Icons (34 page)

I don’t stop when Ro, covered with ash, stands up to see if the Icon is still standing.

Or after that—

The silence.

BEGIN MESSAGE

CURRENT ICON PROJECT PRODUCTION IS UNSATISFACTORY.

GLOBAL OUTPUT AT 84.7%.

MINIMUM IS 90%.

LOS ANGELES: 78%

NORTHEAST: 95%

LONDON: 84%

PARIS: 75%

MOSCOW: 81%

SHANGHAI: 89%

TOKYO: 91%

END MESSAGE

I’m not sure how long I sit, stunned and in shock.

Brutus whimpers until he pulls me out of my daze, and only then do I look around.

A thick, gray-white ash is accumulating everywhere, blanketing the trees, the rocks, the ground. Black smoke clouds the air, and I can’t see more than a few feet ahead.

Ro stands silent, staring up the hill.

I think of the massive gash we have blown into the side of this mountain. I think of the people who have died here, because of the Lords, and of how many more may die now, because of what we have done.

If Lucas is right.

Was right.

What have you done, Doloria Maria? There will be reprisals. Consequences. The House of Lords will not let this go unpunished. If they find you. If they strike.

If.

It comes back again to those two small letters. If I’ve done what I think I’ve done. If the Lords do what Lucas thought they would do.

That’s when I turn around and begin climbing my way up the hill, back the way I came.

I can’t see anything until I get to the top of the hill. And then I see everything.

Or, rather, almost nothing.

No buildings. No Icon. No friends.

Lucas is not anywhere. I don’t see any sign of him or Tima.

“Lucas! Tima!” I yell, though I know it’s useless. Tears are drying on my cheeks, smeared dirt covering my face, and it takes me a moment to notice I don’t feel the pain or pressure of the Icon’s energy.

I close my eyes.

Through my grief, I feel an incredible wave of relief. Our plan worked.

The Icon has been shattered, severed from the earth, and the Lords have lost their power over us.

At least here, at least for now.

But now we know we can do it. Will do it.

One Icon at a time.

Lucas and Tima, their sacrifice means something.

It has to.

I put Brutus down and he runs ahead into the smoke. Where the Icon stood, just minutes ago, there is only a black crater. It looks like a giant has grabbed the Icon and ripped it from the ground—and then used it to smash everything in sight. Fires burn where there is any part of the building still standing. The dead trees surrounding it have toppled. Everything—the sky, the rubble, what’s left of the brown, scrubby brush, me—everything smells like smoke.

Ash floats through the air like snow. It falls along the scattered piles of concrete and pieces of the Icon, slowly covering the ground. It almost makes everything look peaceful.

Almost.

I walk closer to the center of the blast, where the Icon stood. Where the detonator was.

Where Lucas was.

All that remains of him and Tima is in the ashes floating around me.

Gone.

Like the Padre, like Ramona Jamona.

Like everything I love.

I feel my eyes start to burn.

“We can’t leave them.” I say it out loud, because I can feel Ro standing behind me. He must have followed me back up the hill.

I expect Ro to be cheering. Fire and force took down the Icon—just like he’s always wanted.

Instead, when I turn to him, he’s crying.

I walk past him to the deck, to where the crumbling stone balcony gives way to the burning, smoking hills and the silent city below. My foot strikes something, and I stop. A shard, the last remaining bit of the old Icon. Just like the one I’d found before.

I pick it up, feeling the weight in my hands.

I feel it burn and hum, beating with its own quiet life, still.

I feel the loss of Lucas. I feel Tima’s sacrifice. I feel all the pain I’ve locked up inside myself. My parents, my Padre, Ramona. A billion people no longer in the world. Parents, children, grandparents—our invisible history now.

A billion forgotten faces. A billion lost stories. A billion reasons to hate and kill.

The spark inside me is growing. The shard of the Icon is turning hot in my hands.

I feel sorrow, but I feel rage too. I feel fear, but I feel love, and it is stronger, perhaps strongest of all. I feel everything I have come to feel in everyone I have come to love.

I stretch my arms out to the sky and the city and the distant water. I don’t push them away. I want to feel, I want to let myself feel everything there is to feel. Everyone.

I push the last shard of the Icon up above me.

My whole life, I’ve been afraid it would overwhelm me. That the feelings are too big for me, the people too many, the pain too great. I spent every minute of every hour of every day protecting myself from having to feel all the life there is around me.

Because feelings are memories, and I don’t want to remember.

Because feelings are dangerous, and I don’t want to die.

Tonight is different. Now is different. What we have lost, we have lost together. I want to feel the loss. I want to feel the Hole. I want to feel the great goodness of life, of the things that remain when the Icon is gone.

I want to feel it all.

“Dol? Are you okay? What’s going on? We can’t stay here.”

I don’t speak. I can’t.

I feel like my hands are on fire. Between my arms, where I hold the shard, a great ball of energy forms. It leaves my body, spreading wide across the hill, across the city, across the horizon. Pulsing as brightly as the spark of life itself.

I am an Icon.

Not the House of Lords’ Icon, but your Icon.

Feel what I feel
, I think.

Feel what you are.

This is your sorrow as much as mine. Your love, your rage, your fear. These are our gifts, and our gift to you.

I hear the beating of the energy as it radiates outward, flapping in crescendos and waves like the wings of a bird. Like the collective heartbeat of the city.

I am spreading like a virus. Not me—the feeling. The idea. I smile to myself, thinking someone should tell Colonel Catallus. I am more than dangerous. I am contagious. He had no idea how contagious I actually am.

