The Rebels


The girl treaded along the cracked street filled with people hustling along and hurrying to reach their work-places. The smell of freshly baked bread filled the air as somewhere a bakery store’s door opened. Nearby a little boy giggled delightedly as he chased another boy.


The girl gave no thought to any of this, though. She simply shoved her way through the business people, parents, and children, and made her way to a grey house at the end of a dark, filthy alley, fingering the small golden object in her pocket the whole time. As she neared the house’s forbidding steel door, her mind filled with dread and apprehension on whether the leader of her rebel group the Downworlders would believe her when she lied to him about the news.
Long ago, the government became corrupted, as all governments soon become. Taxes became heavy, so many people went homeless. Crime rates increased dramatically, and it soon became common to see even a little girl holding a gun on the streets. Angry people formed small groups and attempted to rebel, but with the government’s advanced technology that the public did not have access to, all rebelling groups were quickly brought down, with threats promising a public execution for those who dared act against the government again. No more organizations were formed, but citizens who had antipathy for the government officials and the selfish rich still called them “rats.”
Then came the Downworlders. It started with a man who was grieving for his dead wife, who had been killed by a government official, one of the many who patrolled the slum cities on the outskirts of Macht, the first of the two large cities in what was left of the world. The rats were always cruel to the poor by beating them for disrespecting them in any way, whether it was looking them directly in the eye without permission or attempting to steal from them. The man had sworn revenge; not just for his wife, but to avenge all those who were treated unfairly by government officials...
And so the defiant anger and terror spread by the Downworlders began. They sabotaged fighter jets the day they were due to take off, destroyed roads the Despot--the leader of the government-- had to travel on to reach army camps to make his encouragement speeches, tortured information out of the rats, and lots more. Someday, the Downworlders would break into the government’s underground building and destroy it’s system and the Despot once and for all. The girl was positive they would. She would be there to see it.
Most Downworlder areas were outside Macht, where no one would dare to look after the government spread the lie that all the other lands were absolutely uninhabitable after the nuclear war, but there was still one base inside Macht. “Outside is incredibly dangerous,” the Despot once announced. “And besides, you might get captured by the barbaric people from Feind, and who knows what will happen to you then.” Yet the Downworlder leader himself had taken the first step onto the “nuclear wastelands” and declared it safe. He had even traveled to Feind, the enemy that constantly attacked Macht to take control of the land, and uncovered many lies the rats had told. The rats had once said that Feinds were cannibals, especially liked to eat children, and wore clothes made of their enemy’s skin. Lies. The leader of the Downworlders said the Feinds were actually just regular human beings like the citizens of Macht, but their government was a lot better.The rats had also said that Macht was winning the war with the Feinds. Another big lie. In fact, Macht was losing the war badly, which was why so many men had to be pulled from their homes to fight in the army. The leader had been lucky; he was at a meeting in a base in Feind when the rats went through his village for men eligible to become soldiers in the Macht army.
The girl knew that the leader was a cold hard man who almost never forgave anybody because of his horrific past. She wasn’t used to lying to fellow rebels, and she supported the Downworlders’ cause. However, she couldn’t bring herself to tell the truth--not just for herself, but for him too. He was different from the rest of the rats. He didn’t deserve to die, and she didn’t believe that she did either.
Yet at the same time, she didn’t want to lie to the leader. She wanted the rebels to win, and she hated the government. After all, they had killed her mother, causing grief for her whole family and even drastically changing their personalities.


