The phone crouched on the desk, black and shining. Kay grabbed the receiver, with the intention of calling the field phone of the Guns stationed outside the Garden.
But no – the commander already had his orders. Kay wasn’t going to change them. The prize would be worth it.
She made a different call instead. At the end of it, she was convinced that the electrician was stalling – deliberately letting Wildcat’s broadcast play for longer.
“Have him shot,” she said in a low voice. “Find someone else who’ll do it. Now.” She hung up.
Pierce has no regard for human life. Kay choked out a small laugh as she stared out at the torches. Yes, and what exactly was so wonderful about human life? Any fool could mate, have babies, bring more squalling children into the world.
To survive, that was the smart thing. To triumph, even better.
Collis, she thought, rubbing one of her rings. She wanted him badly. He’d left for the far north days ago, on an errand for her. He was the only one she trusted to do it.
Looking back, Kay realized that on some level she’d known what Collis was telling her when he’d promised so intensely that they would get rid of Cain, and soon. Even so, the meeting in the secure basement room had been nerve-wracking.
Though the chamber was lavish, there was no getting away from the fact that they were underground, far from listening ears. Apart from Collis, the ten other people in there were all, Kay suspected, in Cain’s secret employ, though several pretended allegiance to her.
The very blandness of Cain’s features made them more menacing. His near-colourless eyes were extremely polite as he said, “I’m afraid, Madame President, that you don’t grasp my point.”
“I grasp it.” Kay kept her spine straight. “I don’t need a Chief Astrologer, Mr Cain. I’m an expert on these matters myself, as you may recall.” Collis had sat to her right. Kay had been glad of his presence.
Cain’s gold signet ring showed the glyph for Cancer the crab. He rubbed its stylized claws with a slow thumb. “The role is needed,” he said. “You’ve taken on far too much, Madame President.”
One of his colleagues added, “Yes, particularly for one so…inexperienced.”
Young, he meant. Kay was just shy of twenty-one. Feigning unconcern, she took a sip of coffee, glad that Cain had drunk from the same pot first so that she could.
“This topic is closed,” she said, and knew she’d just earned more sleepless nights when she saw the look Cain exchanged with a few of his cronies.
Sandford Cain inclined his head in a parody of acquiescence. “As you wish, of course, dear Madame President.”
Collis leaned back in his seat, big and solid, his body language relaxed, though she sensed tension from him. “Mr Cain, if I recall, the item on the agenda is—”
A knock came.
Cain frowned. The room went silent.
The guard at the door held a quick, whispered consultation with the palace messenger who’d knocked. The guard came over to Kay.
He whispered in her ear. “My apologies, Madame President, but this just came in over the wireless. They need an immediate response.” He handed her a slip of paper. Its message was in code.
Kay’s brow furrowed; from the first symbol, she saw that this was to do with international relations. “Please continue without me for a few minutes,” she said to the room at large. “Mr Reed, you’ll take notes for me, won’t you?”
Collis started to say something and stopped. He nodded. “Yes, of course.”
Kay left the room.
She strode some way along the empty hallway and then turned a corner, heading for a quiet stairwell. When she reached it, she looked carefully in both directions, before extracting the key for the code from her charm bracelet.
She quickly deciphered the message. It was short and to the point. There was a question asked at the end.
It felt as if the breath had been knocked from her. Kay slumped against the wall, thoughts reeling. As if the difficulties within her regime weren’t thorny enough.
A secure phone that went through a private switchboard was on the wall nearby. Kay went to it and reached General Keaton. Her side of the conversation took place in low, urgent murmurs.
“Don’t worry, Madame President,” Keaton soothed. “This won’t hold us back. Our troops will take care of it.”
After Kay hung up, she tried to compose herself, realizing suddenly how run-down she was. She’d been running on caffeine and nerves for months.
