prologue
I thought that I was being so smart when I signed up for the overnight pager duty for the solar array at Burroughs High. Solar arrays don’t do anything at night. Because it’s dark. They’re not lunar arrays.
Turns out I outsmarted myself.
My pager app went off at 1:58 a.m., making a sound that I hadn’t heard since the training session, GNAAP GNAAP GNAAP, with those low notes that loosened your bowels offset by high notes that tightened your sphincter. I slapped around my bed for my screen and found the lights and found my underwear and a tee and then the cargo pants I wore on work duty and blinked hard and rubbed my eyes until I could think clearly enough to confirm that I was dressed, had everything that I needed, and then double-checked the pager app to make sure that I really, actually needed to go do something about the school’s solar array at, I checked, 2:07 a.m.
2:07 a.m.! Brooks, you really outsmarted yourself.
Gramps’s house had started out as a two bed / one bath, like most of the houses in Burbank, but it had been expanded with a weird addition at the back—again, like most of the houses in Burbank—giving it a third bedroom and a second bath. That was my room, and it had its own sliding door to the backyard, so I let myself out without waking Gramps.
It was warm enough that I didn’t need a jacket, which was good because I’d forgotten to put one on. Still, there was just enough of a nip in the air that I jogged a little to get my blood going. Burbank was quiet, just the sound of the wind in the big, mature trees that lined Fairview Street, a distant freight train whistle, a car zooming down Verdugo. My breath was louder than any of them. A dog barked at me and startled me as I turned onto Verdugo, streetlit and wide and empty, too.
Two minutes later, I was at Burroughs, using my student app to buzz myself into the school’s gate, then the side entrance, then the utility stairs, and then I jogged up the stairs. I was only supposed to get paged if the solar array had an error it couldn’t diagnose for itself, and that the manufacturer’s techs couldn’t diagnose from its camera feeds and other telemetry. Basically, never. Not at 2:00 a.m. 2:17 a.m. now. I wondered what the hell it could be. I opened the roof access door just in time to hear a glassy crashing sound, like a window breaking, and I froze.
Someone was on the roof with me. A person, glimpsed in the corner of my eye and then lost in the darkness. Too big to be a raccoon. A person. On the roof.
“Hello?” Gramps’s friends sometimes made fun of my voice. I’d hated how high-pitched it was when I was a freshman and had dreamed of it getting deeper someday, but now I was a senior, weeks away from graduation, and I still got mistaken for a girl on gamer voice-chats. I’d made my peace with it, except that I hadn’t entirely because I was not happy at all with how it squeaked out over that roof. “Hello?” I tried for deeper. “Someone there?”
No one answered, so I took a step out onto the roof. Glass crunched under my feet. It was dark and it stayed dark when I slapped at the work-lights switch next to the door—they should have been tripped by the motion anyway. I found my flashlight and twisted it to wide beam and checked my feet. Smashed glass, all right, and when I swung the light around to the nearest solar bank, I saw that each panel had been methodically shattered. I took a step back toward the door, and the light beam swung up and caught the man.
He was wearing a head-to-toe suit—a ghillie suit, Gramps’s friends called them—and holding a short four-pound sledgehammer with a handle and head painted in nonreflective black that swallowed my light beam. He was coming toward me. I reflexively hit the bodycam 911 emergency switch on my screen and it sounded its “Warning, bodycam recording” alert in a warm woman’s voice that I’d chosen for its nonthreatening tone. Mostly I bodycammed when I was having an argument with someone and the calm voice was a good balance between cooling things out and satisfying California’s two-party consent rules for recording.
As he raised the hammer, I wished that I’d chosen the cop voice instead.
“Wait,” I said, taking a step back. The roof access door had closed behind me. “Please.”
“Shit,” the man said. He was using a voice-shifter, either a separate unit or part of the ghillie suit. His voice was deep as a diesel engine. “Dammit, you’re just a kid.” He used the hand that wasn’t holding the hammer to flip up his nightscope goggles and peer at me. His eyes, visible in the ghillie suit’s slit, were bloodshot and wrinkled and blue. He squinted at my light and brandished the hammer. “Shit,” he said again. “Get that out of my eyes, dammit.”
“Sorry,” I squeaked, and lowered the beam, casting it around. It seemed like 80 percent of the panels were ruined. Why had I said sorry? Force of habit. “Shit.” If he could say it, I could too. “Shit. What the hell are you doing, man?”
“You’re recording this, kid?”
“Yes. Livestreaming.”
“Good, then I’ll explain. You just stay there and we won’t have a problem. I was gonna have to make a video when this was done, you’re just saving me the trouble.” He lowered the hammer and let it dangle. I thought about rushing him, but I’m not a fighter, and he was still holding the hammer. Same for turning and trying to get out the door before he could catch up with me.
