Evenfall (117 page)

The sky was dark and gloomy like the other paintings, but in this one he could see far in the distance, tiny, insignificant-looking, and lined up like little ants marching toward food, there were people in all black headed toward an unknown destination.

Sheets of paper were caught in a moment of a twisted dance through the air, many of which were on fire; dull red the color of blood eating away at the edges and obscuring the history and memory of the people whose lives were represented. Most of the sheets of paper were twirling at angles but on a few he could tell there was very small writing although he couldn't read it because most of the sheets were shadowed, too dark. Behind it all, the sun stood out in a brilliant golden hue, intense light sparking off bits of the buildings, the people below, highlighting some pieces of paper so words could be read more clearly.

One in particular was closest to him and after a moment he realized from the way it was angled and the particular pattern of the torn edge that it actually came from a journal strewn by the bed in the skyscraper. He stepped in closer to read and realized that it was an excerpt from a letter; it read, 'Dear son, Time is shorter than I'd hoped. All I can do is sit here, writing, knowing you will never have the chance to read this, to know what happened here, to know how I felt. Knowing I will never see you smile or hear you laugh again, that you will never ask me another question. I wish I would be coming home to you but I know there is no--'

The fire had eaten the rest.

"If you have questions, please ask," a voice said suddenly behind Boyd and he, unable to keep from thinking of his father between that letter and the line of people in black far below, looked over, startled.

The artist Toby stood next to him, a somber smile on his face, his dark hair pulled back in a ponytail to reveal his hazel eyes. When Boyd only managed a slightly confused, "Oh, thanks," Toby looked past him to the painting.

"It is a small departure from the others, yes? We painted that first before we focused on landscapes instead," Toby explained.

"Oh," Boyd said then turned back to the painting. "Why'd you change?"

Toby was silent a moment. "Too personal."

Boyd blinked at the answer and held one hand up like he'd seen Reed do when he thought he was encroaching on personal territory. "Oh-- Sorry, man. I didn't mean..."

Giving him a startled look, Toby shook his head. "Ah, sorry. Not for us, for the lives we show. The city has more lives to exploit and we did not want to disrespect them like that. We realized it was more important to show humanity contrasted to nature, the overall feel, you see?" His expression turned more pensive as he studied the cityscape. "Those resting in nature, where they should be safe in their afterlife, are still haunted by the mistakes their brethren made. Here, they find no nature."

"I dunno about that," Boyd said, studying the damage the war had wreaked. "They found human nature." In his peripheral vision, Boyd could see Toby's eyes narrow and the way he studied him, the alert tilting of his head. Silence briefly fell between them as Toby studied him and Boyd refused to look away from the painting.

"I saw you reading the letter," Toby said finally, gesturing toward the letter from the father to the son. "What do you think the next word was?"

Considering that for a long moment, Boyd finally decided that Kadin's answer would have been the same as his. "One."

"No... one?" Toby asked, seeming like he was trying to prod Boyd into more details. But Boyd only nodded and looked over with a one-shouldered, lazy shrug. "No one to what?" Toby inquired after a moment of waiting.

"No one nothing. That'd end the sentence. Why," he asked curiously, "what's it supposed to be?"

"There is no answer," Toby said, shaking his head. "I have heard 'hope,' 'help,' 'escape,' but not yet 'one.'"

Boyd didn't really know what to say to that so he shrugged. "So, how'd you get that brilliant color for the sun, anyway?"

Toby smiled at that and that led into an extended discussion regarding a few tips for painting and how to get the proper colors. Boyd was honestly interested in the answer so he asked for several details, committing the answers to memory in case sometime in the future he got ambitious and attempted to paint again. He stayed with Toby for a bit until the other admirers started overrunning Corrina. Toby eventually bid Boyd farewell to go rescue his wife from the inundation.

Boyd couldn't help his gaze lingering on the pictures once more, focusing on the cityscape and the distant stream of people passing through the streets like ghosts. It made him remember the smell of match smoke, the flickering of candle flames around him, his mother's fingers curled around his hand as she silently led him down the street toward the large memorial service they were holding for everyone who had died in the second wave of bombs.

He looked away decidedly after a moment and put the thought out of his mind as he walked around the rest of the center, studying the other pieces of art. When he saw Atonement with the image of a soldier standing in an ashen field, looking as though he didn't know where he was headed or where he had come from, knowing only that blood surrounded him, he'd thought that he could see Sin in that painting, in that soldier. He hadn't said anything or spoken to the artist, though; by then, it was time for him to head to where Janus would be meeting.

Boyd didn't know what he'd expected when he'd walked into the Northeast wing, but it wasn't what he found. The room was very open and decorated with warm colors, with a high ceiling and a raised stage toward one end. Pictures of flags, scenery from various countries, and maps lined the wall, representing the majority of the population of Earth regardless of any stance in the war. Tables were arranged across the room in a manner that gave the maximum seating with minimum clutter, allowing plenty of room for people to flow between. Several of the tables had simple white clothes covering them, with a pitcher of cold water and glasses available for anyone who wished to rest for
a while
. There were outlets with opened covers that were installed in the floor so that each table had access to electricity and, Boyd presumed, the internet. The covers appeared to be the color of the floor, which indicated that when closed it would not be apparent that they even existed. It would have been an amazingly expensive bill if everyone actually utilized the outlets at once, so Boyd doubted the room was used for much other than high-class conferences in which the attendees were those who were rich or powerful enough to still use and feel the need to bring their personal laptops.

