by K. Makansi
“You might not like how I look, but you’re here.”
“What of it?” He doesn’t look excited to hear what I have to say. I scan the area. There’s hardly anyone nearby. I chose this spot because it’s a quiet place in a busy city, but still, I don’t relish the idea of casually chatting about my treasonous friends and Resistance members on the streets of the capital city.
“Maybe we can continue this conversation somewhere a bit more secluded?”
“You’re crazy if you think I’m going to follow you anywhere. You look like a slum rat. Why should I believe anything you say?”
“Because,” I say quietly, pushing the hood away from my face, “I’m Remy Alexander.” I remember Corine’s bloody promise to publicly execute me if I am ever caught, and I wonder why I’m not more afraid.
He blinks. Leans in. Studies my face like he’s trying to memorize it. I did my makeup so it would only give me the barest of camouflage tonight, counting instead on the shadows and the protection of my hood to keep anyone—human or drone—from recognizing me. I was prepared to tell Shia who I am, to finally reveal myself. I thought I might have to, in order to convince him to listen to me. I’ve disappeared in this city before and I can do it again. I wait for the recoil, the hands out in self-defense, the moment I’ve dreaded and anticipated for almost two months now.
The moment of recognition.
“By the harvest,” he says, his mouth slightly open, “you are.” But the recoil never comes. He makes no move to leave. He’s looking at me like I’m a revelation, a magic trick come to life.
“Are you going to run away, Shia, and report me to the Watchmen?” It comes out sounding half like a threat, and half like a child’s dare. Bet you can’t jump off that swing! “Or are you going to believe what you already know in your gut—that there’s something rotten in Okaria, and that I can lead you to the truth?”
He stares at me and I hold his gaze. I can see the gears turning frenetically in Shia’s mind, the questions, the doubt, the thirst for answers. I am calm. My mind is clear, like the stream below us.
“Lead the way,” he says at last.
8 - REMY
Spring 74, Sector Annum 106, 19h07
Gregorian Calendar: June 1
The lights around me flicker and go out. The hot smell of summer rain and sweaty bodies permeates the air, and I breathe it in, savor it. For a moment the stadium is quiet. From my vantage point behind the upper bleachers, the moonlight casts an eerie glow on the center ring. The announcer’s voice rings out more vibrantly in the dark.
“Citizens of Okaria, let the games begin! The final night of the 25th Okarian Gymnasia Championship starts now as two of our favorite athletes take the wrestling floor! Throw your hands in the air for The Grizzly!”
Thousands of voices roar together as a single spotlight illuminates a hulking man who looks like he’d been carved out of a cliffside. The giant vidscreens around the stadium light up, giving us a close-up of the contestant. His hands alone look to be the size of my head. The Grizzly clenches his fists and takes a moment to throw his head back and roar. His fans go wild, echoing his cry around the gymnasia hall.
“The Grizzly, hailing from Sakari in northwestern Okaria, tore down Oak-Man’s branches and snatched The Falcon out of the air to qualify for the first round of the championship. With nineteen points out of possible twenty-four The Grizzly has a great shot at the victor’s sunflower crest!” The Grizzly gets down on all fours and paws at the ground, playacting his invented character. “With limbs like tree trunks and fists the size of boulders, The Grizzly has outwitted and outwrestled each and every one of his opponents this Gymnasia season. Will he do the same tonight? Will he be able to defeat his challenger and childhood friend: The Wolf?”
Another half of the crowd goes wild as a second spotlight throws an entirely different figure into relief: a tall and slender woman with strong and unnaturally long limbs. When she crouches, she looks like a coiled spring, ready to leap with a canine’s ferocity. Everyone around me is on their feet, clapping, shouting, and stomping.
I alone am quiet. Watching.
“Also from Sakari,” the announcer continues, “The Wolf and The Grizzly grew up together, fought together, and entered their first gymnasia competition the very same year. Now, their rivalry is famous throughout Okaria. The Wolf brought down the undefeated Avalanche last season and won the right to challenge The Grizzly for today’s competition.” The crowd roars, and the woman howls in response, dancing gleefully around her opponent. “Will she continue her ten-match undefeated streak? Or will her old friend and rival send her whimpering like a pup back to Sakari?”
