For Diane, who saw me.
And for my father, who taught me to fight.
MANHATTAN
11 YEARS AGO
In an antiseptic white room, Ethan Fraction and Steven Walker were a stain. The interrogation had yielded mostly screams and fluids, making a Rorschach of the floor. The exercise left Fraction short a full compliment of finger nails and Walker sporting fresh ligature marks. The agony technicians responsible had long since packed up, leaving the two to consider their choices and bleed at each other.
None of this made sense. The interrogators’ questions were opaque. Proper words in nonsense order. None of it tracked. No one brought up the desert, the derelicts, or the cures, just a document. An article of which they knew nothing. Getting black-bagged, donating plasma to the floor, and playing twenty questions for keeps was not how they had seen their Saturday going. Still tied to their chairs an hour after the fact, they’d begun to wonder about their chances at Sunday.
The gravity of the situation wasn’t lost on them. Regaining consciousness, Walker had the presence of mind to address it.
“You don’t think we made a mistake with this, do you?” Walker asked.
“What? No,” Fraction said. “If we made any mistake it was offering such a small bribe.”
“What? I kept telling them: I will pay you a dollar to let us go. One whole dollar,” Walker added, his giggling punctuated by a bloody cough.
“Right,” Fraction cackled, “because at some point I’m just gonna run out of teeth, and then what’re you gonna do?”
“Yeah, I mean, there’s really only one way to hang somebody, and they already–“
A buzzer sounded, the door opening a second later with an echoing, metallic pop. A tall, thin man with a shaved head stepped out of the comparative blackness of the vestibule. A dark suit rendered him just hands and head in negative space; means of deed and intent. Pulling up a chair in the light, he seemed in his element. This was his show.
“So, nothing?” he asked, confounded. “I went to all that trouble, and you don’t actually know anything? Jesus, if I’d known that, you’d still be sitting at the bar and I could be at the Met,” he said.
The guys gave him a look. Miyamoto had given them the keys to the kingdom. The man saw them doing the math and walked it back some.
“Well, nothing actionable. I know she told you about the op, and us, and the NES, but if you knew what I thought you knew,” he said, looking aside to the floor, “not enough bleach on the world.”
“Well, now I just feel ungrateful for wanting a new tourniquet,” Walker deadpanned.
The man smirked. He couldn’t help but respect the irreverence in the face of blunt force trauma. They weren’t operatives, just kids; twenty-four and wildly out of their depth. But they’d kept it together. If he’d found them on his own, he might have recruited them. Instead, Miyamoto made a dead-end of them after she’d gone to ground.
They were in a state, though. Flashes of light and ringing noise shot through Walker, and the salt left on his wounds stung with every movement. Fraction still bled from his fingers, a pool forming on the white tile underneath them. It pushed into the grout like a vein, pulsing intermittently toward the drain.
“You know why we don’t kill people like you?” The man asked, cocking his head to the side. “It’s not martyrdom; martyrs sell t-shirts, not revolutions. You’re going to walk out of here tonight because I want you to shout what you know from the rooftops.
“The narrative ecosystem takes apart dangerous ideas like an immune system. Even if industry and government don’t kill your story, people want to adhere to the social contract– and your story doesn’t. They might even be cynical enough to have already accepted something like it in the abstract, but if you confront them with the reality of it, they’ll cast you out like lepers.
“Even if it does get out, shock and novelty have a shelf life. The sentiment would shift to resignation. Like PRISM or MKUltra, it’d just be a fact of life.”
The red line barreled ahead between the tile. A kind of dread washed over Fraction and Walker as the man spoke, pulling back the curtain on something they’d thought a paranoid fantasy. He wasn’t even walking between the raindrops, he was scheduling the storm.
“Killing you is a waste of ammunition and janitorial wages, because whether you keep quiet or scream your story at the top of your lungs, it becomes inert.”
Silently, the red line reached the drain. The man leaned forward.
“This is truth that oxidizes as fiction.”
Fraction considered that.
“Yeah, you’d probably better kill us.”