Unfettered

by Terry Brooks

  So many of Gerald’s plans had gone just like this. They counted victories in lives, like picking up spilled grains of rice. They were changing lives, but not the world.

  “Come on,” he ordered. “We’ve got a door.”

  He threw the card at the wall of the alley where they’d hidden. It stuck, glowed blue, and grew. Through the blue glare a gaping hole showed. Holding hands, they dove into it, and it collapsed behind them.

  “Lame coach horses? Hangovers?” Gerald said, pacing back and forth along one of the bookshelves. “We’re trying to save civilization.”

  “What is civilization but the people who live within it?” Clare said softly. It was how she said anything around Gerald.

  “Ninety-six lives saved,” Major said. “What did anyone else accomplish?” Silent gazes, filled with visions of destruction, looked back at him. The rest of them: Fred, Ildie, and Marco. Their jackets were ruffled, their faces weary, but they weren’t covered with dust and ragged like Clare and Major were. They hadn’t gotten that close.

  Gerald paced. “In the end, what does it mean? For us?” The question was rhetorical because no answer would satisfy him. Though Clare thought, it means whatever we want it to mean.

  Clare and Major never bothered hiding their attachment from the others. What could the company say to disapprove? Not even Gerald could stop them, though Ildie often looked at her askance, with a scowl, as if Clare had betrayed her. Major assured her that the other woman had never held a claim on him. Clare wondered if she might have fallen in love with any of the men—Fred, Benton, or even Marco—if any of them had stood by Gerald to recruit her instead of Major. But no, she felt her fate was to be with Major. She didn’t feel small with him.

  Hand in hand, careless, they’d leave the others and retreat to the closet in an unused corner of the warehouse’s second floor, where they’d built a pallet just for them. A nest, Clare thought of it. Here, she had Major all to herself, and he seemed happy enough to be hers. She’d lay across his naked chest and he’d play with her hair. Bliss.

  “Why did you follow Gerald when he came for you?” she asked after the disaster with the exploded building.

  “He offered adventure.”

  “Not for the politics, then? Not because you believe in his party?”

  “I imagine it’s all one and the same in the long run.”

  The deep philosophy of this would have impressed her a few years ago. Now, it seemed like dodging the question. She propped herself on an elbow to study him. She was thinking out loud.

  “Then why do you still follow him? You could find adventure without him, now that he’s shown you the way.”

  He grinned sleepily and gathered her closer. “I’d wander aimlessly. His adventures are more interesting. It’s a game.”

  “Oh.”

  “And why do you still follow him? Why did you take my hand the day we met?”

  “You were more interesting than what I left behind.”

  “But I ask you the same question, now. I know you don’t believe in his politics. So why do you still follow him?”

  “I don’t follow him. I follow you.”

  His expression turned serious, frowning almost. His hand moved from her hair to her cheek, tracing the line of her jaw as if she were fragile glass. “We’re a silly pair, aren’t we? No belief, no faith.”

  “Nothing wrong with that. Major—if neither of us is here for Gerald, we should leave. Let’s go away from this, be our own cohort.” Saying it felt like rebellion, even greater than the rebellion of leaving home in the first place.

  His voice went soft, almost a whisper. “Could we really? How far would we get before we started missing this and came back?”

  “I wouldn’t miss the others,” she said, jaw clenched.

  “No, not them,” he said. “But the game.”

  Gerald could fervently agitate for the opposite party, and Major would play the game with as much glee. She could understand and still not agree.

  “You think we need Gerald, to do what we do?”

  He shook his head, a questioning gesture rather than a denial. “I’m happy here. Aren’t you?”

  She could nod and not lie because here, at this small moment with him, she was happy.

  One could change the world by nudging chances, Clare believed. Sometimes, she went off by herself to study chances the others wouldn’t care about.

