The line was a confused jumble of voices. A woman said, “Throw it up there. Over that rafter.” Another voice said, “The trunk line is over there.” With all the noise, I couldn’t recognize either voice. Suddenly, the circuit went completely dead. Since we only had one party line, I couldn’t communicate with anyone—none of the longhouses, not even the sniper post nearly three hundred feet above me.
Ed was at my elbow. I hadn’t even noticed him approaching. “Full mobilization, manual protocol. Phone line’s dead.”
Ed ran for the door of the longhouse, unslinging the rifle from his back as he went. He yelled, “All platoons, arm and form up!” and Longhouse One instantly transformed from a relaxed, after-dinner scene to a barracks in the midst of a full mobilization. A few seconds after Ed cleared the front door, I heard three shots—the signal that we were under attack. Several more-distant three-shot bursts sounded moments later: other longhouses acknowledging the signal and passing it on.
I leaned close to Rebecca, yelling to be heard over the hubbub. “How’d you know the problem is in Five?”
“Mom was monitoring the line in Five. She started to report something, and then there was a smacking sound and a crash, and she quit responding. I asked the rest of the operators to stay off the line so we could listen in.” Some invisible cord tightened deep in my gut. I handed the phone back to Rebecca. “Line’s dead. Monitor it in case it comes back.” I grabbed my hat, glove, and gun and ran for the door.
Ed already had four Bikezillas formed up outside and waiting. “Leave half your force here to defend the long-house. The other half converge on Longhouse Three.”
“Yes, sir.” Eight soldiers jumped onto the load bed of each Bikezilla, so we had forty-eight packed onto the four bikes. The others would have to follow on foot.
Because of the pattern we’d built them in, Longhouse Three was the closest one to Five. So Five came in view right before we reached Three. Nothing seemed out of order—nobody was outside either longhouse. I was off the Bikezilla running for the door even before we stopped.
When I pulled open the door, I was in for another shock. Longhouse Three was nearly empty. About a dozen kids and two old women were there, washing and sorting part of our black bean harvest.
“Where is everyone?” I asked.
Neither of the adults answered me. One of the kids— a girl of maybe eight or so who had survived the massacre outside Warren—said, “They went to a party.”
“Shh,” the older woman beside her said.
“What kind of party?” I asked.
“It was a Halloween party!” the little girl said.
“Halloween was four days ago,” I said.
“But they took masks and a big rope so they wouldn’t get lost on the way to the party.”
“Quiet!” the old woman said.
“What are they doing!” I said to her, although I thought I knew.
“Nothing but what you should’ve already done,” the woman said. “It should be over by now. Speranta’s in no danger now.”
I bolted from the room.
Chapter 73
I leapt onto one of the empty seats of a Bikezilla. Ed and the two backseat peddlers jumped on while I was straining to get the bike moving. The eight guys who had ridden in the load bed started to come aboard, and I turned and yelled at them, “Off! Now!” We would be much faster without a load.
Still, it took almost two minutes to cover the distance between the longhouses. I was running for the door before the bike had even come to a stop.
Inside, there was pandemonium. The ex-sheriff of Warren, Sam Moyers, was hanging from a rope strung on the rafters in the center of the longhouse.
His face was fading from purple to a mottled gray. His body swung slightly, wavering with the last impetus of his extinguished life. Ex-Mayor Petty was on top of a table nearby, wheelchair and all. A noose encircled his neck, the rope running up to a rafter high above our heads. Francine was behind him on the table.
My mother lay beside the table, a bruise spreading across one side of her face, her hands wrapped around her gravid belly. Another survivor of the Warren massacre—I couldn’t recall his name at that moment—stood over her, training a pistol at her head. My mother wept and pled incoherently, so loudly that I could hear her over the general furor. The room was riotously full. All the Warrenites who were supposed to be in Longhouse Five were packed against the back wall. Men with semi-automatic rifles stood guard over them. Nearly the entire population of Longhouse Three, most of them survivors of the massacre outside of Warren, ringed the hanging tables in the center of the room.
Francine saw me, caught my eye. Then she raised her foot and shoved Mayor Petty’s wheelchair off the table.
I charged, throwing elbows and yelling, trying to clear the crowd out of the way. The rope snapped taut, and Petty’s wheelchair fell to the floor with a clatter. I couldn’t get there in time—the crowd was too thick.
