“There are four of them,” Gabrána said.
“If I go alone, the worst that happens is they just have Mensi and me. If we all get caught—”
“I couldn’t bear it,” Nicalla said.
Wenthi closed his eyes, and dug into himself, feeling the faint whispers of the sync with the rest of the crew. The echoes of Gabrána, Nicalla, Fenito, and Ajiñe right around him.
And Mensi. A quarter mile or so away.
Wenthi started running.
He opened his eyes, knowing Ajiñe was right with him.
“I said—”
“You don’t give orders,” she said.
He didn’t argue, because he could feel Mensi moving. Faster. The speed helped Wenthi lock into Mensi, draw on more of his senses. Mensi was in the back of a truck, shackled with a number of young baniz—mostly boys and girls who had just turned old enough to do the Spirit Dance—which was driving away with a gunroller at the lead. Heading north, out of the town.
He ran, and as he ran, he felt more and more of Mensi—the fear clawing at his heart. Fear of where he was going, of never seeing his friends again, of not knowing what would happen.
He ran with his heart slamming, his lungs burning, but he could feel the truck and Mensi getting farther and farther away.
“Renzi!” Ajiñe pulled up on a garbage junkbash cycle, a weak-engined corn-burner. “Get on!”
He didn’t argue and she poured off.
“Where did you—”
“I asked and they said yes,” she said. “Which way?”
She went fast enough that he could just guide her, connected her with Mensi, feeling him pull on them.
“Can we go faster?” he asked.
“Not much,” she said. “This cycle is shit.”
“It’s the only shit we have,” he said. “Drive it to the white.”
She gunned the throttle and went off.
“Take that path, and try to cut off the truck from the gunroller,” he said.
“You got a plan?” she asked.
“Not at all,” he said, pulling her knife out of its sheath.
Ajiñe crossed through the path, across a ramshackle alley, and dropped down another narroway just as the gunroller rumbled by. She darted into the path of the truck, crossing right in front of it.
Wenthi jumped when she did, and the truck slammed on the brakes. He landed on the hood, and holding on to it with one hand, hung the other arm over the side and jammed the knife into the wheel.
The truck swerved out of control, colliding with a corner pole of one of the shacks.
Wenthi held on, but one of the soldiers inside flew through the truck’s windglass, while the other smashed into the steering wheel. Wenthi scrambled up the hood into the cab, and drove his fist into the soldier’s face, again and again. The soldier sufficiently dazed, Wenthi pulled the keys off his hip and jumped out, around to the truck bed.
“Renzi,” Mensi said weakly. “You shouldn’t—”
“Let’s just get you out,” Wenthi said, unlocking Mensi’s shackles. He got him out and pulled him down to the ground. “Can you run?”
“Not well,” Mensi said. Ajiñe had come back around on the corn-burner.
“Let’s go!” she shouted.
Wenthi helped Mensi on the back. “Get him out! I’m right behind!”
She darted off, and Wenthi climbed into the truck bed, unlocking more shackles.
“Go, go,” he told the young baniz. “Get out of here!”
“Gunroller!” Nália shouted.
Wenthi looked up, and saw the gunroller had stopped and turned its turret toward the truck. Unshackling the last baniz, he pulled them off and ran just as the shell hit the truck. The blast knocked them both to the ground.
Wenthi was dazed and addled, not quite able to see or hear or will himself to move.
But yet he was on his feet, running.
Nália. Her head was clear. She got his body back on its feet and ran.
“Do you feel them?” he asked her. “Are they safe?” He was able to take a bit of control back, look over his shoulder. The gunroller was lumbering forth, but this path was one of the few it could take in this maze of shacks and shanties. The baniz had scattered and hid.
“This way,” Nália said. She willed them to move down through the alleyway, around a set of hovels, and to a bombed-out lot just as the trucks rumbled over.
