Live in Infamy Read online

  Soon, Ren and his father crossed into the nicer part of town, the part built for the tourists. The scuba shop and souvenir stores had closed for the season, but a few places had remained open, like the posh Boulevard restaurant where Ren’s cousin Marty worked and the fancy realty office that boasted a cheery sign filled with photos of oceanfront homes. In the summer months, White Crescent Bay would be crammed full with Japanese families fleeing the hustle and bustle of San Francisco or New Tokyo. They’d come for the soft sand and the sweet air, and they’d stay for the picture-perfect California afternoons.

  But right now, no one was smiling and hardly anyone spoke. There hadn’t been one of those perfect days since the Axis won nearly eighty years ago.

  Down the street the police station loomed ahead, and Ren noticed the latest Wanted signs nailed to the bulletin board out front.

  “Looks like they put up new artwork,” Ren whispered, but his father only grunted.

  Unlike his dad, Ren had always taken interest in the Wanted posters and he looked over the newest ones. Each poster displayed a pencil sketch or a black-and-white photograph of the criminal in question, followed by the charges and reward:

  JŌSEI TODA: Wanted for blaspheming the emperor. Reward: ¥80,000

  TIMOTHY ELDRIDGE: Wanted for approaching Alcatraz prison via boat. Reward: ¥240,000.

  JULIA CHIN: Wanted for harboring an illegal Anomaly. Reward: ¥500,000.

  As the rewards rose in price, so did the size of the posters. The last two took up the entire height of the board, both of them taller than Ren himself. The first one showed a photo of a sharp-eyed girl with short black hair. The picture was grainy, but Ren could make out a smudge on the girl’s cheek. Mud, maybe? Or blood.

  ZARA ST. JAMES: Wanted dead or alive for murder. Reward: 10 million reichsmarks, to be dispersed by the Nazi Intelligence Office in the Eastern American Territories.

  Ren raised a brow. They’d upped the reward yet again, but he had been expecting that.

  The Nazis would pay any price to hunt down this sixteen-year-old girl named Zara St. James — and for good reason, too. Three months ago, Zara had done the unthinkable: She’d infiltrated the White House and assassinated Dieter Hitler himself, the grandson of Adolf and the Führer of the Third Reich. Following the war, the German Empire had taken over a hefty portion of the globe — from Western Europe to North Africa and across the Atlantic to the eastern half of North America — but the Nazis were struggling to hold on to their slice of the American pie. As Dieter’s generals wrestled for power, an insurgent group called the Revolutionary Alliance had rebelled against the Nazis and instigated the Second Revolutionary War, taking over Georgia and Florida and quickly gaining ground. Unsurprisingly, Zara was one of the leaders of the Alliance, and now she was the most wanted criminal in all the Eastern American Territories.

  But someone else held that title here in the west.

  Ren’s eyes landed upon the last poster on the bulletin board, the biggest of the bunch. This one didn’t have a photo or even a pencil sketch of the criminal, merely a giant question mark with a bare-bones description:

  THE VIPER: Wanted for treason and sedition. Reward for any substantiated tips: ¥550 million.

  Ren stared at that staggering amount, 550 million yen. That was double the reward money from a month ago, and this reward was only for a tip.

  The Empire of Japan was getting desperate to arrest the Viper, but Ren doubted that they’d find much of anything. For one thing, no one knew what the Viper looked like. He could have been young or old, short or tall, black or white or brown or a blend of races. Some guessed that he was a she, while others ventured that the Viper was actually a group of people sharing one title.

  The Viper’s identity might have been anyone’s guess, but everyone in the WAT had read his or her writing. The Viper’s essays had been printed on pamphlets and dispersed through illegal newspapers. They were shared up and down the coast, memorized, and repeated. They’d been spray-painted on buildings and chanted at strikes, the song of the oppressed:

  Liberty unto death.

  Together we stand. United we fight.

  And most frequently: In the darkest of nights, we strike.

