The 13 Secret Cities (Omnibus) (34 page)

“Let me ask you something,” I said. “You’re a person of color, yes?”

“What a strange question. Why, yes, I am.”

“And do you work with people of color here at the museum?”

“We have a great diverse team,” he said. He crossed his arms and took a half step toward me. I was not afraid.

“Is that what they teach you to say? I asked, do you work with people of color here?”

He began to walk away. I could hear disgust in the song that his beating heart made. I was like a gnat to him.

“So, can you count how many people of color you actually work with, then?”

He turned. This time, he actually looked angry
.

“Well, there’s me, and we have plenty of people in many departments, such as marketing, development—”

“Okay, so tell me about the executive level,” I said. “Are you the only black person at your level?”

“Yes, I am.”

“The rest are…white men?”

“Well, yes.”

“Any women?”

He was thinking about it. He stayed silent.

“And you’re okay with this, then.”

“Listen, Clara, I am not sure what you’re getting at—”

“There’s no need. You told me all I need to know. I see how little has actually changed.”

I turned my back on him, and I pressed my hands on the cold glass of the windows. A family of spiders had made a home in the nooks and crannies of the window frame, and I marveled at the tiger stripes on their bodies, the way they clung together as the wind whipped them.
 

I had felt and heard spiders like this in the walls of Mictlán, living in the tall cliffs above the woods. Those spiders had lived in thick colonies, the babies suspended in silk pods from the trees while the parents sang poetry without words. The Mictlán spiders had been the size of a house.

But these spiders were not citizens of Mictlán. And neither was I. We were stuck in this city.

Roger checked his watch, and after saying a few words to our tour guide, he left the conference room.

I counted ten minutes on my watch after he left. 1:27 p.m.

It was time.

I walked back toward the elevator, and when the door opened, a tall figure loomed over me.

“Never thought we’d
really
meet in person,” he said. He resembled a boxer with his rugged good looks and muscular build. But the lines on his face told me he was probably in his fifties. The burst capillaries in his nose and cheeks told me he was perhaps an alcoholic, too.

“Glad we could make this happen,” I said, with a new confidence that made me stand tall next to this man.

“Is it okay if I call you by something other than your screen name?” he said.

He was smiling at me; the creases in his eyes reminded me of better times. In IRC and other forums, I only knew him as Snowy. He knew me only as She-Ra
.
 

I shook my head. He didn’t press me any further.

“Let’s go; we have a train to catch,” he said.

Snowy ran his building ID over the scanner. Once the light shone green on the pad, we could rise to the top two levels of the tower. Snowy had worked inside this building for a long time. I had chatted with him for years inside our chat channel. He had arrived at the paper in the ’80s, and he worked as an investigative journalist for many years. Over time, he had been relegated to covering more lifestyle pieces and fewer hard reports. He wasn’t the most powerful person inside the power structure of the news company, but he had been there so long that people didn’t mind if he dropped in on everyone’s business. This had made him a perfect insider for us to see our plan to fruition.

“Be sure to turn off your smartphone, She-Ra. The GPS on that thing will reveal your location right away.”

“Sure did. I’m running all my gear off the MiFi cards now. And I’ll toss them afterward.”

“Good. Once you are up there, you’ll be on your own. I cannot follow you. But I will be there to escort you back down. Make sense?”

“Lots. Where will you be when it happens?”

“Just a few floors below, in the newsroom. I’ll be happier than I have been for years.”

“Do you expect this place to change?”

“This time, I do. That’s why I am helping you.”

Mercy and I had talked for a long time about the frustration we all felt with old newspapers like this one. These companies didn’t report on the actual events. Instead, they defended their self-interests, which were driven by a lot of money and a lot of political campaigns. Snowy had written to us in chat so many times anecdotes of cover-ups and corruption inside the tower.

“They’re buying me out,” Snowy said as he put his lips on an electronic cigarette. His fingers and hands were delicate, hairless, and smooth. “I get to retire early, and they can get us dinosaurs out of here. And then they can continues to provide ‘content’ without any investigative journalism.”

The newspapers and TV stations inside this tower had never shown the user-generated videos of the Millennium Riot. In some of those clips, it was possible to get a sense of who shot first in the clouds of tear gas, but the Tribune ignored those clips, as if they didn’t exist at all. They never aired or appeared as links on any of their broadcasts or sites.

In most of those YouTube videos, the SWAT teams shot at the crowd without mercy.

