Written in Fire

by Marcus Sakey

  “Sir, that’s . . .” She trailed off. “Do you mind if I ask why?”

  “Deniability,” he said. “Ramirez wants cover, and we’re it.”

  “But, sir—”

  “If the president asks me to take the fall, I’ll do it with my head high and my mouth shut. I need the same from you, Jessica. It’s time to serve our country.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  A huge risk. But what choice did he have? At this point, nothing would stop the New Sons from burning Tesla to the ground. It wasn’t what Leahy wanted, but politics never worked out the way anyone planned. The trick was to maneuver circumstances as close as possible to the goal, then quietly redefine your goal. “Quietly” being the operative word. If you can keep this quiet for a little while longer, no one ever need know you were involved.

  Leahy turned from the view, said, “Thank you,” the dismissal clear in his tone. When the aide left, he walked to the mirror, adjusted his tie. He took a deep breath, then sat down and accepted the video call.

  The air shimmered to life. Erik Epstein sat with his hands folded on the table in front of him. Beside him was another man, pudgy and pale, wearing a hooded sweatshirt. “Mr. Secretary?” Epstein sounded confused. “I’m sorry, I used my security code to access the president directly.”

  “I know,” Leahy said. “She’s asked that you speak to me.”

  “Mr. Secretary, I’m going to have to insist—”

  “She has asked that you speak to me.”

  “I see.” Epstein paused, looked at the man sitting beside him. The deferral was obvious.

  “You,” Leahy said to the silent one. “I presume you’re the real Erik Epstein?”

  “Yes. Hello.”

  “Nice to meet you. We’ve known for some time that he”—gesturing at the well-dressed man—“wasn’t you.”

  “My brother. Jakob.”

  Leahy nodded. “What can I do for you, gentlemen?”

  Again the two exchanged a look, then Erik said, “We surrender.”

  Of course you do. The irony was bitter. This was what he had been playing toward for years. For years he and a few other clear-eyed men had done what needed doing to bring about this exact moment. Not the destruction of the gifted, but the control of them. It was what the initiative to microchip the gifted had really been about; it was why the DAR had funding greater than the NSA, why more than a thousand civilians had died in Manhattan, why Leahy had snuck into Wyoming to meet with General Miller in the first place. It was victory—and it came just slightly too late. No choice now. No choice but to stay the course. “I’m sorry?”

  “We surrender. Unconditionally. The Holdfast. We will open all borders. Share all technology. Join the government.”

  “It’s a bit late for that, isn’t it? You’ve already murdered seventy-five thousand soldiers. Destroyed the White House. Killed our president.”

  “Self-defense. Orders were given to attack, to bomb our city—”

  “I know,” Leahy said. “I gave them.”

  The silence that fell was so thick he could practically see Epstein’s thoughts, could follow as he rebuilt the lattice of his history. Jakob started to speak, but his brother gave the merest hint of a sideways glance, and he shut his mouth.

  “Mr. Secretary,” Erik said, “the New Sons of Liberty have cleared the Vogler Ring. They’ve split up and surrounded Tesla. Completely encircled.”

  “I know.”

  “Strategic analysis yields only one reason to do that.”

  “Yes.”

  “Not an attempt to defeat. Not a military victory. They’re trying to annihilate. To kill everyone here. Civilians.”

  Leahy thought of the moment, not a week ago, when he’d sat in a wind-whipped tent opposite Sam Miller and Luke Hammond and made a bargain with them. He would hold off the US military, and they would push into New Canaan. It had never been his intention to wipe out the gifted. True, there were tens of thousands of abnorms not in New Canaan. But nowhere on earth had so many collected in one place. They had helped secure American sovereignty the world over, had pushed technology forward faster than anyone imagined possible. He hadn’t wanted to destroy them; he’d wanted to tame them.

  Damn the New Sons for pushing it this far. Another ugly irony. For decades, American policy had wrought exactly this kind of result. Third parties invented and armed to fight monsters had ended up becoming monsters themselves. Pinochet in Chile. Noriega in Panama. Countless warlords in Africa and the Middle East. That’s the risk of summoning a demon; they don’t tend to follow orders.

