by Kyle Andrews
Putting that pleasant smile back on her face, Marti shook her head and said, “I should make sure that everyone is okay.”
She looked back to the man who was sitting close to the pilot and was about to get up, but Geo kept his hand on hers and said, “It won't help anyone if you're killed trying to treat them.”
Marti looked around the helicopter, and while it could have been her imagination, it seemed as though everyone were watching her. There was no way that she would be able to go through with her plan, now that Geo had drawn so much attention to her. She wanted to kill him right then and there.
Looking past Geo, Marti could see the drones through the helicopter window. She watched as they began to circle like hawks over the city, choosing their targets. Then one of them dove downward. Marti couldn't help but gasp when she saw that happen.
There was nothing she could do. Even if she went nuts and made a crazed attempt at taking out the Governor or the pilot, she would be stopped before she could finish the job. Her plan had failed. Thousands would die in that city, and the Governor would be sleeping comfortably that night.
Marti felt the sting of a tear forming in her eye. She looked to Justin. He had no idea of what was about to happen to their friends and family, but he did see that tear, and Marti could see the confusion turn to worry as he realized that she only cried when their world was about to crumble around them.
46
Dor's eyes were burning from all of the smoke and dust that hung in the air. She looked at her hands and saw them covered in dirt and blood.
The fight had been raging for what seemed like an eternity to her. She didn't know what time it was, but it felt as though the night had lasted forever, and the darkness would never give way to light again.
Around her, the bullets were flying, but not as rapidly as they once had. People were fighting, but the crowd was not as dense as it had once been. Some of those people had disappeared into the HAND building, but most of them were dead. On the ground, there were so many bodies that Dor couldn't begin to estimate their number. Both Freedom fighters and HAND officers lay in unnatural, twisted positions on the ground. Thousands of dead eyes stared into the night sky.
The people who had left their homes and joined Freedom in this battle were not trained. Even those members of Freedom who wouldn't have been considered soldiers before that night had prepared themselves for the possibility of this battle, but the normal citizens knew little of fighting back. They fought as hard as they could, and they overtook HAND by numbers alone, but so many of them were mowed down in the process that Dor had to wonder whether this night would ever be considered a victory. She thought back to the stories of the Civil War, which had been locked away inside the blood of the Jacobs family, after being banned as hostile content by the authorities.
In those stories, she had learned about the fields of battle, soaked through with the blood of the soldiers who fought in them. She had always understood the gruesome nature of those battles, but she had always been disconnected from the reality of that history and of those deaths. She wondered if she could read those same stories ever again without feeling the way she felt now, as she stood in front of the HAND building, smelling the smells and feeling that cool breeze on her face.
Three helicopters flew by overhead, causing the smoke around it to swirl in different directions. Dor watched them, wondering who was on those helicopters and how they would view the deaths of that night. She knew that it was probably some government official who was so far removed from the people in that city that they would feel nothing.
She wondered how anyone could be so cold as to not care about the people around them. How could anyone live like that? Was wealth and power really worth having their humanity stripped away?
As the helicopters vanished into the distance, a group of Freedom soldiers walked out of the HAND building. Dor watched them, noting how tired and dirty they looked. She snapped a picture of them by the front doors of the building, with bodies lying on the stairs in front of them and fire casting their shadows onto the wall behind them.
Then one of them raised their gun into the air and let out a roar. It was a sound that was so wild that it gripped the crowd on a primal level. The people around the building turned toward that doorway and slowly, they began to realize what that roar meant.
The building had been taken. Though gunshots were still being fired and flames were still burning inside of the building, the battle had been won. The only thing that HAND could do now was lose poorly and take out as many members of Freedom as they possibly could before dying or being locked in their own jail cells.
҂
The experience of witnessing that night from inside the Campus was something that Collin would never forget. Though he had waited for that night to happen for many years and he had helped to design the plan for how it would all go down, there was no sense of reality to it. He observed the chaos of what was happening from the safety of his own home, and it felt like he was watching a TV show.
After the power went out, Collin stood in the darkness, listening to the sound of his own breath. Then there was a scramble to get the power turned back on and to tap into the street cameras, because without those cameras, the people of the Campus had no idea what was happening.
While everyone on Aaron's team and Mig's staff were running back and forth, Collin stood against a wall, doing nothing. He felt like a useless fool, having called the city into battle, and now he was just standing in the dark.
He felt every second pass him by. Each time he took a breath, he wondered whether or not someone else had just taken their last breath. He wondered how much blood was being spilled. How many people had taken action because of him? And how many of those people would be upset to know that he was done for the night as soon as he'd finished asking them to sacrifice themselves?
Dim lights were coming back on in Aaron's office, as backup generators kicked in and computers began to power up. Collin could see the people around him, busy at their work. His limbs were aching for something to do or somewhere to go, but there was nowhere. All he could do was watch and wait.