I slammed my right hand down on someone’s shoulder, vaulting onto a nearby table. Petty’s eyes were bulging, and his face was the color of a spoiled tomato. He was dangling so low that if he’d had legs, he could have just stood up. People crowded around him in the tight quarters, but they were cheering and yelling, not helping. I took two steps on the table and leapt, catching the rope above Petty’s head in my right hand, sending us both swinging, crashing into the spectators.
Petty’s face was purple. I reached down with my hook, sawing at the rope above Petty’s head. Every evening without fail, I spent a few minutes honing the edge on my hook. So the rope parted easily, and Petty crashed to the floor. I held on, kicking out at nearby spectators’ heads, trying to clear some room.
Mom crawled over to Petty, ignoring the gun trained on her and the man holding it. She clawed at the noose, and for a moment I was afraid that she wouldn’t be able to loosen it, and Petty would die despite my efforts. Then she pulled it off his neck, and he gasped and coughed, flopping like an air-drowned fish.
“Silence!” I bellowed. The room fell quiet, and I dropped off the rope, bending my knees and landing neatly beside Mom and Petty.
“These are our guests! I promised they’d be safe here!” “They’re murderers!” someone yelled.
“It’s on me, Captain,” Francine said, looking defiantly down from her perch atop the table. “I organized it. I led it. For my dead fiance. For Brock.”
Ed and at least a dozen soldiers carrying rifles filed in. “Out!” I roared. “I’ve got this.” The last thing I needed was any kind of shootout in the packed longhouse. Hundreds could die. Ed saluted and ordered his soldiers out. He, however, stopped in the doorway, leaving the door wide open. The icy breeze was welcome in the heat of the packed longhouse.
“How could you do it, Francine?” I asked. “How could you betray me like this?”
“It has nothing to do with you, Captain. Move on out of here, and we’ll finish what we started.”
“You will not!” I snatched the noose off the floor and put it around my own neck. “When you harm someone under my protection, under our protection, it’s no different than harming me. Than harming Speranta itself. We’ve survived, prospered even, because we aren’t a pack of animals or flensers, because we have laws and respect them, because people can work and live in safety here.”
“We only want justice,” Francine said.
“Justice.” I practically spat the word. “Who appointed you judge? Who elected you mayor? Who asked you to join a jury? You didn’t give Sam justice! This was vengeance. I should exile you all.”
An alarmed mutter spread around the room. “No. It’s on me,” Francine said. “This was my idea. If you’ve got to exile anyone, it should be me.”
I glared at her for a moment. “Everyone out! Back to your own longhouse,” I said. “Ed, collect their weapons at the door. Put guards outside Three. Nobody leaves until we decide what to do.”
Everything was still for a moment. I took the noose off my neck, letting it dangle from my hook. When they finally moved, I breathed a sigh of relief.
“Not you,” I said as Francine started to join the procession. “You’re coming with me.” I took the pistol off her belt, checked the safety and chamber, and tucked it into the large pocket in my coveralls.
I clambered up on the next table over to check on Moyers. There was no sign of life. His face was nearly pure gray I stretched out, reaching for the rope. A quick slice with my hook brought his corpse crashing down on the floor beside the table.
When all the interlopers from Three except Francine had left, I got down off the table. Mom was still kneeling on the floor beside Petty He wore a necklace of bruises and rope burns, but he seemed to be recovering.
“Let’s go,” I said. “You’ll be safer in Longhouse One.” “Alex,” Mom whispered, “thank you.”
Mayor Petty was perhaps my least-favorite person in Speranta. I would have been more eager to save anyone else. But I didn’t see any point to telling her that. “Sure,” I said, “you ready to go?”
“Our people are here,” Petty said, his voice so raspy it was unrecognizable. “And we need to take care of Sam.” “At least come get your neck checked out.”
Petty shook his head.
“I’ll stay here,” Mom said. “I need to be with my husband.”
I suppressed a scowl. Hearing Mom refer to Petty as her husband made my gut churn. “I’ll ask the doctor to stop by, and I’ll have Darla send someone around to fix your phone line. I’ll also post a team of guards outside, make sure this sort of thing doesn’t happen again.”
