# summary
Disregard for personal autonomy, Blood, Death/dying, Drug use, Homophobia, Murder, Racism, Trans misgendering or other transphobic depictions, Vomit // Crisis Actors

# content
Michael sips his coffee, watching the screen automatically cycle through vidfeeds coming in from across the country, lingering just long enough to hit the relevant button. He knows the dominionist rhetoric, had heard it in the media, read it when he researched this job (at least the Department for a Safe America had medical and benefits). But they didn’t even bother with the euphemisms once he began training.

“If you see a bunch of immigrants, hit the white button for ICE,” the blockheaded agent had said, sweating through his pale blue shirt and balding through his crewcut. “Muslims, hit yellow for the FBI; they’ll pass it to DHS if need be. Blacks, queers, anyone else suspicious-looking, hit blue for the police. If you see any crimes in progress, hold down blue so it sticks; you’re our witness until police arrive on scene.”

“And if you don’t see anything suspicious?” Michael asked.

“Then you aren’t looking hard enough,” Blockhead said. Then he laughed. “Naw, I’m kidding. Just hit green. Green is good.”

The feeds were filtered through machine learning algorithms, so the Watchers should get more hits than misses, but the software had no sense of context, labeling a street hockey game as a possible riot, or marking the noise from a pair of bucket drummers as likely assault weapon fire. Michael tried to do his job well, but plenty of other Watchers had itchy button fingers, like Luce who once called the FBI on a Sikh funeral procession carrying an open casket toward their temple.

Michael keeps cycling his feeds, stifling a yawn before the Manager (the camera built into his monitor) can see it. A couple of teens sitting on a low brick wall smoking? It could be weed but GREEN. Night shift workers gathering at a train station? John would probably ICE them, but Michael hits GREEN. An empty street? GREEN. A man standing at an open bus door? Michael’s finger hovers over the green button, but he waits. Instead of getting on the bus, the man pulls an assault rifle from under his duster, aims it at the driver, and shoots.

The burst of gunfire bleaches his screen white. When it comes back, blood spatters the inside of the windscreen, and the man steps onboard the bus. Michael holds down the blue button until it clicks. More bright flashes from inside the bus throw person-shaped shadows against the filthy windows.

The gunman walks calmly off the bus, dragging a woman by the hair. He’s followed by three more women, their shoulders slouched, heads bowed low in fear. Michael swallows hard: The last one looks like his sister. It isn’t her, she’s in Lawrence, and this feed is coming from Chicago, but it looks enough like her that his stomach churns sickly as he watches her step off the bus.

Michael can’t hear anything but the hum of the building’s air conditioning, but he can see the man’s mouth moving, shouting commands to the women. They visibly shake, hugging themselves, then one by one they kneel in the gutter facing the bus.

The gunman stows his assault rifle and draws a pistol. Without ceremony, without hesitation, he aims it at the first woman and pulls the trigger. Blood and gore splatter the side of the bus, marring an advertisement for The Turner Diaries, direct from Broadway.

He steps over to the next woman and shoots. And again. He gets to the final woman, the one that Michael has to remind himself is not his sister, and shoots her in the head.

Next, the gunman turns and walks away, disappearing off-screen.

Blood seeps down the side of the bus, streaking red toward the bodies in the gutter. Michael’s breathing is shallow, rapid. Hot saliva floods his mouth and he swallows.

He pushes back from his desk. Too late.

Michael sprays vomit across his monitor, his keyboard, and the little pad with its lit-up colored buttons.

“Are we clear?” Zephyr asks.

“We’re clear!” Charlii shouts from her workstation behind the camera. “Feed is cut!”

Zephyr whoops and saunters back into frame, offering a hand to Rosa and pulling her to her feet.

Fake blood runs in rivulets down Rosa’s face and is spattered through her dark, wavy hair. “You fuckin’ scare me sometimes, Zeph.”

“What can I say? I was born to play masc,” Zephyr says, grinning and holstering the prop beretta in the back of xer jeans.

Rosa helps Gillian to her feet. They peel the squibs off each other’s heads before quickly walking off. Everyone has a job to do.

“How’d I do?” Kitty asks, pulling the AR-shroud off her head to reveal pink space buns decorated with a multi-color mess of child-sized hair accessories.

“You looked like you were about to piss yourself, but that worked great for the scene,” Zephyr says, taking off xer black ball cap and fluffing up xer bright green hair. “You’re a natural, Kitty.”

“Yay!” Kitty claps her hands at the compliment. She doesn’t have to know that Zephyr says it to all the new girls. Helps keep them invested.

Zephyr takes a Russian cigarette out of xer coat pocket and lights it, leaning back against the wooden shell of the prop bus. The rest of the scene was created digitally and inserted using an AR projector December stole when they quit their last theater job.

“What’s the deal with this thing?” Kitty says, staring at the AR-shroud—basically a cotton bag with a pattern like tartan and digital forest camo had a baby. “Felt like getting black-bagged into conversion therapy all over again.”

Charlii yoinks it out of Kitty’s hand, quickly folds it, and puts it into a hardcase with the projector. “It helps us take out multiple Watchers at once,” she says. “We get basic profiles on a whole list of Watchers, and the shroud lets us change how you look when our injected feed hits their screens. We can’t customize it with too much detail, but enough to create a familial resemblance, or to make you look like a spouse, an ex, whoever. Whatever we need to get under their skin.”

“How many do you reckon we got?” Kitty asks.

“Impossible to say,” December drawls, stepping off the faux bus with a large box of lighting and pyrotechnics. Their voice is soft but effortlessly commanding, filling the entire warehouse with what seems like a whisper’s worth of breath. “Too many variables. But it was a good performance. Hopefully we poisoned a few Watchers to the work.”

Gillian and Rosa come back into the warehouse, carrying jerry cans of gasoline, easily the most expensive part of the entire show. Because it was a show and they’re all actors, performing for an audience made up of cogs in the machinery of mass surveillance. A traveling troupe, moving from region to region in Charlii’s RV, staying one step ahead of the authorities. So far, anyway. Rosa talks rapid-fire about a new yuri anime, set in the final days of the Ukraine War, before Russia dropped the bomb. Gillian nods, stoically attempting to keep her on task. Together they douse the outer perimeter of the abandoned building with accelerant, soaking wooden pallets and cardboard boxes consumed with moisture and rot.

“Nearly done?” December calls out.

“Almost,” says Rosa, while Gillian keeps working. “Reckon we got just enough to finish.”