She started back to the meeting room. Collis had just come out. He spotted her and headed her way, almost jogging. Relief rushed through her, yet when he reached her she said, “I told you to wait, Collis.”
He gripped her arms. “Kay, listen,” he said quickly. “What I’ve been promising…this is it. The Resistance have been planning an attack.” He glanced at his watch. “In seven minutes, a bomb will go off in that room. I was just about to get you out when the messenger came.”
Kay caught her breath. “Have you stalled Cain?” she gasped. “Will they stay in there?”
Collis looked oddly defeated now. “Yeah,” he said. “I’ve…just passed out copies of the Discordant report. I pretended to be annoyed that you were gone for so long, and Cain asked me to go check on you. I think he and his cronies want to discuss their next move.”
He rubbed the tops of her arms with his thumbs, gazing down at her almost angrily. His voice was husky as he said, “I care about you, you know. I’ve tried not to.”
Kay’s immediate response – to say, I care about you too – alarmed her. She squelched the thought and pulled him further down the corridor. Glancing back at the meeting room, she felt grim satisfaction.
“Tell me the whole plan,” she said.
Six minutes later, Kay had made several phone calls, directing troops of Guns to various points around the city. Then, unable to help herself, she drifted back down the carpeted corridor, gazing avidly at the closed meeting room doors.
“Not too close.” Collis was pale.
She slid her hand slowly up his firm chest without looking at him. “Don’t ruin it,” she murmured.
Collis licked his lips and glanced at his watch again – showed her the second hand sweeping up it.
When it reached twelve, thunder roared in her ears and trembled up through her feet. Kay gave a laughing yelp and almost fell, clutching Collis, who steadied them both. There was a pattering noise – thuds of masonry against carpet.
The excitement was almost unbearable. She pushed Collis against the wall and they kissed fiercely. Kay shivered, wanting him. She pulled away abruptly and ran to the meeting room.
Where it had been, there was now a mess of concrete and rubble. The doors and the clock that had hung over them lay a dozen yards down the hallway. Dust rose in a choking cloud. The guard lay against the wall, clearly dead.
It was beautiful.
A whirlwind of events had occurred after that: herself on the phone, barking more orders; security workers streaming onto the scene, yelling and heaving at the rubble – “Is anyone alive in there?” “Shout if you can hear us!”; appearing on the palace balcony with Collis to announce that a strike had been made against Harmony and that she would retaliate.
Satisfying reports had started trickling in: Weir had been captured. Resistance members had been arrested at a telio station; the capitol building; parading down Concord – everywhere Collis had told her. Vancour hadn’t been captured yet but she would be. Guns had entered the tunnels and were busy searching.
Though the hour was a triumph for Kay, fear still lurked. Cain’s death would make little difference if the matter she’d discussed with Keaton wasn’t resolved.
The first chance she had, she’d drawn Collis into her private office and locked the door.
“Something’s happened,” she said.
Collis was unsmiling as he studied her. Kay had the sense that the seriousness of the morning’s events had only just hit him.
“Go on,” he said.
“It’s the reason I was called out of the meeting.” She explained the new threat, and told him also about Black Moon.
There was a pause. Collis’s small smile was rueful. “We really will have it all, won’t we?”
“If we can overcome this.” Kay gripped his arm. “You’ll have to go out there. Will you? You’re the only one I can trust.”
“You know I will,” he said quietly, linking their fingers together. “I’ll do whatever I can.”
Before Collis had left, something had happened between them that Kay hadn’t expected – something that she’d never have imagined herself doing. It had been impetuous, though she wasn’t sorry she’d done it.
Collis was gone and she wanted him here. But she’d spent most of her life alone. She’d cope.
Yet standing there at her window, gazing out at the torches that still wove through the night, she remembered the mob that had burst into the Garden and was frightened.
The tanks, she thought in sudden panic. If she needed outside help, how long would it take for the tanks Gunnison had had built to be transported to New Manhattan along with more troops? The army was currently guarding certain key points out west. She couldn’t call many of them back, not with what was happening out there.
