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Beloved Leader

by Sean Marciniak

---

The day Hana got the call …

Where was she?

Autumn, in a metropolis along the Catalonian coast where, she had come to realize, some live the beautiful life but not all. That sallow day, she remembers every detail. At her apartment in Dogtown, a desolate place in the flatlands where homeless roamed the streets like zombies. She was on her knees in the bathroom, replacing the toilet’s fill valve, cursing the landlord and trying to block out the thumps and grunts from the ceiling as her tiny Sardinian neighbor pumped his sasquatch of a girlfriend.

That’s when her phone buzzed.

“This is Clarisse from Viñeta. Is Hana there?”

Hell yes she was.

Every cell in her body fizzed. Viñeta was one of the big three animation studios, and it had a mission: Dethrone Pixar, with grittier content. The kind she liked.

“Your viral short animated feature, Cassandra, just wowed us. Mr. Tortyr personally extends his complements.”

Then came the offer and all its zeros.

“And I shouldn’t tell you this,” Clarisse said, “but Viñeta’s next project involves orphans!”

Hana was an orphan.

This was weird.

Clarisse said, “Isn’t it perfect?”

*

When the call ended, Hana celebrated by banging the ceiling with a broomstick, synchronizing strikes with her neighbor’s thrusts.

One beat, two beats, three beats, four.

The grotty lovemaking stopped.

She beheld herself in the mirror. Glasses. Hair crowding her face. Eyebrows warranting a tweeze. But beneath that, sharp eyes.

See, Hana told herself, you’re clever. Worthy of Viñeta. She reminded herself that her short film had 150 million views.

In her short film, an orphan acquired the superpower of invisibility, allowing her to flee captors. But when it came time to report their crimes, she couldn’t restore her visibility. Nor could she be heard.

Ho-hum by itself, perhaps. But layered into this short, Hana planted clues to true-life, foster care atrocities she’d witnessed. Names scrawled in subway graffiti, crimes encoded into foliage and license plates.

One viewer noticed.

It only took one, then the video blew up.

In all, police arrested eleven foster parents. Collectively, they received 1,089 years in prison.

*

Fast forward …

A message crosses Hana’s monitor at work. Please report to HR.

Later, in the belly of Viñeta’s campus, she and the HR manager sit on pillows in a faux forest. Sculpted, epoxy trees twist from floor to ceiling. The susurrations of running water drift from unseen speakers.

“Hana,” the manager says, “how are you finding the group setting? The process of collaboration?”

This woman’s voice, so calm it’s hypnotic. She wears cat-eye glasses, has beautiful skin, and rocks clothes that are stylish but not too stylish. Hana appreciates and fears the calculation.

“It’s an … adjustment,” Hana says, hoping she chose the right HR words.

“It’s important,” the manager says, “you contribute during today’s group meeting.”

*

The rest of that HR encounter, Hana doesn’t remember. Things were said, sure, but the subtext is simple. Impress somebody, do it fast.

And Hana needs this job. The Viñeta paycheck keeps her above the poverty line. Without it, she can’t even go back to that Dogtown flat — she forfeited rent control when she split and the crappy apartment now rents for a stratospheric amount. Meanwhile, homeless encampments metastasize throughout the flatlands.

Viñeta wanted to know what it meant to be an orphan?

Hana thinks of this question like negative space:

There’s no safety net, no motherly embrace.

There’s no childhood bedroom in which to take refuge.

Nothing to save her from sleeping in her car.

*

They are gathered, the story supervisor and his writers and storyboard artists, in Viñeta’s fabulous Idea Room, a glass projection from a cliff along la Costa Brava, overhanging ocean waves that explode without sound 100 meters underfoot.

Viñeta’s big idea is an Orwellian film. It will tell the story of an orphan, her parents poisoned by an authoritarian regime, and how she survives shameful brutalities to liberate the nation.

Heavy stuff.

Biblical stuff.

No rats with sophisticated palates who secretly cook for the masses. No sentient toys catering to greedy, unappreciative children.

“H���Բ�?”

Monty, the story supervisor, beholds Hana with steepled hands.

�Ԩ���.”

“The backstory, what’ve you got?” His face is creased with life’s first wrinkles. She’s aware he’s a new father, but it’s made him no more charitable.

“Backstory?” Hana asks.

�Ԩ���.”

“On the parents’ deaths?”

He takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes.

*

“Just tell us what happened. Can you do that?”

She feels numb. Tell us what happened. To you. Don’t bother being creative.

The other writers buzz, the hive ready to activate if she can’t.