“Excellent,” December says. “I’m starving. I don’t know why, but fake brain-meat always puts me in the mood for burgers, y’know?”

“There’s a good place nearby,” Zephyr says. “They don’t give cops free food, so we’ll probably be fine.”

“I’m not sure I have the stomach for burgers,” Kitty says, pulling a face.

“They do good poutine,” Charlii says.

Kitty beams.

Smoke from the burning warehouse snakes across the sky and blots out the moon as the crisis actors sit around two tables jammed together outside Bondi Riot, the “Aussie-style” burger bar. A fire engine screams past, sirens blaring, almost drowning out Charlii’s raucous laugh at one of Rosa’s jokes. The group jangles with adrenaline after their performance, pack-up, and hasty exit: Zephyr flicking a cigarette into a puddle of gas before they tore ass out of there.

“Not too soon, is it?” December says, staring darkly at the receding fire engine, slurping on a blue heaven thickshake, with a half-eaten beef mac and cheese burger on the table in front of them.

“No, it’ll be a proper inferno by now,” Gillian says, eyes glittering. “They’ll be fighting that one all night.”

Rosa grabs Gillian affectionately around the shoulders. “My little firebug,” she says, kissing her cheek.

Gillian blushes.

“Has anybody found a good warehouse for our next scene?” Zephyr asks.

“Uh, I was actually thinking we could try something a little different this time,” Charlii says, pushing her glasses up on her nose. “Is that okay?”

Zephyr shrugs. “Let’s hear it.”

“Don’t ask me how, but I found out this big account on queer Threads is some kind of super Watcher.” Charlii spins her laptop around so the others can see. “They call them Keepers, and they watch the people that the state’s apparatus has tagged as terrorists. Not just the ones the FBI created. The big fish. And people like us, I guess.”

“Jesus,” Rosa says. “This is good intel. Even for you.”

“Targeting one of the higher-ups? Sounds dangerous,” December says. “I like it.”

“About time we upped our game,” Zephyr says. “I’m keen.”

“If it’s a specific target then we won’t be able to make do with only basic profile information,” Charlii says, picking at the plate of gravy-soaked Kangarootine she split with Kitty. “We’re going to need intimate data.”

“You mean a honeypot,” December purrs. “Well now I’m definitely interested.”

“I was hoping Kitty might take point on this?” Charlii says. “Our target has a type …”

She scrolls through photos of the potential target posing with various partners—generally petite and significantly younger.

“Vulnerability and youth appear to motivate them,” Charlii says. “She likes to play the savior to potential partners. She’s also got a thing for anime and Harajuku fashion so I think she should find Kitty’s look particularly appealing.”

Kitty audibly gulps. She licks gravy and cheese curds from her fingers and nods, apprehensive. “I can do it. I’ve been chatting people up online and convincing them to buy me shit since I was thirteen.”

“What about the performance?” Rosa asks. “If she’s a—what, Keeper?”

Charlii nods.

“Then we’ll need something bigger than our usual one-off stochastic terrorism acts to get her attention.”

“Leave it with me,” December says. “I can already feel something percolating in the back of my head.”

Eve sits at her desk, carefully sipping her chamomile tea. A new job is flagged for her in the tracking system. A queer anarchist bookshop running a free brake-light clinic in their carpark after hours. That in itself was below her pay grade, but they’re also reported to have a small, unlicensed gun range in the basement for women and queers of every stripe. A witness reported a stockpile of pistols, shotguns, and rifles; looks like the wrong sort of militia is beginning to form.

She met her ex Xandra at a bookshop just like it, a refuge in an otherwise hostile town. But this is the job. Without it she’d be just another unemployed trans woman, unable to support her polycule.

She brings up live feeds from around the bookshop—traffic cameras, Safe America CCTV, and store security cameras linked to the Omniscience Network. Most store owners volunteered access to their feeds. And the others? They were providing a valuable service to the community and to their country, even if they didn’t realize.

Eve knows she’s incredibly unlikely to see anything actionable while on shift, but she likes to become familiar with a place she’s targeting. As a Watcher she never had the time or resources to truly study a target, but Keepers have significantly more latitude.

She pushes the live feed to one side and sets the algorithm to gather all relevant footage from the past month. The system works slow, so she takes her phone from her handbag and unlocks it. Eve scrolls through, rapidly dismissing notifications until a friend request gives her pause. The girl in the picture looks cute, with a gorgeous decora kei aesthetic and a pretty smile.

Eve opens the Threads app and accepts Kitty Grrl’s request.

“Talking to Eve again?” December says, looking over Kitty’s shoulder while holding two cups of jasmine tea. They pass one to Kitty, and she nods.

“She just seems … nice,” Kitty says. “We’ve been talking about J-fashion and stuff. She’s sending me pictures of a holiday to Tokyo she took with one of her girlfriends. Says she wishes she could take me next.”

December narrows their eyes. “Kinda strange to bring up a trip with somebody you’ve known for like, a week.”

“Two weeks, but yeah.”

“It’s been that long already, huh,” December says, sipping their tea.

The troupe are squatting in a fully-furnished McMansion in the outer suburbs of Columbus—an ugly and garish house on a street lousy with them. Most of the other homes are similarly abandoned, and the few remaining residents look as sketchy as they do.

Still, it’s the nicest space they’d occupied in as long as December could remember. Usually, they’d sleep in the RV instead of whatever dilapidated warehouse or factory the group had chosen, but here they had beds.

“I could probably speed things up if I sent some nudes. I dunno though. She’s been pretty respectful so far. Just keeps offering to buy me things. Which usually I’d like, but …” Kitty bites her lip. “I dunno. It’s making me feel funny somehow.”

December nods. “Can you close your laptop for a sec and look at me?”

Kitty does.

“I know exactly how you’re feeling,” December says. “I don’t talk about it very often, but I had an ex who was a cop once.”

“Oh?” Kitty says. “I can’t imagine you dating a pig.”

“We were like, the only weirdos in our Midwest town.” December shrugs. “I’d known her since we both were kids. There weren’t a lot of jobs around either.”

“Why didn’t you move?” Kitty says.

“We wanted to. We needed money.”

Kitty opens her mouth to speak but December stops her with a look.

“It wasn’t actually about the money,” they say. “She joined the force because she grew up in a violent family. Her mom went to the police for support. She didn’t get it. My ex thought if there was someone like her there, maybe things would’ve been different …”

December traces their thumb along the thick scar running down their left wrist, a far-away look in their deep-set eyes.

