“She’s a spy,” said Vallicose bluntly. “A Jax spy sent to sow confusion.”
Chevie flashed back to how DeeDee’s face had looked before the bullet struck her. She had seemed a hundred years old.
“I am no spy, Director,” she said. “I may be ill. A tumor, maybe, or a virus, but I am no spy. I love the Empire. I would die for the flag.”
A huge Empire flag hung on the wall behind Gunn, perhaps the most recognizable image in the world: a gold circle, and inside the circle a 3-D box, the lower rear horizontal and forward right vertical rendered thicker to form a cross.
This is all wrong, thought Traitor Chevie, brain-shuddering at the very sight of the image.
Director Gunn spun the pad absently on the desktop, puffs of mildew rising from his sleeve.
“You love the Empire, Cadet?”
“Absolutely, Director. With my body and soul.”
“And do you know the Empire, Savano? Do you realize the sacrifices this empire has demanded of the faithful?”
History questions, thought Chevie. I have a chance.
“I do,” she said. “Chapter and verse.”
Director Gunn hmmed. Cadet Savano had set herself a challenge.
“What do you know of the Blessed Colonel, Clayton Box?”
An easy one.
“Colonel Box. A god who came among us to scorch sin from the earth.”
Gunn waved a testy hand. “Yes, yes, yes. Any child with a cereal box knows this. You are a cadet. What is your understanding of the Revolution?”
Chevie frowned; this was a loaded question. Director Gunn was asking for her take on the Revolution. He wanted her to summarize, and summaries often included opinions, and opinions could get a person killed.
Chevie spoke slowly, taking her time, trying to ignore the hulking Thundercats breathing beast-like in each ear, waiting for the order to pounce.
“The world was in chaos. The empires of man were vast and cruel. Millions of souls perished through ignorance, cruelty, want.”
“But more important than the perishing?” said Gunn in a voice that seemed too deep for his miniature frame.
Take it easy, Bilbo, thought Traitor Chevie. I’m getting there.
“More important than the dying bodies were the lost souls. People were dying in vast numbers without enlightenment. God decided that He could no longer suffer this, so He appeared on earth in the form of Colonel Box to build a New Albion that would be a shining example of virtue to the world.”
“And how did the colonel plan to build this New Albion?”
“He recruited his disciples, the first Thundercats.”
Traitor Chevie couldn’t swallow this. It’s a spiel. A hoax, a joke. The whole world is being conned. Box was a rogue soldier. I remember the file.
The effort of keeping these blasphemies inside forced beads of sweat through the skin of Chevie’s brow.
“For thirty long years, Colonel Box and his disciples went into the catacombs below London, where they communed with the souls of the faithful and slowly built the colonel’s machines. When they returned from the underworld on Emergence Day, Colonel Box ordered his men to launch the first missiles at the Houses of Parliament, Windsor Castle, and the naval port of Portsmouth. Most of the government and monarchy got their just deserts in less than an hour, and it took little more than a day for Colonel Box to arm his legion of London poor folk and take the capital. Within a month, Britain was completely given over to the colonel. The reign of man was at an end. Colonel Box set the arms factories in Sheffield to building the great ballistic missiles that the colonel had designed, and in under a year, after the second round of Boxstrike, the earth once more belonged to the righteous.”
Traitor Chevie brain-snorted. London poor folk? Criminals, more like.
Director Gunn nodded; so far, Chevron Savano was on track. “The transition period was not without its hiccups, was it? Some problems are too small to be solved with missiles.”
“No, sir. There was opposition. Those who denied the colonel were publicly hanged all along Swingers’ Row by…”
Chevie’s train of thought ground to a halt.
Gunn was on her like a grizzled tomcat on a cornered mouse.
“Publicly hanged by who?”
Chevie could feel the Thundercats shifting at her shoulders.
Who? Who was the hangman?
“Surely you remember, Cadet. After all, the entire war is known as the Hangman’s Revolution. A little irreverent, perhaps, but cleansing was essential. The Hangman is one of our most honored saints. Beatified by the colonel himself. His portrait is on the wall in front of you, for heaven’s sake.”
Listen to this guy, said Traitor Chevie. He believes his own bull. Box granted sainthood to an executioner. That’s like a monster pinning a medal on a troll.
