“You asleep?”
“No,” Pete said. “Just thinking.”
“Say,” Sebastian said, “what about this Mia thing?”
“What about it?”
“You ever in love with her?”
“Not really. Maybe for a bit.”
“I’m sorry, dude. I’ve known her a long time. She can be, I don’t know. Selfish.”
“All good. I don’t care.”
“You know, uhh, she’s pregnant, right.”
“Yes.”
“All these young lasses around the city. Poor things. Communicating their feelings to you must be like trying to negotiate with a vending machine.”
“Funny. Let’s talk about something else.”
“Like what?” Sebastian steadied his words. “Tripoli?”
“No, like…” Pete pointed to the church and laughed. “Like God.”
“Big fan,” Sebastian said. He tried to focus on what Pete wanted to talk about instead of what he did. “Just wish He’d show up a bit more.”
“So you’re a believer.”
“Hell. Why not.”
“I used to be. Trying again.”
“What happened?”
“Life. War. Books. The usual.”
Sebastian knew he was one of those people for whom things just tended to work out. He always had been. Life wasn’t fair, but what could you do? It could all go awry any instant. Pete and Britt’s father had taken the wrong metro one morning and been exposed to sarin. A life of joy, a life of success, all gone in seconds.
“I barely remember pulling the trigger,” Sebastian said. “In the ballroom, I mean. I was hammered, you know? I’m just glad I didn’t hurt someone else. People died in there, man.”
“Mmm.” Pete was near sleep. Sebastian closed his eyes and breathed in night air. I’m going to figure out what happened to us, he thought before he drifted away, too. Somehow. In life, it’s important to understand why.
CHAPTER 14
GENERAL JACKIE COLLINS had devoted her life to country. She deployed to war zones ten times over the span of her career, for surges, for counterinsurgencies, for occupations and invasions, too. She’d spent the entirety of her adult life thinking through the intricacies and human terrains of those war zones. She possessed a gift for strategy, and through successes and failures, had honed that gift into a mental blade. She knew how the enemy would think before the enemy thought it. Jackpot had turned American special operations into the world’s greatest killing machine by demanding it be the world’s smartest killing machine, the world’s most precise killing machine. In ways known and others not, she was one of the finest generals to ever serve the republic. She was tough, and resilient, and thorough. More than anything, she planned. Nothing was done without knowing possible effects, and the possible effects of those effects. Jackpot didn’t react. She anticipated.
The American citizenry didn’t care about any of that, though. War, peace, generals, privates, army, legion, it was all the same, obscure and faraway, foggy and notional. Service. Sacrifice. Et cetera. They paid the war tax, mostly. They knew kids who went to battle and came back, sometimes. They remembered kids who went to battle and didn’t return, sometimes. They watched the news to learn Something Had Happened Again, less than they should have. General Jackie Collins: credentialed, yes, impressive, yes, knowable, not really. And, in star-spangled truth, lady generals threatened some who’d never gone and borne the battle themselves. What did she know that they couldn’t intuit from the stories, from their being, from the testicles hanging between their legs? Through many decades of foreign war, the citizenry had been told not to concern themselves, not to scrutinize, not to engage or peer too deeply. Clap, yes, believe, yes, care to question, no. The people were good patriots. They met that duty.
How to bridge the divide, then? How could someone of Jackie Collins’s exacting background and worldview earn the everyman vote? It mattered in a democracy. It mattered a lot.
* * *
Knights Stadium was either half-full or half-empty, Mia thought, a full-scale Rorschach test. The afternoon sun halved the stadium into shadows and light, remnant heat sludging the fall air. Fans ambled through the bleachers with the vigor of sloths. They’d been lucky to get the general this ceremonial first pitch. The Yankees hadn’t returned any calls, and neither had the Knights until someone on the Council of Victors contacted the owner. The Council wasn’t supposed to get involved in political races—it was in their charter—but Roger Tran had told the staff not to worry about it.
“Worry about everything else,” he’d advised. “Especially money.”
Twenty games out of the pennant race and in their season’s final home stand, the Knights players lined up for the anthem, mirroring the fans’ torpor. From the owner’s secondary box, they looked to Mia like outsize children—cartoon uniform colors, big heads and long arms that didn’t fit the rest of their bodies, a strange inability to remain still for even ninety seconds. That many of the players were younger than her only occurred to Mia as she watched them fidget.
She’d always found professional sports bizarre. It was tribalism without purpose, expression for the sake of nothing but itself. Both the soldier and athlete in Mia felt separate from those standing beside her in the box, and beneath her in the bleachers. It was more distance than disapproval. Why devote so much to something you couldn’t impact?
Her hand lay across her heart as the anthem droned. Mia looked down at the clean green field and tried to understand. Was it the guise of fairness? That’s what Jesse said. That sports provided equal opportunity, or at least the possibility of it, in ways that life never would. But of course that was false. The Yankees’ payroll was three times that of the Knights. The Knights’ star was a brawny Cuban outfielder. He’d quintuple his current salary in the off-season, either moving uptown to the Yankees or far beyond to one of the California squads.
And he’ll deserve it, Mia thought. Because that’s how the game works.
Knights Stadium sat in a soft basin in Ash Valley, built in the sixties on land Mia’s grandfather remembered as dumps and mechanic shops. The franchise had served as a redheaded stepchild for the community since; it belonged to the outer districts and lower denizens, to anyone who objected to the empire in Empire City or scoffed at the City in the same. It’d made the World Series three times, won it zero times, and missed the playoffs twelve years running. Mia’s family were Yankees fans, of course. She could recall visiting that baseball cathedral many times growing up. Had they ever trekked out here? We must have, she thought. At least for a concert. But she couldn’t place one memory. It was like it’d never happened at all.
The anthem ended to subdued applause and a few lost shouts. Mia exchanged looks with the other staffers in the box and focused on the bottom of the diamond, where General Collins was walking out to the mound, back straight, hand aloft. She looked settled on the jumbotron, not too detached, not too friendly, either—she’d spent the morning finding that balance with a consultant. She wore a navy-and-gray Knights windbreaker with suit pants, and white high-tops the consultant had suggested.