by Susan Grant
“Do you remember what we briefed?” Ty asked.
“We drop and run like hell.”
“We walk like hell. It won’t draw as much notice.” He squeezed her shoulder. “And you don’t let go of my hand.” He checked the pistol and its futuristic version of an ammo clip before giving her one curt nod.
Ty shimmied on his butt to the rear opening, as if he were preparing for a low-altitude parachute drop out the back of a C-130. She heard his borrowed boots hit the asphalt. And she jumped out after him, her heart dancing like crazy.
She’d barely gotten her balance when he snatched her hand and lugged her forward. A wall of crates led to the front gate where the truck had entered the dock area a short time ago.
Bree tried to look normal. She shivered, but sweat still formed on her forehead. She wiped it off, but the evidence of her tension kept coming back. Ty put his arm over her shoulders and drew her close, as if she were a fragile, ailing wife. She wished she could feel his body heat, but what little he had seemed to roll off her. He felt her shivering, drew her even closer, but it didn’t help. She recognized her symptoms as the beginnings of hypothermia. But there was nothing more she could do than what she was already: walking at a pace just under a run.
Ty limped, but she could tell he tried to hide it. She remembered his bloodied feet, and now they were crushed into ill-fitting boots.
The dock was a makeshift produce market, where farmers sold food directly from the backs of their trucks—a little side profit before the produce had to be packaged and shipped elsewhere. The area was small, but crowded with nighttime shoppers. The bounty of the early fall was displayed with pride; the smell of freshly picked fruits, vegetables, and cooking food filled the air, making Bree’s stomach demand sustenance.
Having survived the past few weeks on bowls of rice with an occasional sliver of boiled meat, Ty was surely reeling with hunger, but his concentration centered on getting them to a safe haven for the night. “Not here,” he said under his breath. “We’ll eat after we find lodging.”
Except for the countless electronics accompanying the hundred or so shoppers and a few helper-robots like Pip, the scene was remarkably twenty-first century. Unlike Kyber’s palace, Bree didn’t feel as much of a stranger here. Both shoppers and sellers looked healthy and well fed. There was a noticeable absence of poverty—in any form.
That is, there was an absence of poverty in any form except for her and Ty, if anyone had tried to take a closer look at them. They were grubby and dressed like poor vegetable pickers. The shadows had chosen their clothing well. But nothing would have helped if Kyber had launched an all-out search. But if he had, wouldn’t there be police at every dock and every station, looking for them?
So far, Bree saw no signs a search was under way. Their only hope was that Kyber wouldn’t expect them to be in New Seoul, and so quickly. The gruesome scene at the farmhouse lingered in her mind. Bree could still hear the driver’s last gasps for air. It reminded her that the people in the violent group who’d killed him and attacked them with acid were the ones to fear—not Kyber’s police. The loyalists had appeared out of nowhere before. Just as likely, they could do it again.
Heads down, she and Ty made their way through the crowds. As they neared the front gate of the dock area, they drew a few curious glances but that was all.
The exit loomed. Beyond was freedom.
Ty’s grip on Bree’s hand tightened. Those last few feet were the worst.
She fought the urge to break into a run. As she and Ty passed by the bored-looking gate guard, she imagined everyone within five miles could hear her heart beating.
Then they were out of the dock and on the street proper. Her held-in breath rushed out. But the flight to safety was just beginning.
Ty took her hand again. She didn’t ask again how he knew where to go. She’d asked the question earlier, and he’d explained mysteriously that he knew the layout of many cities, although he’d never visited them. She understood. As a fighter pilot, she knew every airplane and helicopter in the world from memory without having flown most of them.
They walked through a warren of dark, narrow streets.
The air reeked of overcrowded humanity: smoke, garlic, sweat. Stores hawked items using digital price displays and flashy holographic ads. Ty searched the signs, looking for a promising place to stay.
