The Gathering: Book One of The Uprising Series

by Bernadette Giacomazzo

  I saw Rosie leave the room and begin to head down a flight of stairs, and I took that as an opportunity to get her alone, away from the rabid Cabal and out of sight of the vainglorious Emperor. She’d taken a few steps away from her building, and into Emperor’s Park, before passing by the wilting star magnolia tree that I was hiding behind. It was only when I saw the back of her slicked back, perfect ponytail – what a difference from the one she was wearing when we first met, I thought – that I saw the opportunity to get her alone and began walking behind her.

  “You’ve come a long way from making arepas on Ludlow Street,” I said, tapping her on the shoulder when I finally caught up with her.

  She spun around, her face scrunched up in fear, and for a split second, I thought she was going to hit me. But just as quickly, she relaxed as her eyes registered who owned the disembodied voice. “Jamie,” she whispered tearfully. “You’re here. You’re alive. I didn’t realize…”

  “How the hell did you not?” I asked, furrowing my eyebrows and side-eyeing her. “Your damned husband has been hunting me for decades.”

  “I knew that,” she said, taking ragged breaths. “But just the fact that he was never able to take you alive led me to believe that you were…you know…” Her voice trailed off.

  I wasn’t convinced, and I continued to stare at her intently as I scratched my left cheek, which was now beginning to show the first signs of salt-and-pepper beard stubble. “First of all, why the hell are you talking like you’re Queen Elizabeth? Second, let me just state it for the record: you give your asshole husband way too much credit if you think he can take me down.”

  Rosie bit her lower lip, then shifted her eyes down. I put my hand under her chin and tipped her face up, forcing her eyes to meet mine as I tried, desperately, to search for a sign of the Rosie I once knew. “Rosie,” I whispered intently. “It’s me. You don’t have to hide from me.”

  Her face was a blank slate. “My name is Rose. Rose Cunningham,” she said with flat affect.

  “Oh, bullshit,” I whispered, even more intently. “Whatever happened to ‘call me Rosie, everyone else does’? What happened to that woman who was making arepas in the kitchen with my Angelique?”

  That got her attention, and her deep brown eyes flashed with fire as she balled up her fists and began swinging at me. “You shit! You bastard! You did it! You almost killed my baby!”

  I ducked, bobbed and weaved, avoiding each blow as I carefully tried to talk her down from the ledge. “Rosie! What the hell are you talking about? I didn’t do that shit! I swear!”

  She continued to swing at me. “Yes! Yes, you did!” she squealed tearfully, repeating the same “yes, yes” with each swing, her voice getting louder each time.

  “Do you want to knock it off before the fuckin’ Cabal finds us, Rosie? The fuck is wrong with you? Jesus Christ!” I was shouting despite myself and began scanning the landscape frantically for Cabal soldiers that would have undoubtedly heard us, all while bobbing and weaving like a prizefighter to avoid getting punched in the face.

  She swung even harder and squealed even louder. “You tried to kill my baby! Just like you killed yours!”

  That line finally got me to react, and I had to steady my breathing to stop from clocking her in the mouth. Even in the throes of the worst of my Faustian behavior, I never hit a woman, and neither did any of my bandmates – the thought of violence against a woman, let alone a woman we’d loved, didn’t even cross our drug-addled minds.

  Instead, I grabbed her wrists and forced them down to her sides, holding them in place at hip level as she struggled, trying to hit me, until she finally began whimpering in defeat.

  “Now you listen to me, Ramira Diaz, and you listen well,” I began, angrily. “You may have forgotten everything you were and are, but I sure as fuck haven’t forgotten a goddamn thing, and let me rest assure you, I never fuckin’ will.”

  Her lower lip was trembling, her eyes were watering, and it became evident that she was on the verge of tears. Still, I continued. “So, let me get a few things out of the way now, so we’re not confused. Number one: that blast? It wasn’t me. It wasn’t anyone tied to me. It wasn’t anyone whose name I can even spell. Because let me assure you, again, that if it were me, or anyone tied to me, we’d have burned down the entire fuckin’ city, even if it meant killing ourselves in the process, and wouldn’t have left a survivor anywhere on this God-forsaken island.