“Also, she was really nice to me. At first. She got me to talk about things I’d never told anybody else before. Stuff I still don’t talk about. She had me feeling safe, appreciated, in a way I never had while living with my family. Until things started getting hard for her at work …”

“Eve’s been asking about traumatic stuff too,” Kitty says. “She was really curious about what I went through at the camp. The solitary confinement stuff, especially.”

December nods. “Does it bother you that she’s sending people like us into places like that?” they say gently. “More importantly, does it bother her?”

Kitty sighs. “She hasn’t talked about her job at all, but I have been curious about that.”

“She doesn’t know that you know what she does, does she?”

“No,” Kitty says. “I’ve been careful about that.”

“How did she respond to what you told her about your experience?”

Kitty frowns. “I felt good about it at the time, but …” She pauses. “She seemed fascinated by it more than anything else. Wanted me to dredge up all the details.”

December drains her tea and takes Kitty by the wrists, staring into her bright blue eyes. “How did it make you feel?”

Kitty looks away. “It felt like being back there,” she says softly. “I felt … terrified. Sick with it. Then Eve comforted me.”

“I’m sorry, Kitty.”

“It’s okay,” she says, sniffing loudly and wiping tears from her eyes. “I get it. She’s like us, but she chose to side with the state. And she’s a Keeper; she deserves everything that’s coming. But …”

“But you’ve got a kind heart, which makes this hard,” December says.

Kitty nods and frowns. December holds her for a while, an unreadable expression on their face. Eventually Kitty pulls back with determination in her eyes.

“I’ll send her that one of me in all the ropes,” she says, turning back to her computer. “She keeps bringing up her kinks in conversation, so it should be easy enough to work in.”

December smiles thinly. “Good girl,” they say, patting Kitty on the shoulder. “You’ve got this.”

Eve watches, smirking, as the SWAT team breaks through the front and back doors of the bookshop, their handheld battering rams scratched and scraped from constant use. They toss handheld drones in through the openings, then pull back to cover the exits and let Eve do her work. It took weeks of training before she was competent with both the scout drones and the larger sentinels hovering on overwatch outside. Now she’s able to command the full squad with ease, assisted by AI for spatial scanning, threat assessment, and targeting. Some jobs, all she needs to do is pull the trigger.

The scout drones move quickly through the bookshop, torches illuminating bookshelves and nooks as they scan for threats invisible to the sentinels’ heat vision. There are a minimum of three heat signatures in the basement; the drones’ .50 caliber rifles are trained on center mass. The weapons are powerful enough to punch through the walls and floor, but not before visual confirmation.

With the bookshop scouted, Eve wheels in the repurposed bomb disposal robot, the slow and clunky movement frustrating compared to the swift agility of the scouts. Its treads scrape against the short pile carpet as it approaches the basement door. It automatically takes aim at the door jamb beside the lock but Eve adjusts it slightly.

“Firing,” Eve says to her empty office, just in case anything goes wrong and the recording of the job is ever sent upstairs.

She squeezes the relevant trigger on her multi-drone controller and the robot fires, punching a ragged hole through the door jamb. She wheels it forward just far enough to push the door open, then pulls the clunky machine back, her drone swarm flying in through the gap.

Gunfire erupts in bursts and blasts. Two of her drones drop, their feeds turning black before being cleared from Eve’s screen, the other feeds increasing in size to fill the empty space.

“Engaging hostile elements,” Eve says. Already she’s switched control to the sentinels, gunfire from the queer terrorists flaring bright in their thermoptics. She squeezes the trigger and the camera’s view bucks wildly with the recoil, but in the other drones’ view she sees one of the targets drop. She fires again and again.

Three bodies glow warm on screen, unmoving.

She opens her comms channel. “Hostiles neutralized,” she tells the SWAT team lead. “Secure the building.”

SWAT rush into the building, checking corners like Eve hadn’t already cleared the space with deadly force. She leans back in her chair, exhaling deeply, something like satisfaction warming her chest as the police reach the corpses in the basement and confirm her kills.

Her computer pings with a new job and Eve curses.

No rest for the Keepers of America.

“Stay put, I’ll just be a minute,” Charlii says. She exits the RV, carrying a couple of black devices she spent the past week and a half building, hunched over a soldering iron and her main laptop.

“What’s she doing?” Kitty asks, staring after Charlii as she ducks over the road.

If the house they’ve been squatting in the past few weeks is a cheap imitation of the American Dream, the house across the street is the real deal. A large, two-story home with well-tended gardens and a four-car garage.

“It’s for the show,” Rosa says, expertly rolling a joint despite the slight shake of her hands. “Intercepts for the second target’s home security, and for the scout drones Keepers use on-scene.”

“What?”

Rosa shrugs. “Charlii and December have worked it all out.”

“Okay,” Kitty says, sounding unsure. Six brand-new, boxed drones are stacked up on the RV’s small Formica table. Another part of the performance. “How does Charlii afford this stuff?”

Rosa lights the joint, takes a long drag, and exhales a thick plume of smoke toward the ceiling. “She works remote, IT. She knows some old coding language that almost no one else does, so when someone needs her, she can charge what she wants.”

“That’s cool!”

“Yep. Without her there’d be no troupe,” Rosa says. “How’d you get radicalized?”

Kitty blinks, surprised by the tangent. Though she should know better by now—Rosa switches topics as quickly as she talks.

“I was raised Christian, but instead of becoming a hypocrite like most, I actually took Jesus’s lessons to heart. Love your neighbor as yourself. The Good Samaritan. Jesus flipping tables in the temple to scare off merchants. All that stuff. Seemed like if Jesus was real, he would’ve been a leftist. What about you?”

“The first time I ever got high was with my trans girlfriend—I was still an egg, so it’s relevant. She shotgunned weed into my mouth while we watched Genocidal Organ, and I was sitting there like, ‘Yeah, this is the world, this is how it works!’” She draws deeply on the joint and offers it to Kitty, who declines. Rosa shrugs. “And I wanted to do something about it.”

Charlii clambers back into the RV grinning, her smile faltering when she smells the weed smoke. “I told you not to hot box my home, Rosa.”

Rosa looks at her sheepishly. “Sorry?”

Charlii huffs. “Just roll me a fresh one when we get back to the theater.”

“December, with all due respect, are you fucking insane?” Kitty says.

Zephyr sighs, a sense of unfamiliar heaviness on xer face.

“We can’t kill someone’s entire family,” says Kitty, laughing incredulously as she looks towards the other crisis actors for support. “Right?”