“Get in!” Jendiscira shouted, barely slowing down. Wenthi wasted no time jumping on and climbing into the canvassed bed, falling down in a heap around all five of his crew. All of them together, safe.
49
The ride home was quiet. Even Nália kept to herself, scowling at Wenthi the whole ride. She radiated anger and confusion, and he felt all that as well. The boundaries between where her emotions ended and his began were unclear.
They were parked at Circle Hyunma, which didn’t make any damn sense to Wenthi.
“Why are we here?” he asked Jendiscira as they got out.
“Don’t know if we were spotted by the soldiers,” she said. “Or if they radioed into the Alliance nucks or Civil Patrol. We don’t know if we were followed or watched. So we won’t move to the next level of things until we’re comfortable. And also until you’re comfortable.” She guided them over to the taco stand as she talked.
“I’m rather not comfortable with a lot of this,” Gabrána said.
“Gab!” Nicalla snapped. “How can you—”
“I have opinions,” Gabrána said.
“I have concerns,” Fenito said.
“Same,” Mensi added. “And I definitely think I earned them after that.”
Nicalla’s troubled expression turned to Ajiñe. “What do you think?”
“I’m in,” Ajiñe said. “But I don’t want to impose that on anyone else.”
“Let me attempt to put your minds at ease,” Jendiscira said. “For one, you are all being invited to be inducted with us to the closer circle. And each of you is free to make your own choice, not contingent on each other.”
“So it isn’t the whole cell or nothing?” Nicalla asked.
“Of course not,” Jendiscira said.
That was good. The induction process would still move forward.
“Oh, that was it, you asshole,” Nália said. “For a moment, I actually fell for it. I thought you saved Mensi because you cared, but that was it. You knew if he was gone, the rest wouldn’t want to move forward, and you need that, don’t you? That’s how you get to the Inner Circle. To Varazina.”
Jendiscira looked at him kindly. “Renzi, you are being very quiet.”
“Because he’s still figuring out how to arrest you all,” Nália said. “Despite what just happened.”
“Sorry,” he said. “Between the soldiers and meeting my uncle, I’m . . . more than a little out of sorts.”
“They were actually your family?” Ajiñe asked. “That’s incredible.”
“So incredible he’s going to tether them all up,” Nália hissed.
“Are we eating?” Wenthi asked. “Can we order and sit? I’m sorry, just, my head is spinning.”
“Yes, of course,” Jendiscira said. She gestured for them to sit at the table while she spoke to the cart chef.
“You aren’t all right,” Ajiñe said to Wenthi.
“I’m just ringing in my head,” Wenthi said.
Mensi came over and took Wenthi’s head with both hands and kissed him. “Thank you, brother. I . . . I don’t even know what would have happened if you hadn’t been there.”
“We’re in this together,” Wenthi said. “Aren’t we?”
“I want us to be,” Ajiñe said. “I know that I . . . I need to move forward. Get closer to the center. Push this fight further. But if you want to turn off here, that’s fine. All of you,
any of you, it’s fine.”
“Yeah, but,” Mensi said. “If, say, just you and Nic go all in, are we still a cell together? What do the rest of us do?”
“New cell?” Gabrána asked. “We find new recruits, or go our separate ways?”
“Or just go,” Fenito said.
“I don’t want to split the family,” Mensi said. That word hit Wenthi in the chest. They were a family, and they had brought him into it.
“I don’t either,” Fenito said. “But this is a lot more mystical woo and ancient bullshit than I want.”
“What do you want?” Nicalla asked. “Do you want a revolution?”
“Yeah,” Fenito said. “But . . . what does that mean? What does that mean with the Fists? Do we push out the Alliance? Do we kill the caste system? Do we hold elections? Or do we try to, I don’t know, rebuild ourselves into some idea of what Ancient Zapisia was?”
“Is that what you think they want?” Ajiñe asked.
“They talked about this ancient stuff like, I don’t know, like it was something better. Like being farmers with spears was more pure than living in the here and now. Some bullshit like that.”
