The Secret Citizen (Freedom/Hate Series, Book 3)

by Kyle Andrews

  Amanda smiled and said, “I have cancer. I'm going to die either way.”

  “You could have treatment if you were willing to take it.”

  “It's too late for that.”

  “It wouldn't have been if you'd gotten to see a doctor sooner.”

  Rose set up a checkers board on a tray and moved it to Amanda's bedside. The two had gotten used to each other. Now their conversations happened over food or games.

  Amanda's coughing was growing more frequent. She coughed up blood, but tried to hide it when she could. She laughed it off when she couldn't. She was getting thinner and weaker by the day. She smiled and joked, but when Rose walked into the room, she usually found Amanda's eyes red and puffy from crying. Her daughter had died less than a week earlier.

  For some reason, Amanda didn't get under Rose's skin quite as much as her own family did. Maybe it's because Rose didn't expect anything from Amanda. Maybe it was because at this point in her life, Amanda's reaction to Freedom was less about what she believed or how she wanted to live her life. Now it was just about being pissed off at the world. Rose could understand that. She could relate to it.

  “I played checkers with Libby a couple of times. She sucked at it,” Rose told Amanda.

  “We had a board when she was little, but it got wet and moldy. We had to throw it away.”

  “She was a good girl.”

  “Not terribly bright. Horrible taste in friends.”

  “Don't do that. Don't talk about her like that.”

  “She's my daughter. I'll talk about her however I want.”

  Rose nodded and asked, “What does that mean? Your daughter?”

  “It means that... I'm her mother. I raised her.”

  “Did you?” Rose asked, jumping one of Amanda's pieces and taking it off of the board. “How often did you even see her growing up?”

  “People have jobs. They had jobs before too. Are you saying that's bad?”

  “When they force you to put your kid in school before they can speak full sentences and only let you take them home when it's time for bed? Yeah, that's bad.”

  “So, we should leave parents without a place to put their kids during the day?”

  “I didn't say that.”

  “We should keep the parents from working? Putting food on the table?”

  “You don't put food on the table. If you're good, they allow you to have food. There's a difference.”

  “What difference?”

  “It's not yours.”

  “Tastes the same.”

  “No, it doesn't.”

  Amanda took three of Rose's pieces and smiled smugly at her.

  “The alternative is starvation.”

  “So they say.”

  “You say otherwise?”

  “I say that people can take care of themselves. The myth that we need the authorities to tell us what to eat and when to eat it, when to sleep, what to watch, what to read... I'm sure it makes sense to stupid, lazy people.”

  “Calling me stupid now?”

  “Your willingness to die because the government told you to would seem to suggest so.”

  Amanda laughed. She seemed to genuinely enjoy these conversations with Rose at times, but she never really thought about what Rose was saying. That annoyed the crap out of Rose. How could people be content to sleepwalk through life?

  “Who says that I wasn't going to get treatment before you people pulled me out of the home?” Amanda asked.

  “What pills did they give you to help with your symptoms?”

  “I was on a list.”

  “There's always a list, isn't there? A list for medicine. A list for better food. Better housing. Better jobs,” Rose replied, moving one of her pieces to the back of the board and kinging it. “Ever reach the top of one of those lists?”

  “Justin didn't give me a chance.”

  “He gave you your only chance. You refused to take it.”

  Amanda jumped over several more of Rose's pieces and took them off of the board. She was doing pretty well for herself.

  “Have you always been good at checkers?” Rose asked.

  Amanda shrugged and said, “I like to win.”

  Rose couldn't help but laugh at that comment. She shook her head, wondering if Amanda even heard herself speaking sometimes.

  “You like to win?” Rose asked. “You never win.”

  “I win all the time.”

  “You play games. You think that's winning? You take more pride in how you play this game than you do in your own life.”

  The more Rose continued down this path, the more angry she felt. She knocked the board off of the tray, sending pieces across the room.

  “You're not competitive,” Rose told Amanda. “You don't fight to win. You've just been taught to be happy with losing.”

  Amanda looked down at the tray and said nothing. She waited patiently for Rose to finish with her outburst, and even that patience aggravated Rose.

  “Argue with me,” Rose demanded. “Yell at me. Scream.”

  “Why?”

  “Believe in something! Is that so hard? Fight for something! Demand something!”

  “I'm a hostage here. I can't leave. I can't go home.”

  “What home?”

  “The home I'd still have if Uly hadn't gotten my family mixed up in all of this.”

  “Your family? What is that? Family means nothing. The system provides. The system keeps us safe. The system is your family. Isn't that what you believe?”

  “You don't know what I believe.”

  “Did Libby ever even call you 'Mom'?” Rose asked, sharply. “Or did she call you by your first name? Because the system trains us to believe that our families are only as important as anyone else on the street. The people we live with are just roommates, with lives of their own. Dictated by the system, and able to be taken away at any moment. Just like Libby's father. Just like my father. Just like a hundred other fathers and mothers.”

