Blood Zero Sky (19 page)

All I can think to say is, “I want to be free.”

A smile rises in Ethan’s eyes. He turns back to the council.

“I’ll take approximately two weeks to train May and plan the raid,” he says. “After that, we strike.”

He looks around the room for objections, but there are none.

“God bless America, and God bless the Protectorate,” Grace says, and clacks a small gavel on the table, ending the meeting.

McCann smiles, but his thoughts seem far away. “God bless America,” he murmurs, “and bless our bullets, too.”

—Chapter Ø14—

The next morning, Ethan shakes me into wakefulness hours before dawn.

He does not say good morning or offer me coffee. He simply pulls me to my feet and orders me to stand at attention.

Humans, he tells me, are composed of three parts: mind, body, and soul.

I want to tell him this is a pretty esoteric discussion to have at four-thirty in the morning, but the gravity of his demeanor silences me.

If any of these three facets of a human being are deficient, he continues, then that individual will be unable to enter the Order of the Protectorate. Conversely, every Protectorate member must keep each of these aspects of himself honed and balanced, so as to be prepared for any possible test. Since I already put myself through the baptism of the knife, it stands to reason that my spirit is firm. Therefore, since I must be prepared to fight in only two weeks, my accelerated training schedule will focus on my body and my mind.

Standing here at four-thirty am, drowsy enough to nod off standing up, I very much hope we’ll start by working on my mind. Doing crossword puzzles, for example. But no. We spend the next two hours running through miles upon miles of tunnels.

I do pull-ups until my arms tremble, sit-ups until my stomach spasms, and push-ups until I’m afraid my meager breasts will fall off. Then, we run some more. The workouts are so hard that I don’t even notice the throbbing ache of the wound on my face, because the pain in my muscles is even worse.

At lunch, Ethan and I sit apart from the others. While they laugh and dine on pasta and sausage, I choke down four boiled eggs and a banana. Then, Ethan tells me with a grin, it’s time for fight training.

I learn stomp kicks and jabs, takedowns and sprawls, arm bars and chokes, left hooks, elbow strikes, eye gouges and head butts. Each new lesson in pain Ethan first demonstrates on me, so that by the time an hour has passed, I feel as if every inch of my skin should be purple with bruises. Probably, I would have quit within the first hour of running, before the sun even rose, except that Ethan endured each of these trials right along with me. During the runs, we went together, step for step. For every push-up, sit-up, or pull-up I did, he did three.

He ate the same lunch as me: four boiled eggs and some fruit, each and every day. By the third day of fight training, Ethan’s letting me use the moves I’ve learned on him.

