“The birthday,” he said. “Don’t leave me in suspense.”
I let out a breath. “And that night, Ma had baked a chocolate cake.”
“Your favourite?”
“Isn’t it everyone’s?”
“No. Mine is tiramisu.”
“Sorry, but that’s just wrong. And I got a pile of adventure stories, and probably lots of toys and board games, and they let me stay up until midnight.”
Ingo propped his head on his hand. “You didn’t have any friends over?”
“I wasn’t really close to the girls in my class,” I admitted. “All I cared about were airplanes and climbing trees. Besides, we lived a few miles outside of town. Collie was there,” I added. “Sorry. Not to bring exes into it again.”
Ingo shrugged. “He was part of your life. If you have good memories of him, I’m glad.”
“You must have some of Miriam.”
“Oh, ye gods, you are determined to talk about our exes tonight.”
“Don’t you?”
He looked tiredly amused. “My good memories of her take place almost exclusively in bed, if you want the truth. And even then she’d usually pick a fight just afterwards, which tended to take the shine off it.” He grimaced. “Maybe back then I found it exciting. Who knows?”
“I can’t picture you putting up with that,” I confessed. The Ingo I’d known so well for the past seven months would have little time for game-playing.
“No, me neither,” he said. “Not after almost a year in Harmony Five.”
I’d become very conscious of the long lines of his form – the nearness of him. I went silent, playing with a loose thread on my bedroll. “I was in love with Collie, but…I had no idea who he actually was,” I said finally. “So I wasn’t in love with him after all. He was just…a fantasy.”
“I suppose I’ve never…” Ingo hesitated, looking as if he were searching for words.
“What?” I whispered.
“Friendship has always been more important to me. So I suppose I’ve never mixed the two. I’ve never been with someone who I really like…who I also love.”
We gazed at each other. The stillness of the tunnels beyond the small glow of our lantern felt absolute.
As the silence grew heavy, I could sense Ingo about to speak. A feeling oddly like fear came.
I straightened. “All right, first or favourite,” I said. “First time you were ever grounded.”
When I woke up, I was in Ingo’s arms.
I lay motionless, gazing at his ruined face. We’d talked for a long time the night before, playing the game and sharing stories about our pasts, and must have fallen asleep without turning off the lantern. I had a vague memory of half-rousing, freezing cold, and dragging my bedroll next to Ingo’s, pressing against him the way we’d done so many times in the past. He’d put his arms around me without waking up.
He was still asleep. I studied his eyelashes – pitch black, surprisingly long against his pale skin. Even at rest, his arms had a wiry strength.
Something seemed poised within me. I frowned and shook it away. No. Ingo’s my friend.
I edged from his embrace. He murmured something and rolled over.
When I checked my watch, I saw that it was time for us to get up anyway. I dragged my bedroll a few feet away again and then gently shook his shoulder.
“Hey,” I said. “Rise and shine, lazybones.”
Over the next twenty-four hours, we mapped a rough, zigzagging route along the partially-collapsed Broadway Line. In places we had to squirm through narrow passages, praying there wouldn’t be another cave-in.
At last, after dropping down from an old sewer, we suddenly found ourselves facing an underground river coursing past.
On the other side, we could see light.
We stared at it, hardly daring to hope. “Feel like a swim?” said Ingo.
“I’ve never felt more like one,” I said fervently.
The water was waist-high and smelled bad. We made it across, battling the current. The opening was an old grille set in the ceiling; through it hung long strands of moss. Blue sky showed through the slime. No sound of traffic.
Ingo, almost a head taller than me, wrestled the grate off. When we climbed cautiously out through the square hole, neither of us knew what we’d see – we could be emerging into a city park for all we knew.
Instead we found ourselves in a quiet patch of woods, with New Manhattan in the distance. We gave a jubilant whoop and spontaneously hugged, Ingo lifting me off the ground.
“We did it!” he cried. “We did it!”
We were both filthy, wet with mud. I laughed, exultant, holding onto him. We could set up the “railroad” – Ingo might soon have word from his family – President Weir would commit to our plan.
