Zhukov's Dogs (34 page)

“I’m sorry about all this,” he mumbled.

“This is why we should have done it together.”

“I know, and the only person I told was Anya.” He sighed. “The next thing I know,
everyone
knows.”

Val sounded almost as bad as I felt, both of us watching Marco disappear from sight. I needed to keep that yellow-eyed bastard from talking. I needed to make it look like an accident. I needed to keep everything from falling apart.

Something about scheming made me take a step closer to Val. My subconscious must have been trying to make my situation worse, because suddenly I was putting an arm over his shoulder. Still staring at the doorway, thinking about how to silence Marco, I heard Gemma giggle.

“I knew it,” she said.

I looked at her, confused at first as to what she was talking about. Then I felt the rise and fall of Val’s shoulders under my arm as he sighed. I wondered if I should have been embarrassed or something. In my head, coming out of the closet sounded like it would’ve be way scarier than this. It helped that nobody was shouting obscenities or trying to knock my skull in, now that Jayne was gone.

“Good for you two, but can we talk about the real elephant in the room?” Fritzi asked. It was as close to an “I’m happy for you guys” as one could expect from her. “The city’s going to be crushed?”

Anya and Benji showed up in time to overhear the question. Val tensed. I squeezed his shoulder and gave a short nod to answer Fritzi. “It’s true. The Oxford pillars are going to blow, and everything’s coming down.”

“I dislike Jayne as much as everyone else, Nik,” Tibbs began. “But he was right. You’re going to have to give us more than that.”

I couldn’t tell them the truth. Not the whole truth at least. The real trick was going to be getting it all out without setting off any sort of alarms on Val’s internal lie detector. I bent truths together. “The Bloc has eyes in some of the government’s most secret organizations. A friend of mine, undercover in the S.O.R., called yesterday morning and told me what The Council is planning.”

Val’s sigh assured me I wasn’t fooling him, but the others seemed to buy into it. There were still a few skeptical faces in the room. Benji was the first to voice his concerns, which surprised me, considering how passive he usually was. “And we’re supposed to take your word on that?”

“Think about it,” I began. “The article in the paper about Oxford’s re-zoning was published the same day as all the Grey Men showed up. You remember the scene they caused while we were trying to get rations out. They wanted to scare people into leaving, probably so they could start setting up for the explosion without anyone getting in their way.”

“That makes sense,” Gemma said.

Fritzi hummed as she mulled it over in her head. “If you found out about this yesterday, then why didn’t you tell us until now?”

“Because I didn’t know how to tell you.”

It wasn’t the real reason, but it was the truth nonetheless. Fritzi didn’t press me with any more questions after that, and for a long minute, everyone was silent. The tension in the room made me uneasy. I dragged a thumb along Val’s shoulder, grazing over his neckline and against his cold skin. He inhaled, eliciting a delicate shiver only I could feel. It shouldn’t have been enough to turn every thought in my head perverse, but God it was.

Abruptly Val cleared his throat, simultaneously getting everyone’s attention and reminding me this was neither the time nor place for what I was thinking. “So, here’s the real question: What are we going to do?”

Anya responded first with a flourish of her hands. “Well, there’s no way we’re going to let it happen!”

“Right,” Benji agreed. “We’ll protect our home and—”

I cut Benji short. “And get killed in the process.”

“Nik!” Anya gasped. She wasn’t alone in her outrage; Fritzi and Gemma both threw in their two cents on how heartless I was being. It wasn’t that I was heartless by choice. As Val pointed out last night, I was missing those unnecessary emotions which made him and the others care so much.

“How can you say that?” Gemma smacked my arm with her small hand.

Fritzi stepped closer and pointed a finger at me, saying, “Of course we’re going to stop this! Nobody can just bury an entire city!”

I wasn’t the only one to laugh. Val beat me to it and firmly explained what they all seemed ignorant of. “You guys don’t get it. This is
The Council
we’re talking about. They can do whatever they want, and they’re a hundred times more evil than anything you’ve heard… Now, I’m all for fighting back, but let’s be sensible about this.”

“Is Granne in on it?” Tibbs asked.

I shook my head and told him, “Nobody knows. If we play this smart, we should start by evacuating the city.”

“Evacuate the city? The
entire
city?” Fritzi scoffed, eyebrows disappearing under her bangs.

“I know it sounds like a lot of work, but it’s possible,” I said. “Look, more and more Grey Men are going show up over the next few days. We need to get everyone out and head south as fast as we can.”

Fritzi switched from baffled to bitter. She stepped closer and looked me up and down like she didn’t even know what to make of me anymore. “You are seriously suggesting we run away? Give up on the city we all grew up in?” she asked, jutting her chin out.

“It’s better than fighting back,” I insisted.

Fritzi dropped her voice. “It’s cowardly.”

“Yes, but if that’s what it takes to save thousands of lives, then let’s be cowards.”

