Sunset Rising (11 page)

“I’m confused.
Why do you care if I believe you betrayed me or not? Why are you so intent on making sure I know Leisel is the guilty one? You’re not exactly innocent in all of this.”

“I don’t know.
Last confession? Unfortunately neither one of us has much longer to live.” He finally dropped his gaze and looked at my hand resting in my lap. I still had on the ring. It looked shiny against the white dress. A sad look came over his face. “I’m guilty of a lot of things, but being a traitor isn’t one of them. The true traitor is Damien Holt.”

“What does President Holt have to do with this?
I thought this was between you and Leisel.” I instantly regretted my question. I really didn’t care. Whatever issues there were between Jack and the president were for them to sort out. I was already dealing with the backlash of getting caught between two bourge. I had learned my lesson.

“When Leisel told you I wanted change in the Dome
, she wasn’t lying. I talked about it with her a little to see how she would react, but she doesn’t know the entire story. You see, my family heads up a secret organization called Liberty. Our goal is to restore democracy to our government.”

“Restor
e it? But we have a democratic government.”

“No
, we don’t. Holt and his buddies have revised our history so much that most people don’t know the truth. But the Kenners know the truth. We have evidence.”

“What truth?
What evidence?” My curiosity was aroused despite my desire to stay out of bourge politics. But if I was going to be executed because of a secret organization trying to take control of the Dome, I wanted to at least know who they were.

“Where do I begin?
Well… probably at the beginning of the Dome’s history.” He gave me a roguish smile. The smile made him almost seem human, but I wished he would change out of his military uniform. He looked like someone I should fear. “My great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather—give or take a few greats—was Theodore Kenner, Vice President of the United States before the bombs. He entered the Dome as part of President Taylor’s entourage when the bombs were launched.
General
Edward Holt was also part of that entourage.” Jack looked at me closely when he said “general.”

I couldn’t remember ever hearing about a President Taylor
, except for the article I had read in one of Jack’s magazines. The Holts had always held the presidency in the Dome.

“So the Holt
family wasn’t in line for the presidency?”

Jack shifted, bringing one of his legs within touching distance of me.
I bent my knees and hugged them close to my chest, steering clear of any contact. He didn’t seem to notice.

“Actually
, in a democratic government there’s no such thing as being
in line
for the presidency. In a democracy, the people choose a leader through an election process and, once elected, the leader is expected to represent the people. But the Holts don’t operate that way. What we have under the Holt regime is a dictatorship, which gets passed along from generation to generation through the males in that family.”

“How did General
Holt become president then? Was he elected?”

“No.
My family has evidence that implicates Edward Holt in the murder of President Taylor and her husband.” He smiled at my look of surprise. There had never been a female president in the Dome. “Vice President Kenner kept a written journal and video clips of his life in the Dome, which the Kenner family has kept all these years. Every Kenner has read the journal and watched the videos, and we continue to share them with others who want to know the truth. The video that made the most impact on me shows civilians from the valley climbing up the mountain to the open hangar doors where military vehicles were still coming into the Dome. The civilians tried to fight their way in, but soldiers were pushing them back and used machine guns to stop them. General Holt ordered the soldiers to fire, but President Taylor called a stop to it. In the video, you can see bodies everywhere, rivers of blood flowing down the mountain, but still the people kept coming to the Dome. They were desperate to get to safety.” Jack paused for a moment, his eyes bright with unshed tears. “No one with a soul could turn those people away, and President Taylor didn’t. She told the guards to let them through.

“
That caused a huge rift between President Taylor and General Holt. His callous behaviour bothered Taylor so much that she started looking into Holt’s military career, and during her investigation she discovered that Holt had betrayed her. It’s complicated, but I’ll try to explain. In order to launch missiles, two people were required to enter secret codes into a computer that controlled the warheads. It was a safety precaution to make sure that a bomb was never launched accidentally. The two people who held those codes were President Taylor, the leader of our nation, and General Edward Holt, the leader of our military. President Taylor reluctantly agreed to launch the warheads after General Holt informed her that both Russia and Korea had launched theirs at us. But General Holt had lied to her. No one had launched. When she punched in her secret code and activated the missiles, she started World War Three. Countries sent their missiles in retaliation against us, not as an offensive strike. Our Allies launched in our defense, their enemies launched in their defense… and on and on it went until the earth was devastated by a global nuclear war.

