“Cormac,” she begins, exasperated, “even if I had the power to do anything about your situation, I wouldn’t, not now. There are reasons behind everything we do. Real, honest security risks we’re trying to avoid. The regulations are there to protect you as much as they are to protect us.”
“Closing the schools? Limiting medical access? Shutting down the HV broadcasts?”
“We didn’t do that,” replies Jubilee quickly. “Avon’s atmosphere interferes with the signals.”
“But you’re the ones who changed all the access codes to TerraDyn’s retransmission satellites. We can’t send or receive a signal at all now—we’re totally cut off. If you could just give us that—not even newscasts. But movies, documentaries, any window beyond this life to show our children.”
Her hand tightens around the grip of her gun. “Do you know how they organized on Verona ten years ago, Cormac? It was clever. They used a kids’ HV show, broadcast across the galaxy. Coded messages out of the mouths of animated mythological creatures.”
“I don’t even know where Verona is,” I retort. “And we’re paying for it here, a decade later, light-years away. We have no sun, no stars, no food or medicine, no power or entertainment for relief, and no one will tell us if it’s ever getting any better. They’ve swatted a fly with a sledgehammer.”
“A fly?” She’s fierce, every line of her tense, holding herself in check with an effort. “That’s what you call the largest rebellion in the last century? They chose the slums of Verona, where people were most crowded. Where there’d be maximum damage. They smuggled guns, dirty bombs, you name it. When the uprising came, whole cities from November through Sierra were up in flames before anybody knew what had happened. Those the rebels didn’t kill, the looters and raiders did. Thousands. Tens of thousands of people—they can’t sing or tell stories at all now.”
I feel like something’s pressing down on my chest and preventing me from taking a proper breath. I can’t imagine a single city that size, let alone half a dozen of them on fire.
She waits for me to respond, and when I don’t, she gives a quick, tight shake of her head. “There are reasons behind every rule, whether you see them or not. Perhaps some of them are too harsh—that’s not my call to make. But if you could spare one child the loss of her parents by swearing an oath, by upholding the law no matter what it took…” She swallows. “Wouldn’t you?”
To hear a trodaire speaking of justice, of protecting people—it makes my head ache. McBride would say she was lying. Sean would say she was blind. Watching her in the meager light from the window, I don’t know what I would say, except that there’s a pain in her words as deep as ours. She’s silent, and as I watch, her features are returning to that neutral composure everyone else is so used to seeing. But an awful certainty is starting to solidify in my thoughts. “Where are you from, Jubilee? Your homeworld?”
She takes a while to answer, and when she does, her voice is oddly detached. “I’m from Verona. I grew up in a city called November.”
For a long while, the only sounds are the background noises of the base: shuttles taking off and landing in the distance, people moving to and fro, the faint strains of music coming from one of the barracks.
I’m beginning to understand this soldier a little, the fierceness there, the rage underneath that stony exterior. My sister would have loved her.
Well, no, I correct myself. Orla would’ve wanted her strung up as an example to the other trodairí.
But if Jubilee had been born one of us, Orla would’ve been her best friend.
I glance once more at the photograph on her nightstand. I don’t even have a picture of my sister—I have only the blurry-edged memory of her laugh, her dark braid over her shoulder. Little things, like the way she tied her boots; and big, horrible things, like the look on her face when she said good-bye to me the day before her execution. It’s not enough. It won’t ever be enough.
Jubilee’s watching me as the silence stretches out between us, until finally she breaks it. “I didn’t tell them anything about you.” She sounds halfway queasy about it, irritated and confused, but I believe her.
I’m trying to cling to the anger and desperation that brought me here, but it’s growing harder to believe that Jubilee’s the enemy, even one held at bay by a grudging truce. “Why didn’t you?”
Her eyes dart toward mine, a brief glimmer of the lamp outside reflected there before she looks away sharply. “I don’t know.” Her fingers twist around the sheets, betraying the conflict behind her calm voice. “Because if your people listened to you, there might not be insurgents laying booby traps on our patrol routes. Because if you were arrested, maybe more of them would start.”
I want to put my hand over hers and ease that white-knuckled grip. My eloquence fails me; there aren’t words for the impossible strangeness of this, sitting on a soldier’s bed in the middle of the night, wishing I could touch her. But I just look at her hand, fixing my eyes there, not trusting myself to look at her face.
Strangely enough, my voice is steady when I speak. “That’s what scares me about dying. Knowing what will happen here afterward.” Her hand tightens, and I breathe out. The words come from somewhere deep and hidden—not even Sean has heard them before. “And I think I will die, sooner than I want to.”