by K A Riley
Over in the far corner down at the other end of the hall, Cardyn and Manthy are chatting with some kids who look to be about our age. Manthy touches Card’s arm as they talk, and I can feel Card blush from here.
After all the milling around has settled into a quiet, anticipatory hum, Wisp jumps up onto a wooden stage-like platform four of the Insubordinates have dragged from one of the nearby rooms and into the middle of the wide hall.
Brohn, Rain, Granden, and I stand on the floor next to the makeshift stage, positioning ourselves to one side with Cardyn and Manthy on the other. Standing on the floor next to me with his legs wide and his arms crossed, Granden’s eyes scan our milling and excited troops like he’s on the lookout for anyone who’s distracted or too afraid or conflicted to contribute. He’s got nothing to worry about, though. Everyone in this wide and well-lit hallway is on the same page. It’s a blank page, one with nothing but potential and pure possibility.
From her perch on the platform, Wisp calls everyone to attention. She’s practically royalty around here. The last remaining buzz in the hall stops the second she raises her hand.
“We’ve all come a long way from a lot of different places,” she calls out. “We’ve fought. Some of us have been hurt. Some have died. I won’t give you a bunch of clichés about how the ones we lost are in a better place now. It’s our job to make our own world into a better place. Our friends died to help us take a step in that direction. We owe it to them to keep moving forward, to keep taking those next steps. But I’ve taken you as far as I can. I’ve helped bring us together. I’ll still be here as your Major, but the next steps require abilities I just don’t have. Lucky for us, we have a few people with us who do. Here are the ones, your Conspiracy, who’ll lead the way.”
She calls out to me, Brohn, Cardyn, Rain, and Manthy, and I’m glad she didn’t refer to us as “Emergents” in her little intro. That would’ve been embarrassing. Plus, the pressure associated with being some kind of evolutionary freak of nature tasked with saving the world is more than I need right now.
Wisp hops down from the platform to stand next to Granden. I’m still amazed at what an interesting couple they make. He’s twice her size and looms over her like a sequoia over a button mushroom, and yet she’s the one radiating all the energy and power.
Brohn steps up onto the platform to where Wisp was just standing. He reaches his hand out to help me up as well. It’s not necessary, of course, but it’s a nice gesture, and I’ll never object to having my hand in his. Manthy seems content to stay where she is, standing on the floor off to the side. Although she doesn’t follow the rest of us up onto the platform, she does take a half-step forward to receive reverential salutes from the crowd of Insubordinates standing shoulder to shoulder under the hallway’s vivid purplish-white lights.
With the Insubordinates amassed before us, I nod to Brohn to take the lead. “Go ahead,” I say through the side of my mouth.
Brohn leans down and kisses me on the cheek, and a bunch of oohs and aahs rise up from the crowd. Brohn puts his hands up and takes a small step back. “Thanks, but they’re all yours, Kakari Isutse.”
“Great,” I mutter.
I’ve never spoken out loud in front of more than maybe seven or eight people at a time. Now I’m standing here in front of nearly fifty kids and a few adults of every age, shape, color, and size, everyone dressed in black, gray, and gold, heavily armed, hastily trained, and all thinking with the naïveté of youthful optimism and unbridled belief in our cause that we’ll all be coming back here alive.
A few of them pump their fists in the air and chant my Costanoan nickname: “Kakari Isutse!”
I clear my throat. “Over this past week, Wisp has brought us all together. Brohn, Cardyn, and Granden have trained you. Rain has developed the battle plan and given you your assignments. With Render’s help, Olivia and I have gathered the necessary intel. Now it’s just a matter of following the plan Wisp and Rain have laid out. You’ve got to trust the intel. If you deviate, if you get nervous or decide to go off on your own, this plan will fall apart. If you fail, we all fail.”
Most everyone nods or says “Yeah,” and a few murmurs go up from the crowd.
“For as long as most of us in here have been alive, Krug has kept us divided and afraid. He rolled out his Eastern Order boogey man and played on our worst prejudices and our most embedded insecurities.”
