“Dean, what the hell are you doing?” his father hissed.
“I have something to say,” he called across the room, ignoring his frantic parents.
“Young Mr. Owens.”
“Miranda and Julie are innocent,” Dean said strongly. “We all discussed it and agreed that you were wrong in taking them into custody. We demand that you set them free.”
“Who is we?” Dana chuckled. “Your group at Archangel?”
“You are trying to scare us by taking her,” Dean accused. “All it did was make us angry.”
“Dean, sit down,” his mother snapped, grabbing his wrist.
“I don’t see anyone standing to support you,” Dana noted, looking around the room. “I mean it. I want to understand why you are so upset. So, please, stand if you agree with Mr. Owens.”
No one moved.
“Alright, everyone under the age of twenty stand up,” Dana ordered, rolling his eyes. Still, no one moved. He looked around the room and motioned with his hands. “Come on, up, up, up,” he ordered. Hesitant, everyone pulled their seats away from the tables and stood.
“Now,” Dana started, “Miranda was a friend to you,” he said simply, “so naturally, you would be upset. But this seems to be more about you being afraid that I took her under false pretenses, and you’re frightened I might start taking of you.” Dana nodded and paced across the stage, dragging his heels in exaggerated slow steps as he tossed the pocket watch between his hands.
“Let me make this perfectly clear,” Dana said, his voice lined with ice. “If I listened to every complaint about how I took people into the Commission unfairly, thousands upon thousands of very dangerous people would be released back into the population. And, as you know, once you’re in the Commission, you can never leave.”
“But she was already in the Commission!” Dean snapped. “Why would she risk doing anything stupid like smuggling drugs?”
“That was why she used Julie,” Dana said. “And that is why they are both in the back.” Dana turned and faced Dean directly. “You think you know better than me and my intelligence officers what she did? I know more than you could ever possibly dream of. You think that, because you’re in the Commission, you understand everything?” Dana looked around. “Let me tell you something, young Commission members,” he continued, pacing back across the stage, “you are not invincible. Just because you are young and you think that that gives you an excuse to do stupid shit, you are still liable, and there will be consequences for your actions. Not warnings or lectures, but legitimate punishment.”
“So, if I were to break Miranda out, what would the repercussion be?” Dean challenged darkly.
Everyone in the room was so shocked by the statement that most couldn’t help but bark a laugh of disbelief, including me. Dana just smiled.
“Good luck,” he chuckled.
“Dean, sit down, now!” his father ordered.
“I’ll do it if I have to,” Dean barked, starting toward Dana, away from his father’s grabbing hand. The tension in the room rapidly escalated. I watched, trying to think if there was anything I could do to turn the situation around. I knew, at that point, one of two things could happen and only one of them was favorable. Dean was either going to piss Dana off enough that he would be taken into the lab and it would scare off others who were thinking of rebelling, or Dana would just laugh it off and piss Dean off even more, which would put more fuel on the fire of our rebellion.
“You’ll do what?” Dana asked, watching the teen. Sean stepped to Dana’s side but the leader of the Commission, not removing his eyes from Dean, put his hand on Sean’s chest and pushed him backward, telling him to stay away. “You’ll break into the holding cells and take her and Julie? And then what?”
“I’ll be sure to destroy everything I can on the way in and out,” Dean snarled, finally clearing the tables and stepping up to Dana. “And if you try to stop me, I’ll kill you.”
“You? Kill me?”
“Mr. Christenson, I’m so sorry, please—” Dean’s mother tried to stop the situation, standing, but Dana held his hand up to her, his eyes still locked on Dean’s. She silenced and watched helplessly from her table.
“You think you’re ready to play with the big boys, kiddo?” he chuckled coldly.
Dean stood in front of Dana and stared at him for what seemed to be an eternity. The entire room held its breath, waiting to see who would triumph.
Finally, Dana reached forward faster than anyone could blink and turned Dean around, pulling his arms up behind his back and causing the teenager to let out a startled yelp of pain.
“You’re adorable, but you don’t stand a chance, and that doesn’t make this any fun,” Dana said with a condescending laugh. He walked behind Dean, forcing him forward with his arms bent awkwardly as he was led to his seat.
“Now, you sit down and be a good boy,” Dana said, bringing him to his table and sitting him down sharply. After Dean was seated and his arms were released, Dana leaned down to his ear and whispered something I could not hear.
As Dana moved away, the teenage boy looked angrier than hell, but he did not move and I felt relief crash over me like a wave when I realized the confrontation was back in safer territory.
Dana moved to the front of the room.
“If I hear of any of the Commission children getting any ideas about being brave and sneaking into the back, you will find yourselves permanent residents of the holding cells. Be sure you think about that long and hard before you do anything stupid.”
I felt his eyes fall on me, but I remained strong. I stared defiantly back and, even though he smirked and turned away to start the meeting, I remained defiant. Once again, Dana had helped me in my revolution.
