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“I don’t give a damn!” Markovic snapped. “Just get me some warm bodies. Children, if you can find any.”
With Mirror gone, Markovic returned to his thoughts. This was just like any business expansion. He had to think it through to understand the perils and the possibilities. He owned New York City, aside from the Rockborn Gang. He could consolidate his control here and then move against nearby targets—New Jersey, Philadelphia. But that was a mere geographical proximity model. The real target, if he wanted to really take control, had to be Washington, DC.
“Problem,” he muttered, thinking aloud. “How far does my reach extend? Can I have parts of me at long distances?” He had sent small swarms around the immediate vicinity and had maintained contact, seeing through their eyes, hearing what their antennae picked up. Had it been a degraded signal, though? He searched his memory and said, “How about you, Watchers? Any suggestions, oh silent ones?”
But of course the Watchers offered nothing. He’d not quite gotten used to these unseen and maybe unreal observers constantly looking over his shoulder, but he had experience being watched: government regulators from Washington and Albany had been in his face for a long time. Then, too, local media every now and then got the clever idea of attacking him, and he’d heard through the grapevine that 60 Minutes was preparing a piece on Markovic’s Money Machine. He was used to being watched.
Still, damned if they weren’t distracting. And worse, they were vaguely humiliating. He wasn’t some plaything; he was Vector. Vector, Ruler of the Big Apple.
There will be a reckoning with you, too, Watchers. Mark my word.
Had there been a signal loss when his parts were farther away or not? He wasn’t sure. Even a small degradation would mean that he had geographical limits, and that made the prospect of aiming for Washington problematic. Expanding too quickly was a common mistake of businesses. He knew this from personal experience. When he’d tried to expand Markovic’s Money Machine into California, state regulators had made life impossible, and he’d had to retrench, losing half a billion dollars in the process and watching his stock price drop 8 percent.
And yet, if he didn’t take Washington, some politician or general was sure to get the bright idea to nuke New York. They’d be nowhere near such a drastic move, not yet, not while they still had the Rockborn Gang.
And that realization was the deciding reason for his hesitation: as long as the gang was in business, the government had hope. If he destroyed the gang, he might be looking at a mushroom cloud sooner rather than later. The thing was, New York was paralyzed. He could slip out of town, make his way to Washington, and take the national government down. He could infest every congressperson, every senator, the president and his cabinet. But he would keep enough alive and well to be useful hostages.
And then?
The “and then” part had him baffled. He had never played this game before, and he wasn’t entirely sure what a victory would look like.
“I’ll figure it out. I always do.”
In the meantime, he needed transportation, and in a small irony he was actually in a train station that had no trains running. The Acela Express that ran from Boston to Washington no longer stopped in New York. It was running from Stamford, Connecticut, to Boston, and from Newark south to Washington. The middle of the route—New York—had been cut off, isolated.
Rather like the PBA, the so-called FAYZ that had isolated the far smaller Perdido Beach. But unlike the prisoners in that dome, there was nothing stopping Vector. Newark was just over the river.
Yes, he decided, that was the plan. Attack, but not where the enemy expected it. His numbers were vast. His power terrible. The fear he represented broke even the strongest wills.
This expansion would not be shut down.
From the Purple Moleskine
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!
That’s from Edna St. Vincent Millay, who wrote it in 1922 if you believe the internet. That was during the Roaring Twenties, America’s wild spring break party when everything was new: jazz and radio and planes. All the roaring stopped when the stock market fell and the Great Depression came.
Did Edna sense that the big party was coming to an end in less than a decade? Do people have that power, some at least, to sense the temporary nature of their reality? I don’t know, and honestly it’s not something I’ve ever thought about much. Until now.
There are lots of things I think about now that I never had to think about before. Like the fact that I sense candles going out and darkness ahead.
Hope tortures you. And suddenly, lately, I’ve had this pathetic hope that Armo actually liked me. And the thing is, he does. Shouldn’t that make me happy? But when you feed hope, it grows and demands more—like a child, I suppose. That he wasn’t repulsed by me, that he actually likes me just makes me wish he loved me. I know how pathetic and needy I must seem. How pathetic and needy I am. It’s just that growing up, I was loved, at least a little, and then, when I revealed who I am, that love stopped. Probably it would have been better if the whole “L” thing was unknown, something I had never experienced, then I wouldn’t miss it. I think a person blind from birth doesn’t miss color like a person who goes blind later.
I see the way Shade and Dekka both look at me. They think I don’t notice, but I do, and I know they see how pathetic—there’s that word again—I am. They want to warn me off. They want to say, “Cruz, don’t get yourself turned inside out over some guy.” I know because that’s what I would say to me, what I do say.
Everything is coming apart. What am I supposed to do, tell myself he’s not the only guy, there are lots of fish in the sea? But time is short for all of us. I can feel it. My candle is burning at both ends, but night is coming, and sooner not later, my little candle will be snuffed out.
I’m not strong like Dekka, or brilliant and strong like Shade and
Malik. I don’t want to be some superhero. I want to go to college, or maybe have a nice job that I don’t hate. Some day I may want to adopt kids. And I want to do all those boring, safe things with a big, sweet, impossible-to-push-around white boy with a silly name.
Is that asking too much? Of course it is. Because the big, sweet white boy sometimes turns into a bear and I sometimes turn into Beyoncé, and the whole world is teetering on the edge of a cliff and even if we somehow survive, the world I know will never return.