  On the other hand, better the demons consumed each other.

  “There’s nothing I can do for you.”

  “Mr. Secretary, please.” Erik Epstein’s face was pale and guileless. “There are thousands of children in this city.”

  Leahy hit a button and severed the call. Then he rose and went back to the window.

  The snow continued to fall.

  CHAPTER 32

  “How many of you have fired a gun before?”

  The soldier had a man’s height and muscle but a boy’s face, zits like bright stars burning through a cloud-wisp of beard. His uniform was brown, marked with a rising blue sun. Natalie wondered how old he was. Someone had told her that while the average age in the Holdfast was twenty-six, the median was closer to sixteen. He beat that, but not by a lot.

  “None of you?” The soldier boy’s eyes darted over the dozen civilians in front of him. They looked at one another, shrugged.

  “I have,” Natalie said. “With my husband. Ex.”

  “A rifle?”

  “Pistols. And a shotgun.” She remembered the day, more than a decade ago, before the kids were born. Camping near the Grand Tetons, vibrant green and birdsong, Cooper showing her how to brace the gun, how to press the trigger—not pull, press—and the roar and kick of the thing, the rough joy when she’d blown a clump of hurled dirt out of the air, the soil erupting into nothing. Afterward they’d made love as the pine trees whispered, and she’d thought life perfect in every detail.

  “Close enough.” He bent to a long canvas bag at his feet, came out with a rifle that looked like a movie prop, dull metal and rounded plastic curves. “This is an HSD-11. Designed and built here. Open-bolt, selective fire, thirty rounds. Magazine release is here, safety here. It’s fully automatic if you hold down the trigger, but ammo is a problem, so don’t. Single shots and short bursts.”

  He held it out, and she took it, shouldered it, keeping the barrel down.

  “Good,” he said, sounding surprised. “Good. There are seven more, and ammunition. Runners will bring extra ammo later. You teach them.”

  “What?”

  “Teach the others. Be careful when you do, the round can be lethal to a mile.”

  “You’re not staying?”

  “No, ma’am.” He spun on his heel and headed for the truck.

  For a moment Natalie just stared. Then, careful to keep the rifle pointed down, she hurried after him and grabbed his arm. “Wait.”

  “I have a lot of rifles to hand out, and not a lot of time—”

  “Listen,” she said, glancing over her shoulder at the others. A pale man in a suit, his thin hair combed with great precision. A pudgy girl in a shapeless dress holding a squirming dog. A statuesque woman with strong cheekbones, her dreadlocks bound up in a brilliant headscarf. Turning back, Natalie said, “We’re all a little scared.”

  “So?”

  “So, there’s an army headed here, a militia of survivalists and soldiers, none of whom need to be taught how to use a rifle. What are we supposed to do?”

  “Same as the rest of us.” He looked at her, and in that moment she saw that he was frightened too. A boy, just a boy, and like all boys he had played at war, but he had never faced one. “Fight for your lives.”

  Then he was swinging up into the open back of the truck and thumping on the side. It pulled away in a huff of warm exhaust.

  For a moment, she ima
gined running after it. Then she turned and saw the others looking at her.

  Natalie said, “Right.”

  It had seemed so clear in the kitchen, talking to Nick. Telling him that she would join the battle. She’d imagined herself with a line of soldiers, not boys like the one who brought the rifles, but warriors. Tested, calm, ripped. Like Nick’s buddies from the army days. She’d pictured fighting beside them, though really, that had meant behind them.

  It wasn’t until the bunker that she realized this war would look very different.

  The underground complex was a series of broad gymnasiums with rows of bunk beds, each room connected to the others, each accessible by multiple staircases. Like the air raid shelters she’d seen in old movies, only brighter and cleaner and filled mostly with kids. The walls were bare and the sound echoed, mothers and fathers cajoling and promising and putting on a brave face for children crying and clutching at them.

