People begin to ask questions. What does it mean to be Incorporated? Is this what I want? Is this what you want? Some answer yes. Some answer no. Some simply hum, thoughtful, and ask more questions still.
It’s an unmitigated disaster for the Office of the Propagandist.
If I fancied myself a folk hero, I’d sign everything Scheherazade, but I wish to be shot by Incorporated soldiers even less than I wish to be a folk hero, which seems like a troublesome business to begin with. Even so, the Propagandist doesn’t take long to catch on. One day, the bodega owners tell me not to go to work. I launder my week’s paycheck through a dummy side hustle, then transfer the whole thing into their account. They prepare a cot for me in the basement.
When I hear booted footsteps hurtling down the cellar stairs, I shut my eyes. I imagine the shine of Incorporated epaulets. I hope against the worst, but that doesn’t mean I don’t prepare for it. I wonder if the bodega owners are safe. I hope so. I hope they escaped, and grow fat, and old, and happy, and spend every coin in my paycheck.
But when I open my eyes, I see no epaulets. Only a wraith in a low-slung hat and a blood-red scarf, leaning on the bannister. “You’ve made me into quite the legend,” says the insurgent.
I’m on the cot, still, and pull my knees into my chest, self-protective. “I thought you were dead,” I inform him.
“Curiously not,” he says cheerfully. “The way illicit media goes on, you’d think there were a hundred of me, collectively immortal.”
“Rebels do a shit job of recruiting, if you only have a hundred men.”
“Some of us are women too.”
I curl my arms around my knees. “Why are you here?”
The revolutionary shrugs. “Why did you make up all those stories about me?”
“The Propagandist told me to. He wanted everyone to be afraid of you, so they’d understand why people need the Incorporated. I don’t think I did a very good job.” I try to make out his expression through the scarf. “The stories were never really about you, anyway. Like I said, I thought you were dead.”
“You leaked them, though,” he presses. “Those stories the Propagandist asked for, the ones he didn’t like. That’s why you’re in trouble now, right? You must have known the risk. Why did you do it?”
Because I’m sick of ultimatums. Because I’m tired. Because I got lonely, and wondered if perhaps I shouted into the dark, someone else—anyone else—might shout back.
“Even if you’re made-up, or doomed, or dead,” I say at last; I’m thinking of princes and paupers, children frightened and soldiers defiant, questions whispered from ear to ear to ear, “you could exist. I figure people ought to know you’re possible.”
The insurgent doesn’t speak for a while. In weeks and months and years that follow, different versions of what happens next will emerge. In one story, he will thank me and depart, a ghost once more, never to be seen again. In another, Incorporated soldiers will storm the bodega basement and finish us both in one great spray of gunfire. We’ll die bloody, my revolutionary and I, fingers entwined, just like a film scene.
But in my story, the one unfolding right now, the one that’s true, he offers a hand, half-gloved, human skin peeking out from dark wool, and just says, “Come on, then. People ought to know you’re possible too.”
We emerge from the basement, to a war still raging. But as we climb out the bodega door through sleet-covered streets, that great wool scarf whips like a crimson banner between us, blending our shadows dark against the fresh-fallen snow. We run with winter nipping at our skin, and for just a moment, defiant of death, fear, and gravity itself, we fly.