by C. A. Gray
Julie had to support herself on the back of a chair to keep from falling over laughing. But Francis didn’t seem to notice. He danced the lyrics, too, and then burst out, singing the melodic chorus, “Let me see you moooove yo’ body, body.” My sides hurt from laughing so hard. I think we were all too shocked to fill in the background music for him, and at last Francis seemed to realize this and became self-conscious. He opened his eyes and trailed off, coughing once.
“I thought that was the game.”
“It was!” cried Julie, tears running down her face. “Keep going!”
Francis responded primly, “I can tell when I’m being laughed at.”
This only made us laugh harder, but Larissa assured him, “We weren’t laughing at you, we were laughing with you!”
Francis rolled his eyes. “If one is required to utilize such an appallingly trite phrase, it is already false.”
Dr. Yin, her face still frozen in amused disbelief, finally said, “Sooo… I was sent to tell you all that dinner’s ready.”
We slowly regained control of ourselves, laughter fading to lingering mirth. Liam glanced at me with a grin, and I felt myself grinning back. Everyone began to file out of the basement after that, but as I made my way to the stairs, Julie grabbed my sleeve from behind. I turned to look at her, and she raised her eyebrows, glancing pointedly at Liam’s retreating back, and then back at me.
I laughed self-consciously. “What?”
“Does he know yet?” she demanded, just as the door upstairs softly clicked shut.
I flushed, and hem-hawed, trying to decide how to respond. Finally I admitted, “I just… don’t know how.”
“Here’s how,” Julie said flatly, “You say, ‘Liam, I’m in love with you.’”
“Shh!” I shushed her instinctively, looking around the room even though I knew we were alone.
As if this egged her on, Julie added, “Or how about you just walk up and kiss him? That also gets the message across.”
“Stop it!” I laughed. “Nobody actually does that, anyway!”
“I did it with Jake,” Julie shrugged.
My eyes widened, incredulous. “You just walked up and kissed him? The first time?”
“Shoot, yeah! Well I mean, it was kind of mutual. But I didn’t know it was going to be until I was already committed.” She grinned.
I felt a wave of dread at this prospect, and protested, “But—what about Val? There’s obviously still something going on between them. What if you’re wrong, and it’s her—”
“Val still loves him, and she’s clinging to hope because he’s being nice to her,” Julie cut me off matter-of-factly. “That’s all. She’s a sweet girl, and I’m sorry for her. Maybe she and Andy will hook up with each other, you never know. But Becca, in all seriousness. We all love Liam. He’s so obviously crazy about you, and he’s been super patient. If we had a priest here, I’m pretty sure he’d marry you tomorrow. So for his sake as much as yours—tell him.”
“I will, I will,” I promised.
“Tell him soon!”
Chapter 26
I heard Julie’s injunction, and I meant to, I really did. But after dinner, the cast went back into the basement and recorded the final tracks for our songs. After that, we started to record the script until it was time for bed. Then all of us walked back to our rooms together. No alone time.
The next morning, it felt a little bit like the morning of a show: everyone woke early and met downstairs with bedhead and clutching cups of coffee as if they were life support, but with a simultaneous sense of excitement in the air. The goal was to finish recording the script by lunchtime, so that Jake could spend the rest of the day integrating the RecordingStudio tracks into AnimatR. Jake, Julie and I were the only ones who stayed downstairs for the entire morning—everyone else came and went for their scenes only. Whenever Liam was in the room, Julie gave me a questioning look.
Have you told him yet? it said.
I will, I will, my expression promised back.
And then she’d glower at me, which meant, I don’t believe you, I think you’re chickening out.
When the cast and crew were in the basement recording, Andy was in the upstairs dome room, watching films on the netscreen up there. When Jake and I went upstairs—which is where he preferred to work after the recording was done and only the work of editing remained—Andy went downstairs.
“Why don’t you stick around?” Jake asked him when he got up to leave as soon as he saw us. “Hang out with us. You could help me.”
