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“Water plant,” says Jane, spreading the blueprint on the table before you, “It’s where M—Where the Condesce pumps the sedatives into the rivers. The security cameras move on fifteen-second loop, but there’s a blind spot right outside the left gate.”
She shifts, taps her fingers on a printout. She didn’t really have to bring it—it’s not like you read these things anyway—but you guess she likes having things to look at or whatever. Nerd.
“Look here. This factory is the plant for the entire West Coast. Once it’s gone, we can pry the Condesce’s control from California at the very least. Maybe even Saskatchewan.”
“Yeah?” you say “What are we going to do, blow it the fuck up?”
You swirl your drink. She drums her hands on the table, stutter-stop, like the beat of a subwoofer, like somebody else’s arrhythmic heart. There is a tension in the air, a humidity of sorts, something that catches at the words in your throat. You wonder if she feels it too.
“Golly, Miss Ro-Lal,” says Jane, beaming demurely at you,” It’s almost like you can read my mind.”
When you first meet Jane Crocker, she is prim in jeans and Mary Janes. You have just blown up the frontal drone cortex of the Batterwitch’s gaudy palace. She has just, judging by the stains on her shirt, eaten a very nice cake. You dodge the drones, push past a carapace guard, barrel through a set of oak doors, and, hey, there’s a cute girl on the balcony.
You wave at her as you run. Never let it be said that Roxy Lalonde cannot multitask, because you so the fuck can. You scramble up onto the ledge, and fire your rifle into the sky.
“This is for the Oakland 39!” you say, as the girl edges cautiously closer, and then, philosophically, “Viva Resolution.” You lean backwards until your feet slip from the railing, and wink up at the cute girl as you fall.
Jane’s right about the water plant—she always is, but since you’re the big shot action hero, you’re the one risking your ass.
You slink around the main processing center, jumping at shadows. You know there aren’t supposed to be any carapace guards around, but you can’t help but be a bit paranoid. Paranoid’s saved your life way too many times for you to stop. You like paranoid. Paranoid is good. Para—
“Roxy?” says Jane, over the crackle of your radio, “Roxy, are you all right?”
Paranoid gets you embarrassed in front of Jane Incredibly Competent, Totally Awesome Crocker. Paranoid sucks.
“Yeah,” you say, “I’m good. Explosives in place and everything. I’ll be out in a sec. Let me just find a window.”
“What is it with you and windows? Don’t doors work just fine?”
“Windows are easier. See?”
“I can’t see, Roxy, I’m on the radio, not next to you. I might start coming along soon, though. The Parcel Mistress says I’m almost ready.”
You shrug, even though she can’t see that, either, and trigger the explosives.
“Boom,” Jane says.
“Yeah,” you say, “Boom.”
“It’s vive la revolution.”
You glance up. It’s the girl.
“Oh, eff my life,” you say, raise a hand from the keyboard; shake it until your rifle uncaptchalogues. You type with one hand, brandish your gun with the other.
“Soz about this, but if you scream, I shoot. Nothing personal, I just don’t wanna die.” You wave your gun a bit, to make your point. She doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t even stop talking. Cool.
“I can’t even imagine where you found that phrase. Those books are banned.”
“I read ‘em same way you did.”
“I,” says the girl, “Have clearance.”
You look at her, still typing. She’s got bright blue eyes, eyelids epicanthic, framed by oval glasses. Oh, no. Her hair’s cut short, in the distinctive three-pronged harlequin. Oh, no. There’s a delicate red tiara on her head, curved into curlicues at her ears. Oh no, oh no, oh no.
She’s Jane Crocker. She’s the heir.
“Oh, no,” you say, and type faster.
“I looked up those people in Oakland,” she says, “They were criminals.”
“They were trying to teach their kids about their own culture.”
“They were sympathizers. Don’t you kow there’s a war going on?” Her eyes go distant, and she says it like a liturgy, the way they say it every single time it’s on the god-damned news: “There’s no room for people like that in this country.”
“Funny you should say that,” you say, “Since you’re Asian and all.”
“I am,” says the heir to the Corp, speaking like she’s trapped on the floor of the Pacific, voice a waver in the air, “A loyal American citizen, and the folks in Oakland ought to have acted like they were, too.”
And there, that’s it. That’s the Batterwitch, drumming at the inside of Crocker’s skull. Brainwashing at its finest.
It’s stupid, and it’s going to be the death of you someday, but for a moment you think of—of redemption.