  “Number two: you know goddamn well I didn’t kill Angelique or our baby. Now I wear their death on my heart every. Fucking. Day. I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in twenty fucking years, from the day they were killed, because I can’t get their murders out of my mind. There are times I wish I was dead, just so that I don’t have to live with the guilt of their murders, but no, here I am, and ain’t that a fuckin’ bitch from Hell. I’d give all the money in the world to have my Angelique back. I’d trade my life for Jordan’s any day of the week. And my son – my only legacy – never had a chance at life, and you think that’s all fair?

  “Number three – and this is the most important part, Rosie, goddamnit, you’d better fuckin’ listen to this if you listen to nothing else: remember that promise I made to you in the hospital room? All those years ago? Because I fuckin’ do. And that’s why when Evanora and Tommy came down the Bowery after the blast, and I realized who she was, I made sure she was safe and clean and warm…”

  Rosie looked shocked. “Wait. She came to you?”

  I searched her face, trying to see if I could register where her loyalties lie before I continued to answer the question. For some reason, however, I couldn’t make it out. I even tried to read Rosie’s mind using a gentle form of psi, but I still couldn’t read her mind at all. It was like trying to probe a brick wall. So, to protect Evanora – and the rest of us – I chose to cover my tracks. “Yeah,” I said airily, “she mentioned something about listening to Uprising Radio.”

  The name of Uprising Radio registered some type of recognition with Rosie, and her eyes lit up slightly. “My baby has heard Uprising Radio?”

  “I don’t know for sure,” I continued, still adopting an airy affect, “but I’m pretty sure that’s what she said.” Using my Cabal training, I put a mental wall between my thoughts and Rosie, mostly because I didn’t know how much training she’d had in the psi arts, and I wasn’t sure if she, too, could read my mind. And if, God forbid, her loyalties lied with that pathetic excuse of her husband, I could at least protect, if not myself, then the whole Uprising movement.

  I made sure the wall was firmly in place before I continued. “I think I’ve heard Uprising Radio a few times, but I don’t know much about it, who does it, or anything of the sort.”

  “Yeah,” Rosie said, hesitantly, behind a mental brick wall of her own, “I have no idea, either.”

  We were calmer, now – our breath was steady, our thoughts were collected, and Rosie’s fists were limp. I finally felt confident that she wasn’t going to try to hit me again, so I loosened my grip on her wrists.

  But I suddenly found myself unable to let her go, so I slid my hands from her wrists to her hands and grabbed her fingers lightly. I was overcome with emotion.

  “What is it, Jamie?” Her voice was cracking.

  I exhaled loudly, then drew in a ragged breath. “Do you think about him, Rosie? Do you think about Jordan at all?”

  She closed her eyes and allowed the tears to fall as she exhaled shakily. “Every day of my life,” she said softly. “There’s not a day that goes by that Jordan doesn’t cross my mind. Every time I look at Evanora – every time I hear her laugh – he comes to my mind. Sometimes, she gives me this look – you remember, Jamie? You remember when Jordan would hear something that was just too stupid for words, and he would get this look on his face, like, ‘were you dropped on your head as a child?’” – and to this, I gave a half-smile and a nod – “and now, she gets that look. And that one eyebrow” – she took her finger and drew on her left eyebr
ow – “it would just go up like…like…”

  She dropped her hand as her voice trailed off, her eyes filling with tears.

  I nodded my head, closed my eyes, and sighed. “Fuckin’ guy,” I said, opening my eyes and looking at Rosie. “So. You didn’t see me, right?”

  Rosie smiled and winked at me. “Ivan Sapphire? Please. Get over yourself, rock star.” She squeezed my hands one last time for good measure. “I’m going to leave now. I’m not going to look back because I don’t want to see where you’re going. This way, if someone with bad intentions against you asks me if I know where you are, I can answer honestly when I say I don’t know. But just because I don’t look back, doesn’t mean I want to see you go. I need you to understand that, Jamie Ryan. I don’t need you to over-analyze things that don’t need over-analyzing. I need you to let me go, Jamie Ryan, and I need you to know that I love you, and I thank you, from the bottom of my heart.”