  Already there were whispers around town about what the Viper would say next. Call for more strikes? Encourage an attack?

  An elbow dug into Ren’s side. “Move along!” a patrol shouted into his ear.

  The wind kicked up and Ren obeyed the command, letting the soldier herd him with prods and barks, walking the path that led down to the beach where sand pelted his forehead and scattered through his unruly hair. Ren tried to shuffle forward, but there was little room to move. The whole town had arrived to watch the execution — two thousand strong — and the crowd had spread so far down the coast that the soldiers had set up digital viewing screens along the shore, mounted against the rocks.

  For a few minutes, Ren watched the waves somersault over the shore before he dared a glance at the tallest cliff, the same one where his mother had spent her last moments. Nausea hit him like a punch and he stared back out to sea. He hadn’t been here in years, and his first instinct was to run far away from this place and its awful memories.

  “Close your eyes if you need to,” said Mr. Cabot. He tried to wrap an arm around Ren’s shoulders, but Ren shook his head. He wouldn’t run away and he wouldn’t throw up his meager lunch. If his mother could face death with her head held high, then he could stand on a beach without getting sick. He had to stick this out.

  Grinding his teeth, Ren looked at the cliff again. A camera crew stood where his mom had knelt years before, busily checking their equipment to prepare for the live feed on Channel Ten. An execution like this was required watching aross the Territories — it was an actual law — and the WAT would soon grind to a halt. The factory belts would stop rolling, the field laborers would get sent indoors, and the schoolchildren would set down their pencils to turn their heads to the state news.

  And Ren envied them for that. They could watch the killing through an old black-and-white TV instead of standing here on the beach, forced to listen to the fresh screams and smell the warm blood. But this is what he got for residing in White Crescent Bay, the nearest town to Fort Tomogashima and home of the killing cliffs. Apparently, this charade made for an excellent backdrop for the cameras — the cliffs and the sea and the silent submissive crowd — and it had turned into a morbid WAT tradition. The first executions had taken place here a month after the war ended and were broadcasted over the radio to stun the Americans into compliance. Later on, the killings were shown on television whenever the Empire needed to remind everyone who was in power — and who wasn’t.

  “Any idea who it’ll be this time?” said a woman next to Ren.

  “Probably a murderer,” said the man beside her.

  “Nah, it’ll be someone like Abel Quirk. I’m sure of it,” said their friend.

  Ren stiffened. He knew that name well, and a memory flooded his mind: a young father up on the cliff, pleading for his three young daughters. Ren had attended school with the Quirk girls — the middle daughter, Tessa, was a few grades above him and the youngest, Hannah, was in Ren’s class — but now the whole family was gone. Mr. and Mrs. Quirk were dead, and their girls were never heard from again. They had become a cautionary tale of speaking out against Imperial Japan, just like Ren’s mother.

  A soldier stood atop the cliff with a bullhorn in hand. “Attention! Crown Prince Katsura will soon make his arrival!”

  All conversation halted on the beach. Mr. Cabot stared blankly at the horizon while Ren crossed his arms before uncrossing them, unsure what to do with them. Everything about this day felt so wrong — the crowd gathered at the beach, the soldiers with the rising sun on their arms, and the televised execution that he would be forced to watch. But if Ren wanted to protest any of this, he would end up like the Quirks or his mom.

  So Ren bit his tongue. He breathed in deep and dug his shoes into the sand and
tried not to think about the anger prowling inside him like a caged snake.

  Coward, he thought to himself.

  But this was life in the WAT.

  This was reality under the Axis’s thumb. The America that Ren believed in had withered to sand years before.

  And now came the wait to see who the Empire would drag to the slaughter next.

  It was nearly time to start the afternoon events.

  Even the winds calmed into a weak breeze, as if the atmosphere itself was holding its breath for what was to come.

