by Harn, Darby
People advance from the ditch on the Responders. The Responders stand firm in a line before the train.
“I’m just like you. I’ve lost my home. My neighborhood. My friends. I’ve lost my life. But I haven’t lost the one thing that matters most. I haven’t lost who I am.”
I lowered my hood. “My name is Kit Baldwin.”
Canisters of tear gas tumble end over end into the crowd. Still, people charge toward the train. Toward the Responders. The image shakes as Ben runs after them. He trips over someone. Yellow, dry grass twists in a funnel that empties into sky.
“I lived in the Halfway Hotel. I fixed cars and bikes and air conditioners and I was trying to fix something for someone I love. But I made a mistake. That mistake cost me everything.” Magenta bristles beneath my suit. “But not my identity. Not my dignity. Not my rights as a person, inalienable. To be human is to be alien. We are all strange. We are all unknowable. We are all Americans. We are human beings and we have been forgotten. We haven’t had water. We haven’t had electricity. We have lived in squalor and disease and decay for decades as people argued how to best to deal with us and they’ve finally figured out a solution. They’re simply getting rid of us.”
Some of the protesters make it to the train. They try and decouple the cargo containers from the rest of the line as Responders close in on them. Punches shake the ground. The camera. People fly out of frame and past the windshield of the van. They land on the roofs of cars. In the fields beyond.
“Evander Blackwood thinks you won’t notice. He thinks you won’t care. Maybe you don’t. Maybe you think people who can’t pay for protection aren’t entitled to any. Maybe you think it’s not your problem what happens to someone else. You pay your dues, you sad-face-emoji when you read something awful that happened somewhere else and it’s all good, so long as you are in control. But you’re not in control. He’s been telling you so for thirty years. ‘They’ are trying to take your power away from you. Your security. Your peace of mind. ‘They’ are trying to limit you. And who are ‘they’ anyway? People who can’t afford water? Electricity? Food? What power do these people have?”
Blood splatters across the screen. Bones stab through skin. Rock shatters the glass of the Responder’s helmets and the train thunders back into motion. The engine pushes through the parked trucks blocking the intersection, sending them rolling into the ditch. Frankie crouches low in front of the camera, continuing to report as a Responder approaches her from behind.
“Right now, people are being forced out of their homes and put on trains out of the city. Like cattle. That’s what he thinks you are, regardless if you’re paid up or not. If you think for one second that paying your bill on time puts you ahead of someone else in the eyes of Evander Blackwood, then ask the families of the passengers on Flight 347.”
The Responder grabs the mic out of Frankie’s hand. Ben’s helmet-cam tumbles off but continues to record.
“Ask anyone who has suffered in Break Pointe because Evander Blackwood’s greed is such not even money matters to him. He doesn’t want our money. He doesn’t want the ERA abolished. And more than anything he doesn’t want any of us to know a train is leaving Hughes tonight at 8PM for Chicago with hundreds of innocent people whose only crime was to call Break Pointe home.”
Just outside the van, and just outside my field of vision, the train of detainees continues west. Protesters break into the decoupled cargo containers as an airship lowers over the tracks.
“Evander Blackwood stood by and let the city burn. He stood by and let innocent people die.”
The patrol ship arrives without its gondola; it settles right over the rear cargo container of the train.
“Evander Blackwood wants you to think he’s a hero. He isn’t. He wants you to think I’m not human. He wants you to think you’re not. But you are. I am. Humanity isn’t something we leave behind when we develop powers, or wealth. It’s innate. Incontrovertible. It’s the power all of us have together.”
Locks clamp down around the cargo container and it lifts into the air off the tracks with the patrol ship.
“I call on Mayor Gardner to veto the resolution before the council. I call on him to have faith in the people of this city. In me. We’ve carried the city this far. Evander Blackwood can’t rebuild Break Pointe. I can. I can disable the ship. I can lift this shadow over our city and I can do more. I can do so much more than I ever thought I could, but I can’t do it alone.”
