Chapter Sixteen
Drew Ashling, Lightbringer:
When Martha tells you not to indulge yourself in your negative emotions, she’s telling you the right thing. But then she doesn’t tell you what the alternative is—she doesn’t tell you how to deal with those emotions. She just wants you to cover them up. And that doesn’t work. She did us all a serious injustice when she made certain emotions wrong, but then didn’t tell us what to do with them.
It was 9:45 in the evening when Gaylen finally stepped, cloaked, into the large master bedroom of the White House.
He was tired and his muscles trembled from the tension of creeping silently through hallways and stairways. Gaylen had underestimated the size of the White House considerably. He guessed that there were over a hundred rooms, and he felt like he had found most of them before he finally found the president’s residential rooms. He had been surprised and amused to discover a one-lane bowling alley along the way.
There were a lot of household staff and a large number of busy people whose purposes Gaylen could not easily identify, and he’d had to move quietly and carefully. The whole process had been far more taxing and time-consuming than he had naively expected.
In the end, however, he had found his quarry. She sat on an overstuffed chair, wearing a chestnut-brown dressing gown that matched her eyes and hair, reading a novel on her handscreen with a glass of red wine nearby.
Her face was not quite as perfect in person as it appeared on the wallscreens. She looked slightly older as well.
She looked up when her door opened, and her eyes narrowed when she did not see a person enter, though the door closed again.
Gaylen approached quietly. He took a moment to look her over while he thought about what he knew of her. Given all that he had learned in the past week about New America, he could not see Martha in the same way he once had. Kevin and Chloe had assured him that she meant every word of her own teachings. He wasn’t sure if that was more upsetting than if she had been playing some elaborate joke on them all.
Gaylen’s heart pounded in his ears, and his hands shook almost like a frightened bird. Still, he raised his weapon, made sure it was set to stun, and then fired at Martha. Her eyelashes fluttered closed, and she tilted forward, dropping her handscreen.
Quickly, Gaylen moved forward and picked her up, hardly able to believe what he was doing. He had his nation’s greatest cultural and political icon right here in his arms. Her body felt warmer and heavier than he had expected. She had a slight scent of roses.
His whole body shaking from adrenaline and fatigue, he went through the painstaking process of moving back through the hallways of the White House, this time slowed by his weighty burden.
Then he headed through the city toward where the Lightbringers would be waiting to make their broadcast.
He couldn’t believe he’d pulled it off. He wondered where it would go wrong¬¬—what he was missing. It couldn’t be this easy, could it?
When Nick recognized the girl with the purple dreadlocks walking ahead of him in an underground tunnel, glee broke through his rage and pain, and he grinned. Fate had sent her to him. She was one of Drew’s smug little hangers-on—the perfect target for his rage.
He followed her topside. They emerged in one of the deserted areas of the city, an abandoned warehouse district turned into an extension of the underground. Nick trailed her at a careful distance, playing out his intentions in his mind to whet his appetite. When he found a baseball bat lying abandoned in a field, he grinned again and picked it up. It was too perfect.
He waited until they were in an alley between two warehouses, and then he picked up his pace to catch up to her. The painkillers worked well, and the remaining pain took a back seat to the glorious anticipation.
When the girl heard the sound of his footsteps behind her, she turned. He thrilled at the fear that registered in her eyes.
He wound up and struck her on the upper arm with the baseball bat. She yelped and staggered and turned to run. He lunged after her. His next blow crashed solidly into her right hip, and she fell.
He began to beat her as savagely as his own broken ribs would allow, although the huge dose of painkillers allowed him to work almost as if he were uninjured.
At first, her look was one of terror. She screamed. She tried and failed to fend him off with arms that were shattered by the force of his blows. Tears of pain ran down her face as she tried to crawl away on broken hands. It was all of Nick’s favorite things.
But when she rolled over onto her back and looked up at him, he saw something unexpected in her expression. It was a look of resolve. She wasn’t afraid anymore. She wasn’t afraid to face him, and she was letting him know it.
He snarled at her and redoubled his efforts to break every bone in her body. He put into the beating every ounce of hatred and rage he had for every person who had ever offended him. She cried out, and she wept, but always, her eyes came back to his. And her gaze said that this wasn’t about her at all. It was about him.
Her clear, unflinching witness of his brutality sapped his rage and nudged him toward a long-unknown feeling—shame. And without his rage to mask them, the pain and fatigue and shame had free reign. He couldn’t keep going, physically or emotionally, and the painkillers added to his sense of disorientation.
He staggered backward and leaned on the baseball bat, panting, and stared at his victim. She lay on the ground, her injuries impossible to survive, her breathing labored. But she still looked at him with her one good eye.
