by Kyle Andrews
“And here I thought we were a big happy family.”
“I'll visit.”
Mig snorted and said, “You don't expect me to stay in this hole, do you?”
“Where will you go?”
Mig shrugged and said, “Somewhere with a well stocked kitchen for my man to play in.”
“You'll invite me to dinner, of course?”
“Of course,” Mig seemed happy to be discussing this topic, but the joy faded from her eyes. “You know it's not over out there. Not yet. It's still dangerous for you to be wandering around the city.”
“I won't wander.”
“Are you going to find your family?”
Collin didn't answer her right away. The thought hadn't even occurred to him. His mother and sister were still out there, as far as he knew. But at some point over the years, he had stopped dreaming of a big, happy family reunion. At some point, he had found a new family. Those were the people that he needed to find. He needed to know that they were safe.
Collin walked to the doorway where Mig was standing and stopped to take a look at the office behind him. It was usually buzzing with activity, but now there was nobody left in that room besides him.
“I'll see you later,” he said to Mig.
He walked out of that office and down the hallway, toward the exit. He knew that he would have to go back there eventually, if only to gather his equipment and organize his staff, but when he left the Campus that night, Collin knew that he was leaving that part of his life behind forever.
49
When the drone was flying toward Rose, she saw her life flash before her eyes. Not the life that she had led until that point, but the life that she could have had. The life that she wanted. It was so close that she could almost touch it, and that drone was coming to take it away from her.
If it hadn't angered her so much, she would have laughed at that drone. She wanted to be done with the authorities. She was tired of living in a world where they had any say in the life she led. She thought that it was over when they fought back and they actually won that battle. She thought that it was a sweeping victory when the city rose up against the authorities and took back what was rightfully theirs. It should have taken days, weeks or even months for the citizens to claim their victory, but it happened in one night. Why? Because the system cannot survive without the people allowing it to exist. When the people had finally had enough, that system collapsed. There were more citizens than officers. There were more fists than guns.
It was a beautiful victory. It was just.
And then there was that drone. The authorities were showing the citizens of that city that no matter how hard they fought, they would never be able to escape the reach of the petty, greedy elite class. There was no punching a drone. There was no escaping the blast of a missile. The authorities weren't out for justice or glory. If they couldn't have their city, nobody would. It was all a childish game to them.
Rose closed her eyes and calmly hummed to Mandi as she waited for death to claim them.
Only, it didn't.
When a good amount of time had passed and there were no explosions or screams, Rose opened her eyes and she looked for the drone in the sky, but it was gone.
Just like that, her future began to come back to her. The girl that she held in her arms would grow up. The people of the city would be free. The sun would shine. The crowd would cheer. Victory was real. It existed.
Rose took Mandi to a van and set her down inside. She brushed the hair away from Mandi's still-closed eyes and gave the girl a kiss on the forehead, the same way that she had kissed her niece years earlier—back when she still had a family. Then she closed the van door and watched as it drove off, taking that girl back to the home that she had known her entire life.
Mandi was safe from further harm, but Rose was sure that the damage that had already been inflicted on that girl's life would keep Mandi busy for years to come. There was no fixing that. There was no making it right. All Rose could hope to do was prevent it from happening again, and make sure that future generations would never know what it was like to live in the world that Mandi Hollinger had been born into.
Someday, all that she saw when she looked around would be nothing more than a faded memory. Someday, Rose would be sitting in a rocking chair next to Paul and they would be looking back at the life that they had shared together. When that day came, Rose hoped that they could talk for hours and never mention the authorities or Freedom.
Once Mandi was on her way, Rose turned and looked at the hospital. Deciding that there was nothing left for her to do there, she began to walk down the street. She walked past the wounded men and women that were being treated by qualified doctors and nurses. She walked by fires that would eventually burn themselves out. She walked past HAND officers who wore their own handcuffs and screamed all manner of profanity at her, before Freedom soldiers jabbed them in the ribs and forced them to be quiet.
Rose walked toward the HAND building, not to seek out another fight, but to find the man that she planned to marry.
The sun was starting to shine its light over the city. It was the start of a new day.
҂
Dor was supposed to observe the events of that night and keep a record of everything that went down, but there was no way of doing that. There was no way that a rational human being could walk past a field of wounded people and do nothing. At the end of the day, there was no such thing as impartial journalism. When she reported the news of the day, it would be from the perspective of a Freedom member. When they wrote their history books, it would tell their story and not the story of the people who had held them down for so long.
Freedom medics were making their way through the area. By the time the sun began to shine through the gathering clouds, the most vital wounds were being cared for. Those with less serious injuries were helped as quickly as possible before resuming their work.
For some time, before the medics arrived, Dor wondered what would happen to the HAND officers who were lying among the wounded, bleeding and moaning in pain. She wasn't sure that Freedom medics would care about those people, and she thought that she might have to stand there and watch them die painful deaths because they were undeserving of treatment.