“
When Taylor discovered the betrayal, she was going to have Holt formally charged. She had already confided in Vice President Kenner about everything she had found out, which is why all this ended up in his journal. But from this point on, much of what Kenner wrote is hearsay. The president and her husband were murdered just hours after she made her discovery, and General Holt was the first one at the murder scene. He took complete control of the investigation and claimed to have found evidence that their murder was the result of a conspiracy by the civilians—the same civilians they had so generously given shelter from the bombs—to take over the Dome and throw everyone else out. As the head of the military, it seemed natural for Holt to be the one to step up as leader to get the civilians under control. That’s when he made the famous treaty with them—the treaty that turned you into slaves.”

What Jack was
saying was a lot to take in—especially after the day I’d had. I was exhausted. How was I supposed to react to all of this information? He seemed so self-righteous in his confession, yet I saw another side to his story. If the Dome had been built right in our own valley, why hadn’t the president and her entourage invited us in when the bombs were launched in the first place? Why did the civilians have to fight their way in at all? It sounded like there should have been more than enough room, if they were driving vehicles in…

“Considering the amount of time and effort the ruling class put into building a secret shelter
to protect themselves from a nuclear holocaust, it seems to me they had damned us long before they launched the bombs,” I said. Jack looked surprised at my words. I wondered if he was going to hit me, but I pressed on. “So the Kenners have known this all along and haven’t exposed the Holts? Why? Why didn’t anyone fight for us? Why didn’t Vice President Kenner step up and have him arrested?”

Jack looked at me thoughtfully. I wasn’t sure if he was mad or not.
“I’ll try to explain, if I can. By right, Vice President Kenner should have become president, but General Holt had control of the military and felt it was in the best interests of the Dome to retain a military government. And not only did he have the military behind him, but he was also in possession of both his own codes and President Taylor’s codes for the warheads. Remember I told you that two people are needed to launch the missiles? There are warheads inside the Dome. It’s part of the Dome’s defense system.

“
The codes get passed to each president when he’s sworn in and only the Holts have held that office since the beginning of the Dome. There are a lot of people living here who would like to see a return to our democratic government, but the Holts still control the military and the warheads. Every Holt who has come to power has threatened to blow up the entire Dome if there’s an uprising—and each Holt has been crazy enough to do it. They would rather see the end of civilization than relinquish their power. So we try to have a quiet revolution. We plan and plot and hope that one day we’ll find the codes and usurp their control. I’ve searched the computer memory banks, but I can’t find them,” he said.

“I don’t understand why General Holt wa
sn’t exposed back then. I mean if he had the president’s codes, then the only way he could’ve gotten them was from Taylor herself. But if he found her already murdered…” I shook my head. If I could see the flaws in Edward Holt’s story, couldn’t the people back then see them too? “Maybe he doesn’t have the codes. Maybe the Holts have been lying all along in order to stay in control.”

“That’s a really astute observation, Mrs. Kenner
,” he said, giving me an appreciative look.

It annoyed me that he was surprised I had a b
rain, but he went right on talking, oblivious to my irritation.

“
We have medical evidence that President Taylor’s husband was badly tortured before he was killed; however, there are two different stories to explain this indisputable fact. Holt’s explanation, which is in the official report, claims that the civilians tortured President Taylor’s husband in front of her. This was supposed to be an attempt to manipulate her into giving the order for all officials to leave the Dome to the civilians. But VP Kenner wrote in his journal that he believes Holt tortured President Taylor’s husband in order to get the codes out of her. Officially, Holt claims the president whispered them to him before she drew her last breath.” He pulled his knees up and rested his arms on them. His anger seemed to have been replaced with melancholy.

“It doesn’t change anything
, though, does it?” I asked. “I mean,
knowing
the horrible history of how everything came to be doesn’t change it. People in the Pit will continue to live as slaves, you and I will be executed as traitors, and the bourge will continue to win.”

