“Dad?” Ren called out.
There was no response.
Ren gratefully burrowed himself in his room. His dad had probably run out to the grocer’s or gone to check on Marty, and Ren decided to pretend to be sleeping as soon as his dad came home. But hours passed, and Mr. Cabot didn’t show.
And that’s when Ren got worried.
As dusk settled over East Main, Ren pulled on a jacket and headed back outside with jitters in his stomach. He stopped by the corner store, then Marty’s apartment, and then to the cemetery, where his paternal grandparents were buried. His dad liked to tidy up the grass around their graves, even though it had been years since his parents passed. Ren’s grandfather had succumbed to heart disease a decade ago, while his grandmother had fallen victim to a bad blood transfusion before Ren was born. Most Americans died before the age of sixty, and if they came down with a serious illness before that? Not even the crown prince’s free health clinics could help you.
With the curfew looming, Ren had no choice but to return to the shop, except his dad still hadn’t come home. He peeked out the living room window, which overlooked the street. Terrible scenarios began playing in Ren’s head: his father getting hit by a car, his father having a heart attack, his father getting arrested. This was his greatest fear — losing his dad like he had lost his mom. He and his father might not have been close — there were days when they hardly uttered more than twenty words to each other — but the thought of burying his father made Ren want to curl up in a corner and wrap his arms around his knees.
Ren was ready to head out the door again, no longer caring about the curfew, when he saw two shadows running down East Main, one of them half carrying the other. The duo hunkered down behind a Dumpster while a patrol car rolled past, and when the coast was clear they hobbled toward the shop. Ren backpedaled from the window and catapulted down the stairs. He heard an urgent knock on the door.
“Open up, Renny! It’s us,” a voice hissed from the other side.
Only one person ever called him Renny. Ren yanked the door open just in time for the two people to stumble inside. Dust covered them both, and a trail of blood dripped in their wake. They looked like they had walked through the middle of a battlefield. Ren’s stomach dropped.
“Dad!” he cried.
Ren rushed forward to help Marty with his father’s weight. “What happened to him?” he demanded.
“Help me get your dad up the stairs first,” she replied in her matter-of-fact way.
Ren could only stare at the mangled mess that was his father’s right hand. “Was he shot? How did —”
“Just help me get Uncle Paul up the stairs! He’s lost a lot of blood.” Marty shoved her bangs aside to reveal a startingly pretty face, with wide-set eyes and high cheekbones that could have graced a fashion magazine. Dirt and blood matted her long black hair, but she still could have talked her way out of Alcatraz with a carefully placed pout. Soldiers often went tongue-tied around her — they tended to forget that they were supposed to look down on a Chinese American like her — and Marty had never felt guilty about using her appearance to play them for fools.
Ren snapped out of his haze. Moving fast, he wrapped an arm around his dad’s waist and hoisted him onto the worn sofa upstairs, where Mr. Cabot lay back with a groan.
“What happened to him?” Ren repeated, but Marty was quick to deflect the question.
“Grab the first aid kit. I’ll get some water and rags.” Then she was off to the kitchen before Ren could press her for an answer.
As he dashed to the bathroom cabinet, though, Ren thought about what Marty and his dad had been up to that evening. The two of them had never been close. Seven years ago, Ren’s mom had promised her dying sister that she would watch out for Marty after she passed, and that responsibility had fallen to Mr. Cabot after his wife’s execution. But Marty was already twenty by then and she didn’t want or need Mr. Cabot poking into her business and telling her to stop talking about the injustices in the WAT. That was why their relationship had never graduated beyond lukewarm.
With the first aid kit in hand, Ren returned to his father’s side and finally got a good look at his dad’s injury. It was ugly — a dark red mass of flesh and blood and shreds of fabric. One of the fingers crooked at a strange angle, too.