The murmurs turn into a louder buzz with some of the Insubordinates nodding. A few start to clap.
“Then he sat back,” I continue, “and accumulated wealth and power and laughed at us while we fell into cycles of poverty and despair…”
A few more claps burst forth from the crowd.
“…while we amassed enough alcohol, drugs, and guns to kill each other in the privacy of our own broken-down neighborhoods…”
Now some of the Insubordinates shout out their agreement. Cries of “Down with Krug!” and “No more lies!” ring out and start to catch on and spread through the assembly like a virus.
“…while we got tricked into blaming ourselves for our misery…while we got brainwashed into believing there wasn’t enough for everyone. Not enough resources. Not enough wealth. Not enough safety, good schools, jobs, or opportunities to live a decent, healthy life. Krug and his businesses raped the planet to manufacture and sell goods to us we didn’t need and then had the nerve to blame us for buying those very same products that polluted and destroyed the environment. And the worst part is, we bought it. We bought the products. And we bought the lies. I was one of the ones he tricked. I grew up in fear and surrounded by death and deceit. Well, that stops now. We’re stronger together than we are apart. That’s the strength Krug fears: the strength of family. The strength of unity. The strength of loving our neighbor more than we love ourselves. The strength to see through his tricks, to admit we’ve been duped, and to do something about it. The strength of not being afraid anymore.”
Now the shouts from the crowd are rising to a crescendo.
“This isn’t about peaceful protests,” I cry out, my voice rising as I go. “It’s not about informing the masses, election turn-out, or pushing for reform. We’re past all that. We’re not a political movement. We’re not out to change anyone’s mind. We are prepared to do what it takes—one block, street, and city at a time—to expose the lies and to bring down the dictatorship our democracy has become.”
“But we can’t do it alone,” Cardyn shouts out to the crowd from where he’s standing by the edge of the platform next to Rain. “And neither can you!”
“And we can’t do it all at once!” Brohn adds over the growing tumult of the excited crowd.
At the back of the hall, out past the last of the Insubordinates, I spot Caldwell coming through the far door with a familiar companion perched on his shoulder.
Glistening in his new golden armor and feeling not perfect but at least on the mend, Render flutters over the heads of the Insubordinates in an explosion of dust and feathers and alights on my upper arm. Ducking down, the crowd gasps and then bursts into peals of laughter and cheers. I reach into my side pocket and toss Render a small protein cube, which he gulps down with a sharp snap of his black beak. I raise my hand to quiet the rowdy throng.
“What we can do starts here,” I continue. “It starts with this plan in this neighborhood in this city. And it starts right now.”
Render tilts his head back and punctures the open air in the crowded hallway with a series of sharp clicks and kraas!
“This isn’t a coup because this isn’t our government. Not anymore. By its very nature every Conspiracy is an act of rebellion. It’s time to fulfill our purpose and live up to our name!”
Everyone offers up vigorous nods. Dozens of them shout, “Yes!” and pump their fists in the air.
With the hallway now filled to overflowing with adrenalin and with all of us whipped into an energetic frenzy, Wisp signals to Granden, and the two of them lead us thundering down the stairs, out the ba
ck door, and down into the network of tunnels that will lead us directly to the Armory and straight into the biggest fight of our lives.
24
The next half hour is a burble of excited energy as we hike our way toward the enemy and past the point of no return.
Along a short but silent and solemn march through the dimly-lit subway tunnels and dried-up sewer access passageways, we begin to fan out with groups of Insubordinates peeling off one at a time from our ranks. Following Wisp’s and Rain’s plans to the letter, several teams duck down different branches of the subterranean network. One team climbs up a metal fourteen-step safety ladder that ends in a hatch opening into the cellar of an old beer distillery less than two blocks from the Armory. Another team, their black gas-piston assault rifles clutched to their chests, runs ahead of us and into a service elevator that will take them all the way up to the roof of the military surplus store across the street from the Armory. A third team gets the go-ahead from Wisp and scampers up a set of damp concrete steps leading to a trapdoor beneath one of the tool and supply sheds of a local elementary school just around the corner from the Armory.
