by K. Makansi
Bear and I sit around our campfire, exchanging reports of our various conversations during the day. After hours of talking with different workers, probing them about Andre and Sam, and hiding drawings all around the Farms in locations where workers would be likely to find them, it feels as if we’ve gotten absolutely nowhere. Be patient, Little Bird—I imagine my grandfather’s voice in my head. He would always say that as he dangled a fresh date, my favorite dessert, in front of me. I wouldn’t get the date until I told him all about what I learned in school that day, the fun things I did with my friends, the drawings I was excited about. After all that I had to give him a big fat kiss on the cheek, and only then would I get my dessert. Delaying gratification can be sweeter than gobbling down your treat without anticipating it, without truly savoring it, he’d insist with a waggle of his finger.
But I’m not waiting for a little piece of fruit. I’m waiting for a sign. We need a sign that the workers are waking up, that the people will rise, that the Resistance will finally take a stand against the enemy we’ve been cowering from all these years. The sign is coming, I tell myself, over and over again, the words echoing in my head. I can feel it in my bones: the last evening of silence.
Something big is going to happen, and I am ready for it.
15 - VALE
Spring 8, SA 106, 15h00
Gregorian Calendar: March 27
It’s now day four of looking for Remy, and we’re getting desperate. The Director only gave us seventy-two hours, though Eli’s taken to muttering “Damn her and her orders,” under his breath at every opportunity. I had to work hard to suppress a sense of triumph when Soren insisted Remy would be at the Farm nearest to Normandy, but she turned out to be nowhere in sight.
Earlier today, Jahnu wisely observed that Remy might have chosen Bear to accompany her, instead of any of us, for a reason. “I think we ought to think a little less about ourselves and a little more about Remy, about why she left and why Bear went with her,” he said. I acknowledged his subtle reprimand with a smile and earned a wink in return. “Why would she have asked Bear to go with her as opposed to any one of us?” he went on. “By that logic, she’s almost certainly at the farm Bear came from—Farm Ten, right?”
“Round Barn,” Kenzie said, from his side.
“Jeesh, Jahnu, why didn’t you mention this sooner?” Soren asked.
Jahnu shrugged. “I just thought of it last night. Kenzie and I were talking—”
“A little pillow talk, eh?” Miah cut in with a teasing smile and an elbow to Kenzie’s ribs. Kenzie just rolled her eyes in that Miah, you’re such a goof way she has, but Jahnu ignored him, continuing in his earnest manner.
“—and she mentioned that Remy might not be in the places we’re looking because we’re thinking about it from our perspective, not hers. We’ve searched all over Twelve and Four because they’re easily accessible from Normandy, but of course she wasn’t there—why go to those Farms when you’ve got someone with you who knows the ins and outs of Ten?”
“Why, indeed,” Eli asked, turning his glare on Soren.
“Don’t blame me for thinking rationally,” Soren mutters. “Although why I thought Remy’d be rational for once is beyond me.”
“Bickering gets us nowhere closer to Remy,” I said. “Jahnu’s idea is a good one. Let’s head to Round Barn and see if we can get radio contact or a sonar lead on her or the car she, uh, requisitioned from Normandy.”
A few hours later, we’re buzzing around the perimeters of Farm Ten, all our cloaking capacities engaged, and Eli’s surfing the radio frequencies, trying to get a bite.
“Montana Three, do you read? This is Montana Four,” he repeats, over and over again, using his and Remy’s code names. Everyone in the Resistance has a code name based on family groupings and on places from the Old World countries of North America. Miah and I even have our own names now—Calgary One and Two.
“Montana Three, do you read? This is Montana Four.” He cycles through the frequencies again and again until we hear what we’ve all been waiting for. My head snaps around, my heart thudding to a stop.
“Montana Three here. What’s the word?” A wide smile spreads across Eli’s face. There’s static, but Remy’s voice is strong. Relief floods my veins like a drug.