“Turn on a light, won’t you? I can’t see what I’m doing,” said Marty, cleaning the wound without flinching. She had always had a tough shell. She never mentioned her father’s abandonment of her when she was eight, and she had held back her tears when her mom withered away from kidney failure. Ren knew that Marty had feelings like everyone else, but she liked to keep hers locked away.
Just then, Mr. Cabot’s eyes blinked open and he reached for Marty’s shoulder with his good hand. “Don’t tell Ren. You promised me,” he croaked.
“Don’t tell me what?” Ren’s spine straightened. “What’s he talking about?”
Marty ignored Ren’s question yet again. “Call Serrano,” she told him. “We’ll need her to patch up your dad.”
“I’m not calling anyone —” Ren said, until his father lurched up with a gasp, crying out from the pain.
Marty struggled to get her uncle to lay back. “Call Serrano now!”
This time Ren listened, not because of Marty, but because he couldn’t take another second of his father’s agony. Hurrying down the steps, he dialed Serrano’s number on the shop’s ancient rotary phone. The old nurse agreed to come over, depending on how fast she could dodge the patrols — about thirty to forty minutes — and Ren told her that he’d pay her extra if she hurried, even though the shop’s budget was stretched as thin as it was. They’d be lucky to cover her nursing services and even luckier if Mr. Cabot could use his hand again in a month or two. As for the interview tomorrow at the Fortress? That was out of the question.
Ren bolted back upstairs, only to find his dad asleep while Marty wiped a rag over the bleeding wound.
“He shouldn’t be unconscious!” Ren lunged toward the sofa to shake his father by the shoulders. He didn’t know much about medicine, but he knew enough that his father should stay awake until Serrano could see him. But Marty blocked him with her arm.
“It’s all right. I gave him a painkiller to help him rest,” she said, as if there was nothing to it.
“How did you even get your hands on something like that?”
Marty stopped cleaning her uncle’s wound to glare up at Ren. “You have to trust me. I’ve done this before.”
“What are you even talking about?” The questions began rolling off his tongue, and Ren wanted answers. “What happened to you guys tonight? How did my dad get hurt in the first place?”
Marty blinked away from his prying eyes. “It’s … a very long story.”
“Give me the condensed version.”
“It won’t make sense if I do that. You’ll have to hear the whole thing.” Marty elevated her uncle’s arm to stanch the bleeding, not even flinching when some of the blood trickled onto her sleeve. “Look, what I’m about to tell you, you can’t repeat to anyone.”
A shiver worked its way down Ren’s neck. “Tell me.”
“Swear it to me on your mother’s grave.”
“What?” Ren said, his gut twisting at her demand.
“People I cared about have died gathering this intelligence and more lives will be on the line if you start blabbing around town.” Her gaze hardened at Ren. “Swear it. I need to hear it.”
Ren frowned. “Fine. I swear it on my mother’s grave.”
With a nod, Marty got straight to the point. “I’m with the Resistance.”
Ren’s breath stuck in his throat. He’d had a hunch over the years that Marty may have been a spy. She worked as a bartender at the Boulevard — she was barred from becoming a server on account of her Chinese heritage — and she must have overheard some very interesting things when the officers got a little tipsy. Yet he never imagined that she had actually joined the rebels.
> She continued. “I started out passing along intel that I overheard during my shifts, but I joined the Resistance as a full member five years ago.” Marty kept her tone even, but she couldn’t hide the pride in her voice. “About eight months back I got promoted to captain of our local cell.”
Ren’s mouth slid open. “You’re in charge of the whole cell at White Crescent Bay?” The Resistance movement had cropped up as soon as President Roosevelt had surrendered, and it had grown to span the entire WAT. The rebels were divided into cells to maximize efforts, and each cell was led by a captain. Ren doubted that there were many captains as young as Marty.
“Don’t act so surprised,” Marty replied, but she tossed Ren a little smile.
“How’d you rise up so fast to captain?”