But she might have to. She bit a fingernail.
Kay started as a knock came. She straightened. “Yes?”
One of her bodyguards opened the door. “Madame President, rioters are trying to break into the palace. We think we should move you to a more secure room.”
She stared at him, her thoughts skittering. “But there’s no chance of them getting in!” she cried.
It was half-question, half-prayer. Ten minutes later, she was in a chamber on the second floor. There were no windows. Her bodyguards stood poised at its entrance, pistols drawn.
I am not afraid. I refuse to be.
“Do whatever it takes to control the city,” Kay said into the phone to the Head Gun. “Is Vancour still broadcasting?”
At the answer, her spine felt hot. “Go to the electric company,” she said in a low voice. “If you have to shoot someone every thirty seconds, I don’t care. But find an electrician who’ll turn it off.”
She banged the phone down and sank into the chair, rubbing her temples.
Yet thinking of Vancour, barricaded in the inescapable Garden with hardly any food, a hard joy came. They’d confirmed that her group was armed. Was Vancour expecting a big battle where she could kill lots of Guns and be a hero? Well, she’d soon be brought to her knees – humiliated – shown to the world as a defeated coward.
“No going down in a blaze of glory for you, Wildcat,” Kay muttered. “Let’s see how much your followers love you when this is over.”
When this was over.
A thought came – pressing, unavoidable. Kay checked the desk’s drawers and was relieved to find an ephemeris and blank astrology charts.
Black Moon, she wrote at the top of one.
She began to cast the chart. She almost knew it by heart; only infrequently did she have to flip the ephemeris open to check a planetary position.
The room felt too-silent. The chart grew under her pencil, an elaborate interplay of spiky glyphs, exact notations, connecting lines.
In her mind’s eye Kay saw an image of a mushroom cloud blossoming against an eclipsed moon. She took power from it – let it brace her spine.
“See?” she murmured. “Strength. A time of great change. They will not beat me.”
Somewhere below, there might be a mob breaking in. The quick, steady scratching of Kay’s pencil didn’t slow.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
September, 1942
I expected the electricity to be cut off at any moment. It didn’t happen.
About half an hour after we’d first seen them, some of the Guns tried to storm the place. The snipers we’d posted opened fire. One reported later that at the first rifle shots, the Guns had fallen back – and that he could see fires in the distance near the palace, as if further riots were going on.
It was around nine o’clock when I’d started broadcasting. Incredibly, it was almost three a.m. before the electricity went out, plunging the broad space into darkness.
My voice had gone croaky: “…we’ve been seeing fires across the city, so we think riots are going on. Target the palace. We must bring down Pierce—”
Startled gasps as everything went black.
I swallowed hard, looking up from the darkened console. The whole time I’d been broadcasting, I’d expected another attack. It hadn’t come. I thought I’d almost prefer to get it over with.
Ambient light from the city angled in through the broad windows circling the Garden. The people were shadowy shapes on the floor. Many had been huddled talking. Now an apprehensive silence fell.
A group had searched the office while I broadcast and found flashlights. Vera handed me one. “You’ve got to say something to everyone,” she whispered.
I knew with a sinking feeling she was right. Slowly, I stood up and shone the flashlight on myself. It cast the rest of the world into blackness.
“All right, I…I won’t sugar-coat this,” I said, lifting my voice. “You all know we’re surrounded. If we try to leave, they’ll just shoot us down as we exit the doors.”
Silence. The air felt heavy. “But when they attack us here, we’ll fight,” I said. “Some of us might get away then. Or, if we’re lucky, there’ll be enough unrest in the city that Guns will be drawn from their posts, and we can try battling our way out.”
Lowering the light, I caught a few nervous nods. They all seemed to be hanging on my every word.
I exhaled. “So, for now, I guess we just…wait. And be watchful.”
