“You would have, for sure.” I pick up a piece of straw, twist it between my fingers. “She was smarter than me. Braver too, in the ways that matter, in the ways I could never be. I could take a punch, but she could take the whole world telling her she was wrong and keep fighting anyway. During the Dark Decade, she was…” I shake my head. “She was a leader. People listened to her, followed her. She gave them hope when everything else was falling apart.”
“And that’s why they killed her.”
“Yeah.” The word comes out rough. “That’s why they killed her. She had people’s hearts, and that was dangerous. They lacked heart, you know? They could never get what she had.”
The wind whistles through the gaps in the barn walls. Outside, I can hear the distant cry of a hawk and the rustle of grass. The sounds of my childhood, unchanged by everything that’s changed. How this world moves on…
“I told you I was in Syria when it happened,” I say, unable to stop myself. “Middle of the night, middle of nowhere, and my CO pulls me aside and hands me a phone. I knew before I answered. You always know somehow. Those phone calls come with their own frequency.”
Mia’s hand finds mine again. Her fingers are cold, and I fold them into my palm, trying to warm them. I know she probably had that same moment, that same phone call, when she learned her mother and brother had died.
“I wanted to tear the world apart,” I continue. “Wanted to find every person who’d touched her, every person who’d given the order, and make them pay. But I was a soldier. I had a mission. So, I finished the tour, came home, and found out they’d already cremated her. No body to bury. No closure. Justa flag and an urn and a lot of official condolences from people who’d signed her death warrant.”
“I’m so sorry.”
I nod, but I don’t tell her the rest. I don’t tell her I know exactly what happened because I made it my business to know. Pulled every string, called in every favor, tracked down every officer who was there that night until I had the full picture burned into my brain.
Twelve officers. They sent twelve armed ‘federal’ goons to raid a twenty-five-year-old woman’s apartment at 12:48 in the morning. A no-knock warrant, something issued at the drop of the hat in those days. She woke up to flashlights and shouting and men in tactical gear flooding her bedroom, and they say she reached for her phone on the nightstand. Maybe to call 911. Maybe to call me. Maybe just to record what was happening, because that’s who Emma was. She documented everything, believed in the power of bearing witness.
Or maybe she didn’t reach for anything at all. Maybe she just sat there in her bed, hands up, waiting for the execution she knew was coming.
An agent fired three rounds. Two to the chest, one to the head.
They found no weapons in the apartment. The agent wasn’t even placed on leave. He was probably promoted. Congress did nothing, same as it ever was, and no charges were ever brought. State-sanctioned violence is woven into the country’s DNA, after all.
But I knew the truth. Everyone knew the truth. They’d been watching her, wanting her taken out ever since she delivered her speech on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial on the cusp of the Dark Decade, a speech I can recite by heart because it lives in my bones.
“They keep asking when the war will end. Syria, Iran, the forever wars our brothers and sisters have been fighting since before most of us could vote. But here’s what I’ve come to understand: the war already ended. It just changed addresses.
The surveillance. The no-knock raids. The algorithms that decide who’s a citizen and who’s a threat. The behavioral prediction systems flagging you for what youmightdo. These aren’t new inventions. We exported them first. We tested them on villages in places our news won’t name. And now, the weapons have come home.
I know what some of you are thinking. November. The next election. If we just mobilize, if we just vote harder?—
Look around you. Look at who funds both sides. Look at the defense budgets that pass unanimously. Look at the tech company contracts that survive every administration. The Democrats aren’t coming to save us. The Republicans never pretended they would. This isn’t left versus right anymore. It’s top versus bottom. And we are very, very far from the top.
But here’s what they don’t want you to remember: they tried this before. They tried it in Baghdad and Kabul, in Sana’a and Mogadishu. They had the guns and the bombs and the satellites and the endless money, and it didn’t work. You can’t occupy people forever. You can’t surveil your way into legitimacy.
So yes, it’s here. And yes, it’s terrifying. But we’re going to do what people have always done when their governments fail them. We’re going to build something new. Not inside these broken systems—outside of them. Mutual aid networks. Community defense. Real solidarity that doesn’t depend on who’s in the White House.
They’re trying to turn collapse into control. Fine. Let them. Because when the institutions crumble—and they will—we’ll already have our own.”
I first heard that speech when I was deployed, a solider who became a soldier because they didn’t know what else to do. The guilt I felt for being where I was while America was starting to crumble, the fact that it was my sister spearheading some of the movement—it’s guilt I still carry to this day.
Guilt upon guilt upon guilt.
I don’t tell Mia any of this, though, because it’s several levels too deep on a day I’ve already emptied my heart out to her.
“My father died six months after Emma,” I go on, finding my voice again. “Heart attack. They said it was natural causes, but I think he just…stopped. Stopped trying to live in a world without her.” I pause. “I almost stopped too. Would have, probably, if Julia hadn’t found me.”
Mia tenses slightly at her name. I don’t blame her.
I continue. “She came to my father’s funeral. Said she’d been watching me for a while. She had her eyes on my military record, my psych evaluations, mypotential. Said she could give me a purpose, a way to make sure what happened to Emma never happened to anyone else.” I let out a sour laugh. “I was so fucking broken by then, I believed her. I would have agreed to anything that made the pain stop. And while I knew Global Dynamix was a horrible company, they weren’t the military or US government—at least that’s what I wanted to believe. I wanted so badly to distance myself from the very people who killed my sister for speaking out.”
“What did they do to you?” she asks. “What was the procedure?”
I’ve been dreading this question, and I’m surprised it’s taken her this long to ask me about it, especially since it’s more than relevant to my profile piece.
“Theyenhancedme. That’s the official term. They took their time with it too; I was sequestered for years in their labs and facilities. All the tests and training and procedures, then moretests, more training, more procedures. Each time, they made me faster, stronger, better in every measurable way.” I hold up my hand, turning it in the golden light. It looks human and feels human because I am human, but I know what’s underneath the skin—the technology baked into my reinforced bone structure, the neural mesh that lets them monitor my brain.