“That’s not true.
The Kenners know, and we’ve shared the information with as many people as we can trust. We do have supporters. We’re trying to change things the only way we think we can without harming the entire Dome. Try to understand that our family was cast way down after Edward Holt became president. He didn’t want any reminders of the old regime. We clawed our way back up, getting back into the good graces of the other influential families. My marriage to Leisel was the moment my family has been waiting for. Once I became president, we would have the codes. The Holts would lose their power.”

“If the Holts dislike the Kenners so much, how did you become engaged to Leisel in the first place?”

“Because there is no one else. When Edward Holt claimed the presidency, he made it law that the title can’t be passed to a woman. And they’ve been lucky because every generation has produced at least one son, except this generation. Usually the Holts choose their spouses from the West, Powell, or Forbes families, but right now there’s a generation gap. The only boys in those families are under the age of twelve. It’s the first time in the history of the Dome that this has happened. My mother noticed last year that Leisel was showing interest in me and told me to pursue her. When I asked the president if I could marry his daughter, I promised she would keep her last name and all our children would carry the name Holt as well. He liked that. It also helped that Leisel said I was what she wanted, and the president always gives his daughter what she wants.”

“So you were prepared to spend the rest of your life with someone you didn’t love in order
to restore democracy?”

Jack nodded.
“I just wanted to be honest with you. After all that’s happened, you were owed an explanation. I am truly sorry you got caught up in all of this.” He reached for my hand and held it in both of his. Slowly he brought it up to his lips and tenderly kissed it, then placed my hand back on my lap. “Time’s up,” he said.

And h
e went back out into the living room.

I
kept my hand in my lap exactly where Jack had put it down. A tingling sensation lingered where he had pressed his lips against my skin. I stared at my hand, but it didn’t look any different. I never expected kindness from a bourge, especially one so aristocratic. If he thought I had anything to do with Leisel’s betrayal, why didn’t he just beat me? Or kill me? No one would care. But instead of hurting me, he confided in me. In fact, his openness about his feelings toward President Holt and Leisel shocked me. Treasonous words were never heard in the Dome.

I didn’t know what to think of Jack Kenner or his story.
If his family really was intent on restoring democracy to the Dome, they had had almost three hundred years to do it. Yet there we all were, still at the mercy of the Holts. I wondered if life would be any different if Liberty succeeded. For all Jack’s talk about wanting to get rid of the Holts, never once did he actually say life in the Pit would get any better.

He seemed kind enough, but he was definitely
conscious that I came from the Pit. I felt it when he questioned if he could trust me to be alone in his apartment; I heard it when he congratulated me on pointing out some of the obvious flaws in his story. He thought of me as an inferior. I wanted to tell him that we
are
educated in the Pit. Maybe not in elaborate schools like the bourge attended, but our common rooms in the Pit served as classrooms during the day when the adults were working. Although in the Pit, the most valuable lesson was to learn to think on your feet. Every urchin needed a quick mind to get him or herself out of situations that might otherwise result in a beating or death.

Maybe that was the problem with the Kenners and Liberty.
They were over-educated in the classroom and no longer had the ability to think for themselves. After all, they’d had almost three hundred years to confront the Holts with their evidence, and they were still in the planning stage. Perhaps they weren’t as desperate for change as we were in the Pit.

My stomach growl
ed, reminding me I hadn’t eaten anything in more than a day. My last meal had been the breakfast Jack had given me before he left for his interview with Leisel. I looked under the bed, relieved to find the tray of food right where I had hidden it. There was an egg, one and a half pieces of bread, and almost a whole piece of ham left. I was about to take a bite of the bread when I remembered Jack. He had been kind to me, so maybe I should share it. I returned to the living room, the dress dragging behind me, rustling.

“Decided to join me?” he
asked without looking up from his computer.

“What are you doing?”

“Writing my farewell letters.” He put the computer down and raised his eyebrows at the sight of the tray. “You’ve been hoarding food?”

“It’s what every good urchin learns from an early age.
That or starve.” I offered him some of the food.

A barely
concealed look of disgust crossed his face. “Cold eggs and ham. No, thanks.”