For a moment nobody else speaks, pondering the gravity of the plan December has proposed to them.

“We won’t just be play-acting terrorists, we’ll be …” Kitty trails off. “Jesus Christ.”

“We won’t be killing anyone except our target,” Zephyr finally says. “I’ll be the only one with a gun, the only one posing a threat. If our Keeper chooses to shoot his family too then …”

“We’ll simply be revealing the nature of the genocidal state that controls us,” December says, sounding completely calm. “Undermining the leviathan itself. You have to remember, they’re complicit in his violence too.”

“We’re all complicit in state violence,” Rosa says. “That doesn’t mean we all deserve to fucking die.”

“There are degrees of innocence and guilt,” says Gillian. “His children are innocent, but he personally introduced the laws giving the feds permission to detain and/or deport immigrants, refugees, and people like us.”

Rosa pouts at her but Gillian just shakes her head.

“And he constantly uses his family to promote anti-trans laws,” says Charlii. “His wife is always showing off their daughters on her tradwife TikTok, promising they’ll grow up just like her.”

“Their son is really quiet though,” Kitty says. “What if he’s like me? We know he has autism; they talk about it all the time.”

“Right-wingers are allowed acceptable collateral,” December says. “Why aren’t we?”

No one responds.

“Fuck you, December,” Kitty says, breaking down as she realizes she’s lost the argument. “Fuck you, fuck all of you!”

“I’m sorry, Kitty,” says December.

“Fuck you,” Kitty says, wiping tears out of her eyes. “I fucking hate the way you’re always right.”

“I never wanted to be right about any of this,” says December, a heavy look of sadness falling over their features. “But, if there are no further objections,” they glance toward Kitty, who shrugs and sighs, looking away. “Here’s what I need everyone to do …”

Eve had spent weeks on this group. Initially she’d been surprised at the location—a huge, beautiful house in a nice part of town, but there were empty houses just like it all over America. The interior was clean but not tidy, with all the detritus expected of six adults living under one roof, not to mention the array of bomb-making materials cluttering the rooms. They didn’t realize the security system in their squat was still running, still connected to the Omniscience Network. It was impossible to say how long this terror cell had been functioning, but that one mistake would be their downfall.

She doesn’t know their ideology, doesn’t know their targets, but it doesn’t matter. Tonight, she will put an end to the cell and whatever plans they foster.

Her sentinels hover above the two-story house, .50cal rifles aimed at center-mass of the six multi-colored blobs glowing in heat vision. SWAT waits at the corner of the block—the explosive risk too high to send in flesh and blood. This is Eve’s show.

The actors all look a little odd in their costumes and cheap, thick-framed smart-glasses, all except for Charlii with her custom frames. They’re all watching the security camera feeds from inside the senator’s house, each mirroring the movements of their “character”—the two houses don’t line up exactly, but it’s close enough to fool heat vision. Gillian is upstairs in the bathroom, mimicking the senator’s son in his bedroom, while Rosa, Kitty, and December sit downstairs on the couch, Rosa fiddling constantly with the remote for the TV that December unplugged at the wall. They can’t afford any distraction.

One of the senator’s daughters stands up and walks toward the kitchen to help her mother, Kitty moving in time with her steps. She passes Zephyr at the dining table, sitting in for the senator himself. But where the bastard has a laptop and printed paperwork spread out before him, Zephyr has her prop assault rifle and a fake, half-made detonator. She pretends to tinker with the wiring. All part of the show.

Kitty reaches the kitchen where Charlii monitors the incoming and outgoing video feeds on a pair of phones, and readies her pack of scout drones, whirring noisily inside the front and back doors on standby. She does all this while mirroring the senator’s wife preparing a meal in the home kitchen.

“The waiting is killing me,” Kitty says. “I’m gonna be sick.”

“It’ll all be over soon.”

Eve watches her feeds. The terrorist reading alone upstairs comes down to join the others. They all sit around the dining table, repurposed as a bomb-building workbench. They’re a motley group, obviously queer; anarchists probably, or antifa.

The one sitting at the head of the table stops tinkering with the detonator and pushes it aside. They appear to be talking, planning their terror attack, Eve guesses. With everyone together, there’s no better time to strike.

She moves the two bomb disposal robots into position—one at the front door, one at the laundry door at the back, shotguns ready.

“Firing,” Eve says to the empty office. She squeezes two triggers and both robots blast through their doors. Eve sends her scouts in through the openings—a black flicker passes across their feeds for a moment before they rush deeper into the house.

“It’s go time,” December says, though they’re all watching it unfold on the feeds coming in through their smart-glasses.

Kitty takes hers off. She doesn’t need to see what happens next.

Zephyr grabs the assault rifle off the table and aims it at the nearest of Charlii’s drones, programmed to mimic the behavior of Keeper scouts. The others back away from the table, raising their hands in the air, except Gillian, who runs for the stairs like the senator’s son.

Charlii watches with horror but no surprise as a heavy caliber bullet punches through the senator’s chest, dropping the man to the ground. She triggers Zephyr’s squib and a burst of blood explodes inside her shirt.

They all hold their breath, waiting.

The lead terrorist drops bloody. Eve’s scouts surround the others, sentinels high overhead, guns ready.

She squeezes the triggers again and again, dropping the rest of the terrorists.

Eve opens comms to the SWAT team lead. “Hostiles neutralized. Secure the building.”

She leans back in her chair and checks her phone, wondering why Kitty Grrl has stopped responding to her messages. On her screens she watches the SWAT cams as they run up the sidewalk and into the house.

Eve sits forward. The interior is all wrong. That’s not the house she’s been watching.

SWAT reaches the dining room where six bodies surround a table, dinner still steaming; now she notices the glow of it showing in her sentinels’ heat vision.

“This doesn’t look like a terror cell, Keeper,” the SWAT leader says. “Who the fuck did you kill?”

Her other screen shows the terrorists, dead, surrounded by bomb-making materials. One by one they begin to stand. One of them waves at the nearest drone, then suddenly the feed is cut.

“What have I done?” Eve says, before she remembers everything is being recorded.

“Do you think they’ll admit that a Keeper killed the senator?” Rosa asks.

“If they don’t, I have all the footage, all the evidence,” Charlii says. “I can release it.”

“Better yet,” Zephyr says, “let’s release our planning, our procedures. Let others join us.”

“Either way, we struck a blow against the system,” December says. “Fucking with Watchers was fun, but this is real. This is the start of the end.”