You shouldn’t. You really, really shouldn’t. The plan is step one: fuck shit up with mad codes, step two: gtfo, step three: happily ever after. No room for step Roxy you’re a fucking dumbass: try to un-brainwash evil dictator’s beautiful daughter.
You finish the virus with a piano maestro flourish, like you’re fucking Mozart, powdered wig made out of dead people hair and clogs and everything, playing Ode to Joy or something, where the joy is wiping half the databanks of the Castle Condesce and the Ode is. Uh. You’re not sure what the ode is, but you rocked it anyway.
You back out of the room, holding the rifle level, Crocker staring steady down the barrel, and from here it’s a short dash to the hole in the forcefield you made when you came in. Down the corridor, up the stairs, over a table, and…
And heir or not, you can’t just leave her there.
You curse, backtrack. Crocker’s still looking at your pages of code like she’ll understand them if she stares hard enough.
“Look,” you say as you burst through the door, “Look, I’m not going to argue about legality or whatevs, but they got shot for teaching their kids Chinese, and the kids got shot for learning. You think that’s fair?”
“No,” she says, and her tiara glows bright, “Yes. No!” The tiara flickers and fritzes, sparks, dims.
“No,” she says, “No, it isn’t, but what does that have to do with us? If you want to protest, well, amble on over to the White House. Not here.”
You stare. You goggle. You gawk.
“No way,” you say, “No fuckin way. You’re a chump!”
“Excuse me?”
“You,” you say, waving your rifle (wow, you should probably watch where you’re pointing that, huh), “Are a chump. Prime spot on the chumproll. Chump fodder for the chump cannon. Chumptown, population you.”
“What?”
“You’re a chump!”
“You’re insane,” says Crocker. She gives you a long, sturdy stare. You wave your rifle a bit, just in case she gets any ideas. She takes a visibly deep breath, curls her fingers into the fabric of her shirt, opens her mouth and screams.
There is a rumble from somewhere, clanking sounds of chitin on metal. Drone sounds.
“Fuck,” you say. You look at her, then at your rifle, then back at her, then at the door. You curse, again, and then lean in.
“Ask the Batterwitch,” you say, real quick, real urgent, “Ask her about how much power she really has.”
You run.
“Now what?”
Jane spins clockwise, hefts her fork, spins the other way again. You sit perched with your rifle, picking off the drones in the distance shot by shot.
“Now we wait,” you say. Wait for the drones to come, wait for the all clear, wait halfway for the sake of waiting. Jane shrugs, levers a drone’s head from its neck with her spoon.
“I should’ve brought a book.”
Almost there.
Almost.
You grasp at the gap between scales and haul ass, inching up the castle wall, palms caked with chalk so you won’t slip. Your fingers grasp the edge of the windowsill. Kicking, you curl your hands around the ledge and hoist, pulling yourself up, up, and –finally!—over.
You’re in. Sure, you fell in through the window and you look kind of like a dipshit taking a nap, but, hey, it’s not like anyone saw…
“Hello,” says somebody. You look up. It’s her, blue pants and red Betty Crocker apron, holding a very large fork.
“Oh,” you reply, “It’s you. Hey.”
“Weak spot in the force field, twenty clicks back. Window here jams, so nobody ever bothers to shut it. And you ran towards the East Wing last time,” she says, and flushes, “Just in case you were wondering how I found you. Don’t you dare move.”
“All right,” you say, “How did you find me? You a detective or something?”
“As a matter of fact,” Crocker says, “I happen to be an excellent amateur sleuth.” Her spine is ramrod straight, head lifted with pride. You shoot her a floppy, upside-down smile, just to see if she’ll blush.
“Did you ask the Batterwitch?”
She hesitates. Her grip on the fork loosens. You roll over, grasp her ankle, pull. A shake of your captchalogue and you’ve got rope, a couple hard knocks to your specibus (you can’t wait till the next English shipment comes in, Jake had better hurry up because you’re getting im-the-fuck-patient with your shitty specibus) and you’ve got your gun.
You tie her to a nearby chair at gunpoint, winding the rope around her torso. She smells fruity and artificial, like berry-scented shower gel. Crocker Strawberry Breeze. Great job, Lalonde, sniffing the enemy. What the hell is wrong with you?
“Scream and I shoot,” you say, securing the knot.
“You didn’t shoot me last time.”
“Shush, you. No, wait, don’t, you haven’t answered my question yet.”