Later that night I met with my team of advisers. We talked around the issue of what to do for hours. I desperately wished that the constitution committee had finished their work faster. We needed a process for dealing with problems like this, a judicial system of some kind.
In the end we decided to choose a jury randomly and dump the problem in their laps. I closed my eyes and flipped through Anna’s census book, pointing at names. Anyone from the massacre survivors or Warren was automatically disqualified—the massacre survivors might be biased toward Francine, and the Warrenites biased toward Petty—so we wound up with a jury of a dozen Stocktonites. I appointed Uncle Paul to serve as judge—he was one of the oldest people left alive in Speranta and more or less neutral.
The makeshift court convened the next morning. The trial was simple—Francine contested nothing, taking all the blame on herself. She argued that the lynch mob would never have formed except for her incitement and leadership. Her main worry seemed to be that we would exile all her compatriots. The arguments were finished before lunchtime.
The jury retired to a greenhouse to deliberate in private. Three hours later, they were back. The foreman handed a folded scrap of paper to Uncle Paul. He unfolded it and stared at it for a moment, his face grave. Then he read:
“On the count of first-degree murder, the jury finds Francine Lewis guilty. On the count of attempted first-degree murder, guilty.
“Are you ready to recommend a sentence?” Uncle Paul asked gravely.
“We are.” The foreman handed another folded scrap of paper to Uncle Paul.
He unfolded it and read: “Francine Lewis shall be hung by the neck until dead.”
No! She was a friend. Yes, what she had done was wrong, but who could blame her when faced with the man who had ordered the death of her fiance? Surely she deserved no worse than exile. Surely Uncle Paul would overrule the jury.
After a short pause, Uncle Paul said, “So ordered.” Speaking to Ed he added, “Take her into custody, please, Mr. Bauman. The sentence will be carried out at sunrise tomorrow.”
I stormed up to the table he was presiding from. “My office. Now.”
Uncle Paul followed me into the turbine tower.
When the hatch clanged shut behind us, I wheeled to face my uncle. “We are not going to kill Francine.”
“Yes, we are,” he said.
“She’s a—”
“Alex, she killed a man. Was planning to kill two.” “Who can blame her after what Petty and Moyers did?”
“A jury of her peers can and did blame her.” Uncle Paul leaned against the cold metal wall of the turbine tower.
“She deserves to be punished, no question. But killing her? No. She’s not the only culpable party. Mayor Petty deserves to be on trial too.”
“Maybe so. But that trial might not go the way you expect. I understand that he didn’t actually order a mas-sacre—he just told Sheriff Moyers to keep the refugees out of Warren. Somehow the shooting started. Maybe a finger slipped or one of the refugees had a gun. We’ll never know.”
I took a step toward him. “But the result—”
“And another thing: If we start prosecuting people for crimes they committed before they got to Speranta, we’ll all wind up in jail. Mayor Petty was following the rules of Warren. Should he be liable under the rules of Speranta?” He sort of had a point there. “But what gives us the right to take her life? Hasn’t there been enough killing?” “Alex, if you want to ban capital punishment, then argue to have that rule incorporated in our constitution. Hell, I might even join you. But the jury recommended the harshest punishment they could. And they’re right. If we lose control of this—if we allow the refugees and the Warrenites to go to war with each other, we’re going to lose a lot more people than just Sam and Francine.”
I willed my fists to unball. “What’s the saying? An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind?”
“You can change the rules after tomorrow morning. But if you try to change this ruling, the whole system becomes suspect. You’d be saying your judgment supersedes the jury’s and the judge’s. That’s a step down the road to dictatorship.”
“We can’t kill her,” I said, although I was starting to resign myself to the fact that we might have to. Uncle Paul was right: We needed to put a lid on the tensions between the refugees and the Warrenites, and if I overruled the sentence, it would undermine our fledgling justice system.
“I’ll do it,” Uncle Paul said gently. “I affirmed the recommended sentence. I should carry it out.”
I thought about the terrible burden of serving as a hangman and my history of taking all the worst jobs on myself. Part of the cohesiveness of Speranta, I was convinced, was due to the feeling that we were all in this together, that their leader was a part of the community, not above it. “No. If it has to be done, and you’ve convinced me it does, then I should be the one to do it.”