"Though this is the first time they changed the nation's name is slightly more than a century-" Lyra Cannes groaned. "The name makes perfect sense-showing all the other nations still existing that the U.S. has finally turned to violence and power to control,"
The three all let the fact sink into their minds for another moment, each thinking of different things-Ryan Marvick thought of the truth behind the death of the president, Lyra Cannes thought of how her family-if any member of it was still a live-was living under the completely different system, and Alex Mars thought of how and when to launch his Revolution. But his thoughts were short-for he already knew the answer so well.
"We have to start the Revolution tomorrow, Lyra. We just have to. The citizens, even normal guys who aren't even Prodigies, must be suffering. How do I know? I have been in the military for two months about one month ago, and they dig into the brains of each newbie and they trash each of their original beliefs and instill, in a few days, the set of cruel principles they have had for years into those now-empty brains. And then, those brainwashed sheep will do whatever their herders say. And the worst thing is, each city has its own force, so to sum up, thousands of brainwashed sheep will be ready to fight us," Since he spoke in such a rush, the words spilled out in an articulate storm. Ryan gaped at the boy, surprised that he could become so excited and frustrated, while Lyra had opened her mouth in a lower case 'o'. This time, she said: "Though that wasn't a beautiful set of vocabulary, Al, it was quite implying and logical. Plus, I agree." "You know that I also agree, for your role in our cooperation is for you to get the Allied Stratocracy of America back into shape and let us Martians enjoy our full rights-I'll tell Lewis to gather a tiny conference straight away to plan the thing, though I'm not sure if he'll take me seriously," Before they could say anything else, the Martian had sped away to the other table where Lewis and the rest of the Raiders we're assembled around. After watching Lewis' face turn from the shade of normal, pale, pink, then back to normal but kept talking and talking back at Ryan, Lyra sat down at a random chair, leaning and pressing her face to the desk as if she was ready to doze off.
"Today's a strange day," She said-one of the most normalcies things she could have said as a Prod. "Sure it is. Well, the thing is, for me, every day seems strange, though," Alex added before he sat down next to her, hands numb and for a second of complete horror, he felt as if his hands didn't even exist and had been amputees, then remembered that they were only hard to feel the presence of, and were firmly stuck to his wrists.
"So, Al, what do you want to have as your mission or goal if this Revolution really happens?" Lyra asked. Alright, she had asked another question, but thankfully, it wasn't one of her strangest questions, such as 'what do you think love is?', so Alex Mars relaxed and answered straight away, for he had already thought about it quite often. "Save your family and mine. Then I'd like to see Hale and Fawkes-those wasted primates who call themselves 'generals' and now rulers of the entire nation-straight, face to face, and teach them a serious-and, hopefully, bloody-lesson," he said smoothly, and Lyra looked up, all of her tiredness gone at once.
"Wait. I loved the last part, Al, but I'm quite confused with the first-save my family along with yours?" She looked so incredulous and clueless. Alex gave her a bizarre look. "Why not? Look, Lyra Cannes, you don't know if they are alive-but think it backwards. You also don't know if they had died, huh? Also, I saw you hallucinate, be ready to puke, and cry at every single memory of your sister. Why wouldn't I will to get her back for you?" He retorted.
Her eyes were now, instead of confusion, filled with emotion and something that told Alex that such an event-someone else offering to do something for her voluntarily-was almost an unprecedented thing in her life, and it pooled him with pity for the girl.
"Wow," She managed to say at last.
"I will also follow you to your family-anyway, would be a good chance to see each other well, like some first family reunion," She added. Though her statement was quite funny and hopeful, she said it in such a tone that very clearly, told Alex that, she was unsure about it, for the matter whether her family was still intact and breathing was still...well, cryptic.
Just then, Ryan came back to their side, fiddling with his shirt edge in very short and quick tweaks of the finger.
"He loves it. He says that he'll gather up the best of his advisors straight away and you should go to him-y'all of the Raiders," Though he didn't trust Lewis, Alex Mars had expected that, for he knew well that lewis' primary goal of establishing his colony was only and mainly for the Revolution for the beginning.
"What of you?" Lyra inquired from beside him. "What did we expect? I've been excluded. Anyway, I'm going to hack into one of the computers here and contact my Martian advisors and tell them of the latest earth info during the conference," The man's eyes had jumped over to a stray computer in the corner of the room already. "Good luck with Lewis," He added before looking once at the employees of the building, who were busily typing into their individual computers at the front of the room, and sneaking to the computer he had stared at a few seconds ago.
