The Lightbringers, page 10
As usual, Gaylen had no idea what he was talking about.
Chloe waved at the tattooed man in a shushing motion. “You’re not helping,” she said. “This is always hard for them.”
Kevin grinned and went on, “It’s not that bad outside the walls, Gaylen. It’s actually pretty decent. I mean, it was rocky for everybody else when the United States just closed its doors. But they figured out how to function without us. They were able to put their economies back together. Mostly because of the New Republic.”
“The New Republic?”
“Yeah. We used to have states called Texas and California, plus a couple of others I forget the names of, and there used to be a country called Mexico to the south. It’s all the New Republic now. They have almost all of the oil and technology that the United States used to have. We should have fought to keep them, but President Martha just let them walk.
“These days, the whole rest of the world pretty much hates us and doesn’t give a crap what we do with ourselves. They’re just watching and waiting for us to self-destruct. The Lightbringers, though, are descended from a group of people who chose to stay inside to try to save America from itself.
“A lot of other people fled this country in the beginning—not just Texas and California. People are still leaving. You can even leave, if you want. We smuggle people out sometimes.”
Gaylen couldn’t even process it. The firmly secured borders of New America and the barbarism and chaos of the outside world were just facts to him. Facts he had known all his life. He rubbed his face with his hands again.
“OK,” he said weakly, “so, the DAA kills the NCPs, who are anybody who still gets sick or old or whatever, which is—a lot of people. And President Martha doesn’t know because… what was his name? The head of the… socios?”
“Gau Bidarte,” Kevin supplied.
“Because Gau Bidarte runs the DAA in secret with socios who don’t think killing people is a bad thing.” He looked at the two Lightbringers, his eyebrows raised in question.
Chloe nodded, the end of a purple dreadlock in her mouth again. “That’s pretty much it.”
“So then how can there be this huge underground? Why haven’t they all been killed by now?”
Chloe shrugged.
Kevin said, “I don’t think they have the manpower to keep up with us. They’ve done mass exterminations down here before, with chemical weapons and nanotech. But there are a whole lot of people who just disappear when they do that, and it’s a bitch to cover that up. So they don’t do it very often. Just when there get to be too many of us. Like sewer rats.”
They sat quietly for a while again. Gaylen’s mind was mostly blank. Eventually, he found himself saying, “I can still see how it could be true, though. I mean, that President Martha could be right. If all these people in the underground are thinking wrong, that’s got to—” He caught Chloe’s gaze and stopped. She was looking at him with sympathy again. He sighed.
Chapter Seven
Wayne Webster Watts, from his underground book, 9 Lives:
If you really want to know life, you have to face death. I recommend being on the killing end. And then, there’s nothing like a conversation with a corpse to make you really get it. Then nobody can preach to you—nobody can claim that they have some insight you don’t. You get the biggest picture there is to get. You know the end.
That afternoon passed in a blur of awkwardness for Gaylen. Kevin announced that there was no time like the present to give the new guy some training, and he disappeared into the house. A few minutes later, he emerged with a gleam in his eye and an armload of weapons.
First, Gaylen nearly hyperventilated, because these weapons were like the ones the DAA carried that turned people into dust. Once Kevin explained that the guns also had a stun setting which merely put people to sleep for a short time, Gaylen was able to calm down. He made careful note of the dial on the side. He had to keep it below the red line to keep from disintegrating his targets.
He also asked, out of morbid curiosity, how the guns worked—turning people into dust while leaving their clothing intact. In his usual dry, cheery way, Kevin talked about “molecular breakdown” and “chemical disassembly.” What it seemed to come down to was that the stream of nanobots identified the victim’s DNA based on a skin sample and then disassembled all matching living material down to its component parts, even including the water molecules.
After a moment in which Gaylen simply nodded, Kevin added, “It’s actually pretty damn humane. This is how all the people in the hydrorises are killed off, too. It’s quick. Martha insisted on it. Just identify the unique DNA and zap—it’s gone. Same for abortions.”
“For whats?” Gaylen asked.
“Never mind,” Kevin said. “We’ll explain that one some other time.”
Kevin also taught him how to use two other types of weapons. “Just in case you lose your weapon during a fight and pick up someone else’s.”
One was called a revolver, and it fired a small but hard projectile Kevin called a bullet. He described the weapon as hopelessly inefficient and archaic because it required precise shots to the body, neck, or head and carried a high risk of accidental mortality. Then he showed Gaylen another modern-looking weapon and explained that it was the precursor to the dust gun. It had a stun setting, but when turned to the highest setting on its dial, it delivered a jolt of electricity strong enough to kill the person. “It leaves a corpse, which can be problematic. And it’s not as easy a death for the victim. But it’ll get the job done.
“No matter what weapon you’re using, just watch carefully for who’s nearby and behind the person you’re targeting,” Kevin impressed upon him. “If there are allies or civilians near them, don’t shoot. It’s better to do nothing than to take out an ally or accidentally kill a civilian.”
