I was a little worried that two revolutionary activities in one day would send the country into dangerous panic—the city was frightened enough to put the schools on lockdown—but I was also a little pleased to hear that everyone was calling Mykail the angel and not the monster or the weapon.
We were trying to make him our figurehead, and the way people perceived him worked to our advantage. I was trying to keep myself from smiling, but as I thought about the way Dana must be reacting to Mykail’s sudden reappearance made me giggle without wanting to. I tried to pass it off as a cough before people asked me what I was laughing about.
“Do you think he’s real?” one boy whispered.
“What do you mean? Of course he’s real!” another groaned.
“I know that, moron, I mean…do you think that the Commission put wings on his back and made him into a weapon? Or do you think that the wings are fake?”
“They’re real,” one girl shook her head. “I was at the Liberation Day Parade and the way he was flying, it was like watching a bird. I don’t think animatronics could make wings move that fluidly.”
“But…how?” one girl hissed.
“I’m thinking more about him as a person,” another girl mused. “The group said to stop the torture of the Commission, so he was made this way against his will. That means that there’s more of them, that the Commission has been making people into test subjects. Their guidelines state that they can do nothing but humanely treat their prisoners and return them to their native countries if it is applicable to the situation.”
“Well, they’re obviously violating those laws,” one boy growled. “My grandmother always said that she knew the Commission of the People would get too powerful and try to take over the country one day…”
“Are you part of the terrorist group?” Madison teased.
“No,” the boy groaned. “But I don’t disagree with what people are saying. Do we really still need the Commission?”
“What do you think, Commish Kid?” another boy snarled, glaring at me. I was startled by how quickly the conversation swung to me.
“What do you mean?”
“Do you think we need the Commission still?”
I looked at the expectant faces surrounding me, worried that they would attack at any moment.
“To be honest, no,” I whispered, pretending as though I didn’t want anyone else to hear. Everyone leaned closer, interested. “I don’t know if this is really something that’s been going on in the Commission, but it would make sense. A lot of people even in the Commission don’t know what Dana Christenson does…”
“Really?” they gasped. I nodded.
“We’re forced to sign a non-disclosure agreement before we even enter the building. So, who knows who could have done this…”
“Holy shit, that’s scary…” one boy hissed. “Even some people in the Commission don’t know? That’s not right.”
“So you don’t know if the angel was really made by the Commission?” Madison pressed. I shook my head. I had, at least temporarily, cleared the names of some of the Commish Kids.
We were in Code Red for an hour, and when we were finally released, there were people on their phones calling parents and friends, asking them what they knew. I did not call my parents. I went around the side of the school to see if Mark was waiting.
Clark was already at the car. He motioned me over quickly and I jogged carefully across the icy asphalt.
“Are you alright?” he asked.
“I’m fine. You?”
“I’m fine,” he assured. He opened the door for me, and I glanced briefly at Mark, who was still sitting in the driver’s seat, watching both of us. I assumed from his presence that he had successfully kept Mykail safe and hid him at the fort again.
When I slid into the car, Mark reached back, handing me a business card. I took it and looked at the scribbled message on the back.
Call Sean. #4.
“Is everything okay?” I hissed worriedly. Mark nodded and smiled to reassure me.
Deciding to trust Mark despite my nervousness, I pulled out my phone and dialed 4.
“Hello?”
“Hello, Sean, it’s Lily Sandover,” I greeted awkwardly.
“Oh, hello,” Sean smiled. “So, you’re with Mark. Good. I’m assuming you know what happened this afternoon?”
“Yes.”
“We’re putting the city on lockdown and searching for Mykail, so Dana wants you both to go to your homes and stay there. No one is allowed to leave their homes until we can be sure the city is secure.”
“Wait, really?”
“Yes, and, obviously, we need Mark, so can you tell Clark that I’ll be borrowing him for the rest of the day?” Sean asked.
“Um…sure,” I agreed. “Is it that serious?”
“The people are frightened,” Sean admitted. “We’re trying to find him. If you hear anything, let us know.”
I hesitated, surprised by what Sean said. He sighed on the other end in response to my silence.
“I know Dana thinks that you’re somehow behind all this but, call me old-fashioned, I believe in innocent until proven guilty.”
Again, I was stumped at how such a caring person could be working for Dana.
“Will you tell Clark?” Sean asked.
“Yes, I will.”
“Thank you.”
“And Sean?” I started. The words stuck in my throat. I felt extremely guilty about the lie I was about to tell. “If I hear or see anything, I’ll call you…”
“Thank you, Lily,” Sean said, a smile in his voice. “Have a good afternoon.”
“You, too,” I said mechanically. “Bye.”
I hung up the phone and turned to Clark, trying to breathe around the tightness of my ribs.
“What did he say?”
“We’re supposed to go home and not leave. They’re searching the city. And they need Mark, so Sean says he’s borrowing him for the rest of the day,” I relayed. Mark started driving. I leaned forward. “Hey, are you sure everything’s okay?”
