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"I have a really bad idea," Nile says.
Booker looks up from his crossword puzzle to find Nile in the doorway, picking at the edge where paint has started peeling off the wood. He knows she's been taking the news from her country pretty hard. "Yeah?" he says in what he hopes comes across as a neutral but supportive tone.
"It's such a bad idea, but I can't get it out of my head."
Booker pats the spot next to him on the couch. "The kind that might help to talk about?"
"The kind that, if we didn't already have a million things in place to make sure we're not being recorded, I'd want to do a million things to ensure that before talking about."
"Oh," he says heavily. "That bad idea."
"Yeah."
"Come here," he says. "Unless you'd rather punch things while we talk about it?"
Nile scrunches up her mouth a little, like she's trying to keep herself from saying something. Her posture's gone rigid. He's about to get up from the couch to go set up the heavy bag when instead the couch sags with Nile's weight. She curls up, hands tight around a pillow, her head resting heavy on his thigh.
Booker strokes her upper arm gently while he waits for her to decide what to say.
"Did y'all ever try to kill Hitler?"
"I fantasized about it many times. Mostly after he was already dead."
The quiet hangs between them. It's hard to tell whether Nile's silence is about this unsatisfying answer or the much harder questions about her own future she's wrestling with, and as the silence goes on, Booker's own demons start pushing for him to explain himself.
"We spent most of the 30s in Southeast Asia, trying our best to protect people from Imperial Japan and their puppets. I remember seeing the headlines about Germany getting worse, especially for Jews, and feeling like it would be selfish to ask the others to leave behind people who needed us."
Nile looks up at him with a sad little smile. "It wouldn't have been selfish. You wanted to help more people who needed you."
He knows she doesn't mean it like that. It's a knife through his heart all the same. His people had needed him and he didn't— he couldn't—
Several deep breaths later, Booker reminds himself of why Nile is bringing this up. He knows she would hold him through it if he broke down in his own grief, his own guilt. A little selfishly he thinks it would make him feel better to help her through her own mess instead.
"How much do you know about the French Revolution?"
Nile looks up at him again, this time with her eyebrows near to falling off the couch in her surprise at the non sequitur. "I mean, I wasn't there."
"I wasn't exactly there either," he says. "Not for a lot of it."
"Yeah but—"
"For example, I wasn't in the rooms where people who had the power to do so debated whether to execute the beheaded king's 10 year old heir."
Nile grimaces.
"The boy died in prison, of tuberculosis if I recall, almost certainly scared and alone."
She lays a hand on his thigh and gently squeezes.
"The Reign of Terror killed tens of thousands of people. It's an awful mess to look back on, and it was an awful mess to live through, but as it was happening, there were individual executions I agreed with. I bring it up because—" and he sighs. "By the time any of us realized just how bad Hitler was going to be, it was far too late for killing him alone to stop it. So how many people would we have had to kill to stop the Holocaust?"
"How many high-ranking Nazis, you mean," she says. "Not the, what, tens of millions of soldiers and civilians who died in World War 2."
"Yeah. It's hard not to fantasize about torturing Mengele. Eichmann. The obvious names history makes clear to us."
"Makes me want to take a time machine back to 2016." With a snort, she adds, "Maybe 1607."
"1492," he adds darkly.
The weight of it all settles over them, Nile stroking Booker's thigh in rhythm with his own hand on her arm.
Eventually, she says, "Things couldn't have been great for Jews in Spain in 1491 though, were they? And it's not like Columbus was the only guy poised to fuck up everything for my ancestors and the whole western hemisphere."
"As far as I'm aware there's never been an uncomplicated good time in history, no."
"Ok, so we don't have a time machine, and even if we did we can't fix everything. I'm still glad Hitler's dead. Still glad bin Laden's dead, even though I can admit—"
Booker squeezes her shoulder.
"Even though I can admit my war shouldn't have happened, yeah." Nile blows out a long breath through pursed lips. "So I guess what we're both dancing around saying out loud is what to do about JD Vance."
"And how far down the line to go from there."
"I can't believe we're saying any of this out loud."
"Is it helping?" he asks, not at the moment entirely sure what he hopes the answer will be.
"Kind of?" She wraps her arms around his legs and squeezes, then in a flash she's sitting up next to him, reaching for his laptop where it rests on the coffee table.
"Ok," she says. "Let's put all ethical considerations on the back burner for a minute and be purely tactical, just to get it out of my head. If we did this before January 20 vs after, when would Vance be able to appoint a VP?"
He pulls out his phone and they both start furiously scrolling Wikipedia. A few pages into the rabbit hole, he says, "Do we hold out hope for Democrats to take back the House, so Hakeem Jeffries becomes president?"
"Fuck, I would actually be really into that."
He shares a smile with her before going back to his scrolling. The smile fades quickly. "I can feel Copley's words coming out of my mouth here but bear with me. If the Republicans keep the House, which they probably will, and if we're willing to commit multiple political assassinations, then how far down the list do we go, and what strategic considerations are there for timing, given the transition details?"
"Ok, if we wanted President Patty Murray, we'd need to do this not just before the inauguration, but before the new Senate is sworn in, which is um— where'd that tab go— January 3rd. I think that means we'd also have to— Jesus, of course, it's before the inauguration, so we'd have to kill the current administration too."
