CHAPTER 1
DEFY.
Sleepy and half-drunk, Sebastian Rios tried to reason with the message carved into the wall of the subway tunnel. He’d spent the evening with friends and coworkers, celebrating the republic’s birthday, and was attempting to get home. There’d been many toasts and his mouth tasted of rye. His head swam slowly, like an eel. “Defy,” he sounded out to himself. “De-fy.”
He ran his fingers over the word. Someone had spent time with it, he thought, given the depth of the notches that formed the letters. He appreciated that the message was both plain and mysterious, at once grounded and a bit mystical, too. Just above it lay a small, pale sticker of the American flag, its corners frayed and colors bleached by time. Sixty stars and thirteen stripes. It didn’t strike Sebastian as odd, anymore, all those rings of stars in the blue canton.
It was a Friday, late, languid midsummer in Empire City. Sebastian turned around and set his back against the wall. He’d intentionally stood away from others but a man had neared. The stranger wore rags and a vacant smile and held a dull metal pole. He began waving it around like a sword, something everyone noticed while pretending not to. Sebastian adjusted his earbuds and cycled through songs on his phone.
The stranger’s pole whizzed by a few feet from Sebastian, close enough for him to feel a light draft. Sebastian looked up, taking in the stranger’s mesh cap with the words CRETE WARFIGHTER in bright yellow on it. He was old enough to be from that war, Sebastian thought. Why wasn’t he at a rehabilitation colony? Veterans with troubles lived there. But—bureaucracy. Mistakes happened. Sebastian understood that.
A bell sounded through the station. “The threat index is blue,” a woman’s automated voice said. “Homeland Authority reminds citizens to remain guarded.”
Blue was good, Sebastian knew. No change.
The stranger in rags felt otherwise. “Defy!” he shouted, pointing to the message on the wall and hopping into the tunnel. Sebastian ignored him and so did everyone else.
“Defy!” the stranger repeated. He lifted his metal pole. Then he plunged it into the third rail, cracking the protective casing. The stranger’s body lit up like an illum round. The stranger fell. Smoke rose.
Oh, Sebastian thought, looking up. This is different.
The citizens on the platform screamed while Sebastian moved into the tunnel to check on the stranger. Rigid and red, the smile had remained on the man’s face.
“Masha’Allah,” Sebastian said. “Be easy, dude.” Then he made the sign of the cross with his phone over the stranger. He felt stares from across the platform. They didn’t understand and, to his mind, never would. Then Sebastian walked home. Whatever powers he had, they didn’t include resurrection.
* * *
Sebastian woke in his studio apartment the next morning, hungover and alone. He drank from the glass of water he’d placed on the nightstand hours earlier and checked the calendar on his phone. A commitment waited there like a blister: Mia Tucker’s engagement party. Could’ve sworn that was next weekend, he thought. Time seemed to be speeding up to him.
A gift, he remembered. People like this notice.
It was with such a resentment that Sebastian showered. He changed into a pair of slacks and the only unwrinkled dress shirt in his closet. Deciding against a tie—he wanted to make clear he was not of Wall Street or Connecticut—he threw on a sport jacket and a pair of aviator sunglasses and stepped into the day. Monitor drones hummed from above, ever-steady, summer light beating down. Sebastian squinted into it, wondering when the absurdities of life had turned into something else.
An anxious minute passed until a cab pulled over. “Uptown,” he told the driver. “Park and Sixty-Fifth.” He took out his phone to avoid conversation. The cab smelled of old potato. Sebastian lowered his window. Boiled air rushed the breach.
On his phone, Sebastian read an article about Congress repealing an amendment to allow the president to run for yet another term. The parties of the governing coalition cited wartime precedent and extolled the move. The parties in the minority argued that it brought the nation closer to authoritarianism. Sebastian thought the president grimaced too much in his photos, which called attention to a protruding vein in the center of the man’s bald head. He was dour enough as it was. Sebastian wanted a political leader who’d smile every now and then, even if they didn’t mean it.
The cab arrived at the restaurant. Sebastian had never eaten there, but a web search yielded a year-old “Intoxicatingly Elegant” headline from the Imperial Times. The menu consisted mostly of foods with French-sounding names but also offered “a variety of neo-nouvelle cuisines,” which Sebastian couldn’t comprehend, even though he was good with words. He put away his phone and paid the driver, tipping too much because he was bad with numbers.
Sebastian looked up at a three-story building the color of melon and sighed. If he had finished reading the review online, he’d have learned he was looking at a Greek Revival town house that had once served as the headquarters for a conservationist club founded by Teddy Roosevelt, and had a garden patio in the back he might enjoy. He hadn’t read that, though. Besides, his mind was elsewhere.
Two people with silver hair blocked the restaurant entrance, a man and a woman. They held drinks and appetizer napkins and appeared to be arguing in a restrained sort of way. Sebastian tried to part through them to get inside. The man put his arm around Sebastian’s shoulders and pulled him to the discussion. Manners mattered to Sebastian, even though he pretended otherwise, so he didn’t resist. The woman seemed disturbed by his sunglasses, and kept trying to peer under them.
“Here’s one of Mia’s military colleagues.” Sebastian didn’t say anything to that. The man’s tongue carried conviction on it. “No other country in history could wage the Mediterranean Wars and last, let alone prosper. Don’t you agree, young man?”
Sebastian nodded. The silver-haired man continued.
“A testament to our warfighters. But where’s the strategy? What’s the endgame? We learned this lesson in Vietnam: battles must be won before the war can be. Decisive battles.”
“And your solution would be?” the woman asked. “You still haven’t said.”
“Wogs need to be treated like the enemy they are. Same as we treated the British. Same as we treated Nazis. How we beat back the red gooks in my day. Overwhelming force, no apologies.”
“We’ve been at this thirty years, Bernard. When is enough enough?”
“When our way of life is secure. George Orwell said that.”
Sebastian felt sure he’d spent more time in the Near East than the silver-haired man, and he didn’t think George Orwell had said anything about securing a way of life, but he wasn’t about to argue with a member of the Next Greatest Generation. Especially one wearing his old combat ribbons on his blazer. They’d saved the free world from communism. So he kept to listening. It seemed a heavy conversation for an engagement party, but at least they weren’t talking investment portfolios.
“Isn’t that the whole issue? They don’t fight normal. So when we go into these countries to help, to rebuild, they blend in with the population.”