The Invisible by Amelia Kahaney Read Free Book Online Page A

asphalt, the top of her head caved in, blackness seeping around her hair. A policeman with a baton raised, about to come down on a ten-year-old boy, the cop’s face twisted in anger, the boy’s scrawny arms covering his head. Feargas clouding around a group of what looks like thousands of people marching outside of city hall, their eyes wild and wide, mouths open as if screaming.
    The images get faster and faster.
    Dozens of black-and-white stills in quick succession, each of them depicting dead or collapsed people on city streets. Many of them young, younger than me.
    A few shots of what look like twelve-year-olds getting Syndicate tattoos, their faces hard, their eyes fearful.
    As I watch, I sink into a chair at the kitchen table next to my mother, who has poured her wine into a jelly jar and now holds it to her lips with two hands, drinking it the way a small child drinks juice.
    “But how is it happening?” I hear my father ask wonderingly. “It’s on all the TVs. How have they switched the TVs on?”
    Nobody answers him. I pull my arms around myself, a cold shiver rocking through me.
    Now the photos show the kind of people I know. We’ve passed the riots. On to the parties. The balls. The orphans singing for the mayor and his ilk. Tuxedos, champagne, orthodontically perfect smiles. Then shots of South Side children polishing shoes, their foreheads black with grease marks.
    I look out the window for a second, and my throat seizes—in every apartment in all the towers on the block, there are TVs broadcasting the same assault of pictures. People crowd around some of them, their profiles in shadow. Other TVs broadcast to empty rooms.
    But how ?
    I shake my head hard and turn back to the screen, wanting to understand.
    The images combine with similar phrases like the ones I saw this morning on the girl’s phone:
    SOME PEOPLE ARE SO COMFORTABLE IT HURTS.
    THE GAME IS RIGGED.
    THE SCALES ARE OUT OF BALANCE.
    SOME OF US ARE GOING INSANE AT THE SIGHT OF IT.
    And on and on. The music thumping. The images flying.
    And then, again, the masked man behind the desk. The desk draped with the flag of Bedlam. Four white stars in a square formation. One for each bridge. The red and blue halves of the flag split diagonally. His mask, the crude child’s drawing of a face, the features uncannily askew, everything just a little wrong in the placement. The chin area of the mask curling up slightly, jutting into a rounded triangle that reveals a small swatch of his chin, giving the effect of a face being peeled from a skull.
    “To those of you sitting in the dark right now, and you know who you are . . .”
    I feel gooseflesh rise on my arms when there’s muffled laughter from behind the mask.
    “You have an assignment. It’s a simple one. And it won’t hurt you a bit. Go to your banks, withdraw half your money, and give it to someone who has less than you. Let’s come together to even the scales, shall we? You have forty-eight hours. If you complete the assignment, you might get to keep all the things that make your life so easy. And if you decide not to do your homework, there will be . . .” A long pause here. I meet my mother’s eyes and see vivid horror etched in them. “. . . consequences. Bedlam will start to live up to its name.”
    The man in the mask folds his hands together on his desk, sets them down on the Bedlam flag. Then the illustrated eye flashes for a second on the screen, followed by static.
    And just as they all turned on out of nowhere, the TVs shut off all by themselves.
    Then all around the neighborhood, the lights come back on. Our own lights flare on a second later, and we stare at each other around the table, blinking.
    “Forget it,” my father says. “A prank. Let’s eat.”
    The whole thing is over just as quickly as it began. Except that none of us are able to forget what we’ve just seen.
    “We will not be cowed by terrorists,” the mayor huffs into his microphone at a press