“Suit yourself.”
I guessed you had to be an urchin to appreciate that a meal was a meal no matter what temperature it was. I picked up the piece of bread and sat in the chair across from him. I almost choked on it when I heard the apartment door unlock. Leisel walked in, a Domer following closely behind her. Jack was instantly on his feet.

“Well
, here’s the happy couple!” Leisel said with a smile. “Oh, and look, you’re sharing a meagre breakfast. What is that anyway? Cold ham?”

“What do you want
, Leisel? Come to finish off the job yourself?”

“Well that’s hardly the response I expected from my jilted fiancé.
What, no mourning the loss of my love?” Leisel sneered. Jack just glared at her. “I thought not. I knew you never loved me, Jack, and as much as I would love to finish the job myself, I would never deprive my father of that pleasure. He’s really mad at you. I mean, it took some convincing to get him to let me marry a Kenner in the first place and then you turn around and do this to me.” Leisel pouted. “Your family’s never going to recover from this.”

“Leave th
em out of it, Leisel. They had nothing to do with it. This is between you and me.”

“I think we both know
that’s
not true. Your family has been trying to take mine down for hundreds of years, and now my father has a legitimate reason to destroy you all. Starting with you.”

“
Why? Why are you doing this to me?” Jack asked between clenched teeth.

H
is hands were balled into fists at his side, and every muscle in his body was tensed and ready to spring across the room at her. The guard standing behind Leisel tensed up too, his hand reaching for his weapon. Without really thinking about it, I jumped up and grabbed Jack’s arm with both my hands. If he went for Leisel, there was no doubt in my mind that the guard would kill him, and I didn’t want to be left here all alone. I didn’t want to be executed alone. I hung on tight.

“Sunny, how touching
. Oh, wait. I think I have a… a…
tear in my eye
,” Leisel said, pretending to wipe a tear from the corner of her eye.

I wanted to
slap the sarcastic expression off her face. “Shut up, Leisel,” I snapped. My words shocked even me.

“So the urchin has a voice.
Not that you need one. I mean no one is putting you on trial for anything. You’re going to die simply for wearing that dress and marrying above your station. And, by the way, I lied to you—that dress looks way better on me.”

Jack scoffed.
“You wish!”

Leisel looked taken aback
but she recovered quickly when her guard stepped forward to be at her side. “Keep your little insults to yourself. I only came to say thank you. Thank you so much for playing your roles in my little plan so
flawlessly
. I really do wish I had been there to see the look on your faces when Sunny’s scan actually worked. I bet you were so surprised.” She laughed. She was actually enjoying this. Her guard was smiling, too.

“So what
’s your plan, Leisel? You might as well tell us. We’re going to die anyway,” Jack said.

“Why not
? My plan has always been to become president. I mean, who came up with the rule that a woman can’t be president? You know, when I went to my father saying that a Kenner was the most eligible bachelor in the Dome, I had hoped he might consider changing the rules. I was absolutely flabbergasted when he said I could marry a Kenner! He’d rather have a male Kenner as president than see his own daughter inherit the title. So that little plan backfired, and I ended up engaged to
you
.” Leisel shook her head. “It was frustrating, you know? So I had to come up with something else. That’s when I saw Sunny. We’re the same height, and I knew I could alter the dress. I couldn’t believe my luck when you both agreed to go along with everything. I mean you both must’ve been so desperate. You to become president, Jack, and you, Sunny, to save your little friend.”

Summer!
All that time I had been thinking about how Leisel betrayed me and never thought that she probably went back on her word about Summer, too. A knot formed in the pit of my stomach. I did this all for nothing. Now I wanted to kill Leisel myself. I dropped Jack’s arm and headed straight for her, but he grabbed me around the waist, preventing me from reaching my target.

“Let me go!”

“She’s not worth it, Sunny! She’ll just kill you.”

“Listen to him
, Sunny, because I will,” Leisel said, all business now. Her guard drew his gun. “Desmond, put that away. Jack at least knows better.”

Leisel plac
ed her hand over the guard’s, a familiar gesture that was hard to miss. She caught me staring at them.

“Desmond has been a huge source of support to me.
Without him, my plan would never have succeeded. He’s captain of the guard on this level.” A smile played around her mouth. Now I knew how she was able to get rid of all the guards so I could come to her apartment this morning. “When I’m president, we’ll live in a world where he and I can get married. You see, I do want change in the Dome.”

