Manipulate (Book 1, Alien Cadets)

Chapter 18

The protestors in Chicago were chain smokers. After a few hours in their company, Sam felt sure he’d lost a year of his life through smoke inhalation. They weren’t the jovial smoke-and-drink-beer types, either. They smoked with the grim satisfaction of people planning to spend their last years on a ventilator.

Sam was locked in with them in an auto body shop in south Chicago. Two older BMWs rested side by side in the main bay, and Sam wondered idly if whoever owned them was freaking out about them right now.

The rolling doors were all down and the light was murky where Sam sat, trying to be relaxed in a ratty folding chair. Three of the small car bays had been turned into cells, of sorts.  Two of them held Spo, and the last one held the family of his friend, Lucio.

Lucio was of Italian origin, and he had a large family. When Sam asked to see them the protestors let him peek through the wall of tires they’d constructed. He’d seen a number of little kids with thick, curly hair, clumped around a pale couple who looked scared.

Sam sat in the main work area now, a cavernous space, drafty and dark. It was evening, and the sky was growing dark, too, where he could see it through the cracks around the door.

The guy who’d planned this bit of protest/terrorism, Roland, paced the room slowly. He had been hyped up on adrenaline for hours and Sam figured his adrenal gland must be depleted. Despite his anger and fear, Roland’s body was slowing. Sam felt the same way. The other protestors were grouped in the lobby, watching the TV coverage of their event.

Sam rubbed his eyes and then his prickly, shaved head. That drew Roland’s eyes to him.

“You’re tired?” he asked.

“Yeah, a bit. Been a long week for me,” Sam said. During their private flight to Chicago, Greg had broken the news of Oh Li’s death. Sam had barely wrapped his mind around it when he had to shove it all aside to deal with this guy. Tired was an understatement.

Sam had been talking to Roland for hours and hours and he could read his face now. Roland wanted to believe that Sam had thumbed his nose at the Spo, that he was a potential answer to Earth’s problems. The other part of him was convinced the Spo wouldn’t allow something like that to happen. Roland suspected that the Spo arranged Sam’s “disobedience” on TV to make him a hero to the world, while he remained their puppet.

Roland stood in front of a slit in the garage door, half of his face pulsing with orange light from the emergency vehicles outside.  When he stepped into the light, his shadow stretched across the concrete floor.

“There has to be payment,” Roland said.

“I’m only a cadet,” Sam said. They’d been over this. “But I can make certain concessions.”

“What is the bloodguilt for a broken humanity?” Roland said. “What is the payment for a crushed people?”

Roland liked to talk in a grandiose way. Sam guessed he was highly educated, or at least well read, though his crew looked pretty rough.

“You expect the Spo to pay you for everything they’ve done? It’s not you they’ve wronged the most,” Sam said. They hadn’t wronged Sam the most either, though more so than Roland. It was Paolo’s family; it was the volcano survivors in Malaysia. It was Jonathan and Jia and Oh Li. He refused to list Nat.

“Do you know the concept of a wergild?” Roland asked. He rubbed a hand slowly, caressingly along the curved hood of one of the BMWs. “It’s an old Germanic term, it means payment. If somebody killed your clansman or stole your cattle, they owed restitution. Blood money. And the murderer paid, or they died. I’m part of the clan, get it? They wronged us, and they owe me.