by K. Makansi
“Where do I start?”
“Every revolution has its artists, Remy. You start with what you know to be true, the pain and grief and anger, and you create from there. You speak truth to power. With your pen. With your brush. With your heart.”
I nod, trying to visualize this, trying to imagine what I could draw or paint that would express or somehow communicate everything the Resistance stands for, what I stand for. But the only images that come to my mind are the dreams that have been haunting me for the last month.
“Dad,” I say, casting around for ideas, “what did you do at the Farms? When you and Mom….” I trail off. I can’t finish.
He shrugs.
“Your mother did most of the work. She had to help people, first, before they would listen to us. While she was helping them medically, I would sit and talk to them. I would ask them questions. ‘Do you like what you do?’ ‘Were you born on this Farm?’ ‘Do you have many friends?’ We bribed them, a lot of the time, to get them coming back to us—the Director gave us extra rations of chocolate and honey so we could hand them out.”
“But what did you say to them?” I ask. “To try to convince them to work with us?”
“There was no one thing, Remy. There are no magic words. I read them my poetry, sometimes. Verses about freedom, and beauty, and about you and Tai. That hit home with a lot of them. But there was no one thing that I said that had any effect. We couldn’t risk them telling any of the Enforcers about us, so we had to be very subtle, to work very slowly, and to keep quiet most of the time and listen to what they said.”
The words from our meeting yesterday echo in my head. We don’t have time for that. And it’s true. We don’t have time to take it slow, not anymore. The Sector—Philip and Corine Orleán—are coming after us like a fever, to sweat us out and destroy us. If we’re going to have any hope of fighting back, any action we take has to be decisive.
Anything I create, artistically or otherwise, must be big, important. Game-changing. Slow isn’t good enough anymore.
I hear dim voices out in the hallway, echoing and grow steadily louder, raucous, almost celebratory. My father and I turn to look at each other in the dim light.
“Who’s making all that noise at this time of night?” he asks. I shake my head.
As the sounds grow closer, I can hear Eli shouting something about uncovering some of Normandy’s old spirits, and someone—is that Firestone?—demanding it had better be stiffer than the wind outside. I leap to my feet, knocking my chair over backwards. My heart accelerates to flight speed as Eli rounds the corner, his arm over Jahnu’s shoulder, who has his hand firmly ensconced in Kenzie’s. Water from Firestone’s dark hair drips down into his face as he follows them all in, and Eli stops and beams down at me and my father.
“We’ve got company!” he announces, proudly, but I’m confused. I smile but I’m frozen in place, unsure, my heart sinking into my gut, because where is Vale?
Jahnu breaks rank and runs over to me, picking me up and swinging me around like a five-year-old, and I thump his back and kiss him on the cheek and try to laugh when Kenzie pulls me away for a hug of her own. But the sound comes out less like a laugh and more like a sob, and it’s only when Jahnu pulls me in close a second time and whispers in my ear that I truly relax.
“He’s here, Remy. It’s okay. He’s with the Director.”
Swirls of bright-colored happiness engulf me. Jahnu and my father embrace like a parent with a lost child. Kenzie and Firestone aren’t exempt from the parental wash of love, though Firestone growls and favors his shoulder. After a few minutes Eli returns with a bottle of some rust-red liquid in hand. Firestone eyes it with trepidation.
“You sure that shit won’t make me blind?”
“Already tested it scientifically,” Eli responds, sporting a grin so wide a small dimple forms. “Drank about a fifth myself first night after we got here. Totally safe!”
“That explains the foul mood the next morning,” I say with a laugh.
“I love you, too, Remy Alexander,” he says and flashes me a rude gesture behind my father’s back.
“You’ll be starving, I imagine,” my father says. I’ll get some leftovers ready.” He heads to the icebox as Eli pries the stopper out of the bottle.
“You gonna drink out the bottle or pour some for all of us?” I say, grabbing a set of ceramic tumblers. Eli pours out a round of the whiskey—or whatever it is.
“To the harvest!” he says, holding up his glass in a toast.