“Eighty-three, and where the—” The current date on the Sector calendar is always the “word.” These code phrases help confirm that the two people radioing each other are both Resistance fighters, and not Sector operatives who may have obtained a code name illicitly.
“And the time?” Remy cuts Eli off before he can start his tirade. The current season is the “time” and each season is assigned a color. Before Eli answers, he shakes his head like he can’t believe what he’s hearing.
“The time is fucking purple, okay? Now tell me where the hell you are!”
“Where are you?”
“In your neighborhood, cruising the skies.”
“What are you doing out here?”
“Looking for you, stupid. What do you think?”
Our airship is too big to set down near the coordinates Remy gave us, so we land about five kilometers away and radio our coordinates to them. We wait about thirty minutes, the anxiety palpable, before Remy and Bear arrive at a jog. When they pull up short, staring around at the apparently empty field, Eli jumps out of the cloaked ship like a madman, and Remy almost shoots him on the spot. I would have been startled, too, had a manic, fully-grown man jumped at me out of thin air. Much hugging ensues, and I hang at the back of the group and wait until they’ve greeted everyone else.
Her eyes finally catch mine; this time, there is no apprehension in her eyes as they alight on me. Relief washes over me, and I step forward as Miah moves to the side. But once I’m in front of her, I don’t know what to do. Hug her? No. Shake her hand? Hardly. So I wave. Smooth, Vale. Really smooth. Why the press thought I was such a “playboy” back in Okaria is beyond me, since I rarely dated and apparently cannot even properly greet a pretty woman. If Linnea Heilmann saw me now, she’d be laughing her ass off.
“Hi,” I manage.
“Vale.”
Silence, and a jolt of unease courses between us like a lit fuse.
“Didn’t know you had a thing for the wayfaring tendencies of your parents,” Kenzie jokes, breaking the tension.
“Or for the agrarian paradise of Farm life. What the hell are you doing here?” Soren demands, though I notice he’s glaring at me instead of her, as though her unapproved adventures were somehow my fault.
Maybe they are, I think, and a thrill runs through me that maybe something I did or something I said inspired her to action, but I quiet the thought before it gains traction. Nothing she does is because of you, Vale.
Remy narrows her eyes at Soren, and opens her mouth as though about to deliver a rebuke. But she stops mid-breath, and instead turns to Bear.
“We’re doing exactly what Remy said in her letter,” Bear says. “We’re making change. We’re telling the truth.”
“And how, exactly, have you been doing that?” Soren asks.
“By starting a revolution,” she says with a smile. It feels as if the first time I’ve seen her really smile, since the last time I held her hand at the Academy. It’s different, somehow—more mature, of course, but something else, too. There’s definitely something different about her, now. She’s standing taller, seems more confident, more centered. She has a sense of purpose.
“We broke into the Dietician’s lab and fucked with their formulas,” Bear says.
“You what?” Eli demands, eyes wide.
“So that’s why all the questions about my mom’s work,” Kenzie says, nodding with approval.
“It was time for drastic measures.” Remy’s tone is now serious. Her voice takes on the kind of gravity and deliberation that her father has when he speaks to a group. “After Thermopylae, we saw how vulnerable the Resistance is. Corine,” here again she meets my eyes, though only for a second before I
drop mine, “could destroy us all in a heartbeat if she knew where all our bases are. But even Corine can’t stop a true revolution. Bear and I realized that if we took the fight to the Farms and eventually to the factory towns and spread the word of the intellectual and biological oppression the OAC represents, we could make it impossible to destroy the movement even if they take out each and every one of us. Even if they destroy the Resistance. If the people, and I mean more than just defectors from the capital, know the truth, there will always be hope, even if all of us are gone.”
There’s a heartbeat of silence before Firestone, always the one willing to say what no one else will, speaks up. “How’s that going for ya?”
“It’s a slow start, of course,” Remy admits. “The message has been hard to communicate. There’s not a lot of openness, or people asking questions. But we expected that.”
“Even Remy’s drawings, which she made plenty of before we left Normandy, weren’t getting much notice. We’ve salted them around the Farm where folks can find them, but not too many are interested,” Bear says, almost sadly. “Mostly they like her pictures and want her to draw for them. It’s hard to get people to wake up, ya see. Took me a while, too, when I was one of them. No shame in admitting it. With Remy’s art, it’s like that time Soren came to play piano for us. It’s nice, but afterward no one really remembered exactly why it was nice or even what it sounded like. There was a glimmer of wonder in the moment, but then it faded …” Bear trails off and everyone waits. “… It’s not easy to make connections or even listen to your own thoughts and emotions when you’re not yourself. Ya know?”
It hits me that in that short speech, Bear has captured more about the challenges facing the Resistance and the reason why what they’re doing is important than anything I’ve heard since leaving Okaria. I’ve heard Soren play. There’s no way anyone can be unmoved by his music. The fact that Bear and the other workers thought it was “nice” but could not say why or even remember it after the notes faded away hits home like a punch in the gut. My breath hitches, and I feel Remy glance over at me. I push back the emotion with a resolute swallow. How did I not understand? It’s horrific enough to attribute my parents’ crimes to a murderous thirst for political power, but seeing it through Bear’s eyes, seeing that what they’re really doing is taking away the individual’s ability to know and experience beauty, to experience life, stops me cold.
“Tell us about the Dietician’s lab and the formulas,” Kenzie is saying. “What did you do?”
“We replaced all the MealPak additives with sugar water.” Remy beams at us.
There’s another silence, though this one stretches on, unbroken, as we all stare at Remy and Bear, stunned.
“That’s genius,” Kenzie breathes, finally. “Why didn’t the Director think of that before?”
Soren shakes his head as if he can’t believe what he’s just heard. “Because the Resistance has never risked full-out war before, that’s why.”
“All Bear and I did was open up the conversation, and, hopefully, enable the conversation to continue. We’re getting an early start on the inevitable, because we need more people to join the cause. We can’t do this on our own and the people on the Farms or in the factory towns can’t help us take the next steps if they can’t consider their actions—or the consequences of their actions.”
“But we’re not ready to take the next steps,” Soren says. “We’re not positioned to—”
“Positioned?” Remy interrupts, her voice hard. “They forced us into this position when they attacked Thermopylae, when they killed my mom, when they killed the others in cold blood, when they were going to kill the other members of Team Blue—including my father—before the Outsiders intervened, when they outed us to the public as terrorists, when they accused Miah of being Vale’s kidnapper and put a price on his head. What the hell, Soren? What else do they need to do before we take them seriously? Before we realize that when they say they’re going to hunt us down and destroy us, they mean it? If we stay at our bases and do nothing—”
“We’re not planning on doing nothing!” Soren’s voice is raised now. “Did you forget about the plans to steal the seed printer? To infiltrate the food chain?”
“No, I didn’t forget those plans. By all means, go back and steal the printer. By the time we’ve got seeds planted, by the time we’re ready to harvest, by the time we’re ready to start introducing untainted food into the food supply, perhaps we’ll have more people on our side—”
“More people to do what?” Soren shouts.
“Soren—” Jahnu, ever the peacemaker, tries to interrupt, but Remy is having none of it.
“More people to carry on,” she says with vehemence. “If we don’t recruit more people to our cause, sooner or later they’ll hunt us down and the Resistance will be gone. They’ll find each of our outposts and destroy them just like they destroyed Thermopylae and Waterloo, they’ll destroy our entire movement, and what will we have accomplished?” She looks around. “Nothing, that’s what! What the hell have we been waiting for? We may not have risked all out war before, but that hasn’t stopped them. So let’s risk it. Let’s put in all on the line. What else do we have to lose?”
The girl before us is determined, brave, awe-inspiring, and I’m so fucking proud of her, it’s all I can do to stop myself from striding across the space separating us, wrapping her in my arms, and kissing her until neither one of us can breathe. Beside me, Soren shakes his head again and sighs heavily. He runs his fingers through his hair and looks around at the rest of us. “You all agree with her?”
Remy stares at us, arms across her chest, poised in her balanced fighter’s stance. She is defiant, composed, and waiting for someone else to echo Soren, to say this wasn’t a good idea, or you should have checked with the Director first, or you’re going to get us all killed. But now there’s no trace of either challenge or judgment. All I see is camaraderie and determination. Even a little bit of eagerness. And pride. I catch Miah watching me, watching my reaction. He knows, as we all do, that Remy has changed the game. There’s no going back now, and for some reason, I am, for the first time, proud to be standing here, truly proud to be a member of this group.
One by one we go around the group.
Eli first: “I’m all in, Little Bird!”
Jahnu and Kenzie, holding hands, nod and Kenzie speaks for both of them. “We’re with you.”
“What have I got to lose? I’ve got a price on my head, so might as well make them pay it, right?” Miah says, all bravado.
“This is one crazy crew, here,” Firestone says with a laugh. “I just wish it was my fuckin’ idea.”
They all turn to me, waiting. I nod, not trusting my voice.
Soren sighs and shakes his head as if we’re completely out of our minds. And maybe we are. “Well, okay then,” he says. “Game on. Here we go.”
Eli puts his arm around Remy and gives her shoulders a rough squeeze. “I guess I should radio Normandy and let them know we’ve found you two troublemakers. Oh, and not to expect us for dinner anytime soon.”
16 - VALE
Spring 8, Sector Annum 106, 17h24
Gregorian Calendar: March 27
We spent the rest of the day setting up camp, hearing the details of Remy and Bear’s mission up to this point and filling them in on what we’d learned while searching for them.
Late in the afternoon, Jahnu, Kenzie, and I set out to put into practice the trapping skills the wayfarer girl had taught us in the hopes we’d have something fresh to eat over the next few days. As we headed back to camp, we heard rustling in the undergrowth and my first thought was that we’d been discovered. My second thought, as per usual, was utter dread at being questioned by Aulion in front of my parents. My third thought was, shit! That’s a mean boar headed straight for Kenzie. I whipped out my Bolt, jammed the setting to KILL, and fired. But it was already dead by the time I got off my shot. Jahnu and Kenzie had both seen it and fired at the same ti
me. The hairy thing was practically already roasted, smoke rising from its inert body. The smell of burning hair and skin filled the air.
“Bacon!” Kenzie whooped.
“I thought you were a gonner,” I said, wiping my forehead.
She looked down at the carcass, poked at it, and turned it over with her booted foot. “Nah, it’s kinda scrawny.”
“Scrawny or not, it’s fresh meat, protein we probably all need,” I said.
“Who is going to skin and dress this baby for dinner?” she asked.
“We’re bringing home the bacon,” Jahnu quipped, “so I volunteer Miah and Firestone.”
“Hah, Firestone, maybe,” I laughed. “But Miah? I don’t think so.”
“About time he learned to live off the land,” Kenzie said. “It may be scrawny, but I don’t want to carry it back.” She looked from Jahnu to me, and we both shrugged and shook our heads. “Okay, we’ve got to figure out how to move the damn thing.”
We created a makeshift sled and dragged the boar back to camp, Firestone stepped up and volunteered to do the honors and to show all of us how to skin and dress the meat. Eli and Bear dug a hole, fashioned a spit, and the boar roasted over the fire through the evening while we talked about what comes next.
After a well-earned meal and a few brews that Firestone had secretly stowed without telling anyone, we hunkered down for the night and, for the first time in a long time, I slept peacefully knowing that Remy was just on the other side of the fire pit.
Now, evening is upon us again and the sun is dipping behind the trees as we prepare to make our next move. Remy and Bear told us that Rose, one of Bear’s old friends on the Farm, had set up a clandestine meeting with a few of the more spirited workers, including some of Bear’s old friends and a few new transfers from other parts of the Sector. We decided, in the interest of secrecy, to split up and only have a few of us attend the meeting.
