He hears someone call out the name Meriwether and he can’t help but think, and not for the first time, this is Meriwether’s Dome, this is Meriwether’s city, this is Meriwether’s place, not mine. He stares up at the museum — Lewis’s museum — and thinks he sees a face in the window. As if his old friend has returned to mock him too. He tries to look closer but is quickly blinded by the sun cresting its roof. It spills its light like a splash of magma across the platform where he stands. The temperature spikes.
His discomfort hurries him along, reminds him of his task. With a shake of his wrist, he uncurls the whip. He will do his duty. By whipping the boy, he will whip them all. The sooner he is done with this, the sooner he can escape the heat, the sooner he can return to the Dome, the sooner he can bathe the dust and the blood from his skin, the sooner he can forget about this moment and focus on the next, the party.
The whip is heavy in his hand. Its tip looks like a frayed nerve ending. The boy twists his face to look at him, his face pinched with pain, and Thomas says, “Turn around please.”
A fly lands on the boy’s face, tasting the corner of his mouth, and he blows it off.
“I said turn around, boy.”
“My name’s Simon.”
“I don’t care what your name is. Turn around.”
But he won’t. The boy won’t break eye contact. Neither will the crowd. Nor will Slade. Everyone is watching. Everyone is waiting to see what he is capable of.
* * *
Ella watches until she can’t anymore. When the whip lashes Simon a first, a second, a third time, his body convulsing with every strike, she sinks below the window so she can’t see. But she can still hear, the whip cracking, the audience gasping, Simon crying, so she covers her ears and hears then only the blood roaring inside her.
She thought she knew what anger was. She thought she was angry when Lewis left her. She thought she was angry when Slade tore out her tooth. But that wasn’t anger. Anger is not yelling. True anger — the deadliest kind of anger — is the white-hot silence that defines her now.
She had someone — Simon was hers, and she his — and they took him away from her and now they will pay their debt in blood. Lewis charged her to maintain the museum. That made her an educator. She is going to exact her revenge through education.
The museum is empty but won’t be for long. A crowd gathers outside. They form a line at first, but the bodies soon mash together at the door. The day is heating up. Tower tops seem to glow. The blades of turbines spin with a cutting light. People fan their faces with hats. They suck on stones to water their mouths and they spit on their fingers and dampen their wrists, their necks, anything to cool them down.
It has been a long time since the museum rotated its displays. For the past few days, the sign draped above the entry advertised a new exhibit. Simon helped her hang it there. No one knows the subject. Maybe it’s war, the people say. Or maybe anatomy. Maybe electricity. They speculate, but really, they don’t care. They’re hungry for something new, a diversion they desperately need.
Simon remains chained to the nearby whipping post. On Slade’s orders. He will be a reminder to any who think to disobey. His body is crumpled, one cheek crushed against the post. The birds and the flies feast on his body, a seething black drapery. The crowd tries not to look, but the first sweet stirrings of rot offer a constant reminder. It makes them feel as angry as it does depressed, more eager than ever to escape into the museum that will deliver them to a more prosperous, hopeful time.
A man rattles the latch and finds it unlocked. Maybe it has been all along. He creaks open the door and calls out, “Hello?” but Ella is no longer there to hear him, already deep beneath the city and roaming its tunnels with a lantern held before her. His voice echoes back at him like a greeting and he shrugs and steps inside and the rest follow.
In the exhibit hall they find a banner that reads THE RISE AND FALL OF THOMAS LANCER. The room is otherwise empty except for two stages arranged at its center. The barrenness of the space — and the echo chamber of the rotunda — makes their whispers and their footsteps carry into a sound like an army on the march.
On the first stage, which previously housed the bones of a Tyrannosaurus, there is a twenty-gallon plastic barrel set upright. The top has been peeled off to reveal the cool, clear water inside. A ladle hangs beside it. Everyone who walks by dips the ladle and takes a sip and closes their eyes, as if taking communion.
Then they read the sign set on a stand. Harvested from the basement of the Dome. One of several thousand in storage. This afternoon Thomas Lancer is hosting a lavish party. There will be platters of food and bottles of liquor. And water tapped from barrels like this one. You were not invited.
On the other stage sits the Judas chair. Thick wooded, with leather straps. Armored with spikes that needle the back and seat and arms of it. Empty except for a note that reads in tidy script: Reserved for Thomas Lancer.
Everyone files through the room, some of them silent and awed, some of them already making the noise expected of a mob. There is a third display, though few see it. It hangs from the wall next to the exit. It is labeled The Uprising. Beneath today’s date reads a story, told in future tense, about the thousands of tired, disenchanted citizens who will take to the streets and who will storm the Dome and who will see Thomas Lancer seated in the throne he deserves before being hanged and dismembered and burned.
The people move through the museum at a slow walk, but they leave at a run.
Chapter 55
FOR A FEW LONG hours, Lewis and Colter are locked away in a windowless basement with mildew mucking the floor. There is no light except the gray sliver beneath the door at the top of the stairs. Lewis sits on the bottom step while Colter walks the perimeter of the room, running his hands along the walls, looking for some way out or something to aid them in escaping. “Aren’t you going to do anything?”
“What is there to do?” Lewis says. “We are here. We’re finally here. And now we need to understand why.”
“Why?” Colter says. “I didn’t come here for the why. I came for the where. I came for a place dripping with water and layered with black dirt. That’s why enough for me.”
“I came for those things too.”
“And I came for you. Don’t you forget that. I came for you and you better not let me down.”
“I won’t.” He glances at the door. He has traveled these many months and thousands of miles for it to open. Aran Burr waits somewhere on the other side. “Let’s hope he won’t either.”
Colter paces back and forth and slashes the air. After so many months of movement, he can’t sit still. “They put us in a cell.” There is a caged-animal quality to his voice, a desperate growl. “I’m not going to spend any more of my life in a cell.”
“Just wait. We’ve waited this long. What’s a few minutes more?” Lewis says, but Colter pushes past him, climbing the stairs, and at their top he swings his prosthetic against the steel door with a clang.
“I wouldn’t do that.” Lewis backs away from the staircase and says more loudly than before, “Please don’t do that. They put us here because we attacked their men.”
Colter continues to pound the door and punctuates every clang with a word: “I’m — not — going — to — spend — any—”
The door swings open and knocks Colter against the wall. He loses his footing and stumbles down the stairs and falls to the floor, where a moment later he is muscled in place by the five men who come hammering down the steps.