Chapter Thirty
Clark came to my house surprisingly early Sunday morning. My parents had me up at six—three hours after we had gotten home from the Commission—to tell me that they were heading out for their charity event and that I would be in charge of Mykail all day, so I was awake far earlier than I wanted with a fuzzy mind and heavy eyes.
Mykail was asleep when I rolled out of bed again at seven, so I left him alone. I prepared a simple breakfast for both of us and then went into his room, sitting on the bed and watching him sleep. He had waited for us to come home from the Commission, but with the distractions during the meeting, we were later than usual, and he had fallen asleep before we returned.
I didn’t have long to wait before he stirred and woke, his eyes blinking slowly.
“Good morning,” I smiled.
“Good morning,” he murmured, his voice thick with sleep. “Sorry I didn’t see you last night,” he said, his face creased from slumber as he closed his eyes again, his head falling back to the pillow.
“It’s fine,” I said, my heart stopping when his hand slipped into mine. “I made you some breakfast. My parents are going to be out until late, so you’re stuck with me.”
“How horrible…” he joked. He pulled himself upright and leaned forward, kissing my cheek as I furiously wished I didn’t blush so easily.
To hide my embarrassment, I grabbed the plate of toast and bacon I had brought for him, which he took before asking sweetly, “Is it okay to eat up here?”
We enjoyed the morning without a care, but I was half-way through my breakfast when the doorbell resounded through the house.
“Who’s here?” Mykail asked, surprised. I stared at the doorway of his room, confused, trying to think of who would be at our house that early.
“Stay up here,” I said, abandoning my plate and quickly running down the stairs to the front door, not caring about being in my pajamas. I looked out the window next to the front door and was surprised at who I saw.
“Clark?” I gasped as I opened the door. “What are you doing here so early?”
“I wanted to make sure I was here before Becca.”
“Who brought you?” I asked, seeing no one nearby.
“Mark,” Clark answered. “Sorry, it looks
like I woke you up…”
“No, no,” I said quickly. “I was already awake, I just…obviously haven’t bothered to get dressed, yet.” I wasn’t sure why I was suddenly embarrassed. Mykail and I were simply eating breakfast, but I felt as though Clark had interrupted something very intimate. “Sorry, come on in.”
I closed the door behind Clark after he stepped inside. He turned around slowly, fixing me with a suspicious stare.
“Am I interrupting something?”
“What? No,” I said far too quickly to sound natural. I closed my eyes and sighed heavily. “Clark, you showed up at my house at seven-thirty in the morning and I am in my pajamas…I’m a little surprised.”
Clark relaxed and hung his head with a chuckle.
“Yeah…sorry about that…” he laughed, now also embarrassed.
“Let me get dressed,” I said. “Do you want anything to eat? I can make you something.”
“No, thanks. Do you have anything to drink, though?”
“Yeah, go ahead and help yourself to whatever is in the fridge,” I said, leading him into the kitchen before making my way to the back stairs.
I quickly ascended the stairs and rounded the corner, poking my head into Mykail’s room.
“Who’s here?” he whispered.
“Clark,” I answered. “You can come downstairs. But…um, we weren’t doing anything before he showed up, okay?”
“Nope, not at all,” he agreed with a rapid shake of his head.
I ducked into my room and quickly pulled on some comfortable clothes, throwing my hair into a ponytail to avoid taming it. It wasn’t long before I was back in the kitchen. Mykail was lingering in his room as I went downstairs. I guessed it would have been awkward to be downstairs with Clark on his own.
“Sorry about that,” I said, walking into the kitchen and leaning against the table in the breakfast nook where Clark was sitting. “Are you sure you don’t want anything else?”
“No, thank you.” Clark shook his head. “Where’s Mykail?”
“Upstairs.”
“What time is Becca coming over?”
“Ten.”
“Oh,” Clark murmured. “Sorry for coming over so early…”
“I know that you’re worried, it’s alright,” I assured, though there was annoyance lining my voice. “I don’t really know what I’m going to do, either,” I admitted. “I told her that the Commission does experiments on the people they take in and makes them into weapons, but…”
“It’s hard for people to really understand until they see one for themselves,” Clark completed slowly. “So…if you want to desensitize her so that she will be able to handle the truths of the Commission, you need to show Mykail to her.”
“You think so?”
“Yes, I do,” he said. He looked at his hands nervously. “I thought a lot about what you said…and after what happened in the meeting last night, I realized that we will need help from outside the Commission to accomplish this.”
“I was thinking about that,” I agreed. “Maybe this is a horrible thing to say…but…I want to see Becca’s reaction so I can try and understand how the people would react if they were to see one of the experiments.”
“It would be different, though,” Clark noted. “Who knows how people are going to react. It’s all going to depend on how it’s presented.”
I sat in the seat I was next to, picking at the wood grain of the table with my nail.
“I’ve been thinking…”
“About?”
“Thomas Ankell used the college campus of Stanford to kick-start the revolution, right?”
“Yes.”