“To the whiskey,” Firestone mutters and tosses back the entire contents of his glass. I wrap my arm around Jahnu and offer my own glass up.
“To the revolution.”
Jahnu looks at me sideways, his eyebrows raised in a question, but I just smile at him.
We toast, and drink, and the warm, fiery liquid blazes down my throat. I’ve spent enough late nights with Eli and Firestone to have learned not to cough, but I can’t stop my eyes from watering. Through blurry eyes, I watch as another figure appears in the doorway. I blink the haze out, still smiling, and find myself looking across the room into the green eyes of Valerian Orleán.
Neither of us move. Jahnu and Kenzie are laughing at Firestone, who seems to be already on his third drink, but the noises have faded to a distant static. Vale watches me, cautious, hesitant, but not afraid like he was just a few weeks ago. His gaze is steady. Our eyes are connected as though by a wire—any pull in the wrong direction and we will break the circuit, the current will dissipate. I feel, rather than see, the tentative smile work its way onto his face, eventually touching his eyes as he continues to look at me.
“Vale,” my father says, breaking what’s seemed to be an age of silence. He’s come up next to him, and I can almost see sparks fly as Vale drags his eyes away from mine and the connection is broken. Vale’s face clouds, looking at my dad with the same hesitation.
As if recognizing this, my father says, “No one should be held accountable for the sins of their fathers—or mothers.” His voice strong with the melody and cadence of a practiced speaker. The room has gone silent. “I will never forget how you fought for Brinn. How you put your life on the line for hers. Please, don’t ever feel unwelcome where I am.”
He steps up to Vale and puts his arms around him, embracing him like a long-lost son. Vale stands a moment, frozen, staring over my father’s shoulder, and once again, his eyes flicker to mine. It takes a moment before he gives in, wraps his arms around my father and presses his body into the embrace. He closes his eyes, squeezing them shut, but he can’t stop tears from escaping, trailing a wet path down his cheeks.
One hug will not solve everything. But maybe a couple rounds of whiskey with my best friends will make the new day break brighter.
9 - REMY
Winter 64, Sector Annum 106, 10h00
Gregorian Calendar: February 22
“Remy!” A whisper accompanied by a sharp elbow to the ribs jolts me awake. I jerk my head up, stiffening, staring around the full room to see if anyone caught me.
It’s Jahnu, at my side, listening diligently to the Director as she goes on about transportation lines, cloning methodology, genome maps, and 3D printing. I shoot a glance at Soren, on my other side, whose eyes are fixed on the Director.
Meanwhile, I am as bored as a cat in a cage. It’s been almost four weeks since Firestone arrived with the rest of our fragmented team, and we’ve been lying low, waiting out the winter and the Sector’s dire threats. Now winter is losing her mettle and the Sector’s threats have proved fruitless, everyone’s on edge, ready to do something. Eli has taken the lead in planning a mission to “liberate” a 3D printer from the Sector’s clutches. Soren and Jahnu jumped on board with computational analysis of the different pathways and transport lines between the Farms, factory towns, and the capital itself. Kenzie’s been helping reengineer the water purification systems here at Normandy, and Miah’s been put to work rehabbing some old airships in storage. I’ve been helping
others with various tasks when they need it, but my days are filled more with drawing, practicing my breathing exercises, keeping up my physical training, and playing scrap ball. Just this morning, anticipating that we would have a busy day, I challenged Jahnu to a game.
We made scrap ball up a few years ago. It’s not complicated, mostly involves whacking a rubber ball at each other with paddles fashioned out of old metal scraps. You score a point by getting the ball into your basket that your opponent defends, but you can only use your paddle and your feet to maneuver the ball.
I am really good at scrap ball.
Well, I am better than Jahnu at scrap ball. The true master of the game, though I am loathe to admit it, is Soren. But he’s not a good sport, at least not with me. He gets all competitive and tries so hard to beat me. It’s just not as fun with him.
“You better watch it, Remy, I’ve got a big comeback planned,” Jahnu had said when I scored my fourth goal.