“The camera's are down,” Simon told Aaron.
“We need them. Now.”
“There's nothing I can do. They cut power.”
“Damnit!”
And so the night went on for quite a while, with Aaron and Simon discussing different equipment and how they might hack into different systems through various technical methods. To Collin, it was gibberish.
Though he had spent years in that building without it feeling like a prison to him, Collin suddenly began to feel very closed in. The air felt thick. His heart was racing. He was scratching at the HAND-inflicted scar on his chest, despite the fact that it wasn't itching.
His mind was painting a picture of the war that was taking place. He could see HAND officers mowing Freedom's fighters down by the hundreds, using powerful weapons that Freedom stood no chance against.
Each life lost was on him. He was the one who told them to fight. He started all of this, and if they failed, he would have to live his life knowing that his actions had caused greater pain to the world than the everyday oppression of the authorities ever had.
҂
Carrying Mandi through the hospital was unexpectedly emotional for Rose. It required her to act against every instinct that she normally followed. While she might normally rush into a battle without thinking, she now had to find a way to go around it. She didn't normally put a lot of thought into whether or not she would be arrested, injured or killed. Now, she had to be careful. She had to think about her own safety, because if she were taken down, who would take care of the girl?
This was life. It was a brief glimpse of something that she had thought about and wondered about for many years, but she had never actually experienced. She had never known what it was like to be so depended on that she had to second guess herself at every turn.
Mandi was asleep in her arms, still under the in
fluence of whatever drugs the doctors had given her in order to calm her down and stop her from screaming and crying when they brought her into the hospital. The girl's eyes were still red and puffy. There was still crust around her nose, from where it had once been running. The girl was so small and so helpless that it broke Rose's heart, and it hurt even more when Rose thought about what would happen when that girl woke up into a world where her parents no longer existed. No matter where she went after she was safely out of the authorities' reach, that little girl could never go home again.
Rose carried Mandi through the dark hallways of the hospital, listening to the sounds of gunfire in the distance and trying her best to avoid moving closer to any battles. This was easy when she was on the fourth floor, where she had different hallways to move through and plenty of space to put between herself and those fights, but as soon as she entered the stairwell, everything changed.
Fights were taking place above and below Rose. There was no getting out of there without putting Mandi in some amount of danger.
She couldn't go back the way she came, because she couldn't risk running into Justin and Sim again.
Rose paused. She didn't know where to go or what to do. Ordinarily, this would be the part where she would pull out a gun or two and rush in whichever direction she wanted to go in. Instead, she found an empty hospital room and went into it, closing the door behind her.
After she pulled blankets and pillows off of the bed and set them on the floor between the bed and the wall, she put Mandi down and covered her. She brushed the hair out of Mandi's tiny face and watched the girl sleep for a few seconds.
Even knowing that the girl was medicated, Rose had to wonder how anyone could look so peaceful, and she couldn't remember the last time she had met someone who was so innocent. Everyone Rose knew walked around with the weight of the world on their shoulders. Even people who weren't members of Freedom carried the weight of their oppression.
Then it occurred to Rose that this sweet and innocent little child had sparked the revolution that countless adults had failed to ignite over the course of decades. That beautiful girl was, in some way, responsible for every fight being fought that night and everything that happened because of it.
It didn't take a great leader to show the world what needed to happen. It didn't take a strong warrior, commanding his army to fight. It took one scared, crying little girl to make people see the evil that surrounded them.
҂
For the first time all night, Dor felt relief. The battle was something that she couldn't have imagined until she was standing in the middle of it. It was gory and brutal and ugly, and not at all poetic. Its goal might have been beautiful, but the process of attaining that goal was something that would stay with Dor for the rest of her life, and it was her job to make sure that those images remained in the minds of every citizen, because this could never be allowed to happen again.
As the reality of their battle finally being over began to sink in and become the new reality for the people around the HAND building, they went to work at picking up the pieces.
Dor walked to a woman who was lying on the ground, breathing through her teeth and gripping a wounded leg. The woman was in her forties or fifties, with graying hair and a pale, tired face.
Dor knelt down next to the woman and said, “I need to look at your wound.”
“I can't let go,” the woman told her, looking into Dor's eyes with panic. “The blood. There's so much blood.”
There was a puddle of blood under the woman's leg. It was too much blood to be just a normal cut. The woman's pant leg was soaked through.
Dor looked around her, trying to find someone more qualified to help the woman. She yelled, “Someone help me!”
But nobody immediately came running. There were more injured people than there were uninjured, and those who were tending to the injured couldn't drop what they were doing in order to help Dor.