And they were undeserving. Dor never convinced herself otherwise. HAND officers were responsible for the pain and suffering of countless civilians over many, many years. They were heartless, brutal human beings, and Dor wondered what she would do, if the decision were left to her. Would they live, or would they die?
She had seen so much that night. She had been changed in ways that she couldn't begin to understand. There was no hiding the fact that those officers were people and every instinct in her body told her that human beings should not be allowed to suffer like that.
And then she thought of Collin. The scars on his body. The things that were done to him. The things that had been done to countless others. The starvation. The torture. The oppression. Every person lived every day of their lives under the thumb of the authorities, and these HAND officers were responsible for maintaining that system. If they had just said 'no' to an order. If they had only refused to raid a building or burn someone out of their home, the world could have been such a different place.
Dor concluded that, if left to her, those people would keep bleeding and suffering, because they deserved it. They had brought it upon themselves, unlike so many of the more deserving wounded. She didn't like that decision. She didn't enjoy deciding who would live and who would die. She didn't want to be there at all, but she didn't have a choice, because HAND hadn't given her one. So, they should suffer.
To her surprise, the Freedom medics didn't seem to care whether the injured were wearing uniforms or civilian clothes. They cared for the injured without asking about political affiliation.
When Dor approached one of those medics and asked for a comment on the subject, that medic replied by saying, “There will be a time and a place for these people to pay for their crimes. I am
not a judge, and I will not be an executioner.”
She appreciated that position. She hated it. She did not agree with it. She admired it. She loved her people for holding it.
War had always seemed simple to Dor—at least in the most basic of ways. Right versus wrong. Good versus bad. Now she realized how difficult and complex war actually was. It was something to be feared and loathed, but it was also absolutely necessary. Parades may be held to celebrate victory. Soldiers may smile and raise a glass to their success. But no sane and rational person would ever celebrate the amputation of a damaged limb. Nobody would cheer for the pain and brutality.
Corruption, oppression and evil were a cancer to the world. War was the painful, ugly treatment for that cancer. Victory was the sweet relief of remission—though there might never be a cure. Not really.
Dor sat on the front steps of the HAND building as the gray-blue light of morning gave the surrounding area a whole new personality. It was no longer a battlefield. Now it was a historical landmark. A memorial to those who had fallen.
She sat, writing down these thoughts and feelings, because she needed to remember them for her article on the battle. To simply recall those feelings at a later date wouldn't do them justice. She needed them to be real and not a dramatic recreation.
She wrote furiously, describing every detail of her experience, from the time she left the Campus with Tracy until the moment that she was sitting there on the steps.
When she was done, Dor looked out across the area and it occurred to her that she had been taking in the experience and the scene of it all, and while she was doing that, she had completely ignored the personal element. Where was Tracy? Where was Mek? They could have been among the bodies on the ground and she hadn't even considered the possibility before that moment.
҂
The HAND building was a mess. Not only was the building itself damaged in the fight to get inside, but there was a sea of people, both outside of the building and on the inside, that Rose had to push through while she looked for Paul.
It would have been nice if she could have walked up to the building and found him right there, but it wasn't that simple. They didn't even have radios to communicate with each other, so if Rose wanted to find Paul, she would have to look everywhere. She would have to walk the halls of that building and look at every face that she passed until she found him.
Rose knew that she had to check the faces of the dead as well as the living, but she could never bring herself to give them more than a glance. Paul wasn't dead. She would have known if he was. She would have felt something.
The inside of the building was more intimidating than Rose ever imagined. The floors and walls in the main lobby were tiled in marble. A lot of that tile was damaged in the battle, leaving either spots of bare wall or holes that allowed her to see right into another room.
There were large pendant lights hanging from the ceiling. They were very fancy and modern—or at least they had been when they were first installed. Now they were neither modern nor dated. The world's sense of style had been at a standstill for so long that there were no trends anymore. People lived with what they had, and that was that.
Rose walked through the lobby of the building, studying the tired and worn faces of each Freedom member that she passed. Some she knew, but most were strangers to her.
The bodies of the dead were being moved out of the way, so people could pass through the lobby. With nowhere to put the bodies, they wound up being pushed toward the walls. Freedom soldiers on one side of the lobby, and HAND officers on the other.
The Freedom side had more bodies. On the HAND side of the lobby, officers were being bound at the wrists and ankles, and carefully watched by armed Freedom soldiers. Some of the HAND officers tried to make eye contact with Rose as she glanced their way. They either wanted to make an attempt at intimidating her or they wanted to get sympathy from her. She had time for neither, so she kept walking.
At the main desk, members of Freedom were at work, typing commands into the computer and trying to gain access to security cameras or building communications. Though some power had been restored to the building, not every system was online, so they would probably be struggling for a while.