“I don’t think they’re talking about giving up cycles or trains,” Ajiñe said.
“But then what are they talking about with that?” Mensi asked.
Wenthi was barely listening to all of this, but words bubbled up from his mind. And he knew they were his own.
“I really wonder, what does this country—call it Pinogoz or Zapisia or whatever—can we even conceive what it should be like without Sehosian or Outhic interference?” he asked. “Is the Zapisia that might have been a goal? Or do we embrace that we have a legacy that is intrinsically connected to our invaders? They may have colonized this place, but we . . . each of us . . . are children of the colonizers.”
“What is this shit you’re on? Do you even actually mean this?” Nália asked. Her anger at him bled into his own emotions, and he wasn’t sure where the boundary between them even was anymore, but the ideas he was having melted into her feelings, creating a strange harmony in his mind.
“I don’t care about the Alliance overseers or the Outhic military governors,” Wenthi said, surprised by how much he meant it. Or did Nália mean it? “Kick them all out. But if we are a part of something that is going to matter, that is about justice, about law—”
“Law?” Nicalla asked.
“The law isn’t for us,” Gabrána said.
“No, but . . . shouldn’t it be?” He didn’t have the words, but the ideas crashed into Nália’s emotions and bounced back to him more fully formed. “Let’s say for the sake of argument, the revolution is successful. We reclaim this country. What does that look like? What is justice in that country? What is the law there? Who decides what it looks like and how do we make it fair?”
Jendiscira came over with trays full of a wide variety of tacos and salsas.
“Those are heady questions,” she said.
“But that’s right on it,” Mensi said, pointing a finger at Wenthi. “He’s on target.”
“How can we know that working with you creates the better world?” Gabrána asked. “Spirits, do we even know if we can create one? Are we just fighters who never should win the fight?”
“Aren’t you angry?” Nicalla asked Gabrána.
“Livid,” Gabrána said, smothering her taco with salsa and lime. “All the damn time. I am angry all the time about how things are here. Which is why I love what we do, punching in the nose of the Alliance and all the others who have dared grind their boots into our country.”
“But does that qualify us to do better?” Jendiscira asked. “Would you feel better if I said I struggled with it?”
“A little,” Fenito said between bites.
“This is what I learned today,” Wenthi said. “My parents were part of a movement, before the Second Trans came here. To change things, to dissolve the caste system, to try and change all of it. First I’ve heard of that. Have any of you?”
Heads knocked all around, save Jendiscira. None of them had.
“And I wonder what that world would have looked like. What we would look like if baniz, jifoz, rhique, and llipe were all the same.”
“There it is,” Nália said.
“Even llipe?” Ajiñe asked.
“Privileged cocks,” Nicalla said.
“Cocks who were born here,” Gabrána said. “And in most cases, so were their parents and theirs.”
“Do we plan to make a nation that excludes them?” Wenthi asked. “Do we punish them for who they were born to?”
“Like they did to us?” Ajiñe asked, which Nália echoed in near unison.
“Would doing it back be justice?” Wenthi asked. He took up a taco—beef or pork, he didn’t know or care. He just needed to eat something.
Gabrána spoke up. “I had a full chart done a few years ago.”
“Spirits, why?” Ajiñe asked.
“I wanted to know. I always—”
“Always thought you were light enough to pass for rhique?” Nicalla shouted. “Thought you could request a chart and learn you were just enough Sehosian to put you over the line?”
“It turns out my father was llipe. I didn’t know.”
“Some llipe are with us,” Jendiscira said. “Not inducted into the Inner Circles, but with the cause. The boy who was arrested a ways back. Enzu.”
“Shitting traitor, he was,” Nália shouted. “Thought he could trick us.”
“Was he really with us?” Nicalla asked. “Are any of you? Spirits, I’m not sure what ‘us’ even is.”