Crocker goes quiet. You walk over to the cabinet, dig around until you find cups and some alcoholic Faygo.
“Meenah said that… that I shouldn’t worry,” she says, “She said that she’d take care of it: revolutionaries, lawbreakers, anything. She said she takes care of everything. But that doesn’t prove that she’s evil! That doesn’t mean she had anything to do with the Oakland 39.”
You pour yourself a drink, cold Faygo bottle in your steady hands, the liquid bubbling up until it hits the edge of the rim.
“Chump,” you say.
“I am not a chump, and Meenah isn’t evil!”
“Chuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuump.”
“I am not!”
“Well,” you say, “If you’re such a good detective, prove it.”
“Maybe I will,” she spits back, shoulders square even with the rope around them. Then she sags back against the chair.
“I would,” she says, “If I wasn’t tied to this chair.”
You raise your eyebrow. You raise your other eyebrow. You take a sip of your drink.
“What the hell,” you say, shift your rifle to a bayonet (dirty trick, you know, but English is too cheap to get you another specibus), and, with the end, slice the rope.
She stands, rubs at the places where the rope dug into her arms. She uncaptchalogues a mustache. Pastes it onto her lip. Starts walking.
“This way,” she says, striding quickly down the corridor,” You have some nerve, coming here and breaking into our computer systems and ruining perfectly good corporate drones and…”
“And?”
“And flirting with me, for one thing,” she fires back.
“Oh,” you say, awkwardly, and shuffle for at least the next five steps, “Sorry. I could stop, if you want.”
She pauses in her righteous indignation.
“No,” she says, “No, I don’t—I don’t mind. But what I do mind is you barging in here like a hooligan and making a complete mess of things.”
“You know, you’re like, technically my hostage. I have a gun and everything.” You proffer your rifle for inspection, just in case she’s forgotten.
“Just saying,” you continue, “It’s probably a bad idea to rag on the girl with the gun.”
“Oh dearie me, I am so terribly frightened.” She rolls her eyes, rounds a corner, continues: “You’re not good at this whole revolutionary business, are you?”
“Wow,” you say, “Rude much?”
“If you were good, you wouldn’t be here. You’d be at the White House, or, if we’re going with your ridiculous delusions, on Meenah’s ship. Instead, you’re here, mildly irritating Crockercorp.”
“Hey!”
“I’m not done yet, Miss…”
“Roxy.”
“I was asking for your surname. You did try to destroy my home, and we barely even know each other. We shouldn’t be too familiar quite yet, don’t you think?”
“Lalonde. Roxy Lalonde.”
“Miss Lalonde. You didn’t shoot me after I screamed. You went through the trouble of tying me up, but didn’t even bother to gag me. You’re following me, right now, even though I could be leading you right into a trap.”
“Are you?”
She deflates, spine unstarched, fists unclenched. Her steps slow; you stop having to jog to keep up.
“No,” she says, “But I could be.”
You keep on walking. The corridors curve and branch like blood vessels, and the tap of Crocker’s shoes on floor sounds like a pulse. The hallways are round, hollowed into tunnels and plated with metal, and the grouting between the plates is soft like flesh.
“It’s not like there’s a manual or anything,” you say, eventually.
“Didn’t you have training? I imagine there must be a whole cell.”
“No,” you say, “Just me.”
She looks at you sidelong, your uneven haircut and red cup of tequila Faygo and carapace-ragged clothes.
“I’m sorry,” she says, quietly, and then, “We’re here.”
She opens the door.
There are bags of chips and bottles of orange soda and booze strewn all around you. You’ve made a sort of hacker-cave with blankets and coffee mugs and caffeine pills arranged in a semicircle around your glowing monitor. Jane turns on the light when she comes in; you groan but keep typing.
“Almost there,” you say, “Almost!” Besides you, a drone head sparks, wires from the neck connected to your laptop. You’re trying to hack into the system, see if you can get control. You have not slept in four days.
“Roxy,” says Jane, “You’ve been almost there for twelve hours.”
“And I am,” you say, and with a final line of code the light in the drone’s eyes gutters, goes pink instead of white.
“See?” You stand triumphant, yawn.
“And now, for her next trick, the Amazing Lalonde,” you announce, pointing at yourself, “Will sleep for the next thirty-six hours.” You sway in the glare of the light, almost collapse onto Jane’s shoulder.