“’Kay, listen up. This world we’re in, it’s debased. America’s been rotted from the inside. First it was immigrants. You might think I’m a racist, but I’m not. It’s not immigrants I object to. It’s illegals. You want to come to America, you come in the front door, on the terms your gracious hosts here are offering. You don’t skip the line or break in through the window. That’s what a criminal does. You let in a criminal, let ’em become citizens, soon enough they’re voting for other criminals.
“You know just what I’m talking about, don’t kid yourself. The money we’re spending now? This Green New Deal? This Jobs Guarantee? These fuckin’ solar panels? Bill’s gonna come due on this. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. Chinese hoaxed us into believing in this climate garbage, then they got us to go into hock to them up to our eyeballs to buy their shiny crap, and then they’re gonna charge us interest, and our kids, and their kids, and their kids. Mortgaging their future? Shit, what future? They’re headed for debt bondage for eternity. Biblical. It’s biblical.
“All this mumbo jumbo about ‘money users’ and ‘money creators’—it’s just word games. There’re two kinds of people in this world, and it’s not ‘money users’ and ‘money creators’—it’s ‘makers’ and ‘takers.’ The makers create all the wealth, the takers elect politicians who confiscate it and redistribute it.” “Redistribute” came out like another f-bomb.
This was crazy, but it wasn’t unfamiliar. I’d heard versions of this conversation around Gramps’s place ever since I came to live with him, back when I was eight. More, I’d heard these specific words before. I pressed my recollections, tried to put a face to the words. All the faces in Gramps’s living room had a sameness, a whiteness, matching haircuts and the same Maga hats, faded and frayed. Who had said those words? I could bring the face to mind now, the rest of the face that went with those blue watery eyes peering out of the ghillie suit.
Now, the name. Mark. Not Mark. Mike. Mike! Mike, uh.
“Mike Kennedy?”
He was so surprised he fumbled the sledge, then squinted at me. I held the flash under my chin, squinting. “It’s me. Brooks. Palazzo. Richard’s grandson.”
That was when the siren blatted down on Verdugo, blatt blatt, two toots, and a crackle of PA. “On the roof, this is Burbank PD.”
He did drop the sledge then, said, “Fuck,” and produced a water pistol from the suit’s marsupial pouch. He handled it with extreme care, shedding a glove to delicately peel away a big blob of some kind of plastic or wax over the business end. His hand shook.
I knew what it was. Hydrochloric acid. It was the weapon of choice for one-on-one white nationalist killings. It worked great, because even if you didn’t kill your victim, you’d leave them with skin melted and fused like cascades of melted rubber, a reminder to everyone who saw them that even if President Uwayni took away everyone’s guns, the American resistance was still armed and fucking dangerous. Gramps and his buddies would sometimes make jokes about Medicare for All, and how it was gonna go broke paying for acid burns when the big one came. I’d always found those jokes incredibly gross, but I learned to tune them out. They were coming back to me now. I took a step back and his hand jerked and I cried out, flinching in anticipation of the stream of acid that didn’t come.
“Dammit, boy, don’t scare me. I don’t want to hurt you.”
“I don’t want to be hurt. Mr. Kennedy—Mike—you know my gramps. He relies on me. He’s getting old and frail. I’m all he has.” I was crying now. A drop of clear liquid fell from the squirt gun’s business end and sizzled on the roof. I whimpered. “Please. Just put that down, we’ll go get the cops and—”
“I’m not going anywhere. Listen, kid, turn off your camera, okay? I gotta say some things to you.”
“Mike, please—” I was crying harder now. His hand was really shaking, and his finger was on the trigger, and the gun was pointed right at my face.
“Just do it, okay?” He pointed the gun at the ground, and I found I could breathe again. I pretended to turn off my screen and triggered the sound file I had of the “Recording paused” announcement.
“All right, kid. Straight talk. I don’t expect to survive this. I knew that was a chance from the start, and it was a sure thing once you got here and sounded the alarm. I made my peace with that possibility a long time ago.” He took some deep breaths that the voice-shifter made into the sound of a wind tunnel. He pulled the ghillie suit’s mask down and exposed the rest of his face. His lips and chin were shiny with wet sweat in the reflected flashlight beam bouncing up from the roof.
“God dammit, I’m not gonna kid you, this is a stupid thing to die over, but I was gonna die eventually. But you don’t have to. You can get out of this in one piece. You can carry on the struggle.” His real voice was hoarse with emotion.
