Her voice breaks and she stumbles backward, spent. I catch her under the arms and hold her.
“What now?” she mumbles.
My brain races to find its track, to remember what we’re here to do, but while it’s still rebooting, Tomsen steps up next to us with the briefcase in hand.
“Now this!” she says cheerfully, and tosses it into the pit.
“Wait!” Julie gasps, snapping out of her daze and reaching out in a futile attempt to grab the case. We watch in horror as it bounces down the funnel with a series of bell-like clangs and disappears into the shadows.
“What the fuck, Tomsen?” Nora says, running to join us. “Did you just blow us up?”
I’m relieved to see M hobbling along behind Nora, clutching his bandaged midsection, but my relief might be short-lived if Tomsen just lost her mind.
“It was designed to be a suicide bomb,” she says, “but I added a timer circuit so we don’t have to die!” She beams like a kid showing off her science project.
“Okay but…how much time?” Nora says.
“Enough for us to get away, but not enough for anyone to fish out the bomb. It’s perfect! I’m so excited!”
“Huntress,” Julie says, grabbing her shoulders. “How much time?”
Tomsen’s giddy smile falters and she cocks her head. “Fifteen minutes?”
Julie claps a hand over her face.
“Is that…not perfect?” Tomsen asks.
M sighs. “We’re gonna have to run again, aren’t we?”
“We needed to use this place before we destroyed it,” I tell Tomsen. “We needed to show the world what’s happening here.”
Her face brightens. “Oh! We’re already doing that. See?”
She points to the control station. All the editing monitors now display security camera views of various locations in the stadium. The big screen at the top, the one that was showing the Fed TV broadcast, is now showing…us.
Four blood-smeared adults and a debatably Dead child, surrounded by bodies on the rim of a bottomless pit.
“Are you saying,” Julie says under her breath, “that we’re broadcasting to the whole country…right now?”
“Exactly! We have been for about ten minutes.”
A profoundly uncomfortable silence fills the room.
Slowly, with wide eyes, we turn to face the camera.
“Everyone’s watching,” Tomsen says, “and listening, and they’re probably getting pretty confused by now, so maybe you should say something.”
Julie gives the camera a cringing smile. “Um…hi.”
Tomsen runs back to the control station. “Go ahead. Tell and show. Give them a tour of Hell. I’ll keep the cameras on you from here. But hurry, okay? Because…fourteen minutes.” She grins and flashes a thumbs-up.
I stare into the glass eye of the camera and I feel it growing, filling my vision like a dark planet. It can’t really be the whole world in there. It’s just this country. And maybe Canada. And maybe Central America if the technology is as advanced as it looks. But there’s no way it reaches the eastern hemisphere. Unless there are relay stations…?
“R?” Julie whispers, reading the tremors on my face. “Do you have something to say?”
I open my mouth. “My name is—”
My voice sounds too loud, like I’m in a small bedroom shouting into a megaphone. I shut my mouth, startled. I take a deep breath, hoping the words will come when I release it, but someone interrupts me. That voice in my limbic cortex, bitter and wry like a heckler in the back row of my mind.
Let’s hear it, kid. Let’s see you change the world with an idea.
I grimace. I take a step back.
Let’s see you tell hungry people that there’s more to life than food. Let’s see you convince these weaklings that they don’t need a strongman to lead them. Let’s hear some poems about hope while an army of death swarms their homes.
It’s him. It’s not just his raspy timbre in a roar of other voices; it’s him. He surges out of the noise, pulling his scattered identity together and reaching for my throat.
My throat is tight. I can’t speak.
What’s the matter, Recessive Atvist? What’s wrong, Recreant Atvist? Did you forget your big speech or did you never have one? Did you come all this way to stand in front of the world only to realize you’ve got nothing to say?
The black worms are sliding through my grip, spreading out from my wound and wrapping around my neck like a noose. I can’t breathe. I see Julie’s worried eyes on me and I remember what I said to her the last time her asthma attacked. Think about breathing. The pleasure of it. The privilege. I try to follow my own advice, repeating it like a mantra, but he interrupts me again.
You don’t need to breathe, remember? You’re a corpse. You don’t need these people. You don’t need this fight. You’re dead, and everything is easy.
Something sparks inside me, and my panic flares into anger. I feel my blood boiling, my face flushing red.
Wheezing and clutching my throat, I stumble away from the camera toward the emergency exit on the other side of the pit.
“R!” Julie says. “Where are you going?”
I hear Nora’s voice behind me, nervous and thin. “Hey, uh…world? So, I don’t know if you caught this earlier, but in about fourteen minutes, BABL’s gonna be gone. You’ll be able to change the channel. But first we need to show you something, so, uh…stay tuned?”
I hear the footsteps of my friends following me but they sound miles away. I shove the door open and find myself in a narrow shaft, not stairs but a ladder, rising toward a distant square of daylight.
If down can be up then up can be down, my grandfather says, and do I detect a note of unease creeping into his snarl? Maybe you don’t want to climb this ladder. Maybe it’s safer down here. Didn’t you have a speech to make?
I start climbing, ignoring both my grandfather and the screams of my broken knuckles. I hear Julie and M behind me making little agonized noises as they strain their own injuries and I want to tell them to turn back, to keep themselves safe…but no, I don’t want that. I want them by my side.
The shaft emerges onto the stadium rooftop. The wind howls across its opening; I have to crouch to stay steady. It takes an effort to make myself turn and help Julie up, because everything in me is pointing ahead, toward the structure on the apex of the roof.
Glimpsed from the outskirts of Post, it was an ambiguous lump. Now that I can see it clearly, I’m still no closer to understanding it. It appears to be the dome from Post’s city hall—not a recreation but the actual dome itself, torn off that building and dumped here on the stadium roof. Its cracked walls and bent pillars reveal stone-textured fiberglass and marble-patterned plastic, but despite the late era flimsiness of its construction, the stadium still sags under its weight. It doesn’t take an engineer to see that this thing will fall through any day. Perhaps any minute.
I move toward the crooked, crumpled edifice with careful steps. The wind buffets me furiously, blowing my hair over my eyes and hissing in my ears, hot like an animal’s breath.
You’ve come to work for us. This is the right thing. The only thing. We are unsurprised.
The dome is modeled after the US Capitol’s grand old rotunda, but reduced to the size of a small house. At its crown is a statue of a woman in robes, and two flags have been drilled into her shoulders: Old Glory and the Axiom logo. She is a shrunken plastic replica of the capitol’s bronze colossus, a statue called Freedom that was forged and erected by slaves.