  She finally let go of my hands, gave me a slight nod, then turned and walked back to her home, never looking back.

  I watched her, silently, keeping the promise I made so long ago to Jordan Barker and didn’t leave what was once known as Central Park until I saw, for sure, that she was safe inside.

  Battery Park City was now, by all accounts, a dump.

  On my way back to the apartment, I’d received a transmission from Basile that told me to meet him down here, as he’d received some intel that suggested that he’d find who caused the Emperor’s Ball blast amongst these ruins.

  But the minute I got there, I curled my upper lip in disgust. “What a fucking dump,” I muttered to myself as I surveyed the landscape before me.

  From that fateful day on the 11th of September, all those years ago, Lower Manhattan was a bombed-out wasteland. For a brief period after that day on the 11th of September, all those years ago, wealthy developers from different countries tried to gentrify that area beyond all recognition, but when Emperor came to power, Battery Park City, once again, became a bombed-out no man’s land coated in dust and soot, and it stayed in that perpetual state of volatility from that day to this, especially as the new inhabitants began to move in and claim the area as their own, and there was no one amongst the psied out populace to claim otherwise.

  It was hard to believe that anyone could live in these bombed out, barely-habitable buildings, let alone call them home…but they did.

  We knew these people as the Warriors.

  They somehow managed to escape the notice of Emperor and the Cabal, and few – if any – were subject to the terror of psi, but that was, in part, because they – like us -- moved under the cover of night and were unafraid to die for that which they believed in.

  Maybe it was their fear – their fear of coming across the one set of people that weren’t afraid to die – that kept the Cabal from pursing the Warriors with any sort of intensity.

  But whatever the case, they were here with us, now, and they were terrifying, and beautiful, in equal measure.

  The men and the women all seemed to be cut from the same cloth – a cloth that cut an imposing, yet striking, figure against the new New York City skyline.

  All the men were tall, tanned, brawny and broad, with matching long black hair made of fine-spun silk that they wore in perfect cornrows pulled tightly to their scalps. They, like us, were dressed all in black, but chose to adorn their outfits with matching matte black bulletproof vests and glossy black leather jackets. They, unlike us, would denote their family by their tattoos, which they wore exclusively up and down their left arm, and to the untrained eye, looked like a series of circles, squares, and triangles. If a Warrior man wanted to know if another man was a member of their family, all they had to do was compare their sleeve-like tattoos – the more identical their tattoos were, the closer they were related by blood.

  The Warrior women were just as tall as the men, and just as intimidating – and beautiful – as their male counterparts. Golden tanned and silky haired, the women would wear their hair in a strange geometric design and they would often forgo wearing tops in favor of being bare-breasted, even in the freezing cold of the New York City winters. Some of the senior members of the respective families would have tattoos on their breasts that would match the sleeve-like tattoos of the senior men of their tribe.

  And it was this vision of tribal men and women – who were, now, dancing with each other in a primitive, explicit dance that resembled a Hennessy-and-cocaine-fueled group sex encounter that the Faust boys and I had somewhere in Charlotte, North Carolina some twenty years prior (but whose precise details I don’t remember, because if you could remember, you weren’t there…) – that greeted me as the sun started to set in Battery Park City.

  Kanoa noticed my arrival immediately and pogoed through the maddening crowd of ululating women and growling men until he found his way to me. And how could he miss me, really, when I stood out like a proverbial sore thumb against these giants amongst men?

  “Over here,” Kanoa called out as he grabbed my wrists and jerked me, violently, away from everyone. “You’d better not leave my side for five minutes, Jamie Ryan.”

  I tried to stifle a giggle and failed miserably. “Yes, Daddy,” I said, the laugh evident in my voice, “I’ll hold your hand on the Tilt-a-Whirl.”