One of the men at the desk was familiar to Rose. His name was Nick, and he was one of the younger soldiers from the Underground. He was a friendly face, but not the face that she wanted to see.
“The lady lives to tell the tale,” he said with a smile as she approached.
Rose shrugged and said, “But enough about you.”
“I hear you pulled the girl out yourself.”
“Yeah.”
“Nice.”
“It's the job. Hey, have you seen Paul around?”
Nick shook his head and said, “The place was crazy though. He could be anywhere in the building.”
Rose looked at the equipment behind the desk and asked, “Don't suppose you have an intercom or something?”
“We just got the computer to turn on. And the only file that isn't locked is a short story by the guard who worked the night shift. I can get you a copy if you want.”
“And be caught with hostile content? No way. I'm on the straight and narrow these days.”
“I'll bet.”
Rose gave Nick a quick wave as she walked away from the desk, toward the stairs. She entered the stairwell, which was packed full of people who were traveling in both directions. The line to go upward was barely moving. There were twenty-nine floors in the HAND building. Her search was going to take a while.
҂
Tracy was dead.
That was what Dor thought when she finally found Mek. He was kneeling over the dead body of a young woman. In that moment, Dor's heart stopped. She couldn't breathe.
Mek looked up at her and saw the panic in her eyes, and it didn't take him long to realize why she was so scared. Then he shook his head and started to walk toward her.
“It's not Tracy,” he told her. “It's someone else I know, but it's not Tracy.”
It was noon. Dor had been going from floor to floor for hours, looking for someone she knew, stopping to help the injured or to take pictures that she felt would be important to future generations.
She wanted them to see the inside of a HAND interrogation room, for example. Despite what TV shows like The Loyalist wanted people to believe, they were not just rooms with a table where people had pleasant conversations. The interrogation rooms looked more like operating rooms, with all sorts of tools and chemicals that could be used to make someone talk. The smell was something that Dor would never be able to put into words.
Collin had been in one of those rooms. When Dor found it, she almost threw up. Instead, she vowed to let the world know exactly what went on in there. She took pictures of the table in that room, and the tools that were used on prisoners. She documented everything while suppressing the urge to scream or cry. Then, she moved on.
Floor by floor, she searched offices and jail cells. Finally, she found Mek on the thirteenth floor, which was the most high-tech section of the building that she had seen up until that point. The walls were like giant computer monitors, where information could flow constantly. Now they were all black, with a giant blinking cursor off to one side, waiting for someone to type in a command that would bring back the flow of intelligence.
There was a master control room, where every security camera, street camera, drone and HAND vehicle could be accessed. That room looked as though a bomb had gone off inside of it. Blood was splattered across the walls. Computer monitors were thrown on the floor, with holes blown into them. The walls were damaged. The ceiling looked as though it might cave in. Smoke was hanging in the air. It was dark, even though the sun was shining outside. There didn't appear to be any windows on that floor.
Dor assumed that the thirteenth floor was the most fortified. It was probably where the biggest battle had been fought. It was probably after they had taken that floor that victory had been declared. T
hat was why Mek was there.
As soon as Dor saw Mek, she ran to him and put her arms around him.
Though Mek wasn't usually one for big displays of affection, he grabbed onto her and held her tight.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he asked her.
“Tracy brought me,” Dor replied. “Or, she was with me for a while. I lost track of her. Have you seen her?”
Mek shook his head.
Dor was beginning to worry. She had seen so many dead bodies that it was easy for her to picture Tracy's face on one of them. Or worse, it was easy for her to imagine Tracy's face blown off of one of them.
“I'm sure she's fine,” Mek told Dor, releasing her from his grip.
As she stepped back, she realized that her arms were covered in blood now. Mek was practically dripping in it.
“You're injured,” she told Mek, preparing to tend to his wounds.
She looked over him, but aside from some cuts and bumps, she didn't see anything that needed tending to. Certainly nothing that would produce so much blood.
Then she realized that the blood wasn't his. Mek was covered in the blood of his enemies.
When she came to that realization, Dor suddenly grew cold. She looked around the area and realized that they had been clearing out the bodies and the debris for hours before she got there. If what she saw was as bad as it was now, what had been so bad that it needed to be dealt with immediately after the battle?
Mek had a look of shame in his eyes. He said nothing and turned away, pretending to be taking in the scene around him. The only time that she had ever seen him like this was when she asked him about his time working for HAND. He was ashamed of it. He never went into great detail. And now here he was, standing in the place that had once been his headquarters, covered in the blood of people who had once been his coworkers.
Dor moved around Mek, so that he would have to look at her.
She said, “Hey.”
He looked at her.
“You're the good guy,” she assured him, but she wasn't sure that he believed it.