Mark nodded with a smile and gave me a thumbs-up. I decided, with how cautious Mark was, things really were alright.
I got home and was surprised to see my parents waiting. They asked if I was alright, and then would not let me escape to my room, telling me to do my homework in the living room. They had closed all the windows and locked the doors, as the news was telling everyone to do until the Central had declared the city safe. There was reluctance from the military to help in securing the city and finding Mykail because many of the lower level men and women were sympathetic with the growing rebellion, and that slowed things down.
What really made me smile was when there was a knock on our door and we saw that someone had been sent to search our house.
“Oh…come in, please,” my mother said, motioning the two suit-clad men inside. They stepped in and removed their glasses. I tried not to smile at the familiar faces of Hiroki and Minsoo.
“We’re here for search,” Hiroki said with a fake, thick accent.
“Please, go ahead,” my mother nodded, motioning them further into the house. They walked through the house, looking around at closets and pantries as we remained in the living room.
“The Eight Group is checking the Commission houses?” I asked as casually as I could manage.
“Makes sense,” my father nodded. “I mean, after all, they would not be surprised at the experiments in everyone’s homes.”
“Every home but ours,” my mother sighed. “I hope they catch him soon, before this gets out of hand…”
“Mom…if they catch him, Dana will kill him.”
“At this point, it’s understandable. It’d be better if they kill him on camera to prove that he’s gone. Maybe that will calm people down,” she whispered.
“How can you say that?” I gaped.
“I cared about him just as much as you did,” my mother defended.
I sincerely doubt that… I barely
managed not to say.
“But he is dangerous to the stability of America. And he betrayed us. He betrayed our trust. We have to look at the bigger picture.”
I bit my tongue.
Our house was cleared and Hiroki and Minsoo left. The city was later deemed safe, though no one had found Mykail.
The following day, we had to go to the Commission meeting.
As it had been the last few times, there was a lot of talk about how the situation needed to be contained. Dana stood at the front of the room and listened to the babble for over an hour before he finally spoke.
“Alright, I have heard what you have to say, now let me tell you what we are going to do,” he started. “Right now, we will admit to looking at the possibility of improving human strength, but nothing more. We will state that this information was in the most basic state and we had not started testing, but somehow the information leaked, and the terrorist group used that to formulate an attack on us.
“As for Mykail, I understand the concern and I agree that we need to catch him as soon as possible. However, as far as the Commission is concerned, we have absolutely no idea where he came from,” he continued with a sharp tone. “We will only react to him when he appears publicly. We will not search for him in ways that the public can notice. We will shrug and say we have no idea where he came from, but we will not rush to cover anything up. A hurried response will lend credibility to the idea that we created him.”
Dana sighed.
“There are many foreign nations that are getting nervous. They are watching us very carefully. There are many that know of our program, and are beginning to see a threat to their credibility as leaders. As you know, we have sold many of our successes to foreign countries and that makes them conspirators. We do not need an international scandal so near the completion of the Machine of Neutralization project.”
My stomach flipped. Somehow, I had completely forgotten about Eyna.
“Sir,” one of the men in the front called, “if you plan to mass-produce the Machine of Neutralization, how can you allow the people to know that we were only in the beginning stages of such a project?”
Dana glanced at me and my blood ran cold. There was something devious and dangerous in the eyes of the leader of the Commission of the People.
“I’m working on that,” he said. “I have an idea, but we will see if I even need to use it.”
* *** *
Due to the panic of the city, Mark refused to take us to the fort on Sunday. While I didn’t blame him, I was upset that I would not get to see Mykail. Instead, I stayed home and caught up on homework, thinking about other things the rebellion needed to do. I felt as though the revolution was teetering on a cliff. The frightening thing was I knew where it was going…
I saw the bloodshed coming at me rapidly. I knew things were going to get violent and all I could think about was the way water spilled from a ruptured jug. All it took was one bullet and we would be at war with Central…in a bloodbath with Dana Christenson.
I was standing there, looking at it just before it was about to begin. I could feel the oncoming war in my bones.
That night, I dreamt I was in the echoing, cavernous room with the gun laying on the table in front of me. Dana was on the other side of the table, a gun already in his hand, smiling darkly. I turned briefly to see Mark, Griffin, Tori, Clark, Mykail, and hundreds of others behind me. I turned back to Dana, confident in my army.
Dana tapped the gun’s handle with his forefinger, smiling.
“Well?”
I picked up the gun, put it together as I had the previous week, and pointed it at him.
“I think it’s only fair that you understand the concept of the game,” he told me. “You move your pieces, and I’ll move mine. You shoot me, and I’ll shoot you…”
I aimed at his heart and pulled the trigger. The gun had no recoil, and the bullet soared through Dana’s chest, causing his shoulder to fall back with the force of the blow. But he straightened and raised his gun.
“My turn.”
