"Not sensible." He shakes his head but slows down.
"I mean it!" I insist. I swallow, my throat dry. "They're going to beat Phil and Esther"
"No, it's already gone past that point." There's an ugly quaver in his voice.
I dig my heels in and stop. Sam stops, too, of necessityit's that, or shove me over. He's breathing heavily. "We've got to do something."
"Like. What?" He's breathing deeply. "There're at least twenty of them. Cohort three and the idiots who've gotten some idea that they can parade their virtue by joining in. We don't stand a chance." He glances over his shoulder, seems to shudder, then suddenly pulls me closer and speeds up. "Don't stop, don't look round," he hisses. So of course I stop dead and turn around to see what they're doing behind us.
Oh shit, indeed. I feel wobbly, and Sam catches me under one arm as I see what's happening. There are no more screams, but that doesn't mean nothing's going on. The screaming is continuing, inside the privacy of my own skull. "They planned this," I hear myself say, as if from the far end of a very dark tunnel. "They prepared for it. It's not spontaneous."
"Yes." Sam nods, his face whey-pale. There's no other explanation, crazy as it seems. "Ritual human sacrifice seems to have been a major cultural bonding feature in pretech cultures," he mutters. "I wonder how long Fiore's been planning to introduce it?"
They've got two ropes over the branches of the poplars beside the Church, and two groups are busy heaving their twitching payloads up into the greenery. I blink. The ropes seem to curve slightly. It might be centripetal acceleration, but more likely it's because my eyes are watering.
"I don't care. If I had a gun, I'd shoot Jen right now, I really would." I suddenly realize that I'm not feeling faint from fear or dread, but from anger: "The bitch needs killing."
"Wouldn't work," he says, almost absently. "More violence just normalizes the killing, it doesn't put an end to it: They're having a party and all you could do is add to the fun..."
"Yeah, Ibut I'd feel better." Jen had better have bars on her windows and sleep with a baseball bat under her pillow tonight, or she's in trouble. And she royally deserves it, the mendacious bitch.
"Me too, I think."
"Can we do anything?"
"For them?" He shrugs. There's no more screaming, but a tone-deaf choir has struck up some kind of anthem. "No."
I shiver. "Let's go home. Right now."
"Okay," he says, and together we start walking again.
The singing follows us up the road. I'm terrified that if I look back, I'll break down: There's absolutely nothing I can do about it, but I feel a filthy sense of complicity with them. As for Fiore... he's got it coming. Sooner or later I'll get him. But I'm going to bite my tongue and not say a word about that for now, because I've a feeling he staged this little show to teach us a lesson about the construction of totalitarian power, and right this moment all the spies and snitches are going to be wide-awake, looking for signs of dissent.
A kilometer up the road and ten minutes away from the ghastly feeding frenzy, I tug at Sam's arm. "Let's slow down a little," I suggest. "Catch our breath. There's no need to run anymore."
"Catch our" Sam stares at me. "I thought you were mad at me."
"No, it's not you." I carry on walking, but more slowly.
His hand on my arm. "We didn't join in."
I nod, wordlessly.
"Three-quarters of the people there were as horrified as we were. But we couldn't stop it once it got going." He shakes his head.
I take a deep breath. "I'm pissed at myself for not making a stand while there was time. You can game a mob if you know what you're doing. But once people get moving in groups like that, it's really hard to contain them. Fiore didn't need to set that off. But he did, like pouring gasoline on a barbecue." Both of which are items I've only lately become acquainted with. "And after that sermon and the score transfer, he couldn't have stopped it even if he wanted to."
"You sound like you think it's a matter of choice." I glance sidelong at him: Sam's not stupid, but he doesn't normally talk in abstractions. He continues: "Do you really think you could have stopped it? It's implicit in this society, Reeve. They set us up to make it easy to make people kill for an abstraction. You saw Jen. Did you really think you could have stopped her, once she got going?"
"I should have stuck a knife in her ribs." I trudge on in silence for a few seconds. "I'd probably have failed. You're right, but that doesn't make me feel better."
We walk slowly along the road, baking beneath the noonday heat of an artificial late-spring sun in our Sunday outfits. The invertebrates creak in the long, yellowing grass, and the deciduous trees rustle their leaves overhead in the breeze. I smell sage and magnolia in the warm air. Ahead of us the road dives into a cutting that leads to another of the tunnels with built-in T-gates that conceal the true geometry of our inside-out world. Sam pulls out his pocket flashlight, swinging it from his wrist by a strap.
"I've seen mobs before," I tell him. If only I could forget. "They have a peculiar kind of momentum." I feel weak and shaky as I think about it, about the look on Phil's faceI hardly knew himand the hunger stalking the shadow of the crowd. Jen's malicious delight. "Once it gets past a certain point, all you can do is run away fast and make sure you have nothing to do with what happens next. If everybody did that, there wouldn't be any mobs."
"I guess." Sam sounds subdued as we walk into the penumbra of the tunnel. He switches his flashlight on. The cone of light bobs around crazily ahead of us as the road swings to the left.
"Even a sword-fighting fool of a hero can't divert a mob like that on their own once it gets going," I tell him, as much for my own benefit as anything else. "Not without battle armor and some heavy weaponry, because they're going to keep coming and coming. The ones behind can't see what's happening up front, and the fool who stands in the way without backup is going to end up a dead fool really fast, even if he kills a whole load of them. And anyway, your sword-fighting fool, he's no smarter than any of them in the mob. The time to stop the mob is before it gets started. To stand up in front of it first, and tell it no."
We're walking into the dark curve of the tunnel, out of sight of either entrance. Sam sighs.
"I knew someone who'd do that," he says wistfully. "The man I fell in love with. He wasn't a fool, but he'd know how to handle a situation like that."
The man ? Sam doesn't seem like the type to meuntil I remember that I'm seeing him through gender-trapped eyes, the same way he's looking at me, and that I've got no way of knowing who or what Sam was before he volunteered for the experiment. "Nobody could do that," I tell him gently.
"Maybe so. But I think I'd trust Robin's judgment before I'd trust"
I stop as suddenly as if I have just walked into a wall. The hairs on the back of my neck are all standing on end, and my stomach is knotting up again as if I'm going to be sick.
"What's wrong?" asks Sam.
"The person on the outside you've been pining after," I say carefully. "He's called Robin. Is that right?"