“Can you live with that blood on your hands?” Kitty asks darkly.

“Easily,” December says, “if it means revolution.”

# contentMap.en
Michael sips his coffee, watching the screen automatically cycle through vidfeeds coming in from across the country, lingering just long enough to hit the relevant button. He knows the dominionist rhetoric, had heard it in the media, read it when he researched this job (at least the Department for a Safe America had medical and benefits). But they didn’t even bother with the euphemisms once he began training.

“If you see a bunch of immigrants, hit the white button for ICE,” the blockheaded agent had said, sweating through his pale blue shirt and balding through his crewcut. “Muslims, hit yellow for the FBI; they’ll pass it to DHS if need be. Blacks, queers, anyone else suspicious-looking, hit blue for the police. If you see any crimes in progress, hold down blue so it sticks; you’re our witness until police arrive on scene.”

“And if you don’t see anything suspicious?” Michael asked.

“Then you aren’t looking hard enough,” Blockhead said. Then he laughed. “Naw, I’m kidding. Just hit green. Green is good.”

The feeds were filtered through machine learning algorithms, so the Watchers should get more hits than misses, but the software had no sense of context, labeling a street hockey game as a possible riot, or marking the noise from a pair of bucket drummers as likely assault weapon fire. Michael tried to do his job well, but plenty of other Watchers had itchy button fingers, like Luce who once called the FBI on a Sikh funeral procession carrying an open casket toward their temple.

Michael keeps cycling his feeds, stifling a yawn before the Manager (the camera built into his monitor) can see it. A couple of teens sitting on a low brick wall smoking? It could be weed but GREEN. Night shift workers gathering at a train station? John would probably ICE them, but Michael hits GREEN. An empty street? GREEN. A man standing at an open bus door? Michael’s finger hovers over the green button, but he waits. Instead of getting on the bus, the man pulls an assault rifle from under his duster, aims it at the driver, and shoots.

The burst of gunfire bleaches his screen white. When it comes back, blood spatters the inside of the windscreen, and the man steps onboard the bus. Michael holds down the blue button until it clicks. More bright flashes from inside the bus throw person-shaped shadows against the filthy windows.

The gunman walks calmly off the bus, dragging a woman by the hair. He’s followed by three more women, their shoulders slouched, heads bowed low in fear. Michael swallows hard: The last one looks like his sister. It isn’t her, she’s in Lawrence, and this feed is coming from Chicago, but it looks enough like her that his stomach churns sickly as he watches her step off the bus.

Michael can’t hear anything but the hum of the building’s air conditioning, but he can see the man’s mouth moving, shouting commands to the women. They visibly shake, hugging themselves, then one by one they kneel in the gutter facing the bus.

The gunman stows his assault rifle and draws a pistol. Without ceremony, without hesitation, he aims it at the first woman and pulls the trigger. Blood and gore splatter the side of the bus, marring an advertisement for The Turner Diaries, direct from Broadway.

He steps over to the next woman and shoots. And again. He gets to the final woman, the one that Michael has to remind himself is not his sister, and shoots her in the head.

Next, the gunman turns and walks away, disappearing off-screen.

Blood seeps down the side of the bus, streaking red toward the bodies in the gutter. Michael’s breathing is shallow, rapid. Hot saliva floods his mouth and he swallows.

He pushes back from his desk. Too late.

Michael sprays vomit across his monitor, his keyboard, and the little pad with its lit-up colored buttons.

“Are we clear?” Zephyr asks.

“We’re clear!” Charlii shouts from her workstation behind the camera. “Feed is cut!”

Zephyr whoops and saunters back into frame, offering a hand to Rosa and pulling her to her feet.

Fake blood runs in rivulets down Rosa’s face and is spattered through her dark, wavy hair. “You fuckin’ scare me sometimes, Zeph.”

“What can I say? I was born to play masc,” Zephyr says, grinning and holstering the prop beretta in the back of xer jeans.

Rosa helps Gillian to her feet. They peel the squibs off each other’s heads before quickly walking off. Everyone has a job to do.

“How’d I do?” Kitty asks, pulling the AR-shroud off her head to reveal pink space buns decorated with a multi-color mess of child-sized hair accessories.

“You looked like you were about to piss yourself, but that worked great for the scene,” Zephyr says, taking off xer black ball cap and fluffing up xer bright green hair. “You’re a natural, Kitty.”

“Yay!” Kitty claps her hands at the compliment. She doesn’t have to know that Zephyr says it to all the new girls. Helps keep them invested.

Zephyr takes a Russian cigarette out of xer coat pocket and lights it, leaning back against the wooden shell of the prop bus. The rest of the scene was created digitally and inserted using an AR projector December stole when they quit their last theater job.

“What’s the deal with this thing?” Kitty says, staring at the AR-shroud—basically a cotton bag with a pattern like tartan and digital forest camo had a baby. “Felt like getting black-bagged into conversion therapy all over again.”

Charlii yoinks it out of Kitty’s hand, quickly folds it, and puts it into a hardcase with the projector. “It helps us take out multiple Watchers at once,” she says. “We get basic profiles on a whole list of Watchers, and the shroud lets us change how you look when our injected feed hits their screens. We can’t customize it with too much detail, but enough to create a familial resemblance, or to make you look like a spouse, an ex, whoever. Whatever we need to get under their skin.”

“How many do you reckon we got?” Kitty asks.

“Impossible to say,” December drawls, stepping off the faux bus with a large box of lighting and pyrotechnics. Their voice is soft but effortlessly commanding, filling the entire warehouse with what seems like a whisper’s worth of breath. “Too many variables. But it was a good performance. Hopefully we poisoned a few Watchers to the work.”

Gillian and Rosa come back into the warehouse, carrying jerry cans of gasoline, easily the most expensive part of the entire show. Because it was a show and they’re all actors, performing for an audience made up of cogs in the machinery of mass surveillance. A traveling troupe, moving from region to region in Charlii’s RV, staying one step ahead of the authorities. So far, anyway. Rosa talks rapid-fire about a new yuri anime, set in the final days of the Ukraine War, before Russia dropped the bomb. Gillian nods, stoically attempting to keep her on task. Together they douse the outer perimeter of the abandoned building with accelerant, soaking wooden pallets and cardboard boxes consumed with moisture and rot.

“Nearly done?” December calls out.

“Almost,” says Rosa, while Gillian keeps working. “Reckon we got just enough to finish.”

“Excellent,” December says. “I’m starving. I don’t know why, but fake brain-meat always puts me in the mood for burgers, y’know?”