Hana can’t speak.

Monty asks, “Did you understand the question?"

She pinches her inner thigh. After all, hadn’t her parents died almost cartoonishly, both done in by bad seafood ten miles down the coast? Wasn’t that the one big reason Viñeta hired her in the first place?

Fifteen pairs of eyes track her. Hana catches a reflection of herself in one of the glass walls. Filmy glasses. Sweatpants. Her cloak of invisibility is malfunctioning.

The problem was, she’d been a baby when her parents died.

She embellished her résumé.

Didn’t everyone?

*

“Hana, are you with us?”

Scribbling, hands in motion. The other writers furiously drafting backstories. Production is well behind schedule.

“Talk us through it,” Monty says. “Use specific details.”

Out at sea, a herd of fin whales dives from view. Keeping perfectly still, Hana holds what breath she’s got left.

Monty taps the table. “Did they lock eyes during that last minute? Did your dad attempt a heroic Heimlich while he himself choked?”

Hana almost shrugs. Their deaths were obscure mysteries. She doesn’t even have a picture of her mother and father, and inspecting the medical examiner’s cadaverous photos … nuh-uh.

Her parents lived quietly, had no known family. They kept their distance from neighbors.

They were ghosts.

*

It’s funny, she thinks, how job pressures tend to force issues.

A week ago she spat into a vial, sent her gob to OriginStories.com, and prayed they’d return DNA-born clues. Viñeta wants her emotions and she’ll give them away — once she figures them out. Everything is an enigma for Hana. Her parents were immigrants, but from where? Her complexion, bronze at twilight, could’ve come from anywhere.

If a DNA test yields inspiration, so be it.

The Idea Room, meanwhile, is quiet. Monty’s wireless earbud pulses color.

“Hold on,” he says. He taps his earbud.

Hana awakens her phone beneath the table and glimpses her inbox.

No new messages.

She silently curses. So much for expedited service, she thinks. When she looks up, Monty’s face is white.

“We have Tortyr. We’re piping him in now.”

Tortyr. Executive Produce. Director.

Goliath.

*

Ions rearrange themselves on the far glass wall and Tortyr’s face materializes.

He has a ship captain’s beard and the swarthy complexion of a field general. He, too, was a disciple of Classroom A113, alongside Lasseter and Bird, but always trended darker.

“Where are we?” he booms.

“We’re going over the parental death backstory with Hana.”

“H���Բ�?”

“The animator of Cassandra.”

“The Greek myth reboot?” He means Cassandra from classical mythology, who acquired the power of prophecy but fell prey to the curse that nobody would believe her.

“That’s right,” Monty says.

Tortyr grunts. “The whistleblower, huh?” He’s been looking for such a whistleblower, the employee who told El País of his workplace bullying. It’s been reported Tortyr keeps count of those employees he’s made cry.

“Point me to this Hana,” he says.

*

On the glass wall, Tortyr’s face looms.

“Tell me miss, what’s the backstory.” His voice makes the speakers buzz.

Hana cannot speak.

“This isn’t a question.”

Hana feels sick. She knows that he knows she’s hasn’t contributed a single idea to the screenplay in three months.

She knows he’s wondering whether she’s a saboteur, there to expose Viñeta.

She knows this is a test.

But her mind is stuck on the trash-lined streets of the flatlands, where she’ll have to find a space among dark RVs where she’ll sleep in her car while moths orbit street lamps above her, indifferent to the violences below.

“This,” Tortyr says, “is the part where you sing for your supper.” He crosses his arm and leans back. “So sing.”

*

Hana opens her mouth. What she’ll say, who knows.

One second passes.

Then another.

A throat is cleared.

One of the story artists is looking at her. Just wait, his eyes implore.

Freddie is also an orphan, hired too in expectation of having special insights. Sometimes Hana sits with him at lunch, but they’ve nothing to talk about.

It’s not like all orphans are the same.

Freddie removes his sweatshirt to reveal another shirt with white block letters. They read: TORTYR=TORTURE IN SWEDISH.

“Take that off.” Monty’s lips quiver and his fingers strangle a digital pencil. “You fool,” he whispers, “he’s not even Swedish.”

Freddie smiles. He pulls the shirt over his head to reveal yet another shirt with more block letters.

They read: TORTYR=TORTURE IN SWEDISH.

*

An office DM informs Hana she’s to meet with Tortyr in an hour.

In person.

She sits at her desk and realizes there’s nothing to pack. She’s always traveled light.