Fritzi went silent, but held my stare. I didn’t look away. Next to Val, Fritzi was the biggest force in the house to be reckoned with. We were all in this together, though, and she needed to know that just because I came across as heartless, it didn’t mean I didn’t care.

The crease of her brow softened. She nodded, eyes still on mine as she said, “All right… If that’s what it takes.” Resentful as they were, Fritzi’s words carried with them a strange air of respect, which almost coaxed a smile out of me.

“I’m not leaving,” Gemma spoke up. “This is my home, and I’m going to keep it safe! Even if it means I have to take on The Council myself, I am not leaving!”

Tibbs stood next to her, clapping her on the shoulder as he said, “You won’t have to take ‘em on by yourself, Gemma. I’m staying, too. Seattle might not be paradise or anything, but it’s my city, and nobody’s gonna destroy it on my watch.”

“Well, what about those who don’t want to fight? What if we gave people an option? Like, if we told them what was going on, and they could either help us fight or we could help them get out of the city,” Anya suggested.

Everyone jumped in with their own ideas after that, shouting and screaming over each other. The noise was just reaching the point of unbearable when Val stepped out of my grip and whistled to regain control. “All right, let’s settle this now, so we can start making a plan. Show of hands. Who’s for total evacuation and relocation?”

I raised my hand. Finn’s hand crept up. Benji raised his a fraction, too, then played it off as reaching to scratch his chin.

“Who’s for partial evacuation and partial enlistment?”

Every other hand shot up, Val’s included. They wouldn’t leave quietly. I’d hardly expected them to, but I’d held onto a bit of delusional hope until the end. Val looked over at me wearing a small “I told you so” smirk. He might have been pleased with his friends siding with him, but I couldn’t have felt worse about it.

Pioneer Square—Seattle, WA
Friday, November 20th, 2076—6:13 p.m.

eated along the ledge of the statue of former Senator Murray, I studied the small crowd that gathered to listen to Val announce the fall. It was our seventh rally of the day, and I was amazed by the fact that nobody had questioned the words out of his mouth; they trusted him completely. Val and his friends had a better reputation with the city than I thought.

Suddenly, gunfire rang through the square. I grabbed Val’s wrist and yanked him off the ledge. We fled through the screaming crowd, hand-in-hand, keeping our heads low while Grey Men struggled to maintain order in the only way they knew how. This was the seventh time we’d started a rally today, and the fourth time they’d shown up to snub it out. Even though we were doing everything we could to keep things low-key, somehow they still managed to find us.

With a dozen pairs of revolutionaries throughout the underground, coordinating evacuations and spreading the word that the city was coming down, it was safe to assume the Grey Men had their hands full. It was also safe to assume that by the end of the day, everyone in city would know the truth.

“Here! In here!” Val pulled me after him into an alley off the road. It was a tight fit, nothing a Grey Man would be able to squeeze into, and we had to continue single file.

“Let’s go back to the house,” I suggested. “Word’s out now, so let’s lie low for a while.”

“What? No, let’s keep going.”

I sighed. Val misinterpreted the noise as one of exhaustion rather than frustration. He stopped running and turned around. Between shouting at rallies and running for our lives, he was short of breath.

“Are you tired?” he asked. “Is it your wound?”

My body did have a dull ache to it, but it was nothing I couldn’t handle. “No, I just know Grey Men. They’re dumb, but they’re going to start recognizing us if we keep going nonstop like this.”

Val didn’t want to stop. He wanted to rap on every door in Seattle and warn the people who lived there. The problem was, if we wanted to live long enough to make a real difference in a city swarming with Grey Men, we had to be careful.

“Yeah. Yeah, you’re right.” He coughed and slumped against the wall to catch his breath. I could hear a faint rasping in his throat every time he inhaled and suspected he was losing his voice.

Val brought an unlit cigarette to his lips when a particularly violent coughing fit took hold. I patted him on the back until he calmed. Undeterred, Val put the cigarette between his lips and pulled his lighter from his pocket. I snatched the lighter out of his hands. Val tried to grab it from me, but I held it out of his reach.

“Give it back,” Val said, the cigarette falling to the ground as he struggled.

“You almost coughed out your lungs, and now you want to light up? I don’t think so.”

“Nik, come on! Give it!”

“Nope.”

Val jumped at me and latched his arms around my neck. He toppled me into the brick wall, still holding tight as his lips pressed to mine. I kept the lighter behind my back with one hand and wrapped the other around his waist. In one quick movement, I turned him around and pinned him against the wall.

Val laughed against my lips. His hands grabbed at the back of my shirt as they tried to snag the lighter just out of his reach. He leaned away a little, breaking the kiss and wearing a look which warned me he was up to no good.

“How about a deal?”

“A deal?” I asked.

“You tell me what you do, what you
really
do, and I promise to quit smoking.”

From the way he grinned, I knew he expected me to hand over the lighter. I was about to, but at the last second, I reconsidered. Val was going to find out about my involvement with the Y.I.D. eventually. It was better if he heard it from me than from someone else, so maybe it would be good to get it out of the way now.