I understand now. I know what to do with my gift. It seemed like too much for one person, because it was.

This feeling doesn’t belong only to me.

I was meant to share it.

I take my gift and project it out. I am not the Weeper, not now. We all are. We are all Weepers and Ragers, Freaks and Lovers.

Come.

Come and be free.

I belong to you. This, too, is you.

One by one, I feel them. Curious. Slow.

They are ragged and gasping. They are weeping and afraid. They are worried and cautious. They have been
beaten like dogs and are afraid of being beaten again. They are sick. They are poor. They’ve lost their mother, their son, their brother. They huddle together on a bare mattress in a dark room behind a barred window. It hurts to breathe. It hurts to hope.

But they can feel it.

This is who we are. This is what we have become. This great pain is life. This joy and this fear and this rage.

This hope.

It belongs to us.

Chumash Rancheros Spaniards Californians Americans Grass The Lords The Hole. Us.

The pattern belongs to us.

We are here again, as were our mothers, as were their mothers before them. We have lived and died and lived again.

We were here first, and we will be here last.

Feel what you have lost
, I think.

Feel what you have lost and don’t lose it again.

Listen to your own voices.

You are not the No Face.

You are no Silent City.

Let your hearts beat.

Be brave. Be alive. Be free.

My hands drop and I collapse against the remnants of the rocky wall in front of me. The wave passes.

It has left me.

I can feel the tears running down my face. Even Ro is still crying, next to me. I know this as clearly as if I was looking at him.

“My God, Dol. What have you done?”

I can’t find the words. I reach for him and he pulls me to him with strong Ro arms. I am exhausted.

I weep in his lap, not as Doloria Maria de la Cruz, the Icon Child, but as Doloria Maria de la Cruz, the girl.

I am both.

I hear Brutus barking and whining, behind me. “Bru, are you stuck?” I walk toward the sound, climbing through rubble and smoke.

Ro follows.

I see Brutus digging in the dirt and debris. He looks up at me and keeps digging.

“Let’s get you out of here.” I reach down to pick him up. “Come on, Brutus.” When I bend down, my heart stops short, and I can’t breathe.

I see a hand, coming from a gap in the rubble. A wrist, with three dots.

They’re here.

I have spent my tears, and all I can feel is a sharp pain in my chest. “Ro,” I say quietly.

“I know. I see them, Dol. I’m sorry.”

Ro carefully lifts a splintered support beam that seems to be covering Lucas.

I recognize the tile flooring around us and know this was close to where the detonator must have been.

The gap beneath the beam is dark.

In the shadows, we see Tima curled around Lucas. They aren’t ash—but they aren’t moving, either. They look almost like they could be sleeping. Lifeless, but frozen.

Tears run down my cheeks as Brutus jumps out of my arms and races over to Tima, licking her face.

She lies there, motionless, but the dog doesn’t seem to notice. He won’t give up on her.

Then she starts, and pushes him away.

Before she can say a word, Ro and I are upon them. I am holding Tima’s hand when she opens her eyes.

Moments later, we are holding Lucas’s hands when he opens his.

I don’t let go of either one, but I read the shapes in their minds, like pages from a book.

Lucas, resetting the detonator.

Tima, throwing her arms around him.

A bright flash, then nothing.

I smile, but the tears won’t stop.

They don’t stop for any of us.

The lights come slowly, one at a time. Ro sees them before I do.

“Do you see that? What is it?” He points out past the tops of the burning trees and the smoking hill.

Tima looks where he points. “Torches, I think. Or flares.”

Lucas squints, next to me. “Who has a flare?”

I stare in wonder. “What’s happening?”

We watch the lights as they appear below us. First one, then another, until whole streams surge through the streets and veins of the Hole like a flood, like blood. They push their way up the twisty paths of Griff Park. They blanket Las Ramblas and the alleys and the streets.

Nothing stops them.

Nothing, and no one.

They have power. They are power. They feel it now.

They come by the tens, by the hundreds. Old men with dark eyes and leathery hands and black nails, spittle in their lips. Old women with brown skin and no chins, barely walking. Graying hair pulled back in a low, oily twist. Walking from their hips, stiffly, as if each thickankled step pains them. Which it probably does. The world is made up of these men and women, I think, whole armies of them. Women who have borne children and buried them. Men who have endured the march of time and still they march.

And then the young men and the young women, with covered heads and straw hats and muscled legs and glasses and no glasses. Some walk, some run. They are fat and
they are bony. Even smaller children race between them. All they have in common is the forward movement and the look in their eyes.

It is enough.

We watch as the light moves through the city, nothing paranormal, nothing supernatural. Only something natural, something distinctly human.

Only
—

The clouds flash with electricity. We look up at the sky. Tima’s face twists in concern. “Was that—lightning? But there isn’t a storm.”

The ground begins to rattle beneath our feet.

“Dol? You getting anything—” Ro shouts to me. I fall to one knee, pressing against the earth.

I feel nothing, nothing human.

Only energy in its purest form. Heat and power and connection. I pull my hand away, quickly, shaking off the burn. “I don’t know. Something’s wrong.”

Lucas stares up at the sky in horror.

“It’s them. They’re here.”

Then the clouds part, and one by one, the silver ships arrive. They hang low over the city, sliding across the horizon, blocking out the low-hanging moon.

This is what we feared most. I just didn’t expect it so quickly. The Lords have massed their ships like they did on The Day. They have come to put down this Rebellion. To make an example of us.

They have come to use their greatest weapon, our greatest fear.