She turned her attention back to the woman and tried to look as though she wasn't scared out of her wits as she said, “We're going to take care of this.”
Setting her camera down on the ground, Dor put her hands on top of the woman's. She said, “I need you to let go.”
“I can't.”
“You have to trust me. There's nobody else here to help us.”
The woman didn't seem entirely thrilled with the idea of trusting her life to the hands of a kid, but she eventually gave Dor a nod and hesitantly pulled her hands away from her wound.
Dor applied pressure as soon as the woman moved her hands, trying to assure the woman that she wasn't going to just let her bleed out without a fight.
“So, are you with Freedom?” Dor asked, trying to distract the woman by making conversation.
“I wasn't,” the woman replied. “Now... I don't know what I am.”
Dor smiled and said, “Been there.”
“But you're with them now?” the woman asked.
“Seven years.”
“You must have been a baby.”
Dor pulled her hands off of the wound and looked it over. The light wasn't great, so she couldn't see as much as she would have liked, but what she could see was that the wound was large and gushing with blood.
She didn't have water to clean the wound with. She didn't have gauze or alcohol. As she looked over the woman's wounds, all Dor could think of were the things that she didn't have.
Looking down at what she was wearing, Dor saw the old rag of a button-up shirt that she had on over her t-shirt and she pulled it off. She folded the shirt and held it over the wound, applying pressure once again.
Swallowing hard, Dor tried to think of the different books that she had read about first aid and human anatomy. She didn't know if this much blood meant that the woman's artery was cut, or if it just meant that the wound was really big. What she did know was that the woman was bleeding too much, and whether her artery were cut or not, she couldn't stand to keep bleeding for much longer.
“I was about twelve,” Dor said to the woman, trying once again to seem positive. “It wasn't really my choice to join them. They saved me from going to a HAND prison.”
“Prison?” the woman asked. “What did you do?”
“I was here, the night of the riot. I just wanted to see it. HAND decided that I was with Freedom and they arrested me,” she told the woman, still thinking about what she could do for the wound and not paying much attention to the conversation. “Collin Powers saved me.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Is he really as special as they make him out to be?”
Dor looked the woman in the eyes and without a shred of doubt said, “He changed my life.”
The woman accepted that response and then asked, “Did we win?”
With a smile and a nod, Dor said, “Yes.”
The woman closed her eyes and smiled.
҂
“Can we access the satellites?” Aaron asked Simon.
“We have our dish hooked into the backup generator. I should be able to get into their system.”
“Do it.”
“Give me a few seconds.”
“Hurry.”
Collin listened, but he still didn't understand what good it would do. Maybe Aaron was hoping to pick up on a satellite transmission from a news truck that was near the fighting, but it was a long shot. Usually, the press didn't broadcast this type of event. They might record some video, but it was heavily guarded until it could be edited and spun to suit the authorities' message—if it was ever even seen at all.
Aaron turned toward Collin and saw the worry in Collin's eyes. Likewise, Collin could see that Aaron was stressed, but he was handling that stress much better than Collin.
“I'm in. I have visuals,” Simon reported.
Aaron looked over Simon's shoulder, at his computer screen. Collin couldn't see what they were looking at. The larger monitors on the walls were still black.
“What are they doing?” Simon qui
etly asked Aaron. “That's not their normal pattern.”
Aaron hesitated for a moment and then said, “We have to do it.”
“Are you sure? We only have one—”
“They're setting up an attack and our people don't even see it. Do it now.”
Simon didn't hesitate again before he started pecking away at his keyboard.
҂
Normally, Rose wasn't quite this captivated by children. She had never given much thought to what they meant to the world before. But as she used the butt of her gun to knock out the emergency light in the room and joined Mandi on the floor, Rose decided that the girl shouldn't know about the role that she had played in that night. She shouldn't be told about her significance, because telling her would kill a piece of that innocence, and the girl would lose enough of that when she learned about her parents' deaths.
There was so much that Mandi would need to be protected from. The scope of it was overwhelming.
Sitting there, watching Mandi sleep while the sounds of gunfire and explosions continued in the distance, Rose started to think about her own future—her future with Paul. She asked herself what their lives would look like if they ever truly won this war. If they were free, and could go anywhere and do anything, what would they be? Who would they be? Would they have a family? Would that family ever understand the way things were before the fighting and how important it was to keep a watchful eye on the world around them?
There were so many questions running through Rose's head that she never ordinarily thought about, but she could feel the world changing. Those questions would need to be asked and she wanted to know the answers. She wanted to see what kinds of smart-ass kids she and Paul could produce.
That realization was life-changing for Rose. Suddenly, there was a life beyond the fight. Suddenly, there was a future with a purpose that didn't involve guns and car chases—Well, she might still be able to fit those things into her schedule, but they wouldn't be the focus.