Prisoners still on the container cling to guardrails as it retracts into the airship.
“Maybe you feel you’ve done enough, signing a petition. Protesting outside City Hall. Maybe you think there’s nothing you can do. Maybe you’ve already turned the channel, and you think this all goes away if you do, but it won’t. Stand up. Fight for yourself, if no one else. Be a person. Be human.”
The Responder drags Frankie by her hair toward the tracks. She screams, and tries to get away. She can’t.
”No one can hear you,” the Responder says and a beam of light sends him crashing through the ship, out the other side.
I extend a glowing hand to Frankie. “I can.”
The hull of the damaged airship crumples over the stalled cargo container, and the rest of the prisoners escape their confinement onto the tracks. I hover in the air, burning bright, and with a magnetic shove, I knock the emptied train cars off the track. And then, so there’s none of this nonsense again, I bend the rails out of their lines. The saboteurs guide people to the trucks, along with the wounded as I lower to the ground.
Frankie climbs out of the ditch. “Look at what you did…”
“It wasn’t all me,” I say.
“This will certainly get their attention at City Hall.”
I head back toward the news van. “Good.”
“At the Blackwood Building, too.”
“I’m sure it will.”
Frankie trails after me. “Can you really disable the ship?”
I bite my lip. “I said I could.”
I’m a key. If I go to the ship, I can unlock all of the power of the alien ship. Or I can box it away, forever. I think. I slide the door shut behind me and Frankie’s U-turn nearly sends the van into the ditch on the other side of the road.
Ben crashes into the chair at the workstation and goes straight into editing the video he’d just shot. “That was so cool. Frankie. Look. My hands are shaking.”
“This will help with the vote,” I say. “Right?”
Her eyes set in the rearview. “Right.”
Ben goes back to the monitor bank, fingers scurrying over the keyboard like squirrels on the roof of the apartment and I miss the sound. The squirrels. Home. I know now. Things are never go back the way they were, even as the truck speeds back toward Break Pointe, down a lonely, dark highway.
Twenty-Two
Nothing stirs in The Derelicts this morning. The island a ghost ship. No raids. No Responders circling like vultures. No patrol ships lazy like fish in aquariums. Only people, on their stoops, their corners, their roofs, waiting. Watching.
Defending.
Rain pelts back and forth between snow, uncertain. Thousands clog the streets outside City Hall, calling for the mayor to veto the resolution. No one knows what will happen. Nothing has been happening in the city for days now.
Something has to happen.
Signs bleed with the red V. T-shirts. On side of the old bank, there’s graffiti of me from the ground to the top, glowing red with aerosol energy. Bleeding Jesus. Little girls five and six years old run through the crowd, red sequin stars painted or glued on their shirts. This would all go to my head if I thought they were playing at me. I may have gone on television and said my name and showed my face, but that wasn’t me. That was this other woman. This other being. She filled the space I left behind when I grabbed hold of an alien rock. That’s the only way I can do any of this. This isn’t me. Kit can’t connect. She can’t get a word out to save her life. She can’t be anything to anyon
e other than a bulb too cloudy to even smash.
Abi pulls me deeper into the crowd. “Let’s get closer.”
One person after another climbs into the pushcart the organizers use as a soapbox at the corner of Siegel and Shuster, take the megaphone in hand and tell their story. My name is; I have lived here since; this is my home. Some are forceful. Others fearful. All of them committed. I draw the loose fabric of my hood tighter against the pinned eyes of the crowd.
“You should say something,” Vidette says.
After a few glum days checking her PEAL over and over, hopeful for any kind of message from Dr. Piller, all the electricity in the crowd is reanimating for Vidette.
“I don’t want to make it about me,” I say.
“It is about you.”
“I’m no one.”
“That’s not what you said on TV.”
“They don’t need any more motivation.”
“Apparently the council does. That’s why we’re all here. You’re why we’re all here. Go on. Say something.”
I bite my lip. It was loads easier speaking into a camera. No one was there, besides Frankie and in the shadows, I couldn’t see her. I could stop and start. My whole life I’ve been invisible, and now literally, that’s all I want to be.