As they waited, Alex imagined of how the battle would turn out soon-if it'll be as if they were the Vikings, roaring and smashing and killing officials here and there, but he deemed it as silly and violent. Then, he thought if it would be like the French Revolution, but he also didn't like that either, for in that picture, the guillotine had appeared soon after the war and killed about 17,000 people. Then, he realized something.
"I don't want it to be violent," He said to Lyra, who was now, once more, filled with sleep. "What do you mean?" She asked in such an intoxicated, sleepy voice that he suspected that she was playing some game with him and had done it on purpose. "Like, I don't want to jump into the city and massacre officials like the Vikings-or slam down and disconnect heads and necks like the French guillotine. I hate blood, I think-seeing Andrew... die was enough," She opened her brown eyes to her, and for a moment, a series of emotions wavered in there-and he knew that she was remembering how cruel those government officials had been to her and her sister. "We shan't be killers like them-we're much, much, much better than that, at least," He quickly said, and calmed down as the emotions disappeared in her eyes and she nodded in assent. "Yeah, I guess. But then, they still deserve some punishment. How would you do that?" "There are so many ways to do it-jail, force them to labor, or even banish them..." Then he realized that he had said all the things that the military had forced him to experience himself, or forced him to feel and see.
"I don't know," He finally said. For a second, like Lyra, he suddenly felt a flare of anger and had the will to do those same atrocities back to those god-damned fellas and send them on a paper plane straight to hell, but then, just then, somehow, a hand laid itself on his shoulder.
Melanie waved him up from his chair.
"Lewis is calling us," "And we shall go," Lyra replied, getting up promptly from her seat. She walked away quickly, and for a second, Alex was left with Melanie, who stared after Lyra, then back to Alex, then back to Lyra.
Then she started to walk after Lyra, out the door.
Though he didn't know what had just happened, luckily enough, Miles(who was hauling Thomas, who seemed as if he had no life or was full to the brim with boredom) found him and gave his mummified hand a huge slap, which gave him the feeling as if some dead part of his body had been activating and started to feel an annoying, electronic buzz in his suddenly-alive fingers.
"You're alive, Alex," Miles commented before pushing his back and leading them to the door after the girls.

They found themselves in a room that smelled of old books, rotten coffee, and trash where a huge, steel desk had been hastily thrown into the center, with 5 people in grey work suits seated around the thing, and Lewis already at the head of the desk, hands clasped together and looking at his men as if he was King Arthur of Camelot with his knights around the table of his.
"Sit," The man ordered, and though he was annoyed by his attitude, Alex sat, and the others also sat next to him, opposite of the 5 people-probably 'King' Lewis' 5 'advisors'.
The door shut close and Lewis cleared his throat, leaning forward like a businessman and pointed at Alex.
"So you have finally brought up the topic, Alex. I'll give you a primary opportunity to tell us what you have been thinking on it," He said. All 10 pairs of eyes turned to him, but Alex didn't feel too anxious, for the only task he had been given was for his mouth to read aloud a script of the speech he had already planned before in his head.
"You mentioned some secret passageway in the sewers before, Lewis. We're going to secretly travel there and get into the city and we're going to divide the whole team up and do a set amount of work each day-like, a tiny group would break into the building and capture the officials, while another group would disable every connection or electrify within the building to increase confusion. Then, after getting what we need and telling the people sufficiently that I am alive and the Rebels are alive and on their side, we run back to our tunnel in the sewers and plan the next day-I think it would be like a raid. Like a real raid. We raid the gov of-" "Wait, wait, wait, wait," Lewis suddenly cut in, eyes staring at Alex as if he was insane. "Well, I love the whole idea, but the thing is a bit strange at one single point, Mars. We capture the officials?" The guy's words had so tipped him off balance that Alex Mars could only stare back with the same intensity as if Lewis was mad himself. "What's wrong with that?" Miles helped, eyes as round as Alex. Lewis scoffed and whirled his bout around to face his 5 advisors. "Speak," He ordered, body tense, bald head gleaming victoriously. As soon as his order was out, one guy cleared his throat as if he had been waiting and turned his gaze on the Raiders calmly as if accusing them and telling them not to do whatever they had been doing.
"Let me excuse myself, Lewis. Well, to be exact, I agree with you-this isn't very supported by logic, but we all know this, thus, it is an obvious fact. haven't we all been suffering? Haven't they kicked, jolted, dunked, harmed, then banished us out of our own nation? Lewis made this group only to finally amass the strength of the prodigies and show them what we really are and don't deserve what we have all somehow received. We ought to bring this Revolution in an action-based way, Alex from the Raiders, not in your submissive and kind, gentle way. They have to get taught a lesson," The man calmly but quickly spoke and sank back into his seat after getting a satisfied glance from Lewis. Fuck, Alex thought. So this had been exactly what he had told Lyra that he was opposed to, something that they should never do...
