29
THE VIRUS
I’m not sure how long I sit, stunned and in shock.
Brutus whimpers until he pulls me out of my daze, and only then do I look around.
A thick, gray-white ash is accumulating everywhere, blanketing the trees, the rocks, the ground. Black smoke clouds the air, and I can’t see more than a few feet ahead.
Ro stands silent, staring up the hill.
I think of the massive gash we have blown into the side of this mountain. I think of the people who have died here, because of the Lords, and of how many more may die now, because of what we have done.
If Lucas is right.
Was right.
What have you done, Doloria Maria? There will be reprisals. Consequences. The House of Lords will not let this go unpunished. If they find you. If they strike.
If.
It comes back again to those two small letters. If I’ve done what I think I’ve done. If the Lords do what Lucas thought they would do.
That’s when I turn around and begin climbing my way up the hill, back the way I came.
I can’t see anything until I get to the top of the hill. And then I see everything.
Or, rather, almost nothing.
No buildings. No Icon. No friends.
Lucas is not anywhere. I don’t see any sign of him or Tima.
“Lucas! Tima!” I yell, though I know it’s useless. Tears are drying on my cheeks, smeared dirt covering my face, and it takes me a moment to notice I don’t feel the pain or pressure of the Icon’s energy.
I close my eyes.
Through my grief, I feel an incredible wave of relief. Our plan worked.
The Icon has been shattered, severed from the earth, and the Lords have lost their power over us.
At least here, at least for now.
But now we know we can do it. Will do it.
One Icon at a time.
Lucas and Tima, their sacrifice means something.
It has to.
I put Brutus down and he runs ahead into the smoke. Where the Icon stood, just minutes ago, there is only a black crater. It looks like a giant has grabbed the Icon and ripped it from the ground—and then used it to smash everything in sight. Fires burn where there is any part of the building still standing. The dead trees surrounding it have toppled. Everything—the sky, the rubble, what’s left of the brown, scrubby brush, me—everything smells like smoke.
Ash floats through the air like snow. It falls along the scattered piles of concrete and pieces of the Icon, slowly covering the ground. It almost makes everything look peaceful.
Almost.
I walk closer to the center of the blast, where the Icon stood. Where the detonator was.
Where Lucas was.
All that remains of him and Tima is in the ashes floating around me.
Gone.
Like the Padre, like Ramona Jamona.
Like everything I love.
I feel my eyes start to burn.
“We can’t leave them.” I say it out loud, because I can feel Ro standing behind me. He must have followed me back up the hill.
I expect Ro to be cheering. Fire and force took down the Icon—just like he’s always wanted.
Instead, when I turn to him, he’s crying.
I walk past him to the deck, to where the crumbling stone balcony gives way to the burning, smoking hills and the silent city below. My foot strikes something, and I stop. A shard, the last remaining bit of the old Icon. Just like the one I’d found before.
I pick it up, feeling the weight in my hands.
I feel it burn and hum, beating with its own quiet life, still.
I feel the loss of Lucas. I feel Tima’s sacrifice. I feel all the pain I’ve locked up inside myself. My parents, my Padre, Ramona. A billion people no longer in the world. Parents, children, grandparents—our invisible history now.
A billion forgotten faces. A billion lost stories. A billion reasons to hate and kill.
The spark inside me is growing. The shard of the Icon is turning hot in my hands.
I feel sorrow, but I feel rage too. I feel fear, but I feel love, and it is stronger, perhaps strongest of all. I feel everything I have come to feel in everyone I have come to love.
I stretch my arms out to the sky and the city and the distant water. I don’t push them away. I want to feel, I want to let myself feel everything there is to feel. Everyone.
I push the last shard of the Icon up above me.
My whole life, I’ve been afraid it would overwhelm me. That the feelings are too big for me, the people too many, the pain too great. I spent every minute of every hour of every day protecting myself from having to feel all the life there is around me.
Because feelings are memories, and I don’t want to remember.
Because feelings are dangerous, and I don’t want to die.
Tonight is different. Now is different. What we have lost, we have lost together. I want to feel the loss. I want to feel the Hole. I want to feel the great goodness of life, of the things that remain when the Icon is gone.
I want to feel it all.
“Dol? Are you okay? What’s going on? We can’t stay here.”
I don’t speak. I can’t.