It took him a while to register that the look was compassion. This girl felt sorry for him.
The realization twisted his stomach so that he nearly retched. He was the one with the power. He was the one in control.
He dropped to his knees and put his hands around her throat. He squeezed, staring her in the eyes all the while. He would put out that light. He would watch until it burned out, until the compassion was gone, until he had killed it, and then—
And then—
Then he was sobbing as he squeezed, every part of his body and soul hurting exquisitely, unbearably.
Then he heard footsteps, and he tore himself away from the girl with the dreadlocks and hid himself, trying to stifle his sobs, wild with some kind of grief he could not understand.
John Oldman stood with thirty-three escaped convicts at the base of a flight of stairs in the underground. Everyone panted from the long run. John let them catch their breath while he checked on Sierra.
As soon as she saw him, the little girl asked, “When do I get to see Mommy and Daddy?”
Unfortunately, this was about as far as John’s planning had gone.
He looked into the little girl’s hopeful eyes and knew that he had made an idiotic mistake in saying that both of her parents had sent him to get her. It would break her heart all over again if he didn’t reunite her with both of her parents now. Yet what right did he have to put Serena and Gaylen back into contact with one another?
He sighed. One thing at a time. He certainly had to put her back together with at least one of her parents, and since she had been living with her mother most recently, that seemed to be the logical first step.
First, he put the green-haired boy in charge of the NCPs and directed him to take them to the Lightbringers’ safe house. It seemed the safest course of action for them. The Lightbringers would break the truth to them much more gently than any denizen would. Maybe they could find them all new lives.
Then he took Sierra’s hand and set off toward Serena’s house.
When she had taken Sierra and left Gaylen, Serena had moved to the extreme end of town, beyond several checkpoints. John was afraid to go through them with his escaped NCP, so they went by foot through the underground.
By the time they got there, John was beyond exhausted, and his knees hurt so much, he could hardly think of anything else. The adrenaline that had been fueling him had long ago worn off, and every step was a test of endurance.
He hesitated at the nearest intersection to Serena’s house. Was it so simple as to walk up and ring the doorbell? He tried to think of what he might have been missing.
He realized in retrospect that it was lucky he’d rescued so many people. Had he taken only Sierra, it would have implicated Serena. The DAA might have been here already, interrogating her. But now they had no particular reason to be here.
He remembered the words from Serena’s file: Watch list. Checks every five days until November 31, 2079. Were such checks made in person or by wallscreen?
Sierra tugged at his sleeve. “Are we lost?”
“No, honey. Just thinking for a minute.”
Try as he might, he couldn’t think of any reason for the DAA to observe watch-listed NCPs in person.
A few minutes later, he rang the doorbell of Serena’s house. The door opened, a beautiful, tall black woman appeared at the threshold, and Sierra shrieked, “Mommy!” Then the two were hugging, both of them crying.
John took a few steps back, to give them privacy. He scanned the street. Still no sign of any reason to worry.
Finally, the woman looked up at him. “Who are you? Where’s her grandmother?”
Grandmother. Cute. So that’s what Sierra’s postcard had said. Grandma had probably been dusted decades ago.
“I’m John Oldman, ma’am, and I’m… with the government. I’m here to return Sierra to you. But we need to talk over a few things. Can you come with me, please?”
“Of course. Just let me get my purse. Come with me, Sierra.” The two disappeared into the house.
John waited impatiently. It seemed to take forever before they came back, but finally
they emerged, and Serena shut the door behind them. As they walked down the sidewalk, she scanned the street, and then, seeming confused, she asked, “Do you have a car with you, Mr. Oldman?”
“No, actually… let’s just walk a little way and I’ll explain things. There’s really no hurry.”
Now, how in the world was he going to explain this?
Still carrying President Martha’s unconscious body, Gaylen entered the warehouse from which the Lightbringers would be broadcasting.
The place was full of denizens, former prisoners, and revolutionaries, all in that uncomfortable state of suspense between bored idleness and eager waiting. The camera was set up, and everyone was ready to go at a moment’s notice.
When Gaylen appeared, all eyes turned to him and the room fell silent as they saw the body over his shoulder. Drew, who had been sitting up against a wall, leaped to her feet. Any words she had been preparing to say died in her throat as she saw President Martha.
Gaylen lifted Martha’s body off his shoulder and lay her on a nearby table. Her beautiful dressing gown was in marked contrast to the squalor of the warehouse, her soft, lightly tanned skin in contrast to the rough attire of the denizens who had rejected perfection and beauty.
“Is that really—” someone asked.
“Yes,” Gaylen said. “Just stunned. We need her. Did Chloe tell you?” He looked around for the girl with the purple dreadlocks.
