Live in Infamy

by Caroline Tung Richmond

  “What’s wrong?” his father whispered, alarmed.

  “Nothing. Sorry,” Ren said quickly. He looked away from his dad and pretended to clear his throat, hoping to hide how the blood had drained from his cheeks.

  Around them, another round of murmuring scattered through the crowd.

  “The Viper?” someone said.

  “Is that girl an accomplice?”

  The whisperings multiplied, but Ren could only shake his head. Daisy Montgomery couldn’t have been the Viper’s collaborator — couldn’t anyone else see that? Some of the Viper’s essays encouraged worker strikes and factory walkouts, while others spoke of joining the Resistance — but all of the writings urged unified acts of rebellion instead of a lone-gunman approach. Daisy’s crime didn’t have the Viper’s familiar stamp on it.

  But still, Ren’s chest hurt for her.

  “You all right?” Mr. Cabot repeated. He tried to give Ren his vest, but Ren refused. He wasn’t cold. If anything, his collar felt suffocatingly warm.

  Crown Prince Katsura went on, this time speaking to the cameras. “For these crimes, Daisy Montgomery, you are sentenced to death.”

  The crowd went quiet again, but one last question remained: How would Daisy Montgomery die? Over the decades, the overseers of the WAT preferred different methods of execution. One had preferred a slow death by sword. Another, beheadings. And still another had a soft spot for crucifixions in the rising tide.

  Crown Prince Katsura signaled to Major Endo to proceed, and the matter was settled. The Ronin Elite would carry out the dirty work today — and their work was often dirty indeed.

  At last, Daisy Montgomery made a sound. She spat out a desperate string of words, but they all came out broken.

  Mr. Cabot sucked in a breath. “They must’ve cut out her tongue.”

  Ren felt nauseous. So that was why Daisy hadn’t said anything before. He tried counting again, but it was no use stopping the fury — and the fear — from swirling through him. Everyone knew what the Ronin Elite were capable of. Some could turn your insides out with a tilt of the head, while others could drive you insane with a sweet little song. The Japanese scientists who had first engineered these superhuman soldiers had called them Anomalies, for the anomalous gene that made them so prized.

  Ren thought another name was more fitting: killers.

  Major Endo approached her newest victim, and Ren grimaced as he recalled her powers: crushing bones and boiling blood with a simple touch. Endo was a rare Dual Anomaly, possessing two superpowers instead of one, which was why she had been selected to protect the crown prince himself. There were very few females in the regular imperial army — Japanese women were expected to marry young and raise children and attend monthly meetings of the Patriotic Women’s Association — but the Ronin Elite gladly admitted them into their ranks. Anomalies, after all, were scarce. And so, if a little Japanese girl manifested the ability to bend metal or conjure fire in her small hands, then that couldn’t go to waste.

  At Major Endo’s approach, Daisy struggled against her restraints, but it didn’t matter. Endo merely placed her hands atop Daisy’s head, and the girl began screaming until her throat went raw. The sound leapt off the cliffs and hammered home into Ren’s ears, tunneling itself into his memory.

  Ren told himself to breathe. The Empire killed dozens of Americans each week, in the camps or out in the streets. Daisy’s death would be no different. Yet Ren’s heart kept speeding faster, urging him to run up the path and put a stop to the suffering. But Ren didn’t move. Neither did anyone else around him. Maybe it was fear that kept them rooted where they stood, or maybe it was something worse. Like complacency.

  A sickening crunch echoed across the beach. Daisy’s head lolled to one side, her skull crushed like a quail’s egg. Ren shuddered. He couldn’t have done anything to save her, but he was disgusted with himself anyway. He had accepted Daisy’s fate like everyone else. He had said nothing, done nothing.

  Atop the cliff, Crown Prince Katsura wasn’t finished yet. “A dangerous cancer is spreading through our lands. The Viper’s writing has polluted people’s minds and has caused unrest in our peaceful society. Both Americans and Japanese have lost lives, and as steward of the Territories I cannot allow this any longer, which leads me to my newest decree. If the Viper is watching this broadcast, I demand that you step forward and give yourself up.” His gaze bore into the camera lens. “If you continue to resist, my soldiers will execute more traitors upon these cliffs. What other choice will you leave us?”