“And once you take the buyout?” I said.

“Belize. I have a tiny house there, and my lady will come with me. Then I can dive as often as I want.”

“But I thought you’d go back to harder reporting.”

“We all get a little tired as time passes. Some of us get more tired than others. I think this will be my swan song today.”

For once, I could relate to these kinds of words. I did feel a tiredness, something heavy, tugging at me, and I thought that perhaps I would come to envy Snowy’s situation one day.

We emerged into a narrow hall, which led into another boardroom lined with more books. Snowy led me through a locked door with a key he kept in his pocket. I stepped out onto a balcony that overlooked Michigan Avenue. Off to my left, I could see the jagged steel lines of the skyscrapers, and down to my right, a valley of streets and commercial buildings. The wind buffeted my face and arms at this height. I leaned over the railing and I felt a rush of adrenaline. The parade would come through here in just minutes. People filled the sidewalks.

“I probably won’t see you in person again, Montes,” Snowy said.

“Seeing really isn’t everything,” I said. “But it doesn’t mean we won’t cross paths in some way.”

“Your tour group is scheduled to exit the building at 3 p.m. I imagine it’s not going to go as planned.”

“We’ll see,” I said. “Thanks for bringing me here.”

“Enjoy the parade,” Snowy said, and the elevator doors slid shut. I was now alone in the highest level of the tower.

The event was coordinated simply but covertly: The parade was scheduled to start at 2 pm, and it would take an estimated sixty minutes for the floats to cover the length of Michigan Avenue down to the bridge over the Chicago River from north to south. The tower was located right next to this bridge.

At 2:10, I would begin recording using my camera.

At 2:20, I would begin transmitting my live feed to four different video streaming sites.

At 2:25 p.m, the web attacks would begin. OLF had three sites on its list: the City of Chicago, the mayor’s political fundraising site, and the Tribune’s site.

At 2:27 p.m., the computer-based controls for turning on the decorations throughout Michigan Avenue would be cut over to control by the OLF.

At 2:30 p.m., the operations on the ground would begin.

The time was now 2:09. I steadied my camera on a portable tripod, and checked the sound and the image one more time. Above me, the clouds swirled as the wind picked up speed.

2:21 pm
.

The adrenaline in my veins quickened my heartbeat, and for the first time since the return from the Coil, I felt what it meant to be older. I had a nineteen-year-old mind but a twenty-three-year-old body. Inside my heart, nothing had changed, though. I wanted change with a touch of revenge.

My live feed had kicked off, and I tested them on my laptop. Anyone with a web browser could watch these feeds at sites like Ustream and through other hosted sites. Days before, we had spread the word about these feeds, and I hoped that our meme went all the way around the planet, if possible.

I wished we had thought of this before we attended Millennium.

I tried to spot Mercy on Ohio Street, but I had to squint, and my eye gave me nothing more than a cluster of tiny heads.

Dennis was positioned much farther north, and I gave up on trying to spot him.

The sites where I fed the video showed users were starting to log on to watch. I knew these were probably just OLF members on the ground.

The numbers would rise soon.

The floats gave off tiny clicks like camera shutters as they traveled south on Michigan Avenue. The familiar characters of my youth crowned each one. Cartoon characters that had entertained me for years at the movies and on DVD at home with my parents. The corporations that owned these characters put them on top of the motorized floats, and they waved endlessly, some waving hankies, and the crowds on the sidewalk roared. They were anthropomorphic darlings: mice, ducks, dogs and even a woodpecker. They smiled forever from their large masks, and the familiar theme songs of their shows and movies played on the float speakers. Children begged for their attention, and later that afternoon those same children would beg their parents to take them to the shops on Michigan Avenue to buy the corresponding merchandise.

The floats of the Parade of Lights had been outfitted with the most expensive LED technology possible. These digital caravans were molded into shapes of corkscrews, mountains, and giant bubbles, and their surfaces shone with textures and shapes that made them elongate, turn purple and red, and set them on fire. It was magic for the eyes and a wonder of technology. Sunlight was still not penetrating the clouds, and the grayness of the day allowed the LED floats to shine to their brightest.

Their colors and intensities burned my eye, but I couldn’t stop staring at them.

It was the LED floats, all of them full of surfaces that could show any image, and any video on them that interested me most.

My eye grew hot, and I relished the passage of the floats coming down Michigan Avenue.

It was like seeing blood pour into a vein for the first time.