That’s what you remember, the next morning: the bright white light, your arm around her neck, for balance, her hand steady on your back, and Jane singing a sad, sad, song as she carries you home.
Crocker’s room is red and white like the Crockercorp logo and American flag. You know it’s hers by the proprietary way she sits at her desk and the mystery novels in neat stacks on the bookshelves: real paperbacks, antique. Otherwise, though, this could be the room of any other girl in the Western hemisphere, with the same exact Crockercorp-issue sheets and curtains and chairs. You were expecting something fancier, something more child-of-the-ruling-regime, but, hey, she’s a chump. Chumps don’t get the cool rooms.
She gestures at a white, curving fork of a chair. You sit. She takes out a CrockerPad and stylus, poised to take notes.
“Nope,” you tell her, “Nooope. Nope to the thousandth power. Nope to the freaking logarithms. Nope to the shittiest Precalc textbook you have ever read.”
“Mm,” she says, scrawling something on the pad.
“Don’t use that! Minute you write something, it gets mainlined to the Batterwitch’s morning newsfeed. You want to use something, use a pencil.”
You toss her a good old No. 2, from way before the Batterwitch outlawed them.
“How remarkably antique of you.”
She pulls a novel from the shelf, opens it to the blank pages at the back.
“Tell me everything you know about Meenah,” she says.
You do. You tell her about the coup that placed the Insane Clown Posse in the White House for life, about the brainwashing and the breeding programs and the internment camps just like 1942. You tell her every single atrocity and indignity, down to the mandatory Crocker ass tattoo pilot program instituted in Chicago last week. When you’re done, she closes the pages of her eleventh novel and sits there for a long minute, pencil slack in her hand. Finally, she tucks the pencil behind her ear and stands.
“Thank you. I’ll keep the writing utensil, if you don’t mind,” she says, then, “Give me a week. One week, then meet me right here at fifteen-hundred exactly. I suppose you can see yourself out? The drones start a sweep of the grounds in twelve minutes.”
“See you,” you say.
You pause at the door jamb. She looks very small in her chair, almost bleak, and you can’t help but turn around.
“Wait a second here,” you say, “Crocker, did you just ask me out?”
She smiles, then, a real actual smile, and you smile back.
“Don’t be late, Miss Lalonde,” she says, and shuts the door.
You’re the one giving the speeches. Jane’s got a thing where she feels like she’s not good enough to represent the fight against the Crocker regime, because she used to be part of it, and even though that is completely stupid and you’re going to have to work on that someday, you’re better at speeches anyway, so it all works out.
Today you’re in Georgia, one of the underground churches, too-thin kids and bushels of the supplies you always bring with you: gifts of peace, and goodwill.
“I’m not asking you to fight with me,” you say, “I’m not asking you to risk your lives, or your families. I’m not asking for soldiers: I am not asking for your mothers and your sisters and your sons.
“What I am asking for is your hope. I’m asking you to think about what comes next; what you’ll do after the Condesce is gone. Because after we defeat the Batterwitch—and trust me, we will defeat the Batterwitch—we’re going to have to build a nation, and we’re going to have to build something good.”
She’s impatient when you show up, foot tracing patterns on the carpet of her floor.
“We’re going to the main control room,” she says, “It won’t be guarded. Follow me.”
She sweeps past you, stops halfway down the hall.
“Oh, and Miss Lalonde?”
“Yeah?”
“Hi.”
You keep half a pace behind her, loping through loops and loops of branching, curved, corridors like capillaries, all the way to the castle’s depths.
“What’d you learn?”
“I learned where the control room is. How to avoid the drones. The password for the databases. It changes every five days, by the way, so there’s no use looking.”
She stops at a circular door. It moves like an aorta, beat by beat, but it stays open after Crocker types in the passcode. She blindfolds you and has you face the opposite wall.
“Heart of the castle,” she says, “All clear.”
You guess this means you can take off the blindfold. You turn to join her, see her tapping some alien language into a large console, screens like scales clustering around one ginat widescreen display.
“This is Daedric,” she explains, “Language of Meenah’s planet. That’s also how I spent the week, by the way: learning it.”
She types something in, a convoluted search query.
“If there’s anything about brainwashing in here, it’ll show up. See? Noth—“
Then the page loads, and a dozen, a hundred, a thousand results flicker onto the monitors.
Crocker breathes in, sharply, makes a soft sound at the back of her throat. You keep quiet. Some epiphanies are better alone. She scrolls past rows and rows of Alternian, past graphs and chemical formulas and photos of test subjects with glassy-eyed stares.
