by C. A. Gray
“No, I didn’t! I—” I stopped. I’d been thinking of the dungeon. But I had thought the bullets on the roof of the Potentate’s palace were real.
“The only defense you’re going to have in there is your own mind,” Jackson reminded me. “For that, you’ve got to be focused.”
He really could be so annoying sometimes.
“Fine,” I muttered, and forced myself to breathe in and out as Jackson counted. As he did, I played out scenarios in my mind of how the interaction might go with each person we’d meet along the way: Candice at the front desk; Grant and Michael and Henrietta in the studio itself. The rest of the staff would probably do whatever they did. Grant had asked me out once, before he knew I was dating Will—and even afterwards, I could tell he always had a crush on me. I might be able to use that to my advantage. Henrietta was the local anchor in Greensborough, and she’d practically hero-worshipped me. Michael was a bit more of a tough cookie; it was hard to make him smile. I was never sure where I stood with him, but I was pretty sure nobody else knew either.
“All right,” Jackson said. “Let’s go.”
I opened my eyes. Charlie left the car idling and we walked up to the filthy glass door together. Without discussing it, I took the lead, and walked in first. I saw Candice’s eyes pop, and she did a double take.
“Kate Brandeis!” she breathed.
I forced my face into a smile. “Hi Candice. We’d like an audience with—”
She sucked in a breath, ignoring me. “Is that… Jackson MacNamera?”
I’d lost her. She stood up and backed away from her desk, her eyes never leaving Jackson’s face.
“Don’t hurt me, please don’t hurt me!” she begged, her hands in the air. “I’ll—I’ll do whatever you want, just please…”
“We’re not here to hurt you, Candice,” Jackson said, holding his hands in the air too in the universal sign of peace. “We’re not here to hurt anyone. You’ve been lied to about us. We’re only here to set the record straight.”
“Hey,” Charlie cut in, waving to get Candice’s attention. “Do you notice anything different about this place, since we’ve walked in?” He swept his finger around the room.
Candice looked confused as well as terrified. “N-no,” she said. “Different?”
Charlie sighed. This certainly would have been easier, had Candice been ripe for convincing. But apparently she wasn’t.
“Candice,” I said again, “we’re going to use the broadcasting studio. If you’d like to help us, that would be wonderful. If not—”
“Please don’t hurt me!” Candice begged, her arms over her head now.
“We’re not going to hurt you!” I said, exasperated. “If you promise not to alert anyone that we are here, you’re free to go.” I turned to Jackson. “Right?”
He nodded, and walked past Candice as if she’d given us the go-ahead. The rest of us followed him. I glanced back and saw that she was still frozen in place, staring after us.
“That went well,” Charlie muttered.
Normally when I walked in to this studio, I wore heels which click-clacked on the gleaming black tiles polished to a high sheen, reflecting back the track lighting on the way to the glass elevators. This time, my filthy sneakers smudged dirt on the cheap linoleum, and bare lightbulbs illuminated the path to an elevator that looked like it might decide to stop working at any second.
“Let’s take the stairs,” I murmured.
I’d never been in the stairwell in this building before, but I felt trapped when the heavy door on a spring shut behind us. In here there were no lights at all.
“I don’t like this…” whimpered my mother.
“Shh, it’ll be all right, honey,” whispered my father.
I climbed to the second floor, and could barely make out the door when we came to it and pushed it open. Then I led the way down the hall, covered with threadbare carpet, to the studio on the left.
Grant and Michael were both in there with their backs turned to us, probably editing something. I cleared my throat.
Michael turned around first. His face was impassive as ever, but he raised his eyebrows. That was about as much surprise as we were likely to get from him.
“What the—?” Grant murmured, his back still to us. That had to mean the appearance of the room had changed for him, once we came in range. He turned around too, and blinked at me.
“Kate?”
“Hi,” I said, and held up my hands. “Before you freak out, please just let me explain.”
Chapter 37: Kate
Grant and Michael called the rest of their crew into the studio at Jackson’s insistence, so that we’d only have to tell our story once. I did most of the talking, since I was the one they all knew. I could tell that the signal disruptor was only working on about a quarter of them. But when Jackson said the others were free to go if they wished, nobody moved.
“You aren’t… going to kill us?” ventured one middle-aged woman named Janice. I thought I remembered seeing her once before, working in production.
“Not if you don’t try to kill us first,” said Jackson. “We don’t want to hurt anybody.”
As the majority of the group moved uncertainly to leave, Michael announced, “Any one of you who leaves here and calls the agents on us won’t have a job tomorrow, and I’ll make sure you never work in this industry again! Don’t think I won’t know who did it, either.”
I smiled at Michael as they left. “Thanks,” I said.
He didn’t smile back. “Kid, I didn’t know it till now, but I’ve been waiting for the chance to film this broadcast for years.”
I cleared my throat and shouted to the remaining skeleton crew, “You all see the change in the room here, right? It looks different to you than when you got here this morning?” Everyone who stayed nodded, and I said, “Well, it’s because of the signal disruptor my parents have. They’re going to be leaving shortly and you'll likely see everything go back to the way it was. I just wanted to warn you.” Some of them looked confused, but they would have been even more confused if I hadn’t told them what to expect.