Something about his real voice and his real face made me more scared, not less. Gramps’s friends were usually just … sour. But there was often this undercurrent of violence in them, a bowstring tension that sometimes snapped. Usually that just meant yelling or throwing something or storming out and slamming the door so hard the whole house shook. But every now and then, it turned into punches, and everyone in the room would pull the fighting men apart, and once or twice there had been blood on the floor before they were separated.
I had never been in a fight, not since grade school anyway, and had never thrown a real punch. I found the idea of punching someone literally unimaginable. But I was finding it incredibly easy to vividly imagine this guy punching me.
“Mike, you don’t have to die, we can talk to the cops. This is Burbank PD, not LAPD. They’ll negotiate. They’re not gonna shoot you. Not if you don’t give them a reason to. Why don’t you put down—”
The roof was flooded with blinding light and the roar of a quadrotor as a BPD drone rose up over us, floodlights set to max. We both staggered back, hair blowing in the rotor wash, and squinted. Mike involuntarily squirted a small stream of acid that arced over the roof, then got his gun under control.
“THIS IS THE BURBANK POLICE DEPARTMENT. PUT DOWN YOUR WEAPONS AND LACE YOUR HANDS OVER YOUR HEAD. COMPLY IMMEDIATELY.”
He swore fiercely and pointed his gun at the drone.
“No!” I shouted. “Jesus, Mike, do you want to fucking die?”
He stared at me. His eyes were wild and unhinged. His mouth worked soundlessly, and then he shouted, “What the fuck does it matter to you?”
“Because—” I almost said, Because I want to fight on your side and we need you. I could have sold the line, even though I didn’t believe it. Even though he was a terrorist kook whose cause was both idiotic and terrible. I could have sold it because I’m a good actor, even by Burbank standards, where the star of the school play might be moonlighting from their job as an A-lister for one of the studios. But I didn’t say it. I didn’t want to lie to this guy. “Because there’s enough stupid death out there. Because I don’t want to explain to Gramps how I saw his poker buddy blown away by BPD on my high-school roof. Because it’s a stupid way to die. Because it won’t accomplish a goddamned thing.” I found that I was angry. God, why did people have to be so stupid? Why was I sitting around with this idiotic person having this idiotic argument, waiting for the cops to storm the roof and maybe kill us both?
“Fuck this,” I said. I stalked over to him. The drone dipped toward us, making him flinch, and I was able to grab his stupid water pistol full of acid and wrench it out of his shaking hand and send it skittering over the smashed solar panels. “There,” I said, and turned to the drone. “I’ve disarmed this goddamned idiot. Don’t shoot him. And don’t shoot me—I’m a bystander.”
The drone’s PA clicked back on. “That was really stupid, kid.”
Mike looked like he wanted to cry or punch me.
“This whole thing is really stupid,” I said. “But it doesn’t have to be violent, too.”
“We’re coming up. Lace your hands behind your head.”
Mike opened his mouth.
“Just do it,” I snapped. “I just saved your fucking life, asshole. Do what the nice police officer says.”
They burst through the roof door a minute later, and we both laced our hands behind our heads. They cuffed and searched both of us, relieving Mike of a long hunting knife and what I took for hand grenades, but which turned out to be flashbangs.
After patting me down and conferring, they uncuffed me and led me away from Mike, who was looking miserable and scared.
They took a statement from me in the cruiser, tapped my ID to their scanner, conferred a while longer, read messages on their screens that I couldn’t see—the cops all had polarizing privacy screens on their devices—and finally let me go.
The cop who opened the back of the cruiser for me was a big, jowly guy, someone who would have looked perfectly at home with Gramps and his pals, rocking a red trucker cap and complaining about “illegals.” But he was tender with me as he helped me up and asked me twice if I needed help getting home. I pointed out that I lived a ten-minute walk away—he knew that from my ID, of course—and that I hadn’t been hurt.
There had been six Burbank PD SUVs on the street when they led me down, but by the time they let me go, there were only two. The other one had Mike in the back, behind reflective windows. Even though I couldn’t see him, I could feel his eyes on me as I turned and started to walk home. It was 3:27 a.m., and I was both completely wired and completely exhausted.
I let myself into Gramps’s place by the back door, made my way back to my bedroom, stripped off, and pulled the covers over me.
Who was I kidding? I wasn’t going to sleep after that. I rolled over and hit my screen. I had a notification that my livestream had been archived and that I could toggle it private if I wanted to, but that it was also going to be subject to FOIA requests because I’d used the 911 option and it had gone straight to Burbank PD.