  “Libby loved me.”

  “She did. I agree with that. She loved you in spite of what she was told. She cared about you in spite of what they wanted her to do. Because she was better than the system.”

  Amanda didn't respond this time. She just looked off to the side, as though she were waiting for Rose to shut up and leave her alone. But Rose wasn't ready to shut up yet.

  “Did you love your daughter, Amanda?” Rose asked.

  Amanda didn't respond.

  “I don't think you did. I don't think you cared about her one way or the other.”

  Amanda's eyes moved slowly to meet Rose's and she cocked her head as though she were holding back her anger. Rather than yell, she simply said, “I love my daughter.”

  “People who love their kids usually want something better for them. They don't sacrifice them to their master,” Rose shot back, standing up and walking toward the door.

  She was done talking. She was sick of talking, at least for the time being. But as she neared the door, she started to feel like maybe she'd gone a little too far. She hadn't gone to that room to torture Amanda. She went there with only the best intentions.

  As she opened the door to leave, Rose turned around and said, “I'm sorry. I just have some family issues of my own going on right now.”

  Amanda wiped a tear away from her face and shrugged. She said, “What else would I expect from a terrorist?”

  Accepting that from Amanda's point of view, she was a prisoner being brainwashed by terrorists, Rose started to walk out of the room.

  “I'm not stupid,” Amanda said before Rose could leave. She said it softly, as though she might actually want to have a normal conversation. As though she might not entirely hate Rose after all. Continuing, she said, “I get what you believe. I understand why you believe it. But I just have to ask you, is it worth all of these people dying? Was it worth the loss of everyone that I ever loved?”

  As she finished that question, Amanda looked as though she might start coughing. Rose wait
ed for her to compose herself before she responded and took that extra time to consider her words carefully.

  Once she was sure that Amanda wasn't going to cough, Rose answered, “It's not a question of what people die for. People die every day, whether we do this or not. The question is, what did they live for?”

  Rose waited for Amanda to say something else, but she didn't. She just nodded to let Rose know that she understood what Rose said. Whether it meant anything to her or not, Rose didn't know.

  “Feel better. I'll come see you tomorrow if you want,” Rose told Amanda, and got another nod in return. Rose could tell that Amanda didn't like being left alone, and there weren't many other people who would pay her a visit.

  As Rose walked out of the room and through the hallways of the Garden, she kept asking herself why people would hold on so tightly to the system that held them down. Why would they fight so hard to protect what hurt them?

  The answer was that people were afraid of the unknown. Even the pain of the current system was preferable to a system that they had never seen and couldn't wrap their mind around. Freedom was a scary proposition when you'd been held prisoner since birth. When you'd been trained for as long as you could remember to obey the system. To follow their rules. To never ask questions. To never think or feel for yourself. To never demand justice.

  Everything wrong with the people in Rose's life could be traced back to the same beginning. The indoctrination during early childhood. They called it 'school' but it wasn't about learning and understanding. It was about learning to not ask questions. To accept what you were given. People were just babies when they went into those schools and by the time they graduated, they were robots, programmed to perform certain tasks on command.

  Everyone had gone through those schools. With some distance, maybe people could start to think outside of the box that had been established for them, but not everyone did that. And what about the kids like Ze? The ones who were still inside of those schools, having every ounce of independence suffocated? What about Ze's baby and all of the others who stood a chance of being saved from that fate, if only Freedom could stop them from being put in those schools to begin with?

  Rose felt a growing desire to bring down the system of indoctrination. To put an end to the extracurriculars that were forced on people, in preparation for their future careers. To allow the next generation of citizens to think freely, without the shackles of the lessons that they'd been taught by their oppressors.

  But wanting to bring down the school system was one thing. Actually doing it was something else entirely. How could they even begin? The task was too large to wrap her mind around. She felt as though she were standing at the beginning of a very long, very windy road and she couldn't even figure out how to take the first step.

  19

  Collin had worked on his project for days. He had written every word of that article himself and he had reread it a hundred times, carefully correcting each mistake and making sure that every sentence flowed perfectly. He had worked on that article until he couldn't stand to look at the computer screen for a single moment longer. Then he ran through it a few more times, just to be safe.

  When it came to choosing a title for the paper, he struggled. He didn't want to call it the press or the gazette, because those words still held meaning for people. They conjured images of the big media outlets. Consciously or not, people would see words like those and connect them with the very institutions that Collin was hoping to destroy by publishing real stories and exposing the lies of the press.

  Finding the perfect name was probably the hardest part of the entire process for him, thus far. Speaking to the people was easy. If anything, he had too much that he wanted to tell them. He had too many stories of people who had been oppressed or news stories that had been faked. He had a list of potential articles that was as long as his arm, but each one of those articles would be written under the same newspaper name. It could be carried with him for years—possibly decades. It would become the public identity of Freedom, so that one little name had a lot of weight on its shoulders. It needed to be memorable. It needed to strike the right chords inside of people.