Fifty minutes later an email from OriginStories.com arrives. Her results are ready. She thumbs a link and, bam, there they are:

-51% from the Asian subcontinent.

-49% from the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Mérikah.

She blinks.

Rumors of Mérikah abound. A hermit kingdom on a sad, flaccid peninsula, ruled by a populist, despotic leader. A hermetically sealed border. Prison camps too, and starving citizens who’ve trapped and eaten frogs to extinction.

So they say.

There’s more in the email — a message from a relative who, like her, opted into OriginStories.com’s “relative match” feature.

“What you know of your family is false,” the message says.

The rest is pretty crazy too.

*

She passes Freddie, who’s attempting to sit on a cartoonishly shallow bench outside Tortyr’s office. He’s been reclothed in an oversized Viñeta T-shirt.

Hana touches his shoulder. “I always liked you,” she says, “and you’re not going anywhere.”

He’s puzzled. She pats his arm.

Tortyr’s office is awash in murals of bulls. A telescope occupies a corner, pointed downward at a coastal village.

He hulks behind his desk. His breath is labored.

“Sit,” he says.

She doesn’t sit.

“I’ve been invited to Mérikah,” she says. “By the Superior Leader.”

Tortyr stops breathing. Mérikah is the place that’s inspired his latest project, but he can only guess, like the rest of the world, what truly happens there.

“Impossible,” he says.

She shows him her invitation.

“I’m allowed one guest,” she says. “I’ll be taking Freddie.”

*

Mérikah was born after its people, without objection, seceded from their union. They’d rejected Copernicus for flat-earth theorists, nourishment for opiates. Good riddance, said the parent nation.

So they say.

Hana and Freddie arrive by boat — one cannot fly or drive there.

In the gulf, magnificent thunderheads flicker with internal lightning. The ferry noses them into a bay guarded by breakwaters and they pass beneath a 60-foot-tall bronze statue of Okaynow Tokonoko, the Superior Leader. From face to toe, it’s remarkably accurate.

The boxy head.

The iconic, square glasses.

The bouffant hair.

That small (but full-lipped) mouth, the chunky arms folded across a fire-plug body and, yes, the alligator-skinned boots.

Further down the breakwater Hana spots a severed bronze foot. She’s uncertain, but thinks it has a toe-ring.

*

Hana feels like the thunderhead, as though lightning keeps striking inside her chest. Whatever this place is, it’s part of her. She says that again in her head.

It’s just as unsettling the second time.

Freddie is stuck on the colossal statue. He says, “They say he’s murdered five million.”

“Five million and one if you don’t shut up.”

Soldiers stand at attention on the dock, Kalashnikov rifles tucked vertical against their shoulders. They say nothing, their faces don’t move.

The port consists of pastel-hued buildings clustered around a cobbled square that slopes into the water. Geraniums burst from balconies and roof terraces. Hana has the sense she’s entering a theme park replica of the Italian Riviera.

Except for the tanks.

Those look real.

*

The tanks sit quietly around the plaza, helmed by men scouting the skies with binoculars.

But there’s music.

Tropical music with marimbas. The ferry draws closer and the tune carries when the crosswinds ebb. And the port hums with people in palm-leafed shirts holding margarita glasses with tiny paper umbrellas.

As they pull into berth, Hana remains puzzled. She thought the people here would look a certain way but they don’t. They aren’t pallid, but incredibly sunburned. They aren’t scrawny and meek, but rotund and boisterous.

Soldiers help Hana onto the dock, Freddie too. The crowd parts like cinema curtains and there he is, not ten feet away.

Tokonoko.

He’s tall as a broomstick.

He approaches them and says, “Didn’t expect a midget turd, eh?”

*

Tokonoko talks fast and nonstop. He loves animated films, they are the über-peak of storytelling and its future. He’s on team Viñeta, Pixar is so basic.

“Their films, all the same, “ he says. “Pixar opens with the character knee-deep in their passion, but their motivation … no bueno. Mr. Incredible, Lightning McQueen — they want acclaim. Then Pixar upends their world. Superheroes are banned, wah. Mr. Incredible can’t be a hero, wah. So he’s gotta choose — live quietly, or kick ass in secret? We root for the irresponsible choice and, snorefest, this all leads to a life lesson.”

Tokonoko sighs.

Hana eyeballs his platform alligator boots. She wonders, this is the man who built highways from human bones?

*

As abruptly as he says hello, Tokonoko says goodbye.

“My people will escort you to your residences.”

Freddie look at her and mouths, “Residences?”

