Bram Wolfe's Arc

Chapter 2 of 5

Bram came back to the tunnel the next night with a scrap of coal in his pocket and a plan that already felt too small. He drew another black line through a painted farmer's teeth. Then another. Six murals, six marks. When he stepped back, the tunnel looked exactly as it had the night before. The same handful of workers shuffled past the same handful of walls. If the sign stayed here, it would die here. One tunnel. One story guards could scrub in an hour. Joss found him at the last mural. The painter carried his brushes in a belt loop and a jar of black under his coat. Paint flecks covered his sleeves like a rash he'd stopped scratching. He was the only man in Zeroline who had watched Bram draw the first line, and Bram still hadn't decided if that made him safe. "You're pacing," Joss said. "Six months you painted alone," Bram said. "Nobody copied you." "Nobody knew what it meant." "They still don't. And they won't, past this tunnel." Bram held up the coal. "One man with a stick isn't a rebellion. It's graffiti." Joss looked at the mural a long moment. Then he reached under his coat and pulled out a folded square of butcher paper. He opened it on a supply crate near the ration gate. Inside lay a flat tin stencil, cut clean: one straight black bar, the length of a hand. "I cut forty of these last week," Joss said. "Tin from the roof of the queue. A child can use one. Press it, brush across, lift. One second. No skill." Bram picked the stencil up. The edges were sharp. He thought of the boy who had pointed at him in the ration line. He thought of the women who had nodded and turned away. "Forty isn't a city." "Forty is forty hands," Joss said. "Each hand finds two more. I know which painters. I know which queue boys. You give me a night, I put a stencil in every district by dawn." Bram set the tin down. Above them, on the archway, a crow watched from a vent grate, thin smoke curling from a scrap of something in its beak. It tilted its head and did not fly. "Do it," Bram said. "Tonight." Joss gathered the stencils. He was gone through the side passage before Bram counted to ten. Bram walked home the long way. He slept four hours. When he came up for the morning shift, the wall beside the factory gate had a black bar through the regime crest. Two blocks on, another. On the tram bridge, a girl in a school coat pressed a tin to the rail and lifted it clean. She saw Bram's face and did not know it. She ran. The sign had left the tunnel. So had the witness who could name him, and now that witness held the map of every hand that carried it.