I reviewed the footage. It was crazy of course—the dark night slashed with my flashlight beam, the screen’s night-sight flicking off and on—but the audio was good and once things stabilized, the image was clear enough. I jumped it up to 3X and listened to Mike Kennedy in chipmunk mode spouting his crazy Maga Club garbage. Even at that speed, I picked up on stuff I’d missed, little bits of inflection and vocab, and most of all, how scared he sounded. He’d been more scared than me. I guess that made sense, because he was so sure that he was going to die. Look at it that way, I had saved his life.
And as soon as I looked at it that way, I knew it was true. I had saved his life. I’d saved a man’s life the night before. A man who had been ready to kill me. Or if he hadn’t been, he’d said he was.
The realization let something loose inside me and I started to yawn. I pasted a link to the video into my feed and dialed the syndication wheel all the way open because why not, it was freaky and everyone shares freaky stuff wide as possible.
I tapped out a message to the Burroughs High attendance office letting them know I was going to be late for school, then I put my screen down, thumped my pillow, and, amazingly, fell asleep.
* * *
I woke at noon, the house hot because Gramps had left the blinds up in the front room, and ever since the big live oak had been cut up and taken away for blight, we’d lost its shade.
I used the bathroom, pulled on shorts and a tee, and went looking for breakfast, or brunch, or whatever.
“Gramps?”
He didn’t answer. That was weird. Gramps was a late riser and he rarely got up before ten, and then he took a long time to get going, listening to his podcasts and drinking coffee and sending memes around to his buddies with his giant tablet, with the type zoomed way, way up. He didn’t like going out in the heat, either, so in the summer he rarely left the house before four or five, once the sun was low to the hills. He’d left his coffee cup in the sink and his tablet on the table, so I knew he’d gone in a hurry. He hated dirty dishes and hated dead batteries even more.
I put his stuff away and thawed out some waffles and got a big iced coffee from the cold-brew jug I kept in the fridge and started the process of becoming human.
I gobbled my first waffle before the emotional weight of the previous night settled on me. Those emotions were way too big, so big that they all layered on top of each other, leaving me with nothing but numbness.
I did the reflex thing and pulled out my screen, giving myself a brief sear of shame for my mindless screen-handling, just as I’d been trained to do in mindfulness class. That was enough to prompt me to run through the checklist: Do I need to look at my screen? Do I need to look at it now? What do I hope to find? When will I be done? I answered the questions (Yes, yes, news about last night, when I’ve looked at two or three stories), and then unlocked it, but didn’t look at it until I’d poured myself another glass of coffee.
Two hours later, there was no coffee left and my eyes hurt from screenburn. I dropped my screen, came out of my trance, and stood up.
I’d gone viral. Or rather, Mike had.
My post had been picked up, first in Burbank, then statewide, then nationally, then internationally. Amateur comedians had edited the footage into highlight reels, moments chosen to demonstrate just how idiotic and hateful he was. Someone made a White Nationalist Bingo Card where every square had a quote from Mike Kennedy. There were lots of jokes about inbreeding, hillbillies, musket-fuckers and ammosexuals, master race masturbation, senility, removable boomers—all the age- and class-based slurs that we weren’t allowed to say in school, but that everyone busted out as soon as we were off the property. It was pretty gross, but on the other hand, I couldn’t exactly argue with them. Bottom line was, Mike Kennedy had been up on that roof for no good reason, and he’d been ready to kill me to let him finish his stupid, senseless project. So yeah, fuck that guy. I guess.
I was pleased to see that I came off as a hero, with strangers around the world praising me for my cool head, saying I’d saved his life.
I put my plate in the dishwasher and wiped up my crumbs and checked the clock on the kitchen wall—I’d always loved its plain analog face with its thick and thin lines, the yellowing AC cord that came off it. It had belonged to Gramps’s own parents, and it was the only thing in the house I considered anything like an heirloom.
It was coming up on two and if I showered fast and ran, I could make my physics class. I decided to go for it, had the fastest shower in history, pulled on whatever was on the top of my dresser drawers, and sprinted for the street.
I was just jogging up to the entrance to Burroughs when I got a screen chime, which stopped me because, like all the students, I’d installed the school app that turned off audible alarms while I was on property during school hours. It wasn’t mandatory, but the punishment for having an alarm in class was confiscation, so …
I pulled out my screen as I panted by the doorway, mopping my face with my shirttail. It was a text from Burbank PD, informing me that Mike Kennedy was headed for a bail hearing in two hours, and I was entitled to present a victim impact statement, either recorded or in person. I’d known that the police could override the school app (there was a kid in my class whose parole office sometimes paged him, and the fact that he audibly dinged was just part of the package, I figured—a way to remind us all that this kid had fucked up bad), but I hadn’t expected them to ping me, let alone on school property.
I tapped out a quick thanks-no-thanks, and headed to physics.
* * *