Privately, Gaylen thought that perhaps doing nothing was his best bet. He was very out of place here, especially compared to Kevin, who seemed to relish the use of the guns. The tattooed man fired with quick precision and made every shot when he was demonstrating the weapons.
The rest of the afternoon was spent in the back yard doing target practice on a couple of metal trash cans. While Gaylen had no experience aiming anything at anything—he had never even gone in for basketball—they determined that he had some natural aptitude for it. By the time dinner was served, he could reliably hit a man-sized target at short range—which, Kevin assured him, was all he had to do.
In the early evening, Drew walked through the house and called everyone to assemble in the living room.
There were around two dozen Lightbringers in the living room. Some leaned against the walls while others sat on the floor. Chloe stood to Gaylen’s right side. She was chewing gum, and she played with it, stretching it out of her mouth and then pushing it back in.
Drew stood at the front of the room with a warm smile. “Orders are in from HQ,” she announced. “We have a serious mission. It’s on a tight timeline, and it has a lot of moving parts. And it’s important enough that we’re breaking out the cloaking devices for the first time on a real mission.”
Gaylen assumed that by ‘cloaking devices’ she meant the ring she had used to make them both invisible to the DAA.
He glanced around the room. Everyone looked serious but calm. Chloe snapped her gum.
Drew went on, “I’ve never heard Don sound so excited about a mission. This could be the strike the Lightbringers have been hoping to make for decades. And we get to make it, because of our location here in D.C. The other cells will be waiting and watching to see what we do.”
At that, a few whispers rustled through the room, and smiles appeared on a few faces.
“The next step is going to be recruitment, because we need more manpower than we have here. We’re going to see what we can find at the Bureau of Provision. The rest of the orders will be revealed to us all as we go.
“Nine of us are going on this recruitment trip. Once we pick up the recruits, we won’t be able to get more behind the cloaking devices we have. Gaylen, you’re coming. Kevin, you’re my second. Pick your third. The rest of you, self-select five more. We leave in ten, so say your goodbyes.” She looked over all of them with the warmth of a mother surveying her much-loved children. “Let’s bring the light.”
“Let’s bring the light,” the revolutionaries echoed.
Gaylen was caught off guard, and he missed the moment. He felt very much out of his element.
The revolutionaries gathered into small groups or milled around as they broke into quiet conversation. The leaders of the group went off together and talked too quietly for Gaylen to hear. Again, Gaylen felt like an outsider, and he decided to pretend to do that meditation thing. He sat down and kept his gaze down.
After a couple of minutes, he overheard Chloe say that she was going to self-select to go on the mission. He glanced up at her, and she caught his eye and stuck her tongue out at him, revealing a silver tongue ring. He grinned and then returned to his meditation.
The group exchanged what sounded like goodbyes. It sounded suspiciously as if they were expecting not to see one another again. It worried Gaylen.
The rest of the team then recited some words together, with several others gathered around to join in. He heard only fragments: “… as I walk into darkness, may I never forget that it has no power over me that I have not given it… as I go out into the world of darkness, may I act out of the light that I carry within me…”
Someone entered his field of vision. It was Chloe. She knelt in front of him, leaned in slowly, raised his head, and gave him a soft kiss.
He looked at her, surprised, and she shrugged with a fragile grin. “Goodbye, Gaylen,” she said, sounding hesitant. “I enjoyed talking to you earlier, and I enjoyed that kiss just now, and I hope that we can have more of those if we both come back from this mission. Because you’re nice-looking, and I think that you… are a… nice person.”
Gaylen was used to being hit on, but Chloe was struggling to be genuine in a way that he had never seen before. Usually, women just wanted to get in bed and then get on with their day. There was rarely anything so sweet or sincere about it.
He gathered his wits and tried to think of the right sort of thing to say in response. But then Drew called for their attention again, and Chloe stood and stepped away.
Kevin handed out weapons to each team member. Gaylen took his dust gun and a holster and inexpertly strapped it on. His heart beat faster—he was going to have to use one already.
Drew, Kevin, and two others gathered in the center of the room and called the others close. They put on the rings and pressed the LEDs. The lights began blinking, and then a stream of glittering particles spilled out from the rings faster than the eye could track and settled in a translucent field that surrounded the nine members of the group.
Some of the revolutionaries still in the room looked them over, one of them through a handheld camera. “You’re gone,” he said, and the others nodded confirmation.
Drew glanced at Gaylen. “Here are the rules, for those of you who don’t know them.
“First, stay within three feet of a ring at all times or you’ll lose the field.
“Second, once we get around other people, don’t move too fast; the field follows your body but it doesn’t adjust instantaneously. If you don’t move, you’re perfectly invisible, but if you try to move too fast, you’ll cause a shimmer in the air that people can see.
“Third, if we’re around other people, you must be quiet. The rings do nothing to mask sound.
“Finally, the different fields join up if we’re all close together, but if your group gets separated, you won’t be able to see the rest of us anymore. The team leads are wearing subvocal gear so we can communicate”—she tapped her ear—”but it’ll make things harder if we can’t see each other. So stay close.”
