by C. A. Gray
I couldn’t speak. Fortunately Molly changed the subject for me.
“Jackson isn’t with the others. He said he doesn’t know anything about computers anyway, so he wouldn’t be of much help. He’s off fishing for us in the stream a mile thataway,” she pointed north, “and told me to send you to find him when you woke up.”
“Fishing?” I repeated, perplexed. I hadn’t even known there was any water nearby. Nobody had mentioned it. “With what? We don’t have any equipment…”
Molly shrugged. “That’s Jackson’s profession in Iceland—he’s a fisherman, remember? I’m sure he figured out something.”
I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to find the stream exactly. If Jackson thought all I needed was Molly’s general “thataway,” then I figured it must be hard to miss.
Just when I started to get concerned that I was really lost, though, I heard the distant sound of flowing water. I quickened my pace, shouting, “Jackson?”
“Over here!” he called back.
I spotted him crouching over the stream with one arm extended across the water. He looked over his shoulder and waved. He held a hoop of some kind, attached to a net.
“Where did you get that?”
“Made it,” he said. “You know the rope I used from tying up the Council members? I took the extra length of it with me, and just unraveled it into thinner threads. Then I wove it into a net, and attached it to some tree branches. The pine here is pretty flexible, it bends well.” The clear water flowed over the rocks beneath the bottom of his net, along with several slippery silver fish. “What can I say, I was getting sick of deer.” He grinned, standing up and lifting his catch out of the water. “What I don’t have is a container to transport them back to camp alive, so we’ll have to just catch a few at a time. This will be our lunch. I don’t want them to suffocate to death, though—that’s a bad way to go. Come here, I’ll show you how to kill them. Then I figured we could have our first hunting lesson.”
I swallowed my gag reflex at the idea of killing a fish, and let him hand me a knife. He found a flat rock, grabbed one of the wriggly creatures, and flipped his knife backwards. Then he aimed the butt of the knife at the top of its head, and prepared to deliver a blow.
I… might’ve closed my eyes before impact. I heard him chuckle.
“Helps if you watch,” he said. “That’s the worst part. He’s not dead yet, just unconscious. This way he won’t feel the rest. Next you just bleed him out, cutting along the gill rakers, see?”
He traced the gills with his knife, and I forced myself to watch. Then he gestured at me. “Your turn.”
“Uh.”
“You want to hunt, right?” he pressed. “This is a lot less disgusting than cleaning big game, I promise you.”
I reached into the net, swallowed hard, and grabbed the first slippery creature I could get my hand around. It fought against me, and almost wriggled away, but I clamped down with my other hand.
“Get him on the rock. There you go,” Jackson coached. “Now clamp him with one hand so his head can’t move, and get your knife ready…”
I pulled out my knife as instructed, turned it butt first and held it from just above the blade, and positioned the rounded bottom of the knife at the fish’s head. I gave it a few practice swings without actually making contact, as if making sure the trajectory would land where I intended. I felt a little lightheaded.
You can do this, Kate.
I struck. I flinched, but I struck, and the fish went limp.
I felt terrible. I just bludgeoned a living creature… look at the little guy…
“Perfect,” said Jackson, not noticing my inner conflict. “Now, bleed him out…”
I hesitated. I can’t do this. I can’t.
“You don’t want to wait for him to wake up,” Jackson warned. “It’s more humane to do it while he’s out.”
We have to eat, I reminded myself. Besides, I was a hypocrite anyway: I was fine eating fish when someone else killed it…
I flipped my knife around and poised the tip at the gill rakers, feeling another wave of lightheadedness. But then I imagined what Will would say if he were here.
She doesn’t do this kind of thing. She can’t stomach it. Here, Kate, give me the knife, I’ll do it for you…
I gritted my teeth and sliced, gasping when I saw how much blood ran out.
“Nice job!” Jackson said, grabbing another fish himself, and handing me another as we tossed the carcasses in his satchel. “We’ll gut them when we get back to camp.”
It got easier after the first two. Although I still felt nauseous and guilty, I was also just a tiny bit pleased with myself.
When we finished with the fish, Jackson rinsed his hands off in the stream. I followed him, wincing when I felt how cold the water was.
“Okay,” he turned to me. “Before anything else, I have to at least start to teach you the fundamentals, of getting in tune with the world around you. Let’s have you sit here”—he gestured to a small log on the bank, and I obeyed—“and sit up straight—comfortable yet alert is the goal. Close your eyes, and just breathe. Focus on the contact of your feet on the ground, the log beneath you… the way the wind feels on your skin, and as it blows through your hair. The sound of the rushing water. Feel the way your abdomen, or your chest, rises and falls with your breath.”
I tried, but it was hard to focus on all those things at once. I kept thinking about the way all the blood looked rushing out of the fish. And about Charlie. I wondered what Charlie would think of Jackson? I imagined he’d simultaneously admire and despise him—he’d admire the self-sufficiency, but he’d despise this stuff, all the meditation and mind control and what not. Come to think of it, Will would probably despise that about him too. I didn’t think Will and Jackson had really had much of a conversation yet, at least not that I’d seen. I knew Will resented Jackson because he perceived that something had been going on between Jackson and myself. But of course all of that changed when I found out Will was alive.