“You know I don’t know how to do any of that stuff,” Andy muttered.
“You could learn,” suggested Jake. “I could teach you—”
“I don’t care about your stupid movie, okay?” Andy snapped, and left the room as Jake and I sat in stunned silence. We exchanged a concerned look, and Jake sighed.
“I’ve been kind of worried about him,” he confessed.
I nodded. “Me too, but I don’t know what to do about it. He wants to be miserable.”
“Every time I see him, he’s chatting on the Commune,” said Jake, “He never talks to any of us actual people that are here with him in the real world.”
“And… how is that different than before?” I joked. Andy had always spent most of his time playing End Game with strangers on the labyrinth.
“True. But at least at college he’d go to parties and get wasted and hook up with random chicks occasionally too. I can’t see that happening here, considering his only options are you, Val, and Alex.”
I looked up abruptly, and accused, “You always swore he wasn’t doing that stuff before!”
Jake’s eyes widened, and he held up his hands. “I… wait… what? Did I say that?”
I laughed, long past caring what Andy did on his weekends in college.
“I mean… he’d… go to knitting parties… and drink… tea…” Jake backpedaled, eyes darting theatrically around the room.
“You always thought all us girls were so naive,” I shook my head at him. “Like we didn’t know what you guys were up to when we weren’t around.”
“You were so naive!” Jake protested, “we just didn’t want to ruin your good opinion of us!”
My smile faded. “Well. I wish I knew what to do for Andy now.”
“Besides make out with him?” Jake suggested with a shrug. “Hey, just sayin’. It would probably work.”
I shook my head in mock exasperation. “Like I said. If he wants to be unhappy, I don’t see that anybody can talk him out of it.”
Jake gave a short laugh. “That’s you all over again, Becca. You think people can just choose whether they’re happy or not.”
“Well, they can! That’s documented science!”
“Yeah, but it’s not like it’s that easy.”
“I didn’t say it was easy. But people do have a choice, in more cases than not,” I pointed out. “It’s all about what you choose to focus on. If he sits there and meditates on how miserable he is all day long, then guess what? He gets more miserable…”
Jake rolled his eyes. “Okay, off the soapbox. Let’s just edit this sucker.”
“Are we done?” I murmured a few hours later, incredulous, as Jake began to play back our final product. “That can’t be it…”
“I know, right?” Jake grinned at me. “If I’d known it was this easy, I’d have been making short films all the time! I mean, not that this was easy exactly. But did you know, back in the Second Age sometime, they had to draw the characters literally frame by frame?”
“Let’s get everybody together to watch it!” I cried, jumping up. “Then we can get it out on the Commune to distribute tonight!”
I heard Jake behind me, laughing at my enthusiasm as I skipped down the stairs.
Fifteen minutes later, I’d convinced everyone to drop what they were doing and come downstairs to view our final product, which we called Renegades. Even Alex was there, as i
t wasn’t feasible to really keep her from finding out what we were up to at this point, and Mom was less inclined to keep her in the dark after Mack’s pep talk anyway. We’d have to push dinner back a bit, but that was fine. It also meant Andy had to pause whatever he’d been watching, but he was in a bad mood no matter what, anyway. Rick came downstairs, pausing his sentry duty long enough to join us. I even dragged Madeline downstairs to watch. She and I sat on the floor, right up front.
I was nervous—after all, this was my brainchild, and my story. Would it look and sound totally unprofessional? Would everyone have to try hard to think of something nice to say? Except for Alex and Francis, I thought, who will find a way to be rude even if it’s awesome…
But the opening ‘produced by’ credits featured an incendiary logo of a phoenix that I hadn’t even seen Jake draw, with flames rippling around its feathers and dancing in its eyes. I leaned back into his knees and grinned, pointing at the image.
“Where did that come from?”
He tried to look nonchalant, but was obviously pleased. “‘We will rise from the ashes,’ right? It seemed appropriate.”