Chevie gazed at the portrait, hoping for inspiration, and an image flashed in her mind’s eye. The wiry man from the painting but holding a tattooist’s needle, the cracks in his nails traced with ink. She gave voice to the image without thinking about it.
“The tattooist,” she blurted. “Anton Farley the tattooist. He was the hangman.”
Gunn jumped to his feet, slamming his palms on his desk.
The director’s hands are red! Chevie saw. Red with Jax blood.
“Farley the tattooist!” he roared.
Roared? Really? said blasphemous Chevie. That’s more like a bleat.
“Shut up!” said real-world Chevie. “Just shut up.”
Gunn fixed her with his blazing eyes. “Shut up? You would…Do you know who I am?”
“Hobbit!” shouted Chevie. “Hobbit…Hobbit…HOBBIT!”
The Thundercats moved, each grabbing one of Chevie’s shoulders.
I have so had enough of these guys, thought Traitor Chevie, the silent killer, the betrayer.
If the Thundercats had been expecting resistance, they would have fared better; but Cadet Chevron Savano had only proven to be a middling combatant at best. And, in any event, the particular moves she used now had never been taught in the academy.
Chevie took Witmeyer first, spinning under the Thundercat’s outstretched arm and jabbing her kidney with four straight fingers. Continuing the pirouette, Chevie bent Vallicose’s knee with a powerful kick, then turned back to Witmeyer, who seemed bemused to be in intense pain. Chevie grabbed the warrior nun’s splashback visor and yanked it downward until their faces were level.
“Hi,” said Chevie, in a tone that was somehow more shocking than the assault, then she punched Witmeyer in the nose. Chevie could never put the Thundercat down with
force alone, but pain was distracting Witmeyer, which gave Chevie a chance to snag her weapon and cover Vallicose as the warrior nun reached for the buzz baton on her hip.
“Leave it, Miley,” Chevie ordered, flicking off the pistol’s safety. Then she nodded to Vallicose. “You too, Gaga.”
Inside, Cadet Chevie was wailing in terror.
What?
Did the Traitor teach me to fight?
How else could I have attacked Thundercats?
The Traitor has damned me to hell.
Miley?
Gaga?
Of course the most dangerous person in the room had been forgotten, as her brain erroneously assigned him the role of least dangerous person in the room. This had been the secret of his success in France. Director Gunn scrabbled onto the desk, hefted his tablet computer, and bashed Chevie across the skull.
Cadet Savano toppled in angular sections, and as unconsciousness drew its slow curtains across her senses, the last thing she heard was Gunn’s sarcastic voice.
“My most feared Thundercats laid low by a helpless girl. Perhaps you two are not as formidable as you think, eh, Moley and Googoo?”
Ha, thought Traitor Chevie. Moley and Googoo? Hobbit be stoopid.
Then both Chevies were lost in the dark.
A guy walks into a bar and says to the barman: “Gimme one whiskey for myself and ten billion for all my possible alternate selves.”
—Professor Charles Smart
ORIENT THEATRE, HOLBORN, LONDON, 1899
Now our story migrates, following the curve of Professor Smart’s wormhole, emerging in the Victorian Era, where three million souls fuss and sprawl on the banks of the Thames, Fleet, and Lea. Where the sky is black with Machine Age pollution that would choke a Pompeii donkey. Where life is cheap and death is gratis. And if this prose seems overly soused in bleakness, let me remind you that we have not even touched on the great slums, where rendered fat is considered a culinary delicacy and the chief distraction for the legions of red-knuckled, soot-faced orphans is a brisk game of rat-hunt.
But we will not tarry in these quagmires of deprivation, for our tale entices us elsewhere. We follow the riffle of crow tail feathers across the patchwork rooftops of Soho and Mayfair toward Holborn, dipping through the majestic spans of its viaduct and hovering above a chalked sidewalk that proclaims in footstep-smudged capital letters that the grand reopening of the Orient Theatre takes place on this very day. In truth, the phrase grand reopening seems a trifle hyperbolic given the dilapidated state of the building beyond, but exaggerated claims are the essence of theater, are they not? The public demands embellishment. Superlatives only, if you please. Sopranos are incomparable. Comic turns are invariably sidesplitting (only clowns can offer mutilation as an endorsement), and magicians are occasionally magnificent, often incredible, and without exception great.