“Relax your face,” Jackson’s voice cut in, and I jumped. He went on, “It’s normal for your thoughts to wander—just gently bring them back to your breath, every time you notice that they’re somewhere else.”
My breath. My breath. I started just counting my inhales and my exhales, listening to the sound of the water.
I wondered when I’d get a shower next. Theoretically I could rinse off in the stream now that I knew it was here, but it was pretty shallow and painfully cold even to just my fingers. I couldn’t imagine my whole body in there… but maybe I just wasn’t desperate enough yet. Then again, we’d be moving on later today, and who knew if we’d have another stream near our next camp site—maybe I should take advantage of the opportunity now that it was here. I was sure if I asked Jackson to leave me alone for a bit and keep watch, he’d be too much of a gentleman to—
“Tune in to the sounds around you,” Jackson cut in. “Begin to recognize the baseline: the stream, but also the wind in the trees, and the chatter of the birds. That way it will become much easier to pick out anomalies when they occur.”
I sighed, frustrated, but didn’t open my eyes. I was terrible at this.
“Gently bring your thoughts back to your breath and the sensations in your body whenever your mind wanders,” Jackson reminded me. “No judgment. This takes a lot of practice.”
I started to wonder if we were ever going to hunt today, or if he was just going to make me sit here until lunchtime. I started to shiver. Did I really want to hunt yet though, if even killing a fish made me queasy?
You have to get over that if you’re ever going to be useful, I told myself.
My breath. Back to my breath.
Was Jackson even still here? I couldn’t hear him at all, nor did I feel his eyes on me, in that strange sixth-sense way when you know someone is watching you.
Huh, I thought, I guess that’s the sort of thing he means—tuning i
n to the world around you. Why can I feel it when people are watching me, anyway? There’s nothing tangible about that…
I cracked my eyelids open just a little, and glanced around. He sat behind me, staring at me after all, and smiling.
“Pretty good for a first time,” he told me.
“No it wasn’t. I’m awful.”
He shook his head. “Controlling your mind is a discipline. You can’t just use willpower and think that’s enough; you have to train it. You’ve been sitting there for probably twenty minutes already. Most beginners start to squirm after five, or even less. I promise, you’re doing well.” He stood up and moved toward the fish carcasses. “Come on, let’s head back. We can keep our eyes peeled for some root vegetables growing along the way back to camp.”
When Jackson and I returned, the hunters were back. Will, Jean, and Nick all stood in a little circle, speaking to one another in low voices. I saw Will look up at us and narrow his eyes. Jackson caught it, and I felt him give me a look. I shrunk back a little.
“You never told him, did you,” he murmured under his breath.
I shook my head.
“You need to tell him, Kate.”
“He’ll forbid it if I tell him!”
“Sneaking behind his back is not the solution to that.”
“Well, I’m sorry if I’m not as perfect as you are!” I snapped. I saw him recoil just a bit, and instantly regretted it. I sighed. “I’m sorry.”
“No, you’re right, it’s not my place to preach. You can do what you want in your relationship. But I respect Will, and I don’t want him thinking of me as an enemy.” He gestured to the little camp fire where Molly had prepared breakfast. “Come on, I’ll show you how to prepare the fish if you want. I can’t see how he’d object if we’re in plain sight of everyone.”
You don’t know Will, I thought. But I followed him.
Jackson gutted the fish, but left the skins on. He skewered one on a stick and began to roast it over the fire.
“You watch for the scales to char,” he told me. “Then you can pull the skin away and just pick out the meat with your fingers, see?”
We passed around the fish to the others when they were done cooking, skewer and all, and Molly laid her satchel of nuts and berries open in the middle of the little circle we formed. Will sat beside me. I determined to say nothing unless he did, but of course that didn’t take long.
“Had a nice little fishing lesson, huh?”
“Yep.” I shoved some fish into my mouth.
There was a long pause. Old me would have immediately jumped in and tried to smooth things over, and I knew that was what he was waiting for. But I just sat there in stubborn silence. I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction.
Finally, Will said in a low voice, “I don’t want you spending time with him.”
“He’s a fisherman,” I shot back. “And the best hunter here, and the only one who can really train us to control our minds when we get back on the grid—”
“—And none of that matters because you’re not going back on the grid,” Will finished through gritted teeth. “Nor do you need to learn to fish, or to hunt, Kate. I will take care of you, like I have always done—”
“What if I want to contribute?” I hissed. “What if for once in my life I want to develop a useful skill, other than looking pretty and smiling at a camera?”
“I don’t care what you want, I am telling you that you’re not allowed to—”
“Allowed?” I cut him off, my eyes flashing. “Allowed? I’m sorry, do you think you own me?”
I thought we’d kept our voices down, but I suddenly realized that most of the rest of the group had grown quiet, watching us. I bit my lip and turned away from Will, closing my eyes. I pictured the stream where Jackson and I had caught the fish.
Focus on your breath, Kate. Listen to the sounds of the wind, to the birds…
“So, Will, any progress?” Molly asked loudly.