"So we're going to finally revenge what they had done to us right back at them?" Thomas suddenly interrupted. Lewis nodded, eyes scrunched up, lips not in a smile nor a grin. "That's cool-actually, it had become the point of my life since I got banished," And in a second of utter horror and silence, the rest of the Raiders watched as Thomas grinned for the first time in weeks-his original smile, but somehow, just a tiny bit, maybe a bit...like, spoiled. Yes, a spoiled smile... Then, still keeping that smile, the boy walked over to the other side of the table and sat beside Lewis. It was as if Alex was watching some horror movie as he watched the Raider who had been the first to be kind to himself hen he got there hand himself over to Lewis' side.
It got worse when Lewis finally gave the boy a beaming grin.
"Of course, Thomas. I never thought that the rest of you would be so... traditional, so caught up in such a small space...but aren't the most brightest and smartest supposed to be the most innovative? Thousands of research have shown that, and you aren't abiding those results, so maybe you aren't 'majors' at all, except Thomas here...Wait. I'll ask only once more. Lyra?"
It was as if his last trusted wall had been bombed in a single minute-though he had known that Lewis wasn't his type, he had never thought it would turn out in such a fashion, and he watched in the greatest shock and horror he had ever been charged within his lifetime as Lyra Cannes stood up from her seat with calm and her usual force just as the force and emphasis Thomas had used right now. No, she wouldn't, no, couldn't, betray him, they had talked on the issue so exclusively...
But instead of breaking a devious smile and walking over to Lewis, she just stood and glared at lewis, then never lowering down her intensity, turned her glare to the others, and especially, for 2, full minutes, stared at Thomas, then back to Lewis and started raging a staring contest, just like the one that Alex had had with his dad the day he had been Muted.
Then, while all eyes were on her, she opened her mouth(this different action of her aside from staring brought obvious comfort over the other side, and 6 shoulders, including Thomas', heaved down from the relief of stress and a strange feeling of being accused somehow) at last.
"You complete, piteous jackasses," She finally said. "I won't speak for long. Actually, me and Alex have been expecting this-that Lewis, you, had never been on the same page as us. Finally, it has been unveiled. You are definitely not a guy to accept and succumb easily, so speaking even this second would be a waste of my own energy. However, we'll show you-through action, Lewis. That's the best and most hard-striking. And we'll also watch-as you quickly knock your own humanity and ethics as you kill and kill and see blood," She then turned herself on Thomas, whom Alex was sure had inched one inch of his butt deeper into his seat. "Never knew a person could morph or hide oneself so easily, Thomas-you'll never be the Tom we all knew again,"
Then, she was leaving, without looking back-not even huffing and puffing from anger, but cool and straight-faced as if she was Muhhammeed the Prophet and knew that all the things that had just occurred were anyway going to be occurring.
After she left, with the door a bit ajar, the suddenly opposite, enemy sides faced each other one last minute.
"I knew this place was too Utopian, but anyway, thanks for giving me a whole new experience," -That was the only coolest and Lyra-imitating, but sincere words that Alex was able to come up after staring at all of the ones on the other side.
Lewis only stared at him-not with a "Gee, I went too far. Hell," glance, but with a 'Woah. Right. So live your own life" style.
One more minute passed before Alex stopped his eyes and let them rest from their intense string exercise.
"Let's go," Trying to imitate how Lewis had commanded the others, he said and the other two thankfully stood up after him without complaining, and he led them out of the room once and for all.
And the strange thing was, though the situation had been quite unexpected, he just felt so calm and... as if some burden had been lifted off his shoulders and the truth had been uncovered, and, he loved it.

Luckily, Lyra Cannes hadn't let her lid pop off even inside the car and hadn't left the others to walk kilometers back to the house. But as Alex slid down next to her(Miles had opened the door for him), she just turned on the ignition. And Alex knew plenty that sometimes, when people who should be angry, and they just seemed normal, something wrong must have ticked inside their brains, maybe triggered by the extreme anger incapable for the brain to deal with. So, he turned to face Lyra slowly with a huge sense of fear.
"Aren't you infuriated?" He asked, after checking that she was as stoic and normal as ever. "Why?" She asked back, in a surprisingly calm voice as if nothing had happened, as if Thomas didn't exist, as if everything was working well. "From the moment we entered the room, I knew it. I mean, those 5 guys that Lewis had come with-they were as if they had been forced or coaxed to come there. He had ordered them to support him against us, Al. As we said some weeks ago, nothing's perfect. And Lewis here has claimed that his actually dictatorship-ruled community was some utopian place. That's why there's a term called mirage. Looks so real and great, but in the end, you find sand, sand, and more sand-and not even a single drop of water. And we were fooled by it-till now," After talking so much in a single breathe, she took in a quick amount of oxygen.