“Subliminal messaging, but subliminal messaging doesn’t work, it’s been scientifically proven—“
“Check the funding for those studies,” you say. She does: American Association of Psychiatrists, Stanford University, and—there, Betty Crocker, in red and white letters. She swallows, leans back into the chair. Then, slowly, she types something in: two words that look like a name.
The hot guy onscreen stares at you from the familiar format of an execution order. He looks like you know him, and it’s not just the pipe and the rugged, movie-star face (hey, can’t blame a girl for looking). You’ve seen him before, you know it.
“No,” says Crocker, hunched over, voice a whisper, almost plaintive. That’s when it hits you: the man on the execution order looks almost exactly like her.
There is a sound from one of the corridors, a great clatter of plastic on metal. Jane starts, almost hits you with a wild wave of her hand.
“That’s the tripwire,” she says, then, “Quick, into the vents!”
She ushers you into one of the larger air vents, but it’s a tight squeeze all the same. You logde yourself in as quietly as you can, pressed up against the grille, and wait.
You can see Crocker at the console—erasing her search history, maybe?—and then, after a moment, she comes in, Her Imperious Condescension herself, the Batterwitch in all her tangled, vicious glory, tacky in a glittery bodysuit and tulle. You can see Crocker almost tremble with the effort of poise.
“This place is off-limits,” she says, “Water you even doin’?”
“I know,” she says, soft, almost conciliatory, “But I wanted – I wanted to know.” And all at once you know how Crocker’s going to play this, see it in the way she bares her neck and folds her hand. It’s a dance that’s been around longer than the planet fucking Alternia’s been dead, and you’ll be damned if all three of you don’t know the steps.
“Gill,” says the Batterwitch, voice a rasp, like coal on stone, “Gill, let me tell ya, you’re too young to be pale for someone old as me.”
“Someone otter tell you that,” she continues, “Someone oughta protect you from me.”
“But, Meenah,” Crocker says, all ingénue, and she says it right, all breathy anticipation, but beneath that there is ire in her eyes, “Who’s going to protect you from yourself?” And it’s just, that line is so fucking textbook, like it’s a manual or something, like it’s a fucking romance, and you can’t watch, you can’t, you press your head to the fabric of your skirt and breathe.
Afterwards, you heft the grille away and walk over. Crocker’s still by the console, shoulders shaking, and you approach with all due hesitance.
“Hey,” you say, real gentle, “Hey, Crocker. Crocker. Jane. Jane.”
When you move to comfort her, you discover she is shaking not with sobs but with rage.
“Roxy,” she says, and it feels like compromise.
“You’re the revolution, right?”
“Yeah,” you answer, dragging out the vowels. She turns to you, smiles tight and brittle with strength, like a knife, like bared teeth and bones.
“How do I sign up?”
“When the revolution’s over,” you say, “I am going to have a long shower and eat like fifty pieces of pie.”
“When the revolution’s over, you’re going to be President,” says Jane.
“What? No, I’m not, the Mayor’s going to be President.”
“Maybe,” she says, noncommital, “When the revolution’s over, we’re going to go bowling. I’ve always wanted to go bowling.”
“When the revolution’s over, we’re going to be stuck in administrative meetings forever,” you say, “But we can go bowling afterwards.”
“When the revolution’s over, we’re going to make more of—of people like you. Human-troll hybrids. We owe that much, at least.”
“We owe her nothing, Jane.”
“Not her. We don’t owe Meenah, we owe the planet. We owe Alternia. We’re alive, and they’re not, Roxy, I think that gives us a certain obligation.”
You shift a bit closer to her, so you can see her eyes. You’re sleeping in the same field, on cold, hard, ground, wrapped in layers of blankets for warmth. Your heads are pressed together. When she speaks, you can feel the sound reverberating through your skull.
“Huh,” you say, “I could do it. If I had enough DNA. When the revolution’s over.”
“When the revolution’s over,” she echoes, and you smile.
“Did you know,” she tells you, “when we first met, I thought I was going to save you, show you the error of your ways.”
“Maybe you did,” you say. She scoffs, but you press on: “Maybe you showed up and I was like, wow, maybe I should be getting all these new recruits, I have seen the light, Glory Condescension. Except not, because fuck her.”
“Don’t say that!”she snaps, before catching herself and easing her posture, “What I mean is, it’s still hard for me to hear—things like that. Meenah, I mean, the Condesce, was… like a mother to me.”
