“Enough,” she said. They quieted. “Quinn’s right.”
“Right about what?” Allen asked.
“Our approach.”
“That’s cryptic,” said Kai.
“We’re not effective because we’re not that frightening. Not really. We’re cute. An amusing sideshow in the news cycle. A nuisance at best.” She looked into the fire. “That’s why they don’t use our real name. They’re calling us the same thing as the last cute little group of revolutionaries who changed nothing.”
“Besides, what makes them think only men can pull this off?” Quinn joked. No one was in the mood.
“It’s been seventeen years,” she said, and those words lingered for a moment.
“Shane.” Murdock tossed the clip on the counter. “It’s late, and we’re all gone tomorrow. Maybe just say what it is you want to say, huh?”
Shane looked directly at Kai when she said, brusquely, determinedly, “Targets. In politics and business. So-called civilians, if you believe in such a thing.”
There was a moment of quiet as all their minds worked around the wording. Kai glared at her.
“Absolutely not.” He crossed his arms and shook his head. “We’re not even discussing that. Move on.”
“That’s not how this works. We hear each other out—”
“Move on.”
“You don’t have a veto, Kai.”
“Move. The fuck. On.”
“I want to hear what she has to say,” said Quinn.
“No,” cried Kai. He gripped a living room chair and slammed its legs against the hardwood. “That is not what we’re about. We’re not even talking through it. That’s not why we— That’s not— We’re not killers—”
KAI While driving across Illinois once as a teenager, on his way to visit his then girlfriend on winter break from college, his car hit a patch of ice and spun out at nearly seventy mph. There was that skidding, slippery sense of an absolute loss of control, of having one’s fate served up to chance in a way that felt so unfair, so terrifying. Now he searched for any way to wrestle the wheel back.
“I’m a killer.” Murdock took a seat on a living room chair, bringing a fat leg up under its partner so that he looked like an oversized version of the pudgy children in Lali’s daycare. “I was part of a savage military campaign that killed hundreds of thousands and turned the Middle East to rubble. I don’t shirk my complicity in that. Not anymore.” He gestured to the chair Kai had just rattled. “Now, before we go start calling each other ‘murderer’ I suggest we hear Shane out, as per the rules we established long ago and far away. Then we vote. Like always.”
QUINN Felt a thrill crawl up her legs and arms into the core of her chest. Finally, someone was going to say what she’d been thinking since roughly 2016 when the country went truly dark and all the evil men stepped right out into the spotlight. They needed to be stronger, fiercer, and crueler than the people they were up against, or they stood no chance. Kai tried to catch her eye because he surely thought he could persuade her back to his side, but she ignored him. Shane looked positively frightening standing there, this fattening, bedraggled mother suddenly picking up the sword.
After a moment Kai did as Murdock demanded, pulled the chair out and sat back down, furious but silent. Murdock’s eyes slid to Shane, offering her the floor again. She took it.
“What makes us think these elites are any different from all the other tyrants and kings who’ve come before? Because they wear suits? If anything, they’re worse. We are talking about people who are happily incinerating the conditions for life on Earth for nothing more than a few quarters of profit. We can hem and haw about violence, but—fuck, man—they are the most violent people history’s ever seen. And there’s just no time left.”
She huffed a disbelieving breath and put her hands on her hips like she couldn’t believe her daughter had wet herself again.
“There won’t be any chance to look back and second-guess because we can’t wait a few decades to build a worthwhile mass resistance. By then it’ll be too late. So how will they be stopped? This is the only tactical move left. The corporate state is faceless. The fossil-fuel elite is anonymous, but behind this holocaust there are human beings, and they have addresses. We can rip those masks right off. I see three benefits to this. First, it’s easy. Small bombs or a handgun. All you need are one or two operatives per target. We’ve built a clandestine network in an age when that’s supposedly impossible. The second advantage is that it demonstrates what’s actually at stake. This is life and death for all of us, and it’s time to choose sides. We offer amnesty to anyone who turns against the fossil system, who joins us in sabotage or resistance. Otherwise, every defender and apparatchik of the regime is fair game.” She paused. “Their families are fair game.”
PROPAGANDA OF THE DEED Part of Allen’s curriculum for his class about radical movements always included the anarchists of the 1880s and ’90s who attempted to instigate insurrection by assassinating various “class enemies.” How frustrating that history was so chockful of lessons that people so heedlessly ignored again and again. To lecture Shane on how those killings did far more to alienate the working classes than inspire them seemed, in this context, rather pointless: Where’s the thrill in learning about history when you can make history? He’d feared this moment for some time now, that one of them might suggest such a thing. He just never thought it would be Shane.
MURDOCK Hadn’t thought Shane had it in her. He’d pegged her as more the mother hen of the group or the glue guy, in sports terms. Not that he wasn’t still in love with the lady. Speaking of inconvenient truths. When he looked between the professor, Kai, and Quinn Worthington, though, he could see far down the road. His brain fireworked, the way it sometimes did, and he wondered if he was back in Iraq or in this cabin or off in some restaurant in the future, discussing their endgame and watching darkening clouds roll in across stewing whitecapped water.
“Jesus Christ,” whispered Kai, rubbing his face.
“You know what scares me?” She pointed upstairs, her voice straining. “That something awful is coming for my daughter. These people, the carbon profiteers and the politicians who do their bidding—they own every aspect of the system. They own the courts, the media, the political process at every level. That’s why this has all been futile so far.” She thumped her chest with a fist. “So they need to feel the fear that I feel for her. They need to feel that something is coming for them and theirs.”
Kai massaged his eye sockets. The dishwasher hummed. Outside, the gentle tinkling of wind chimes.
“You said three,” said Quinn. “Benefits, you said.”
“The third is simple.” Shane paused. “People enjoy killing. We’ll recruit easily.”
Kai shook his head, staring straight at the dark green carpet.
“Well,” said Murdock. “This just got real. Someone tell me why Shane ain’t right on this.”
“If it’s not self-evident, Murdock—” Kai began, and Allen cut him off with a palm.
“I’ve got three reasons for Shane’s three reasons.” He looked at her with a father’s practiced disappointment and held his hand in the OK sign. “First, we’ve got to understand that the five of us—no matter how many new cells we start—we’re never winning this in any military sense. It’s, how they say, about hearts and minds. Right now, we’re folk heroes to a certain set. We will lose popular support the minute we start killing people.” Shane saw that he was sweating, and because he had no eyebrows to catch the beads, he had to swipe at his brow as he searched for the words. “The media might be calling us terrorists, but people do not think of us like ISIS or neo-Nazis. We take a human life and that changes. Second”—he flashed a peace sign—“the way I see it, alls we’d be doing is killing cogs in a machine. Nothing more. It’s time and work and risk to take out an interchangeable functionary. They mint thousands of new ones in the Ivy League every year. Finally”—he held his index finger high—“we differ with Morris and her ilk about what ‘nonviolence’ means, yes, but nonviolent movements ultimately succeed by flipping those within the power structure. Our goal shouldn’t be to kill them but recruit them. Wake up their souls.”