They’re only supposed to stay two weeks. Hana reminds herself that she and Freddie are protected citizens of a supranational union of first-world countries. Tokonoko has simply misspoken.

She reminds herself too, they’re being treated nicely.

An old-timey train platform sits beyond the port and a locomotive emerges from a tunnel chuffing steam. This, too, reminds Hana of a theme park attraction.

Attendants lead them to a quaint, private compartment. Hana and Freddie duck in and spin to close the door but the attendants stand in the way. They offer tight smiles, then enter and sit beside them.

The train begins to move.

*

She notices other oddities. The windows are translucent, she cannot see outside.

She looks to her attendant who refreshes a smile. “For your privacy,” the woman says.

Hana’s thoughts run rickety like the locomotive. They’ll stay two weeks. It’s a residence like an artist’s residency. Of course the port and train have notes of theme park artificiality. Before its isolation, this republic was a world-class destination for amusement parks.

Freddie stands. “My teeth are floating,” he says, and leaves the compartment.

His attendant follows.

Minutes pass. Hana smiles at her attendant, who smiles back.

When Freddie returns, he’s weirdly exuberant. He clasps Hana’s hand.

“We’re here,” he says. “We’re actually here!”

A wad of toilet paper passes through his fingers into her palm.

She pockets it.

She decides she, too, must pee.

*

She unfolds the paper in the restroom while her attendant waits outside.

Scrawled within are instructions: WIPE WINDOW CORNER.

The translucency of one lower corner is starchier than the rest and Hana licks her thumb and swipes, opening a clear view to the passing countryside.

She squats and looks.

Swampland. Refrigerators submerged in marshes. Garbage, lots of garbage, and listing double-wide trailers, some with roofs made of vinyl billboard advertisements.

And soggy people in lawnchairs, mad-dogging the train.

Hana looks back at the paper in her hand.

PATCH WITH HANDSOAP + TOILET-PAPER LINT

She follows Freddie’s recipe and makes a paste and smears it across the exposed glass.

There’s a sharp knock.

“One second.” Hana flushes.

When she steps outside the attendant says, “You didn’t wash your hands.”

*

They disembark and two purring black Mercedes await.

She and Freddie are separated into separate cars.

Hana’s attendant joins her in the back and Hana realizes the attendant is something more than an attendant.

But what?

A woman, late-forties. Dark eyes, tinted complexion, well-manicured. A Mao-collared tunic.

The sun has dipped below the treeline and the countryside exists in silhouette.

Hana glances at the rearview mirror, to check for Freddie’s car.

When it happened she doesn’t know, but the headlights are gone.

“Where’s Freddie?” she asks.

The woman pats her knee.

They ride through a gate where a storybook Tuscan villa awaits, but Hana’s attention sticks on the surrounding walls, twenty feet tall.

She swallows.

“Was the countryside appealing?” her attendant asks.

“It was dark.”

“Hmmm,” she says, “on the train too?”

*

The ignition quits, the car is still.

“Where’s my friend?” Hana asks.

“My name is Eve,” the woman says. “Come with me.” She leads Hana into the villa, into all its rooms. A great room. A library. A cinema. Chandeliers in each.

And Hana’s bedroom is enormous, the bed too, and a chaise lounge teems with gifts. Chanel cosmetics, Hermès scarves, designer dresses in boxes.

“All yours,” Eve says.

Hana blinks. “But what are the walls fo —”

“For your protection. Are you hungry?”

Hana shakes her head, she’s anything but hungry.

“Get some rest then,” Eve says. “Tomorrow is critical.”

Once alone, Hana goes to lock the door and discovers there aren’t any locks.

She goes to the window.

A soldier leans against the wall and smokes a cigarette in the moonlight.

*

She’s been awake forty-eight hours straight and can’t fight it any longer. Sleep drops its velvet curtains.

Hana dreams Eve is her mother. She dreams they escape this hermit kingdom using tunnels and chicanery and speedboats. She dreams —

A hand shakes her foot.

Eve stands bedside with grim people in white scrubs.

Hana backs away on elbows — her heart spasms, she’s seconds from a medical experiment — and indeed one of them holds … a hair dryer? Hana fumbles for her glasses on the nightstand and jams them on her face.

They are stylists, cosmeticians.

Eve studies her. “Disgusting,” she says. “Fix her.”

And they do.

Hana gets a facial. A haircut. Contact lenses.

And when she finally sees the mirror she looks twice. Someone beautiful looks back.

Eve sucks their teeth and nods.

*

In the late morning, another convoy of Mercedes arrives.