The thoughts tumbled past. Ingo put me down almost immediately, both of us still grinning…and I suddenly realized what else this meant.
It was almost June. I’d begin doing the wireless broadcasts now, and Ingo would start getting people out of the city – it had been decided for weeks that that would be his role. Through Sephy’s astrology work, there were already many desperate to escape.
From now on, until – if – Pierce was defeated, I’d see Ingo only when he returned to Jakov’s to stock up before taking another group out. I’d never know whether my friend was safe until he got back.
The thought left me hollow.
“I’ll miss you,” I said without thinking.
Ingo was studying the New Manhattan skyline, the scarred half of his face to me. At first he didn’t move. Then he glanced at me, his dark gaze slightly unsure – questioning. For a moment I felt unaccountably awkward.
After a beat, Ingo gave a rueful smile.
“I’ll miss you too,” he said.
CHAPTER SIX
June – July, 1942
I rubbed my palms on my thigh. “I don’t know what to say,” I muttered to Mac. I’d prepared notes, but looking over them, they seemed trite and stilted.
Mac and Dwight had readied numerous locations for our secret broadcasts. The boarded-up shoe factory still smelled faintly of leather. I sat at a long, dusty table. In front of me, the wireless set’s switches and dials reminded me a little of a Firedove.
Mac leaned against the table. His voice was low, as passionate as I’d ever heard it.
“Tell them not to lose hope,” he said. “Tell them you’re Wildcat, that you’re here, that they’ve got to find ways to fight that won’t get them killed but that will keep the spirit of victory alive. Wake them up, Amity.”
“You’d be better at this than me,” I said softly, shaken by his intensity.
“Nah. They don’t want to listen to some bozo they’ve barely heard of, who used to work with Sandford goddamn Cain. They want you, kiddo.” He touched my shoulder. “You can do it. Be our voice.”
I turned on the wireless set. Its dials glowed yellow as it hummed into life. I glanced down at my notes, frowning, thinking. Slowly, I slid them aside.
Mac checked his watch. At seven o’clock exactly, he murmured, “Go.”
Trying to ignore my thumping heart, I leaned towards the mic.
“This is Amity Vancour, the voice of the Resistance,” I said. “The press call me ‘Wildcat’. I’m here to tell you that you’re not alone.”
My voice sounded squeaky. Angry with myself – come on, Amity, you can do this – I kept talking, pushing myself.
Somehow words came, though I stumbled several times. I urged people not to give up hope – to keep victory in their hearts.
We only dared broadcast for five minutes at a time; we knew the Guns were sure to start seeking us using wireless waves of their own. That first night, the five minutes felt like five hours.
When I finished, I slumped back in my seat. I had little recollection of what I’d actually said; for those minutes my whole world had been the microphone.
Mac squeezed my hand and smiled.
“Good job, Wil
dcat,” he murmured.
I got used to broadcasting more quickly than I would have expected. It helped that my only visible audience was Mac. He was always there, willing me on with his eyes.
He reminded me of Russ, my old team leader. He made me want to be better than I was. Having spent so much time in the tunnels, I’d missed a lot of what was happening in the city. In the glimpses of its streets that I saw now, while being covertly driven somewhere to broadcast, there were Guns everywhere.
Spotting them never got easier. It always brought back Harmony Five.
Kay Pierce relished showing people what would happen if they put a toe out of line. The street lamp on the corner of Central and 42nd was a favourite of hers. We avoided passing it whenever possible, but sometimes had no choice. Once, Dwight was driving us and I knew from his sudden silence and the whiteness of his knuckles what was coming up.
Mac, in the back of the van with me, didn’t tell me not to look. He wouldn’t; he faced things head-on. From his expression, he was thinking, This is what we’re fighting.
The bloodied body of an old man dangled limply from the street lamp. A sign reading Dissenter hung around his neck. I felt empty. I stared at his features, obscured by a dark, moving mass of flies in the heat…and thought numbly that Harmony Five had been better that way, with its frost instead.