  She’d been so proud of Todd and Kate for not going to pieces. In truth, they’d been stronger than she was. Natalie had started to waver the moment they arrived, and when she saw her son standing with a strained look of duty, hand on his little sister’s shoulder, she’d almost broken. Surely others would fight. They were too young to leave. She would stay, would climb into one of the bunk beds and clutch her kids to her and keep them safe through sheer maternal will.

  “No, Mommy,” Kate had said. “You have to go.”

  Todd had nodded, straightened. “We’ll be all right.”

  They were her children, her babies. She had borne them and nursed them and cut their grapes in half and read them whole libraries of books and applied crates’ worth of Band-Aids. She had a mother’s nearly psychic connection with them, would sometimes wake in the night moments before they called out, or hear their thoughts echoing in her own brain. Right now, her ten-year-old son was telling himself that he had to be a man, had to protect his little sister, and the horror of that thought had nuances that went on for days.

  There is no choice here. There was only one way to defend her kids, and while it would indeed involve will, that began by finding the will to leave.

  So she’d hugged and kissed them, promised everything would be okay, and made herself walk out the door and wait her turn to talk to one of the harried people giving assignments. A young man staring at a d-pad had told her which van to board, and she’d joined a pudgy girl with a squirming dog in her arms and a statuesque beauty whose hair was bound in brilliant cloth.

  None of them had spoken on the drive over. Most had cried at some point. Natalie hadn’t. She was remembering something Nick told her years ago, when she’d asked if he was ever frightened doing the things he did.

  “Of course,” he’d said. “Only very stupid people aren’t. The trick is to make it work for you. Use it to make your thoughts clearer and your planning better, so that you get home again.”

  And so she had tried to do that. To prepare herself for the fact that she might—would—have to point a gun at a human being and pull the trigger. She made herself picture it, over and over and over, all while staring out the window as the city of mirrors transformed itself into a battlefield.

  She watched as a crew hitched a bulldozer to a bus and toppled it, the bus drifting and hanging and then crunching down, blocking the width of a street.

  Felt the gut-rumble of chainsaws cutting down the gene-modified trees so every window had a clear line of sight.

  Watched bartenders nail tables across doors. Teenagers haul floodlights. Cyclists distribute ammunition.

  Smelled the smoke as outlying buildings were burned to deny the invaders cover.

  Listened to:

  Jackhammers.

  Siren wails.

  Gunfire.

  And when her van started to slow, she took in the battlefield, the patch of earth she would be defending with her life. A complex of low-rise buildings, perhaps ten in all. The corporate headquarters of a firm called Magellan Designs. Atop the tallest building was a wireframe globe thirty feet across and glowing, a pulse of light circling it slowly. Magellan made expensive electronics; she remembered Nick drooling over one of their tri-ds, a sleek projector with sound that made her rib cage rattle. They hadn’t bought it, of course—it cost a month of his government salary—but now she wished they had. Wished they hadn’t been practical. They should have taken it home and watched movies all day long, then made love on the floor in front of it.

  A long time ago, in a lost world.

  The man with thinning hair turned out to be named Kurt, and he was the one who suggested they use the basement as a shooting range.

  “Won’t the bullets ricochet?”

  “We’ll stand here”—he gestured to one side—“and shoot at an oblique.”

  “But—”

  “Do you usually wear your hair back like that?”

  “Huh?”

  “Given gravity as a constant and variable values for flexibility and curl, I can generate a fourth-order nonlinear differential equation to describe the shape of your ponytail.”

  “Right,” she said. “You’re gifted.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “Standing here, you said?” She handed him the rifle. “No, not sideways. Face forward. One foot a little in front of the other. Brace the butt against your body, and press your cheek against the stock. Okay. Now—”

  Five o’clock, and the sun was nearly touching the horizon. Cold whiskey light glinted on mirrored glass, battling with the pale glow of the corporate logo atop the neighboring building. The ring around it pulsed slowly, tracing, she assumed, Ferdinand Magellan’s course circumnavigating the earth. Every time his “ship” was in the Pacific, it turned her whole world violet.

