Children of the Uprising (6 page)

The buzz in the compound didn't die. It only grew, like a balloon inflating to the verge of exploding. Then Max and Christopher arrived. Addy was sitting behind her desk when the two of them walked in. She was working with mapping programs, evaluating new locations to pick up people running from the War. She had options—Palm Beach, Miami, Orlando, even Tampa. She had heard that the close proximity to so many cities was one of the reasons that Reggie had decided to put the compound outside of Port St. Lucie. Still, she was having trouble concentrating. She was trying to ignore the excited, secretive whispers around her, but she was failing miserably.

When Max walked into the building with the stranger, the whispers stopped. The talking stopped. Everything stopped. The room became completely still and silent. Everything but Max and the stranger was put on Pause. Everyone stared at the stranger. Addy, still confused, stared at Max. Max caught her glance for a moment and smiled. Then he wordlessly escorted the stranger through the building towards Reggie's office.

Addy had had enough. She needed to know what was happening. She got up from her desk and walked over to a woman who had named herself Angelina after some obscure Bob Dylan song. She was sweet, and though Addy wouldn't say they were friends, Addy liked her well enough. “What's going on?” Addy whispered to Angelina once Max and the stranger had walked past them. “Who is that?” she asked.

“That's the
Child
,” Angelina said. Not even her whisper could cover up the excitement in her voice.

“The child?” Addy asked, confused. “He doesn't look like a child to me,” she said, following the stranger with her eyes. He was young and not very tall, but she wouldn't have called him a child. He looked like a man. He looked strong and fierce and his eyes glowed.

“Christopher,”
Angelina said.
“The Child with the parents.”
Angelina's words were little more than nonsense, but Addy finally understood. She could barely believe it. He was here. Max hadn't been teasing her when he had told her that he was going on an important job. She wished she had known what was going on before they walked through the door. She would have watched Christopher more closely. She would have joined the others and stared at him unabashedly. Christopher. The Child with the parents. Addy would have killed ten men at that moment for the chance to talk to Max. Not only was Christopher real and alive but
he
was actually
there
. Addy had no idea what it all meant or what it all would mean. All she knew was that her life now felt larger and more important than it had felt only moments ago.

Maybe it was a good thing that Addy hadn't known that the stranger that Max brought into the compound was the Child. If Addy had watched Christopher closely when he walked through the door, she wouldn't have seen the person she had heard stories about since she herself was a child. Instead, she would have seen a confused and scared eighteen-year-old boy. She didn't get a close look, though, so she didn't see reality. She only saw the legend.

Christopher felt uncomfortable being marched through a room full of strangers. Hell, he would have been uncomfortable being marched through a room full of people he knew. He hated being looked at. He hated being watched. He'd spent his life trying to avoid being watched by people he couldn't even see. Now Max was marching him past people who were standing right in front of him, staring at him. He had to believe that another route existed. He was sure that the building had a back door. He and Max could have come at a different time. He wondered if Max was doing this on purpose, if Max was trying to prove some sort of point. But what point could it be and who was he trying to prove it to? Christopher didn't know and couldn't figure it out. Max barely seemed to notice the oglers. Or at least, he didn't seem to care about them. He made eye contact with only one person, the confused-looking woman in the corner with the light brown hair. Christopher had an urge to run from all of this, to cut back out the door they'd just walked through and never look back. He didn't run, though. In the few days he'd known Max, he'd begun to trust him. He figured he had to trust somebody.

Christopher had slept for almost the entire twenty-six-hour drive from Montreal to this strange building hidden in the Florida swamps. He'd tried to catch up on the sleep that he'd lost over the two days after he killed the men in the woods. To Christopher, those moments in the darkness in those woods already seemed like an eternity ago. His memory of that night was dim and impersonal, like the memory of a movie he'd seen when he was a kid. This two-day emotional roller-coaster ride had him all off-kilter. He wasn't ready when Max pulled the car up to the building, put it in park, and told Christopher that they were “here.” Christopher didn't even know what he wasn't ready for. And where the fuck was “here” anyway? Max sensed Christopher's unease. In a lot of ways, Christopher was the same as all the other people Max had found and brought to this building to be cleaned and sent back out into the world. Max knew that the ways that Christopher was the same weren't important. All that mattered was how Christopher was different. “It's okay, Christopher,” Max assured him. “You're safe here. The guy I'm going to introduce you to, he's someone you're going to want to meet.”