I give him a black eye.

~~~

The third evening of my training, Ethan leads me into room full of books. The air is rich with the smell of their musty pages. We are at another camp now—this one is larger than the last, pitched inside an old oil refinery.

“Remember,” he tells me as he leaves, “body, mind, and soul.”

Alone now, I stand among piles of books higher than I am tall. A few of the titles I’ve seen before:
Treasure Island, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, The Three Musketeers,
the
Bible
.
Most of them, though, I’m unfamiliar with. There are multiple copies of many titles—especially those dealing with American history, philosophy, and warfare. The sight amazes me. I’ve never seen so many books in one place—ever. My dad has a few shelves full of them in his office, but nothing like this.

Over the next few days, I read as much as I can.

At first, I read very slowly, almost painfully, having to stop every few minutes to walk around or look up from the page. I hardly read during my school days—N-Ed has much more efficient ways of teaching than merely having kids read books—and since then I haven’t done it at all. For adults, it’s easy to download a copy of the few dozen Company-approved books on your IC, but who has time to read when you have to work sixty-five hours a week? Even when I was in school, I mostly listened to audiobooks. The ability to absorb the words and let my imagination fly free takes time to re-learn, but soon, just as one develops sea legs onboard a ship, my eyes and mind once again acclimate to digesting the written word.

After a few days, Ethan no longer has to direct me to go into the room; I race there myself when my training is done. I spend hour after hour sprawled on the floor or leaning against stacks of moldering paperbacks, poring over biographies of Martin Luther King Jr., Benjamin Franklin, and George Washington, the writings of John Locke, the Dalai Lama, and Karl Marx, novels by Kurt Vonnegut, Ernest Hemingway, and George Orwell, and books with titles like:
1776, Self-Defense for Dummies,
and
The U. S. Army Field Manual.

Occasionally, Ethan stops by to check on my progress or to suggest a title for me to read. Sometimes, we get into long discussions about philosophy or religion, about the nature of life or love or mankind itself. Every book I mention, he’s read. Often, especially if we disagree or if I am particularly adamant in opposition to one of his arguments, he pulls a book from the middle of one of the stacks and hands it to me.

“You’re still thinking Company thoughts,” he says, his face serious but his eyes smiling. “Look deeper.”

Once, during one of his brief visits, I ask him why I’ve never seen so many of these wonderful books before. “What happened?” I ask. “Did the government make them illegal? Did the Company round up copies and burn them?”

Ethan shakes his head. “No,” he says, “They didn’t have to do anything as dramatic as that. They just stopped printing them. They stopped promoting them, and they removed the downloadable copies from the Company network. Most of all, they distracted people with other, more flashy, less substantive forms of entertainment so that pretty soon nobody had the patience to read. And they keep everyone working so hard, nobody has time anyway.”

He’s right. I’m ashamed to think of how many nights I wasted staring at my imager, playing video games, or working at the office until well past midnight.

“The Company isn’t our real enemy, May,” he continues. “It’s complacency. Apathy. Fear. We destroy those emotions in the hearts of the workers and the Company won’t stand a chance.”

Now, I feel myself changing. Between chapters, I do push-ups or sit-ups. I do pull-ups on a dripping pipe that runs across the hallway just outside my little library. I feel myself getting leaner and stronger, feel my thoughts getting sharper, like I’m an image that’s coming into focus. I feel my entire self expanding, not just the lean muscles of my arms and shoulders, not just my mind, but my soul. My energy feels too big to fit inside me any longer. I take up more space than my physical body occupies. The other rebels, at meals or around the camp, smile warmly at me but give me a wide berth as I pass. One night, I find Ada and ask her to do me a favor—she finds a set of shears and cuts off my hair for me. The resulting hairstyle is a short, uneven, unfashionable mess that makes me look even more awkwardly masculine than usual. And I feel more like myself than I ever have in my life.

After the first seven days, Ethan expands my training, teaching me to shoot, to strategize, to wire explosives. He takes me to the hundreds of underground locations used as camps by the rebels and shows me maps and blueprints of tunnel networks all over the land that was once America.

“We’re always in danger,” he tells me, “but when we’re above ground, where the sats can see us, we’re completely exposed—like a mouse in a field with a hawk circling above. You have to know the underground.”

He tells me the history of the Protectorate, the fourth branch of the American government, formed in secret by George Washington himself. After playing a key but unpublicized role in the first American Revolution, the group that would become the Protectorate lay silent for years, training their leaders, staying few in number but never losing the collective knowledge of their forefathers. Often, posts were handed down from father to son to maintain the secrecy and integrity of the Order. For hundreds of years, the other three branches of government checked each other’s power, as the Constitution had envisioned, and there was no need for the Protectorate to come forward. Always, Ethan explained, the fear had been that one of the other branches of government would become too powerful, overstepping its bounds and forcing the Protectorate to rise and reestablish equilibrium. A few times in history, the executive branch became power hungry and managed to gain almost complete domination over the other two branches, to the point where the Protectorate elders were forced to convene and consider stepping in, but always balance was restored naturally, without their needing to take action.

Nobody envisioned that the sanctity of the government would be broken not by a power-hungry faction in the government itself, not by the army or the CIA or a fanatical political party, or even by an invading foreign state, but by the corrupted capitalist system itself.

“We should have seen it coming,” Ethan says with a sad shake of his head. “As soon as the big corporations took over the government and started writing their own regulations, it was over. The natural outcome of the rigged market they created is one Company, controlling everything.”

But they didn’t see it—not in time, anyway. The consolidation of power happened too gradually for anyone to notice in the beginning, and later, the Company’s usurpation of all government function happened too fast and was too complete for any effective reprisal. To make matters worse, many of the Protectorate elders were also major Company stockholders, either in N-Corp or B&S, and resisted any action that might hurt their own financial well-being until it was too late.

The result, eventually, was a schism in the Protectorate itself, which left Ethan—its youngest member at the time—along with a handful of others, the only ones able to organize any meaningful resistance. Still, even with all the resources, the knowledge, and the training of the Protectorate at his disposal, Ethan found fighting the Company nearly impossible.

“George Washington and the others, when forming the Order of the Protectorate, believed that all forms of society, no matter how well organized or well-intentioned, would eventually fall into domination by a calculating and self-serving few. They were right. But there was one area in which they were wrong: they assumed that people would have the capacity to realize when they were no longer free. The Companies, in their genius, have manipulated and bribed the people into submission. They give them fancy toys to play with, expensive clothes to wear, luxurious places to live. They occupy them with jobs that eat away their time and their mental energy, wasting their days with endless menial tasks. The media division fills their minds with confusion, not by telling lies, but through a series of half truths, omissions and rhetorical tricks that slowly warp the public consciousness until even the most basic principles of the society are distorted. Perhaps most importantly, they give them stock, so the workers believe that they and the Company are one and the same. They hold out the examples of a few powerful people who’ve become Blackies—like your father—to perpetuate the false notion that if they work hard enough, they too can become a Blackie one day. They put their words in God’s mouth, so that even
goodness
and
righteousness
are commodities they control and benefits they can dole out or withhold as they please. They completed a centuries-long campaign of vilifying the government, so that in the end, the people were glad to see it go. And now, most of the fortunate ones are grateful slaves, happy to have lost their freedom, content to be cogs in the machine that converts human dignity into cash.”

“Wow,” I say. “Nice speech.”

“But do you understand?” Ethan presses.

“Yes . . . but . . . my father used to brag to me about all the good the Company was doing for people, you know? How much more they had now than when he was a kid, how technology was better and work was easier and life was safer and . . . I was proud of him. Proud to be a part of it.”

“People do have a lot of toys,” Ethan agrees. “They’ve mortgaged their lives for them.”

“What’s a mortgage?” I ask. Like every other debtor-worker, I rent my housing from the Company.

“I’ll wake you up early tomorrow,” he says. “And show you what I mean.”