“I hope you all are,” Jendiscira said. She took Wenthi’s hand. “We need your ideals. We need your sense of justice.”
Nália scoffed again. “His sense of justice is us all in prison. Or worse.”
The radio on the taco cart squelched. “Justice isn’t in the streets, not tonight. Tonight we bring it in, tonight we ravage our hearts, tonight we close our fists. Tonight is united in we, tonight is united in love, tonight is a beating drum of truth. Tonight we come together and welcome.”
Unease filled Wenthi’s gut on hearing her voice again. Who was she? Where was she? What did she want?
“Finish eating, children,” Jendiscira said. “We’ll come together for the last rituals, and you can all decide where you stand.”
50
They were brought back to the temple, or warehouse, or whatever it was, where Hocnupec was waiting with several other people—a full mix of baniz, jifoz, and even a few so fair they had to be rhique. There were a few faces he had seen before, like Casintel and Bindeniz. They were all dressed in simple robes of agave cloth, the sort that Wenthi had seen only in the Great National Museum in the 7th Senja.
“Welcome, children,” he said. “You’ve seen what we do, what we want. Are you ready for us to open our heart to you?”
“You, or Varazina?” Ajiñe asked. “Are we actually going to meet her?”
“You will feel her,” Hocnupec said. “We will all feel her and know her. And each other.”
Wenthi noticed the answer was a dodge. Why was that?
Nicalla’s hand went up. “Does this ritual mean we have to fuck? I . . . I want to be a part of this, with all my heart, but . . . I hate fucking. I really hate it so much.”
“Completely?” Hocnupec asked. He looked at the other members around him like he didn’t even know how to respond to that.
“We’ve never inducted an edoromé before,” Jendiscira said.
“Well, that’s what I am,” Nicalla said. “And I want to be part of it, but . . .”
“Our induction, our faith, it does involve surrendering to each other, giving ourselves fully. Heart and mind and body in totality. I don’t mean to be offensive, but that is how . . .”
Ajiñe stepped clos
er to Nicalla. “We all love each other, in every way possible, but in this we have always honored Nicalla. None of us could continue with this if she isn’t respected here.”
“Of course you couldn’t,” Jendiscira said.
“I won’t be dishonest,” Hocnupec said. “Regardless of the physicality, the induction will be emotionally intense. There is intended to be joy in release and connection. But if that does not bring you joy, you will not be imposed upon that way. We would never do that.”
“And I don’t want to be in sync with people who are,” Nicalla said.
“She knows how to pull herself out when she wants to,” Gabrána said.
“You might find it more challenging in these circumstances,” Jendiscira said. “The sync connecting you here will be stronger than you’ve ever experienced. I want you to understand that if you choose to go forward.”
Wenthi saw an opportunity here, and moved up next to Nicalla. “Whatever you choose, I’m with you.”
Mensi and Fenito came up to Nicalla and put their hands on her shoulder. “We go where you do, sister.”
Nicalla took Wenthi’s hand, and then Ajiñe’s. “No matter what, stay close to me. I can endure anything if you are with me.”
“Damn it,” Gabrána said. “All right, all of us together. I would accept nothing less.”
“All of us,” Ajiñe said.
That worked. They were moving forward now, and Wenthi knew the rest of the cell fully accepted him as part of their family. He would have no problem—
“Betraying them?” Nália asked. “All this, all you saw, all you learned, and you’re still gunning the throttle to turn on these people who love you.”
“What now?” Wenthi asked.
“Now you can shit yourself until you die,” Nália said.
“Now we begin,” Hocnupec said. “With fire and iron and connection and speed. And it’s time to commune with Varazina.”
51
Their clothes had been taken, which Wenthi had expected. Everything leading up to this had told him that at some point in this process, he and the rest would be naked. He didn’t object to that—being naked with Ajiñe and the rest of the crew was quite agreeable—but he found it decidedly amusing. It was predictable to the point of absurdity.
The Velocity of Revolution Page 26