  Natalie could see a dozen other defenders up in other buildings. Like hers, their windows had been broken out, with desks and filing cabinets piled up to block incoming bullets. In one of the neighboring buildings, a handsome man in his fifties was doing the same thing she was, and for a moment their eyes met. He smiled and raised a closed fist. She returned the salute.

  The complex was near the edge of the city, but the buildings beyond were all squat things, single story. A charging station. A restaurant. An empty parking lot beside the last stop of the light rail train. Cars had been towed and stacked in rough barricades of jagged metal and broken glass.

  In the distance, out of range of her rifle, the enemy moved. Thousands of them. At this distance, she couldn’t make out any details, and that was somehow more menacing. Like it was a single formless creature out there, stretching across her entire field of view, a shapeless, ruthless beast waiting only for darkness to fall. Her belly spasmed and her hands shook.

  Use the fear.

  She tried to think what Nick would do if he were here. Plan his reaction when the attack started? Well, keep low. Aim carefully. Don’t waste ammunition. She practiced releasing the magazine from her rifle, grabbing a fresh one from the bag at her feet, and slapping it in. Squatting, she raised the rifle and sighted on the edge of a drugstore down the block, imagined a man stepping out from behind it. Kept her breathing easy, paused between exhales, visualized steadily pressing the trigger.

  “Damn, girl, you look fierce.”

  Natalie turned. “Hey, Jolene.”

  “Brought you some food. Some firebombs. And this.” She held up a bucket.

  “What’s that for?”

  “Well, gonna be a long night. Not like you can head off to the ladies’.”

  “Wonderful.” The sky was saddening, the shadows growing deep. “Hey, you should probably take that off,” she said, gesturing to the woman’s gold-and-scarlet headscarf.

  “Huh? Why?”

  “Too easy to see.”

  Jolene laughed, a warm, throaty sound, then unwrapped the cloth. “How do you know all this stuff?”

  “My husband. Ex. He’s . . . he was an agent with the DAR.”

  “DAR? What you doing here, then?”

  “Long story.” She s
et the rifle in the corner, took the sandwich Jolene had brought. It was the kind from a gas station, tired-looking and wrapped in plastic, and the purple light wasn’t flattering.

  “He ever kill anyone? Your ex?”

  “Yes.”

  “Think you can?”

  Natalie hesitated. “I don’t know. I’ve been trying to imagine that all day. But imagining isn’t the same.”

  “You know, I’ve shot thousands of people. Maybe tens of thousands.” She sat down heavily and smiled. “I play a lot of video games. Don’t think it will help. You got people here?”

  “My kids. Nick. You?”

  “My niece. Her momma left her with me when she was three, never came back. Kaylee’s nine and speaks eleven languages. Says she sees words as colors, so it doesn’t matter which language, she just uses the colors. Isn’t that something?”

  “Yes,” Natalie said. “It really is.”

  “And because of that, those men out there, they want to kill her.” Her voice was suddenly cold. “Oh, I know, it isn’t that simple. They lost people too, they’re scared, hurting. But you know what? It is that simple. Get me?”

  Natalie took a bite of her sandwich. The bread was stale, the meat indeterminate, the lettuce like Kleenex. It was maybe the best thing she’d ever tasted. She thought of Todd, standing with his arm around his little sister; of Kate’s too-wise eyes.

  It doesn’t matter that you’ll be aiming at human beings. It doesn’t matter that they have thoughts and feelings and parents and children.

  And it doesn’t matter what happens to you. Not at all.

  There are only two things that matter.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I get you.”

  CHAPTER 33

  Hawk was trying very hard not to cry.

  Could it really only have been this afternoon that he’d been sitting in his bedroom with John Smith, the two of them talking like confidants? There had been that perfect moment at the end, when John put a hand on his shoulder, and for a second he didn’t feel like a little kid whose mom had been killed, he felt like a soldier, a revolutionary. The kind of man he’d always wanted to be. Strong, determined, important.