Or they did until five minutes ago. Now a different show is on.
Team Manager Abbot bursts into the crowded room of frightened people. He sees the TVs and the rapt faces watching them: live footage of the battle outside, if one can even call that clusterfuck a battle.
“Turn that off!” Abbot shouts. When no one jumps to obey, he draws his revolver and shoots out the screens. A dramatic, wild-west gesture, but that’s the point. The crowd huddles as glass rains down on them.
Abram watches through the doorway from the balcony outside as Abbot shouts orders at the refugees. And then a flash diverts his attention. He instinctively looks up, but it’s not lightning—the roof is closed; they’re locked in a skyless box. He turns to the railing, scanning the patchwork cityscape below, and he sees it: a blue-white brilliance pulsing out from the entrance lobby.
Arc cutters.
He feels himself sinking as the pieces click together. The Goldman rebels will open the gates. They’re too few to fight Axiom directly, but if they can help God’s Jury reach its verdict, there won’t be much left to fight.
It’s a strategy Axiom would admire. Didn’t they use it themselves not so long ago? Circling above the global fray until America exhausted itself, then swooping in to pick the bones clean? The new America will need a new bird to represent the new patriotism. A vulture will do nicely.
“Roberts!” Abbot shouts at Abram’s back. “Snap to it, son!”
“They’re cutting the gates,” Abram says quietly.
“Let the wall crew handle the siege. We’ve got other orders.”
Abram turns around. “Are we going to shoot all the TVs in the stadium?”
Abbot’s eyes narrow. “Executive is prioritizing the pirate broadcast. We can’t get into the basement, but we have pitchmen on the roof waiting to do damage control once we clear the terrorists.”
Abram can’t hide the incredulity in his voice. “Sir…Goldman’s cutting the gate. If the Boneys get inside, they’ll gut this place in an hour.”
“It’s just one branch,” Abbot says. “We have dozens.” There’s a stiffness in his voice that Abram hasn’t heard before, a reduction in personality, like he’s fighting his own thoughts—Path Narrowing. “But if we don’t stop this broadcast, we might not have any.”
Abbot’s walkie crackles, receiving that very broadcast on Fed FM.
“My name…is R.”
Gentle and hesitant. Weak and uncertain. If that voice ever convinces anyone of anything, Abram will give up on understanding the world. So why does Abbot look so worried?
“I was an Atvist. My grandfather founded the Axiom Group.”
The voice is a little firmer now.
“His grandfather?” Abram says. “What’s he talking about?”
Abbot’s face is pale.
“Sir?”
“Move,” Abbot growls, and runs toward the tunnel into the walls.
“This is Axiom’s Executive branch,” R says as they race up the stairwell. “This is where your orders come from.”
What could “this” possibly refer to? Did he take the executives hostage? Abram glances through the doorways of each landing, searching for the glow of a screen, but the wall is a dark, dead place.
Abbot radios for backup. Four men join them on the fourth floor—or is it the fifth? Abram feels disoriented. He feels places and people overlapping like the pages of different books, wet and translucent and blending together.
“Their troops are probably on their way here right now,” R says, and the soldiers chuckle darkly, but Abram’s face is blank. A memory flickers in his head. Men in beige jackets pointing guns at his daughter outside the flaming wreckage of his old truck. Are these the very same men? Of course not. Those men are dead, like Jim Roberts, the man whose name Abram wears like an animal’s hide.
“You don’t have to be what you are,” R says. “Even the Dead can heal.”
Abram feels the balloon in his brain stretching again. But before it can burst and flood him with toxic bile, he hears that other voice, far closer and clearer than R’s staticky monologue.
You thought you had to do it, Abram. So did Kenrei.
He flinches at the sound of her name. He thought he’d never hear it again.
You did it because you loved her, and that’s how it’s written on her final page. So let her go. Let the rules change.
He feels the balloon shrink a little, as if someone has sucked out some poison.
Who are you? Abram demands, and it’s strange to hear a tremor in the voice of his own thoughts.
Do you really not know?
He grits his teeth. He tries to pull himself together as the other men push through a door and daylight floods the stairwell. He steps out onto the stadium roof and into a wind so fierce he wonders if it’s another hurricane. But the sky is blue. The wind is hot and dry. He’s never seen weather like this.
He has seen the dome, but only from the ground, and even from that distance it seemed a tacky pastiche. Up close it’s fully ludicrous, a giant plastic playhouse dumped crookedly on a roof that can barely support it. But he’s surprised that he’s surprised. Especially when he sees the three pitchmen waiting around the back, grinning in their colorful costumes. Did he ever really believe he was working for men of sanity?
The pitchmen don’t say a word. They gesture to the door. Even Abbot shrinks away from them as he slips inside.
The dome is unlit, but shafts of light pour through the little arch windows and leak through cracks in the fiberglass walls. Abram feels dizzy in the surreal structure. Walking in a space that was designed as a ceiling creates a sense of floating. It doesn’t help that the whole thing heaves with each gust of wind. He reaches out to steady himself on the freight container that inexplicably dominates the room, but when his hand touches the metal he feels something crawling up his arm. A vibration, or maybe an electric current, humming through his shoulder and into his neck. It creeps around his skull and starts to cohere into voices and he jerks his hand away.
“Roberts,” Abbot hisses, elbowing him in the ribs. “Focus.” He jabs two fingers at his eyes and then forward.
There they are.
The dome is thick with shadows, but Abram can see his former travel partners in the dusty shafts of daylight. He starts to catalogue them by features—the black girl, the big guy, the blond bitch, the lanky fucker—but his mind surprises him with names.
Nora. Marcus. Julie. R.
They look like they’ve been through Hell. Abram saw some of it on the screens. He saw Marcus take a knife in the ribs. He saw Julie take it in the leg while trying to protect Marcus. And now they’re all here, bloody and gaunt, knowing full well that Axiom is coming for them and apparently not caring.
It is hard to call this weakness.
“Some people think the plague came from outside, like a foreign invader,” R is saying to the camera. “They think it can be stopped with walls and guns and quarantines…”
“Drop your weapons!” Abbot shouts, rushing out from behind the container with the four soldiers at his back. Marcus and Nora start to raise their pistols but Abbot fires an inch over Nora’s head, sending a tuft of hair flying. “Don’t do it, dumb-fucks! Drop ’em!”
Nora and Marcus drop their weapons. Abbot nods to his men and they move forward to secure the prisoners.