“Because I’m that good.” Her smile arched, and Ren wasn’t sure if she was joking or not. Even if she was, she was probably only half kidding. Marty had never had any problems in the self-confidence department. “We only have about seventy-five members these days, nothing like in your dad’s time, when there were hundreds. People got cold feet after your mom was killed, not that I blame them for that.” An awkward beat passed between them before Marty spoke again. “But we’ve had an uptick in recruits ever since the Viper showed up. Every time a new essay comes out, we reprint it and pass it around and that generates even more interest.”
Ren flushed, not sure what he should say. No one in the White Crescent Bay cell had ever deduced the Viper was living right next to them. Not even Marty suspected a thing, even here, even now. Ren was both relieved and a little hurt. He had no plans to tell Marty his biggest secret, but he sometimes wished that she saw him as more than her kid cousin. More than Renny.
“We used to pick leaders by seniority,” Marty said, “but with so many newer members, we do it by vote now. When our last captain stepped down, I figured I’d toss my hat into the ring. I mean, why not? We needed some female blood in the leadership — and people agreed.”
This made sense to Ren. The soldiers often overlooked girls like Marty. It wasn’t just her pretty face, although that was (sadly) part of the equation. It was the fact that Marty knew how to use her looks like a weapon. Once, during a family dinner, a patrol car had stopped by the shop and demanded to search the apartment. Mr. Cabot had let them in, but Marty didn’t look too pleased about it. As soon as the soldiers started shouting at Ren, she had cried like a trained actress, her chin wobbling as she pleaded for her poor baby cousin. Ren wanted to warn her that she was going to get arrested, but the soldiers departed five minutes later — along with Marty’s tears. She had returned to the dining table like nothing had happened and asked Ren to pass the rolls. He should’ve known right then and there that she would’ve made a great Resistance fighter.
Ren’s thoughts shifted back to the present. “Did you send Daisy Montgomery to infiltrate the Fortress?”
Marty wrinkled her nose. “No way. What she did was far too risky.”
“Then why did she do it?”
“Hard to say for sure. I’ve heard that she blamed the crown prince for the death of her parents. They got thrown into an internment camp for unpaid taxes, and they died of dysentery there.” Gently, she laid her uncle’s arm back onto the sofa and covered it in a thin layer of gauze from the first aid kit. “Either Daisy was deluded or she had a death wish. A one-woman mission to infiltrate the Fortress? I’d never ask my people to do that.”
“Right,” murmured Ren. Marty probably thought Daisy was a fool, but he saw courage in her last act. While so many Americans had accepted the Empire’s rule, she had tried to do something about it, as reckless as it was. But he was getting too off course. “What does all of this have to do with my dad?”
“I’ll get there. Patience, Renny,” Marty chided.
Ren had always hated that nickname. He was actually named after his dad, but ever since he was little his parents had called him Ren, which was a part of the Chinese name that his mom had chosen for him, Tsai Ren-Kai. Marty, however, had always teased him as Renny, much to Ren’s constant annoyance. “Answer the question, Martine.”
The use of her full name made Marty cringe, then smirk. “Touché. And I really am getting there, I promise. So the Resistance has hit the same problem for years — we’ll never match the Empire’s firepower, especially when you factor in the Ronin Elite. But what if we could tip that balance a little? What if we could recruit Anomalies with powers like creating tsunamis or hurricanes?”
Ren leaned forward. “But there aren’t many of those Anomalies around, and they usually work for the government.”
“Not always.” Marty seemed to savor her words like a rare cut of beef. “The San Francisco cell got their hands on some interesting info a few months back, and they’ve built a huge operation around this intel. Over a dozen cells are on board, up and down the coast and pushing inland, too.”
Hearing this made the hair on Ren’s arms prick up. “What’s the intel?”
“It originated from Alcatraz.” Her voice became hushed even though Mr. Cabot was still unconscious. “Alcatraz is more than a prison — it’s a laboratory. They’ve been conducting top secret tests on the prisoners for years.”