The train slows, stops. You don’t jump out—you’ve been riding the rails for long enough to recognize how long it takes until you’re home.
“Jeez,” you say, after a while, “I really hope that doesn’t mean we’re related.”
“What?”
“Pink eyes. They don’t come natural. Pink blood, too. If I wasn’t so Black I’d be gray, and these disk things ,right here, top of my head, they’re keratin. Not enough for horns, not even enough for nubs, but almost there.”
“You’re a troll?”
“More like a third of a troll. The rest of me is human. Batterwitch spliced her DNA with one of her greatest enemies’. My mom went all the way into the Battleship to get me. She plugged me out, killed the pilot, blew up like half the engine room. Dave took me to a safe house, and then he went back in. Then they, uh. They didn't make it.”
“I'm sorry,” she says.
“It’s history.”
“Isn’t everything?”
The train shudders, stills.
“Our stop,” you say, “Come on. Let me introduce you to the Mayor.”
Jake isn’t good at webcams. You usually end up talking to him voice-only, unless his grandmother’s there, which she usually isn’t: the Prime Minister of the Pacific Alliance doesn’t have much time to chat.
You don’t have much time, either. You’re the revolution, and even though you’ve got people, and your people have people (they used to be smugglers and farmers and priests, and now they’re yours), every moment you’re not on the frontlines feels like a betrayal.
“I wish I could be there with you,” he says, “On the front lines.”
“Eh,” you say, shooting a drone, “If it makes you feel better, you do look really good on the recruitment posters.”
It’s nice, though, talking to someone who isn’t as wrapped up in everything as you are. Someone on the outside; someone who doesn’t wake up every morning thinking about supply lines and the black market and every fighter you’ve lost. Someone who doesn’t know about the chemicals in the water table and the oil spills in the Atlantic and that the Castle Condescension used to be the Batterwitch’s lusus, and that the Batterwitch hollowed her own mother out, that you have walked through Gl’bgolyb’s bones.
(Jane’s got Dirk. Yesterday, you’d walked into the truck and heard them talking, quiet with the coming dawn.
“Do you ever wonder,” he’d asked, “If maybe all the stuff about brainwashing was a lie, and they’re the ones who’ve brainwashed you, and if you’re on the wrong side? I mean, it’s stupid, but what if?”
Jane had choked an almost-sob, hand curled into the steering wheel.
“You too?” she’d said, “You too?”
You’d left, then, climbed out of the back and gently closed the door.)
“Hello? Roxy, are you even listening? God’s bones, the connection here is awful. I’ll give the computer a good, solid kick and call you back in fifteen minutes, all right?”
You must’ve been staring at her (more than usual, because phwoar),because Jane slides in on the ledge next to you, shoulder to shoulder, hand on hand.
“It wouldn’t matter,” she says to you, quietly, “Even if you’re the one who tricked me. It wouldn’t matter, and sometimes that makes me very, very afraid.”
She stands, leaps back into the fray.
“Huh,” you say, and lean back against the cool metal, “Huh.”
The Mayor’s gracious as always, and politely offers to hold his presentation on democracy an hour earlier to accommodate your schedules. Jane declines, just as politely. There’s something she needs to do first.
“Okay,” she says, once the two of you are safely ensconced in what you like to call the Situation Room (otherwise known as the kitchen). The Authority Regulator had insisted on sticking around and “Hmm”ing loudly to make sure Jane doesn’t steal your virtue or whatever, but you got the Postal Mistress to drag him away.
“Okay,” you echo.
“What’s the plan?”
“What plan?”
She stares. You, very slowly, blink.
“Oh, right, yeah, that plan. The defeat-the-Batterwitch plan. Uh, mostly I’ve been delivering supplies, making sure people stay safe and, uh, doing what you saw me. Fucking shit up.. Wiping her databases, getting rid of execution orders, blowing up drone factories.”
“Could you stop the brainwashing? Incapacitate the satellite network?”
“Jane…”
You pause, tilt your head.
“Janey?”
“I like it. Ro-Lal?”
“Sweet. Anyway, Janey, I can’t. If I get people to rise up, she’ll just kill them all. It’s happened before. Rio de Janeiro. Vancouver. For fuck’s sake, Texas. She has this thing, the Red Miles, and the sky cracks open, and energy pours out, and you can never, ever, escape.”