Though it was so late, few slept. A woman had a portable transistor radio and kept twiddling the dial, hoping to pick up a broadcast. So far there was only static.
People passed the flashlights around to take shadowy trips to the restrooms and water fountains. Someone else found the concessions storeroom and passed out candy bars and liquorice sticks.
“A few of us have been looking around,” Harlan whispered to me. “You’d better come and see this.”
I went with him to the cellar: a large, boxlike space with an industrial boiler. In the flashlight’s beams, the boiler looked like a prehistoric beast.
Harlan showed me a dusty-looking metal door.
“I think it leads to the tunnels.” He shot me a glance. “The Resistance used them, right? Please tell me those damn things really exist, and weren’t just rumours.”
The sudden hope felt painful. “They exist, all right.”
We creaked the door open and started down. The stairs had the tunnels’ familiar, musty scent, but you could only go down ten of them before rubble blocked the way.
“Maybe we could dig it out – what do you think?” said Harlan.
I stared at the debris, going over my mental map. “We could try.”
“You’re not hopeful.”
“No. But we’ll try anyway.” Reluctantly, I added, “I doubt we can clear it before an attack comes, though. The cave-ins in this area are pretty bad – we never found a route that led here.”
“All right,” said Harlan finally. “Good to know.”
“It is?”
“Sure. It’s like poker. You want to figure out the other guy’s hand, if you can. When it comes to the tunnels, sounds like the Guns’ isn’t shit-hot either.”
I sighed, remembering what had been happening when Ingo and the others left. “Unfortunately, they’ve got explosives,” I said.
Harlan winced at this. We closed the door and started back across the cellar. “Well, it still beats truck-driving, I guess,” he said.
I smiled faintly. “Is that what you’ve been doing?”
“Yeah, can you feature it? I’ve been going stir-crazy. Me and Vera both – she’s been driving a cab. Damn thing is, she makes more than me. Everyo
ne gives her tips ’cause she’s cute.”
As if realizing the odd normality of the conversation, Harlan grimaced and shoved a hand through his hair.
“Ah, what the hell,” he muttered.
I didn’t want word to get around about the caved-in tunnel. It seemed worse for people to hope if nothing came of it. I quietly spoke to a few burly guys I’d noticed earlier – steady-seeming types. They agreed to start trying to dig it out and to keep quiet. Harlan said he’d help too.
We found a pair of coal shovels and a wheelbarrow in the cellar. Along with the flashlights, we were lucky to have that much.
The passage was too narrow for more than two workers at once. Harlan was on the second shift…if there’d be one. I glanced warily at the snipers still poised above. Hal was up there too, now.
Meanwhile, Harlan, Vera and I sat and talked in the shadows. Having them both here felt surreal. So did the fact that they were apparently a couple. Harlan had had a crush on Vera back on the base; I’d never thought she might return his feelings.
The last time they’d seen me, we’d flown into battle together when Gunnison attacked the Western Seaboard. Though it wasn’t my favourite subject, I told them briefly what had happened since – my arrest, Harmony Five, joining the Resistance.
“I’m very glad you made it,” said Vera, touching my arm. She’d gone pale even from my glossed-over description of Harmony Five.
“And glad you wasted Gunnison,” added Harlan.
“It didn’t make much difference,” I pointed out bitterly.
“Glad you did it anyway.”
I learned that they’d been in New Manhattan over a year now; ever since the Western Seaboard base had been decommissioned. Appalachia had still been free then.
“We tried to leave when Pierce took over, but we were denied,” said Vera. I could very faintly see her freckles in the glow from the street lamps. “We didn’t push it. We were afraid they’d rethink having cleared us in the first place.”
“It was that bastard Collie who cleared us,” said Harlan sourly. “You know he was there when they decommissioned the base?” he said to me. “In a Gun’s uniform. The other guy sent three dozen people off to die and he just stood there.”
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