I felt myself relax after that: the film transitions, the score, and especially the artwork all looked as professional as I could have hoped. The glory for this was all Jake’s, but it meant that my script and our songs and performances had the best possible chance to shine.
And shine they did. After each song, the room burst into applause. Mom looked a bit bemused the whole time, but Mack grinned at me when my first song finished, and Jake’s and my “Can’t Keep Us Down” number produced whistles and cat-calls. Periodically Julie leaned forward to me and made little encouraging comments after every good monologue or set of snappy dialogue.
“Liam! Is that you?” Dr. Yin asked incredulously, pointing at the projection when Prime Minister Abaddon belted, “They Never Had A Chance.”
He shrugged at her with a guilty smile. Meanwhile, Val clutched at his forearm, and beamed up at him with pride, like she owned him. My smile faltered. How could he not notice that?
The whoops and whistles for Liam’s song echoed through the room. “You missed your calling, my friend,” said Giovanni.
The film finished with my short interview at the end, describing my actual story. Then it faded to black, and the credits flashed with our names in silence, along with the injunction, “Please share this film with your loved ones. Together, we can still change the future. —The Renegades.”
There was a long silence at the end, and something in me trembled with anticipation. The film wasn’t perfect—there were moments when the sound wasn’t mixed quite right, or where the characters’ expressions weren’t perfectly in sync with the dialogue. The script was good, but it was the first script I’d ever written. I thought it was powerful enough, but it could have been better, of course. It was no Abraham Chiefton picture. The songs were good, but could I have chosen better ones? Or maybe we should have written original songs after all—
Mom cut through my anxious thoughts first, leaning past Mack to look at me.
“Excellent work, Rebecca,” she said formally, but with a smile. Then she shifted her gaze to Jake. “And to you, Jake. And all of you.”
This broke the silence, and everyone else burst into applause, echoing her sentiments. “Bravo, guys!” called Dr. Yin, “I’m very impressed!” I hadn’t realized that my chest had constricted until it released, and I exchanged a giddy grin with Jake. He raised his hand to me in a high five, and I pounded my palm against his, laughing. Even Francis said, “Not half bad. Not half bad.” Alex alone sat with her legs and arms both crossed, her expression still stony and disapproving.
“Francis, will you upload it and send it to Matt tonight with whatever code you wrote for broadcasting?” I asked him when the applause died down, breathless.
“And then we’ll celebrate our first real blow against the Silver Six,” said Mom. “We’ve got some champagne upstairs we can open with dinner.”
The group broke apart after that: Julie kissed Jake deeply in celebration, heedless of all of their spectators. Francis and Nilesh walked over to the netscreens to upload the film to the Commune. Giovanni and Mack helped Andy rearrange the furniture back to where it was before. Val dragged Liam upstairs by the hand to help her with dinner, but his other hand rested briefly on my lower back as he passed me by.
“Your dad would be proud,” he whispered, clutching my hand just briefly before he slid past. This brought an immediate lump to my throat. He glanced over his shoulder at me with a half smile, and I tried to smile back as Val led him away. Once they were gone, I took a deep breath, then turned back around to find Julie watching me, eyebrows raised in pointed expectation. I looked away.
It turned out that Liam had been monitoring a roast for most of the afternoon in between coding sessions with Larissa and Nilesh. Mom poured the champagne, and Mack offered a toast—“To the turning of the tide,” he said, and we all raised our glasses and called, “Hear, hear!”
“So whose story is next, then?” asked Nilesh eagerly, looking around the table. “What about Giovanni’s?”
Everyone turned to look at the older man, who seemed startled to suddenly find himself at the center of attention. “Mine?” he echoed, and with a forced laugh, said, “I’m afraid I can neither sing, nor act…”
“You don’t have to, someone else can play you,” Nilesh persisted, “and this one shouldn’t be a musical anyway. We can do it live action, right, Becca?”
“I agree,” Dr Yin cut in, “Giovanni’s story is very compelling.”
“Wait,” said Liam, glancing at Giovanni, “have I heard your story?”