Wisp leads me and my Conspiracy to another set of stairs, through an unlocked emergency door, and up an access ramp that opens out into a mag-car parking garage below an office building. According to Wisp, the Patriots—acting on bad intel and thinking it was a base of operations for the Insubordinates—took over the once-busy building about two weeks before we got into town. Although they claimed it was “a legal and peaceful exchange of title to the property,” more than fifty people who worked in this building mysteriously “disappeared.” Now, the garage is ghostly and almost empty with a few vehicles hovering on grav-pads in front of a bank of charging stations and a few older-style military jeeps resting on their rubber wheels in designated parking spots over by the service elevators.
Thanks to the on-the-ground surveillance Wisp has been conducting over the past couple of months, the specs Olivia has been able to pilfer from the city’s urban and zoning systems databases, and the intel Render and I have provided from our endless, crisscrossing flights around the city these past few days, I know every inch of this area, inside and out. Combined with the holo-sims and the detailed information Granden, Brohn, and Cardyn have spent the week drilling into the heads of the Insubordinates, most of us could probably navigate these conduits and corridors and conduct this raid with our eyes closed.
Of course, given the enemy we’re up against and the severity of the stakes, eyes wide open is probably our safest bet.
From the parking garage, Granden heads toward a stairway behind an emergency door while Wisp leads my Conspiracy up a maintenance tunnel and through a delivery entrance that opens onto the patio of a café nestled behind a small hotel. A haze of white light comes from behind the curtains of a window on the second floor, but the rest of the hotel is dark. With the café closed for the night, the patio is empty except for a stack of chairs and a few round tables tethered together against the back wall. The manager left an hour ago, and the custodial staff doesn’t report until tomorrow. Again, thanks to Render and to my own oddly acute memory, I know the names, faces, and schedules of at least two dozen people who have been in and out of here over the past few days.
Slipping out the back door of the parking garage, Wisp leads us through a small laneway and out to the sidewalk, where we crouch down behind a long concrete barrier set out by the Patriot Army to cordon off this part of the street around the Armory. Two soldiers—overloaded with a variety of bulky rifles and handguns—are on guard duty, but they have turned their attention to a pair of teenagers who are engaged in what looks like a squabbling lovers’ quarrel under the light cast by a green-tinted halo-post on the corner. As the argument gets louder and as the soldiers trot off to investigate, we scamper across the street in a crouch and plunge over a low stone wall lining the perimeter of the park where the Patriot Army conducts some of their military training exercises.
Wisp taps her comm-link and whispers, “Settled and primed.” Out under the halo-post, the two teenagers suddenly stop their bickering and sprint off, leaving the two soldiers on the empty corner to share a head-scratching moment before returning to their guard duty.
In the quiet of the city and in the pitch-dark shadow of the Armory, our teams have now assumed their positions. Wisp taps her comm-link again, but nothing happens. She scowls and taps it again. When she still doesn’t get a signal, Manthy crawls over and puts her hand behind Wisp’s neck, her palm covering the comm-link. Wisp’s eyes widen, and she nods. “Got a signal,” she whispers, her hand on Manthy’s forearm in a gesture of thanks.
Wisp nods her head at a few quick and quiet reports and gives us a closed-fist signal, confirming that the nine teams of Insubordinates are all in place.
A couple of days ago, up on the fifth floor and on Rain’s advice, each team gave itself a nickname. I suggested just calling them “Team 1, Team 2, etcetera,” which caused Rain to roll her eyes and call me boring.
“Fine,” I said. “What do you suggest?”
One of the Insubordinates—a tall, strong, but strangely mousy girl named Clover—put up her hand, and, when Rain called on her, Clover suggested they name themselves after various neighborhoods, streets, and landmarks of San Francisco.
They all thought it was a great idea, so, after Rain gave them her endorsement, that’s what they became.
