Children of the Uprising Read online

  “My ex wanted to have children,” Jay answered.

  “And you?” Christopher asked.

  Jay shook his head. “I didn’t want to bring anyone else into this War.”

  “You have pretty strong opinions about the War,” Max said.

  “I hate it. Why do you think the three of you are here?” More food came out. As Alice pushed the kitchen door open, bringing out slabs of red meat for the diners, the cook glanced at Christopher again over the steaming pots and smoking burners in the kitchen.

  “You’re a way station. The first stop in cleaning Christopher,” Addy answered over a forkful of food.

  “Sure,” Jay said. “I’m also paying for you to run. Your hotels, gas money, food, plane tickets if you need them. I’m paying for it all. The Underground needs money too.”

  “So what’s in it for you?” Christopher asked the silver-haired man.

  “You are,” Jay answered, the levity dropping entirely out of his voice. “I just wanted to help keep you alive.” He stared at Christopher. “My one condition before agreeing with Reggie to pay for your little escapade was that you stop here first so I would get to meet you.”

  “And have I lived up to your expectations?” Christopher asked, his face a stone.

  “Have another glass of wine,” Jay said to Christopher. “You have to realize that just by being alive, you mean so much to so many people. Your life is proof that the bastards aren’t perfect.”

  “My life means a lot more to me than that,” Christopher said.

  “Just remember, boy, only the real crazies like the War, the ones that want to be heroes and bleed for a cause. The rest of us merely tolerate it because we don’t want to be killed. Dessert, anyone?”

  They were all drunk when dinner ended, all four of them. They’d gone through five bottles of wine. “I’m off to bed,” Jay declared with some panache, throwing his napkin on the table and wavering only slightly when he stood. “It’s been an honor to meet each of you. And you, sir,” Jay said, staring at Christopher. “I didn’t get this house making bad investments.” And with that, he exited the room as if he were walking off the stage.

  Barry led Addy, Max, and Christopher back to their rooms, and this time, when Christopher peeked out his doorway, Max and Addy were peeking out theirs as well. “It will be safer if we all stay in the same room,” Max announced with only a slight slur to his speech. They all knew that it was merely an excuse to stick together. Since Christopher’s room was the biggest, they all piled into it, Addy and Max carrying sheets and pillows from their beds.

  Once they were all inside, Christopher closed the door. He felt an uncertain level of giddiness that he could never remember having felt before. “So what did you guys think of our host?” he asked, not entirely sure if in this crowd, Jay was the weird one or he was.

  “Dude’s nuts,” Addy offered. Then she began to lay her blanket down on the floor on the opposite side of the room from Max.

  “I’ll sleep on the floor,” Christopher said to Addy. “You can have the bed.”

  Addy laughed at him. “I don’t do chivalry,” she told him.

  As they were settling in, Max had a sudden idea. “I know what we should do, Addy.”

  “What’s that?” Addy asked. She was sitting next to one of the windows looking out over the ocean. Christopher couldn’t see the waves, but he could hear them.

  “Let’s give him a name,” Max said.

  “Who? Christopher?” Addy asked.

  “Yeah. Everybody needs a name.”

  “What do you mean?” Christopher asked, growing dizzy from listening to how quickly Max and Addy spoke to each other.

  “Your name. If you’re going to be part of the Underground, you need a new name.”

  Even though he’d read about it in his mother’s journal, it hadn’t dawned on Christopher that Max and Addy weren’t his new friends’ real names. “So you guys picked your own names? And you just forget the old ones?”

  “Yeah,” Max said. “Try to forget anyway. No one’s called me anything but Max for almost ten years.” Then he laughed before instructing Christopher, “Ask Addy how she got her name.”

  “Shut up!” Addy yelled across the room to him. Christopher felt like he was on the outside of an inside joke.

  “Why, where’d you get your name?” Christopher asked meekly, hoping not to offend anyone.

