How could she know that? I went and got it, also grabbing a pair of pliers. Who keeps pliers in their nightstand? What a creep! I gave the pliers to Cassie.
“Mia, you don’t want to see this,” Strepp said, not sounding sorry.
Mia hesitated for a moment, then nodded. “I’ll go direct the palace staff to surrender peacefully,” she said, and a soldier opened her handcuffs. What the hell? Does Strepp know Mia? Just who is Helen Strepp?
“Good idea,” Strepp said. “Thanks.” Once Mia and the other sold
iers were gone, Strepp asked again: “Take me to the Thousand-Eye Room.”
“Screw you, you scarecrow!” the President snarled, and Strepp nodded at me.
I tased him, he jerked and twitched, then fell to the ground. Once he recovered, he got that unattractive sneer on his face.
Before he could speak, Cassie clicked her pliers a couple of times. “I’ve always wanted to do this. Let’s see how many fingernails he really needs,” she mused.
He stared at her in horror, then tried to bluff. “You wouldn’t—”
Cassie leaned over him, giving him that creepy smile that used to piss me off so much. She waved her pliers in the president’s face. “Guys, hold him.”
Tim and Nate each grabbed an arm and got the President to his feet. Strepp snatched one of his struggling hands and held it out for Cassie.
“Fine!” he cried. “Fine!”
With the boys keeping a good hold of him, the President led us to the backstairs, the servants’ stairs I used to use.
He pressed a spot on the wall that I couldn’t make out and a section of the stairs slid sideways, revealing a short hallway. At the end of the hallway was a door, and Strepp held out her hand for the key. The President almost stabbed her with it but gave it up.
When Strepp unlocked the door, we were in a room as big as a bowling alley, and every foot of every wall was covered with monitors—hundreds of them. Thousands. My jaw hung open as I saw they were labeled: everything from Cell A-1-1 to Cell F-69-430. Covering the whole country.
Even Strepp looked appalled, watching cellfolk going about their business. Some screens were divided in halves or fours, some had only one picture.
“You are such a goddamn freak show,” Strepp murmured, looking at the screens.
“It’s the only way!” the President said angrily. “You don’t know the world our grandparents inherited! The people were rebelling! Oceans were rising! World War III almost destroyed the planet. Then the plague rose up! Chemical weapons! This is the only way humanity can survive. This is the only way that makes sense!”
“It might make sense to you,” Strepp said, still looking at the monitors in horror.
I was trying to find the monitor for Cell B-92-4275. My home cell. But there were so many and I did have to be ready to put a bullet through this guy’s head.
“But the world you live in isn’t the world I want the next generation to inherit,” Strepp went on, surprisingly calm. “We can do better. We have to do better. Take them out,” she told me and Cassie, waving her hand at the walls of surveillance equipment.
“Nate and Tim? Please take this person to the dungeon.”
The former President roared and tried to pull free, so I tased him again.
“I know where the dungeons are,” I heard Nate tell Tim.
Cassie began firing, shattering screen after screen, and I raised my rifle and did the same. It sounded like a thousand rocks busting a thousand wine glasses, and I would be lying if I didn’t say it was damn fun.
Five minutes later the room was nothing but a dark cavern full of broken glass, wires, and smoke. And a former President, sobbing on the ground.
124
CASSIE
“WE HAVE DONE THE UNTHINKABLE!” Ms. Strepp yelled into a microphone. The front terrace of the presidential palace stood twenty marble steps above the shouting crowd. Some people were protesting, and we had hundreds of armed kid-soldiers keeping their eyes—and their guns—on them. But not everyone looked outraged; at least a thousand people looked curious, and more than a thousand people—people whose clothes showed that they were servants, cooks, maids—were apparently thrilled and eager to hear more.
“We have begun the revolution!” Ms. Strepp shouted, and punched her fist in the air. Behind her, twenty feet high, Nate had rigged up a display of pictures from books and files we’d found in the President’s study. The projected pictures shone brightly in the night. They showed cellfolk plowing with horses or oxen, other cellfolk winding thread through weaving looms. These were juxtaposed with city people lounging by swimming pools or having fancy drinks with sunsets in the background.