Tokonoko emerges from a rear door. An assistant holds a gold sun umbrella over his head for the twenty paces it takes to reach the villa.

Hana and Eve stand at the doorway.

Tokonoko stops, appraises Hana, and turns to Eve. “Well done, comradess,” he says, and breezes past them into the villa. He spins in the foyer. “Well, what do you think?”

Hana’s mind goes blank. “Why am I here?” she blurts.

“To meet a relative.”

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“Of course.”

“Am I free to leave?”

Tokonoko puts on a serious face. “You’re here for a bigger purpose. You don’t want to leave. Come, it’s razzle-dazzle time.”

*

The motorcade prowls the capital city and its wide boulevards and vast plazas. But it’s all empty, there’s not a soul anywhere.

They pass imposing monuments and billboards with simple messages. Loyalty! Fealty! One sign shows a diapered man in a sty with words writ across his belly: “I am a corrupt pig.”

In the Mercedes, Tokonoko leans toward Hana. “Total asshole, that guy,” he says.

As they leave town he launches into discourse on the sad state of the republic’s cinema. He tells her things like:

“There’s no creativity, no motivation.”

“Mérikah is a cashless, taxless society. The state provides, which makes the people lazy.”

“Our biggest film award, ugh — silver at the Moscow film festival.”

“But what if,” he asks her, “the republic won an Oscar?”

*

In the outskirts, one road cuts through the jungleland. Armored tanks join the convoy, their growling engines and clanking treads all hammering at Hana’s eardrums.

It doesn’t stop Tokonoko from talking. His forehead glistens and his cheeks are flush.

“What you did in Cassandra — give the protagonist a superpower, but with the curse of impotence — then merging the Greek myth with Plato’s Ring of Gyges — it was just sublime.”

With her makeover and all this praise, Hana’s skin buzzes. The tank’s vibrato, the lingering unease over Freddie’s mysterious whereabouts — oh well.

“…and the irony that the film secretly exposes real-world jerkoffs. You know something, Viñeta didn’t know what it had.”

Go on, she thinks.

*

At the road’s end is a mountain.

She says, “I thought Mérikah was flat.”

Tokonoko smiles. “Clever girl,” he says. “It’s man-made. But keep your fork, there’s pie.”

An iron door in the mountainside opens and swallows the convoy. From there they pass by foot through a labyrinth of tunnels, then into an elevator which elevates them up, up, up.

The door opens to a reception area that mimics, down to the Mid-Century modern furniture, the reception at Viñeta. Hana spots one difference. The lettering behind the desk spells Studio Hana. Their entourage begins to clap.

“What?” she says.

Tokonoko touches her back. “All yours,” he says, “with a team of one thousand animators.”

Hana’s speechless.

“Let’s make a movie, yes?”

She’s still speechless.

“Wait until you see the Idea Room.”

*

They’re seated at an oval table in the replica Idea Room. This glass box also protrudes from cliffs, with waves detonating mutely on rocks below.

“Coco won two Oscars,” Tokonoko says. “Let’s win five.”

Hana feels swimmy. “Yes,” she says. “Hell yes.”

He smiles. “We have better technology than Viñeta,” he says. “Watch.”

Tokonoko taps an invisible button on the table and everything changes. They’re now immersed in holograms, sitting on the moon. The earth is distant, Mérikah at its center.

Her eyes flit to the first world nations. Then she remembers.

“I’ll need Freddie.”

“W���?”

An assistant whispers into his ear. Tokonoko’s face drains of joy.

“He broke rules,” he growls.

A cold front descends through Hana’s intestines. “But dear leader,” she says, “if you want outside-the-box, Oscar-winning films, I’ll need a rulebreaker.”

*

Freddie wears a Dior suit but his jaw is blued over.

And he’s bringing no ideas to the Idea Room.

“It’s been two hours,” Hana says. “You owe me some ideas.”

“You were prettier before.”

He’s refused to look at her. Hana checks her glowed-up reflection in the glass wall.

“I’m the same person,” she says.

��ٱ�����dzܳ�.”

She closes her eyes. “You’re welcome,” she huffs, then excuses herself to the restroom.

Before she even unbuttons, he’s barged in. His finger stands against his lip, hush, and he opens the faucet full-blast.

“We’re kidnapped,” he whispers.

“No shit.”

“We’ve gotta escape.”

“That’s a limp handshake of a solution.”

“Look,” he says. His voice waivers. He rolls up his shirt and shows her.

Hana puts her hand to her own stomach. “What is that?” she asks, but she knows.