“Oh yeah?” I said, bouncing the ball against the wall and preparing to whack it into my basket. It went in so hard the basket fell over. “You better be staging a big-ass comeback because I just scored yet another point!” I laughed like a maniac when I beat him 7-2 in the end.
I smile at the memory of my hard-earned victory and glance around the meeting room. Everyone at Normandy is gathered here today, as well as a few higher-ups in the Resistance who are listening in remotely. The Director paces and outlines her marching orders for the entirety of the Resistance. Everyone except me; I’ve gotten no specific assignments so far. None of my skills seem to match what the Resistance needs for this mission. Since dad gave me that paper, I’ve been re-thinking my role in the Resistance. I’m just not sure how to begin. I know one thing, though: I can’t continue like this, in the shadow of everyone else’s projects and Eli’s mission. This is the third time now I’ve nodded off on Jahnu’s or Soren’s shoulders, and the hot mug of tea in my hands isn’t helping.
My eyes lock on Vale. He’s staring at the ceiling, focusing intently on some invisible spot no one else can see. He frowns when the Director mentions Evander Sun-Zi, as though he has a bad taste in his mouth. But otherwise, he looks as disconnected from this meeting as I feel.
“Our short-term goal,” Rhinehouse says, as the Director nods at him, “is to replace the modified food used by Sector Dieticians to produce MealPaks with the untainted, old world seeds Kanaan Alexander left for us in the LOTUS database. Long-term, of course, we aim for complete overthrow of the Okarian Agricultural Consortium and a return to natural farming practices and the founding principles of the Sector.”
“We must concentrate on the seeds,” the Director says, a fierce glint in the narrowing of her eyes, “Substituting unmodified food for the corrupted foods grown on the Farms will be both challenging and dangerous. To begin, we have to be able to replicate and mass-produce the seeds from the LOTUS database. This requires cloning and printing technology, neither of which we have the capacity to build without clean rooms and nanotech. This is a big operation, and it starts with acquiring the technology that will make it possible. Eli has proposed a mission to steal these machines from a Sector seed bank. Eli, would you like to share the details?”
Eli stands, exuberant. He glances at me with a little smile, and I know what he’s thinking. This is the beginning of our revenge, Little Bird. I smile back at him, wondering how Tai would feel if she were here, too. But I can’t seem to muster his enthusiasm. As a member of his team and his best friend, I know every detail of his proposed mission inside and out. But when it comes to my role, I’m little more than a grunt. I can shoot straight and run fast. Once, that would have been enough for me. Now I find myself yearning for more. I try to imagine what Tai would think, what she would want me to do. Simply following orders wouldn’t make her proud. She would want me to do more, to do something with my art, to bring something to the Resistance that the others can’t.
As Eli launches himself into a description of his proposed mission, I yawn. Soren’s hand sneaks down and finds mine, and without thinking, I lace my fingers in his and renew my focus on the meeting.
“Anyone who worked in the upper echelons of the OAC knows that most of their seeds are manufactured at Seed Bank Fairview, which is one of their largest and best-defended facilities. But we’ve learned they have backup tech at Seed Bank Flora. It’s the farthest north and therefore the farthest from us, but security there is lax, and it’s a small facility. We’re targeting Flora as our best bet for stealing their machinery.”
“But Corine Orleán knows we have the LOTUS database, doesn’t she?” one of the Normandy fighters pipes up. Out of the corner of my eye, I watch Vale flinch at the mention of his mother’s name. “She’s not stupid. She knows what we can do with that database. Isn’t that why she tried to murder Soren and Remy when they were prisoners, once she knew they’d discovered the key to the whole thing?”
“Yes,” Soren says. “She’ll undoubtedly have doubled security anywhere with cloning or printing machinery.”
“But without those machines, the LOTUS database does us no good,” Eli points out. “Unless we can bring those seeds to life again, they’re no better than computer code. We know the risks, but we have to take them if we hope to use LOTUS at all.”
“Umm,” Bear pipes up, raising his hand tentatively as if he’s not sure how to go about speaking. Eli looks at him expectantly. “What exactly is a seed bank?”