Technology had become something that was inconsistent; it was seen very prevalently in some forms, and in others it had become rare. It was not uncommon for people to have computers, but it was less common to see people walking around with laptops. Part of the reason was that they were very expensive and difficult to maintain; even if the owner had batteries, electrical outlets to charge the batteries were not always available. The internet was not available across the globe and many of the landlines had been destroyed and never fully rewired after the bombs. And although wireless networks were found in wealthier, fully functional cities, it was still rare everywhere else. Not to mention, with all the scavengers around it would be stupid to visibly be carrying something that could sell for thousands of dollars to the right buyer.

Beyond that, in the wrong country words and recorded information could be lethal. If there was belief that a person was a terrorist, sympathetic to past enemies, or in some manner a threat to those around them, there were quite a few places where that person would not live long. In some areas of the world, the very act of carrying something with so much identifying information that could so easily be stolen was tantamount to signing a death warrant. This area of Mexico was luckily not such a place. Even so, it was a little strange to see a room apparently made specifically for the usage of laptops post-war.

Janus drew support from across the world and that fact was certainly represented by the people milling about. There was no particular stereotype for the demographics; they were varying ages, ethnicities, physical descriptions, gender, even how wealthy they appeared to be judging by the way they dressed. It was well done, actually; if Boyd did not know what the conference was for, he would not have guessed that it was a room full of rebels. The only thing conspicuous to Boyd was the absence of even a single target they were there to assassinate, but he figured they would just be coming later. The speech wasn't scheduled until a few hours into the conference, and the leaders would have to be stupid to spend too much time in one place for fear of an attack exactly like he and Sin had planned. Even if the rebels didn't know they were there, it didn't mean that the event couldn't have drawn others in with similar goals.

Although Boyd knew that there was supposed to be a speech later in the conference, which he assumed would take place on the raised stage, he didn't hear anyone talking about it. It made sense as the present Janus representatives wouldn't want to pin down the exact time the leaders would be there. No one but Janus supporters was supposed to know about the conference but Boyd knew that if he were in their position, he still would take precautions just in case. In the context of Janus and the governments they rebelled against, it was in its own way war.

To blend in and gain information, Boyd spent a lot of his time walking around talking to people. There wasn't much else to do in the room; it wasn't like in the South wing where there was art to view and the artists to speak to. The organizers couldn't very well put out pro-Janus materials on tables for people to browse through so instead everyone was basically mingling.

Some were exchanging stories of past successes or bragging about missions that had everything go wrong but still were somehow pulled off perfectly. Others were talking about the people they had lost in the war, the friends and family that were now dead due entirely to countries with too much greed in the people in power. Boyd saw people representing every major country from the war, which was expected but no less quelling of a thought. Even if Janus was a rebel group that originated in America against the American government, it was amazing how quickly and powerfully its voice had spread.

Not everyone in that room was necessarily against the American government; many of them were more interested in their own government and wanted Janus' support and help to grow as strong as they had, to pose as much of a threat in their homeland as Janus had in America. With the amount of power Janus was steadily building, it made Boyd wonder what would happen if they decided to stage their own war, worldwide, against the countries that their factions were in.

If every government in the world that Janus felt was corrupt was attacked at the same time in an organized manner by their constituents, then most likely even the allies of the afflicted countries would not be able to help fast enough, or give enough support. It wasn't necessarily that Janus had such a huge population, although they certainly had a large following, but more that of all the rebel groups Boyd had ever had contact with or heard about, they seemed to be the most intelligent and cunning. They were determined down to the last soldier and the people in power were very good at what they did.

What Janus offered to the masses was hope, salvation, the power to stand against those in power. Walking through that room and listening to the conversations, it almost seemed like Janus was a religion, an ideology, something that brought people together in a way that didn't seem like a motley crew joined for one goal, but rather a gathering of individuals who all had their own goals that just happened to coincide with each other.

It was a bizarre thought and not something Boyd could entirely relate to.

He didn't think he had ever been passionate enough about anything in his life to have reached that same level of belief in anything, let alone a better world. And for all of Janus' pretty words and stirring ideology, they were still just a group of humans forming what basically equated to a cult following. For all that they had formed from idealistic college students -- probably the very same people who marched in the peace rallies -- the fact was they still killed people, and that included innocents. It wasn't that Janus targeted innocents, but it wasn't like the government did either. Sometimes bystanders were caught in the crossfire of battles between groups with differing views.

Janus' intentions were not absolutely pure or selfless; even if many of the people who joined had lost someone in the war or were angry that lives were lost at all, they had ultimately ended up creating their own group that was vying for control just like any other founding government. They had their own rules, regulations, they had their own laws. They probably had their own punishments for those who broke them. In a way, they used the people to spread their word, to gain further power and support, to try to encompass the world and from what he could see and hear from the people at the conference, it was working.

From what Boyd could tell, most of the representatives from the smaller rebel factions were actively trying to compete with each other as to who had the most successes. Many people were crowded around tables, showing off schematics and information on laptops or papers that some of them had brought. In some cases, it looked as though smaller factions were discussing their territories and even perhaps ways to merge groups or shift the boundaries to be more convenient for them. As a representative of 53, especially as Kadin Reed who was in upper level support, it was Boyd's job to basically do the same. And as a field agent from the Agency, it was his job to also find as much further information as he could on Janus; its structure, its people, everything. Unfortunately, he wasn't hearing anything he didn't already know. The Janus representatives seemed to be pretty low-level; they basically knew the goal of the group and a few minor details that the Agency had learned long ago, and they spouted nothing else. Even when Boyd talked to several of them casually and overheard other conversations, they would say nothing of import. He did absolutely nothing to imply he was anyone but Kadin Reed or had any interest beyond what Kadin would have, but he was not having much luck.