“I can get her out,” says Jane. “Yesterday, you saw what happened. If I keep up that moirallegiance, I could get her off-planet.”
You breathe in, place your hands against the table.
“Okay,” you say, “Okay, Janey, what’s the plan?”
There‘s a lot of screaming, and fire, and you’re surrounded by drones, using your rifle not as a gun but as a club, and then Jane Crocker punches a drone for you.
Wait. Rewind. You’re laying siege to Albuquerque, at the front of the army, and that’s why you almost got crushed by a drone’s giant head, and that’s why Jane Crocker is standing above you, clutching her hand.
“Ow,” she says. This is when the explosives go off, when the walls of Albuquerque fall, and haloed in the bright light, coolant on her clothes, the glue of fake mustache loosened so that it dangles from one end of her upper lip, she is as beautiful as she always is.
“Aw, hell,” you say, and kiss her. It’s a movie star moment: backlit by the explosion, her hands on your waist, your arms around her neck, you and the girl you maybe kind of sort of love.
You’re running and running and running, faster than you ever have, up the stairs and down the hall and there is a strength in your lungs, a rhythm to your steps, you are the fucking wind—
And then you see him, floating in stasis. His hair’s short but it goes straight up, anime style. The virtual reality uplink covers his eyes like triangular shades, but you know just by looking that his irises are neon like yours. He’s grayer than your deep brown, his horns more pronounced, but he’s still like you, exactly like you.
You are not the only one of your kind.
You place a hand on his tank, your palm against the cool glass.
“I’ll be back,” you say, and run.
You run, but the rhythm’s off, there’s a stitch in your side, and even though your legs are pumping fast as you can, you can’t breathe, you can’t breathe, you can’t.
You’re so close to freedom, so close, but as you run towards the window, you see drones blocking the way, and when you turn back, the carapace guards have caught up with you, a forbidding row of chitinous bodies like pawns in a line.
They grasp you by the arms, one on each side, and a guard walking behind you with a gun to you rneck. They take you ever downwards, lower and lower, until finally they place you in a room labeled Re-education.
There’s a chair, and straps to hold you down, and pincers to stop you from closing your eyes. You start to struggle in earnest, if you struggle maybe they’ll shoot, but they don’t, they don’t, and you can see the Condesce’s smile and Jane implacable beside.
“No,” you say, “no, no, no, no, no!”
The Condesce takes her seat behind you and smiles.
Years in the future (but not many) this is what you will remember most:
You and Jane, in the pale light of dawn, her head on your shoulder, your hand on knee, reading through a list of your dead. There is coffee cooling on the table (hers, you prefer tea) and a hole in your right shoe. You’ll remember the fighting, of course, and the explosions, and the moments of utter, complete terror for your life and hers, but in later years, when you think of the revolution, you will think of this, of the stillness of morning and the cold wind at your heels and Jane in your arms.
Your name is Roxy Lalonde. You are not a troll. Your mother was a hero.
Your name is Roxy Lalonde, daughter of Rose Lalonde, and you are mostly human. You like wizards and pink and science and hacking and the weight of your hair on your shoulders. Jane Crocker is the most beautiful girl you’ve ever seen.
Your name is Roxy Lalonde. You are trying to fight the Batterwitch, and you have a plan.
Your name is Roxy Lalonde. You are not a troll. Your mother was a hero.
Your name is Roxy Lalonde, daughter of Rose Lalonde, and you are mostly human. You like wizards and pink and science and hacking and the weight of your hair on your shoulders. Jane Crocker is…
Jane Crocker is standing right outside your cell.
“Hello,” she says. Your name is Roxy Lalonde.
“Hey,” you reply. You are trying to fight the Batterwitch.
“Are you holding up all right? Even with the brainwashing?” You have a plan.
“Yeah,” you say (your name is Roxy Lalonde), “I’ve been training since I was a kid. I spent like five months when I was nine thinking I was a potato. How’s your end holding up?” You are not a troll. Your mother was a hero.
“She got the signal you planted,” says Jane, “Alternian distress call. Six month’s travel away. She’s leaving in two days.”
“It’s working,” you say, “It’s actually working.” Your name is Roxy Lalonde, daughter of Rose Lalonde, and you are mostly human. You like wizards and pink and science and hacking and the weight of your hair on your shoulders and tricking the Batterwitch because it’s working, it’s really working, it really is.
“Of course it is,” says Jane, “I have to go. Meenah wants me with her.”