In the arena, Faisal Bergsland and Susannah Malik morph into new characters. They play on primal aspects of their personalities and bring those characteristics into the spotlight. With their costumes and makeup, they assume personas they’re unable to embody in real life. The Wolf is no longer Susannah Malik, hydroponics coordinator at Sakari. The Grizzly has nothing to do with plasma technologist Faisal Bergsland, who lives in Okaria’s Cacti neighborhood, just married and with his first baby on the way. Here in the gymnasia, their day-to-day personalities fade and a new truth is revealed—a truth normally obscured by the banalities of daily life. Here in the gymnasia, a darker, more violent side of them is revealed.
Of course, there is no fight to the death, and both will emerge from the contest mostly unharmed. The gymnasia competition, hosted every year in Okaria by the OAC and featuring contestants from all over the Sector, is nothing but fun and games.
But tonight will be different. Tonight it won’t be all fun and games. A deeper, darker truth will be revealed, not about The Grizzly or The Wolf, but about the streets we walk, the food we eat, the banalities of life that make us all complacent. Tonight I’ll show the citizens of the Sector that Okaria, too, has a violent side.
“How could you have known I wasn’t going to turn you in?” Shia had asked, many hours after I pulled down my hood and showed him who I really am. We sat by the bank of the little stream, partially hidden from the main street by a thicket of cattails, talking in hushed voices for hours. Shia had been a friend of Eli’s, it turned out, when they were younger. When Eli came to the Academy on his TREE scholarship, Shia was one of his first friends. They parted ways quickly, though, and were only passing friends later at the Academy. When Shia failed to make it into the SRI, he went on to work in digital communications, and the two fell out of touch. But he could never bring himself to believe the OAC’s cover story—that Eli had gone crazy after the trauma of the massacre.
I shrugged. “I didn’t know,” I said. “But you asked the right questions. You already had doubts about the OAC’s story. I knew you would at least hear me out.”
“You should tell your story,” Shia said. “Far and wide. There are people like me who would listen. I work in communications, you know. I could help. I don’t work for the Sector. I work for Olympia.”
Olympia, I thought, trying to remember. It had been so long since I watched regular Okarian programming. What was Olympia? And it came to me: the company that hosts and broadcasts the athletic games. Wrestling, running, jumping, boxing. And the annual OAC-sponsored gymnasia competition, one of the most exciting events of the year.
“You do broadcasting for the games?” I asked, racking my memories. “The gymnasia? Isn’t there a big one coming up?”
“Pan-Okaria,” Shia nodded. “The biggest of the year. I’m not directly involved this year, but last year I was the broadcast controller. I know the whole stadium, in and out.” He leaned forward, staring at me. “It’s five days from now. You said earlier you had video footage from the fight at Round Barn. We could play that all across Okaria.”
I sat looking at him, dumbfounded. The sheer power of it. It was almost blinding, the ferocity of his idea.
“If the people didn’t believe Linnea before, they will when they learn about Round Barn.” His mouth was set in a grim line.
&n
bsp; The crowd roars as The Wolf and The Grizzly circle each other in the pit. I pull my scarf tighter around my face, watching the crowd. This is the last night of the 25th annual Okarian Gymnasia Competition. More people attend this event than any other in the city, with the single exception of the chancellor’s annual Okarian Address. The crowd is comprised of more than thirty thousand Sector citizens from all ranks and walks of life. Those of us in the cheap seats—no more than a few hundred seeds—watch the opening match on a series of huge holographic displays in the center of the stadium. Tonight’s event, the wrestling matches, will decide who takes home the OAC’s sunflower crest. The winner will also take home money, glory, and—best of all—a scholarship for themselves or a family member for a single year at the Okarian Academy. The Gymnasia is open to all citizens and is sponsored by the Okarian Agricultural Consortium as a way to publicize and advance the athletic-enhancing abilities of the MealPaks and drug cocktails.