So Christopher followed Max into the compound and felt the eyes of all those people staring at him. Instead of meeting their gazes, Christopher put his head down and walked. No one made a sound. When they were a few steps into the hallway on the other side of the crowded room, Christopher asked Max in a whisper, “Is it always this quiet?”

Max looked at Christopher. Christopher still had no idea who he was or what he represented. “No,” Max answered.

Reggie could hear Christopher and Max coming down the hall. He could hear the wall of silence that surrounded them. Reggie was nervous. He could barely remember the last time that he'd been this nervous. He'd been scared plenty of times, but the last time he could remember being nervous was more than eighteen years ago when he was hiding in a tiny apartment in New York with a woman he didn't know while running from the War for the first time. That felt like a very long time ago.

Max led Christopher into Reggie's office. Like all the others, Reggie stared at the boy. He had a different reason for staring, though. Even though Reggie had never seen Christopher before, he would have recognized him instantly, anywhere. It was the shape of his eyes more than anything else. It was like looking at a shadow of a reflection of someone he knew a long time ago. Reggie tried to reconcile the image of the boy standing in front of him with everything else that he knew. He tried to really look at the person standing in front of him, forgetting about the boy's history, forgetting about the power that the boy unknowingly had at his fingertips and what someone could do with that power, remembering only a promise that he'd made a long time ago.

Reggie stood up from his desk and took a few steps toward Christopher, meeting Christopher halfway across the room. “Christopher,” Max said as Reggie approached them, “this is Reggie. Reggie, this is Christopher.” The two of them—one a tall thirty-six-year-old black man with graying hair and one a powerfully built but scared white boy three days past his eighteenth birthday—shook hands. “I believe Reggie knew your mother, Christopher,” Max said by way of introduction.

Christopher recognized Reggie from the description in Maria's journal, focusing on the startling green color of Reggie's eyes. “I read about you,” Christopher announced.

Reggie nodded. “Would you mind leaving us alone for a few minutes, Max?” Reggie said to the man who had already become the second best friend Christopher had in the world.

“Sure thing,” Max said. He backed out of the office, closing the door behind him.

“So what did you read?” Reggie said to Christopher once they were alone.

“Maria talked about you in her journal,” Christopher answered him.

“So you know that your mother saved my life. In fact, if it wasn't for her, neither of us would be here. So we have at least one thing in common.” Reggie laughed at his own joke, trying to be simultaneously casual and authoritative. He waited for some sort of response from Christopher, but none came. “Do you know what we do here?” Reggie finally asked Christopher after waiting out the silence.

Christopher nodded. “Max told me.”

“Before or after you got in the car to come here?”

“Before.”

“That's good.” Reggie walked over to a cabinet that was pushed up against the far wall. “I'm going to have a drink,” he said as he opened the cabinet door. Inside were a bottle of whiskey and a few glasses. “Do you want to have a drink?” Reggie lifted two glasses into the air.

Christopher shook his head. “I don't drink.”

“That's probably smart,” Reggie said, sounding more like a father than he wanted to. “Will you be offended if I still do?”

“No,” Christopher said. “I'm a pretty hard person to offend.”

Reggie poured out a half glass of whiskey and carried it back to his desk. He sat down in the chair behind the desk. Following Reggie's lead, Christopher took a seat in one of the other chairs. Reggie leaned back in his seat and took a long swig from his glass. “So you read your parents' journals. That's good. After reading them, do you think you understand how dangerous this War is? How big this War is?”

Christopher thought about his answer, rehearsing it in his head before saying anything. He knew that saying “yes” or “no” wasn't adequate. “I've spent every single day of my life afraid, without having any idea what I was afraid of. Everything I've done in my life was done out of fear. The other night, two men tried to kill me in the woods outside the house where I grew up. Instead, I killed them, but I know that I got lucky. Everything else that I know, I read in the journals of the people that you guys keep calling my mother and father, but I get the impression that they didn't know how big or how dangerous the War was either. Do you know how big and how dangerous the War is?”

Reggie picked up his whiskey and finished it in two massive gulps. “I only know that it's too big and too dangerous for anyone to make it alone.” Reggie lifted his eyes over the rim of his glass and looked at Christopher. “Especially you.”