  At a table in the corner of a café—the simple, homelike kind that students frequented, with worn armchairs, and chessboards and pieces stored in boxes under end tables with old lamps on them—Clare drew a pattern in a bit of tea that dripped from her saucer. Swirled the shape into two circles, forever linked. In front of the counter, a boy dropped a napkin. The girl behind him picked it up. Their hands brushed. He saw that she had a book of sonnets, which he never would have noticed if he hadn’t dropped the napkin. She saw that he had a book of philosophy. They were students, maybe, or odd enthusiasts. One asked the other, are you a student? The answer didn’t matter because the deed was done. In this world, in this moment, despite all the unhappiness, this small thing went right.

  This whole thing started because Gerald saw patterns. She wondered later: Did he see the pattern, identify them because of it, and bring them together? Was that his talent? Or did he cause the pattern to happen? If not for Gerald, would she have gone on, free and ignorant, happily living her life with no knowledge of what she could do? Or was she always destined to follow this path, use this talent with or without the others? Might she have spent her time keeping kittens from running into busy streets or children from falling into rivers? And perhaps one of those children would grow up to be the leader Gerald sought, the one who would change the world.

  All that had happened, all their work, and she still could not decide if she believed in destiny.

  She wouldn’t change how any of it had happened because of Major. The others marveled over Gerald’s stern, Cossack determination. But she fell in love with Major, with his shining eyes.

  “We have to do better, think harder, more creatively. Look how much we’ve done already, never forget how much we’ve done.”

  After almost a decade of this, only six of the original ten were left. The diehards, as mad as Gerald. Even Major looked on him with that calculating light in his eyes. Did Gerald even realize that Major’s passion was for tactics rather than outcome?

  “Opportunities abound, if we have the courage to see them. The potential for good, great good, manifests everywhere. We must have the courage to see it.”

  Rallying the troops. Clare sighed. How many times had Gerald given variations of this speech in this dingy warehouse, hidden by spells and out of the world? They all sounded the same. She’d stopped being able to see the large patterns a long time ago and could only see the little things now. A dropped napkin in a café. She could only change the course of a few small lives.

  “There’s an assassination,” said Gerald. “It will tip the balance into a hundred years of chaos. Do you see it?”

  Fred smiled. “We can stop it. Maybe jam a rifle.”

  “A distraction, to throw off the assassin’s aim.”

  “Or give him a hangover,” Major said. “We’ve had great success with hangovers and oversleeping.” He glanced at Clare with his starry smile. She beamed back. Fred rolled his eyes.

  “Quaint,” Gerald said, frowning.

  The game was afoot. So many ways to change a pattern. Maybe Clare’s problem was she saw them as people, not patterns. And maybe she was the one holding the rest back. Thinking too small. She wasn’t part of their pattern anymore.

  This rally was the largest Clare had ever seen. Her generation had grown up hearing grandparents’ stories of protest and clashes (civil war, everyone knew, but the official history said clashes, which sounded temporary and isolated). While their parents grew up in a country that was tired and sedate, where they were content to consolidate their little lives and barricade themselves against the wo
rld, the children wondered what it must have been like to believe in idealism.

  Gerald’s target this time was the strongest candidate the PTP had ever put forward for Premiere. The younger generation flocked to Jonathan Smith. People adored him—unless they supported the RLP. Rallies like this were the result. Great crowds of hope and belief, unafraid. And the crowds who opposed them.

  Gerald said that Jonathan Smith was going to be assassinated. Here, today, at the rally, in front of thousands. All the portents pointed to this. But it would not result in martyrdom and change, because the assassin would be one of his own and people would think, our parents were right, and go home.

  Clare and Major stood in the crowd like islands, unmoving, unfeeling, not able to be caught up in the exhilarating speech, the roaring response. She felt alien. These were her people, they were all human, but never had she felt so far removed. She might have felt god-like, if she believed in a god who took such close interest in creation as to move around it like this. God didn’t have to, because there were people like Gerald and Major.