I feel like my hands are on fire. Between my arms, where I hold the shard, a great ball of energy forms. It leaves my body, spreading wide across the hill, across the city, across the horizon. Pulsing as brightly as the spark of life itself.
I am an Icon.
Not the House of Lords’ Icon, but your Icon.
Feel what I feel, I think.
Feel what you are.
This is your sorrow as much as mine. Your love, your rage, your fear. These are our gifts, and our gift to you.
I hear the beating of the energy as it radiates outward, flapping in crescendos and waves like the wings of a bird. Like the collective heartbeat of the city.
I am spreading like a virus. Not me—the feeling. The idea. I smile to myself, thinking someone should tell Colonel Catallus. I am more than dangerous. I am contagious. He had no idea how contagious I actually am.
I understand now. I know what to do with my gift. It seemed like too much for one person, because it was.
This feeling doesn’t belong only to me.
I was meant to share it.
I take my gift and project it out. I am not the Weeper, not now. We all are. We are all Weepers and Ragers, Freaks and Lovers.
Come.
Come and be free.
I belong to you. This, too, is you.
One by one, I feel them. Curious. Slow.
They are ragged and gasping. They are weeping and afraid. They are worried and cautious. They have been beaten like dogs and are afraid of being beaten again. They are sick. They are poor. They’ve lost their mother, their son, their brother. They huddle together on a bare mattress in a dark room behind a barred window. It hurts to breathe. It hurts to hope.
But they can feel it.
This is who we are. This is what we have become. This great pain is life. This joy and this fear and this rage.
This hope.
It belongs to us.
Chumash Rancheros Spaniards Californians Americans Grass The Lords The Hole. Us.
The pattern belongs to us.
We are here again, as were our mothers, as were their mothers before them. We have lived and died and lived again.
We were here first, and we will be here last.
Feel what you have lost, I think.
Feel what you have lost and don’t lose it again.
Listen to your own voices.
You are not the No Face.
You are no Silent City.
Let your hearts beat.
Be brave. Be alive. Be free.
My hands drop and I collapse against the remnants of the rocky wall in front of me. The wave passes.
It has left me.
I can feel the tears running down my face. Even Ro is still crying, next to me. I know this as clearly as if I was looking at him.
“My God, Dol. What have you done?”
I can’t find the words. I reach for him and he pulls me to him with strong Ro arms. I am exhausted.
I weep in his lap, not as Doloria Maria de la Cruz, the Icon Child, but as Doloria Maria de la Cruz, the girl.
I am both.
I hear Brutus barking and whining, behind me. “Bru, are you stuck?” I walk toward the sound, climbing through rubble and smoke.
Ro follows.
I see Brutus digging in the dirt and debris. He looks up at me and keeps digging.
“Let’s get you out of here.” I reach down to pick him up. “Come on, Brutus.” When I bend down, my heart stops short, and I can’t breathe.
I see a hand, coming from a gap in the rubble. A wrist, with three dots.
They’re here.
I have spent my tears, and all I can feel is a sharp pain in my chest. “Ro,” I say quietly.
“I know. I see them, Dol. I’m sorry.”
Ro carefully lifts a splintered support beam that seems to be covering Lucas.
I recognize the tile flooring around us and know this was close to where the detonator must have been.
The gap beneath the beam is dark.
In the shadows, we see Tima curled around Lucas. They aren’t ash—but they aren’t moving, either. They look almost like they could be sleeping. Lifeless, but frozen.
Tears run down my cheeks as Brutus jumps out of my arms and races over to Tima, licking her face.
She lies there, motionless, but the dog doesn’t seem to notice. He won’t give up on her.
Then she starts, and pushes him away.
Before she can say a word, Ro and I are upon them. I am holding Tima’s hand when she opens her eyes.
Moments later, we are holding Lucas’s hands when he opens his.
I don’t let go of either one, but I read the shapes in their minds, like pages from a book.
Lucas, resetting the detonator.
Tima, throwing her arms around him.
A bright flash, then nothing.
I smile, but the tears won’t stop.
They don’t stop for any of us.
The lights come slowly, one at a time. Ro sees them before I do.
“Do you see that? What is it?” He points out past the tops of the burning trees and the smoking hill.
Tima looks where he points. “Torches, I think. Or flares.”
Lucas squints, next to me. “Who has a flare?”
