by M. G. Herron
“That’s it?” Po said, her voice rising with surprise.
“That’s not counting the ten thousand farmers and their families living in the valley to begin with, or the people we couldn’t find to count in the first place. In any case, that’s half a million people we can’t feed.”
Po pursed her lips. “How long will our rations last, Magistrate?”
Ming shrugged. “They won’t. We don’t even have enough food to serve everyone in the valley a single good meal. It’s lucky the river is nearby. Muddy as it is, at least it’s fresh water.”
“You’ve killed us, Po,” Captain Wallace said. “Whether you realize it yet or not. The army waits because they know we can’t last. It’s only been twenty-four hours and already people are restless. We’ve even gotten a few reports from families in the valley that keep finding people sneaking onto their property, stealing chickens, breaking cellar doors, you name it. And it’s only been a day.”
Po had helped set up spots in the river to collect clean drinking water and distribute it among the people in the Valley. Some men had even pitched in with the police officers to reinforce their barricades. But once people realized there was nothing left to do but wait, they became tense and on edge, and those who wanted to cause trouble—or were driven to do so out of the need to eat—had no trouble finding it.
“The good news,” Ming said, “is that I managed to get through to the World Food Programme this morning. Since the terrorist attack on the Capitol has reached global news networks, they’ve decided to reconsider our application for food aid. The regulations also say that an army occupying a city is an act of civil war, so that puts us in a better position. The people I’ve been communicating with at the UN say that we’ll get aid in the next 24 hours.”
“How can we ensure the drop happens in the valley and not in the army encampment?”
“I send them coordinates in the valley. And then we cross our fingers and hope they don’t fuck it up.”
Wallace grunted.
Ming had been able to get through to the UN on his sat phone. The cell towers were still jammed. But when Po took her phone out—the spare one she borrowed from her aunt while Ari was recovering from his episode in Rose Petal—expecting the phone to read “no signal,” she instead saw full signal bars and that data had been reactivated. A hundred messages and missed calls from her aunt had come flooding in all at once. “Hey, my phone’s working again.”
Wallace’s brow scrunched as he pulled his own phone out of his pocket. “That’s odd. Why would they want to remove the jam on the cell towers? It was put in place to hamper the communications of the rebels. Unless…”
Po opened an internet browser on her phone and did a search for Enshi news.
At the top of the search results page was Senator Khan’s face. The title of the story: Senator Joseph Khan Becomes President Pro Tempore Following Terrorist Attack in Enshi.
Po pulled up a video of the press conference where the announcement had been made in the early hours of this fateful day, and waited a second while it buffered.
At a lectern in front of a crowd of reporters, Senator Khan stood in front of a row of red and yellow flags with the stars of the republic, that had been lowered to half-mast.
“Yesterday, an attack on our nation’s Capitol was perpetrated by a terrorist group known as Citizen. It is with regret and a heavy heart that I am here to inform the country that our nation’s President Ezekiel Aramat was killed in the attack. Also among those currently known as dead are Vice President Ali Ghorbani, Secretary of the Treasury Gary Ablenado, and many more. Our nation’s heart has been wounded and we grieve personally for those lost, and for their families, and for our people.
“Now, in this time of crisis, more than ever before, despite the tragedy that has befallen us and in the face of adversity, we must band together as a people. And we must have strong leadership that shows these terrorists that we, the people, are not afraid. That is why I am officially accepting, with a unanimous vote of the remaining senate and the full support of the military, the position of president pro tempore.
“An attack of this nature is an irrevocable act of war. While this group of evil people who call themselves Citizen is still out there, we have no choice but to continue to pursue them with relentless determination, find them where they hide like insects in the dark, and crush them with overwhelming force.
“Fortunately, there is a silver lining in the dark cloud that hangs over us today. During the attack on our Capitol yesterday, a key leader of the rebel insurgency has been captured and is now being questioned about the attack and the location of the rest of the members of Citizen. His name is Ari Klokov—”
Po’s heart was yanked up into her windpipe where it choked her. A shuddering gasp escaped her lips.
“—and he was not born here. He is not a citizen of this country, but a refugee from the nuclear fallout in Europe. Once we have the information we need from him, he will face criminal charges for using illegal weapons to commit an act of mass destruction, terrorism, and treason.
“Finally, the first executive order that I’m putting forward in my position as president is to instate martial law. The military now has control of the security of this city. As of today, free citizen status for refugees is formally revoked, except on a case-by-case basis. The city-wide curfew in Enshi has been reinstated. Anyone out after 10pm will be arrested and detained until further notice. Anyone gathering unlawfully will be arrested and detained until further notice. Any refugees found without proper identification will be deported immediately.
“Thank you, and God bless the Republic.”
Po was stunned. The entire speech floored her. This was not the country full of hopes and dreams that her mother had raised her to believe in. This was not the country her father helped build with his farm and his sweat and his blood. This was now a country of death and fear, inhospitable and unsafe.
She dropped the phone in the grass, as if touching it were poisoning her, and walked like a zombie away from the cliff’s edge.
