The Hangman's Revolution Read Free

would be proud to lay down our lives for them.”
    Witmeyer laughed, then finger-ticked an imaginary box. “Straight out of the manual, but well remembered under pressure.” She nodded at the cadet. “Now get ready, Cadet; the director is waiting.”
    Chevie shuddered. She could not help it.
    Director Waldo Gunn.
    A hero of Box’s War, awarded the Empire Cross. For thirty years the director had endured working undercover in Provence. Director Gunn was a true believer and a master assassin—who resembled nothing more than a diminutive, kindly grandfather.
    Look at the hands, the other cadets whispered as he passed in the corridor. They are darker than the rest of his skin, stained red by Jax blood.
    Chevie had only seen Director Gunn in person as he strode the academy corridors on Box’s business, surrounded by committee members and his personal guard, a phalanx of pistoning legs and swinging arms.
    I have never seen his hands.
    Forget Director Gunn’s hands. Get dressed, Cadet, Chevie told herself. Your life is at stake.
    Chevie hurriedly zipped up her regulation navy jumpsuit and high boots, tugging on a peaked cap emblazoned with a golden Boxite Youth Academy symbol. She stepped smartly past Vallicose and into the dorm.
    The Thundercats marched Chevie Savano down the academy’s long corridor, their boots drawing creaks and groans from floorboards that had long since sprung their pegs. The dormitory’s other cadets were concealed behind drawn curtains, and the only significant sounds besides boots and boards were the occasional whimper of someone with night terrors and the background drone of Colonel Clayton Box’s collected speeches, which were piped through the sound system twenty-four hours a day.
    The corridor was a hundred feet long, the length of what had once been four joined but separate terraced houses on Farley Square in Bloomsbury. Through the sash windows Chevie saw the steel edges of the Blessed Colonel’s pyramidal mausoleum, and the crimson laser glint from the all-seeing-eye mounted on its peak.
    Like Sauron, thought the second Chevie, who was hiding inside the mind of the first one. Traitor Chevie, as she had named the mind disease that was determined to get her killed.
    Sauron?
    What is a Sauron?
    The door to Director Gunn’s office was conspicuously plain, in stark contrast to the wall in which it sat. The wall was decorated with a heroic mural depicting the second round of Boxstrike, when the United States, the British Isles, and mainland Europe were brought forcibly under angels’ wings. The style was typical of the Empire, with muscled figures in profile, and fans of crepuscular sun rays. The door was a simple wooden panel, adorned with nothing more than faded blue paint.
    This door had been Director Gunn’s only modification to the building when he took office. A door transported from the guesthouse in France where Waldo Gunn had poached Jax information and personnel for all those years.
    How many now dead men have touched that doorknob? wondered Chevie as she paused before knocking.
    Witmeyer poked her with a gloved finger. “Are you nervous, sweetie? Is that it?”
    Chevie bit her lip and nodded. It was true, she was more nervous than she could remember being. In fact, she was bordering on frantic.
    I am at war with myself, she realized. How could a person win that fight?
    She flexed her fingers to stop their shaking, then once more reached toward the door.
    “Enter, Cadet,” came the commanding voice from within.
    The director knows I’m here, thought Chevie. It’s true what they say: Waldo Gunn has the sight.
    Sure, the sight, sneered Traitor Chevie. Or a camera over the door.
    Chevie curled her fingers into a fist, then stuffed it in her mouth to stifle the sob. They would execute her in the yard if she could not control herself. They would ask for volunteers from the ranks of her own class to shoot her.
    Remember DeeDee.
    Deirdre Woollen, her dearest friend since first grade,