Will glared at her at first, but then took a deep breath, allowing the subject change. “Remember how I told you about the code I wrote that interrupted the control center signals?” She nodded. “I was gonna go back on the grid and do the same thing for increasing intervals of time. Well, it turns out there are a few complications with that plan.”
“Like what?” Molly asked. I could see the others relax visibly, now that Will and I were no longer at each other’s throats. I glanced at Jackson, and saw him watching me with an expression I could not read.
“Well, there’s the obvious issue of getting access,” Will told Molly. “At the time I wrote the code, I was actually on the government compound and had a working password with high security clearance. I didn’t have to hack into anything. I guarantee they disabled my username and password as soon as I didn’t report for work, but even if they didn’t, the only way for me to get in to their system directly from out here is through a portal.”
“What’s a portal?” asked Violet.
“It’s a page on the net with its own address,” Will told her, and continued speaking to Molly. “I can still use it now with someone else’s working credentials, though—and I sort of anticipated a situation like this, so I swiped my colleague’s when he wasn’t looking. But that will only work if he hasn’t changed his password yet, and we change them once a month for security. Not all on the same schedule either. So if he hasn’t done it yet, he will soon. That’s part of why there’s a rush—if I’m going to do this, I have to do it fast. And we’re not even in Beckenshire yet. I might just have to stop somewhere along the way, go back on the grid, and find a netscreen. But if the control centers ID me while I’m there…”
“I thought you told me you could make metal cages to protect your brainwaves or whatever,” I muttered to him.
Will sighed. “Yeah, but there are two problems with that. One is that we don’t have the materials to build them yet, and even that will require a raid on the grid to gather them, or else we’d have to wait until we get to Beckenshire to raid the empty houses there. And if we’re going to do the raid for supplies, why not just have me go back and code the sequel injection instead, and I’ll take my chances? We’d be taking the same risk either way.”
“You mentioned multiple complications. What are the other problems?” Jackson asked.
Will narrowed his eyes at him, and then looked back at Molly, as if she’d asked the question. “The other problem with the faraday cages, the metal cages Kate mentioned, is if we cover just our heads, and not our faces and our eyes, some of the brainwaves will inevitably still escape. So if we go that route, we have to hope that our brainwaves will be attenuated enough that they'll be under the detection threshold for the control centers. And that’s a risk—we won’t know if it works until we try it.”
“So if you’re wrong, people die?” demanded Molly, turning a fierce look on Nick. “Hell no. What are the other options?”
“Well, it wouldn’t mean we’d die necessarily,” Nick placated her, “just that agents would show up. Then we’d just have to hope Jackson trained us well enough to resist them.”
Everyone turned to look at Jackson at this, who raised his eyebrows but said nothing.
“Besides, at this point we’re talking about a raid without even the faraday cages, at least once, since we’d have to go on the grid for supplies to make them,” said Will. “And if my colleague Hank changed his password already, the best I can do is embed my code into an innocent-looking message and send it to him in a comm. If he opens the comm, the code might execute. If he doesn’t…” Will shrugged. “And if he already knows I’m a traitor, why would he open it?”
“Why don’t I send it then?” asked Jean. “He doesn’t know me.”
Will pursed his lips and thought about this. “That could work.” He shoved a piece of fish in his mouth.
“So let me get this straight,” I said. “If you can find a connected net screen, and if he hasn’t changed hi
s password, and if he opens the comm, then it might execute?”
Will nodded. “That’s about the size of it. But it even gets more complicated than that. Even if, one way or the other, I manage to successfully disrupt the signals at regular intervals, they’ll figure out pretty quick that their signals aren’t sending—I’d estimate within 24 hours. After that, the Potentate will have technical teams on it day and night to try to fix the problem—nothing will be higher priority. I’d buy us maybe 48 hours at best. And that’s if everything goes perfectly.” He sighed.
Brian, on Will’s other side, leaned in and summarized for me. “So it’s not a long-term strategy. I suggested reprogramming the messages the control center sends out entirely, but Will didn’t like that idea…”
“No, it’s a great idea, I just don’t know how to do it,” Will told him, running a hand through his hair in frustration. “I never found out how the control centers send out messages, all I found out was how to disrupt them. If I could get back in there for a good day or two I might be able to figure it out, but at this point they’d kill me long before I had the chance!”
“I have an idea,” I said.
The entire group’s hushed mini-conversations stopped at exactly that moment, and I felt everyone staring at me. I looked around self-consciously, and said, “I told Jackson and Alec this idea once before. But…” I glanced at Will, setting my jaw. “Everyone in the Republic knows and trusts me. So if we’ve only got 24-48 hours of signal disruption to work with, we should capitalize on that. When people are already asking questions, I should go in and… somehow hijack the air waves.” I glanced at Brian and said, “Maybe we can’t reprogram the control center signals to tell people the truth. But I could do it directly.”
I saw Brenda Halfpenny and Nelson Armstrong nodding with approval. Alec did as well. Jackson looked worried.
“No,” said Will shortly. “Out of the question.”
“Why?” I demanded.