“There’s a good place nearby,” Zephyr says. “They don’t give cops free food, so we’ll probably be fine.”

“I’m not sure I have the stomach for burgers,” Kitty says, pulling a face.

“They do good poutine,” Charlii says.

Kitty beams.

Smoke from the burning warehouse snakes across the sky and blots out the moon as the crisis actors sit around two tables jammed together outside Bondi Riot, the “Aussie-style” burger bar. A fire engine screams past, sirens blaring, almost drowning out Charlii’s raucous laugh at one of Rosa’s jokes. The group jangles with adrenaline after their performance, pack-up, and hasty exit: Zephyr flicking a cigarette into a puddle of gas before they tore ass out of there.

“Not too soon, is it?” December says, staring darkly at the receding fire engine, slurping on a blue heaven thickshake, with a half-eaten beef mac and cheese burger on the table in front of them.

“No, it’ll be a proper inferno by now,” Gillian says, eyes glittering. “They’ll be fighting that one all night.”

Rosa grabs Gillian affectionately around the shoulders. “My little firebug,” she says, kissing her cheek.

Gillian blushes.

“Has anybody found a good warehouse for our next scene?” Zephyr asks.

“Uh, I was actually thinking we could try something a little different this time,” Charlii says, pushing her glasses up on her nose. “Is that okay?”

Zephyr shrugs. “Let’s hear it.”

“Don’t ask me how, but I found out this big account on queer Threads is some kind of super Watcher.” Charlii spins her laptop around so the others can see. “They call them Keepers, and they watch the people that the state’s apparatus has tagged as terrorists. Not just the ones the FBI created. The big fish. And people like us, I guess.”

“Jesus,” Rosa says. “This is good intel. Even for you.”

“Targeting one of the higher-ups? Sounds dangerous,” December says. “I like it.”

“About time we upped our game,” Zephyr says. “I’m keen.”

“If it’s a specific target then we won’t be able to make do with only basic profile information,” Charlii says, picking at the plate of gravy-soaked Kangarootine she split with Kitty. “We’re going to need intimate data.”

“You mean a honeypot,” December purrs. “Well now I’m definitely interested.”

“I was hoping Kitty might take point on this?” Charlii says. “Our target has a type …”

She scrolls through photos of the potential target posing with various partners—generally petite and significantly younger.

“Vulnerability and youth appear to motivate them,” Charlii says. “She likes to play the savior to potential partners. She’s also got a thing for anime and Harajuku fashion so I think she should find Kitty’s look particularly appealing.”

Kitty audibly gulps. She licks gravy and cheese curds from her fingers and nods, apprehensive. “I can do it. I’ve been chatting people up online and convincing them to buy me shit since I was thirteen.”

“What about the performance?” Rosa asks. “If she’s a—what, Keeper?”

Charlii nods.

“Then we’ll need something bigger than our usual one-off stochastic terrorism acts to get her attention.”

“Leave it with me,” December says. “I can already feel something percolating in the back of my head.”

Eve sits at her desk, carefully sipping her chamomile tea. A new job is flagged for her in the tracking system. A queer anarchist bookshop running a free brake-light clinic in their carpark after hours. That in itself was below her pay grade, but they’re also reported to have a small, unlicensed gun range in the basement for women and queers of every stripe. A witness reported a stockpile of pistols, shotguns, and rifles; looks like the wrong sort of militia is beginning to form.

She met her ex Xandra at a bookshop just like it, a refuge in an otherwise hostile town. But this is the job. Without it she’d be just another unemployed trans woman, unable to support her polycule.

She brings up live feeds from around the bookshop—traffic cameras, Safe America CCTV, and store security cameras linked to the Omniscience Network. Most store owners volunteered access to their feeds. And the others? They were providing a valuable service to the community and to their country, even if they didn’t realize.

Eve knows she’s incredibly unlikely to see anything actionable while on shift, but she likes to become familiar with a place she’s targeting. As a Watcher she never had the time or resources to truly study a target, but Keepers have significantly more latitude.

She pushes the live feed to one side and sets the algorithm to gather all relevant footage from the past month. The system works slow, so she takes her phone from her handbag and unlocks it. Eve scrolls through, rapidly dismissing notifications until a friend request gives her pause. The girl in the picture looks cute, with a gorgeous decora kei aesthetic and a pretty smile.

Eve opens the Threads app and accepts Kitty Grrl’s request.

“Talking to Eve again?” December says, looking over Kitty’s shoulder while holding two cups of jasmine tea. They pass one to Kitty, and she nods.

“She just seems … nice,” Kitty says. “We’ve been talking about J-fashion and stuff. She’s sending me pictures of a holiday to Tokyo she took with one of her girlfriends. Says she wishes she could take me next.”

December narrows their eyes. “Kinda strange to bring up a trip with somebody you’ve known for like, a week.”

“Two weeks, but yeah.”

“It’s been that long already, huh,” December says, sipping their tea.

The troupe are squatting in a fully-furnished McMansion in the outer suburbs of Columbus—an ugly and garish house on a street lousy with them. Most of the other homes are similarly abandoned, and the few remaining residents look as sketchy as they do.

Still, it’s the nicest space they’d occupied in as long as December could remember. Usually, they’d sleep in the RV instead of whatever dilapidated warehouse or factory the group had chosen, but here they had beds.

“I could probably speed things up if I sent some nudes. I dunno though. She’s been pretty respectful so far. Just keeps offering to buy me things. Which usually I’d like, but …” Kitty bites her lip. “I dunno. It’s making me feel funny somehow.”

December nods. “Can you close your laptop for a sec and look at me?”

Kitty does.

“I know exactly how you’re feeling,” December says. “I don’t talk about it very often, but I had an ex who was a cop once.”

“Oh?” Kitty says. “I can’t imagine you dating a pig.”

“We were like, the only weirdos in our Midwest town.” December shrugs. “I’d known her since we both were kids. There weren’t a lot of jobs around either.”

“Why didn’t you move?” Kitty says.

“We wanted to. We needed money.”

Kitty opens her mouth to speak but December stops her with a look.

“It wasn’t actually about the money,” they say. “She joined the force because she grew up in a violent family. Her mom went to the police for support. She didn’t get it. My ex thought if there was someone like her there, maybe things would’ve been different …”

December traces their thumb along the thick scar running down their left wrist, a far-away look in their deep-set eyes.

