Page 46 of From the Noblest Motives
True. Damien carried my sorry carcass out of gunfire when I couldn't walk. "Okay. Yes. Fine. Damien doesn't need us."
"Maybe." Blaze didn't say more, and Shudder knew that stubborn set of his jaw. He'd shut the conversation down and wouldn't be coaxed into continuing.
A world of uncertainty and hurt lurked beneath that stubbornness, and Shudder thought he understood. Hard to glean what Damien needed, since he showed bits and pieces of himself in miserly amounts. While he might not need them as protection, as a physical wall against the world most of the time, Shudder had experienced his concern, his tenderness firsthand. He thought it likely that with them, with his buffers, Damien was able to let the tightly coiled spring of his being unwind, even if it was only a few notches.
Need came in a lot of different packages.
He set his rambling thoughts off to the side as Blaze pulled off the road onto a dirt and gravel track. The trees abruptly gave way to a meadow of yellow and blue wildflowers, where crickets discussed the temperature and birds called territorial warnings. A building that might have been white once appeared—a dingy gray box with a series of delivery-bay doors along one side. An old warehouse, Shudder thought, or an archaic processing center for mail, maybe.
From the opposite direction, three white, windowless vans pulled up in front of the building. Shudder gripped Blaze's wrist in alarm.
"Steady, steady. Let's see what this is," Blaze rumbled, though he unsnapped the holster at his side.
Instead of a flood of enforcement officers pouring out, as Shudder had feared, the vans disgorged a small herd of people in business attire and nice shoes who squinted in the bright sunlight and stumbled over meadow hummocks. A few of the figures were brawnier but carried recorder-transmitters on their backs rather than rifles.
The drivers, all wearing helmets with mirrored face shields, shepherded the media people to one of the bay doors, which they opened to reveal chairs lined up in neat rows and a single lectern facing them. When the reporters and their tech people had settled, Blaze edged the truck forward and parked right at the doors. He held up a finger to Shudder in a wait gesture and came around the front of the truck, staring down the reporters with his best Emerson glare, then opened the door for Shudder as if he were an actual hired bodyguard.
Some of the reporters leaped from their chairs and started yelling questions, but Blaze held up a hand and bellowed, "Stop!"
Incredibly, they did.
"You all sit your asses back in those chairs. Don't move, or Mr. McKenzie won't be answering any fucking questions. You don't touch him. You don't crowd him. You raise your hand and wait until he calls on you like good little reporters. Understood?"
The media folks subsided, and Shudder had to admit it was fun watching Blaze in full intimidation mode. He couldn't dawdle any longer, though. On shaking legs, he slid out of the truck and limped toward the lectern and microphone Cyril's people had provided for him.Oh look. There's a holoprojector, too. I should've had a manifesto ready.
He took his place at the lectern, pushed his hood back to gasps from the reporters, and conjured up a smile he absolutely didn't feel. "Hello, everyone. I should probably start with a statement, right? These things start that way, I think. You might not recognize me right now, but I'm Shudder McKenzie. Your recognition programs will verify that for me. I want to start by saying I did not kill Science Minister Sheila Tapper. I've never met the woman. The disagreements I might have had with her were minor in the grand scheme of things. And, as we'll no doubt discuss in a bit, I was in no shape to do so at the time."
"But Mr. McKenzie—" The young woman cut off and belatedly raised her hand.
"Yes? Wait, don't tell me… Patrice Nettlefloss, isn't it? From FNN?"
"Um, yes." She seemed surprised but went on gamely. "The courts have very clear vids of you pulling that wall down on Minister Tapper."
"Yes, weren't those fun?" Shudder startled to find one of Cyril's people leaning close to whisper in his ear. "Also, they were altered. I'm told we have…" He fumbled with the controls in front of him until he'd managed to bring up the vid sequence Cyril had shown them previously. "Ah. Here we go. This is the one used as evidence in my rather questionable trial."
The footage was no doubt all too familiar to the people gathered in front of him. They waited politely but didn't watch with keen interest as Shudder appeared at the mouth of the alley and lifted his hand to bring the bricks down.
"There are some striking differences when the added layers are stripped away." Shudder timed his words so he stopped speaking as the unaltered vid played.
Murmuring rose from the reporters as the video showed the men supporting Shudder and more gasps peppered his audience when they spotted the heavy machinery on the other side of the collapsing wall.
Shudder leaned in toward his impromptu assistant to get confirmation before offering, "Both vids will be provided to your newsrooms if you'd like your own data experts to verify."
A young man with a cute button nose waved wildly from the back row, so Shudder pointed to him to go ahead. "Mr. McKenzie, were you satisfied with your defense team's efforts?"
It seemed a ridiculous question at first, but it gave Shudder an opening to talk about the inequities of the trial. He arched an eyebrow. "My defense team was a single public defender who was disappointed that I hadn't signed a confession while I was drugged and barely able to sit up on my own."
He went on to describe the rushed nature of the trial and his inability to view and vet the evidence. A reporter asked if the Horace Act had been used as a justification for the handling of the trial, and Shudder started to wonder if Cyril had not only picked sympathetic reporters but also fed them questions. By all accounts, Cyril had run a shadow organization for decades. It seemed likely.
"Funny thing, wasn't it?" Shudder felt his smile sliding and quickly froze it in place. "That the Horace Act was passed three days prior to my arrest. I don't mean to imply anything, but you have to admit the timing was odd."
He rubbed a hand over the spot where the metal plate had been and hoped this wouldn't take too much longer. His head was already starting to ache. "My trial was used as the test case for Horace. The accelerated trial. The legal withholding of evidence from defense. The sentencing held during the same court session. All designed to keep the public safe from the dangerous, violent variant."
"Mr. McKenzie, Libre Ignacio, Eastern News. Were you ever charged previously with a violent offense?"
"Hello, Libre, good to see you. You know the answer to that. I know you do your research. The only harm I've ever done is to property, never people. And no, I was never charged." Shudder managed a little chuckle. "They would've had to catch me."
Laughs ignited here and there, quickly extinguished. The media folks were as tense as he was. He launched into a listing of the various ways in which the Horace Act walked back previous civil-rights laws, both historical and recent. He had just taken that class, after all, though he didn't want to admit anything good had come out of his imprisonment. The reporters dutifully tapped on their various devices through his mini-lecture. While it would all be on vid, Shudder was certain they were writing their own reaction notes as they went.
