But what if it wasn’t about sides, or perspectives, or radicals? What if it was just about truth?
How did you find truth when everyone was talking about sides?
Moses was grinning at her. Alix could practically see the self-satisfied smirk as he whispered in her ear. “Makes it kind of difficult, doesn’t it?”
Screw you, Moses, Alix thought.
“Would you quit talking to yourself?” Jonah said. “It’s driving me crazy.”
27
ADAM SAID, “THEY KILLED THE rats, Moses.”
“I know they killed the rats! I was there, too. I’m just saying that we shouldn’t give up just because we had one setback.”
“You call rat murder a setback?”
“Christ, Adam,” Kook said. “You sound like PETA.” She lit a joint and inhaled, blowing sweet smoke at the ceiling.
“Leather kills, goth girl.”
Kook regarded him with dilated pupils. “I’d eat those rats if it would make you shut up.”
“Cut it out,” Cynthia said. “Adam’s right. We didn’t see them coming in like that.” She looked seriously at Moses. “We didn’t plan on being gassed like that. We had a lot right, but we missed the tear gas.”
Moses looked from one face to the next and didn’t like what he was seeing. A lot of fear and uncertainty. Before, he’d always been able to coax and cajole them to believe, but now? Now it was serious.
“We all saw those dead rats,” Tank said. “Stakes are high is all they’re sayin’.”
“Stakes have always been high,” Moses pointed out, but he could tell he was losing them. “So, what? We quit now? We walk away?”
“Quit while we’re ahead,” Adam said.
“And just let everything they’ve done… what? Just go? Like it didn’t count or something?”
“It counted,” Cynthia soothed. “Of course it counted. But getting ourselves gassed to death doesn’t do anyone any good.”
“Maybe at least then someone would notice!” Moses shot back. “News loves bodies.”
He wished he hadn’t said it as soon as the words were out of his mouth. Wrong words. Wrong tone. Everything was wrong. He’d always been good with words. He could hack people with his words as easily as Kook hacked servers in Eastern Europe. But these were the wrong words, and he knew it as soon as he said them.
“Dude,” Kook exhaled smoke. “I so didn’t sign up for a suicide pact.”
“If you’re dead, there’s sure as hell no party,” Adam added.
“When the hell did either of you agree on anything?”
“Around the time you started talking crazy,” Kook said.
Tank didn’t say anything.
“Look,” Moses tried again. “I’m not saying we should suicide-pact or anything—”
“Big relief,” Adam interjected.
“—I’m just saying that we’re finally seeing what these guys are capable of. We finally see how they act. What they do, how they roll… and now we’re walking away? We knew they were bad, right from the start. Of course they were going to use all that tear gas—”
“If that had been Tank, he would have been dead, for sure,” Cynthia said. “His asthma would have wasted him.”
Tank looked at Moses mournfully.
“I know!” Moses retorted. “I get it. I’m not blind!”
“So why do we want to keep stirring these people up? They’re coming for us. We poked them too many times, and now they’re getting serious. The next time this happens, one of us ends up dead.”
“So you’re okay with what they did to your family now? Because I’m not okay with what they did to mine, I’ll tell you that. They’re still in business, and they’re still making money. I’m not stopping until I figure out how to make them pay.”
“Here comes the Don Quixote shit again,” Kook muttered.
“Shove it, Kook. They’re out there right now, making money while people die. They’re making money, and they’re laughing all the way to the bank because no one stops them.”
Cynthia sighed. “It’s just that no one cares, Moses.”
“They only don’t care because they don’t know.”
“Sure they do,” Cynthia said. “Everybody knows. People say it all the time. ‘Corporations control politicians.’ ‘Money controls politics.’ ‘Lobbyists control Congress.’ ‘Corporations write the laws.’ ‘The politicians are all corrupt.’ ‘The little guy doesn’t matter.’ ”
The others were nodding at her words.
“Everybody already knows, Moses. Everybody says those things. It’s probably the one thing you can get a bunch of Republicans and Democrats to agree on: The system’s rigged. We all know it. The truth is that people just don’t care. We’re just starting to think that it’s not worth dying for something that no one cares about anyway.”
Moses wanted to tear out his hair. “I thought we were trying to make people care!”
“Maybe it can’t be done!” Cynthia shot back. “Even the Doubt Factory doesn’t take money to make people care. They take money to do the opposite. Status quo is easy to sell. People like to be nice and consistent. They like to be told to just stay in their seats, and don’t worry about the theater burning. So what are we selling? Revolution?” Cynthia laughed sadly. “Who wants to buy that?”
“It happened in the Middle East.”
“We kind of got it better than they do,” Kook observed.
“So… what? We just sit here and let them go because they aren’t screwing over enough people. Just a few? Just us? Just our families?”
Cynthia stood up. “Be serious, Moses. It’s dangerous. We’ve got the FBI on us for sure now.”
Kook was nodding. “Definitely got Williams & Crowe’s attention. Those fuckers are playing for keeps now. I’ve got trackers all over them, and they’re like a bunch of stung hornets. They got clients who are shitting about us, wondering who’s next. You know it wasn’t an accident they used gas like that. They don’t want us just caught, they want us dead.”
“I don’t know about you all, but I’m playing for keeps, too.”
Tank finally spoke. Small voice, small kid looking up at him. “We all saw the rats, Moses. We all saw them. If we’d been inside, what would have happened? If we hadn’t set everything up perfect…”
“But we did!”
“No way, boss,” Kook interjected. “That was not perfect. We barely got on the news. Nobody gives a shit. And if we keep going like this, we’re going to be just like those rats. Just a pile of dead kids. We’ll be on the news, all right, but it will be one of those ‘What’s Wrong With Teens These Days’ stories, right up there with the chicks on Girls Gone Wild.”
“So we can make them—”
“Moses,” Cynthia interrupted. “What’s the first rule of your uncle’s cons?”
“Trust…”
“No. It’s to make sure that you’re the one who’s running the con. Not the one who’s being conned. Don’t trick yourself into thinking people are different than they are. We’ve already been doing this a long time. Nothing changes people. Nothing.”
She looked sad. “I’m sorry, Moses. Maybe it’s time to grow up. We can’t fix things that people don’t want fixed. You can’t con someone who doesn’t want to be conned, and you can’t wake up someone who doesn’t want to wake up.”
“I just don’t want to end up like the rats,” Tank said.
28
IT STARTED AS AN EXPERIMENT. A quick test to see what would come back. Even though it felt disloyal to her father, Alix couldn’t shake off the need to test if any of it was real.