CHAPTER 54
SURVIVORS
The house in which Po grew up lay barren before her, nothing but a burnt husk tossed with rubble, ash and dust, and a sooty stone foundation.
She looked at it and let herself cry for a minute, then picked her way cautiously among the charred timbers and wrecked furniture. In a stupor, in what used to be her mother’s room, she rescued from the ashes a comb that belonged to mom. It went into her back pocket. The bodies of her parents—she counted her blessings—were nowhere in sight. Po hoped that a kind neighbor had stopped by and spent the time to give them proper burials. She hoped so. Her dad had said once or twice that he wanted to be cremated, but not like this.
She stepped out of what used to be her mother’s room and walked around to the remains of the back office. She picked several broad sheaves of shingles off the old mahogany desk under which they’d hid that night, where Jia had left nail marks in the backs of Po’s hands. Remarkably, the desk was still solid, and standing. Her parents’ bodies, however, were not under it and did not seem to be in the room. She looked for blood stains, but it was impossible to tell when everything was covered with rubble or blackened by the fire.
She kicked through the rubble with her muddy sneakers until she found the tiny copper and metal pieces of a circuit board glinting dully through a thick layer of ash.
It was no use. Po made herself turn and leave the husk of a house behind. She walked along the packed dirt path that led from the back of the house into the rice paddies, through the trees. Eventually, she came upon her father’s greenhouse and experimentation laboratory. The door had been left ajar.
She walked into the room. It was normally twenty degrees warmer in here, and humid, but the open door had let all the humid air out. The glass dome of the roof had cracked in the middle, and the morning light glinted off broken glass. That hadn’t been there on the day the valley was raided. Those thugs must have taken
their anger out on the greenhouse when they weren’t able to find the modified rice seeds in her father’s lab. That, or some other wayfarers had wandered through and chucked rocks until the glass broke. The dome didn’t go that high, so it wouldn’t have been hard to hit. Either way it made her blood boil, to know that her father’s work had not only been taken from him, but then disrespected when he was gone.
Around the edge of the lab, where the desks were set into the wall. All manner of microscopes, beakers, glass cooling units, and other instruments of her father’s craft were broken against the chemical-proof, smooth lab countertops and strewn across the floor. She did her best to pick up the equipment. A lot of it was heavy duty and still functional, but the glass fronts of the cooling units would need to be replaced, and the centrifuges had been broken beyond repair. The fridge that contained his current round of tests had been smashed, and dark liquids had oozed onto the floor, and then evaporated.
Po exhaled a shuddering breath, leaned back against the cabinets under the lab tables, and sank to the floor. She gazed across the multiple, tiny-tiered rice paddies, miniature microcosms of the much larger tiered paddy systems decorating the hills throughout King Valley. Many of them were just dull black water, but a few had brown stalks growing out of them. The plants had died when they were left untended.
Her father had spent more than half his life in the valley. He died here, but he had come first to live among his work. He had a fascination with agriculture, and a passion for genetic engineering, a special combination. And he was always one of those people who learned best by doing things. Before the disease that began to wipe out King Valley’s rice crops two years ago, their farm had grown an incredible amount of rice. But afterward, like everyone else’s farms, the yields shrank and shrank, while the disease spread, a kind of vibrant green algae, through the paddy water.
At first, she remembered him telling her once, he had examined the water and soon realized that if they managed to balance the water in an infected paddy, the disease would come back two or three weeks later. It seemed to originate from the rice seeds themselves. And, he had said, was it any surprise? We’ve been engineering rice seeds away from their stronger ancestor seeds for years. What we have now is so susceptible that it’s become poison to itself.
It was shortly after that that her father, with some persuasion from Ming, agreed to undertake the rice seed modification project, with promise of funding from the government, who was deeply reliant on King Valley’s rice production.
Of course, it hadn’t worked fast enough. Her father blew through three deadlines. And then everything was destroyed in the riots—her father’s seeds, their farm, the lab itself.
Just like the algae that had killed the rice seeds they’d been growing in the valley for generations, the country’s population had come back to poison and destroy itself.
A few raindrops trickled down through the crack in the roof, glistening as they fell, and landed among the brown grasses in one of the experimental microcosms at the center of the room. As the water splashed down, it highlighted a few petite green stalks nestled in among the taller brown reeds.
Po sat up ramrod straight. She kicked off her shoes and waded into the dark, squishy paddy water. Her jeans were immediately soaked up to the ankle. She hurried to the center of the paddy, her breath coming fast now, and parted the reeds.
While all the brown grass at the edges had rotted and died, there was one paddy, a slight terrace that was at the center of the lab, where green grass grew. The area had which had gotten enough fresh water and a tiny bit of sunlight through the dome above to allow it to grow. Po had lived long enough on the farm to know what healthy rice looked like. These plants were still babies, but their roots were strong, the leaves hardy, the stem thick. A few grains had begun to sprout off the top.
They were not only alive—they were thriving.