Raw and blistered and red. He’d been branded. “TOKONOKO,” it reads.

“Let’s encode rescue plans into the movie,” he says. “Let’s pull a Cassandra.”

Hana thinks on this. She pictures the reception, Studio Hana.

“No,” she says. “That’s suicide.”

“Then … what?”

She throws him a weak smile. There’s really just one other option.

“At the Oscars,” she says, “we’ll defect.”

*

Their thousand animators begin storyboards while Hana and Freddie refine ideas. Freddie is given limited access to the internet for research.

In their film, their villain is a gauzy doppelgänger of Tortyr, who murders his employees at an animation studio. His victims begin appearing as unscripted characters in his animated features, taking those stories off-rail and disclosing his secrets. To make this one sting, Freddie is digging deep into their old boss’ life.

But apparently their new boss too.

“Hana.” Freddie speaks so low she can barely hear. “Tokonoko’s internet firewall has holes. Turns out Tokonoko once married a Bollywood actress he kidnapped.”

They both study Hana’s skin.

*

In a cavernous theater, they’re seated by Tokonoko.

As the lights dim and the film begins and the room explodes with applause, Hana glances at Tokonoko’s face.

They don’t look alike, but can she truly see past his ridiculous hair and blocky glasses? Her thoughts keep boomeranging to the broken foot on the jetty and its toe ring. Unbelievably, Tokonoko kidnapped a Bollywood actress. How had she never heard this?

And she wonders, oh she wonders, did the actress escape?

And bear him a child in a foreign land?

Suddenly, her parents’ mysterious deaths feel a lot less mysterious.

*

Mid-movie, the screen goes dark and the theatre lights blaze on.

People blink.

Tokonoko sits with his brow furrowed and, in the trailing silence, it seems the room awaits his response. Sitting so close, Hana can tell. He’s pissed. And she knows that people who piss him off lose fingers.

Questions flood her brain.

She’s protected, isn’t she?

She must be his daughter, no? Why else give her a studio?

But Hana considers, too, that changing letters on a studio wall must take, what, five minutes?

A military officer approaches and whispers into Tokonoko’s ear. The Superior Leader nods, stands, and leaves with the officer.

Maybe, Hana thinks, this isn’t about her. She reminds herself the hermit kingdom always has international drama.

Ballistic missile tests.

Smuggling plutonium past embargos.

Et cetera.

Right?

*

Come morning, there’s no fresh flowers at breakfast. Nor does the buffet table sag with lobsters and Belgian waffles.

Hana chews coarse bread but leaves the turnips, and her thoughts slur with worries.

Eve’s been shadowing her since the premier and finally Hana snaps. “Where’s my relatives. I’ve got a right to meet them.”

“A right?” Eve’s smirking. “You have no relatives here.”

“I have a DNA test.”

Eve  laughs. “We’ve hacked Hollywood studies. Your government’s servers too. You think OriginStories.com is immune?”

*

Eve tells her to dress one morning and she does. It rained overnight and a slick fleet of black Mercedes comes to retrieve her.

Hana feels her pulse in her fingertips.

They shuttle her through wide, empty boulevards and deposit her — and at first she can’t believe it — at a full-scale replica of the Coliseum.

She’s led into a tunnel by men who won’t look her in the eye. By now she’s staggering and the world underfoot is spinning, spinning to infinity. She loses a shoe and the men push her along. A rush of brutal possibilities flood her imagination. Combat. Savage animals. A forced duel. With Freddie.

The tunnel ends at doors which open into bedlam, some 50,000 red-faced citizens filling four tiers of seating, yelling with pumped fists.

*

The crowd’s roar shakes her. It takes a moment for Hana to understand she’s not on the Colosseum floor but on a balcony overlooking it.

They tell her to sit and she sits.

Three posts jut from the arena’s wooden floor, a mound of white sand around each. Behind them looms a house-sized statue of Tokonoko scowling down at the posts, its massive arms folded.

Side gates open and three people dressed in coarse, white coveralls are led to the posts and secured at the waist with chains. White hoods conceal their faces.

In a gallery high in the arena, a man with spiky hair shouts into a microphone.

He names their crimes.

Treason. Sedition.

The crowd jeers and the prisoners’ hoods are removed.

Freddie stands center.

*

Things happen fast.

Tokonoko emerges from a gallery opposite his statue, hands up, waving to the crowd. He points to the spikey-haired MC in the gallery, who then bays a command through the loudspeakers: Bring out the shooters.

