Bram Wolfe's Arc

Chapter 4 of 5

By dusk the yard wall was black with marks, and Bram could feel the crowd waiting for the next word. They had drawn their lines. Now they stood in loose knots near the gate, watching him without watching him, hands empty. A boy kicked a broken crate. Two men argued over a stripped bolt. The anger had lit, but it had nowhere to go. If he walked away now, they would burn a guard post tonight and hang for it by morning. He needed to point them at something bigger than a wall. Joss stepped in beside him, brushes still in his belt, palms still black. He kept his voice low. "They'll scatter in ten minutes. Then they'll smash the first window they see." "I know." "Tell them where to go." "I can't stand up there twice. The second time, someone matches me to the poster." Joss looked at the tower over the sheds. The horns had come back on. The ration numbers droned above the district again, steady as a clock. "Then don't stand," Joss said. "Write it." He pulled a folded stencil from his coat. It was a fresh one, cut that afternoon. Not a bar this time. An arrow, and under the arrow, three letters: TWR. "Paint it on every wall between here and the tower," Joss said. "They'll follow it. The tower is the voice. Take the voice, you take the district." Bram turned the tin in his good hand. His two missing fingers ached the way they always did before a bad choice. "They'll die on the fence." "They'll die in the ration line either way. At least this way the horns go quiet for good." Bram looked past him. A small sparrow sat on the wire above the sheds, feathers grey with ash, the same one from that morning or one just like it. It watched the yard without fear. It had lived its whole life under the horns and did not care. He took the stencil. He worked the yard first. Arrow, arrow, arrow, three letters, low on the brick where a man's eye would catch them. The workers saw him painting and did not stop him. A woman took a second tin from Joss and started on the far wall. Two men followed her out the gate with a bucket of pitch. By the time the horns pushed the eight o'clock numbers, the arrows ran three streets deep. Men Bram had never spoken to were walking the line, quiet, looking up at the antenna array against the sky. The crowd had a direction now. It moved toward the tower. Bram lowered the stencil. He had pointed two hundred angry men at a guarded building, and he had no plan for what they would do when they reached its legs.