  “It’s not a big deal,” Addy said. “It’s short for Adelaide—like Saint Adelaide. She was a princess, the daughter of a king, and her father arranged for her to be married to a man she didn’t want to marry. When she refused to marry him, they threw her into solitary confinement in the Castle of Garda. But she was rescued by a priest who dug a tunnel under the castle walls and snuck her out.”

  The room was quiet for a moment and then Max stifled a laugh. “God, you take yourself so fucking seriously, Addy.”

  “It’s better than your name,” Addy shouted at Max. “At least I didn’t name myself after a children’s book.”

  Christopher looked at Max and tried to remember his favorite books from when he was young. He really had only one favorite. “Where the Wild Things Are?” he asked Max.

  Max nodded. “Of course.”

  “But why?”

  Max grinned a grin that could have made even his worst enemies fall in love with him. “Because I’m the king of all wild things.”

  “Jackass,” Addy muttered, but the word was full of warmth.

  “So, what name should we give Christopher?” Max asked, staring at him. And for a moment Christopher wanted nothing more in the world than to have these two people he barely knew christen him with a new name.

  “I don’t think he should have a new name,” Addy said. She was staring at Christopher too, but she was looking at him differently than Max was. “I think he should stay Christopher.”

  “But everybody gets a new name,” Max protested. Christopher sat up in the bed, looking from Max to Addy and back again and saying nothing. The effect of the wine was wearing off and he was becoming tired.

  “Yeah, but he’s not everybody,” Addy said. “He’s different from the rest of us. The world needs him to be Christopher.”

  Christopher began to feel uncomfortable beneath their gazes, particularly Addy’s. “I’m tired, guys,” he said, trying to end the conversation.

  “Fine,” Max said. “We’ll have plenty of time to talk about this later.” Then Max stood up and turned out the light. The room became dark except for the incoming light of the moon. “Good night, you two,” Max said and lay down on his makeshift bed.

  “Good night,” Addy answered.

  “Good night,” Christopher said last. Then they all lay there silently, waiting for sleep to creep up on them. Christopher was the last one to let go of consciousness.

  Fourteen

  “There are people here asking questions about you.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, the police have been asking everybody questions, but there are other people too. I don’t know who the other people are.”

  “What have they been asking?”

  “They’ve been asking if anybody knows how to get in touch with you or if anyone has any clues as to where you are or might have gone.”

  “Who have they asked?”

  “Everybody. You’d laugh if you saw the people they were asking, people you wouldn’t have been caught dead talking to. But mostly they’ve been concentrating on your parents, your teachers, and me. I think people might be following me. This town is getting really weird.” They can’t hurt you, Christopher almost assured Evan, remembering the rules that he’d read in his birth parents’ journals. He stopped himself, though. He didn’t have any faith in those rules. They seemed ludicrous. He wondered if he was putting Evan in danger merely by talking to him. They’d developed a
system. Evan would text Christopher some sort of cryptic message that would have meaning only to the two of them. Then Christopher would call Evan the next chance he had to sneak away from Addy and Max. Christopher had turned the ringer off his phone. He was getting too many strange calls. He was nervous that people might be able to track him by his cell phone, but he wasn’t ready to give it up. It was the only connection he still had to home.

  “When did it start?” Christopher asked Evan.

  “The police have been asking questions since the day you left. The others came, I don’t know, three days ago, two days after the police.”

  “How long have they been following you?”

  “Ever since they got here, I think. Maybe before I even knew they were here.”

  “Has anybody threatened you?”

  “No. They’re nice, just fucking creepy. When are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

  “I can’t now, not if people are asking you questions. It would make it too dangerous. How are my folks?”

  “The same.” Christopher felt his chest tighten. The same wasn’t good. He supposed it could be worse, though. He hadn’t called his parents since he and Max were holed up in the hotel room in Montreal. That was more than five days ago. Now that Christopher knew that people had been questioning them, he was sure that he’d made the right decision. He could only imagine what people would do to them if it seemed like they knew something. He’d have to wait. He didn’t know how long.