“Max already gave me this speech.”

“Yeah, but he didn't know your mother. Your mother wanted to get you out of the War, and I think I can do that if that's what you want. I owe her that much.” Reggie stood up and walked back to the cabinet to refill his glass. It would be more than he'd had to drink at one sitting in years. Normally, he kept the whiskey and the glasses in his office only for ceremonial purposes. Today, he needed it. He poured another three fingers of whiskey into the glass. He wondered if he should tell Christopher that the War was getting bloodier, that more people were running away, that more people were getting killed, that some people were even talking about revolution. He wondered if he should tell Christopher about the plans that he already knew about. He wondered if he should tell Christopher what the people talking about revolution said about him. Reggie drank half of the second glass before stepping back toward the desk. He could feel the alcohol already rushing through his veins. Reggie could see Maria in Christopher's face. He looked at Christopher and remembered drinking with Christopher's mother and her friend Michael in the apartment in New York. Maria and Michael were famous now. Famous and dead. “Will you let us help you?”

“What if I don't want to run?” Christopher asked. Reggie held his breath during the pregnant pause that followed the question, waiting to see what Christopher would say next, trying to think of how he would respond if Christopher told him that instead of running he wanted to fight.
If he asks to fight
, Reggie thought,
do I still have to keep the promises that I made or can I tell this boy who he is? Can I tell him that he alone possesses the power to end this War?
But the dilemma that Reggie was almost wishing for never crystallized. “What if I just want to go home?” the boy said, and Reggie once again remembered that Christopher, with all the power he had, was still a boy, and he remembered why he'd made the promise in the first place.

“You can't. You run with us or you run alone.”

Christopher knew what that meant, but he didn't know what to say. He didn't know what choice he had, but he wasn't ready to forsake his parents in Maine or Evan without thinking about his options first. “I need to think about it,” Christopher finally answered.

Thinking is dangerous,
Reggie thought. “Okay,” he said. “You can stay with Max tonight. I'll let him know. But you don't have a lot of time. Staying in one place for any amount of time is dangerous. I can't guarantee that you'll be safe here.”

“I understand,” Christopher said.

Reggie stood up and walked toward the door. His legs were already wobbly from the liquor. He girded himself and walked out the door to find Max. Reggie closed the door behind him. Christopher watched the door close and then he was alone in the dimly lit, windowless room. He had an urge to get up and pour himself a drink from Reggie's whiskey bottle. He fought it. He knew that it wouldn't do him any good. He didn't know anything that would.

Alejandro scooped up a handful of sand from the beach and let it slowly sift through his fingers. The sand was as fine and white as baby powder. It was still cool from the night before. The sun would heat it up soon enough. Before long, the sand would be so hot that you would barely be able to walk on it.

Alejandro looked down the beach. It stretched out in front of him, curving around the blue water of the Pacific Ocean. The waves came crashing onto the shore, endlessly battering it into submission. Dozens of palm trees lined the back of the beach where the white sand turned quickly into jungle. From where he was kneeling Alejandro could see the entire mile-long beach. He was alone. The beach would get more crowded later, but not by much. The tourists hadn't discovered this beach yet. Alejandro knew that they would find it eventually, but probably not for another few years. Still, plans were already being drawn up to move the Intelligence Center. The fact was that they'd put the Intelligence Center where it was, in the jungles of Costa Rica, specifically because of how remote the place was. As the world encroached on them, the relocation plans would have to be taken more seriously. After fifteen years working at the Intelligence Center, Alejandro had heard all the talk. He also knew that if everything went according to plan, moving the Intelligence Center would become a moot point. They wouldn't have to move it. They could simply stand by while the jungle reclaimed it.

One way or another, it would all be over in less than seventy-two hours. All of what? Alejandro couldn't be sure. He tried to stay positive but couldn't imagine the world without the War. So instead, he focused on what he had to do. He knew that he couldn't control anything else or anyone else. He had to play his part and then have faith. Whether the War ended or not, this was going to be something.

Alejandro stood up. Some of the white sand still clung to his hands so he wiped it off on his jeans. He looked out over the water. A boat would be coming soon—a boat full of people and weapons—and Alejandro would be there to greet them, to pull them ashore and to tell them the plan. Before that, Alejandro said a silent prayer to himself and hoped that Christopher knew what he was doing.