“Also, she was really nice to me. At first. She got me to talk about things I’d never told anybody else before. Stuff I still don’t talk about. She had me feeling safe, appreciated, in a way I never had while living with my family. Until things started getting hard for her at work …”

“Eve’s been asking about traumatic stuff too,” Kitty says. “She was really curious about what I went through at the camp. The solitary confinement stuff, especially.”

December nods. “Does it bother you that she’s sending people like us into places like that?” they say gently. “More importantly, does it bother her?”

Kitty sighs. “She hasn’t talked about her job at all, but I have been curious about that.”

“She doesn’t know that you know what she does, does she?”

“No,” Kitty says. “I’ve been careful about that.”

“How did she respond to what you told her about your experience?”

Kitty frowns. “I felt good about it at the time, but …” She pauses. “She seemed fascinated by it more than anything else. Wanted me to dredge up all the details.”

December drains her tea and takes Kitty by the wrists, staring into her bright blue eyes. “How did it make you feel?”

Kitty looks away. “It felt like being back there,” she says softly. “I felt … terrified. Sick with it. Then Eve comforted me.”

“I’m sorry, Kitty.”

“It’s okay,” she says, sniffing loudly and wiping tears from her eyes. “I get it. She’s like us, but she chose to side with the state. And she’s a Keeper; she deserves everything that’s coming. But …”

“But you’ve got a kind heart, which makes this hard,” December says.

Kitty nods and frowns. December holds her for a while, an unreadable expression on their face. Eventually Kitty pulls back with determination in her eyes.

“I’ll send her that one of me in all the ropes,” she says, turning back to her computer. “She keeps bringing up her kinks in conversation, so it should be easy enough to work in.”

December smiles thinly. “Good girl,” they say, patting Kitty on the shoulder. “You’ve got this.”

Eve watches, smirking, as the SWAT team breaks through the front and back doors of the bookshop, their handheld battering rams scratched and scraped from constant use. They toss handheld drones in through the openings, then pull back to cover the exits and let Eve do her work. It took weeks of training before she was competent with both the scout drones and the larger sentinels hovering on overwatch outside. Now she’s able to command the full squad with ease, assisted by AI for spatial scanning, threat assessment, and targeting. Some jobs, all she needs to do is pull the trigger.

The scout drones move quickly through the bookshop, torches illuminating bookshelves and nooks as they scan for threats invisible to the sentinels’ heat vision. There are a minimum of three heat signatures in the basement; the drones’ .50 caliber rifles are trained on center mass. The weapons are powerful enough to punch through the walls and floor, but not before visual confirmation.

With the bookshop scouted, Eve wheels in the repurposed bomb disposal robot, the slow and clunky movement frustrating compared to the swift agility of the scouts. Its treads scrape against the short pile carpet as it approaches the basement door. It automatically takes aim at the door jamb beside the lock but Eve adjusts it slightly.

“Firing,” Eve says to her empty office, just in case anything goes wrong and the recording of the job is ever sent upstairs.

She squeezes the relevant trigger on her multi-drone controller and the robot fires, punching a ragged hole through the door jamb. She wheels it forward just far enough to push the door open, then pulls the clunky machine back, her drone swarm flying in through the gap.

Gunfire erupts in bursts and blasts. Two of her drones drop, their feeds turning black before being cleared from Eve’s screen, the other feeds increasing in size to fill the empty space.

“Engaging hostile elements,” Eve says. Already she’s switched control to the sentinels, gunfire from the queer terrorists flaring bright in their thermoptics. She squeezes the trigger and the camera’s view bucks wildly with the recoil, but in the other drones’ view she sees one of the targets drop. She fires again and again.

Three bodies glow warm on screen, unmoving.

She opens her comms channel. “Hostiles neutralized,” she tells the SWAT team lead. “Secure the building.”

SWAT rush into the building, checking corners like Eve hadn’t already cleared the space with deadly force. She leans back in her chair, exhaling deeply, something like satisfaction warming her chest as the police reach the corpses in the basement and confirm her kills.

Her computer pings with a new job and Eve curses.

No rest for the Keepers of America.

“Stay put, I’ll just be a minute,” Charlii says. She exits the RV, carrying a couple of black devices she spent the past week and a half building, hunched over a soldering iron and her main laptop.

“What’s she doing?” Kitty asks, staring after Charlii as she ducks over the road.

If the house they’ve been squatting in the past few weeks is a cheap imitation of the American Dream, the house across the street is the real deal. A large, two-story home with well-tended gardens and a four-car garage.

“It’s for the show,” Rosa says, expertly rolling a joint despite the slight shake of her hands. “Intercepts for the second target’s home security, and for the scout drones Keepers use on-scene.”

“What?”

Rosa shrugs. “Charlii and December have worked it all out.”

“Okay,” Kitty says, sounding unsure. Six brand-new, boxed drones are stacked up on the RV’s small Formica table. Another part of the performance. “How does Charlii afford this stuff?”

Rosa lights the joint, takes a long drag, and exhales a thick plume of smoke toward the ceiling. “She works remote, IT. She knows some old coding language that almost no one else does, so when someone needs her, she can charge what she wants.”

“That’s cool!”

“Yep. Without her there’d be no troupe,” Rosa says. “How’d you get radicalized?”

Kitty blinks, surprised by the tangent. Though she should know better by now—Rosa switches topics as quickly as she talks.

“I was raised Christian, but instead of becoming a hypocrite like most, I actually took Jesus’s lessons to heart. Love your neighbor as yourself. The Good Samaritan. Jesus flipping tables in the temple to scare off merchants. All that stuff. Seemed like if Jesus was real, he would’ve been a leftist. What about you?”

“The first time I ever got high was with my trans girlfriend—I was still an egg, so it’s relevant. She shotgunned weed into my mouth while we watched Genocidal Organ, and I was sitting there like, ‘Yeah, this is the world, this is how it works!’” She draws deeply on the joint and offers it to Kitty, who declines. Rosa shrugs. “And I wanted to do something about it.”

Charlii clambers back into the RV grinning, her smile faltering when she smells the weed smoke. “I told you not to hot box my home, Rosa.”

Rosa looks at her sheepishly. “Sorry?”

Charlii huffs. “Just roll me a fresh one when we get back to the theater.”

“December, with all due respect, are you fucking insane?” Kitty says.

Zephyr sighs, a sense of unfamiliar heaviness on xer face.

“We can’t kill someone’s entire family,” says Kitty, laughing incredulously as she looks towards the other crisis actors for support. “Right?”

For a moment nobody else speaks, pondering the gravity of the plan December has proposed to them.