From another gate on the arena floor, nine men dressed in red uniforms goosestep to the arena’s center, thirty yards from the prisoners. They fan into groups of three.

“Ready,” the announcer yells.

The gunmen snap their rifles — elephant guns! — diagonally across their bodies.

“A����.”

They shoulder their rifles.

Hana thinks she’s screaming but can’t hear herself over the crowd.

“F������!”

They take out the prisoner’s knees, obliterating them.

“F������!”

Holes open across the prisoners’ chests. The white coveralls bloom crimson.

“F������!”

Their heads explode in bloody pulps.

*

Her mind drowns in demonized images and ruminations each night thereafter, and Hana’s never sure she slept.

The blood, all that blood, seeping through the white coveralls.

Coagulating puddles on the bleached sand beneath the posts.

The villa offers, still, only bread and turnips, and Hana refuses to eat. Even when Eve offers up her own rations — soup, salami, coffee — Hana won’t partake.

It’s when Hana least expects them that the worst memories come. Freddie’s face, black-and-blue, rivulets of tears braiding down his cheeks.

He saw her too.

Imploring.

But she’s useless. Her profession involves making up cartoon stories. She cannot fire a weapon, parkour over walls, pilot a helicopter. Rescue isn’t her superpower.

A few days later, a box arrives.

Hana unties its ribbons and, inside, she finds white coveralls in her size.

*

Eve is at her shoulder.

“You must dress,” she says.

The coveralls fit loose and scratchy.

The black Mercedes sedans growl in at noon. Hana sits in the kitchen and notices knives and utensils have been removed.

Tokonoko comes in, only him. He flaps a stack of papers on the table.

“The film was shit,” he barks. His voice pierces her. “Another roman à clef,” he says. “Too derivative of Cassandra, like you’re a one-note pony?”

He scoffs. “And your villain? You’ve a childish view of power. Complicate him, goddammit.”

Hana is trying not to cry. His notes are spot-on, and she winces at the thought of Studio Hana. It wasn’t Viñeta that suffocated her genius, that was just a shitty narrative she fed herself.

“Oh, and another thing,” he says. “Your friend put secret messages in the backgrounds.” He surveys her coveralls. “That has consequences.”

Hana nods.

“So does failure,” he says.

*

At dawn Eve wakes her.

“Thirty days,” she says, nothing more.

Hana lays in bed.

She’s read Tokonoko’s screenplay notes. He wants showstopping moments. He wants a complicated villain. He essentially wants his own story told to the world, and for the world to love it.

By day ten she’s written nothing.

At dusk, a package arrives. It contains Freddie’s personal effects, including his TORTYR=TORTURE shirts and a bottle of black nail polish.

She’s too numb to cry.

By day twenty she’s still written nothing.

Sometime overnight a scarecrow appears in the villa’s yard, dressed in white coveralls. From the window Hana nervously picks at Freddie’s nail polish bottle and discovers the label separates and unfolds.

She looks closer.

The fine print inside has been replaced with Freddie’s impossibly small handwriting.

It begins, devoid of spaces and punctuation:

�մǰ�DzԴǰ��’s·�ٰ��ܱ�·���ٴǰ���·����·��DzԴǰ�·�Ǵ�·

�ٳ��·���Ծ������ٴǰ���·�쾱�������·����·�ٳ��·�Բ�����·�Ǵ�·�ٰ��ܳٳ�

*

The label speaks of genocides, mass graves, and nuclear silos — all these rumors now substantiated with dates and geolocations. Along with the nukes, the nations’ critical military infrastructure is laid bare.

She realizes: this was Freddie’s longshot insurance policy, to tell the world what he learned if their movie failed.

But what fixates Hana most is the Bollywood actress story.

Kidnapped, a movie studio built around her. Seven films, including the runner-up at Moscow. But Tokonoko’s father still ruled, the Almighty Leader Zenonoko, who despised his son’s affair with a foreigner. As far as what happened next, Hana finds only this:

������·���DzԳٳ��·����𲵲Բ��Գ�·���辱�����ٱ��·���ɲ���
Pursued·by·Almighty·Leader Fate·unknown
�մǰ�DzԴǰ��·����𳦳ٲ�·����·���ٲ��ٳܳٱ�·����·����·������������ٲ�·���𲹻���·���dz�����·����

Freddie meant this for her, she knows this, and Hana ponders all the warring histories she’s now heard.

To live, she’ll have to weave her film from the right ones. She must embrace who she is.

She must use it to her advantage.

She puts pen to paper.