“Well…he was really far away from the government. I mean all the way across the country. So, he had some time to act and then hide so that the government would not catch him, but we’re in Central. We have no time to hide if we start rallying people. I figured we could do it a little differently.”
“How?”
“The internet,” I suggested
“Dana can track the source easily.”
“You’ve hacked into the system of the Commission before, though, right?” I pressed. “You’re good at stuff like that. There has to be a way.”
“That really depends on what you want to do.”
“Mass emails, pop-ups on random sites, things that grab people’s attention and make them curious,” I elaborated. “Like…something with a picture of one of the people in the Commission—not anyone of racial minority—so that way people can start to think about it without scaring them. Maybe with something that says: ‘What is the Commission of the People doing to people?’ just to promote thought.”
“Something like that…” I watched him, seeing the gears turning in his head. “Social media would be the best way to get our message to people our age…but it’s so easy to track those. A mass, simultaneous attack would be the best way to cover our tracks.”
“How could we do that?”
“That’s the tough part…unless you wanted to get the numbers of all the computers in the country—” He stopped and his eyes went wide.
“What?”
“Oh my God, it’s possible…”
“What? What’s possible? To get the numbers of all the computers?”
“Every computer that accesses the internet registers on a list that is monitored by the Censor Board. The numbers and the sites that these computers visit is recorded and crosschecked by the computer to be sure that illegal sites are not being accessed. The central computers for this process could potentially be turned around to send the same thing to all computers across the country in mass.”
“Really?”
“It’s possible, but it wouldn’t be easy. That place is heavily guarded and security would be hell on earth…not to mention I would have to know what kind of system they run in order to reverse the signals and send something…”
“But just once wouldn’t be enough,” I said. “It would have to be sent multiple times. The more times the message is sent, the more likely the people to question.”
“I guess…it could be a virus,” Clark mused. “The best way to do this without it shutting down is to program it right into the main computers of the Censor Board, rather than hack in and do it from another computer.”
“Is it even possible to do that? Get into the Censor Board computers?”
“I don’t know,” Clark admitted. “I think the first thing would be to decide the message we want to send the people and then program something to send the message continuously at random periods to be sure that no pattern is traced.”
“But just that might not be enough,” I said. “I mean, we should try and find a way to get on the national news with something, or even good old-fashioned paper fliers.”
“The paper fliers might be difficult…”
“Mykail had an interesting idea,” I said. “At parades, you know how people generally spread coupons and such? What if we were to send these fliers to people who were spreading the coupons and they spread them at the parades?”
“That would be risky to the people doing it.” Clark made a face. “And what parades? There are parades all the time around this time of year.”
“Exactly. We send it to the committees that are preparing the parades that happen close together and then it’s harder to track where the fliers come from, particularly if we send them all over the country.”
“Except that there is a return address when you send something,” Clark pointed out.
“Who says that we send it?” I said. “There are truckers and transport companies going all over the country all the time. We find someone going that direction and say that the Commission demands these be sent to where they’re going.”
“We would probably have to wait until the electronic messages have been going around for a while so that people are more likely to recognize the message on the fliers.
I smiled, feeling adrenaline coursing through me as we brainstormed.
“We would have to be very careful, though,” he added. “We have to make sure that very angry people, like Dean, are not causing too much of an obvious scene to undermine the whole operation.”
“Yeah…”
“Maybe Dean could be Dana’s distraction,” Clark concluded. “If he’s keeping Dana busy by poking him like he did last night, then we could work without him breathing down our necks as much.”
“That might work.”
“Okay, so tomorrow, we should do three things,” he said. “We should see what that book in the Commission library says, I should look up those addresses, and we should see what kind of system the Censor Board is running to plan the message for the people.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
For another fifteen minutes, we discussed our list of tasks for Monday. When the conversation trailed off, Clark sighed and nodded to the back stairs, confused.
“Um…shouldn’t you let Mykail out of his room for this?”
I mentally kicked myself as hard as I could. Of course he thought that Mykail was still locked up because that is what my family did with him at night as per Dana’s instructions. Mykail obviously understood that enough to stay where he was until I came to get him.
“Oh, right,” I gasped, quickly standing, trying not to overact in the situation, even though I knew I was failing horribly. “I’ll be right back.”
After my hurried declaration, I jogged up the stairs to Mykail’s room. I reached his door and saw him laughing into his hand, having heard what happened downstairs and realizing I had forgotten to “let him out.”
“It’s not funny!” I snapped quietly, though I was grinning. He took a deep breath and nodded, suppressing his laughter as I opened the door, trying to make it as loud as possible. Mykail took my hand as he stepped out.
“Take a deep breath and calm down,” he whispered. “You’re going to have to learn how to hide when you’re flustered.”
Agreeing, I took a deep breath walking downstairs.
“Are you hungry?” I asked, surprised at how natural I sounded.
“No, thank you,” he said, playing along.
We crossed the living room into the kitchen, where Clark stood to greet Mykail.
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