by Marie Lu
“Long live the Elector! Long live the Republic!”
He manages six shots before the Colonies soldiers return fire. I hug Tess to my chest, then cover her eyes. She lets out a cry of protest. “Don’t look,” I whisper in her ear. At that very moment, I see Thomas’s head snap violently back and his entire body go limp. An image of my mother flashes before my eyes.
Shot through the head. He’s been shot through the head. Death by firing squad.
The blast makes Tess jump—she utters a strangled sob behind my shielding hands. The door swings shut.
Pascao greets us the instant we’re safely through. He’s covered head to toe in dust, but he still has a half grin on his face. “The final evacuation wave is waiting for us,” he says, nodding toward two parked jeeps ready to take us back to the bunker. Republic soldiers have already started toward us, but before any of us can feel relieved, I notice that Frankie has collapsed to the ground and Tess is hovering over her. Pascao’s half grin vanishes. As soldiers seal off the side entrance, we gather around Frankie. Tess pulls out a kit of supplies. Frankie has started to convulse.
Her coat’s stripped completely off, revealing a blood-soaked shirt beneath. Her eyes are open wide in shock, and she’s struggling to breathe.
“She was shot as we were getting away,” Tess says as she tears away the cloth of Frankie’s shirt. Sweat beads along her brow. “Three or four times.” Her trembling hands fly across Frankie’s body, scattering powder and pressing ointment into the wounds. When she’s done, she yanks out a thick wad of bandages.
“She’s not gonna make it,” Pascao mutters to Tess as she pushes him out of the way and pushes firmly down on one of Frankie’s gushing wounds. “We have to move. Now.”
Tess wipes her brow. “Just give me another minute,” she insists through gritted teeth. “We have to control the bleeding.”
Pascao starts to protest, but I silence him with a dangerous look. “Let her do it.” Then I kneel beside Tess, my eyes helplessly drawn to Frankie’s pitiful figure. I can tell that she’s not going to make it. “I’ll do whatever you say,” I murmur to Tess. “Let us help.”
“Keep pressure on her wounds,” Tess replies, waving a hand at the bandages that are already more red than white. She rushes to make a poultice.
Frankie’s eyelids flutter. She chokes out a strangled cry, then manages to look up at us. “You’ve—got—to go. The Colonies—they’re—coming—”
It takes a whole minute for her to die. Tess keeps applying meds for a while longer, until I finally put a hand over hers to stop her. I look up at Pascao. One of the Republic soldiers approaches us again and gives us a stern frown. “This is your final warning,” he says, gesturing toward the open doors of two jeeps. “We’re heading out.”
“Go,” I tell Pascao. “We’ll take the jeep right behind you.”
Pascao hesitates for a second, stricken at the sight of Frankie, but then hops to his feet and disappears into the first jeep. It tears away, leaving a cloud of dust in its wake.
“Come on,” I urge Tess, who stays hunched over Frankie’s lifeless body. On the other side of the Armor, the sounds of battle rage. “We have to go.”
Tess wrenches free of my grasp and flings her roll of bandages hard at the wall. Then she turns to look back at Frankie’s ashen face. I stand up, forcing Tess to do the same. My bloody hand leaves prints on her arm. Soldiers grab both of us and lead us toward the remaining jeep. As we finally make our way inside, Tess turns her eyes up to mine. They’re brimming with tears, and the sight of her anguish breaks my heart. We pull away from the Armor as soldiers load Frankie onto a truck. Then we turn a corner and speed toward the bunker.
By the time we arrive, Pascao’s jeep has already unloaded and they’ve headed down to the train. The soldiers are tense. As they clear us past the bunker entrance’s chain-link fence, another explosion from the Armor sends tremors through the ground. As if in a dream, we rush down the metal staircase and through the corridors flooded with dim red lights, the sound of pounding boots echoing dully from outside. Farther and farther down we go, until we finally reach the bunker and make our way onto the waiting train. Soldiers pull us on board.