  “Tell them that you’re sure I’m okay.”

  “I will,” Evan assured Christopher. He paused, then said, “Are you okay?”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t talk for a while,” Christopher answered. “Maybe it’s too dangerous.”

  “Fuck you,” Evan replied, to Christopher’s relief. “I’ll text you if anything happens.”

  “Okay.” Evan hung up first. Christopher listened to the dead air for a minute or two and then went back to join Addy and Max.

  Fifteen

  They were all supposed to change their look. Addy chose to dye her hair red. She didn’t go for just any red, though. Her hair became the color of a burning ember. Her head seemed to glow like the tip of a lit candle. Christopher and Max could barely move when they watched her come out of the bathroom. It wasn’t only her hair color that changed; so much else seemed to change with it. Everything about Addy looked different. She looked stronger and more dangerous, and that was all Christopher would let himself think for now.

  “Jesus, Addy,” Max said when he could speak again. “They told us to try to look inconspicuous.”

  “No, they didn’t,” Addy replied. “They told us to look different. I looked inconspicuous before. That’s what they told me to change.”

  The order had come in the day before. The three of them were at their fourth stop, if you counted the night they spent in Palm Beach. They’d been staying with random people. Max would be sent their destination and they’d go. Each of their hosts treated Christopher like he was an exotic animal, like he was either the first or the last of his kind. So he was excited when they were finally given the order to make a stop without a host. Then they were also ordered to change their appearance and Christopher wasn’t so excited anymore. Now he was nervous. He figured it meant that somebody had spotted them or maybe one of their hosts had turned on them.

  Max had gone first. They’d already talked about what each of them should do before sending Addy off to the store to get the supplies that they would need to make it happen. Addy came back with hair clippers, bleach, and two different colors of hair dye, one for men and one for women. She gave Max the hair clippers and gave Christopher the men’s hair dye. The box he had in his hands said DARK BLOND on the label. He had trouble wrapping his head around what the words meant.

  “We’ll have to bleach it first,” Addy said as Christopher looked down at the box. “We’ll have to take your natural, darker color out before we can put the new color in.” Christopher didn’t say anything to her. He just stared at the picture of the smiling man on the box.

  “Who’s going first?” Addy polled the room.

  “I’ll go,” Max said, pulling the clippers from their box. Max hadn’t shaved his face since they left Palm Beach. The clippers weren’t for his face, though.

  Max walked into the bathroom. They were somewhere in Kentucky, all three of them sharing a room in a weird medieval-themed hotel near the Cincinnati airport. Max left the bathroom door open so Addy and Christopher could watch him sacrifice his hair for the cause. Max plugged the clippers into the wall socket and turned them on to test them. They buzzed with eagerness. They made the sound of a lawn mower as they cut the hair on Max’s head down to little more than scruff.

  Christopher and Addy watched in silence. Christopher kept thinking about Maria’s journal. He remembered the details about how she took out a knife and carved off her hair one bunch at a time, how she went back two or three times to make her hair shorter, how the front was easier to control than the back, how much she seemed to change after she cut her hair like that. It was how much she seemed to change that Christopher remembered the most.

  It didn’t take long for Max to shave his head. After seven quick passes with the clippers, all he had left to do was tidy up. He asked Addy to help him at the end, to make sure he didn’t miss any spots. His hair was piled up on the bathroom floor like the pelt of a small, dead animal. Max looked at Christopher. “What do you think?” Only a thin layer of dark stubble remained on Max’s head. The hair on his face was longer than the hair on his head now. Without the hair on Max’s head, Christopher noticed the gray in his beard for the first time. Christopher thought the gray must be new. “So, how do I look?” Max asked again.

  Addy answered. “Bald.”

  “Screw you guys,” Max said, staring at his reflection in the mirror. “I think I look kind of like a pirate.”