“I still don’t
see how you’re going to become president. Your father won’t agree to that,” Jack said.

“Are you kidding me?
After the public betrayal I’ve gone through? The humiliation of being the jilted bride… the broken heart I’m suffering…” She pouted, shaking her head. “When I tell my father I never plan on marrying again, he’ll understand completely. I mean, who’s left for me to marry anyway? I’d have to start scraping the bottom of the barrel to come up with someone who’s eligible, and Daddy would never stand for that. I’ll convince him the only way to keep a Holt as president is to let me succeed him.”

“I guess you have it all worked out then.
Thanks for stopping by.” Jack gestured like he was dismissing her.

“Oh, don’t be like that
, Jack. We did have a few good moments during our… relationship.” Her voice was a purr.

“To be honest
, Leisel, I detested the sight of you. So you can imagine what inner strength it took for me not to run every time you touched me. I guess I should thank you, too. Turns out the thought of getting a bullet in the head isn’t nearly as bad as the stress I was under wondering how I was going to get through my wedding night with you.”

By the look on Leisel’s face, Jack’s words hit home.
She curled her lips into a snarl.

“Good bye
, Jack. The next time I see you, you’ll be with your executioner. Enjoy the rest of your short life.” And with that, Leisel turned and left the room, her guard close on her heels.

I wanted to
run after her—claw the door open and race down the hall to find her. A creature that evil should not be allowed to live, let alone have a chance to become president. Life in the Pit was already bad, but it would be intolerable under that monster. And I had unwittingly helped her. She had to be stopped. I tried again to get to the door, and then realized Jack’s arms still had me in a vise-like grip. I tried to pry his arms off me. “Let me go!”

“Sh
e’s gone, Sunny. She’s gone.”

“I’ll get the door open
. Let me go before she’s gone.” Why did he want to stop me? He must hate her, too.

“Sunny.
Sunny.” His lips were by my ear. “Relax. She’s gone. I don’t want you to hurt yourself.”

M
y strength left me. He was right. The door was locked, and I couldn’t get at her.

“How did she get in here?
You said there are cameras everywhere, but she got in here and said all those things. She wasn’t worried about being caught.”

Jack grabbed his compute
r, did something on it, and then looked at me triumphantly. “You’re a genius. She has the cameras jammed on this entire floor. And I just locked it in. She won’t be able to unjam it for quite a while.”

“Then I’m not going to waste it.
I’m going home.”

The determination I felt was stronger than anything I had ever felt before.
I knew I wouldn’t get far. The Dome was only so big. But if I could just get enough time to go home! I didn’t want to die wondering if Reyes thought I betrayed him. I had to let my father know I wasn’t long for this world and he needed to get out of bed and look after himself. I wanted to make sure Summer was okay and that she knew Leisel had betrayed us.

I marched into the bedroom
to look for something less conspicuous to wear than the wedding dress. I opened Jack’s closet doors. My green dress was still there. Nothing else would fit me.

“Um…what are you doing?” Jack asked, standing in the doorway watching me.

“Can you help me get out of this dress?
” I remembered how long it took Leisel to do up the buttons this morning. It would take forever to undo them. “Just rip the buttons off.”

“Where are you going?”

“You have your computer to say your farewells, but I have nothing. I need to go home and see everyone before I’m executed. Will you help me?”

He considered me for a moment.
“Only if you take me with you.”

“Then help me get out of this wedding dress.
I might get noticed in it.” I took the green dress out of the closet and put it on the bed.

“Trust me,
you’re going to get noticed in that dress, too.”

“There
is nothing else.”

Jack went over to his bureau and took out pants and
t-shirts and then came up behind me and ripped the back of my dress apart. “Have you thought about where we’re going to go once we leave the apartment?”

“Home.”

I let the dress fall to the floor in a heap and stepped out of it.
I was still wearing the bulletproof vest. Jack took off his military uniform, and I could tell he was thinking about my plan.

“Keep the vest on,” he said
as he threw a shirt and pair of pants at me. “The Pit’s on lockdown. There’s no way for us to get down there.”