“Wait,” you call, as she turns away, “Jane. There’s a boy, sector 259, he’s in stasis right now but I think he’s like me. We have to get him out of here.” Jane considers, nods.
“It’s done,” she says, “I’ll have him with me when I let you out.”
She leaves, and this time you don’t call her back.
Your name is Roxy Lalonde.
The Batterwitch is scheduled to be back precisely a year after she leaves; when she lands her ship, you are waiting. The first explosions rock the Battleship moments after it touches down; after that, you’re in. You’re commander of the ground troops (if they can even be called troops; you have about eighty and a dog), Prime Minister Jade English the air, and in a quiet moment (between the first round of grenades and Squad B's foray into the engine room) you take a second to wish her Godspeed.
The battle is a blur of drones and gunfire, of your voice directing the squads on radio, of the sky thick with airplanes and smoke, of the recoil of your rifle and whirlwind dance of Jane’s fork and spoon. She got you the map of the ship, the specifications of the weapons settings, and she stayed up nights with you and Jade and Dirk and the Postal Mistress, running through battle plans, her voice slow and steady, sketching squad formations on a map.
Dirk nods at you as he runs past, stabs a drone in the abdomen, under and up. You have him as a rover, flickering between battle stations like a ghoul, his weird auto-responder brain thingy spitting red text into your visual feed. The Batterwitch's virtual reality had him as a soldier, you remember, in the Alternian Imperial Corps. He's good, a cut better than most of your men (and women, and carapaces), and the Autoresponder is a fucking gift. You use it to relay messages; locations and orders and the names of your stratagems (Plush Palace, Dick Tracy, Lavender Storm) as you run into the ship, rifle steady as the beat of your heart.
Sometimes, you are grateful that your gun is an impersonal weapon. When you kill up close, it's worse, more visceral, not a vague figure in the distance's fall but the distinct crunch of blood and bone. You don't know how Jane does it, how she manages the proximity, how she can press against an enemy close as lovers and not break her heart.
You think, distantly, that, whatever happens today, you will be remembered a hero.
It is not a comforting thought.
It’s good to be out of the straps: they chafe like hell. It’s even better to stand up and take an actual shower and lie flat on Jane’s bed.
“Lying down,” you tell her, “I love lying down. Lying down is the best thing ever.” You turn your head.
“That’s—“
It’s him, bobbing gently, still in his tank.
“I found his files,” says Jane, “He thinks he’s a troll: he’s been living as one for his entire life.”
“Let him out,” you say. She pulls the lever. The panels open and the boy falls; his stasis fluid spills onto the carpet. You stare down at him. He looks up at you. His pupils are bright orange.
“Hi,” you say, “Hey. I’m Roxy. I’m your friend.”
You get to the Batterwitch just as the first crackles of the Red Miles split the Earth, you and Jane both. You shoot her five times in the head; not that it’ll work. They’ve tried, before, so many times, and each time she just grows back. Ten years ago, there was the city of Caracas, and a guillotine. The bullets slow her, though, throw her to the ground.
Jane kneels above the Batterwitch, her fork gleaming like a sword, and in that moment it feels almost as if the years are leeching from the Condesce and into Jane, into her iris, cornea, pupils, her eyes older than the castle that was once Gl’bgolyb. The castle that was your grandmother, of a sort. Jane'd pretended to be pale for the Condesce for months, while your plans fell into place, months and months of knowing and unravelling her enemy's soul. She is graceful at the Batterwitch's side, almost maternal, hand on her brow like love in the movies, and this time you don't feel sick. You feel sorry.
“Shoosh,” says Jane, “Shush, shush, Meenah, shoosh. It’s time.”
Meenah Peixes closes her eyes, and the tine of Jane’s fork is sharp enough to slit Her Imperious Condescension’s throat.
You and Jane watch as the Batterwitch’s ship blips out of contact distance: going, going, gone. You are sitting closer to her than you really need to, your head close to hers, both bent over the same screen.
“Right,” says Jane, once the indicator’s gone, “Now for the real work.”
The field of battle is pitted with craters and covered in a distinct layer of soot. Jane sits on the dead spaceship, tired and bloody and yours, and you settle down next to her.
“Hey,” you say.
“Hey,” she replies, and leans into you.
Neither of you move for a long minute. Then you sigh and shudder and stand.
“Right,” you say, “Now for the real work,” and, her hand slipping into yours, you start to rebuild.