“You think you’re ready to play with the big boys, kiddo?” Dana chuckled coldly.
Dean stood in front of Dana and stared at him for what seemed to be an eternity. The entire room held its breath, waiting to see who would triumph.
Finally, Dana reached forward faster than anyone could blink and turned Dean around, pulling his arms up behind his back and causing the teenager to let out a startled yelp of pain.
“You’re adorable, but you don’t stand a chance, and that doesn’t make this any fun,” Dana said with a condescending laugh. He walked behind Dean, forcing him forward with his arms bent awkwardly behind his back as he was led to his seat.
“Now, you sit down and be a good boy,” Dana smiled, bringing him to his table and sitting him down sharply. After Dean was seated and his arms were released, Dana leaned down to his ear and whispered something I could not hear.
As Dana moved away from Dean, the teenage boy looked angrier than hell, but he did not move and I felt relief crash over me like a wave when I realized the confrontation was back in safer territory.
Dana moved to the front of the room.
“If I hear of any of the Commission children getting any ideas about being brave and sneaking into the back, you will find yourselves permanent residents of the holding cells. Be sure you think about that long and hard before you do anything stupid…”
I felt his eyes fall on me, but I remained strong. I stared defiantly back and, even though he smirked and turned away to start the meeting, I remained defiant. Once again, Dana had helped me in my revolution.
Chapter Thirty
Clark came to my house surprisingly early Sunday morning. My parents had me up at six, three hours after we had gotten home from the Commission, to tell me that they were heading out for their charity event and that I would be in charge of Mykail all day, so I was awake far earlier than I wanted with a fuzzy mind and heavy eyes.
My mother had told me to feed Mykail, but not to worry about bathing him—she said she would do it the following day because she did not want me to see him unclothed. Even in my mostly-asleep state, the thought made me flush.
Mykail was asleep when I rolled out of bed at seven, so I left him alone. I prepared a simple breakfast for both of us and then went into his room quietly, sitting on the bed and watching him sleep. He had waited for us to come home from the Commission, but with the distractions during the meeting, we were later than usual, and he fell asleep before we returned.
I didn’t have long to wait before he stirred and woke, his eyes blinking slowly.
“Good morning,” I smiled.
“Good morning,” he murmured, his voice thick with sleep. “Sorry I didn’t see you last night…” he said, his face creased from slumber as he closed his eyes again and his head fell back to the pillow.
“It’s fine,” I smiled, my heart stopping completely in my chest when his hand slipped into mine and squeezed. “I made you some breakfast. My parents are going to be out until late, so you’re stuck with me.”
“How horrible…” he joked. He pulled himself upright and leaned forward, kissing my cheek. I wished I didn’t blush so easily.
To hide my embarrassment, I grabbed the plate of toast and bacon I had brought for him, which he took before asking sweetly,
“Is it okay to eat up here?”
We started eating, enjoying the morning without a care, but I was half-way through my breakfast when the doorbell resounded through the house.
“Who’s here?” Mykail asked, surprised. I stared at the doorway of his room, confused, trying to think of who would be at our house that early.
“Stay up here,” I said, abandoning my plate and quickly running down the stairs to the front door, not caring about being in my pajamas. I looked out the window next to the front door and was surprised at who I saw.
“Clark?” I gasped as I opened the door. “What are you doing here so early?”
“I wanted to make sure I was here before Becca,” Clark said.
“Who brought you?” I asked, seeing no one nearby.
“Mark,” Clark nodded. “Sorry, it looks like I woke you up…”
“No, no,” I said quickly. “I was already awake, I just…obviously haven’t bothered to get dressed yet.” I wasn’t sure why I was suddenly embarrassed. Mykail and I were simply eating breakfast, but I felt as though Clark had interrupted something very intimate. “Sorry, come in,” I said hurriedly.
I closed the door behind Clark after he stepped inside. He turned around slowly, fixing me with a suspicious stare.
“Am I interrupting something?” he asked carefully.
“What? No,” I said far too quickly to sound natural. I closed my eyes and sighed heavily, smiling. “Clark, you showed up at my house at seven-thirty in the morning and I am in my pajamas…I’m a little surprised.”
Clark relaxed and hung his head with a chuckle.
“Yeah…sorry about that…” he laughed, now embarrassed himself.
“Let me get dressed,” I nodded. “Do you want anything to eat? I can make you something.”
“No thanks,” he shook his head. “Do you have anything to drink, though?”
“Yeah, go ahead and help yourself to whatever is in the fridge,” I nodded, leading him into the kitchen before making my way to the back stairs.
I quickly ascended the stairs and rounded the corner, poking my head into Mykail’s room.
“Who’s here?” he whispered.
“Clark,” I answered. “You can come downstairs. But…um, we weren’t doing anything before he showed up, okay?”
“Nope, not at all,” he agreed with a rapid shake of his head.
