“What about them?”
“Their sonar. How they’ll dive at an acorn because they think it’s a bug. She goes into our backyard and throws stuff at the sky to get the bats to dive at it. She thinks it’s so funny.”
Allen laughed loudly at this. It was a kind and beautiful sound. She’d first met him in the Gulf during the BP crisis as he was trying to transition from “the piss-pot of academia to doing something right for the world.” She learned he’d spent his career writing about the School of the Americas, where the US military had spent decades training death squads. He’d traveled South America extensively, without speaking nearly enough Spanish. It wasn’t that he reminded her of her dad, but he spoke like a father. His voice was calming. When she and Kai decided to take the first step in this plan, she’d gone to see Professor Allen Ford. They’d met in a Cracker Barrel near Clemson, and she pulled from her battered pack a dossier: law enforcement protocols, data collection practices, surveillance techniques, over a hundred pages on the civilian explosive tracking system and the “date/plant/shift code,” and then targets—all that gas and drilling infrastructure lying out there, exposed. He hadn’t laughed in her face. Instead, he had questions.
Twenty years later, she adored him because he looked at her with love and she felt so little of that in her life these days. She almost didn’t mind what he asked next.
“Kai’s not her father, is he?”
She leaned forward, into the intensity of the heat.
“That’s not your business, Allen.”
“No,” he admitted. “It’s not. But since you’ve had her—this can’t be easy on you. I guess what I’m saying is if you ever want out, Shane, I’ll be there for you. I’ll talk to the others. I’ll be on your side. We can make it so you can just fade away. I’ll get you money. You can raise her somewhere safe.”
She let out a humorless snort. “As if there is such a place.” They were quiet for a while. “You know what I think about sometimes? I wonder about her future, but not like, what will happen as the planet buckles. What I think about is, ‘Can we afford college?’ ”
“That seems reasonable, hon.”
“No it’s not,” she said matter-of-factly. “It’s really not. But I can’t stand the thought of her life being like mine. Where she’s constantly worried about her bank account. Where she’s terrified of losing a tip and will put up with anything some pig customer says because if she doesn’t get his five bucks, it’s a minor catastrophe. I don’t want her to ever live a life like the one I’ve had.”
As Allen opened his mouth to reply, Quinn’s boots creaked across the warped-wood porch.
“Should we finish this?” she said.
Shane and Allen rose to go inside, leaving the fire to smolder down to its coals.
It was closing in on midnight. They all had to be back on the road the next day. Shane sat on the living room’s large plush couch, while Quinn sat pretzel-style at the other end, her wool-socked feet tucked under her. Allen hunched forward in the armchair breathing noisily through a deviated septum. Murdock stood at the kitchen counter, playing with a plastic clip for a potato chip bag. Kai sat sideways at the head of the dining table, his back straight, hands clenched as if at the helm of a ship fighting rough waves.
“A corporate headquarters is easier in some ways, harder in others,” Murdock explained. “I could probably get it done with a hillbilly mix of some kind. Off the top of my head, a brew of gas, diesel, and glycerin tar soap—splash some of that around—but it’s more time intensive.”
“I don’t like the idea of office buildings,” said Kai. “So much harder to control.”
“We still make a call to evacuate,” Quinn argued. “Principally, it’s the same procedure.”
They agreed they needed escalation, but they’d been going around for hours about what that escalation should look like. All kinds of ideas had been floated.
“Industry is beefing up security—satellites tracking pipelines, drones watching power plants, engineers monitoring grids.” Quinn shook her head. She’d been chewing her nails to splinters all night. Greasy strands of hair hung in her face, the same candlelit color as the homey lamps of the cabin. “An office building might actually be a softer target now.”
“But much harder to control the variables of the attack,” Kai repeated.
“It’s also not infrastructure. An office building…” Allen made a troubled sound in the back of his throat. “It’s personal. It’s leaning toward humans instead of machinery.”
Kai stood. They’d shut off the lights in the rest of the cabin. It created the illusion of isolation, an island of light. The wood crackled and hissed in the fireplace. Kai fed it another log but didn’t sit back down.
“Okay,” said Kai. “We have a few ideas on the table: Why not all of them?”
Quinn’s eyes drifted up from her ragged nails. “All of them?”
“Yes. All of them. The refinery, the tar sands facility, the dragline manufacturer. We have two cells, dozens of operatives ready and willing, and we have this new delivery method”—he nodded at Murdock, clacking away with the potato chip clip—“that Kel is itching to try out. Our original goal was to create disastrous uncertainty in the market for dirty energy, make it too risky and expensive for investors, but it’s all been surprisingly resilient. So let’s hit the full fucking menu.”
Shane felt an agitation bubbling in her core. The urge to interrupt a friend can itch worse than a hive.
“We keep it geographically dispersed. All in a twenty-four-hour period. We show them we’re everywhere.”
“What about the office building?” asked Quinn.
“We shouldn’t hit office buildings,” said Allen.
“Why is that so important to you?” she demanded.
“Our only goal is to inflict damage on the infrastructure,” he reminded her.
“A corporate headquarters is infrastructure, Allen. It’s where they make the decisions on how to best turn the world to ash for shareholder value.”
“We don’t want to inspire the wrong thing. It’s not a far step from office buildings to playgrounds.”
“They have significant equipment in their Calgary offices,” said Kai. “I’m not saying it’s a must.”
They all jumped as a hard gust slammed the living room windows. It sounded like someone smacking the glass with a palm, and only the moan of the wind that followed reassured them they were still alone. Nevertheless, they sat in silence for a moment, and Shane knew their four hearts were pounding as hard as hers.
“Maybe.” Quinn hugged her knees to her chest. “What I think—and what I’ve always thought—is we need to escalate toward some version of total war. Whatever that means for us. Destroy the economic infrastructure, and if that means bridges, railroads, the electric grid, server storage facilities, so be it.”
Shane watched Allen squirm at this. “We’ll garner no support for taking away people’s comforts.”
“I’m sorry, Quinn,” Kai added. “But you have a bad habit of entertaining high-cost fantasies. We’re not toppling capitalism in one fell swoop. We’re propogandists eking out greenhouse gas reductions where we can and raising insurance, security, and operational costs. That’s always been the plan.”
“Have you seen how little this is working?” Quinn stabbed two fingers at the coffee table. The beer bottles and chip crumbs rattled. “We first came here in 2014, and we didn’t execute our first operation until nearly a decade later. Now almost another decade has gone by. Seventeen years, and the situation has gone from catastrophic to apocalyptic. We are out of time, and you two show no fucking urgency.”
And then the two of them were arguing, as juvenile and simple-minded as a debate in a Slapdish worlde. Quinn told Kai to go write press releases for Aamanzaihou. Kai told Quinn to go tack up a Che Guevara poster in her dorm room. And on they went. Murdock clacked his potato chip clip and pouted his lower lip like he was watching a good show. Allen rubbed his bald head. Finally, Shane stood and walked to the fire, interrupting their argument with her tired body.