  It was Liam who wound up being the most help to Collin once this challenge had become so difficult that it was almost comedic. He told Collin that when he was trying to figure out a recipe, he would sit down and make a list of all the ingredients that he had on hand. Then he would mix and match those ingredients, depending on what he hoped to accomplish with the finished product.

  It worked. Collin sat down with a piece of paper and a pencil, and he started writing down words that related to what his project was and what he hoped to do with it. In the end, he walked to the computer where Kenny was sitting and he typed in the name of his newspaper: 'THE SECRET CITIZEN'

  He stood back and allowed Kenny to look at those words, turning them around inside of his head to see how they settled.

  “There's something interesting about it,” Kenny said, narrowing his eyes. “I can't quite put my finger on it.”

  Collin smiled and said, “Then it worked.”

  When Tracy and Mig were brought into the conversation and looked at the name, Tracy's first question was “Who is the secret citizen?”

  But Mig smiled as she looked at the name and said, “I like it.”

  “Then we go to print,” Collin replied, slapping Kenny on the shoulder.

  Kenny brought up the print command and hovered his finger over the button. He asked, “Are we sure?”

  “Do it,” Mig ordered.

  Within seconds, the printer was spitting out pages and people were stapling them together. It might not have been the most impressive presentation, but when that first issue was handed to Collin, still warm from the printer, he looked down at it and he felt as though his heart were about to explode.

  The words that he had seen over a hundred times before suddenly looked different to him. They looked real. They looked powerful. And as he watched the other copies being printed and put together, he imagined the people who would see those words. People who never knew just how corrupt their world had become would finally see the truth.

  Collin flipped to the back of the paper and noticed something written in small words: 'This Paper Constitutes Hostile Content. If Found In Your Possession You Will Be Arrested. It Is Highly Advised That You Burn This Paper Once It Has Been Read'

  He had never noticed that warning before, but he couldn't argue with it. Knowing the consequences of having and reading that paper might turn people away, but burning it made them a part of the secret. It connected them with Freedom, and with Collin himself. It made people scared of the authorities, marking them as the villain.

  Collin couldn't help but grin when he thought about this. He remembered sitting in front of Sophia's TV, watching the news as she outlined all of the different ways that the press was twisting facts and manipulating the audience. The sneaky, underhanded tactics that were used to play with the basic instincts of the citizens. Collin didn't necessarily enjoy manipulating people, but that was how the game was being played already. If he wanted to compete, he had to play by their rules.

  But was it sneaky? Was it underhanded? Or was he just telling people the truth? They should fear the authorities. They should understand how truly scary it was that a person could be arrested simply for openly questioning the system. Collin wished that they were simply scare tactics. The idea of someone being arrested for reading his words did not sit well with him, but neither did allowing things to remain the same.

  Stacks of papers were printed and tied together. Men and women from the Campus came through the office, grabbing stacks and walking them out into the world to be distributed. Collin felt bold for putting those words on paper, but his contribution paled in comparison to those who were putting their lives on the line by passing them out.

  As he began to think of the danger that he had put those people in with his idea for a newspaper, he began to feel her standing behind him on
ce again, watching and worrying. Liz shouldn't be there. She wasn't real. He wasn't being tortured anymore. She needed to be put away once and for all, but as stress began to mount, she became his refuge.

  He closed his eyes tightly for a moment, pushing that feeling aside. She wasn't there, and he kept repeating that fact to himself until the feeling of having her there began to subside. There was a real Liz somewhere in the world, and she hadn't come looking for him when he needed her. She left and never looked back. He needed to remember who the real person was if he wanted to rid himself of that fantasy once and for all.

  “I'm serious, by the way. Still wondering,” Tracy said, pulling Collin's mind back to that room where the papers were being printed.

  Mig was gone. Kenny was working on something else. Tracy was standing there, staring at Collin and asked him, “Who is the secret citizen?”

  Collin didn't answer her. The question was part of the name's purpose. The answer that people came to was part of the impact. So when she asked the question, he simply raised an eyebrow and walked away.

  By the time Collin walked out of the office and into the hallway, every member of the Campus seemed to have a copy of The Secret Citizen in their hands and each had their eyes glued to the page. As he walked down the hall, none of them looked up. They'd gotten over the initial thrill of having him under the same roof and now he was simply Collin. It felt nice to be a mere person once again.

  On the stairs that led only to a wall, Dor was sitting with a copy of the paper in her hand. She was moving her lips along with the story as she read it, which was only the latest in a list of things about the girl that reminded him of his little sister. Their personalities were completely different, but when he looked at her, he saw what might have been.

  He sat next to Dor on the stairs and waited for her to finish reading the article. When she was done, she looked up at him and then looked away.

  She'd grown a little bit more comfortable with the people in the Campus since she first arrived. She seemed to like Mek more than any of them, though he wasn't around very often. Whether or not she agreed with them was anyone's guess, but at least she seemed to understand what they were doing there. It was something.