I stare in wonder. “What’s happening?”
We watch the lights as they appear below us. First one, then another, until whole streams surge through the streets and veins of the Hole like a flood, like blood. They push their way up the twisty paths of Griff Park. They blanket Las Ramblas and the alleys and the streets.
Nothing stops them.
Nothing, and no one.
They have power. They are power. They feel it now.
They come by the tens, by the hundreds. Old men with dark eyes and leathery hands and black nails, spittle in their lips. Old women with brown skin and no chins, barely walking. Graying hair pulled back in a low, oily twist. Walking from their hips, stiffly, as if each thickankled step pains them. Which it probably does. The world is made up of these men and women, I think, whole armies of them. Women who have borne children and buried them. Men who have endured the march of time and still they march.
And then the young men and the young women, with covered heads and straw hats and muscled legs and glasses and no glasses. Some walk, some run. They are fat and they are bony. Even smaller children race between them. All they have in common is the forward movement and the look in their eyes.
It is enough.
We watch as the light moves through the city, nothing paranormal, nothing supernatural. Only something natural, something distinctly human.
Only—
The clouds flash with electricity. We look up at the sky. Tima’s face twists in concern. “Was that—lightning? But there isn’t a storm.”
The ground begins to rattle beneath our feet.
“Dol? You getting anything—” Ro shouts to me. I fall to one knee, pressing against the earth.
I feel nothing, nothing human.
Only energy in its purest form. Heat and power and connection. I pull my hand away, quickly, shaking off the burn. “I don’t know. Something’s wrong.”
Lucas stares up at the sky in horror.
“It’s them. They’re here.”
Then the clouds part, and one by one, the silver ships arrive. They hang low over the city, sliding across the horizon, blocking out the low-hanging moon.
This is what we feared most. I just didn’t expect it so quickly. The Lords have massed their ships like they did on The Day. They have come to put down this Rebellion. To make an example of us.
They have come to use their greatest weapon, our greatest fear.
“Can they do it without the Icon?” I whisper.
Nobody dares answer.
Have we done enough?
Silence falls over the Hole. In the streets, the people stand motionless.
“Ro! Lucas!” I stretch out my hands, but Tima is already coiled against Lucas’s body. Ro dives toward me, as if he could shield me from the Lords themselves.
“Don’t look—” shouts Lucas. As if that could stop The Day from happening all over again.
My heart is pounding.
I don’t take my eyes off the ships.
My heart is pounding.
I watch as the Carrier ships align in a perfect circle over the Hole.
My heart is pounding.
I watch as a stream of light unites the ships, like the spokes of a wheel.
My heart is pounding.
I watch as the sky flashes blinding white, so bright that my eyes blur.
My heart stops pounding.
My heart stops.
My heart
My
A sound like thunder echoes across the sky. I feel a jolt of energy coursing through me, almost lifting me off my feet. It’s as though all the energy from the Lords’ ships is flowing through the entire population of the Hole, to me. We are all connected. And I accept it. I take it in and release it back into the heavens.
The clouds break open, and the air fills with rain.
I exhale, and slowly, slowly—my heart begins to beat again.
Silence.
Then I watch in awe as the ships slowly, grudgingly, rise to the clouds and disappear.
A cheer builds from the city below, the streets singing and shouting, laughing and catcalling.
They’ve failed. The Lords. They’ve retreated.
Ro grabs me into a hug the size of the city, and we roll in the rubble like puppies.
Because the Hole remains.
Tima jumps onto Lucas’s back, screaming at the top of her lungs. I can hear her voice carry over the hilltop and across the city. Brutus barks, chasing wildly after her.
Because today is not The Day.
Lucas trips over Ro, and Tima lands on me, and all four of us become one pile of tangled limbs, laughing.
Because we are not a Silent City—not today, not ever again.
We lie back on the dirt, staring up at the sky, panting. I find myself caught between Lucas and Ro, one hand tangled in Lucas’s gold hair, one wedged beneath Ro’s back.
Today, right now, they feel exactly the same to me.
Alive.
We stay like this for a moment. Still. Then Tima sits up and raises her arms to welcome the rain. “Even the sky is happy for us.” Ro smiles at me with a look of wonder.
“What did you do, Dol?” Tima turns to me, a shock of silver hair and wild eyes, curious.
I try to put the answer into words. “I don’t know. I think, somehow, I passed our immunity on to them.”