“I wouldn’t know what to say.”
Abi smiles. “I know what to say.”
“Abi, don’t.”
“You can’t stop me.”
“I literally can.”
Abi sticks her tongue out at me, and then cuts about a dozen people to take the megaphone from the person on the cart.
“Ok. So. This is happening. My name is Abi Fisher and I worked at GP.” Abi wilts under the boos and jeers but the woman behind her won’t let her off the cart. “Worked. I said worked. Past tense. Is this thing on? I worked with Kit Baldwin.”
The cheers grow louder. The tremor in the street greater.
“I know Kit,” Abi says, looking right at me, her smile broadening, her hair catching that pink halo of the sky. “And Kit is here with us – in spirit. She’s shy and kind and true and when I first met her, I crushed on her hard. Because I knew who she was. She didn’t have to tell me. Some people, they’re like rivers. You can’t see anything beneath them, really, unless you get real close. Unless you spend some time there. Then you see, there’s all this life underneath. This whole world, we don’t see or know. But if you stop, and slow, you can go with it. You can find that current, that’s going through all of us. That’s Kit. She’s the river. The current. She’s the life we all deserve.”
A bird lands on my shoulder, and chirps me out of my stupor. I can’t do this. I can’t process all this. People hem me in. Vidette. The crowd congeals. It erupts. Abi’s fist shoots into the air. “KIT!” She chants my name, over and over and the people echo her. Break Pointe does. This is slightly frightening. Never once did I think I’d be anything more than a box of random parts cobbled together, with no purpose or spark.
Abi rushes off the cart and gobbles me up in her arms. I feel her energy. Her life. I feel mine.
God.
That draw. That pull, between me and her. Me and everyone here, everything living and powerful in the world, it’s a connection. A bond, between me and all things.
“I’m a river?” I say.
“You’re my life,” Abi says.
“Abi.”
She smiles. “I know.”
Mike squeezes out of the crowd with a slice of pizza. “Everybody knows, man. Everybody.”
“Where did you get pizza?” I say.
“This old couple brought like a hundred pies. Gooey. So they’re talking about marching to the Blackwood Building.”
A smile cracks Vidette’s lips. “Now we’re talking.”
Mike rubs his hands in anticipation. Abi teems with excitement. Energy surges through the crowd that I can’t absorb or control. I created a ripple in Break Pointe when I went on TV and challenged Blackwood; the ripple has become a wave. Across the river, the peninsula is a gigantic breakwater.
“You’re not really going to march,” I say.
Vidette winks at me. “We are.”
Mike nudges Vidette. “You got a boyfriend?”
“Not really.”
“I’m probably too young for you.”
She nudges him back. “Not really.”
The chant reverberates outwards from the cart through the entire crowd: MARCH! MARCH! MARCH! All at once, the dam of people on Perez breaks and floods west toward the river. Cheers and laughter echo through the empty streets. So does the static crackle of radio traffic from the patrol ships shadowing us.
“This is a bad idea,” I say.
“They can’t hold us down,” Mike says, his voice carrying. Others pick it up. They can’t hold us down.
THEY CAN’T HOLD US DOWN.
Some people run along the edges of the crowd, banging on the red cage enclosing the pedestrian path across the Stitch. A few come up the subway track just below, walking both on the track and on the roofs of the rusted, abandoned train cars. No way in hell GP lets us off, on the other side. All we’re doing is lining up the beer cans on the shelf for the Responders to shoot down. A patrol ship lowers directly over the bridge, so low I can see the conductor at the helm in the gondola.
I pull hard on Abi’s hand. “Go back.”
“Kit,” she says. “C’mon.”
Chants die out. Shouts become whispers. The crowd slows. I climb the railing, looking over the heads of the thousands in front of me. The Interdictor stands in the archway through the center tower, blocking the way to the Keep. The crowd stalls out, the verve of the moment jumping track over to fear.