I take a moment to admire the arena, one of Okaria’s most magnificent buildings. The stadium ceiling is built upon a complex exostructure designed with a combination of glass and swooping, curvaceous steel, with indoor hanging gardens to provide cooling during the summer and insulation during the winter. The gardens are rooted in a geodesic frame, arcing up and around the whole of the stadium in an elegant egg-shaped dome. In addition to insulation, the gardens provide electricity and produce a small amount of biolight, bathing the whole stadium in a delicate golden glow. With six giant vidscreens dotted around the arena, it would be impossible to miss the excitement of the contests.
“The Wolf has her opponent in what appears to be an illegal throathold—but no, citizens, the referee has called it a pressure point attack and therefore non-deadly by gymnasia rules, her attack stands, and in five, four, three, two—” the whole stadium begins to count down along with the announcer as The Grizzly thrashes helplessly—“one—and, The Wolf has clinched the match!” The crowd erupts in a deafening roar as The Wolf leaps up and throws her hands triumphantly into the air. “Even with The Grizzly’s point lead, The Wolf will advance and face the victor of the next match …”
The announcer’s voice fades. The sounds collapse and condense into a single dull hum of energy around me. The stadium swirls and melts into greyscale. I practice patience. I lose myself. I become a machine. Now, I am just waiting on Meera’s signal. I am waiting for someone to flip my switch and turn me on.
Spearhead and Windrush compete: Windrush, a broad-shouldered man with long hair, the fastest wrestler I’ve seen thus far, knocks Spearhead out in under a minute. Jason of the Argonauts takes two rounds to pin the Squid, and a character who just calls herself Siberia, with blonde hair and a physique reminiscent of the now-extinct polar bears, takes out her opponent Mastodon in the longest and most torturous round I’ve ever watched. When it comes down to Siberia and Windrush and the crowd breaks for a moment, I tense. My eyes wander away from the vidscreen, focusing instead across the stadium where Meera is supposed to be waiting. Around me, spectators get up to refresh their cocktails. Some open their plasmas to adjust their final bets. In section A4, I see it. The flash. Meera’s bioflare, glancing briefly across the stadium. Once. Twice. Three times it passes me.
I move.
I follow my memory of the map Shia drew for me and Meera, heading directly for the unused staircase that was locked off when the stadium was expanded ten years ago.
“Only the workers know where the old staircases are,” Shia said. “Servers will use it as a shortcut, sometimes. There’s one that leads directly up to the broadcast studio. It’s locked, but you can unlock it with employee biomarkers.” So Meera began the painstaking process of replicating Shia’s fingerprints and superimposing them onto microfibers designed to replicate human flesh.
“Normally these are used for medical purposes,” Meera said, as she copied Shia’s fingerprints over and over again at a hundred different angles on a tiny handheld scanner. “For burn victims, for instance. Or people with scar tissue that won’t heal properly. But years ago Soo-Sun figured out how to use them to make fake fingerprints. She was able to help Outsiders forge identities in the Personhood database.”
Meera meets me at the staircase. With her characteristic raised eyebrows and cheeky expression, she palms the scanner at the door jamb. It slides open without a hitch. She cocks an eyebrow at me and I smile. So far, so good. The stadium is settling into a comfortable hush before the final round. We race up the stairs together, taking them two at a time as we follow the staircase up to the center of it all, where the filmography for the gymnasia is coordinated and the event is broadcast to the ten million citizens of the Okarian Sector.
At the top floor, we pause before opening the door, both of us panting lightly. She swings her backpack around to the front of her body and opens it. She pulls out a small bottle of champagne and two glass flutes, carefully wrapped in waxed leaves, and hands one to me.
“Cheers, darling,” she says, holding her glass out in a fake toast. I wonder if there’s an alternate universe somewhere where Vale never came to the Resistance and Meera and I are lovers. I can’t deny my attraction to her as she puts on her best impression of a sloppy drunk, falling against the door and giggling as she presses her fingertips to the heat sensor and almost collapses when the door opens. We link arms and lean into each other as the door closes silently behind us.