As the subway flares to life and we pull away from the bunker, a series of explosions reverberate through the space, nearly knocking us off our feet. Tess clings to me. As I hold her close, the tunnel behind us collapses, encasing us in darkness. We speed along. Echoes of the explosions ring through the earth.
My headache flares up.
Pascao tries to say something to me, but I can no longer hear him. I can’t hear anything. The world around me dulls into grays, and I feel myself spinning. Where are we again? Somewhere, Tess screams out my name—but I don’t know what she says after that, because I lose myself in an ocean of pain and collapse into blackness.
2100 HOURS.
ROOM 3323, LEVEL INFINITY HOTEL, ROSS CITY.
ALL OF US HAVE SETTLED INTO OUR INDIVIDUAL HOTEL rooms. Ollie’s resting at the foot of my bed, completely knocked out after an exhausting day. I can’t imagine falling asleep, though. After a while, I get up quietly, leave three treats for Ollie near the door, and step out. I wander the halls with my virtual glasses tucked into my pocket, relieved to see the world as it really is again without the onslaught of hovering numbers and words. I don’t know where I’m going, but eventually I end up two floors higher and not far from Anden’s room. It’s quieter up here. Anden might be the only one staying on this floor, along with a few guards.
As I go, I pass a door that leads into a large chamber that must be some public, central room on this floor. I turn back and peer inside. The place looks whitewashed, probably because I don’t have my virtual glasses on and can’t see all the simulations; the room is partitioned into a series of tall cylinder-like booths, each one a circle of tall, transparent slabs of glass. Interesting. I have one of those cylinder booths in a corner of my hotel room, although I haven’t bothered trying it yet. I look around the hall, then push gingerly on the door. It slides open without a sound.
I step inside and as soon as the door slides shut behind me, the room declares something in Antarctican that I can’t understand. I take my virtual glasses out of my pocket and put them on. Automatically, the room’s voice brightens and repeats her phrase, this time in English. “Welcome to the simulation room, June Iparis.” I see my virtual score go up by ten points, congratulating me for using a simulation room for the very first time. Just as I suspected, the room now looks bright and full of colors, and the glass walls of the cylindrical rooms have all sorts of moving displays on them.
Your access to the portal away from home! one panel says. Use in conjunction with your virtual glasses for a fully immersive experience. Behind the text is a lush video depicting what look like beautiful scenes from around the world. I wonder whether their portal is their way of connecting to the Internet. Suddenly, my interest piques. I’ve never browsed the Internet outside of the Republic, never seen the world for what it was without the Republic’s masks and filters. I approach one of the glass cylinder booths and step inside. The glass around me lights up.
“Hello, June,” it says. “What can I find for you?”
What should I look up? I decide to try out the first thing that pops into my head. I hesitantly reply, wondering whether it’ll just read my voice. “Daniel Altan Wing,” I say. How much does the rest of the world know about Day?
Suddenly everything around me vanishes. Instead, I’m standing in a white circle with hundreds—thousands—of hovering rectangular screens all around me, each one covered with images and videos and text. At first I don’t know what to do, so I just stay where I am, staring in wonder at the images all around me. Each screen has different info on Day. Many of them are news articles. The one closest to me is playing an old video of Day standing on top of the Capitol Tower balcony, rousing the people to support Anden. When I look at it long enough (three seconds), a voice starts talking. “In this video, Daniel
Altan Wing—also known as Day—gives his support to the Republic’s new Elector and prevents a national uprising. Source: The Republic of America’s public archives. See whole article?”
My eyes flicker to another screen, and the voice from the first screen fades. This second screen comes to life as I look on, playing a video interviewing some girl I don’t know, with light brown skin and pale hazel eyes. She sports a scarlet streak in her hair. She says, “I’ve lived in Nairobi for the past five years, but we’d never heard of him until videos of his strikes against the R-oh-A started popping up online. Now I belong to a club—” The video pauses there, and the same soothing voice from earlier says, “Source: Kenya Broadcasting Corporation. See whole video?”
