“It’s a careful calibration,” said Allen, “when we ask people to take things into their own hands. It’s not like Murdock can set up a ‘My First Claymore’ workshop. We don’t want people blowing themselves up with homemade pipe bombs.”
Quinn’s head ticked toward him, a spindly blond predator hearing a twig snap in the brush. “I thought the point of all this was to inspire people to resistance. Why else am I spending time encrypting and distributing these communiqués?”
Shane resisted rolling her eyes. Quinn’s absurd communiqués calling people “to war” were, in her opinion, cringe-inducing. It made them sound like every dorm room revolutionary, and Quinn betrayed her hacktivist background with dopey leftist juvenile rhetoric that made Anonymous sound mature. Shane didn’t want to acquiesce to her distaste for the only other woman among the Principals but every time they met in person, she could not help but bristle at Quinn’s every little habit, motion, or notion.
BUMPER STICKERS, T-SHIRTS, SLOGANS, TATTOOS Quinn had flown from SFO to O’Hare before picking up the burner car to drive north. On the plane, she’d spent her time engaged in a dangerous hobby: looking at the world’s reaction. A sign outside a barrister’s office in Brisbane: WE DIDN’T DO IT BUT WE DUG IT: THE OHIO RIVER MASSACRE 2030. A banner draped across Times Square for nearly an hour before authorities cut it down: 6DEGREES IS COMING. A quote from one of her first communiqués now on social media posts, T-shirts, bumper stickers: DON’T TELL ME ABOUT YOUR CARBON FOOTPRINT UNLESS YOU’VE BLOWN UP A PIPELINE. Her words now sizzling in the ether. Inspiring others. It did give her a tingle in the belly, there was no denying it.
“I’m reading about this group in the Niger Delta, and they’ve got all our identical rhetoric with an anticolonial twist.” Allen burped uncomfortably, his face pinching as the gas rose through his throat and he tried to muffle it. “Excuse me. But it’s all the same: child soldiers drilling holes in people, torturing, executing. Same thing with the Maoist Naxalites in India’s Red Corridor assassinating coal workers. This is not something we want to emulate, obviously, or trigger. When we ask people to join a resistance, we have to give them the tools to do so in a way that threatens no human or animal life.”
DOMESTIC COPYCATS Crank calls and bomb threats to the New York Stock Exchange, Goldman Sachs, and Chevron corporate headquarters was about the best they’d inspired. A group of college kids in Texas bought materials to build an IED to target a refinery and had been caught before they even downloaded the instructions. When Kai first began seriously discussing this with Shane, he had known it would be vital that they appear as a hydra of cunning, the Great and Terrible Oz. The problem was, one could claim the mantle of 6Degrees, but without any of the discipline, one could measure the time it took to get caught in hours. He too was frustrated with the lack of movement from copycats. He’d imagined hordes rising up and sabotaging operations with everything from computer viruses to wrenches. He’d expected sledgehammers, axes, and screwdrivers as rebels dismantled infrastructure. Instead, there was the San Antonio 9, who didn’t even bother to clear their search histories.
Kai tapped his foot. Murdock looked irritated. Everyone stared at their plate for a moment, scrambled egg crumbs and syrup-soaked pancake bits going cold.
“It’s hard,” Kai finally said. “We had eleven years to prepare and put safeguards in place. There’s no way to disseminate that information or that know-how without giving the FBI a manual to finding us.”
“Which is why we need to build more cells,” Quinn said for the fifth time that morning.
“We also don’t know the effects of PRIRA,” Allen added. “When we ask people to take matters into their own hands, they’re facing down this amorphous, unconstitutional bill that no one really understands—”
“PRIRA’s a paper-fucking-tiger,” grumbled Murdock. “We’ve got nothing to fear from it.”
“Except drastically enhanced prison sentences,” said Kai.