The fear was constant. I hoped Ingo would be safer in the tunnels, but the Guns’ presence down there had increased. They seemed to be mapping it themselves. We could barely use the routes under the West Side now. We tried to keep the shadowy passageways that led to the deepest routes, heading out of the city, hidden.
But we were doing it – helping people to escape. “When I take a group out, I get to know them a little,” Ingo told me on one of his fleeting return visits. “You can’t help it. And I also know what would happen to every one of them if we hadn’t found that route.”
From the expression in his eyes, we were both seeing a barbed-wire fence…Guns in greatcoats.
I cleared my throat. “We should find your friend Will and thank him.”
Ingo smiled. “Screw that,” he said softly. “Thank you. I’d have gone crazy searching down there alone.”
Whenever he left for another journey, I knew almost a week would pass before I saw him again. As the summer burned on, I listened tensely to Pierce’s nightly telio speeches, dreading to hear that he’d been caught.
Worry for my friend became a way of life. Missing him became a way of life.
Meanwhile, word spread about our illegal broadcasts. We’d mentioned them in Victory and people were listening, tuning in secretly on ham wireless sets – telling others, gathering in small groups to hear.
Soon Pierce was proclaiming on the telio, “‘V for victory’ is a sham! Drawing the Resistance’s symbol just proves you’re a traitor like Vancour – don’t believe her lies! For a Harmonic society, we must all…”
Mac grinned when he heard this. “Thanks, buddy,” he said to the invisible Collie behind the scenes. It made me smile grimly too – Collie had managed to promote our new symbol even while Pierce was denouncing it.
The idea about drawing a V for victory had come from Hal, the second week I was broadcasting.
When he’d asked Mac if he could come along to a broadcast, I’d hoped it was a good sign. Even with me around more now, things hadn’t improved much between us. That sense of a pane of glass separating me from my brother was still there.
This time we were broadcasting from the top floor of an abandoned house in Hell’s Kitchen, with Dwight standing guard below. Through the window, a red sunset bled across the sky. The buildings of New Manhattan rose against it.
The tallest, the Majestic Building, had a giant Harmony flag flying from its iconic spike. The same flag I’d seen from across the river before we’d entered the city. Of all Kay Pierce’s actions, flying her symbol from the beloved Majestic was one of the most hated.
As we set things up, Hal looked out the window, studying the flag’s red-and-black swirls. From the line of his jaw, I wondered if he was thinking about Dad too – if he wanted to move on as much as I did.
I hesitated, and then went and stood beside him. He was tall for fifteen. Though I was five foot eight, he had a good two inches on me.
“Terrible view, isn’t it?” I said.
“Yeah, it is,” he said after a pause, jamming his hands in his back pockets. He glanced at me with a small, rueful smile.
A few minutes later, it was time. At seven o’clock, on Mac’s signal, I leaned close to the mic. Hal was sitting on the battered table. I felt very aware of his scrutiny.
“This is Amity Vancour, the voice of the Resistance,” I said. “The press call me ‘Wildcat’. I know you see terrible things every day here in New Manhattan – I see them too. You’re afraid that you or someone you love might be next.”
Despite myself, I glanced at my Aries tattoo and clenched my hand shut. “I understand your fear,” I said roughly. “But there are still things you can do to make a difference. If you see a copy of Victory, read it, pass it on…”
I noticed Hal out of the corner of my eye then, idly sketching a V in the table’s dust. The next words flowed, as if I’d planned them:
“…and draw a V for victory wherever it’s safe! With a pencil on a park bench, maybe, or in chalk on a building. V for Victory! Draw it, spread the word!”
When the broadcast ended, we began packing up hastily. Mac’s grin lit his face. “Kiddo, that was inspired! A rallying sign is exactly what we’ve needed.”
I felt jubilant. “It was because of Hal.” I pointed to the scrawled V on the table. “Thank you,” I said fervently to him. “I wouldn’t have thought of it otherwise.”
He’d been wrapping up the antenna’s cable. Startled, he looked at the V and then at me.