Ren felt breathless. The Empire had never admitted that it had experimented on humans during the war, but everyone knew that it had. How else could it have created the first Anomalies? Most Americans, however, had assumed that those experiments were long over, due to the success of the Ronin Elite. “What sort of tests?”
“Experimenting on the Anomaly gene again. The general public doesn’t know this — most military officials have no idea about it, either — but the Empire’s Anomaly population has been dwindling for the last decade and no one knows why.”
Ren certainly hadn’t been expecting that. “How bad is it?”
“Very. Cadet enrollment has been decreasing at the Fortress for years, and the same trend has happened across all of the Ronin Elite academies. Most of these schools are half full, and no one knows why the numbers are so low.” Marty began working a crick out of her neck as she spoke. “Some people think that this is nature righting the course because humans didn’t develop these powers through evolution. Obviously, the Empire can’t accept that, but so far their attempts to create new Anomalies haven’t gone well. They keep coming up against the same problem that they did with the first generation of Anomalies — their bodies can’t cope with the changes.”
Ren found himself nodding along. Those first Anomalies dated back to the 1940s, when the Axis powers raced to create a new generation of super soldiers, and Imperial Japan had barely edged out the Nazis to produce the first viable patient. But due to genetic instability, the new soldiers of the Ronin Elite didn’t live very long — they burned bright but they burned out fast. The whole program threatened to cease, but hope arose in the children of the original Ronin. Of those born with the Anomaly gene, most survived well into adulthood. The Empire pounced on this revelation, urging the healthy Ronin to procreate as often as possible, thus creating stable Anomalies who were ready to serve the imperial army. But apparently, this was no longer the case.
Marty spoke faster, a new urgency in her words. “There was a breakthrough at Alcatraz about five years ago. The Empire teamed up with a group of Nazi geneticists who tested out a new gene therapy on a hundred Americans at the prison. Most of the prisoners didn’t survive the first few weeks of testing, but there were fifteen who did. They’re still living today — all of them with superpowers, too — thanks to this therapy that the Nazis called viral vector 220314, roughly translated. We’ve shortened it to V2.”
“V2,” Ren repeated. “Shouldn’t that solve the Empire’s problem of creating new Anomalies?”
“It isn’t that simple. Most patients still die within days of starting the V2 regimen, and you have to remember that the Nazis were the ones who developed V2.” She looked at Ren expectantly, but he had no idea what she wanted him to say.
“And …”
/>
“And the Nazis aren’t stupid. They’ve been very strategic in how they’ve shared the details of V2 with the Empire. They’ll give the emperor enough to keep him appeased, but they’ve never shared the exact formula for the injections, and the Nazi geneticists always inject V2 patients directly.”
Ren imagined the two empires locked in a cautious dance of diplomacy and silent frustration. “I doubt that has gone over well with the Empire.”
“Probably not, but that’s the nature of their relationship. They’re longtime allies, but they’ve always looked out for themselves first,” Marty said shrewdly. “But when one empire needs help, it’s going to start knocking on the other’s door. That’s why the Nazis have been cozying up to their old friends in Tokyo. They’ve got their hands full between the Führer’s death and fighting off the Second American Revolution, and they need more troops and weapons and supplies.” Marty paused and smirked. “You know the Joint Prosperity Ball? It was the Nazis’ idea. They need to reassert their partnership with Imperial Japan and put up a united front to scare Zara St. James and her rebels.”
Ren had questioned why the Nazis were sending so many ambassadors and dignitaries to the ball when they had a war on their hands. “What does the Empire get out of a fancy party, though?” Then a thought dawned on him. “V2?”
“In a way. The Nazis have dispatched their geneticists to Alcatraz again to test a new batch of prisoners. Essentially, they’re giving their allies new Anomalies but still keeping the formula for themselves. Looks like they’re saving that gift for a rainy day.”
Live in Infamy Page 4