  The crowd began to fidget, but everyone went motionless again as soon as the beating of propellers drummed into people’s ears. Ren spotted a black helicopter rising from the enormous military complex down the coast, built on top of the white cliffs. The Japanese called it Fort Tomogashima, but the Americans had long ago nicknamed it the Fortress.

  The Fortress was a hulking thing, perched high on the tallest peak and surrounded by a tangle of barbed-wire fence. Crown Prince Katsura lived inside that metal nest, along with hundreds of young Japanese military cadets. These weren’t ordinary cadets, either, who would become the grunts patrolling the beach or badgering shopkeepers for their rental papers. No, these were the cadets of the Ronin Elite, who stood upon the highest shelf of the entire army — because every single Ronin possessed a very special skill.

  Mr. Cabot leaned into Ren. “Do you see Marty anywhere?”

  Ren glanced around them, but the crowd was too thick to spot his twenty-five-year-old cousin. He wasn’t worried, though. Marty Tsai had taken care of herself for years, and she preferred it that way, like a scrappy stray cat who refused to be domesticated. She’d come around every few weeks, usually at dinnertime, with a bottle of sake that she had pilfered from the restaurant where she worked. Mr. Cabot had always refused the bottle, and his lips would pull taut whenever Marty inevitably brought up the latest news about the revolution out east. But Ren liked listening to his cousin. She reminded him of his mom, and she even looked like her, too, which made sense since Ren’s mother and Marty’s mother had been sisters.

  The helicopter soared over the beach and released it contents onto a landing pad on a nearby bluff. The crown prince’s staff popped out first, followed by his personal bodyguard, Major Endo. Upon her arrival, the crowd collectively shrank back. Endo wasn’t frighteningly tall or powerfully muscled; she was just a petite woman in her late twenties, with an ordinary face that would get lost in a crowd. But her blue Ronin uniform set her apart from the others on the cliff, not to mention the absence of artillery on her body. A small black pistol rested on her hip, but aside from that she carried no weapons. No standard rifle. No knives. Not even a can of pepper spray. She had no need for them.

  Finally, Crown Prince Katsura stepped into the light. His uniform, a charcoal gray, hung loosely off his slender frame, as if he had stolen the clothes from an older brother’s closet. He squinted in the bright sun, looking like a lost tourist rather than the most powerful man in the WAT.

  The cameras started rolling, and the television screens on the beach flickered to life. The broadcast began like it always did, starting off with the imperial anthem while images of national landmarks faded in and out of the telecast: the Royal Summer Palace in New Tokyo; the National War Museum in downtown Seattle; the Shinto shrine in Phoenix, which honored the very first emperor of Japan; and finally the Golden Gate Bridge and the rocky prison island called Alcatraz, home to over a hundred American dissidents who would never know what freedom felt like again.

  As soon as the anthem ended, the monitors displayed a portrait of the emperor himself, dressed in a military uniform that boasted golden epaulets and an array of medals, even though he’d never stepped foot on a battlefield. The emperor wasn’t a military leader and neither were his predecessors — they had their generals take care of that — but the emperor had always been the head of state, the father of all Japanese, and the guardian of the Chrysanthemum Throne. These days he was too frail to leave his palace in Tokyo, but Ren had long felt the emperor’s presence across the ocean, especially because his son the crown prince bore a striking resemblance to him.

  Finally, the feed went live. The cameras panned over the waves and up the cliffs and came to a stop on Crown Prince Katsura. He was a couple of years older than Mr. Cabot, but his hair lacked any gray and his cheeks had remained smooth, likely due to a healthy diet and a flock of expensive doctors that his subjects could never afford. Given his status, no one would’ve blamed the crown prince for sending one of his generals to give the announcement today, but he had decided to take a more hands-on approach to ruling than his forerunners.