~~~

The next day Ethan wakes me, shoves a protein bar into my hand, and leads me, blinking, out of our basement encampment and into the fresh morning light. We travel for quite a ways on foot—perhaps a mile—before coming upon what must’ve been a handsome, modest house at some time in the not-too-distant past. Now, the roof has fallen in and a stray dog, bone thin and mangy, watches us from the hole where a few splintered shards of a front door still hang from broken hinges. Ethan takes me into the garage attached to the house, where we find a motorcycle.

“Motorcycles are less likely to be spotted by the sat-watchers than larger vehicles,” he explains. “Still, we’re taking a risk where we’re going, so pay close attention to everything you see. I won’t be able to take you back there again.”

I have no idea what he’s talking about, but I nod anyway. Mostly, my attention is taken up by the motorcycle. It’s impossible to tell how old it is, but it must be many years, since as far as I know neither N-Corp nor B&S make motorcycles any longer. The bike is sleek-looking and painted flat black, with no logos or placards to identify its maker.

Ethan fires up the engine. It gives a throaty roar that instantly subsides to a grumble.

“Come here,” he says, and paints a cross overtop the incision on my cheek with some dark gray, strangely metallic paint. “If anyone asks about the incision, tell them that your old cross implant stopped working and you got a new one a few days ago. Here, put this in your pocket.” He hands me a tiny, plastic chip, flat, smooth and small, like a dog’s tag.

“This contains your electronic identity code for this mission. When the squadmen try to scan your cross, they’ll get this instead. Don’t lose it or we’re as good as dead. Your name is Elizabeth Ono. You work in retail, selling shoes. My name is Mike Prescott and I’m your boss—and your boyfriend. Got it?”

“Sure, baby.”

Ethan laughs. “Let’s go.”

I climb on behind him, arms around his waist, and in a spray of dirt we’re off. I quickly lose track of what direction we’re traveling. My mind is tangled in the serpentine curves of the road and blown to excited tatters by the wind in my hair. For this one fleeting instant, life is good.