"But do we stop and cry and die when we feel betrayed by the mirage?" Though it mustn't have been a question, she actually paused and let him answer. "Nah," So he inserted and gratefully, Lyra continued on cue. "Exactly, Al. We rise back like an angry yo-yo, and we use the great amount of faith we poured at the mirage to strike it this time," She grabbed the wheel on emphasis, then pulled the car off the sidewalk and pulled down all the windows before realizing that all eyes were watching her just like back at the conference room.
"You're a helluva speaker, Lyra," That was what Alex Mars was able to come up with, still stunned, when she looked back at the rest of the Raiders(excluding Thomas from now on) so hard.

They made a few firm rules as soon as they got home-Miles locked the front door after walking through it the last, while Melanie closed the door of Thomas-who-had-been-a-Raider-but-now-wasn't, and they all convened at the living room. Things don't seem to be working bad nor good for us, Alex thought as he now looked around the room, which Lyra had pulled the shutters down. They all sat down silently in front o the TV as if they were about to play pat-a-cake right there and then. But of course, they weren't-they were there to discuss what they were going to do.
"First thing we shall do-we need a leader. A real, serious leader," Miles finally broke the silence. When no one replied back, he continued. "In 3 seconds, we point only to one person we think is ok to be a human to lead us, including ourselves-3, 2, 1. Ha," As each of their fingers shot forward in some certain direction, Alex just couldn't help feeling like a member of a group of of 5-year-olds playing under a tree in a meadow.
By that time he shook himself out of that feeling and stared at where his finger had pointed to, he found it directed at Lyra. Well, it wasn't much of a surprise, so as Miles calculated who had gotten the most votes, he sat in silence. "I have one vote by me, Mel has none, Lyra has one from Alex, and Alex has two from Lyra and Melanie. Surprise, surprise. We Raiders have no celebrations-Al, be sure to keep it steady since leadership is damned hard. Since you're now the leader, you decide what's next,"
It had been so fast-decided that Alex didn't' know what had just happened even for him and by the time he had gotten his wits, everyone was looking over at him, waiting. In his brain, thoughts frantically raced around, putting themselves in this sequence and that until it was agreed that he could now speak. "We have to-um, decide how to get to the tunnel and when. Does anyone have a map?" They all shook their heads. "Great, great-then I shall draw," Miles handed over an A4 paper slip and a pencil even before he could completely download the old memory of the Wikipedia entry dubbed "All the Deserts In the World" but the Raiders had enough patience-after 2 minutes and 6 seconds, the picture of the entry slid into his mind and with great relief, he started to draw the fourth in the contents-"The North American Deserts". However, the thing was, deserts grew and shrank so easily in those days, so there were only a few places that even Wikipedia had confirmed. Consequently, after writing those places names(for instance, 'the Middle Range'), all he had to do was scribble two simple lines indicating the border of the 'Allied Statocrasy of America" and the 'Rebels' Canadian town's border'.'
He found that he had nothing more to do, and felt too much pressure from the watching eyes, for he had never been a leader but always someone left behind, so finally rendered what all leaders did when they had run out of things to do themselves: command.
"Spit out all the ideas," He ordered and as if for his rescue, Miles cleared his throat. "A straight take from the Canadian border to the city is the most simple and quickest, you know. The desert only has sand, sand, and more sand, and no pits or dips or crevices-you get the idea," "To utilize that idea, then, we should also know the exact location of the tunnels-I mean, the sewers," Alex put in. "Lewis-I mean, that traitor bitch-told us a few months ago. It's located at the edge of the desert, about 15 kilometers away from the borderline of the country. Actually, these sewers are the sewers of the early 2000s which kinda got damned when the place got desertificated," Jesus, 15 kilos? It's perfect, he was thinking when he noticed that he, for the second time, had said his thoughts aloud without noticing. "Uh-huh, it is perfect. And the thing is, we must get there before Lewis does and massacres anyone in sight inside the country," Melanie commented.
Alex Mars was giving the 'map' one last glance when he felt someone's eyes on him and of course, turned around to find Lyra looking at him, as if she was tapping on his shirt for attention with her eyes. "So, leader," She said, as if she had waited, and Mars could only tense up, for he knew so well that the girl said so unexpected stuff...
"When are we going to get there?" She finished.
All eyes, once more, were back on him, but this time, he was well-prepared for this question.
"Tonight, right at 9," He answered.