  “To our good and loyal subjects of the Western American Territories, and to those who may be watching this broadcast across the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” said the crown prince into his microphone, “I speak to you today with a troubled conscience.” As usual, he wore his round, gold-rimmed glasses, which made him look like the political science professor he had once aspired to become instead of the public figure that he was forced to take on. Four years prior, his two older brothers had perished in a small plane crash over the Tibetan territories (their deaths were later blamed on Chinese nationalists), and the soft-spoken third son had to assume the responsibilities of the eldest, which included overseeing the Empire’s most prized colony.

  “Since I arrived in the Territories, I’ve tried to bring change to these lands,” the crown prince continued. “I’ve worked to better our roads and schools. I’ve built health clinics to care for the poor and the sick. I’ve also put an end to public executions, choosing to reform our criminals through hard labor in our reeducation centers.”

  Ren bit back a harsh laugh. Crown Prince Katsura was part of a new progressive movement that promoted harmony between the Empire and its conquered peoples, and his reforms had reflected that, but Ren had always been wary. Take the “reeducation centers.” Ren had never stepped foot inside one, but everyone knew there was nothing “reeducating” about them. They were internment camps, plain and simple, with dirty water to drink and rancid rice to eat and hundreds of bedbugs to keep you company at night. The sad thing was, they had first been built by the US to house Japanese Americans during the war, and the Empire had simply reused them after the takeover for criminals and Resistance fighters. Ren had never forgotten this ironic twist in history, but some Americans had been lulled by the crown prince’s reforms. They failed to see that at the end of the day, Crown Prince Katsura served the Empire — and the Empire ruled with a fascist fist.

  The crown prince pushed his glasses farther up the bridge of his nose. “I undertook such reforms for our sake. I was married in the Western American Territories, and my daughter was born here. This is our home. This is our land. But within the last year, I’ve seen a sharp spike in violence and treasonous acts across the territories. Innocent lives have been lost, including women and small children. The peace we’ve enjoyed for so long has quickly broken apart.

  “Because of this unrest, I will reinstate the nine o’clock curfew, starting tonight,” Crown Prince Katsura continued. “The Ronin Elite will also conduct regular sweeps across the WAT. Furthermore, after much thought and deliberation, I’ve decided to lift the ban on public executions, having no other choice.”

  Ren ground his teeth at the news, even though he knew it was coming. In the last twelve months, guerilla groups across the WAT — operating under the name the Resistance — had upped their exploits: organizing strikes at state-owned orchards, bombing patrol outposts, and poisoning water supplies that fed into soldiers’ barracks — and the Viper’s essays had fueled every one of those flames. The Empire had tried to smash each rebellion and hide the attacks from the daily news reports, but the Resistance refused to back down.

  “Retrieve the criminal,” Crown Prince Katsura said off camera, and Major Endo swept into motion. She returned to the helicopter, where she pulled someone out of the backseat. The camera crew worked fast to zero in
on the criminal’s face, but a dark hood covered their head.

  “To your knees,” said Major Endo, depositing the criminal by the crown prince’s boots.

  The cameras swooped in even closer, as Crown Prince Katsura yanked off the hood. Whispers thrashed through the crowd at the reveal. Somebody gasped next to Ren and Mr. Cabot muttered something to him, but Ren wasn’t listening.

  The criminal was a Caucasian girl, not much older than he was. Fresh blood dripped under her nose, trailing splotches onto her gray prisoner’s jumpsuit, and a mural of bruises covered her cheeks. Her dark hair whipped in the wind like tumbleweed, reminding Ren of his mother. And just like his mom, this girl didn’t whimper.

  Whoever the criminal was, she was brave, that was for sure. It was obvious that the soldiers had tortured her for hours before they brought her to the cliffs. Or perhaps the torture had lasted for days. Ire swelled inside Ren like a tide, and he began counting to twenty to calm it.

  Crown Prince Katsura addressed the girl directly. “Daisy Montgomery. You have been found guilty of attempted murder and treason against the Empire. Two nights ago, you endeavored to infiltrate my office at Fort Tomogashima. You claimed to commit this act on behalf of the Viper.”

  Suddenly, Ren lost his balance and he stumbled into his father.