“Go back,” I say. I pull down my hood. “Go back!”
Vidette blocks the way. “There’s no going back.”
“There are people here.”
“You can’t avoid this,” she says. “You can’t run from this. You drew a line in the sand. Now you have to walk it.”
“I’m not getting any more people hurt.”
“It’s fine for him,” she says, looking at Mike, looking back at us, confused. “You go bust up raids with him. He has no powers. He can’t help you. But me you expect to stay at home on the shelf. The one person you need most by your side.”
“We just have to get through this – “
“Kitsie. Baby. I am not your mother.”
She pushes ahead through the stalled crowd, forward, toward The Interdictor. Birds flutter against rusted steel plates, their wings batting against my jacket, twisted in confusion.
Are you the light?
I zip down my jacket. Lower my hood. Leave my feet. I float off the pedway, above the bridge, a burning flare in the sky.
“Go back,” I say.
The rear of the line trickles back down the pedway. Someone shouts WHOSE STREETS? The answer comes back swift and strong. OUR STREETS. The protesters consolidate in a line of their own, opposite The Interdictor and the rallying cry continues, it builds and builds, fierce and undaunted. WHOSE STREETS?
OUR STREETS.
Please. All of you. You’ve got to go back. They don’t listen. They just go on, banging pots, the rafters, their feet against the loose grate of the pedway. A metal thunder shakes through the bridge. Some of those that ran start coming back up the pedway. Capes snap in the wind as Responders swoop down from out of the low, thick clouds, and drop a burnt-out city bus at the foot of the bridge, cutting off the way back.
Abi climbs a girder. “You have to get out of here.”
I lower back to her. “Not without you.”
“What do we do?”
People clot on the pedway, uncertain. WHOSE STREETS?
OUR STREETS.
In ones and twos people climb the girders down to the subway track and traffic lane. The crowd surges off the pedway, the chants louder, the mob energy throttling them forward on their quest across the river and The Interdictor rises off the bridge, into the halogen creep of clouds ac
ross the sky.
“Is he leaving?” Abi says, and then it happens.
Sparks explode out of the east end of the bridge. Then it just falls away, splashing into the river. The entire span winces, sending thousands to their hands and knees. The Interdictor emerges out of the mist, driving a crumpled gob of steel beams into the air so fast they don’t make a sound.
“No,” I say, but before the words have left my lips, he’s sliced through the western span, and right through that fucking bus his buddies left on the pedway a minute before. Steel bends. Cables snap. Men and women scream for their lives and I reach out with all of my magnetic will to hold it together.
A sound like thunder inside an earthquake breaks my concentration. The Stitch rises off of its towers, out of the water, into the air. People fall off. Tiny splashes.
Big screams.
The Interdictor jangles beneath the center of the disintegrating bridge, holding it aloft with one hand. He carries it, until he’s close enough to meet me eye to eye.
“Baldwin,” he says, his voice filtered to an electronic hiss through his helmet. “I understand you’re a very intelligent woman. I have a physics problem for you.”
“Don’t,” I say. “I’ll do whatever you want.”
“Catch.”
The bridge comes at me. Millions of tons of steel. Thousands of people. I reach out with all my power. Abi. Vi. Mike. They’re all on the bridge. Everyone I know.
Everything I love.
Tracks heave in sudden mountains of webbed rail ties. Train cars torpedo the river. Bodies. I clench my fists. Grip the steel. The bolts. Rivets. I compress it all together until I ease the bending lattice of beams and splayed umbilical cable to the river shore and set it down. I dive toward the pedway, searching for Abi, her energy in the dust and smoke.
“Abi!”
Vidette punches through the roof of the cage enclosing the pedway, and climbs through. “Everybody this way!”
I help people bloody and bruised up and onto the roof. Flying Responders snatch people right off their feet. Vidette charges down the slope of the buckled pedway, and then launches headfirst into them. I hover over the pedway, caught between covering the retreat and digging down into the crumpled mess of the bridge for Abi. I don’t see her. I can’t see her.