I ducked into my room and quickly pulled on some comfortable clothes, throwing my hair into a ponytail to avoid taming it. It wasn’t long before I was back in the kitchen. Mykail was lingering in his room as I went downstairs. I guessed it would have been awkward to be downstairs with Clark on his own.
“Sorry about that,” I said, walking into the kitchen and leaning against the table in the breakfast nook where Clark was sitting. “Are you sure you don’t want anything else?”
“No, thank you,” Clark shook his head. “Where’s Mykail?”
“Upstairs.”
“What time is Becca coming over?”
“Ten.”
“Oh,” Clark nodded. “Sorry for coming over so early…”
“I know that you’re worried, it’s alright,” I assured, though there was annoyance lining my voice. “I don’t really know what I’m going to do, either,” I told him. “I told her that the Commission does experiments on the people they take in and make them into weapons, but…”
“It’s hard for people to really understand until they see one for themselves,” Clark nodded in understanding. “So…if you want to start desensitizing her so that she will be able to handle the Commission better, you need to show Mykail to her.”
“You think so?”
“Yes, I do,” Clark nodded. He looked at his hands nervously. “I thought a lot about what you said…and after what happened in the meeting last night, I realized that we will need a lot of help from outside the Commission to accomplish this.”
“I was thinking about that,” I nodded. “Maybe this is a horrible thing to say…but…I want to see Becca’s reaction so I can try and understand how the people would react if they were to see one of the experiments.”
“It would be different, though,” Clark shook his head. “Who knows how people are going to react…It’s all going to depend on how it’s presented.”
I nodded and sat in the seat I was next to, picking at the wood grain of the table with my nail.
“I’ve been thinking…”
“About what?”
“Thomas Ankell used the college campus of Stanford to start his real revolution, right?”
“Yes.”
“Well…he was really far away from the government. I mean all the way across the country. So, he had some ti
me to act and then hide so that the government would not catch him, but we’re in Central. We have no time to hide if we start rallying people, so I figured we could do it a little differently.”
“How?”
“The internet,” I said meekly.
“Dana can track the source easily,” Clark shook his head.
“You’ve hacked into the system of the Commission before, though, right?” I pressed. “You’re good at stuff like that. There has to be a way.”
“Well, that depends on what you want to do.”
“Mass emails, pop-ups on random sites, things that grab people’s attention and make them curious,” I said. “Like…something with a picture of one of the people in the Commission—not anyone of racial minority—so that way people can start to think about it without scaring them. Maybe with something that says: ‘What is the Commission of the People doing to people?’ just to promote thought.”
“Something like that…” Clark thought carefully. I watched him, seeing the gears turning in his head. “Social media would be the best way to get our message to people our age…but it’s so easy to track those…a mass, simultaneous attack would be the best way to cover our tracks.”
“How could we do that?”
“Well…that’s the tough part…unless you wanted to get the numbers of all the computers in the country—” He stopped and his eyes went wide.
“What?”
“Oh my God, it’s possible…”
“What? What’s possible? To get the numbers of all the computers?”
“Every computer that accesses the internet registers on a list that is monitored by the Censor Board. The numbers and the sites that these computers visit is recorded and crosschecked by the computer to be sure that illegal sites are not being accessed. The central computers for this process could potentially be turned around to send the same thing to all the computers across the country in mass.”
“Really?”
“It’s possible, but…it wouldn’t be easy. This place is heavily guarded and security would be hell on earth…not to mention I would have to know what kind of system they run in order to reverse the signals and send something…”
“But just once wouldn’t be enough,” I shook my head. “It would have to be sent multiple times. The more times the message is sent, the more likely the people are to start to question.”
“I guess…it could be a virus,” Clark mused. “The best way to do this without it shutting down is to program it right into the main computers of the Censor Board, rather than hack in and do it from another computer.”
“Is it even possible to do that? Get into the Censor Board computers?”
“I don’t know,” Clark admitted. “I think the first thing would be to decide the message we want to send the people and then program something to send the message continuously at random periods to be sure that no pattern is traced.”
“But just that…might not be enough…” I said. “I mean, we should try and find a way to get on the news with something, or even good old paper fliers.”
“The paper fliers might be difficult…”
“Mykail had an interesting idea,” I said. “At parades, you know how people generally spread coupons and such? What if we were to send these fliers to people who were spreading the coupons and they spread them at the parades?”
“That would be risky to the people doing it,” Clark shook his head. “And what parades? There are parades all the time around this time of year.”
“Exactly,” I nodded. “We send it to the committees that are preparing the parades that happen close together and then it’s harder to track where the fliers come from, particularly if we send them all over the country.”
“Except that there is a return address when you send something,” Clark pointed out.
“Who says that we send it?” I said. “There are truckers and transport companies going all over the country all the time. We find someone going that direction and say that the Commission demands these be sent to where they’re going.”