  Silence blanketed the crowd. Crown Prince Katsura motioned to the cameraman to shut off the feed before shuffling back to the helicopter with Major Endo on his heels. As soon as they were buckled in their seats, the helicopter took off from the launching pad and headed back toward the Fortress, but this time without Daisy Montgomery.

  Down on the shore, it took a minute for anyone to move. Only when the soldiers began barking “Off the beach!” did people begin their trudge back into town, mumbling all along the way.

  “Who are they going to kill next?” someone said.

  “Just don’t do anything stupid and it won’t be any of us,” replied someone else.

  “Wonder what the Viper is going to do now.”

  The question echoed inside Ren’s head, along with Daisy Montgomery’s last screams. Her body lay quiet on the cliff, curled inward like a fawn, but this wouldn’t be the last time that Ren would see her. Daisy’s execution would be broadcasted on the evening news and again on tomorrow’s morning reports. The Empire would keep using her death to send the Viper their message: Come forward or else.

  “Let’s go. You don’t look too good.” Mr. Cabot offered Ren his vest again. “You’re shivering.”

  Ren walked numbly forward, matching his steps to his father’s. “I’m fine,” he said, but that was a lie. Something had cracked inside him. The wall he had carefully built to dam up his emotions was crumbling fast, and he didn’t have enough mortar to patch it up. “I need to walk this off.”

  “Ren, wait!” His father made a grab for his arm. “Slow down, won’t you?”

  As if that would fix anything.

  “I’ll be home later. Don’t worry,” Ren said, slipping into the crowd as quick as a trout. He picked up speed, bumping shoulders with those around him, but no matter how fast he went he couldn’t outrun the secret locked inside him. It was the reason why he played nice with the soldiers and tamped down his anger. It was the reason why he knew Daisy Montgomery was innocent of her crimes.

  Because they were his crimes, not hers.

  He was the one who had written those essays. He was the most wanted criminal in the Western American Territories.

  Ren Cabot was the Viper.

  With the killing cliffs behind him, Ren ran back into town. His breathing grew wheezy in the cold sea air, but he had to keep moving. He had to get away from the beach or else he’d replay the execution over and over in his mind, and then his wrath would spike hot enough that he might do something stupid.

  So he headed for the one place that might give him some peace.

  Hurrying down East Main, Ren passed by his family’s shop and Marty’s apartment building and left the town behind entirely, walking on a winding road that curled up the side of a pretty bluff. Thirty houses soon came into view, with their cement-and-glass façades overlooking the tumbling seas below. In the summer months, the homes would fill with tourists and their fat pocketbooks, but in the off-season they lay empty and quiet.

  Once he reached the Naguchis’ vacation house, Ren punched in the code to slip through the gate and skirted along the property’s edge. The Naguchi family had made their riches after the war by taking over Californian strawberry farms and shipping the fruit back to Japan and throughout the Eastern American Territories. On paper they were loyal citizens of the Empire, but in secret they’d been sympathetic to the suffering of American workers. The Naguchis were now in their late nineties and had moved back to Japan t
o live out their days, but they had kept their vacation home for one purpose — and for that Ren was very grateful.

  Ren strode past the main house and the guest cottage and made for the gardener’s shed. Once inside, he pushed away an old leaking wheelbarrow to expose the splintered floorboards. He ran his thumb along the floor until it caught on a chip in the corner, using it as leverage to pry open the board. A hole opened up before him, with a ladder leading down to the hidden room below.

  Ren hopped down, coughed out dust, and switched on a bare lightbulb. A desk was pushed against the far wall, with a single typewriter sitting on top of it. Reams of paper were piled in the corner, unopened. And in front of Ren, there sat a simple printing press.

  Resting his fingers on the metal, Ren felt his fury cool, fraction by fraction. For the past year, whenever his frustrations rose, whenever his anger raged, whenever he missed his mom too much, he would visit this room.