Lucas sits up. “The entire city?”
I nod. “With this.” I hold up the Icon shard, now blackened in my hand.
“And this,” says Ro, touching my heart with a knowing smile. It’s impossible not to smile back.
“It’s our city now,” says Tima. Lucas nods, but as he turns his head toward the coast and Santa Catalina, I see his eyes and feel what he feels.
There are many ways to lose a family, I remember.
Ro stands up, holding out his hand to me. “That’s one down. Only twelve more to go.”
I take his hand and offer mine to Lucas, who grabs Tima. We pull each other up.
As I make my way down the hill, I hold on to my friends, hand in hand, and know Tima is right.
There is no way to stop the demonstrations now. They will say what they will. They will speak the truth and nothing else.
The Projects will be empty, I think.
The Embassy will be powerless, I hope.
At least in the Hole.
For now, for a moment, this moment—the Hole has found its voice.
We know the plan. We do as we said we would. By early light, we have found our way back to the Cathedral, past the fires and the torches and the singing and the celebrations. When I look up toward the Observatory, I see it is still lit with a bonfire as big as the Icon itself.
Inside the gates of Our Lady of the Angels, Tima is so happy to see Fortis she flings her arms around him and kisses him on both cheeks—even though he’s already juggling a flask in each hand.
Ro disappears into a tightening circle of his Rebellion friends. They grab him, hoisting him off the ground, and he dives back into the throng of them, as if they were all made of the same wild energy.
I don’t need to listen to know he is busily embroidering our story, watching it grow like wildfire with every retelling.
Let him.
I stumble toward the others, but I find my legs won’t support me any longer. I am so exhausted I can’t speak, I can’t move.
Lucas sees my legs buckle before I can hit the stone floor. Wordlessly, he scoops me up and carries me away through the crowd. He knows. His chest is warm and steady, even though he’s scorched and bruised from the blast. I listen to the beat of his heart, all the way until he leaves me, curled against the low cot.
“There,” Lucas says, pulling a thin army blanket up to my chin. He looks at me, affectionately.
There, I think.
Home.
I can’t say anything now—not to Lucas, or to anyone—and he doesn’t make me try. So instead, I lie there in the darkness, numb and still, until Fortis awakens me.
Time to leave the Hole behind.
By noon light, we have found our way back to the Tracks. There are no carloads of ragged Remnants, headed to the Projects. The Sympas are on high alert, though, and the Tracks are still dangerous. We slip back to the last Embassy prison car, where a certain Merk and a coat of explosives and pack of four thousand digs sees to it that four exhausted prisoners are transported back to a long-forgotten Mission in the Grasslands.
La Purísima.
What remains of it. The fields are torched. The flocks are scattered and gone. The trees are charred black sticks.
Yet Bigger and Biggest are having bowls of bread and milk in the kitchen when we arrive. The glass has been broken from the windows, but Bigger has covered them with burlap, all the same. Bigger knocks his bowl off the table, he is so surprised. I can’t tell which one of us is happier to see the other.
Biggest, as she always does, takes one look at me and makes me a bed in front of the oven.
The goats lap up the spilled milk, and I try to choke out the words to introduce Bigger and Biggest to my friends.
That night, I sleep next to Ro and Tima and Lucas and Fortis on the warm tiles of the kitchen floor. I wake up to find that Fortis has drawn his insane coat, full of strange wonders and secret curiosities, all the way over me. I’m so drained, all I can do is lie there and breathe. Only one thought struggles to the surface of my mind.
They aren’t perfect. They aren’t much. They didn’t grow me in their bellies or a lab or adopt me through the Embassy. I don’t know the total truth of them, or the truth behind the truths.
But it doesn’t matter. For better, for worse, here we are. What we have is one another.
This is my family now.
EMBASSY CITY TRIBUNAL VIRTUAL AUTOPSY: DECEASED PERSONAL POSSESSIONS TRANSCRIPT (DPPT)
CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET
Performed by Dr. O. Brad Huxley-Clarke, VPHD
Note: Conducted at the private request of Amb. Amare
Santa Catalina Examination Facility #9B
See adjoining Tribunal Autopsy, attached.
DPPT (CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS PAGE)
Catalogue at Time of Death includes:
45. Grass Rebellion propaganda flyer, text-scan follows: