’t have chosen anything else in that moment. You were in darkness and you acted from darkness.

“Please understand, I agree that it’s awful. It probably wounded her more deeply than you have even imagined. And you deserve to feel guilty for it, Gaylen. Guilt is the appropriate reaction to making a mistake.

“But what you shouldn’t feel is shame. Shame is the feeling that you are bad, deep down. Listen to me, Gaylen, you are not bad.” She looked him in the eyes. “You just screwed up. You’re just human. That’s all.”

Gaylen wiped away tears. He wasn’t sure if they were tears of relief or misery. Maybe both.

“If you ever see her again, you must apologize to her, and you must try to find a way to make amends. In fact, you should try to find her so that you can. Do you understand? That’s how you pay for your mistake.”

Gaylen nodded.

“But let go of the shame. You don’t deserve that. Use the methods I’ve taught you to let it go. Bring it to the light.”

Gaylen nodded and put his feelings through the process. It took much longer than anything he had done before. One emotion would break over him and ebb away, only to be replaced by a fresh wave of a different emotion. But he took away the layers one at a time until they were gone.

Finally, he came to the cold, hard feeling of guilt, like a stone slab, that told him that he had done something wrong, something that could never be undone. He realized that the guilt could not be released, but he could accept that. He deserved it. The guilt would remind him to be more careful with the feelings of others in the future.

Even with the weight of that knowledge deep in his heart, when he had finished, he felt like a man released from decades of imprisonment.

He looked up at Drew and she took him into her arms and caressed his face. He relaxed into her lap and soaked up the warmth and compassion that she emanated as if it were the sunlight on a cold day. She held him for a long while.

He had never known such peace before.

“Thank you,” he said.

She smiled. “Now the hard part is for you to apply this to John and to all the others. Remember, there are no bad guys. Whatever happens from here on out. There are just people lost in the darkness.”

Some time later, John realized that his feet had, ironically, brought him into the Bureau of Safety and down the hallway to his office at the DAA. He stopped walking.

The overhead lights were off, since it was past working hours. The wallscreens every few feet were the only source of light. They played a cheerful cartoon music video starring animated cats and dogs that strutted and jumped around while they sang. John stared at them without comprehension. They might as well have been aliens.

He trudged to his desk and sat down with a bone-jarring thud. For the moment, his entire plan was to go to sleep on his desk and face the world some other time. For now, he wanted an Off button. He would have found solace in booze, but he was, frankly, too exhausted to make it to a bar now. He cursed his feet for not taking him to a place that had alcohol.

On his wallscreen, the ticker went by. All categories had ticked up. Personal Control violations for October were up to 148. He resisted the urge to throw something at the marquee, to shut it up forever.

A thought crept into his mind. It was an errant thought, but it called to him the way whiskey usually did. It asked him, what really did happen to Gaylen’s wife and daughter?

He could find out easily enough.

In fact, he could easily find out what had really happened to his father. And whether his own family was still safe.

Gaylen’s words echoed in his mind. “I want to know that they’re OK. And if they’re not… I’d still want to know.”

John began to look them up. One methodical keypress after another, the information came closer and closer, all while his mind protested vigorously. He didn’t want to know. It was true. He didn’t. But he couldn’t seem to stop himself.

The screen flickered in response to his query.

Bob Oldman. Detected in randomized home review. Taken into custody July 25, 2041. Rehabilitation unsuccessful. Reduced on November 29, 2041.

He refused to process the words, not yet. His heart thudding slowly, John hit more keys to look up his ex-wife and his two kids.

Rebecca Leigh Lawrence. No record.

His ex-wife was OK. He typed in his daughter’s name.

Suzanne Mary Lawrence. Health issue discovered during Wellness Confirmation. Taken into custody January 11, 2074. Rehabilitation unsuccessful. Reduced on April 29, 2074.

He typed in his son’s name.

John Robert Oldman, Jr. Requested assistance due to disappearance of sister. Taken into custody February 1, 2074. Rehabilitation unsuccessful. Reduced on May 1, 2074.

He kept up the emotional wall that protected him from feeling this. He pulled up Gaylen’s profile, then looked for his family connections.

Serena Anne Tate. Watch list. Checks every five days until November 31, 2079.

Gaylen’s wife was still free.

Sierra Tate Andrews. Requested assistance due to missing her absent father. Taken into custody September 03, 2079. Rehabilitation unsuccessful. Scheduled for reduction.

John fell back into his chair. Moments passed as his emotional wall began to crumble under the onslaught of information he had never wanted to know.

The agency he had dedicated his life to had been lying to him all along. It had killed his father years ago. It had killed his two children. And now it was about to kill a five-year-old girl whose only crime was missing her daddy.

His face contorted as if he would cry, but his eyes were dry.

Inexplicably, the feeler mantra worked its way into his mind. There is only good and right in the world, he heard in a cheerful, vacuous wallscreen voice. There is only good and right in the world.

He started screaming. He swept everything off his desk indiscriminately, some items hitting the walls and everything crashing to the floor, with no regard to whether they might be watching his wallscreen right now. He picked up his chair and threw it at a corner of the room and stood there still hyperventilating. He tried to settle his breathing, but he couldn’t. He threw over his entire desk, yelling, “No!” as if it would make any difference.

He fell to the ground in the midst of the mess and tried to cry. He couldn’t. Adrenaline pumped too hard through his system. This wasn’t grief, he realized then. It was rage. Pure, fervent rage.

His mind fixated on Sierra. She was still alive.

He picked himself up off the floor, breathing hard.

He was going to save Gaylen’s daughter.

It was decades too late for his father and years too late for his own children, but whatever it took, whatever it cost him, they would not kill this little girl.