“I’m sorry.” He roughly pulled a hand through his hair. “If you weren’t in on it with her, then you have every reason to be upset.” He studied me with his blue eyes, and I leaned farther back against the wall, hoping to somehow evade them. I didn’t trust him. “I want you to know that I’ve never lied to you. Your presence in all of this was… unexpected. I completely misread Leisel. I thought I had her under control.”
“What? Had her under control? That’s not exactly a declaration of love.”
“I never loved Leisel,” he said matter-of-factly.
“So she was right? You were just marrying her so you could become president?”
“Yeah, I was.” Jack laughed. “But it sounds so seedy when you say it.”
“Were you the one that gave her the bruise? Did you lock her in the closet after I left?” I’d been thinking it was Leisel who betrayed Jack, but now…
“No!” Jack shook his head. “I didn’t touch her. I honestly don’t know who did that to her. I just want you to know Leisel is the one who betrayed you, not me. I think she planned the whole thing out the moment she met you. You’re both the same height.”
“I’m confused. Why do you care if I believe you betrayed me or not? Why are you so intent on making sure I know Leisel is the guilty one? You’re not exactly innocent in all of this.”
“I don’t know. Last confession? Unfortunately neither one of us has much longer to live.” He finally dropped his gaze and looked at my hand resting in my lap. I still had on the ring. It looked shiny against the white dress. A sad look came over his face. “I’m guilty of a lot of things, but being a traitor isn’t one of them. The true traitor is Damien Holt.”
“What does President Holt have to do with this? I thought this was between you and Leisel.” I instantly regretted my question. I really didn’t care. Whatever issues there were between Jack and the president were for them to sort out. I was already dealing with the backlash of getting caught between two bourge. I had learned my lesson.
“When Leisel told you I wanted change in the Dome, she wasn’t lying. I talked about it with her a little to see how she would react, but she doesn’t know the entire story. You see, my family heads up a secret organization called Liberty. Our goal is to restore democracy to our government.”
“Restore it? But we have a democratic government.”
“No, we don’t. Holt and his buddies have revised our history so much that most people don’t know the truth. But the Kenners know the truth. We have evidence.”
“What truth? What evidence?” My curiosity was aroused despite my desire to stay out of bourge politics. But if I was going to be executed because of a secret organization trying to take control of the Dome, I wanted to at least know who they were.
“Where do I begin? Well… probably at the beginning of the Dome’s history.” He gave me a roguish smile. The smile made him almost seem human, but I wished he would change out of his military uniform. He looked like someone I should fear. “My great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather—give or take a few greats—was Theodore Kenner, Vice President of the United States before the bombs. He entered the Dome as part of President Taylor’s entourage when the bombs were launched. General Edward Holt was also part of that entourage.” Jack looked at me closely when he said “general.”
I couldn’t remember ever hearing about a President Taylor, except for the article I had read in one of Jack’s magazines. The Holts had always held the presidency in the Dome.
“So the Holt family wasn’t in line for the presidency?”
Jack shifted, bringing one of his legs within touching distance of me. I bent my knees and hugged them close to my chest, steering clear of any contact. He didn’t seem to notice.
“Actually, in a democratic government there’s no such thing as being in line for the presidency. In a democracy, the people choose a leader through an election process and, once elected, the leader is expected to represent the people. But the Holts don’t operate that way. What we have under the Holt regime is a dictatorship, which gets passed along from generation to generation through the males in that family.”
“How did General Holt become president then? Was he elected?”
“No. My family has evidence that implicates Edward Holt in the murder of President Taylor and her husband.” He smiled at my look of surprise. There had never been a female president in the Dome. “Vice President Kenner kept a written journal and video clips of his life in the Dome, which the Kenner family has kept all these years. Every Kenner has read the journal and watched the videos, and we continue to share them with others who want to know the truth. The video that made the most impact on me shows civilians from the valley climbing up the mountain to the open hangar doors where military vehicles were still coming into the Dome. The civilians tried to fight their way in, but soldiers were pushing them back and used machine guns to stop them. General Holt ordered the soldiers to fire, but President Taylor called a stop to it. In the video, you can see bodies everywhere, rivers of blood flowing down the mountain, but still the people kept coming to the Dome. They were desperate to get to safety.” Jack paused for a moment, his eyes bright with unshed tears. “No one with a soul could turn those people away, and President Taylor didn’t. She told the guards to let them through.
“That caused a huge rift between President Taylor and General Holt. His callous behaviour bothered Taylor so much that she started looking into Holt’s military career, and during her investigation she discovered that Holt had betrayed her. It’s complicated, but I’ll try to explain. In order to launch missiles, two people were required to enter secret codes into a computer that controlled the warheads. It was a safety precaution to make sure that a bomb was never launched accidentally. The two people who held those codes were President Taylor, the leader of our nation, and General Edward Holt, the leader of our military. President Taylor reluctantly agreed to launch the warheads after General Holt informed her that both Russia and Korea had launched theirs at us. But General Holt had lied to her. No one had launched. When she punched in her secret code and activated the missiles, she started World War Three. Countries sent their missiles in retaliation against us, not as an offensive strike. Our Allies launched in our defense, their enemies launched in their defense… and on and on it went until the earth was devastated by a global nuclear war.
“When Taylor discovered the betrayal, she was going to have Holt formally charged. She had already confided in Vice President Kenner about everything she had found out, which is why all this ended up in his journal. But from this point on, much of what Kenner wrote is hearsay. The president and her husband were murdered just hours after she made her discovery, and General Holt was the first one at the murder scene. He took complete control of the investigation and claimed to have found evidence that their murder was the result of a conspiracy by the civilians—the same civilians they had so generously given shelter from the bombs—to take over the Dome and throw everyone else out. As the head of the military, it seemed natural for Holt to be the one to step up as leader to get the civilians under control. That’s when he made the famous treaty with them—the treaty that turned you into slaves.”
What Jack was saying was a lot to take in—especially after the day I’d had. I was exhausted. How was I supposed to react to all of this information? He seemed so self-righteous in his confession, yet I saw another side to his story. If the Dome had been built right in our own valley, why hadn’t the president and her entourage invited us in when the bombs were launched in the first place? Why did the civilians have to fight their way in at all? It sounded like there should have been more than enough room, if they were driving vehicles in…
“Considering the amount of time and effort the ruling class put into building a secret shelter to protect themselves from a nuclear holocaust, it seems to me they had damned us long before they launched the bombs,” I said. Jack looked surprised at my words. I wondered if he was going to hit me, but I pressed on. “So the Kenners have known this all along and haven’t exposed the Holts? Why? Why didn’t anyone fight for us? Why didn’t Vice President Kenner step up and have him arrested?”