“Down with the Select!”
James focused on the words. He heard them drawing close, the old man calling out again and again. He had shouted the same thing before–before today, before it happened. Now he proclaimed the words with a predatory glee.
“Down with the Select! Throw off their shackles! Their pride caused this disaster, their meddling brought the buildings down upon your heads! Listen! We must take advantage of the moment. They are wounded. Look, the Wheel is smoking! We must act!”
James let the words prod him. Heat and heaviness filled his chest; he could not move; he burned with inaction.
“It’s too early,” he snapped.
The man heard him, even amid the shouts and cries and shifting rubble. James had wanted to speak and be done, but now the man approached.
“We must strike now, while they are off-balance.”
James laughed and pointed. The four-story apartment behind him leaned against its twin. “We’re all off-balance. Tomorrow.”
The old man was indignant. He lived in the streets and begged, but now he acted as a king. Everyone knew him–the Select were an obsession with him. He claimed they took power and granted power at their leisure. “I’m on the side of man and mankind. Don’t you desire freedom?”
“I don’t care.”
“They’ve taken everything from us.”
James nodded. He did not agree, not really, but the statement resonated with him. His few rooms, wrecked. His wife…. He looked at her, limp on the ground beside him. He touched her face. He’d dug her out from the weight of the floor above, carried her downstairs, and there he’d sat for…a long time. A few minutes.
“It’s too early,” he repeated.
She almost looked as if she were sleeping.
The old man squatted down beside him, eyes gleaming. “What was her name?”
“Her name’s Illiana.”
“Girlfriend? Wife?”
“Both.”
“Did you get along? Did she nag?”
“She always told me to stop complaining, that everyone’s always complaining, and she didn’t see much use to it, even when times were bad. They were bad enough often enough. She complained sometimes, but when she caught herself doing it, or I caught her, she’d laugh and reprimand herself. We were planning to have kids. I wanted to get everything squared away, make sure we’d have the money, but you’re always scraping by in the Grunt. Always scraping.”
“And they took her from you?”
James shook his head. “It’s too early.”
“They live over there, in their rich towers, studying you like a rat. You’re a number in an equation. She was too.”
James didn’t want to talk. He’d heard it all before. He’d said it before. The night after the factory shut down, he’d brandished a knife and told Illiana how he’d gut the Select. He’d worked in the steel mill, in the grime and heat and sweat, and suddenly someone higher up decided to make a factory in Section 5, and old Hector Mellon, may his bones rot, decided the Grunt no longer needed to support the rest of the city.
He’d not loved it, but he’d done the work day after day since he was 14.
The night after, he’d had the taste of blood in his mouth. He’d have killed any Select where he stood. And in the morning he was a useless lump, smouldering, no longer able to act.
“They don’t care if you live or die,” the man continued. ‘They probably caused this, as a test. They’ll call it urban revitalization. Old Mellon probably nodded his gray head, muttered some wise words, and thought to himself, What will happen to the cost of living quarters if half the population ceases to exist? And then he began to make notations on his napkin.”
The crazed man was speaking lucidly. It frightened James. He spoke so well while the world made less and less sense.
“What would she say?” The man gently touched his wife’s face.
“Mind your own business.” That’s what she believed. To be happy, don’t complain, don’t compare. Focus on your own little world.
He looked at her and wondered if anything of his world would survive when she was covered with earth.
The man tugged his elbow. “You must come with me.”
“I’m staying.”
“We must move. You understand. Help me gather others.”
“I don’t care about all that.”
“Yes, you do. Your face says you do. Your hands say you do. We strike now. Tomorrow will be too late. They will be ready for us by then. Strike while the fire burns hot.”
James remembered the knife in his hands that night, the night he hesitated. He carried it now.
“I can’t leave her.”
“She’ll be here when you return.”
She isn’t here now.
But he held her cold hand. He had not yet left her.
The man tugged again, harder.
“Stay off me!”
“Now! We need to go now! I need you to convince others. Now!” The fury in his voice burrowed into James. He wanted the man to leave. He needed him to leave.
“Don’t you hate the Select?” the old man asked.
“Yes, I hate them.”
“Don’t you want to see them burn?”
“I would not turn away.”
“You will be the first of thousands. The first! The first is the most important, the pebble that causes the avalanche.”
“No. I will stay.”
“With the dead.”
“With my wife.”
“She’s no longer your wife. She’s a corpse.”
“Go.”
“She will not move again. She is dead because of them. Gone forever.”
“Go!”
“If they had their way, they would take her and dissect her. To see how she works.”
The knife was out in a moment. The man stumbled back, blood gushing from the wound. He was too shocked to cry out.
“It’s too soon,” James moaned. “Tomorrow, I would have marched into Barathrum with you! But today, today….”
He laid his head on his wife’s bosom and tried to make the world disappear.
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