The Secret Citizen (Freedom/Hate Series, Book 3)

by Kyle Andrews

  “You killed him?” Daph stepped back, as though she were worried that Rose would kill her too.

  “A kid was gunned down last night. An innocent child,” Rose told Daph. “A girl who had so much potential and didn't even realize it. A girl I knew. A girl that I considered a friend. You want me to mourn for a teenager? Fine. I'll mourn her. I'll remember seeing her blood all over the ground and the people gathering around to celebrate—celebrate!—the fact that she was dead. Look at the news. They are mourning someone who tried to kill me and completely ignoring the girl who just wanted to survive.”

  Daph fell silent. She smirked as though she thought Rose were lying or joking. She was in over her head now and didn't seem to quite know how she wanted to react to what Rose was saying.

  “You're lying,” Daph finally told her, though she didn't seem to believe it herself.

  “I'm not lying.”

  “You're... That's not what happened.”

  “It is what happened.”

  Daph took another moment to sort out her thoughts and then her eyes turned cold as she said, “I don't believe you.”

  “I never expected you to.”

  For some reason, that comment seemed to hit Daph harder than any of the others. She said, “I don't even know who you are anymore.”

  Rose nodded and said, “I should go.”

  “That's it? You're just going to leave?”

  “What else am I supposed to do?”

  Daph didn't answer. She obviously couldn't bring herself to tell Rose that she wanted to discuss this matter or to hear Rose's side of things. She couldn't bring herself to listen, so she obviously didn't know what she expected from Rose. Everything she could say was written on her face in that moment.

  Rose started to walk toward the front door, but before she got there, she paused, looked at her feet and asked, “Can you just give me ten minutes before you call?”

  It was the hardest thing she had ever asked in her life. The words nearly got stuck in her throat, but she forced them out. As she spoke them, she could see the disbelief in Daph's eyes.

  “You're an idiot,” Daph told her. “A damn fool.”

  Rose said nothing.

  “Do you really believe that you're that good a liar? That I never knew who your friends were?” Daph asked. “If I was going to turn you in, I would have done it by now.”

  Rose looked her sister in the eye and told her, “I wasn't asking you.” She then turned to face Ze's bedroom door, which was open just a crack. Through that crack, she could see Ze listening to their conversation. She already had her phone in hand.

  Daph turned and saw Ze just as the bedroom door slammed shut and yelled “Ze!”

  While Daph ran to the door and started pounding on it, Rose walked out the same front door that she'd been walking through her whole life, and she knew that she could never walk through it again.

  15

  Collin didn't sleep. He closed his eyes and allowed his mind to wander, but true sleep never came. At first, it was chaos. He replayed everything he'd said to every member of the Campus since he arrived, convinced that he'd made a fool of himself or come across as ungrateful for what they had done for him.

  He thought about his former base and the people who were back there now, probably wondering what happened to him. He would have to find some way to get a message to them and let them know that he was alive and safe.

  The image of that room in the HAND building, where he had spent the previous month was so strong in his mind that it was in the background of all of his thoughts. The way sounds echoed in that room. The feeling that Liz was there with him.

  She wasn't in the Campus. He probably should have been thankful for that, since her being there would have meant that she was less of a defense mechanism in his own mind than she was a symptom of his going crazy. He didn't feel crazy, though he was never really sure if that meant anything. Still, he waited for the moment when his mind would snap and everyone around him would realize that they'd wasted all of their time and effort on saving someone who was lost in spite of his rescue.

  As he played back the moment where he spoke to the people of the Campus, he heard Beta Winston's voice in his head. Each time he remembered the moment where he talked about Uly Jacobs and repeated his last words, 'it's in our blood,' he heard Beta's voice in his head yelling, 'No! No! No!'

  Was it all the same thing? Was he turning into that man, standing in front of a crowd of people who looked to him for something resembling hope or inspiration and speaking hollow words of concern and anger? Was he a fraud, like that man? Was he a liar?

  He felt like a liar. What right did he have to use Uly Jacobs' name like that? He didn't know Uly. He didn't know Libby Jacobs either. Yet he threw their memory around the same way Beta waved that dead boy's memory around. It was disgusting.

  Still, no matter how much of a fraud he felt he might be, he couldn't think of a word that he regretted. He couldn't think of anything he said that was untrue. Unlike Beta, Collin lived among these people. He lived in the same rundown holes that they lived in. He grew up nearly starving to death, forced to eat over-processed imitation foods, which provided more stomach aches and fatigue than nutrition. And he had it better than most, as he had been groomed for a HAND assignment.

  Beta was a fraud because he pulled up to those speeches in luxury cars, while the people he claimed to relate to would probably never ride in a car at all. He waved his fists in the air in anger and joined in the sorrow of the people, while the sunlight reflected off of his gold watches and diamond rings. He never starved. He never had to sit in a public hospital's waiting room. Beta Winston was born and raised to be a member of the elite class. The only assignment he ever got was to sell the words of the authorities in a way that made the lesser-people rally in support. To convince them that he was speaking what was on their minds already while planting those thoughts himself.

  Beta Winston was a politician without office. He spoke the same lies as anyone trying to get elected. He oozed the same slime. And when he went home at night and spread out in his comfortable, oversized bed with his third wife, Kandi, his sleep was as sound as his belly was full.

  Collin loathed the man and everyone like him. Every candidate or commentator who got on TV and flashed their well rehearsed smiles. Every news anchor who repeated lies, knowing full well that they were deceiving the people. He hated them. But at the same time, he realized that they were doing something right. Something that Freedom had spent decades avoiding.

  By the time Collin opened his eyes and sat up, he had decided that it wouldn't be enough to simply destroy those people and their entire system. In order to truly win this war, someone needed to become those people. The face. The voice. If that person had to be Collin himself, then so be it. He would stand on the highest rooftop that he could find and scream to the world at the top of his lungs that Freedom would prevail.

  And before he knew it, that voice of Beta in his head changed to his own. Only instead of screaming, 'No! No! No!' he was screaming, 'Yes!'

  As he sat up on the floor, every one of his stitched-up wounds was throbbing. The pain was sharp and with each beating of his own heart, he was reminded of what those people had done to him. He could have requested a painkiller, but he didn't want that pain dulled. He wanted to hold onto it for as long as possible and remember it well into his old age, because that pain was going to drive him forward.

  He was inspired. He truly was. So much so that he had a stupid grin on his face and a hunger in his eyes, but he only realized this when he turned his head toward the little girl and saw her staring at him as though he were insane.

  Quickly, his look softened. His grin turned to a warm smile. His hatred turned to concern.

  “Are you feeling okay?” he asked her.

  The girl hesitated, then nodded.

  “Good,” Collin said. “You're safe now. You're in a place where HAND won't be able to find you. You don't need to be afraid of anyone here,
I promise. Okay?”

  The girl didn't nod or say anything to him. She just looked around the room, taking in her surroundings and seeming as uncertain about her future there as Collin was.

  “Have you ever known anyone in Freedom before?” he asked her. She didn't seem to know what he was talking about.

  Collin wondered where their communication was being derailed for only a moment before realizing the source of their problems.

  “Have you heard of Freedom before?” he asked her.

  The girl shook her head.

  “I bet you've heard of Hate though, right?”

  The girl nodded.

  “We're not the people they talk about on the news, I promise. They always talk about monsters, don't they? Crazy people who do crazy things? But... You know how they arrested you for something you never did?”

  The girl nodded.

  “They kinda do the same thing to us. They tell people that we do things that we really don't do. They tell people that we say things that we really don't say. Does that make sense?”

  The girl looked at him as though he were speaking an entirely different language. Collin couldn't help but smile at his inability to get his point across.

  “I'm going to call you Phyllis,” he told her. “Do you mind if I call you Phyllis?”

  The girl didn't respond.

  “Phyllis, I'm going to need you to stop throwing kittens around, okay? I know you enjoy it, but it's not something that we do around here and I think it might hurt the kittens.”

  “I don't throw kittens,” the girl said in a low, but defensive tone.

  “You don't?”

  She shook her head.

  “But someone told me that you do. And that your name is Phyllis. Should I believe you or that other person?”

  “I don't throw kittens and my name isn't Phyllis.”

  “And it would annoy you if people kept believing things about you that weren't true, right?” Collin grinned. “It's the same thing with us. We don't bomb people, or hate people. And our name isn't Hate. No matter how many times they say it is on the news, it's just not true. Do you believe me?”

  The girl shrugged.

  “You don't really want to be here and you probably wish I'd leave you alone, right?”

  The girl nodded.

  “I wish I could. But if I let you go back to your old life, do you know what would happen?”

  The girl didn't respond at all.

  Collin pushed up his sleeves and his pant legs. He decided not to go as far as taking off his shirt, figuring that his arm and legs would be enough to get the point across.

  “They don't tell you about this on the TV, do they?” he asked her.

  She stared at his wounds, obviously disturbed by them. As disgusted as she was by the sight of his wounds, she looked even more scared to think that the same fate could fall on her.

  Pulling his sleeves and pant legs back down, Collin told her, “I will do everything in my power to make sure this never happens to you, but I need you to understand something first. I need you to understand that you can't go back to the way things were. You can't tell people about this place. If you do, we will all suffer and die. You too. And I'm not telling you that to scare you. I'm telling you so that you know how fortunate you are to be here, with these people. We both are.”

  “Why would they lie to us?” the girl asked. Collin couldn't tell by the tone of her voice whether she believed him or not.

  “Because they want power.”

  She looked confused once again.

  Collin took a deep breath and said, “My sister always dreamed about her assignment day. Always wondering what she would be and where she would live. Do you do that?”

  The girl shrugged.

  “What would you be, if you could choose?” he asked.

  She shrugged again.

  Smiling, Collin said, “I never knew either. I've always loved learning. History, mainly. I like learning about people and talking about people. But I wasn't going to be a historian or a teacher or anything like that. They were training me to be something else. A soldier.”

  As he said the word 'soldier' he half-chuckled. The idea seemed absurd to him because he wasn't a fighter. He didn't think like a fighter or feel like one. But then he remembered running for his life and fighting the police in order to hold onto his own freedom. He killed people. Their faces flashed before his eyes.

  He must have been staring off into space for too long, because when he looked back to the girl, she was staring at him. She actually looked a little bit worried about him.

  “I never wanted to be a soldier,” he told her. “They made me into one. They chased me down and cut me open, and do you know why they did that?”

  She shook her head.

  “Because I gave a girl some books. They call it 'hostile content' but what it really is is history. Or sometimes, just children's stories. But they want to control what we read and what we think as much as they control what we do with our lives.

  “We don't call ourselves Hate like they say we do. Why would we do that? They make it sound like we're hateful, evil people. Monsters who kill without reason. But do you know what we call ourselves?”

  “Freedom?”

  Collin nodded and said, “Because that's why we fight. So we can choose our own fates. Read what we want to read. Say what we want to say. To keep what is ours. To love who is ours. Freedom is what we dream of when we go to sleep, after the long nightmare of our day. You don't have to be scared of us, okay... Phyllis?”

  The girl narrowed her eyes and sternly told him, “My name isn't Phyllis.”

  “What is it?”

  “Dor.”

  Collin extended a hand and said, “It's nice to meet you, Dor. Though I wish it were under better circumstances.”

  Dor hesitated for a moment, but eventually she reached out and shook Collin's hand. As she did, she said, “I want to draw pictures, when I grow up.”

  “Let's see if we can make that happen,” Collin replied.

  Someone on the other side of the room turned up the volume on the TV, and a roundtable discussion on the death of Croy Fisker was taking place between four commentators and a host.

  “What we have to do is destroy Hate, once and for all. No more games. No more playing around or playing nice,” said an older female with thick green-rimmed glasses. “These people are dangerous. They are murderers who kill little children. They are the worst people in the world, and we must finally declare once and for all that we will not tolerate their kind in our country.”

  The host adjusted his position in his seat and scratched his balding head. He glanced down at his notes and then asked, “But is it that simple? Can we simply tell them to go away at this point?”

  “Of course it's not that simple,” a fat man with a red face chimed in, wiping sweat off of his forehead with a handkerchief. “We're talking about a cancer that has been growing for years. And as with any other cancer, we must attack these people from all sides. We must cut them out of our society. We must blast them with every weapon that we have until they are gone, once and for all.”

  The woman waved off that idea and said, “We cannot go around bombing our own cities. The thought is ludicrous, and frankly that sort of attitude is why we've had so much trouble so far. Your entire party takes this grand, yet entirely unrealistic, approach to everything.”

  “Then what can we do?” the host asked.

  Collin couldn't listen anymore. He looked to Dor's face and saw her listening to those comments and he couldn't help but wonder if they were counteracting all of the progress that he had just made with her.

  “I'll come and see you in a little bit,” he said, standing up.

  Dor nodded to him and then her eyes drifted right back to the TV screen, just in time for the fat man to declare, “The worst people who ever walked the earth!”

  As he walked out of the room, he wondered what it was about those people on the TV that drew in the crowd.
How could people believe everything that they were told without question?

  It was because there was no counter-argument. Everyone on TV held a variation of the same belief, thus skewing the scales on every topic. Anyone who didn't fit within those boundaries was immediately dismissed as an extremist, the same way conspiracy theorists and UFO nuts were shrugged off.

  The people on TV spoke in extremes so that when the dust settled on any topic, the field was still littered with false information. People could laugh and wave off the idea of monsters who wanted to eat babies for dinner, but the rational version of that story was still about horrible, evil people.

  As he walked down the hall, Collin saw Tracy heading toward one of the offices. He hurried to catch up with her, waiting until he was right beside her before he said, “Hey.”

  “Hey back,” she replied, stopping to chat. “How are your wounds feeling?”

  “They hurt like hell, but I don't care,” he told her.

  “We have medication.”

  “I'm fine. Listen, I need your help with something.”

  “Okay. What am I helping with?”

  “I need to figure out a way to address the public.”

  Tracy's eyes widened and she looked as though she were going to burst into laughter. She said, “Sure. Let me just show you to our press room.”

  “You're joking, but why don't we have a press room?”

  “Because we have no access to the airwaves? We have no means of distribution.”

  “Tell that to the people who are passing out the fliers.”

  “You want to hand out fliers on the street corners?” Tracy asked with a blend of sarcasm and intrigue in her voice. She raised an eyebrow at him as soon as she said it.

  “As a matter of fact, I do. Only we're not going to call them 'fliers'.”