Everyone nodded, then Drew pulled open the front door, and they all stepped out into an overgrown yard. The area around the house looked deserted, as if not part of the city at all. It was fairly dark, with only the occasional working streetlight, and no lights inside the houses. With the faint illumination, Gaylen could make out broken windows, overgrown yards, and ugly bright-colored markings that marred many of the buildings.
It was chilly, and Gaylen pulled his coat closer around him.
To his surprise, Drew called his name. He stepped up next to her and they walked side by side, with Kevin at Drew’s other side.
“Gaylen, you’ve already seen some upsetting things,” Drew said. “And now you may see more. And if you see one of us do something that bothers you, you’ll need to be able to keep moving. So, there’s something you should hear now.”
He waited for her to go on.
“Think now about this fact: no action is inherently of the darkness. Right is what comes from the light. Wrong is what comes from the darkness. But light and darkness are not static things. They are living things, and they speak to each of us differently. You may not be able to tell from the outside where something is coming from. You will need to suspend your judgment and trust in the actions we take until we have time to debrief.”
“‘No action can be judged without judging the state of the mind that inspired it,’” said Kevin, his words taking the tone of a recitation. He sounded more serious than he had in their earlier conversation, his dry humor missing.
Drew nodded at Kevin, then said to Gaylen, “One of our aphorisms. You’ll learn a few in time.”
They were speaking another language, it seemed. He tried to understand what they were getting at, but he only understood that he was being told that he didn’t know right from wrong anymore. He was willing to believe that. He hardly seemed to know anything anymore.
He stumbled and almost twisted his ankle because of a pothole in the street—something that would never happen in a civilized area of New America—and became sharply aware that he was in danger on many levels. He had spent his whole life making sure he was safe—every New American had ‘stop work’ authority for everything they ever witnessed, and crying foul was second nature to everyone—and now unknown risks threatened him at every turn. He didn’t even know why he was here. Surely he was unprepared for a real mission. He’d had exactly four hours of training. Why had Drew made him come along?
As he walked, the situation took on an increasing sense of unreality. These people were insane. But he had witnessed so much insanity in the past few days, he had no idea what was normal anymore. And he wasn’t exactly sane either. That was what had started this whole thing—his inability to keep himself together. For a moment, he hated himself.
He wondered whether a short life ended in the company of these people was better than one that ended in cracking up and being taken away by the ART.
“Drew?” he asked.
She looked over at him.
“So if I had given myself up to the DAA, I would have been put in stasis?”
“Actually, here in D.C. and in a number of other cities, they’ve stopped doing stasis these days. They just dust people if rehabilitation fails. Which it usually does, since they have no idea what they’re doing.”
“What’s rehabilitation?”
“They try to train you to be happy. Except that they have no idea how to do that. They try to indoctrinate you, they give you drugs—some left over from the old days, and some experimental ones—basically, they do whatever they think might work, but without any understanding of what human happiness is really about. So it doesn’t work. Almost never. Some people are able to fake it well enough to be let out again, though.”
This information squared with what he had noticed about his encounters with the ART—especially the part about faking it well enough to be left alone. But now a new thought had come to him, and he found himself compelled to ask it. “Does the DAA… take away children? To do rehabilitation and… the rest of it?”
Drew’s face and voice became somber. “Yes. Usually because they’ve witnessed something upsetting and the DAA knows they won’t know how to apply positive thinking correctly. Children are imprisoned and dusted from the time they begin to understand the world and form long-term memories—usually about twenty-four months.”
Gaylen’s face went hot as he imagined the DAA taking Sierra.
He could not allow this—not ever.
This thought propelled him into saying what he needed to say—as frightening as it was to try any tactic in life besides ignoring bad things and thinking good things.
“Drew…” He took a deep breath. His heart thudded. “I don’t even know why I’m here or how I’m supposed to help your group. But I will help, and I will do my best, because you did save my life, but listen to me. You have to help me find my family and tell them the truth about New America, to keep them safe. When this mission is over, when I’ve done my part, the Lightbringers will help me find my family. OK?”
The group had stopped walking, and everyone stared at him. Chloe smiled. Drew looked at him intently, but with her head cocked to the side as if listening to something else far off in the distance. Moments of silence passed while Gaylen bit his tongue. He wanted to apologize and take it back—he had never deliberately caused trouble for anyone before, not once in his life—but this was more important to him than anything else had ever been.
At last, Drew said, “Agreed. We will help you.” She extended her hand, and Gaylen shook it. His tension drained away, and weakness followed it. He let out a long breath.
“There are several parts to this mission,” Drew said, “but it should all be over within a few days. Then we will keep our end of the bargain. In fact, I look forward to it.” She smiled warmly at him, then resumed walking, and the others followed.
The pleasantly warm flush of victory came up Gaylen’s cheeks. He found himself walking taller.
Soon after, they came around the corner and found themselves in New America again—where everything was cheerful, clean, new, and safe.