  “It’s nice to be saving someone,” Clare said. “I’ve always liked that better.”

  “It only has to be a little thing,” Major said. “Someone in the front row falls and breaks a bone. The commotion stalls the attack when Smith goes to help the victim. Because he’s like that.”

  “We want to avoid having a victim at all, don’t we?”

  “Maybe it’ll rain.”

  “We change coach horses, not the weather.” But not so well that they couldn’t keep an anarchist bomb from arriving at its destination. They weren’t omnipotent. They weren’t gods. If they were, they could control the weather.

  She had tried sending a message about the government building behind Gerald’s back. He would have called the action too direct, but she’d taken the risk. She’d called the police, the newspapers, everyone, with all the details they’d conjured. Her information went into official records, was filed for the appropriate authorities, all of which moved too slowly to be of any good. It wasn’t too direct after all.

  Inexorable. This path of history had the same feeling of being inexorable. Official channels here would welcome an assassination. The police would not believe her. They only had to save one life.

  She wished for rain. The sky above was clear.

  They walked among the crowd, and it was grand. She rested her hand in the crook of Major’s elbow; he held it there. He wore a happy, silly smile on his face. They might have been in a park, strolling along a gentle river in a painting.

  “There’s change here,” he said, gazing over the angry young crowd and their vitriolic signs.

  She squeezed his arm and smiled back.

  The ground they walked on was ancient cobblestone. This historic square had witnessed rallies like this for a thousand years. In such times of change, gallows had stood here, or hooded men with axes. How much blood had soaked between these cobbles?

  That was where she nudged. From the edges of the crowd, they were able to move with the flow of people surging. They could linger at the edges with relative freedom of movement, so she spotted a bit of pavement before the steps climbing to the platform where the demagogue would speak. A toe caught on a broken cobblestone would delay him. Just for a second. Sometimes that was enough to change the pattern.

  “Here,” she said, squeezing Major’s arm to anchor him. He nodded, pulled her to the wall of a town house, and waited.

  While she focused on the platform, on the path that Jonathan Smith would take—on the victim—Major turned his attention to the crowd, looking for the barrel of a gun, the glint of sunlight off a spyglass, counter-stream movement in the enthusiastic surge. The assassin.

  Someone else looking for suspicious movement in a crowd like this would find them, Clare thought. Though somehow no one ever did find them.

  Sometimes, all they could do was wait. Sometimes, they waited and nothing happened. Sometimes they were too late or early, or one of the others had already nudged one thing or another.

  “There,” Major said, the same time that Clare gripped his arm and whispered, “There.”

  She was looking to the front where the iconic man, so different than the bodyguards around him, emerged and waved at the crowd. There, the cobblestone—she drew from her pocket a cube of sugar that had been soaked in amaretto, crumbled it, let the grains fall, then licked her fingers. The sweet, heady flavor stung her tongue.

  Major lunged away from her. “No!”

  The stone lifted, and the great Jonathan Smith tripped. A universal gasp went up.

  Major wasn’t looking to the front with everyone else. He was looking at a man in the crowd, twenty feet away, dissolute. A troublemaker. Hair ragged, shirt soiled, faded trousers, and a canvas jacket a size too large. Boots made for kicking. He held something in his right fist, in a white-knuckled grip.

  This was it, the source, the gun—the locus, everything. This was where they learned if they nudged enough, and correctly. But the assassin didn’t raise a straight arm to aim. He cocked back to throw. He didn’t carry a gun, he held a grenade.

  Gerald and the others had planned for a bullet. They hadn’t planned for this.

  Major put his shoulder to the man’s chest and shoved. The would-be assassin stumbled, surprised, clutched the grenade to his chest—it wasn’t active, he hadn’t lit the fuse. Major stopped him. Stopped the explosive, stopped the assassin, and that was good. Except it wasn’t, and he didn’t.