“You and Val weren’t back yet when he told it,” said Mom. “Neither were Jake and Julie, or Alex, Larissa, and Francis, for that matter.”
“Oh, I have an idea!” Jake interjected, “let’s have him tell it again to the rest of us after dinner on camera, around a fire up in the caves. It’ll be atmospheric!”
Giovanni seemed a bit uncomfortable with this suggestion, but agreed at last. Julie and I cleaned up while the boys took Madeline out to the caves, since she had the camera on her.
“It’s okay,” I murmured to Madeline as I scooped her up and transferred her to Liam’s arms. “They’ll take good care of you. Right?”
Liam shook his head at me, then said to Madeline, “Honestly, after all we’ve been through, it’s like she still doesn’t trust me or something!” Then he joked to me, “Madeline and I are going to bond, and tell each other aaaalll our deepest darkest secrets, aren’t we, Madeline?”
“You had better not!” I warned Madeline. She looked from Liam to me with wide, searching eyes.
“No?” she asked me, then turned to Liam with firm resolution. “No secrets.”
He laughed, and sighed with mock disappointment, glancing up at me. “I can’t seem to get secrets out of either one of you.”
He was gone before I could think of a snappy reply.
Mom and Mack lingered behind the rest of the group, and went with Julie, Queenie and me in the last golf cart up to the caves. When we arrived, there was already a fire blazing, and Nilesh had paired the microphone with Madeline’s holograph camera. An empty chair sat at the back of the cave, overlooking a blank wall, while everyone else sat around the other side of the fire. Everyone except Andy, I noticed.
“Where’s Andy?” I whispered to Jake.
“He said he’s already heard Giovanni’s story, he doesn’t need to hear it again,” Jake murmured back to me. I gave him a look, and Jake said, “I know, I know.” But there was nothing we could do, of course.
“All right, everybody ready?” called Nilesh, who gestured to Giovanni to get into position.
I’d heard Giovanni’s story already: how he’d worked with Rameses Youssef in building the Silver Six themselves, and then continued to do so even after Youssef went into hiding. He’d still believed that advancement of knowledge w
as always for the best, regardless of how that knowledge was acquired. He continued to believe this, or convinced himself that he believed it, even after he saw the first human prisoners taken to Mars. Then he learned of one prisoner who had been arrested by Justice Wallenberg for complicity in his son’s petty thievery, knowing that the punishment for his crime would have been imprisonment and likely death.
“For failure to report his son’s crimes, both father and son were arrested, and Dr. Polanski of the Space Program chose them as test subjects,” Giovanni said. “This meant they were subjected to operations in order to discover what alterations were necessary for human survival in space. Ordinarily this would have been the last I’d heard of it, but my conscience pricked me about this particular story. I knew it was cruel and unusual punishment, and I needed to know what became of them. When I followed up, I discovered that the father seemed to tolerate the surgery well, but the son died on the operating table in the pod on the moon. After that, the father essentially died of a broken heart, though the official report said it was asphyxiation—perhaps due to hyperventilation from sobbing.
“After that, I ‘retired.’ I created a new identity for myself and vanished as completely as I could. I could no longer give my talents in service to a regime that would do such a thing.”
When it became clear that he had finished, Nilesh crept forward to Madeline to stop the recording, and unpaired the microphone.
The mood of celebration had decidedly vanished, and almost as if we’d agreed upon it, we shared a moment of silence for that father and son.
“Well,” said Mack after a long pause.
“It’s not a cheerful story,” Giovanni agreed. “But it is one that ought to be told.”
Jake had brought his guitar, but nobody felt much like singing after that. Dr. Yin, Alex, Rick, and Francis went back to the compound first, and I saw Val tug on Liam’s hand again to take the next cart back with her, along with Mom and Mack.
“Go on ahead,” I heard Liam tell Val, and I saw him gesture at Giovanni, then approach him once Val wandered back toward the golf carts on her own. Jake said something to Giovanni and Liam, and Liam nodded at him, then pointed towards Julie and to me.