Michael gave me a curt nod. Then he signaled to Maryanne, the makeup artist, and pointed to me. “Do something with her face, with you?”
Under different circumstances I might have been offended by his phrasing, but I’d been in this industry long enough to know that he was right. Passable in real life still looked horrible on camera. I glanced at Jackson, who was over with Charlie and Grant as Grant taught them both about the technical side of broadcasting that I’d never bothered to learn anything about. Jackson caught my eye and winked, and I tried to give him a brave smile. Then he gestured with his head to my mom and dad. My mom was hugging herself, her eyes darting around the room like a frightened animal. I cleared my throat and walked over to them.
“You guys go on,” I said, hugging my mom first, and then my dad. “We’ll catch up. It will probably take us an hour here, maybe two. Depends on whether they’re just going live, or whether we’re recording and editing.”
Dad said, “If we don’t see you in two hours, we’ll come looking.” He kissed the top of my head and put his arm around my mom. Nobody even noticed them as they left the room.
As I turned away from my parents, Maryanne signaled to me to come over to where she stood so she could start working on my makeup. But as I made my way over to her, with a flash, the cracked plastic folding chair became plush leather again, and the stick-on mirror became a full vanity. I stopped walking. Maryanne herself had transformed: from a wraith to a buxom, rosy-cheeked beauty.
At the same moment, Maryanne herself froze, looking around the studio in shock. She shook her head once, like she was trying to hit a reset button. I sat down in the chair.
“You weren’t kidding,” Maryanne muttered to me.
“It’s still possible for us to see the truth without the signal disruptor,” I told her. “Now we just have to work
at it.”
“How?” she demanded.
See the truth, Kate, I willed myself. Come on.
Instead of answering Maryanne, I stared at the leather chair I sat in and tried to remember what I’d done in prison that had worked.
You’re a folding chair, I told it, willing it to appear in its original state before my eyes. A folding chair! The folding chair came in flashes, but no more. Did I need to stop and meditate? Even when I was in prison, I didn’t have to work this hard. But I’d been in some kind of altered mental state then—there had been a sense of freedom there, ironically, because I had no power at all. It wasn’t like I could escape, or talk my way out of my predicament… so relaxing was somehow easier. There was nothing I could have done to help myself anyway.
Not like now, when I felt the fate of The Republic resting on my shoulders.
It’s the pressure that’s getting to me, I told myself. That has to be it.
“You never answered me,” said Maryanne apprehensively as she put primer on my face.
“Because I’m having a hard time, myself,” I admitted.
Behind us, the studio looked the way I remembered it, and not the way it had appeared when we’d first walked in: stage lights, state-of-the-art cameras from all angles, a soundboard that was smaller but otherwise just like the one in my own studio. The threadbare carpet where the crew walked became soft and thick, with hardwood floors behind a mahogany desk where I’d be presenting before a green screen. In post, if we recorded and edited later, they’d project some kind of background image there. Grant set up the cameras and Michael directed Charlie and the skeleton crew he had left.
“You okay?”
Jackson appeared at my side, and I jumped, causing Maryanne to smear some of the cream foundation she was applying.
“Sorry,” I told her, and then said to Jackson, one hand on my chest to calm my pounding heart, “Yeah. Yeah, I’m… fine.”
“What’s wrong?” he frowned. “I mean, aside from the obvious.”
I hesitated, not sure if I wanted to admit it to him. Maybe it’s my fault for not paying attention in the meditation before we came in. If I told him my problem, he’d make me do it again, and I really didn’t want to do that. But as Maryanne applied makeup to my forehead so I could use my mouth, I finally confessed to him, “I’m weaker than I thought, apparently.”
He tilted his head to the side and indicated the room with his finger. “Things look different?”
“Uh huh,” I said, since I couldn’t nod. “As soon as my parents left.”
“Ditto,” said Maryanne, pausing in her work to glance at Jackson. “I kind of feel like I’m going crazy, I’m not gonna lie.”
“You’re not going crazy,” Jackson told her. “Without the signal disruptor, the government signals can penetrate us again. But you can fight them.”
“That’s what she said, but she can’t tell me how,” muttered Maryanne.
Jackson glanced at me, worried. “Kate, do we need to—”
“No,” I cut him off. “No, I’ll be fine. I think I must just be jittery. I can bring back reality in flashes, but it takes all my concentration…”
Jackson squeezed my hand, and I looked up to meet his gaze.
Don’t trust him.
I froze. The thought came out of nowhere.
“What?” Jackson asked, his brow furrowing.
“N-nothing,” I murmured.
“She looks lovely,” called Michael to Maryanne and me. “Kate my dear, you ready?”
I stood up, trying to escape from Jackson. But he wouldn’t let go of my hand.
“Look at me,” he commanded.
Reluctantly, I did.
He’s evil.
I caught my breath, and my eyes widened. Where are these thoughts coming from?
“Kate,” said Jackson slowly and deliberately, “I need you to look me in the eye and tell me you are okay.”