Here, the buildings clustered so tightly together that they blocked the starry sky. Walls of brick or stone transformed to laser-bright ads or exploded into three-dimensional, holographic images before morphing into other, decorative textures. Ty didn’t seem to notice, but the barrage made Bree feel as if she’d stayed too long at a carnival midway. Her nerves were raw after a while. She felt jumpy, overstimulated. She supposed that’s how someone from the Civil War might have felt, if brought to the twentieth or twenty-first centuries and face-to-face with billboards and televised entertainment.
A few locals had set up temporary cookeries outside their shops, open late at night the way Bree remembered from the Korea she once knew. One woman dipped a ladle into a tub of batter and poured it onto the red-hot top of a metal drum. Working quickly, she swirled the batter around until it simmered. As it cooked, she threw in a handful of prepared meat and vegetables. With a spatula, she deftly folded it into a tube with closed ends, wrapped it in paper, and handed the bundle to a waiting customer. Then she started all over again.
Bree planted her boots, forcing Ty to stop. “Cover me. I’m buying us some of that.”
Ty glanced up one side of the street and down the other, and gave her a nod. She paid for three of the stuffed pancakes—one for her, two for Ty—and a couple of bottles of juice. They huddled close to the building and began to eat.
While Ty wasn’t as desperately hungry as he was the night he’d come to dinner in Kyber’s apartment, Bree could tell he wanted to shove the food into his mouth but held back for fear of offending her. “You’re starving, Ty,” she mumbled, her mouth full. “Eat as fast as you want. Who cares about manners!”
He glanced up. “Mmm?”
“No! Don’t stop. Eat.” She chuckled. “Listen to me now. I sound just like my grandmother Vitale.”
Ty wolfed down his food, but never fully lost his veneer of manners. The Ax and his wife had been taskmaster parents, apparently.
Bree couldn’t eat fast enough. Gravy dripped from the wrapper onto her wrists. Only the scalding center of the pancake slowed her down. But she’d eaten less than half of hers when Ty wiped his hands on his shirt and swallowed his last bite. “Good,” he grunted in true caveman fashion, and lifted the juice drink to his mouth.
Her attention was still on Ty’s face when she saw his expression change abruptly. He lowered the bottle, his gaze tracking upward. “It’s back...”
Bree spun around. The billboard across the street was white. Bright white. Then a voice erupted, rumbling like thunder: “‘These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will in this crisis shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands now deserves the love and thanks of men and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered.”
“Holy Christmas,” Bree whispered.
“‘Yet, we have this consolation with us: The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value.’ That, my friends, is what Thomas Paine told his fellow revolutionaries more than five hundred years ago. And I bring his words to you now. Rise up! Rise up! Let this be the shot heard around the world!”
“It’s like a telemarketer calling during dinner,” she said, her mouth full.
“Tele...marketer?” Ty asked. “What’s that?”
“Thank you,” she said to his puzzlement. “You have just made the future a better place.”
“Some will tell you to ignore my call to arms,” the voice declared, rising in volume. “If you do, remember this: Those who give up essential
liberty to preserve a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety; those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must undergo the fatigue of supporting it. Now that you have won your liberty, Banzai Maguire, you must win freedom for us all!”
What the hell?
Bree’s pancake fell to the sidewalk with a soggy thump.
“Let’s go,” Ty said, grabbing her. He strode away from the pancake stand at a near run, his arm tight over her shoulders.
“Did you hear that? It said my name.”
He tucked her face against his chest, shielding her, but that made it hard to walk without tripping over her feet.
“I don’t want to be involved with this,” she mumbled, her mouth crushed against his shirt.
The voice continued to echo all around them. Some of the vendors had shut off their billboards, but many were still on. She cast a furtive glance at the people milling around her. She would have thought any calls to rise up would cause alarm in a foreign state, but most of the pedestrians appeared to treat the voice exactly like that tele-marketer who called at dinnertime—an annoying entity they tried to ignore. Or, maybe they recognized it as she did: a message meant for UCE, and not them.