Murdock pfffted at this. “If we’re at that stage, it’s all for shit anyway. Point is, they’re already using every maximally extraconstitutional method on deck. What’s gonna happen is they’re gonna wrangle up a bunch of idiot trust fund kids like the San Antone 9, Mommy and Daddy will get lawyers, and these measures will get struck down. Meanwhile, they ain’t got no fucking way of finding us. Doesn’t help ’em there.”
Kai and Allen were both shaking their heads. Kai said, “No one understands this bill yet.”
“Tinkerbell understands it,” Shane interrupted.
“Right,” said Quinn. “Our fairy-fucking-godmother.”
“Tinkerbell is actually just your standard-fare fairy, I think,” said Murdock. Shane felt her blood beating fast because of Quinn.
“Why are you so pissed about her?” Shane demanded.
WHO WAS HUNTING THEM Quinn knew the list included the government’s heavy hitters and multiple private intelligence contractors. All assembled into the Joint Terrorism Task Force, where Shane supposedly had her mole. Shane claimed that according to her woman, the JTTF was targeting mainstream environmental groups. The problem with shadowy national security apparatuses was that there was no accountability for lazy thinking. It was a multibillion-dollar Maginot Line. Nevertheless, Quinn was convinced that the gravest danger within their group was Shane’s sole access to this mole. Meanwhile, Quinn, doing all the most dangerous hacking, was treated like a combination of the kid sister and the naggy aunt. She watched the girl, Lali, fret about her pissed pants, and the rest of them melt for Shane’s single-mom act.
“I’m not.”
“Tinkerbell is keeping us safe at great risk.”
Quinn snorted. “So you say.”
And then they were all talking over one another again, so that no one noticed Lali, who came down the stairs and stood at the edge of the room, wringing her hands at all the furious adults. She finally said, “Mama.”
They all stopped. Lali stood looking guilty, the stain, mortifying and obvious, on the legs and inseam of her gray cotton pajama pants.
“I couldn’t—I couldn’t—I couldn’t—I had to take a nap,” she began to explain, her words coming out punctuated by the short breaths she excitedly took to avoid crying, “because I don’t have my fiddle, and if I don’t have my fiddle, it makes—it makes—it makes—”
“Okay, okay, dígame, mi amor. Let’s get you changed.” She took her daughter by the hand and led her back up the stairs.
“Me and Professor Ford are gonna walk on down to the lake. Get some fresh air.” Murdock rattled a pack of Camels at Shane. “Care to join?”
Lali was playing a board game with Kai; they’d started with Clue but when that proved a bit complicated had moved a step backward to checkers. Quinn was in her room taking a nap. Kai nodded to Shane: “Go ahead. I got Lals.”
“He’s got Laaaals!” Lali brayed in her robot voice. She moved a black checker back and forth indecisively between two squares.
Shane bundled into her hat, boots, and gloves, yet when they stepped outside, the chill snaked into every slit. She, Allen, and Murdock stomped down the porch and into the woods, toward the bloodied lip of the sunset.
Allen led them onto a narrow trail that cut between the trees. They walked single file, with Shane bringing up the rear, as Allen pointed out the Upper Cambrian sandstone and the forests of jack pine, oak, and aspen. The air smelled of snow.
PRIRA The Zombie Climate Bill, Allen’s wife called it. Signed under duress during record-setting D.C. floods, a veneer of investment for renewable energy, worker retraining, and environmental justice initiatives coupled with a veritable deluge of money for national security to chase terrorist threats, including themselves. When Vic Love wasn’t charming housewives by sitting for interviews on Good Morning America with his alarmingly handsome husband, he’d been cutting backdoor deals to include gobs of cash for military contractors, including his former company, Xuritas. Now he was the hero for pushing through what everyone was calling “the Green New Deal,” even though it didn’t even glance at fulfilling that daffy Keynesian castle in the sky. The bill was stuffed with money for beach sand replenishment on the coasts and loopholes that deputized private military contractors. It included money to replace lead pipes in cities but also allowed private security forces to patrol the streets of those cities. It was so expansive, so stuffed with provisions, even legal experts couldn’t agree what to make of it yet. Allen had a few bets on that subject, though.