The gunshot was loud and I flinched. The bullet hit me. I felt the cold air that soared through my chest, but I did not fall. Blinking, I turned and saw Griffin lying dead behind me. The others were staring ahead, unblinking, as though Griffin had not died at all.
Frightened, I turned back to Dana and shot the gun as many times as I could, hitting him, knowing I needed to kill him before he killed anyone else. His body jerked and jolted as it was riddled with bullets, but he remained standing, smiling darkly, unable to fall, too strong and deeply rooted.
When the clip was empty, I pulled the trigger uselessly as I saw Dana raise his arm to aim at me.
The cold air hit my body like a train as he fired bullets with the same rapid fire I had used on him. I felt my body move, shivering and shaking from the cold, but I did not fall, either. There was not enough force to push me down completely.
When he stopped firing, I was terrified to turn around.
As much as I screamed at myself not to, I turned.
The bodies littered the floor of the room, soaking the cold concrete in blood as it eased out the wounds. The ungraceful heap of mangled limbs and glassy eyes made my panic swell.
“What a mess you made…” Dana hissed.
I jolted awake, trying to find my breath and come back to reality. Every time I blinked, I saw the dead bodies. In a panic, I leapt out of bed and turned my lights on, looking around the room frantically.
In that frantic and terrified moment, I wanted to stop the revolution.
Throughout Monday, I replayed the dream, trying to convince myself that it was just a dream. When I heard that Maryland-Tuckett University in the Western Region, which was a school mostly dedicated to humanitarian efforts and aid to Third World countries, had called the Commission out on inhumane treatment and becoming the next death concentration camp, I realized the ball was rolling too fast for me to stop.
I was becoming fearful of what I had set in motion.
I tried to block out the chatter around school about Mykail and Maryland-Tuckett University calling for investigation into the health and care of the criminals the Commission kept, but every time I heard about it, I saw another dead body. This was another strike against Dana, and he was going to strike back soon enough, like a taunted predator.
That was the first day I felt that we were really at war.
At the end of the day, I was exhausted and worried about the rapid progression of events. Clark noticed, and he seemed to be feeling the same way. We did not speak as we were driven to the Commission, and stoic Mark did not provide any insight into how he was feeling about the growing tension.
We went through security silently and got into the elevator.
However, when the doors opened, instead of being greeted by the normal silence of the Commission of the People, we heard chatter. Mark was just as surprised as we were. He carefully stepped out of the elevator, his hand at his hip to grab his gun if necessary.
Carefully opening the door to the meeting room, all three of us were surprised by what we saw.
The room was completely full of people, men and women dressed professionally with an intimidating air. On one side of the room, there were two large groups of men and women donning military uniforms, decorated with medals and ribbons, their hair short and slicked back. Through the rest of the room, there were people of many different races, all with who I guessed were translators and advisors. There were foreign ambassadors and even a few foreign leaders I recognized, such as the Prime Minister of France, and the President of the Korean Peninsula.
And there was Dana, standing at the front of the room with Sean stationed behind him. Dana saw us and smiled. His gaze caught the attention of everyone in the room, who silenced and turned.
Though the whole world was staring at us.
These were all people who knew about the Commission of the People and the experimentations…all people Dana had influence over…
�
�Ah, Little Lily and the gang,” Dana grinned in a chastising tone. “I’m sorry, I guess I should have told you that I was having a meeting today and that you didn’t need to be here.” He sighed. “Well, sorry about that. Mark, take them home.”
Mark hesitated only a moment before he bowed at the waist and ushered us backward, closing the door to the meeting room.
Nausea overwhelmed me. While we were planning our next move, so was Dana.
Chapter Fifty-Four
The following day, Carolina High School in the South-East Region organized a walkout, claiming that they were not going to learn material that was approved from the Commission of the People when the Commission was torturing the people they were capturing.
There were whispers around our school of doing the same thing. Again, it felt as though everything was going too fast.
I was having nightmares about people dying, about our revolution failing and Dana somehow winning in the end. I tried to tell myself they were only dreams. Besides, that same Tuesday, I had other things to worry about.
Saying I was going on a date with Clark, I left the house, running away after my mother started talking about condoms and safe sex. Knowing she thought I was having sex with Clark made me cringe. Then I blushed because of the sex I had been having with Mykail without protection…
The entire situation was more than uncomfortable.
Mark took both Clark and I to the agreed abandoned warehouse by public transportation, walking us from the bus stop to the location. I vaguely remembered how to get to the factory we had seen when trying to decide where to base our operation. We decided to complete our project in the basement so that the lights through the broken windows would not attract attention.
By the time the three of us got to the basement, Peter, a medical school dropout, and Bethany, an art student, had set up the lights and camera facing a chair. Tori and Griffin were there as well and greeted us warmly next to Hiroki, Ichiro, Rin, and Minsoo. It had been a while since I had seen some of the members of the Eight Group, so I hugged all of them, thrilled to see them.
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