“Banzai Maguire!” She cringed at the sound of her name booming in the crowded streets. “I am well aware of the toil and blood it will cost you to come to me, but come to me you must. Hear my words; heed my call. I will be waiting for you, Banzai Maguire.”
Bree exchanged a panicked glance up at Ty. “All I did was sleep through two centuries. Now this person thinks I’m a hero.”
“I did my duty, that’s all,” she remembered telling Kyber at the palace. “I’m nothing special.”
“You are the stuff of legends, Banzai,” he’d said.
And Joo-Eun had insisted, “The shadows want you to succeed.”
Succeed in what? Shivering, Bree sweated at the same time, her stomach filled with butterflies.
“In what destiny has brought you here to do.”
She cringed at Joo-Eun’s conviction. This wasn’t Bree’s fight. She wasn’t from this world. She was Bree Ann Maguire, the daughter of an auto mechanic and a stay-at-home mom, a small-town tomboy with a keen sense of competition and a heart full of patriotism. Give her a mission plan and she’d fight courageously to the death, because that’s what she’d pledged the day she received the gold lieutenant’s bars on her shoulders. But lead a revolution? Was that what the owner of the voice wanted? She wasn’t qualified to lead a campaign of that magnitude, let alone to inspire anyone to fight a revolution—and she didn’t want to be.
Those who give up essential liberty to preserve a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety; those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must undergo the fatigue of supporting it. Bree shrank from the voice’s accusation. The American flag waved behind her eyes...taunting her. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will in this crisis shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands now deserves the love and thanks of men and women.
The voice was silent now. The white screens returned to the flashy ads, and the few pedestrians who had been listening went back to their routine. Then several imperial guards rounded the corner.
“Police!” she whispered loudly.
Ty spun her around until they faced a storefront. Trying to breathe normally, Bree pretended to look at the window display of holographically enhanced clothing. Ty’s face was shadowed, but she knew a mask of indifference hid his fear of recapture. It would not go well for Ty, if that happened. And who knew what would happen to her?
But the guards strode past, talking and laughing.
“Come on.” Ty took her by the arm and urged her across the street. “We’ve got to get out of the open.”
“The Celadon,” she whispered.
“Yes.”
On a small television sitting on the ground next to a man stirring a boiling pot of noodles, the news showed a scene of jubilation. Ty slowed to watch the crowd cheering a screen of solid white.
Hanging from a tall flagpole over the crowd was a huge flag Bree recognized as the UCE banner—a white globe on a blue square in a field of solid red. “It’s coming from the UCE,” Ty confirmed. His shock melted into acute dismay and then reluctant acknowledgment. “The central colony, where the boycotts started. What you knew as the United States.”
A narrator said, “For a fourth consecutive day, a broadcast has interrupted communication across a broad area. President Beauchamp today called the speeches ‘a revolting example of Interweb terrorism.’”
So many people, Bree thought. The camera panned over streets and streets of them. Those close to the camera yelled; some shook their fists; others cheered; a few even cried. So many emotions. She could feel the passion rising off them like steam from boiling water. And in the midst of it all, she saw someone in the crowd of protestors lift a flag, an American flag, and wave it slowly back and forth.
The sight hit Bree like a fist in the stomach. It was something from the past—her past. It didn’t belong in this turbulent demonstration in a futuristic city. And yet, somehow, it did. “Old Glory” was a symbol all at once incongruous and poignantly familiar waving above the protestors. Did these people understand what those stars and stripes meant? Did they know how many had bled to keep that flag waving?
She did!
That’s why the voice wants you.
Averting her eyes, she winced and turned her head. That’s when it hit her that Ty stood at her side, her hands crushed in his. On opposite sides, she and Ty were in this together.