My father and Rhinehouse recently took Bear aside and told him that he was welcome to speak up in our meetings anytime he wanted, as he’s one of the very few Resistance members from the Farms.
“Your input is invaluable,” my father said to him. “You’re one of the only Farm workers to leave a Farm of your own volition.”
“And you’re the only one we have with us now,” Rhinehouse added in the friendliest of his gruff voices. “There are a few at other bases, but you’re the only one here. We can use your knowledge and ideas.”
Eli looks as though he’s trying to suppress a laugh, but the Director glares at him and answers for him.
“All the food you grew on the Farms came from seeds that are manufactured and stored at one of five different OAC Seed Banks.”
“Oh,” Bear says. “So every year, the seeds we plant come straight from a machine? All that work we did collecting, drying, and categorizing seeds on the Farms…”
“Was a lie,” Soren finishes for him. “They’re probably all composted and returned to the soil, but the only seeds you grew were manufactured at Seed Banks using OAC genetic manipulations, printed by the millions.”
“It seems so … unnatural.” Bear says, looking a little sad.
“There nothing wrong with hybridizing and improving seeds,” Rhinehouse speaks up. “It’s only when DNA is manipulated in an effort to shape or control the people who eat it that it becomes dangerous.”
Bear listens, nodding as Rhinehouse goes on. Bear and I have been spending more time together lately. He still idolizes Soren and is in awe of Eli and Vale, but there are times when he’s overwhelmed by it all and I find him at my side. He’s even taken to drawing, using the paper my father gave me weeks ago. Yesterday, I found a crude but clear drawing of him and Sam together walking through the woods. They were both smiling, as if better days were ahead. With a lump in my throat so big I wondered if I could ever swallow again, I put the drawing back where I found it, sorry for having looked at his private papers.
“These aren’t small pieces of equipment we’re talking about,” Zoe pipes up. “How are you going to get them out and get them back here?”
“And do we have airships with capacity to carry that kind of load?” an unfamiliar man asks.
“They’re not that big—” Eli objects, before Miah jumps in to his rescue with a detailed analysis of the amount of weight an airship can carry before slowing. I notice that the Director and Rhinehouse seem noticeably subdued, as though stepping back to let Eli assume the leadership position. Or as tho
ugh they’re waiting for something. As the questions come steadily and Eli fends them off, I start to drift off again. This time, my mind wanders down Bear’s path, retracing his steps back to the Farm he and Sam originated from. He mentioned a healer they met on the outskirts of the Farm, after Sam was hurt. Could it have been my mother? I picture her with a headscarf and makeup, a disguise, meeting with Sam and Bear, doing everything she could to help. Was my father there? I’ve asked him, but he said they met so many people, he can’t remember. Are there others out there, missing the presence of the itinerant healer and poet?
And then the thought springs to my mind, as it has many times in recent weeks, that I could do that. We need a new artist to speak the truth, my father said. Can I carry our message to the people who need it most? Bear and I have been talking a lot about the Farms lately, about how the Resistance needs to make a more concerted effort to approach the workers, and how someone needs to pick up where my parents left off. Could I do that?
“So who’s going on this mission?” the man from Normandy whose name I don’t know asks. “Who’s on the team?”
“It’ll be a larger team than our usual six-man raid teams,” Eli says. “We’re not aiming for stealth, unlike with most of our past missions. There’s no way we’re going to get in and out without them noticing we’re there. This will be a twelve-man team, including two airship pilots—one for the equipment, once we lift it out, and one for the team.”
“So ten sets of boots on the ground?” the man asks. “Who’s leading?”
“I am,” Eli says, without hesitation. The Director and Rhinehouse glance at each other, and then the Director opens her mouth to speak.
“Not this time,” she says. “Your mission to Seed Bank Carbon was a disaster. We’re going to keep you in a directorial position here at base, but you’re not going with the team.”
Soren has suddenly straightened and leaned forward. I glance at him. There’s surprise written all over his face. If Eli’s not leading the team, this will probably be Soren’s chance to take the helm of a major raid—but he admires Eli and will probably see this as an affront to his leadership abilities.