I take a careful step forward. Each time I move, the rectangular screens rearrange around me to showcase the next circle of images for me to peruse. Images of Day pop up from when he and I were still working for the Patriots—I see one blurry image of Day looking over his shoulder, a smirk on his lips. It makes me blush, so I quickly glance away. I look through two more rounds of them, then decide to change my search. This time I search for something I’ve always been curious about. “The United States of America,” I say.
The screens with videos and images of Day vanish, leaving me strangely disappointed. A new set of screens flip up around me, and I can almost feel a slight breeze as they shift into place. The first thing that pops up is an image that I instantly recognize as the full flag that the Patriots both use and base their symbol on. The voiceover says, “The flag of the former United States of America. Source: Wikiversity, the Free Academy. United States History One-oh-two, Grade Eleven. See full entry? For textual version, say ‘Text.’”
“See full entry,” I say. The screen zooms in toward me, engulfing me in its contents. I blink, momentarily thrown off by the rushing images. When I open my eyes again, I nearly stumble. I’m hovering in the sky over a landscape that looks both familiar and strange. The outline of it appears to be some version of North America, except there’s no lake stretching from Los Angeles to San Francisco, and the Colonies’ territory looks much larger than I remember. Clouds float by below my feet. When I reach a hesitant foot down, I smudge part of the clouds and can actually feel the cool air whistling beneath my shoes.
The voiceover begins. “The United States of America—also known as the USA, the United States, the US, America, and the States—was a prominent country in North America composed of fifty states held together as a federal constitutional republic. It first declared independence from England on July 4, 1776, and became recognized on September 3, 1783. The United States unofficially split into two countries on October 1, 2054 and officially became the western Republic of America and the eastern Colonies of America on March 14, 2055.”
Here the voiceover pauses, then shifts. “Skip to a subtopic? Popular subtopics: the Three-Year Flood, the Flood of 2046, the Republic of America, the Colonies of America.”
A series of bright blue markers appear over the west and east coasts of North America. I stare at them for a moment, my heart pounding, before I reach out and try to touch a marker near the southern coastline of the Colonies. To my surprise, I can feel the texture of the landscape under my finger. “The Colonies of America,” I say.
The world rushes up at me with dizzying speed. I’m now standing on what feels like solid ground, and all around me are thousands of people huddled together in makeshift shelters in a flooded cityscape, while hundreds are launching an all-out attack against soldiers decked out in uniforms I don’t recognize. Behind the soldiers are crates and sacks of what look like rations.
“Unlike the Republic of America,” the voiceover starts, “where the government enforced rule through martial law in order to crack down on the influx of refugees into its borders, the Colonies of America formed on March 14, 2055 after corporations seized control of the federal government (the former United States, see higher index) following the latter’s failure to handle debt accumulated from the Flood of 2046.” I take a few steps forward—it’s as if I’m right here in the middle of the scene, standing just a few dozen feet from where the people are rioting. My surroundings look shaky and pixelated, as if rendered from someone’s personal videos. “In this civilian recording, the city of Atlanta stages a fifteen-day riot against the United States Federal Emergency Management Agency. Similar riots appeared in all eastern cities over the course of three months, after which the cities declared loyalty to the military corporation DesCon, which possessed funds the beleaguered government did not.”
The scene blurs and clears, placing me in the center of an enormous campus full of buildings, each displaying a symbol I recognize as the DesCon logo. “Along with twelve other corporations, DesCon contributed its funds to aid the civilians. By early 2058, the United States government ceased to exist altogether in the east and was replaced with the Colonies of America, formed by a coalition of the country’s top thirteen corporations and bolstered by their joint profits. After a series of mergers, the Colonies of America now consists of four ruling corporations: DesCon, Cloud, Meditech, and Evergreen. Skip to a specific corporation?”
I stay silent, watching the rest of the immersive video unfold until it finally pauses on the last frame, an unsettling image of a desperate civilian shielding his face from a soldier’s hoisted gun. Then I remove my virtual glasses, rub my eyes, and step out of the now-blank and sterile-looking glass cylinder. My footsteps echo in the empty chamber. I feel dizzy and numb from the sudden lack of moving images.