What is the definition of ‘okay?’
“Sure I am,” I said, not meeting his eyes. But he wouldn’t release me. One hand now clutched my shoulder, and with the other, he tilted my chin up so I had to look at him. It was the same gesture he’d used last night before he’d kissed me. My heart skipped for a split second at the memory, and at the tenderness in his eyes as he looked at me now.
“Tell me what’s going on in your head right now,” he begged.
You’re the enemy.
“Kate!” called Michael. “Let’s do this, kiddo!”
I wrenched myself away from Jackson and didn’t look back. My heart pounded in earnest as I stood up and walked behind the mahogany desk, which I knew wasn’t really mahogany, but looked like it was for all the world.
“All right,” said Michael, “you’re speaking off the cuff. No teleprompters, we’re just gonna do this live. That okay?”
I nodded, feeling dizzy and lightheaded. “No teleprompters,” I confirmed. The lights were much too bright.
“All right then. Everyone ready?” He looked around, and the remaining crew members and Charlie gave him the thumbs up. “Three. Two. One. Rolling,” called Michael, and pointed at me.
I started to hyperventilate.
Focus, Kate. Come on. I forced a deep breath in, and began the way I’d rehearsed this in my head. I can do this. I can do this.
“Hi, friends.” I smiled at the camera. My own face appeared on the smaller screen in the back of the room, so the crew could see what the cameras saw. As usual, I tried to ignore it and speak directly to the cameras. “I know you’ve been told a lot of things about me since I’ve been gone, most recently that I’m a terrorist and that I am your enemy. I imagine that for a lot of you, that’s been very confusing. You know in your hearts that I am devoted to you. I’m your Voice of Truth, the face you’ve come to trust. I want to honor that trust today, by telling you what I know is true. Some of you will believe it and some of you won’t—I understand that. But I have to at least do my duty, as I’ve always done, to report the facts as I see them. What you do with those facts is up to you.”
Michael’s camera had a light on top of the lens, and I stared directly into that. It washed out everything else in the room, and that’s what I needed. I started to gain momentum, and my pounding heart slowed a bit. There were no teleprompters, but I read from the script I’d rehearsed in my head.
“I believed everything I’ve previously told you about our Republic, our Potentate, and our Tribunal: that we were a blessed and prosperous nation, and that Potentate is our savior. I believed this with all my heart—until I found out that someone I’d known years ago had been executed as an Enemy of State. Her name was Maggie Jensen.
“I’d actually forgotten Maggie’s existence entirely, and the period in my life she represented, until I saw her name on the list of EOS’s on which I was to report. After that it came to me in flashes that I’d spent a few years of my childhood at a reform school called McCormick’s.
“At first my memories of it were elegant and lovely, like everything else in the Republic. But over time, I began to remember the threats, the injections to make us more docile, and the horrible appearance of the place the first time I arrived. Once I remembered that, I also remembered that I’d been sent there in the first place for recognizing that there were voices in my head that did not belong to me. You all have them too, if you’re honest. The voices say things like, ‘We are prosperous. The Potentate has your best interests at heart. You are healthy and well cared for.’
“Once I realized those voices were not coming from my own mind, I started to see that those thoughts are meant to directly contradict an unpleasant reality. The truth is, most of us are malnourished, some severely so. Many of you have friends and relatives who supposedly died of rare and incurable diseases—but the truth is, many of them starved to death. Others died from diseases of poverty, the result of homes infested with rats and mice and mold and chemicals. The Potentate, the Tribunal, and most of
the government officials are well fed and live in decent homes—the Potentate’s palace, for instance, is every bit as fabulous as the pictures show. I know this, because I was there two days ago, on trial for my life. But the rest of us live in squalor.”
Where did this script come from? I suddenly wondered as I spoke. I know I rehearsed it and memorized it, but… but these aren’t my words. These are Jackson’s words.
He made me think they were my words.
He’s brainwashed me.
My heart pounded in my chest, and I started to see little flashes of light in my field of vision, like I was on the brink of passing out. In the shadows, I saw Jackson whispering to Charlie. Both of them looked worried.
You’re live, Kate. Focus! I forced myself to breathe slowly and deeply. These are my words. These are my words. They’re mine. I looked back at the bright light above the camera, and felt beads of sweat pop out on my forehead, settling on top of my pasty stage makeup.
Talk, I willed myself. Talk, dammit.
“Maggie tried to tell me all of this when we were in school together, and I listened to her at first. She told me the stories, that kids who failed their end-of-year exams (which were all about whether or not they’d been successfully brainwashed) got sent to something called ‘special projects,’ and were never seen or heard from again. She told me about the control centers that are set up throughout our Republic, which broadcast the very thoughts I’d recognized did not belong to me. The injections infected us with a virus that made us anemic, and therefore easier to control. Maggie and the other rebels in the school found out that the Potentate had released that same virus on the entire population right after the United States crashed, while he was getting the control centers up and running.”
Lies. Lies. All lies. I looked at Jackson. He was watching me intently.
Like he would kill me if I screwed up.
He’s going to kill me eventually, just like he killed all those Tribunal members.