  “Jamie, shut the fuck up,” Kanoa said, an air of exasperation evident in his voice, as he led me towards the Oval Lawn, east of the Esplanade, and away from the tribal dance being performed before us. “Don’t fucking move from here, do you understand me?”

  I looked around. Even if I wanted to move away from the maddening crowd, I had no choice but to watch, with fascination, as the men began to beat their fists on the concrete rhythmically, grunting in time with the beat.

  “Kanoa, man, what the hell are they doing?” I stage-whispered to him as I watched their performance.

  “Announcing the arrival of their leader,” Basile volunteered as he seemed to appear out of nowhere. “We told him that you were our leader, and he wanted to meet with you directly in a ‘formal ceremony,’ so here we are. He’s apparently a man who goes by the name of Raw.”

  “Raw?” I repeated. “Basile, Kanoa, hold on – how the hell do you two know all this?”

  Kanoa scoffed and rolled his eyes. “Just what the hell did you think we were doing while you were off talking to Rosie, man? Getting pedicures? Nah, man – we talked to these people. That’s how we found shit out.”

  I was skeptical of his claims, and my raised eyebrow betrayed as much. “How did you talk to these people?” I asked. “They don’t speak a word of English.”

  “You’re right, they don’t,” volunteered Basile, “but apparently, the eldest daughter of the tribal leader speaks perfect English. This Raw character does nothing but grunt and growl, I swear fo’God, and somehow, his baby girl not only understands every word he says, but she’s not afraid to tell the tagate ese like us where to go and how to get there in the most perfect English I ever heard in recent times.”

  “Tagate ese?” I asked.

  “Yeah, tagate ese,” Kanoa repeated. “Strangers.”

  The beating on the concrete suddenly got louder and the women began ululating louder as three shadowy figures approached us.

  Two women, one man.

  The older woman, probably the leader’s wife and unquestionably the other woman’s mother, approached us, bare-chested, with her head held high. She didn’t smile, or frown – she just gave us all a stoic face that was filled with equal parts quiet dignity and battle weariness. The bottom of her head was shaved, and the top of her head was arranged in a dodecahedral pattern that tapered off to a long, flowing curl.

  Despite the lack of emotion on her face, the lines of age and stress were evident, and their wear-and-tear were in perfect compliment to the gray hairs that were speckled throughout the woman’s impressive mane. I couldn’t help but wonder how similar she and Rosie would live if their circumstances were identical – if Rosie, for example, hadn’t married Emp
eror and into wealth and privilege, and was instead forced to raise her child as a single mother in the Bronx in the old New York, struggling from paycheck to paycheck, subjected to the ravages of poverty and life in what was once known as “the hood.”

  If she had to – if Rosie had led the life that so many racists in the old New York thought she would live, never more and never less, and always conscious of her social standing in life – Rosie would look no different than the Warrior woman standing before me.

  And then there was her daughter, who was the same age as Evanora, but whose face registered a wisdom about her that stood in stark contrast to Evanora’s sheltered life of privilege. Dark and raven-haired like her mother, the daughter of the leader was cloaked in a white fringe dress that sat just below her shoulder line, tucked safely under a white wool Friar’s cloak, and complimented by an off-white pearl necklace whose strands, in various lengths, hung over her shoulders and down to the top of her breasts.

  But it was her father – the woman’s husband – the Warrior chieftain – that cut the most imposing figure of all. He was well over six feet tall, and probably closer to seven feet tall, because both Basile and I were a few inches over an even six feet and we had to crane up our necks to meet his eyes. His long, silky cornrows waved wildly from his head, giving him a Kokopelli-like appearance. His shredded, strong muscles looked waxy under his skin, which was laden with tattoos that seemed to be arranged in a random pattern, save for the crown on the top of his left bicep (which, I suspected, was indicative of his rank amongst the Warriors). He had broad, thick lips that he hid behind a horseshoe mustache, and he wore a black cape made of various pieces of fur and leather stitched together in a strange pattern.