  Smith recovered from his near-fall. He mounted the platform. The bodyguard behind him drew his handgun, pointed at the back of Smith’s head, and fired. The shot echoed and everyone saw it and spent a moment in frozen astonishment. Even the man with the grenade. Everyone but Major, who was on the ground, doubled over, shivering as if every nerve burned.

  Clare fell on top of him, crying, clutching at him. His eyes rolled back, enough to look at her, enough for her to see the fear in them. If she could have held onto him, carried him with her, saved him, she would have. But he’d put himself back into the world. He’d acted, plunged back into a time and place he wasn’t part of anymore, and now it tore him to pieces. The skin of his face cracked under her hands, and the blood and flesh underneath was black and crumbling to dust.

  She couldn’t sob hard enough to save him.

  Clare was lost in chaos. Then Gerald was there with his cloak. So theatrical, Major always said. Gerald used the cloak like Major used the jack of diamonds. He swept it around the three of them, shoving them through a doorway.

  But only Clare and Gerald emerged on the other side.

  The first lesson they learned, that Major forgot for only a second, the wrong second: they could only build steps, not leap. They couldn’t act directly, they couldn’t be part of the history they made.

  So Jonathan Smith died, and the military coup that followed ruined everything.

  Five of them remained.

  The problem was she could not imagine a world different from the burned-out husk that resulted from the war fought over the course of the next year. Gerald’s plan might have worked, bringing forth a lush Eden where everyone drank nectar and played hopscotch with angelic children, and she still would have felt empty.

  Gerald’s goal had always been utopia. Clare no longer believed it was possible.

  The others were very kind to her, in the way anyone was kind to a child they pitied. Poor dear, but she should have known better. Clare accepted the blanket Ildie put over her shoulders and the cup of hot tea Fred pressed into her hands.

  “Be strong, Clare,” Ildie said, and Clare thought, easy for her to say.

  “What next, what next,” Gerard paced the warehouse, head bent, snarling almost, his frown was so energetic.

  “Corruption scandal?” Marco offered.

  “Too direct.”

  “A single line of accounting, the wrong number in the right place, to discredit the regime,” Ildie said.

  Gerald stopped pacing. “Maybe.
”

  Another meeting. As if nothing had happened. As if they could still go on.

  “Major was the best of us,” Clare murmured.

  “We’ll just have to be more careful,” Ildie murmured back.

  “He made a mistake. An elementary mistake,” Gerald said, and never spoke of Major again.

  The village a mile outside the city had once been greater, a way station and market town. Now, it was a skeleton. The war had crushed it, burned it, until only hovels remained, the scorched frames of buildings standing like trees in a forest. Brick walls had fallen and lay strewn, crumbling, decaying. Rough canvas stretched over alcoves provided shelter. Cooking fires burned under tripods and pots beaten out of other objects. What had been the cobbled town square still had the atmosphere of an open-air market, people shouting and milling, bartering fiercely, trading. The noise made a language all its own, and a dozen different scents mingled.

  Despite the war and bombing, some of the people hadn’t fled, but they hadn’t tried to rebuild. Instead, they seemed to have crawled underground when the bombardment began, and when it ended they reemerged, continued their lives where they left off as best they could, with the materials they had at hand. Cockroaches, Clare thought, and shook the thought away.

  At the end of the main street, where the twisted, naked foundations gave way and only shattered cobblestones remained, a group of men were digging a well into an old aquifer, part of the water system of the dying village. They were looking for water. Really, though, at this point they weren’t digging, but observing the amount of dirt they’d already removed and arguing. They were about to give up and try again somewhere else. A whole day’s work wasted, a day they could little afford when they had children to feed and material to scavenge.

  Clare helped. Spit on her hands, put them on the dusty earth, then rubbed them together and drew patterns in the dust. Pressed her hands to the ground again. The aquifer that they had missed by just a few feet seeped into the ditch they’d dug. The well filled. The men cheered.