“We would probably have to wait until the electronic messages have been going around for a while so that people are more likely to recognize the fliers,” Clark admitted. “If we can hack into the Central Transport office, it is entirely possible we could do that…”
I smiled, feeling adrenaline coursing through me as we brainstormed.
“We would have to be very careful, though,” he added. “We have to make sure that very angry people, like Dean, are not causing too much of an obvious scene to undermine the whole operation.”
“Yeah…”
“Maybe Dean could be Dana’s distraction,” Clark concluded. “If he’s keeping Dana busy by poking him like he did last night, then we could work without him breathing down our necks as much.”
“That could work.”
“Okay, so tomorrow, we should do three things,” he said. “We should see what that book in the Commission library says, I should look up those addresses, and we should see what kind of system the Censor Board is running so I can see what I need to do to send a message around the country.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
For another fifteen minutes, we discussed what to do when Monday came around. When the conversation trailed off, Clark sighed and nodded to the back stairs, confused.
“Um…shouldn’t you let Mykail out of his room?”
I mentally kicked myself as hard as I could. Of course he thought that Mykail was still locked up because that is what my family did with him at night as per Dana’s instructions. Mykail obviously understood that enough to stay where he was until I came to get him.
“Oh, right,” I gasped, quickly standing up, trying not to overact in the situation, even though I knew I was failing horribly. “I’ll be right back.”
After my hurried declaration, I jogged into the back living room and up the stairs to Mykail’s room. I reached his door and saw him laughing into his hand, having had listened to what happened downstairs and realizing I had forgotten to “let him out.”
“It’s not funny!” I snapped quietly, though I was smiling. He took a deep breath and nodded, suppressing his laughter as I opened the door, trying to make it as loud as possible. Mykail took my hand as he stepped out and grinned.
“Take a deep breath and calm down,” he whispered. “You’re going to have to learn how to hide when you’re flustered.”
Agreeing, I took a deep breath and nodded before walking downstairs.
“Are you hungry?” I asked, surprised at how natural I sounded.
“No, thank you,” he said, playing along.
We crossed the living room into the kitchen, where Clark stood to greet Mykail.
“Mykail,” he nodded simply.
“Clark,” he greeted in similar fashion, though he appeared nervous. “How are you?”
“Well, thank you,” Clark said, his tone also stiff and uncomfortable. “You?”
“Well.”
“Okay,” I smiled to try and break the tension. “Are you sure neither one of you are hungry?” I asked, realizing it was going to be extremely awkward waiting for Becca with the two of them.
The time was uncomfortable and slow, but we filled in Mykail on what we had discussed and showed him the new notes, telling him what we knew. He was curious if we had figured out who was helping, but we still had no idea.
When Becca finally did come over, I told Mykail to wait in his room so we could prepare Becca as best we could before she saw him.
I opened the door and invited her in, trying not to let my nervousness show in my smile.
“Hey,” I greeted, motioning for her to step inside.
“Hey there,” she greeted back. When she saw Clark, she blinked and hesitated in her step. “Clark,” she said, shocked. “I didn’t expect to see you here…”
“Yes, well, if you’re worried, you don’t need to be,” he assured with a small, shy smile. “I’m on Lily’s side.”
“Oh,”
Becca breathed a sigh of relief, grinning widely. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to imply—I mean, it’s just—”
“I know, we’re both in the Commission and all,” Clark said, understanding.
“So…then I take it this is a study session?” she asked. “About An Angel Without Wings?”
“Yeah,” I nodded, walking with both of them into the kitchen and sitting down. “Do you want anything? Something to drink or eat?”
“No, I’m alright, thank you,” Becca assured. “You know, I found out yesterday that our parents are going to the same event today.”
“Really?” I chuckled. “Small town…”
“So…before I forget,” Clark said, turning to Becca. “I trust you, but I want you to understand that you do not know the Commission like we do, so…I’m hesitant to include you…”
“Geez, Clark, way to break the ice,” I groaned, sitting down heavily.
“No, I understand,” Becca assured. “I mean, I’m really nervous about the Commission, and I’m sure my fear is not a good thing in this kind of situation,” she admitted. “But if the Commission is taken out of the picture, I will feel a lot better about our country.”
“Do you really mean that?” Clark asked. “Do you have a secret that would cause you to be taken into the Commission?”
“Maybe,” she said shortly, her tone clipped to tell him not to press the matter. He sighed and folded his hands together, squeezing his fingers nervously.
“Alright,” Clark nodded. “Then can I ask that you do one thing for now until we know how this will progress?”
“What’s that?”
“Will you keep your ears open for the rumors about kids taking down the Commission? Let us know what the general sentiment is, if people are supportive, indifferent…”
“I can do that,” Becca nodded. “No one has been talking about the Commission being taken down, but people around school have been noticing how intense the Commish Kids have become. I guess it was the whole thing with Miranda, huh?”
“It’s gotten ugly, yes,” Clark admitted.
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