Slowly, he smiled – a real smile, for a change. “Any time, Sis,” he said.
Then he hesitated, playing with the cable. “You said we’re going to fight.” He looked at Mac, his expression taut, hopeful. “Are we? Is there a plan yet?”
Mac shook his head. “Not yet, buddy. But I hope we’re getting there.”
I had to look away as I put the wireless set in its pouch. Mac was lying. There was a fledgling plan in place. It focused on a new secure meeting room that Kay Pierce was building deep in her palace basement. One of the abandoned tunnels led to a chamber directly below it.
“Explosives,” Mac had said tersely to Sephy and me just the other night. We’d been up after Hal had gone to bed, talking in undertones. Chilled, I’d gone motionless, imagining it.
“Can we get them?” Sephy sounded as if she were steeling herself.
Mac had nodded. “Jimmy,” he said. One of his contacts; an ex-thief who worked in construction now.
Murder. Premeditated. I thought of my Peacefighting vow to honour the sanctity of life and didn’t know what to feel. As I slowly ran my hand over my mouth, all I could see were hanging bodies…heads on a fence.
I let my hand fall. “All right,” I murmured, almost to myself. Then I glanced at Mac. “When?”
“We don’t know yet,” he said. “Collis is keeping me informed. We all just have to keep doing what we’re doing for now.”
With Hal’s help, Sephy was doctoring charts night and day. “We wouldn’t do anything else, babe,” she said. Her green scarf looked emerald against her black hair; her brown eyes soft and level.
For a moment it was like I wasn’t there. Mac’s expression was conflicted as he put his arm around her, drawing her close. She pressed against him.
I could see in his eyes that he’d give anything if she was someplace safe, far away from here.
“Hey, Amity, why did the Resistance worker cross the road?”
I sighed. “I don’t know, Dwight.”
“To fight the other side.”
I half-groaned, half-snorted.
The abandoned subway platform that hid our printing press was shadowy, lit by
a single lantern. City Hall, read its faded tiles. Dwight, taking a day off from his uncle’s hardware store, was helping me lay out page one of Victory, laboriously creating each word letter by letter with small wooden blocks. Across the room, Anton and Susannah worked on page two.
We all tensed as murmurs came from the tunnel – someone talking to our guards. Then Mac appeared, hefting himself nimbly onto the platform.
He came over. “How’s it going?”
“Fine, if I don’t end up strangling Dwight,” I said, and Dwight grinned at me.
“You wouldn’t do that,” he said. “You like me too much.”
“I do?”
Mac was checking the layout. “Good stuff.” He clapped Dwight on the shoulder. “Nah, don’t strangle him, kiddo,” he said to me. “We’d have to find someone else to cart the wireless equipment around.”
“That would be a pain, it’s true.” I glanced at him. “Any news?”
He shook his head. “Saw two victory Vs on my way here. Better than none.”
“There was one on my street yesterday,” Dwight offered. “The Guns were bitching about it.”
“We’ll get there,” muttered Mac. He met my gaze and gave a small smile. Troubled, I returned it, hoping he was right. New Manhattan was still scared – how could it not be?
I was too. No amount of anger at myself helped the fact. Yet according to the rumours stirring in the city, twenty-year-old “Wildcat” had strode up to John Gunnison like a warrior and shot him in cold blood. She led the Resistance single-handedly. She probably laughed whenever she saw a Gun.
They’d gotten my age right, at least.
Mac went over to speak with Anton and Susannah. Dwight and I worked in silence for a while, the only sound the faint click of letters.
Finally he cleared his throat. “Hey, doll-face…can I ask you something?”
I glanced at him in surprise. He sounded serious for a change. “Okay.”
He hesitated. “I know, um…that you probably don’t like to talk about it. But…” His gaze flicked to the tattoo on my palm. “What – what are those places like?”
I stared at him. He flushed and played with his silver ring. “This, um… This was my mother’s,” he said. “I’m originally from what used to be the Central States – she was taken when I was twelve. So I just…wondered.”
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