"Your government was pretty well designed to discourage people from doing what we're talking about, it seems."
"The founders were slave-owning shitbags but they did get a few things right."
"Indeed. And I'm afraid I'm too French not to point out that many of your government's design details were established while the Terror was redesigning mine."
"Thanks for the bad example to learn from, I guess?"
"Some say it's what I do best," he says, letting his lips quirk up for a brief moment of humor. "Anyway, Wikipedia isn't very forthcoming about what happens to the line of succession during the interregnum. The, ah, lame-duck period."
"Ok, still not debating the ethics per se, but — yeah, ok, I see what you mean about hearing Copley's voice coming out of your mouth, and he's not wrong. There's the knock-on effects of all this if we did it. Let's say we do some things and Patty Murray is now president. Her party just lost the popular vote for the first time in 20 years, and she's taking office in the wake of an election season full of threats of political violence followed by a literal bloodbath to change the outcome of that election. What happens next? How the hell is she supposed to govern like that?"
"And who's to say people like us on the other side — not immortals, sure, but mercenaries, let's call ourselves what we are — won't pay us back in kind."
"Jesus."
"Which is why I answered your let's kill Hitler question with a question about the Reign of Terror."
"Once it starts, where does it fucking end," Nile says, heavy with resignation. For all her very understandable frustration, she manages not to throw the laptop across the room. She doesn't even slam it shut.
"There is an alternative," Booker ventures after a while.
Nile tilts her head. "Waiting for the inevitable annihilation of all humanity by either nuclear war or climate change?"
"Very likely all humanity except for us, of course."
She covers her face in her hands.
"What if, somehow," he says, "we could engineer for him to die "by accident" on a golden toilet at Mar a Lago."
Oh, what a sight. Nile grins like a damn sunbeam. Then she begins to talk quickly. "President Vance would still be very very bad, but he doesn't have cult leader energy. He could be a one-term president through the democratic process not by the bad bad terrible idea I still can't believe we're talking about out loud. There'd be conspiracy theories, tons of them — and they'd be right, unlike the millions of people who genuinely believe that Joe Biden somehow stole the 2020 election. But enough people would believe it really was a heart attack, or whatever we'd do, that it wouldn't open the floodgates."
"So then there's the matter of whatever exactly it is that we'd do."
"Is it possible for a team of five people to do this?"
"Would our elders be willing to help is one of those pesky ethics questions we've put on the back burner for the moment, but I think they would."
"Copley would help. Well, unless he wouldn't. There's some sliver of possibility that he'd feel a moral obligation to report this threat to the democratic process. And he has access to the kind of reporting channels where this threat would actually get acted on."
He almost breaks in with, "Which means getting us locked up again," but Nile has blessedly already moved on to the next tactical matter.
"Is there a magic heart attack drug that doesn't show up on tox screens like in all the movies, and if so how do we get it, and if so how do we deliver it to the target. On the bright side, it's public knowledge that he's constantly going out of his way to make it harder for the Secret Service to protect him. When we get right down to it the logistics might not actually be all that hard compared to some of our other jobs."
Booker laughs darkly. "Once we figure out all of that, a small but also very important question remains." He can't help himself: he pauses for effect. "Where do we park ourselves to watch the memes pour in."
"Those headlines would be spectacular," she says with something akin to hope in her eyes.
"They really would be."
"After that small but very important question is resolved, there's just the one more, the one about to boil over where we put it on the back burner. How to live with ourselves after we've done this."
"Yeah," he says with a heavy sigh.
"I'm—" Nile starts. She swallows, then sets her jaw. "I'm already a killer. I'm already condemned to looking myself in the mirror for the next hundred or thousand or hundred thousand years. Every life I end makes it worse, either because I've killed someone again, or if it starts getting easier, then I've become someone who—"
Booker puts his arm around her.
"My dad, my mom, my grandparents, my great-grandparents, my brother, so many family members I miss and so many more I never even got to meet, fought so hard for this to be a country that respects us. For a few months here I let myself hope that we'd worked hard enough for long enough that a majority of our neighbors would be willing to elect a Black woman president and—"
He kisses her temple as she forces herself to breathe.
"If I do this, am I taking a knife to the democracy so many of us have fought so hard for? Am I spitting in their faces? Is this justified revenge against a system that was only ever going to see me as subhuman, or am I just killing my own hope that it could ever be any different?"
The only answer he can give, inadequate though it is, is to hold her tighter.
"Is there anything else I'm not thinking of?" she whispers.
"Perhaps what brought you to this idea in the first place," he says quietly. He really doesn't want to bring this up but he's fairly certain it's already occurred to her. "How will you feel if we do nothing and then in a year or two Dizzy and Jay are deployed to Chicago to arrest your brother for peaceful protest."
Nile scrunches up her face again, this time perhaps to hold back tears. "You'd tell me I'm only one person and I can't stop every bad thing. But I know I'd feel how you looked when I said your people needed you."
"I know you didn't mean it like that."
"But I know you feel guilty. It's not your fault that you couldn't stop the fucking Holocaust, of course it's not, Book. But I would feel guilty too, if—"
There's so much he can't do, but he can hold Nile while she cries. Later he'll cook for her, and he'll do his best to make her laugh, and after that they'll do their best to get a good night's sleep. Inadequate though it is, their best is what they can do.