  The printing press itself had been built in the early 1800s and had spent decades in retirement at the local historical society before gaining a second life after Imperial Japan’s takeover. A former newspaper owner had smuggled the machine to this very room, with the Naguchis’ permission, and since then it had passed from editor to editor. Some of them had even carved their names onto the press’s wooden legs: Josephine Teller, Luis Medina, Abel Quirk. Then came Ren’s mother’s own inscription, Jenny Tsai. She had never changed her last name after she married. She may have loved her husband fiercely, but she was also a proud third-generation Chinese American who didn’t want to lose that connection to her heritage.

  Ren rubbed his thumb along his mother’s name. There was a blank space underneath it where his own name could go, but he hadn’t gotten around to inscribing it yet. He had been too busy.

  Over a year ago, Ren had revisited the press on the anniversary of his mother’s death. The secret room had been abandoned after her execution, and only Ren and his father and the elderly Naguchis remembered its location. Everyone else who had known the press’s whereabouts had been killed, including his mother’s courier, who was captured and tortured until she gave up the names of her accomplices. That confession was the reason why the Empire had arrested Ren’s mom.

  On the night of the anniversary, Ren had stood next to the printing press for a long time, with his flashlight flickering, letting himself simply remember. As a kid his parents had forbidden him from seeing the press, but once he got older his mom would swear him to secrecy and sneak him down to the gardening shed whenever she needed an extra hand. Ren’s very first visit had felt like walking into a brand-new world — the ink on his fingers, the scent of the paper. His mom had put him to work, too, showing him how to typeset the last two articles for the newest issue of her newspaper. The first piece had been an interview with an anonymous Japanese citizen who supported the Resistance, while the second had been an exposé about orphaned American girls forced to become “comfort women” for imperial soldiers. His mother had let Ren read the article, even though its details had made him want to throw up his dinner.

  “I know these stories can be hard to read, but we can’t live with blinders on,” his mother had said as she inked up the press. “Too many Americans have accepted the world around us. They’ve forgotten how to get angry — and someone has to wake them up.”

  As Ren sat silent on that anniversary night, his mother’s words had resurfaced in his mind, whispering about liberty and the free press and inalienable rights. Jenny Tsai would’ve seen right through the crown prince’s reforms.

  His health clinics stayed closed half the time.

  His road construction raised taxes across town.

  His new schools taught the same curriculum as before — loyalty, obedience, and reverence to the emperor.

  Ren’s mother would have written article after article about how Crown Prince Katsura may have had good intentions, but those intentions couldn’t change an empire. Underneath those reforms, America still bowed to its master across the sea.

  Something had shifted inside Ren that night. With his mother’s words echoing between his ears, he dusted himself off and left for home with an idea for his own essay planted in his head. The words had dug roots in his thoughts, begging him to put pencil to paper. At first, he had tried to swat them away. His dad had made it clear that they had to toe the line, but words lengthened into sentences and the sentences soon formed entire paragraphs. Ren couldn’t stop fighting it anymore. He couldn’t drift into complacency like his father had.

  And so Ren had started writing. Not on paper — that would be too risky — but in his head. He had written while shining shoes and mending hems. He had written when he should have been sleeping, while the crescent moon rose in the night sky and while his dad snored in the bedroom next to his own.

  One evening, against his better judgement, Ren had grabbed a scrap of paper and scribbled down the essay. Then, with shaky hands, he had read the whole thing over. He hadn’t expected much — like other American kids, he had only attended school through the fifth grade — but to Ren’s surprise his writing hadn’t been half bad. He couldn’t take all of the credit for that, considering he had piggybacked on Thomas Jefferson himself. Ren’s mother once had an old copy of the Declaration of Independence, and he had memorized a few passages before his dad had burned it after his mom’s arrest. Ren had decided to riff on a couple paragraphs, using the original script as his essay’s backbone, but updating it to reflect the America he lived in:

  We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all people are created equal, that they are born with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. But under the regime of Imperial Japan, we the people have lost these very basic rights.

  And we must fight for their return.

  Governments are instituted among the people, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed — which the Empire has duly ignored. Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new Government.

  Of which we the people now demand.

  A strange current had flowed through Ren, part nerves and part thrill. He thought his mom would have approved of his work. She had admired Jefferson, even though she felt he hadn’t gone far enough — he didn’t give women the vote; he owned slaves and never saw the hypocrisy in that — but she had always believed in what Jefferson had helped found. She simply wanted to improve on it.

  In another life, Ren’s mother could have been a politician. She had told him once that she would have loved running for Congress if it hadn’t been dismantled, but she had been born into this world where a woman like her was forced into a cleaning job by age eleven.

  But that hadn’t stopped her from standing up to fight.

  So what was stopping Ren?

  It took over a month for Ren to convince himself to get started and gather everything into place: making a short trip to San Francisco to buy the supplies he needed, revising each sentence until he was happy with the whole thing, and relearning how to typeset his work. When he was finished and covered in ink, Ren printed fifty copies of his one-page essay. It was a far cry from the six-page newspaper that his mother had put together, but Ren was proud of what he’d done. Even if his first printing got stepped on or tossed in the garbage, he was carrying on his mother’s legacy. He was keeping her alive.

  Then a funny thing happened. Ren’s essay had plucked a nerve, and his fifty copies were shared and passed beyond the limits of White Crescent Bay. Other underground papers republished his words, and Ren heard whispers around town asking who exactly was this Viper and what was he going to publish next? So he wrote a new issue, this time printing seventy-five copies. Then he penned another one, with a hundred-copy run. He learned over time that he didn’t need to print more than that; the local Resistance would pass along his work to bigger newspapers that would reprint Ren’s writing, and it grew from there.
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  Despite the danger he had put himself in, Ren hadn’t regretted what he had done. Until this afternoon.

  Back in the present, Ren pressed his fingers against his temples and thought again about Daisy Montgomery. He had chosen his pseudonym because vipers were deadly and secretive, but he had done absolutely nothing while Daisy died in his name. Worse still, there’d be more like her to come.

  Ren had known since publishing his first essay that his writing might lead some of his readers to get beaten or arrested. Likely even killed. He had grimly accepted this fact by reasoning that the Viper was merely a small part of the equation. A revolution was already simmering across the land, clamoring to break out on the California soil. The Viper was only one shovel trying to unearth it.

  The execution today, however, had felt different. Watching Daisy on the cliff … Ren still felt dizzy from it. His practical side kept telling him that her death wasn’t his fault. He wasn’t the one who dragged her to the beach and crushed her skull with his fingertips. Daisy’s blood wasn’t on his hands. But when Ren glanced down at his palms, they looked smeared just the same.

  Maybe I should quit altogether, thought Ren, wincing as a headache bloomed. He could leave the Viper behind and throw himself into working at the shop, toeing the line like his father did. But the thought of that made Ren feel hollow inside — and it wouldn’t stop the executions. The Viper’s poison had already spread across the WAT, and the Empire was determined to drive him out of hiding. Ren wondered what his mother would have done in his shoes, but he really had no idea. All he knew was that he’d have to figure out his next steps alone.

  Ren forced himself to get up. He owed his readers a new essay, a rebuttal against the crown prince’s speech, but not today. Right now, he needed to go home and shut off his thoughts for the night. He wanted to bury himself between his sheets and sleep and forget about Daisy, even if it only lasted a few hours.

  He returned to the shop in silence, his eyes flickering skyward in case the flying Ronin Elite were out on patrol. He was relieved when he turned onto his block, but that relief wavered when he thought about the lecture his father was going to give him once he stepped inside the shop. He knew exactly what his dad would say: I was worried sick. You can’t run off like that. You know what’ll happen if we make even a little mistake. It almost made Ren turn around and duck into the pawnshop for a few minutes, but then he noticed that the Cabots’ shop looked dark and empty. He unlocked the door and quietly made his way upstairs to the apartment.