“By the harvest,” Meera says loudly, as bubbly as the champagne in our glasses, as we walk down the hall. “Did you see the clothes Windrush was wearing?”
“Or lack thereof,” I respond, slurring my words, even as my body tenses, ready for a fight. Meera looks at me and winks. Then she opens her hand and drops her glass. It shatters, the noise ringing out through the halls. Around the corner, I can hear voices, too low to make out. Will they both come? Or just one? Will this be easy, or hard?
“Oh, no,” I say as two Watchmen round the corner, approaching us cautiously. A man and a woman. I sigh, resigning myself to the challenge. At least neither of them has pulled a weapon. “I’m so sorry,” I say, to no one in particular. I fall into the wall.
“What are you two doing here?” the male Watchman asks.
“There used to be a bathroom here, I swear,” Meera says, sounding mildly disappointed. She stares around for a moment, as if looking for a door. Then she bends, teetering and unsteady, to try to pick up the shards of glass. I see what the two Watchmen don’t—as she stoops, she drops a small flower, still wrapped in leaves, not yet bloomed. As soon as the flower hits the ground, its petals start to unfold, and within seconds a foul-smelling, noxious gas will start seeping from its anthers. Meera and I both took a heavy dose of the antidote right before we walked into the stadium, but the two Watchmen will be very much incapacitated after just a few seconds of inhaling the toxin.
The female Watchman darts toward Meera, unaware of the flower, trying to stop her before she falls on the glass and slices open her hands. I tense in preparation. Meera lets the woman catch her. For a frozen moment the two look almost like dancers, Meera dipping down in an elegant twist, the Watchman counterbalancing her before they pull back up for a dramatic spin.
Then Meera’s fingers encircle the other woman’s wrist. She clamps down. She twists the woman’s arm across her body, spinning her a hundred and eighty degrees, and grabs her free hand as it goes out wide in a desperate attempt to steady herself. Swiftly she pulls both of her hands behind her back. The woman yelps in pain, and Meera pulls the Watchman’s body in front of her own, a human shield in defense against deadly fire from the other officer.
The whole thing takes about a second and a half. The other Watchman jerks his Bolt out, but his instinct is to aim for Meera. Distracted, he barely notices me. But the fumes are already starting to take a toll. His weapon is unsteady and his legs are as wobbly as mine looked just a moment ago.
In the same instant as Meera grabs the woman’s wrist, I launch, using the wall to propel myself forward. In a move that migh
t have finally scored me a goal in our old games of football at Thermopylae, I slide-tackle the other Watchman’s shins, and he collapses in an awkward heap on top of me.
He’s small for a man, but his weight might still have pinned me if I hadn’t rolled out of the way at the last second. He’s managed to hold onto his Bolt, but I scramble to my knees to pull it from him. By this point, he’s hardly putting up a fight. I pull the gun out of his limp hands. He stares at me for a moment, his jaw slack. Then his eyes roll back and his head falls uselessly to the floor.
Meera’s Watchman has also collapsed. She’s lying on her side, at Meera’s feet, her arms tied behind her back with a strip of bioplastic.
“Concentrated, aerosolized valerian root,” she whispers. Vale would be proud. “Your own James Rhinehouse came up with that, you know. It’s not an Outsider concoction.”
I stare at the two Watchmen, lying limp as if dead, and I remember Rhinehouse telling us about the bioweapons he’d spent so many years creating.
“Botanical guard dogs,” I’d said, walking through his hidden lab. “That’s terrifying.”
“Yes,” he said, a shadow clouding his face. “Now, I spend my time developing effective antidotes.” I could hear the guilt in his voice, the regret that he’d spent so much of his life turning these beautiful plants into deadly weapons.
“Come on,” Meera whispers. “Let’s get the drone!”
We spare a few seconds to tie up the other Watchman and gag both of them. We leave them with the flower, which will continue blooming for at least another fifteen minutes, and the effects of the gas won’t start to wear off for another hour after that. I follow Meera down the hall, pulling the knife out of my boot as we creep up to the corner, waiting. She risks a glance around the edge of the wall, and pulls back immediately.