“We won’t just be play-acting terrorists, we’ll be …” Kitty trails off. “Jesus Christ.”

“We won’t be killing anyone except our target,” Zephyr finally says. “I’ll be the only one with a gun, the only one posing a threat. If our Keeper chooses to shoot his family too then …”

“We’ll simply be revealing the nature of the genocidal state that controls us,” December says, sounding completely calm. “Undermining the leviathan itself. You have to remember, they’re complicit in his violence too.”

“We’re all complicit in state violence,” Rosa says. “That doesn’t mean we all deserve to fucking die.”

“There are degrees of innocence and guilt,” says Gillian. “His children are innocent, but he personally introduced the laws giving the feds permission to detain and/or deport immigrants, refugees, and people like us.”

Rosa pouts at her but Gillian just shakes her head.

“And he constantly uses his family to promote anti-trans laws,” says Charlii. “His wife is always showing off their daughters on her tradwife TikTok, promising they’ll grow up just like her.”

“Their son is really quiet though,” Kitty says. “What if he’s like me? We know he has autism; they talk about it all the time.”

“Right-wingers are allowed acceptable collateral,” December says. “Why aren’t we?”

No one responds.

“Fuck you, December,” Kitty says, breaking down as she realizes she’s lost the argument. “Fuck you, fuck all of you!”

“I’m sorry, Kitty,” says December.

“Fuck you,” Kitty says, wiping tears out of her eyes. “I fucking hate the way you’re always right.”

“I never wanted to be right about any of this,” says December, a heavy look of sadness falling over their features. “But, if there are no further objections,” they glance toward Kitty, who shrugs and sighs, looking away. “Here’s what I need everyone to do …”

Eve had spent weeks on this group. Initially she’d been surprised at the location—a huge, beautiful house in a nice part of town, but there were empty houses just like it all over America. The interior was clean but not tidy, with all the detritus expected of six adults living under one roof, not to mention the array of bomb-making materials cluttering the rooms. They didn’t realize the security system in their squat was still running, still connected to the Omniscience Network. It was impossible to say how long this terror cell had been functioning, but that one mistake would be their downfall.

She doesn’t know their ideology, doesn’t know their targets, but it doesn’t matter. Tonight, she will put an end to the cell and whatever plans they foster.

Her sentinels hover above the two-story house, .50cal rifles aimed at center-mass of the six multi-colored blobs glowing in heat vision. SWAT waits at the corner of the block—the explosive risk too high to send in flesh and blood. This is Eve’s show.

The actors all look a little odd in their costumes and cheap, thick-framed smart-glasses, all except for Charlii with her custom frames. They’re all watching the security camera feeds from inside the senator’s house, each mirroring the movements of their “character”—the two houses don’t line up exactly, but it’s close enough to fool heat vision. Gillian is upstairs in the bathroom, mimicking the senator’s son in his bedroom, while Rosa, Kitty, and December sit downstairs on the couch, Rosa fiddling constantly with the remote for the TV that December unplugged at the wall. They can’t afford any distraction.

One of the senator’s daughters stands up and walks toward the kitchen to help her mother, Kitty moving in time with her steps. She passes Zephyr at the dining table, sitting in for the senator himself. But where the bastard has a laptop and printed paperwork spread out before him, Zephyr has her prop assault rifle and a fake, half-made detonator. She pretends to tinker with the wiring. All part of the show.

Kitty reaches the kitchen where Charlii monitors the incoming and outgoing video feeds on a pair of phones, and readies her pack of scout drones, whirring noisily inside the front and back doors on standby. She does all this while mirroring the senator’s wife preparing a meal in the home kitchen.

“The waiting is killing me,” Kitty says. “I’m gonna be sick.”

“It’ll all be over soon.”

Eve watches her feeds. The terrorist reading alone upstairs comes down to join the others. They all sit around the dining table, repurposed as a bomb-building workbench. They’re a motley group, obviously queer; anarchists probably, or antifa.

The one sitting at the head of the table stops tinkering with the detonator and pushes it aside. They appear to be talking, planning their terror attack, Eve guesses. With everyone together, there’s no better time to strike.

She moves the two bomb disposal robots into position—one at the front door, one at the laundry door at the back, shotguns ready.

“Firing,” Eve says to the empty office. She squeezes two triggers and both robots blast through their doors. Eve sends her scouts in through the openings—a black flicker passes across their feeds for a moment before they rush deeper into the house.

“It’s go time,” December says, though they’re all watching it unfold on the feeds coming in through their smart-glasses.

Kitty takes hers off. She doesn’t need to see what happens next.

Zephyr grabs the assault rifle off the table and aims it at the nearest of Charlii’s drones, programmed to mimic the behavior of Keeper scouts. The others back away from the table, raising their hands in the air, except Gillian, who runs for the stairs like the senator’s son.

Charlii watches with horror but no surprise as a heavy caliber bullet punches through the senator’s chest, dropping the man to the ground. She triggers Zephyr’s squib and a burst of blood explodes inside her shirt.

They all hold their breath, waiting.

The lead terrorist drops bloody. Eve’s scouts surround the others, sentinels high overhead, guns ready.

She squeezes the triggers again and again, dropping the rest of the terrorists.

Eve opens comms to the SWAT team lead. “Hostiles neutralized. Secure the building.”

She leans back in her chair and checks her phone, wondering why Kitty Grrl has stopped responding to her messages. On her screens she watches the SWAT cams as they run up the sidewalk and into the house.

Eve sits forward. The interior is all wrong. That’s not the house she’s been watching.

SWAT reaches the dining room where six bodies surround a table, dinner still steaming; now she notices the glow of it showing in her sentinels’ heat vision.

“This doesn’t look like a terror cell, Keeper,” the SWAT leader says. “Who the fuck did you kill?”

Her other screen shows the terrorists, dead, surrounded by bomb-making materials. One by one they begin to stand. One of them waves at the nearest drone, then suddenly the feed is cut.

“What have I done?” Eve says, before she remembers everything is being recorded.

“Do you think they’ll admit that a Keeper killed the senator?” Rosa asks.

“If they don’t, I have all the footage, all the evidence,” Charlii says. “I can release it.”

“Better yet,” Zephyr says, “let’s release our planning, our procedures. Let others join us.”

“Either way, we struck a blow against the system,” December says. “Fucking with Watchers was fun, but this is real. This is the start of the end.”

“Can you live with that blood on your hands?” Kitty asks darkly.

“Easily,” December says, “if it means revolution.”