A wind is rising. I tug at my collar to let it cool my sweaty neck, but the tie is like the knot on a balloon, sealing all that damp air inside. We keep to the side streets, avoiding the active areas, but we still encounter a few stray soldiers here and there. I straighten my posture and flash them an insane grin, and they nod nervously and move on. It’s easy at a distance. My big acting challenge is a few blocks ahead.
I glance at Julie and my eyes stick. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen her clean. Her skin glows. Her hair is silky gold, tied back in a stubby ponytail, and her clothes—olive drab shorts and a light gray tank top—have a look of military purpose. Like my beard stubble, they don’t quite fit the character she’ll be playing—a stretchy red dress would be more convincing—but the shorts are short and the top is tight and Julie makes any outfit distracting.
“Should probably do this now,” I mumble, pulling the zip-tie out of my pocket.
She nods and holds her wrists out to me. I avoid her gaze as I cinch them together, but when I look up, she’s smirking.
“I never thought you’d be a kinky one,” she says.
I try to ignore her but I feel a faint flush. “You’re sure you’re okay with this?”
“It’s a story they understand, right? I don’t care. I just want to get this done.” She blows a strand of hair out of her face. “And I trust you.”
Casual. Off-hand. I forbid myself to grin.
“Okay. But I’m going to improvise…and it might get ugly. So promise you’ll forget whatever I say.”
She uses her thumbs to cross her heart.
“Say it.”
She smiles. “I promise.”
The closer we get to the stadium gate, the greater the tension in the immigration line. These people have probably been camped here for days, waiting for their big moment at the gate, and their desperation shows in wide eyes and clenched fists. I wonder where they came from and what they’re expecting to find here. I wonder what they’ve been promised by the fever dream flashing on their televisions.
The gate is open. One trio of soldiers interviews applicants while another points rifles at them. With a grimace, I knock on my basement door. One last job, I tell the basement’s occupant. Time to pay our debts.
The door opens. The wretch smiles.
Dragging Julie by the wrists, I shove my way into the front of the line.
“Hey!” shouts a grizzled man with two kids clinging to his legs. He grabs my shirt and I give him a fierce backhand; he collapses while his kids scream. I hear Julie mumbling, “Jesus,” but I stride forward, chest out, grinning.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” one of the guards says, putting a hand out. “What’s this about? Who are you”—he glances at my tie and falters slightly—“sir?”
I infuse my grin with murder. “If you have to ask who I am, I think you won’t be working here long. I haven’t made it to many meetings lately but I expect a basic awareness of Executive hierarchy, even from front desk girls like you.”
He hesitates. “Sorry, sir, I’m new to the company and communication’s been—”
“Shut up,” I say pleasantly. “I don’t care. I’m Mr. Atvist’s grandson. Get out of my way.”
I step forward, but the guards don’t part for me. They look nervous, but they watch the officer for a signal.
“I’m sorry, sir,” he says, “I just—I have orders to—”
“Who do you think gave those orders?” I snap, stepping into his personal space.
He swallows, then points at Julie. “But…who’s that?”
I shove Julie in front of me, toward the gate. “That’s my birthday present.”
He eyes Julie and I see lust and envy filling the space reserved for reason. He nods and reaches for a clipboard. “I’ll just need to check your—”
I move in close to his face, making the veins of my neck bulge. “Listen to me, kid. My family conquered New York and stuck our crown on the tallest building in America. We pissed the Atvist name all over this country, and I’m not having this conversation with whoever the fuck you are.”
He reflexively steps back. “Sir, I just—”
I put my face inches from his in that bizarre old ritual of domination, proving my superior manhood by threatening to kiss him. “Disappear quickly,” I growl, “and maybe I won’t remember you.”
He drops his eyes. He waves to the guards. They step aside for us.
With a decisive nod, I prod Julie into the lobby, and in the darkness of the entry tunnel, I stuff the wretch back into the basement, shuddering with revulsion.
“Wow,” Julie says. “‘Just…wow.”
“Please don’t,” I mutter.
“‘That’s my birthday present’? Where’d you dig up that one?”
“Julie. You promised.”
“I know, I know.” She chuckles and shakes her head. “But I’m gonna need a minute.”
I glance around for something to cut her zip-tie and end my humiliation—and it really is just mine; Julie is too self-assured to be affected by fake degradation. She seems to be having fun.
“Were you really like that?” she says through clamped teeth as she bites the end of the zip-tie and cinches it tight. “How could you have been like that?” She slams her elbows against her waist, forcing her arms apart, and the tie snaps.
“I wasn’t…quite that bad,” I reply. “But I would’ve been if I’d stayed in that world.”
She rubs her wrists and stares down the tunnel at the roiling crowds inside. “We have to destroy it.”
As much as I agree with Julie’s lethal intent, our ambitions today are more measured. We can’t topple Axiom and erase all its influence with one little bomb. We’re just here to break the silence. To show the world the dirt on its face and hope it has the sense to clean itself.
Our plan was simple, but I can already smell complications as we emerge from the tunnel into the stadium’s narrow streets, now so densely populated they’re almost solid. I can’t seem to find my bearings in the grid; all the familiar landmarks are gone or changed. A building that might be the Agriculture hothouse is covered in black plastic sheeting for no conceivable reason. The open space where I expected to find the cattle pens now houses some kind of assembly line manned by sweating, sunburned children. All of the street signs are gone.
“What the hell are they trying to do?” Julie wonders aloud, taking in the inexplicable renovations.
This pseudo-city once felt cramped, but now I feel lost in a labyrinth of plywood and trash. Julie gives up on landmarks and looks to the stadium’s retracted roof panels, using stains and broken girders like a sailor uses the stars. She navigates to a tiny “house” of rusty metal sheets and knocks on the door. There’s no answer, so she opens it, and we step inside.
Once, this was the home of Lawrence Rosso and Ella Desconsado. I remember it through two sets of eyes. Through Perry’s, it was a place of sorrow and decline. He browsed Rosso’s old books, searching for clues to blurry riddles. He watched Julie and Ella pretend to enjoy their dinner, he watched Rosso pretend to enjoy their conversations, he watched everyone around him fight to stay afloat, and he muttered, Fools, while he let himself sink.
Perry discarded his life here. I picked it up, dusted it off, and resumed it. Through my eyes, this is a place of rising, not sinking. A place of rebirth. It’s where I began my efforts to reenter Living society, where I sat at Ella’s table and tasted my first home-cooked meal, where I practiced my small talk and my big talk, where I drank tea in Rosso’s reading room and discoursed late into the night, both of us bloviating on topics mundane and esoteric. In this house as I remember it, no one was pretending. We may have been fools, but we were earnest fools. We believed in every mad act.