“No, tell us what?” Drew answered.
The others were crowding around, looking at Martha’s body with fascination.
“Chloe isn’t here? I sent her here…” Gaylen looked around again.
“No,” Drew said. “I sent Kevin after both of you when you didn’t—”
The door opened again, behind Gaylen. Drew’s face froze in horror, and she began to run toward the door. Gaylen turned and looked, too, and his heart stopped.
Kevin carried Chloe in his arms. She was covered in blood, and her limbs hung awkwardly. It was clear at a glance that she was devastatingly injured.
Gaylen and Drew both ran to them, but Kevin motioned them aside. He barely glanced at President Martha’s unconscious body on the table. “Move her,” he ordered.
A couple of Lightbringers moved Martha away, and Kevin lowered Chloe to the table. She moaned, her voice garbled by the blood in her throat.
Gaylen stepped forward, looking at her body, seeing and not wanting to see, wanting to hold her and terrified to touch her.
Drew took her left hand, and Gaylen took her right one.
“I’ve given her a shot of painkillers and a shot of sedative,” Kevin said quietly.
Her one good eye focused on him. “Gaylen?” she murmured. Her voice rasped as if she had been screaming.
“Yes,” he said. “I’m here. I’m here, Chloe.” His eyes filled with tears.
She looked at him again and tried to smile.
Gaylen couldn’t find the words to ask what had happened or who had hurt her. “The doctor,” he said to Kevin. “The one who healed me and Drew. Where is he? How do we get her there?”
She shook her head slowly. “No,” she whispered. “Too late.”
Kevin shook his head, too. His jaw was clenched, his eyes tight.
Gaylen looked at Drew. “No… please…” He wouldn’t let it be too late.
Drew shook her head, too, and tears ran down her face.
Chloe turned her head and a rush of blood came out of her mouth. She fought for breath and gave him a look that said that arguing was pointless. His heart sank..
She smiled slightly and said, “I did good. I stayed in the light. I even found… I found compassion…”
Tears ran down both their faces. Gaylen wiped hers away. “I’m proud of you, Chloe. You’re such a… such a good person.” Gently stroking her cheek, he tried to smile at her.
“We love you, Chloe,” Drew said gently.
Kevin visibly fought back tears as he said, “Yes, we do.” He put his hand on her shoulder.
Chloe shuddered and tried to breathe. She swallowed, shifted, got another breath, and then whispered, “I should have told you before… Gaylen…”
“Shhhh,” he whispered. “It’s OK…”
“I should have told you… I was falling… falling in love with you… Gaylen…”
The words hit him hard. For a moment, he closed his eyes. He thought back over the awkward moments they’d had and her distance with him recently. It all made sense now. She’d rejected him only because she’d known that he didn’t feel the same way… at least, not yet.
And now, not ever.
He said, “I’m sorry, Chloe. I didn’t realize. I didn’t understand. I’m an idiot.” He’d missed what was right in front of him.
She grinned a little. “S’OK,” she said again.
She said no more, and her breath came harder and harder and she began to cry and writhe with the agony and effort of trying to breathe. Both Drew and Gaylen held her hands until she suddenly convulsed, and then she died.
Gaylen held her body and sobbed.
He wanted to protect and comfort her, even though she wasn’t there anymore. More than that, he wanted to turn back the days and relive them and this time take advantage of every possible moment with the sweet, pretty girl with the purple dreadlocks. He wanted another chance. And most of all, he wanted to have saved her—to have spared her this ending.
He stayed present and experienced every hard emotion that ran through him, as Drew had taught him when she grieved for Mercy. He was in a sort of darkness he had never encountered before—a rich, profound, multi-layered darkness. The light surrounded both him and the darkness, waiting for him to re-emerge.
Standing just outside the warehouse door, Nick listened to Chloe’s death against his will. Every word added up to break down his mind by degrees. As the Lightbringers’ grief ran its course, tears ran down Nick’s face, too, but for some other reason he could not fathom. All he knew was that he had been pushed over some edge he hadn’t even known existed. He felt like a hysterical lost child and a rabid wild beast pressed into one soul that could not endure either one of them. He had to do something. He had to make the pain stop.
And so, as someone drew a jacket over Chloe’s still body and the Lightbringers regrouped, murmuring words of sorrow and regret, Nick stepped into the warehouse with his gun drawn.
When Gaylen saw him, Nick already had an old-fashioned revolver aimed at Drew’s head from only a few feet away.
Gaylen shouted, “Drew! Look out!”
Drew looked around and saw Nick. She looked confused for a moment. She wiped away tears.