Something very close to real emotion pressed behind her eyes, but she caught herself before the ache could turn into tears. She’d spent the past few weeks entombed in blessed numbness. But that protective cocoon had just ripped wide open.
The narrator droned on in a tone that was an oddly subdued counterpoint to her boiling emotions and the crowd’s vehemence. “Listening to the speeches will only encourage its organizers, the president warned. All suspected agitators will be tried for treason.”
Treason? Bree turned to Ty and said, “He means me.”
Chapter Sixteen
Autumn in northern Asia brought chilly nights. Tonight was no exception. It didn’t help that the so-called Cheju Precinct was on the opposite end of town. And so they’d walked on through the night, the air growing damper and chillier with each passing hour. Bree had completed a number of intense survival courses as a cadet and later as a pilot, but never did she remember feeling so low. Hunger and exhaustion had allowed the cold to burrow deep inside her. By the time she and Ty reached Cheju, located on the fringes of the city proper, it was on the dawn side of midnight and shivers wracked Bree’s body.
Here, inns were few and far between. When at last Bree read the green lettering on one humble and slightly shabby edifice called the Celadon Inn, she thought her knees would give way with relief. That is, if her legs weren’t too stiff with cold to buckle.
All we have to do is get safe for the night, so we can make the rendezvous in the morning.
Ty scouted out the immediate area with keen soldier’s eyes before pushing open the door and following her inside. The place was part bar, part eatery, chaotic with noisy patrons. The air was damp, and scented thickly with garlic and white pepper. Bree tried to soak up the warmth, but her shaking wouldn’t stop. Her cold seemed to go much deeper, settling in a place where warmth couldn’t reach.
Music played, more of a synthesized throb than a melody. It was a young crowd. She couldn’t help wondering about them. Were they shadow people or regular locals? Bree’s instincts told her they were normal citizens, but then she’d been wrong about Joo-Eun.
Those patrons not eating were engaged in loud conversations; others interacted with screens flickering with a variety of 3-D images. As her eyes adjusted to the dim light, she noticed that the game players wore hats with glasses and headsets, and had covered their hands with thin gloves. Wireless virtual realit
y.
It was just another late night in New Seoul. And while she and Ty looked disheveled, no one seemed to care.
An ancient-looking woman appeared out of the crowd. Her skin was seamed and leathery. Where the flesh covered the tops of her hands and neck, it was almost transparent, revealing a network of blue, coiled veins. Life expectancies reached to the mid-100s now. Bree clocked this woman at no less than 130.
Yet the old woman’s eyes were discerning and bright as she scanned Bree and Ty’s ragged appearance. Her nostrils flared—with recognition or at the odor, Bree didn’t know, but sagging lids masked her eyes and what hints they held.
“A room if you have one,” Ty told the proprietor.
To Bree’s joy, she nodded. “You want food, too?”
“Yes,” Bree answered, maybe a little too eagerly.
“But you clean up first, or I won’t serve you. Come.” The old woman turned and walked away.
Bree and Ty followed. “How much?” he asked when she handed them something the size of a memory stick that Bree assumed was a room key.
“Twenty-five. Includes both of you.”
One hundred credits were all Bree had. Total. Twenty-five was a lot to spend the first night out, but they needed shelter. Teeth chattering, she paid for the room.
They tromped up a narrow, dark staircase. It was cold in the building, too, she was dismayed to discover. Ty unlocked the door. They spilled into the room and he locked the door behind them. The lights came on automatically.
Bree stood there, shivering. Cold had settled so deeply inside her that she wondered if she’d ever feel warm again.
Ty pulled their pistol from his pocket and laid it on the bed. “So we’ll be ready no matter who stops by to welcome you to town.”
“G-good.” She tossed her travel pack on the bed next to the pistol. “I’ve got to get warm. Wh-where’s the shower?”
In the harsh, halogen-bright light, Ty looked down at her face. At the sight of his shock, she coughed out a weak laugh. “By the expression on your face, I must look pretty bad.”