How can two countries with such radically different philosophies ever reunite? What hope do we possibly have of transforming the Republic and the Colonies into what they once were? Or perhaps they’re not as drastically different as I think they are. Aren’t the Colonies’ corporations and the Republic’s government really the same thing? Absolute power is absolute power, no matter what it’s called. Isn’t it?
I exit the chamber, lost in thought, and as I turn the corner to head to my room, I almost bump right into Anden.
“June?” he blurts out when he sees me. His wavy hair is slightly disheveled, as if he’s been raking his hands through it, and his collar shirt is crumpled, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows and the buttons near his neck undone. He manages to compose himself enough to offer me a smile and a bow. “What are you doing up here?”
“Just exploring.” I return his smile. I’m too tired to mention all my online research. “I’m not sure what I’m doing here, to be honest.”
Anden laughs softly. “Me either. I’ve been wandering the halls for over an hour.” We pause for a moment. Then he turns back in the direction of his suite and gives me a questioning look. “The Antarcticans won’t help us, but they’ve been kind enough to send a bottle of their best wine up to my room. Care to have a sip? I could use some company—and some advice.”
Advice from his lowliest Princeps-Elect? I fall into step with him, all too aware of the closeness between us. “How very polite of them,” I reply.
“Exceedingly polite,” he murmurs under his breath so that I can barely hear him. “Next they’ll be throwing us a parade.”
Anden’s suite is nicer, of course, than my own—at least the Antarcticans did him that courtesy. A curved glass window runs along half of the wall, giving us a breathtaking view of Ross City engulfed in thousands of twinkling lights. The Antarcticans must be simulating this nightfall too, considering how it’s supposed to be summer down here—but the simulation seems flawless. I think back on the dome-like film we passed through as we descended into the city. Maybe it acts like a giant screen too. Streaks dance quietly across the sky in sheets of breathtaking color, turquoise and magenta and gold, all of them swirling together and vanishing and reappearing against a backdrop of stars. I catch my breath. Must be imitating the aurora australis. I’d read about these southern lights during our weekly lessons, although I hadn’t expected them to look this beautiful, simulation or not.
“Nice view,” I say.
Anden grins wryly, a small spark of amusement shining through his otherwise weary mood. “The useless advantages of being the Republic’s Elector,” he replies. “I’ve been reassured that we can see through this glass, but that no one from outside can see us. Then again, perhaps they’re just messing with me.”
We settle into soft chairs near the window. Anden pours us both glasses of wine. “One of the accused guards confessed about Commander Jameson,” he says as he hands a glass to me. “Republic soldiers unhappy with my rule, paid off by the Colonies. The Colonies is taking advantage of Commander Jameson’s knowledge of our military. She might even still be within our borders.”
I sip my wine numbly. So, it was all true. I desperately wish I could go back in time to when I’d visited Thomas in his cell, that I could have noticed the unusual setup in time. And she could still be within our borders. Where is Thomas?
“Rest assured,” Anden says when he sees my expression, “that we’re doing everything we can to find her.”
Everything we can might not be enough. Not with our attention and soldiers spread out so thin, trying to fight a war on so many sides. “What do we do now?”
“We return to the Republic tomorrow morning,” he replies. “That’s what we do. And we’ll push the Colonies back without the Antarcticans’ help.”
“Are you really going to give up some of our land to them?” I ask after a pause.
Anden swirls the wine in his glass before taking a sip. “I haven’t turned them down yet,” he says. I can hear the disgust with himself in his voice. His father must’ve seen such a move as the ultimate betrayal of his country.
“I’m sorry,” I say quietly, unsure how to console him.
“I’m sorry too. The good news is I’ve received word that Day and his brother have both successfully evacuated to Los Angeles.” He exhales a long breath. “I don’t want to force him into anything, but I might be running out of options. He’s keeping his word, you know. He’d agreed to help us in any way he could, short of giving up his brother. He’s trying to help, in the hopes that it’ll guilt me out of asking for Eden. I wish we’d brought him. I wish he could see the situation from my point of view.” He looks down.