sutton phillips | d12f

“One final wire,” her father whispers, a pair of needle-nose pliers between his teeth as he braids the red and yellow wires together, his hands shaking despite years of practice.

Sutton holds her breath, she doesn’t mean to, but she does, mirroring her father, knowing the concussive explosion would do more than tear the air from her lungs.

It would send shrapnel in all directions of their kitchen - nails and tacks and shards of glass moving at hundreds of miles per hour. Tiny ballistic missiles designed to tear, to shred. To kill. To send a message.

Her father sighs deeply, the weight of a thousand nuclear blasts within the exhale and finally, finally, Sutton can breathe easily again. The device is placed next to a pile of others and he rises from his seat. She watches from the doorway, green eyes sparkling in the firelight.

He could be hanged for this. Or worse. He could be made an example of while the whipping post was still red and sticky with blood from the last public punishment. Spies lurked everywhere in the shadows of the district.

“You should be in bed, you know,” he tells her, eyes flashing dark in the firelight as he looks up.

“You should be in bed too. Your shift starts soon,” the thirteen-year-old replies dryly, eyes moving to the grandfather clock, a layer of dark dust adorning the glass.

Much like the layer of dark dust all over their house, on their clothes, on her father’s hands. She wondered how he could work with such delicate pieces when his hands were black with soot, covered with it, but somehow, his creations were always sparkling. The mechanisms always worked.

Sutton isn’t sure how they all fit into this. How her father stayed on the fringes but vowed to enmesh himself deeper into the rebellion.

She isn’t sure how she fits into it.

Teenage girls were explosions in their own right and Sutton preferred to shatter all on her own. Quietly. With little fanfare.

She didn’t need a revolution to tell her that they were poor, barely scraping by. She didn’t need a rebellion to know that they would always be poor, even with her father’s meager wages and her mother’s contributions from teaching in the district’s only schoolhouse.

She didn’t need a pile of bombs in their kitchen to know that something big was about to happen, something was going to change.

For generations, their family lived and died by the mines and her father - smart, courageous, headstrong - wanted to forge his own path with homemade dynamite. He wasn’t content to watch the world move past them, to watch it change without the power to dictate the how and the why, so he had spirited some supplies away from the mines each shift - a wire here, a bit of explosives there - to do his part.

“Perks of being the boss - they all know to start without you.” She’s drawn back by his voice, but even with the joke, it falls heavy between them.

“You aren’t the boss.”

“No, but one day, I might be.”

She remembers a night when one of her father’s bombs had gone off in a military barracks, killing dozens. She woke to a crash, no, a slam of her father's fist, her parent's anguished whispering carrying through the house and threatening to wake Sutton and her sister.

She had missed chunks of the conversation - their hushed voices muffled through their bedroom door but her father is pacing, judging by the creaking of the floorboards and her mother is saying, “Those were just kids, Seb. They didn’t deserve -”

“They were on the other side. It was bad information. Nothing we could do.”

“You could stop,” her mother, Aster, pleads.

“You’re risking all of us and for what? The rebels can’t possibly win and we can’t possibly lose you. How many bodies will our district bury before you realize that?”

Sutton hears nothing after that, just the sound of the wind whipping outside of her window and her father’s constant pacing.

When she sleeps later that night, fitfully, tossing and turning, she can almost hear him making another bomb and another and another, staying up late like he always had. It starts the same - he first tests the timer, winding it tightly, and she can feel every beat of her heart in her ears, can feel every second as the dial spins and her eyes adjust to the light peeking from under her bedroom door.

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

He was lucky he hadn’t been round up in the raids.

Three years have passed since the fight, since the treaty and her father goes to work each night, keeps his head down low. He never speaks of the bombs and Sutton never got up the courage to ask what became of them.

Who they killed.

How the explosions caressed the bodies of the dying.