Tonight, lurking in shadows and peering down from rooftops, we have nine teams of five Insubordinates each plus my Conspiracy with all of us connected by comm-link and coordinated by Olivia back in the Style and by Wisp and Granden out here with us in the field.
The team of Insubordinates calling themselves Team Marina is up on the roof of the two-story military surplus building just across the street from the Armory. Team Bayview is camped out in a small courtyard of an apartment building a block away. A diversion team, Team Presidio, is stationed on Mission Street with another squad calling themselves Team Van Ness set up to run interference over on 15th Street, where we know a three-person night-patrol of Patriot Army soldiers will be on very sleepy guard duty after a long day of escorting Krug and his personal attaché around San Francisco.
Team Golden Gate and Team Alcatraz are set up to seal the barracks where the enemy soldiers are bivouacked, with Team Trolley stationed out back to commandeer the military vehicles on site. Team Ashbury is responsible for breaking into the small control shed out back and disabling the power-coupler controlling the Armory’s external vehicle and pedestrian doors. They’re also in charge of coordinating with Olivia to disable the building’s three-stage communications generator.
“We can’t have the Patriots calling for backup,” Wisp explained during one of the recent training sessions. Team North Beach, the most heavily-armed and, frankly, gung-ho of all of us, will be the first ones through the front doors while my team sneaks into the Armory from the north side, worms our way inside, and seizes control of Command Headquarters.
Thanks to Render’s amazing senses and my increasingly eidetic memory, we know exactly when every change of guard happens, who’s going on duty, and who’s coming off. We know exactly how many Patriot soldiers are currently out on patrol and how many are in the Armory.
For Ekker and the Patriot Army, that’s the disadvantage of following protocol and adhering to strict military precision. It’s predictable.
We’re not.
We don’t have the Patriots’ numbers—there are over two-hundred of them on active duty in the Armory at the moment—and we can’t match their weapons, their ruthlessness, or even their training.
Other than our actual combat knives, handguns, sniper rifles, stun-sticks, and concussion grenades, our best weapons are a touch of desperation, a bit of fear, and a whole lot of crazy. Plus, it doesn’t hurt that our leader is a military genius and that her big brother is bullet-proof.
With everyone in position and with the Armory now quietly surrounded, we wait for Wisp’s signa
l.
Tucked invisibly behind a landscaped cluster of boxwood and purple hopseed bushes, I can tell, even through the sparse moonlight speckling its way between the canopy of trees overhead, that everyone’s on edge, which shouldn’t be surprising considering what we’re about to do. Cardyn has peeled off one of his gloves and is nibbling at the dry skin around the edge of his thumb. Rain keeps peering through small gaps in the vegetation and over the stone wall around us, her eyes riveted on the contingent of Patriot guards patrolling the darkened sidewalk across the street. Manthy looks droopy-eyed and seems small and weighted down by the cache of weapons packed into her tactical vest. Even Brohn looks fidgety, although he gives me a confident smile when our eyes meet through the midnight gloom.
Personally, I’m beyond terrified. I’ve had to fight for my life before, but it was always in the heat of the moment, a foray into spontaneous combat in defense of myself or my friends. Being part of a planned attack like this carries with it a whole new host of headaches. What if our plan is flawed in ways we haven’t anticipated? What if Ekker knows what we’re up to? After all, he did find the Style even if he didn’t technically find us. If it weren’t for Wisp and Olivia’s transformational magic trick that hid us all from Ekker’s raid, we would have easily been captured or killed.
Given all that, we’re going into this with a lot of confidence that may not be warranted.
On the other hand, I remind myself, we have brilliant tacticians and expert trainers on our side. We have the moral high ground in a rebellion against tyranny. And, for what it’s worth, we have the Emergents.
Who knows? I ask myself by way of consolation in a time of crisis. Maybe we can actually pull this off, defeat Krug and Ekker, liberate the city, expose the government’s lies, and be back to the Style in time for breakfast.