Shakily, she bent down and pulled a few stripling grains off the top of the plant. They were already larger than normal rice seeds. Po knew that they would grow large enough that several grains would fill her palm.
She straightened, and with the grains clutched in one hand and her shoes in the other, ran from the lab, her bare feet slapping along the packed dirt path across the farm.
CHAPTER 55
A RISK WORTH TAKING
Ming thought about going after Po when she ran off, but decided to let her have the time to herself. She had every right to the anger and hopeless despair she was feeling. Standing next to Captain Wallace by the car and looking over the burnt husk of the Li’s house, he didn’t have to imagine her grief. He felt it, too, like a wound that wouldn’t heal.
He flexed his aching hand. The sopping bandage and split he’d been using to stabilize his wrist had been torn off in the chaos of the retreat from Telerethon Square.
The captain sat in the car and juggled his phone and the handheld radio. On one line he coordinated with a large group of volunteers, supervised by his officers, who were going around to each home in the valley and asking for any extra food the residents could spare, to feed the refugees they had let into the valley. The other line called to the sergeant in charge of the sanitation effort. More volunteers were digging latrines, organizing the makeshift camps that were going up—so fast!—made of whatever fallen lumber or tarps were on hand, and organizing a water hauling and cleansing effort upriver.
When the dark-haired form of Po broke out of the woods, running flat out across the open field toward them, Ming knocked on the window of the car. Wallace set the phone and radio aside and got out of the vehicle.
Po stopped two feet in front of him. Her chest heaved from the run, and she held out a fist, palm up. When her fingers spread like a flower, Ming gaped, and his whole body broke out in goosebumps.
Three tan rice seeds huddled together in her palm.
“Are those…?” Ming asked.
Po nodded enthusiastically. “My father’s rice seeds.”
“I thought they had all been destroyed,” Ming breathed softly, as if a stray exhalation would blow the seeds away again as fast as they had appeared.
“So did Felix and the rebels. They must have been furious after they found the backup drives for his research destroyed. They broke into his lab that night—that was before they kidnapped me. But the seeds were there all along, hiding in the dirt. I knew he had some kind of failsafe in place. Father must have planted these before he gave the seeds to you that day. And then, out of habit, he put all his research on his backup drives and locked them in his desk.” She looked down and seemed overcome with the aforementioned sadness and anger once again. “He destroyed the backups before the rebels came.”
“And he didn’t tell me because he knew the position I was in at the time.” Ming put his hand across his eyes as his mind caught up with the implications. He rubbed his temples with his thumb and middle finger of one hand, then glanced back up at the earnest, bright-eyed girl. “How did the rebels even know about the seeds?”
Captain Wallace chimed in. “Po, you told us that Ari said Senator Khan was working with the rebels, right?”
“Yes.”
“The obvious answer is that Khan fed them the information,” Wallace said. “But why would Citizen want with the rice seeds?”
“The same reason we want them,” Ming said. “As a bargaining chip. The government would have been forced to take Citizen more seriously if they held the seeds. Maybe even negotiate with them.”
Po’s eyes glistened with mischief, and a small smile played across her lips.
Po angled her hand slightly with a nod to Ming. He cupped his hands under hers, and she tipped the rice seeds into his palm. He brought his hands to his chest and held the seeds close to his body.
“Whoever has these seeds has the power to end the food riots,” Po said, “and put an end to this martial law business.”
Ming nodded once and made a noise of agreement deep in his throat.
Po pointed in the direction of the arm
y encampment on the edge of the valley. “They need King Valley—we all do. It’s still the country’s largest concentration of farm land, and if my father’s rice seeds really bring the level of production back up like he thought it could, then that means everything.”
“What if they refuse to negotiate with us?” Wallace said. “What if they decide to march those mechs across the river and take the gate by force?”
“If they won’t negotiate with us, or if they choose to press on, we burn the valley behind us as we retreat. Then it’s not just Enshi that will starve. It’s the whole country. Khan and General Greif and every one of those soldiers has to eat, too.”
“So we just turn over the seeds to Khan?” Ming asked, not even bothering to hide the disgust in his voice.
“You don’t have to,” Po said. “We keep the seeds, and give him the formula.”
“You said your father destroyed his research. We don’t have his formula anymore,” Ming frowned. “Well, we could get someone to sequence the genome of these seeds, but that would take time…”
Po’s mischievous smile widened. “Khan doesn’t know we don’t have it. And he doesn’t know what the formula looks like. No one does.”
Ming’s eyes widened as he suddenly grasped the full extent of Po’s plan.
It was a risk. But it was a risk worth taking.
CHAPTER 56
INEXORABLE
Po had never seen or heard her uncle cry, but he wiped rivers of tears from his face when she finally got him on a video call.
Uncle Bohai had gotten lucky. Between crisis management sessions in Congress, in which no productive agreements were reached, Bohai had decided to go out to Rose Petal and check on Jia and Kylie. He was, understandably, worried about them. He happened to be driving to see them when the attack on Congress took place.
Bohai was one of only about fifty elected officials to survive the attack.