The girl furiously shook her head and chided to herself as she recalled the pattern for her personal knock on the door. Don’t be a fool, she thought. Of course I have to lie. I promised him that I would. Ever since the failed mission to use the Despot’s son as hostage the girl had known that she could.....deeply care about someone after all. She wasn’t the cold-hearted person she thought she’d been all along until he made her think otherwise.
Every Downworlder had obtained their own unique knock so the people inside would know who was knocking. The girl lifted her hand and hammered on the massive steel door, each knock creating a deep resonating sound.
At first there was silence. Then, there were five slight thuds, and the heavy door slowly opened, revealing a small and thin light-skinned boy with dark curly hair and big brown eyes, which widened as they looked up at her. He was eleven or twelve years old, but she couldn’t be sure. It seemed like a century had passed since they had seen each other, and somewhere along the way she had lost track of his age.
“Miles,” she muttered, automatically hiding any expression that was showing on her face. After years of brutal training in a Downworlder base between Macht and Feind, hiding her expressions as much as possible was natural for her.
The girl was vaguely reminded of herself, who had similar features as the boy. Based on the look of the him, he probably hadn’t expected to see her when he unbarred the door, even though he should have recognized that it was she who had been knocking on the door based on the pattern he heard. The girl indifferently glared down at him.
“Move aside, boy. What, ya still asleep?”
The boy vigorously shook his head, his brown hair flapping all around his face. He stepped aside, staring up at the girl in wonder and with a hint of terror.
Scoffing silently to herself, the girl got in and shut the door. She moved the five bolts on the dirty floor back into place on the steel door for the boy, and was about to walk away when she stopped, turned, and knelt down to make herself level with the small boy, who cowered away from her.
“Hey.” She took a golden necklace out from the pocket of her Abercrombie and Fitch jacket and showed it to him. His eyes widened at the sight of the crystal horseshoe dangling from the necklace.
“You always wanted this, right? Here. Hold still.” He obeyed and stopped fidgeting. The girl put the necklace over his head and looked at him. The corner of her mouth lifted ever so slightly.
“Well, good. It fits you. Keep it safe, for good luck.” The girl lightly touched the horseshoe on the necklace, then got up and walked away.
She never heard him say, “Thank you.” She was too far away by then to hear.
The girl purposefully strode down the dusty, isolated corridor. The walls were all very plain, and it had nothing on it but dust that had been there for years. She routinely traversed an entanglement of doors and walkways. As she did so, she was reminded of a time, long long ago, when she was still young and ignorant of the threats of the world around her. She and her brother had adored mazes and hungrily consumed every opportunity they had to go through them and solve them. And in the distance, there was always a man, cold and hard, watching.
“Papa!” She and her brother had squealed, running towards him. “Come look at the puzzle Miles and me just finished! It’s a map of Macht, and it has a thousand pieces!” But, as always, the man had just turned and walked away. The siblings had tried again and again, but he had simply done the same thing, whether it was on seeing they had finished a puzzle or if they had found an ancient coin, one that was supposedly used when the rumored United States was said to have existed. He just turned and walked away. Eventually they stopped trying.
The girl arrived at the door that led to the leader’s office. She took a shaky breath, willing herself to stay composed and not think of what the leader might do to her if she didn’t make a good enough act. She had never been in the torture room, but she had heard the rumors.
Nevertheless, the girl opened the door.
Inside was a vast room filled with plushy sofas, elaborate rugs and tables, expensive china, and paintings that must have costed millions of dollars. On the ceiling hung an immense crystal chandelier with a dozen blazing lights. Everything about the room oozed high class. But all this the girl paid no attention to. Instead her eyes focused on the familiar silhouette of a tall, thin man sitting behind a large rosewood desk with nothing but a picture frame on it. She took one, two, three steps toward the desk and bowed her head respectfully towards him. The man did nothing.
The girl glanced at the photo for a moment with curiosity. It was an old picture of a family of four. They were in front of the local city hall, which looked so different back then than it did now. On the right was a beautiful blonde woman with brown eyes, and to her left was an eight to nine year old black haired girl with her arm slung over the shoulders of a younger boy with curly brown hair. She noticed that the woman looked very familiar, and that both children had the same big brown eyes. And to their left was......The girl’s breath stopped short. It was the leader himself, but much younger. He was in his late twenties or early thirties and was laughing so hard he was clutching his stomach. He was the one with the dark curly hair his son had inherited, and he had shiny blue eyes that crinkled a little bit on the edges. He was so young and happy that she almost didn’t believe it was the leader. Almost. She knew it was him in that photo.
Just in time, the girl caught herself and turned to look at the man. She nervously cleared her throat and said, “Sir, I have important news for you.”
Nothing.
The girl felt a panic attack coming up. The leader was one of the smartest people she knew. What if he could see right through her? What if he could tell she was lying?
Silently counting to three, the girl steadied herself. And said it.
“The boy... is dead. We have succeeded.”
The girl held her breath. Time seemed to go in slow motion. Would it work? Would he fall for it?
The leader smiled. “Excellent,” he said. “A job well done, Alessandra.”
***
The Despot looked out the tinted window of his sleek black car, which glided silently through the night along with his escorts with cars identical to his. He noted the severely cracked walls of some houses, and several had broken windows with dust covering most of them. Humph, he thought. How can these people stand to live in such a lowly place? What scumbags they are. He marveled at how they didn’t have afternoon tea, and that none of them had beautiful gardens in front of their houses. Don’t they want to strike a good impression on their visitors when they host a bridge party? Bridge was the Despot’s favorite game, so he couldn’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t want to play it.
The Despot proudly looked over at his tall, lean son, who stared ahead with a dazed look on his face. He had single-handedly escaped chains on a rickety roof bound to fall at any time on a house that the rebel group, the Downworlders, had set fire to. The Despot supposed he couldn’t blame his son for looking like an idiot--after all, he had just survived an attack from those annoying Downworlders--but it was because of his kind character that he had been kidnapped in the first place. Also, there was something about the way that teenager acted that he just couldn’t put his finger on. He wondered what it could be. His son certainly wasn’t acting right.
The Downworlders had planned on using his son as hostage so that the Despot would give them their most advanced weapons in return for his son. Things hadn’t worked out the way the rebels wanted to, and so his son ended up on the roof of that burning house, left to die as if he was just a rat.
“Will,” he said, reaching out to tuck a black strand of hair on his son’s face behind his ear. “Are you alright? We’re about to be transported to a safe house. You’ll be quite safe there.” Then, remembering how his son had been taken by the Downworlders in the first place, he winced. “For real this time.”
Slowly, Will looked over at him, piercing him with sea green eyes that he had inherited from his father. “Oh...okay then.”
The Despot smiled. “The Downworlders will never lay a finger on you again. Don’t you worry, son. Don’t you worry.”
***
Alessandra looked down at the silver case that lay before her hands. All of the Downworlders had come together to be in this one base inside Macht, a dangerous feat that had been done only once before, and tension was a heavy fog in the room, refusing to back off... But this was the moment they had all been waiting for. This was the time when all the Downworlders’ hard work would pay off. She glanced up at the leader, who looked down at her with fierce pride on his face. Guilt sliced through her like a thousand knives. If he knew what she had done, she knew that his expression would be wiped off as fast as the blink of an eye.
“Go ahead,” he said. “You were the key factor to this mission’s success. Therefore, you reserve the right to press the button. You have the right to be the one to change everything.” He smiled. “You have proved your worth, Alessandra!”
The crowd of rebels roared its approval. From somewhere near the back, she heard Miles cheering for her. Alessandra punched in a code, and the case opened. She looked at the buttons in front of her. There were only two of them: a red one and a green one. The red one would set off the countdown for the bomb, and the green one would destroy the bomb.
Her finger hovered over the red button. Did she really have the courage to do it? To be the one to start the real wrath of the Downworlders, even though his life might be ruined?
“Go on,” the leader prodded.
Yes. She did. Just because he was with the government didn’t mean she would back off from her cause.
Alessandra lifted her hand and pressed down, hard, on the red button.