  “Do you want to look like a pirate?” Addy asked.

  “Who the hell wouldn’t want to look like a pirate?” Max turned back toward Christopher. “Wouldn’t you want to look like a pirate?”

  Christopher didn’t answer, unable to tear his eyes away from the ridiculous picture on the side of his box of hair dye. He didn’t want to look like that. He didn’t want to look like anything.

  “I’ll go next,” Addy said, grabbing her hair dye and walking toward the bathroom. “You can leave now,” she said to Max, pushing him out the bathroom door.

  While Max’s transformation took only minutes, Addy’s took well over an hour. “I don’t think I can do this,” Christopher said to Max as they waited. He held up the men’s hair dye, showing Max the smiling face on the front of the box.

  “What do you mean, you ‘can’t do this’?” Max asked.

  “I know they told us to change our appearance, but—I don’t know—I feel kind of sick.”

  Max shook his newly bald head. “I fucking shaved my head and you can’t make your hair a little lighter?”

  “I’m sorry,” Christopher said to Max. And he was. He wished he could go through with it, but he knew that he couldn’t.

  “First you don’t change your name and now this,” Max said to him, shaking his head. “Look, kid, I get it. You don’t believe that this is your War, so you don’t want to have to change because of it. But it’s going to change you. In more ways than you can imagine, it’s going to change you. Your hair? Your name? They’re nothing compared to what’s in store for you. I’ll try to protect you from it, but I won’t be able to stop it.”

  “Okay,” Christopher said. “But I still don’t want to dye my hair.”

  “Let’s wait to see how Addy looks. If she looks different enough, then maybe you dyeing your hair won’t matter.” So they waited for Addy to step out of the bathroom. They barely recognized her when she did. They all agreed that maybe it was enough. Maybe nobody would notice Christopher now aft
er Addy and Max had changed so much.

  “But what do you guys really think?” Addy asked Max and Christopher after they discussed their plans.

  “I think you should have dyed your hair that color a long time ago,” Max told Addy. Christopher, never having been wordy to begin with, was speechless. Addy took Christopher’s frozen tongue to be the compliment that it was. She looked fierce.

  They had the rest of the night to rest. Addy and Max had one night to become the new people they’d changed into. Christopher had one more night to try to ignore the insanity around him and try not to change. Tomorrow, the three of them would be on the road again, seemingly destined for nowhere.

  Sixteen

  Katsu looked around, trying to make sure no one was following him. The Tokyo street behind him was busy. In the few seconds that Katsu spent focusing on the traffic passing by the end of the alley, he counted eight scooters, four bicycles, and five cars. Katsu did not believe he’d been followed, but he knew that any secret can be ruined if a single whisper is heard or a single misstep is seen by the wrong person. He stood motionless for a moment. More scooters, bicycles, and cars passed the entrance to the alley, but Katsu saw nothing suspicious. The city was so full of people, but most of them knew nothing about the War. Then he reached deep into his pocket for the keys.

  Katsu’s hand trembled slightly as he dug through his pocket. He had lived a hard and violent life, but he could never remember being this anxious or this scared before. This time he knew that, one way or the other, he was close to the end. He heard the keys jingle in his pocket before he felt the metal with his fingers. He took one last look around him, and seeing no one else, he pulled out the keys. The door in front of Katsu didn’t look like much. It was merely a rusty metal door in a wall halfway down a skinny, dank, dead-end alley. Nevertheless, Katsu slid the key into the lock and opened it.

  Once the door was open, Katsu stepped quickly through it into a windowless room. Then he closed the door behind him and locked it. The lights were off inside the room. The room was empty except for a flight of stairs leading down into the cellar. Katsu didn’t bother to turn the lights on. He knew the way through the darkness. He made his way to the stairs and went down them. At the bottom of the stairs another door blocked his way. Katsu took out another key and unlocked the second door.