Nick looked insane—exhausted, stiff, wild-eyed, his face twisted with hatred.
Around them, the room fell silent again as the Lightbringers saw what was happening. Gaylen and most of the Lightbringers pulled their weapons and trained them on Nick.
Nick said to Drew, “You think you know something, but you don’t know anything. You think you’re special. You are nothing. You are no one. We don’t need you in our world.” His gun was still pointed at Drew’s face.
Suddenly, Gaylen realized what had happened to Chloe.
Drew looked at Nick for a long moment, and it seemed that she had come to the same realization that Gaylen had. She bowed her head and closed her eyes for a moment, wiping her face again.
“Look at me, bitch!” Nick screamed.
A moment went by before Drew raised her head and looked at him. Her eyes were weary, her face resigned. She spoke slowly, patiently. “Nick, you can kill me—you can kill us all, one by one—but you cannot kill the light. It will always be inside you, always telling you that who you have become and what you have done is deeply, deeply wrong. And you know it. And you will never stop knowing it.”
Emotions ran across Nick’s face—anger, fear, pain, fear again. “You have no right,” he said. “You are no one—”
“We are the light,” Drew said. “You will never be free of us.”
Nick’s weapon wavered and his face twisted.
“But you can always embrace it,” Drew said. She took one step toward him. “It is never too late to step out of the darkness, out of what you have—”
Nick screamed, “Shut it! Shut up, you worthless, useless—!” His hand, and the revolver he held, trembled.
Gaylen stepped up quietly behind Nick, just out of the other man’s peripheral vision.
“Shoot him!” someone screamed from behind him.
“No!” Gaylen shouted to the men and women around him. He had seen that Nick’s finger was on his trigger. If anyone shot him, he might pull the trigger either deliberately or reflexively.
Nick started laughing. The laughter had an unhinged, wild quality to it. It was so rough and raw that it made Gaylen’s throat hurt just to hear it. Then the laughter twisted and contorted into raw, naked sobs, painful to watch and hear. Nick staggered back and forth, his gun still pointed at Drew, as he vacillated between crying and laughing. Twice he lunged at someone in the circle around him, making them flinch and jump back. And then he stopped, screamed wordlessly, and, not even looking at Drew, pulled the trigger and shot her.
Gaylen saw it as if in slow motion. Drew jerked as the old-fashioned bullet struck her on the left side of her chest, spilling blood. Her green eyes unfocused, shifting from weariness to confusion, and then closed, and she collapsed in a crumpled heap.
All around them, gunfire erupted. Nick jerked and spasmed as dozens of beams and bullets struck him, and then he fell unmoving to the concrete floor.
Gaylen rushed to Drew. Others gathered around them as well, faces drawn and somber. The room had fallen silent for a second time. Nick’s body went ignored.
Kneeling beside Drew, Gaylen turned her over carefully and touched her face. He knew immediately that the light had already left her body. He fell back into a seated position and stared into space. Too much death. Too much.
A long moment passed in silence, with all heads bowed in mourning. Then Kevin stepped up. Gaylen hardly processed his words. “My friends. I hate to ask you to do anything right now other than mourn, because you deserve the chance to mourn. But for now, the best way to honor them is to complete the mission that they died trying to accomplish. That mission awaits us right now, and it is time-sensitive. We must step up.”
Around the room, heads reluctantly nodded.
Two Lightbringers came forward and gently, respectfully carried the women’s bodies to the side, where they would be safe, and covered them. Two more carried Nick’s body to a separate area and covered it as well.
“Gaylen.”
It was Kevin again. The stocky man knelt down and looked at Gaylen intently. “Are you with me?”
Gaylen nodded reluctantly. He wanted to be anywhere but here. Here was a place so full of grief he could hardly bear it. But he nodded.
“Gaylen, you brought President Martha here. What’s the plan?”
At first, Gaylen could hardly marshal coherent thought, let alone explain the plan. But he found himself stumbling through what Tommy had told him about the riots and the war and the DAA massacring everyone who couldn’t be trusted to “forget” if the denizens lost and were driven back underground.
Kevin listened carefully, and then said, “You’re the one with the plan. And you brought in Martha. No small thing. You take over from here, when you’re ready.” He offered him a bottle of water, which Gaylen gratefully took and drank.
He glanced again at the two slender bodies on the floor. It was the most outrageously unfair thing he could imagine, that these two women should have died while he still lived. He had to finish this, for them.
He went to President Martha, carried her to a chair and propped her up in it, and pointed the camera at her and turned it on. He called Tommy on Kevin’s handscreen—they had no reason for secrecy now that everything was about to unfold—and told him to click the two icons to begin the transmission. And then he shook Martha awake.