*

In this film, there will be a girl. There will be a minotaur in a labyrinth. There will be a king who puts them both in that labyrinth.

It will be a mash of The Hunger Games and The Gladiator franchises. Only then does she realize these are both derivative of more ancient mythologies, the ones she means to return to.

BELOVED LEADER

Logline:
Every nine years King Minos chooses seven boys and seven girls from Athens to face the Minotaur, but when he picks the wrong kid — a supposed orphan, who happens to be a long lost daughter of the Minotaur — the spectators of all this slaughter will become the spectacle.

Comps:
THE HUNGER GAMES, GLADIATOR, PREDATOR, BLUE EYE SAMAURAI

 

The Story:

OPENING IMAGE: Bird’s-eye view of a labyrinth inscribed in an island, surrounded by clear, aquamarine waters. Paradise? This is Crete. Camera zooms in, closer. Crowds sit along the labyrinth in stone, stadium seating. This crowd roars. There’s a quick pass by a king, draped in sycophants. Then we’re in the labyrinth. Bodies, strewn everywhere, delimbed, blood everywhere, guts everywhere. Camera settles on a girl lying prone, her face covered in dripping blood. She opens an eye. She’s playing dead.

HERA (16) – A young Athenian girl, willowy, meek, perfect fodder for a Minotaur. From an orphanage, of unknown origins. But she has dark secrets and, under the surface, violent tendencies and a clever mind lurk. The exact reason the Athenians served her up.

THE MINOTAUR (43) – A hugely muscled beast with crooked horns and a nose ring made of human bone. Short, dense, hair, with a thicker mane around the head and shoulders. His biceps and hands are oversized. There’s evidence of scars throughout his body, a proverbial map of those cruelties delivered, and suffered, by him. Inside, deep inside, is a man who had a mother, who fathered children. He is blinded by rage, kept as a pet by his true father, the king.

KING MINOS (60) –A warhorse. Once noble, once an idealist. Now: cruel and indulgent, with lavish clothes reminiscent of Western European styles. A blend of tunics and sandals and Parisian streetwear. Courtesans abound. Platters of Continental delicacies lay askance. They’ll go uneaten and will rot.

Hana cracks her knuckles. She’s been writing only an hour but the entire story buzzes like a swarm inside her head. She only must cage it with her pen.

Eve taps her shoulder, serves her coffee.

“Keep going,” she says.

She will. Hana’s in full flow. Father and daughter will reunite. How? In a confrontation of course. Exactly how? She’ll figure that out.

The rest is easy. The minotaur and the girl will join forces, reach the labyrinth’s end, break out, then vanquish the king.

Who is the king? It’s an amalgam of Tokonoko’s almighty father and the iconic leaders of that other, beautiful world. A little bit of Freud, a little bit of underdog politics, a lot of vendetta.

Just don’t be too “on the nose,” Hana reminds herself.

*

Eve tells her: the Superior Leader approves.

And things move quickly.

The animators finish in record time and an international theatrical release follows. It wins the film festival in Moscow, then Beijing. Eve brings Hana articles from Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, all chattering about this curiosity from the hermit kingdom.

But with international proxy wars, nuclear rhetoric, and closed borders, no western journalists have actually seen it.

And then they do.

Tokonoko arranges its premiere at a Berkeley underground theater.

The day passes and each hour, Hana and Eve trade meaningful looks.

Any news?

Not yet.

The convoy of Mercedes growl in at nightfall. Eve and Hana sit on a sofa and Eve turns and hugs her. She holds her there.

“Whatever happens,” she whispers, “I loved your film.”

*

Tokonoko is screaming. Spittle mists the atmosphere.

Hana sits on the sofa with review clippings he’s tossed in her lap. Eve squeezes her knee.

“It’s a piece of shit!” he yells. “Derivative! Bush-league, compared to Pixar and Viñeta.”

Hana flinches. This will hurt on so many levels.

But then he says something familiar, something she’s glimpsed from the newsprint in her lap.

“A cloying tale that never rises above what it is — sinister propaganda — assisted by a clumsy Viñeta defector.”

Their eyes connect.

Tokonoko isn’t angry — not at her.

“What do they know?” he says. His voice is quiet. “We won Beijing, Moscow too. That’s two billion people more than La-La Land and its confederacy. Who cares what botoxed, self-important weirdos think.”

He looks to Eve.

“Leave us,” he says.

*

Once alone, he sits beside her, their knees almost touching.

“Clever girl,” he says. “I loved the film, it ….”

His voice trails off.

It’s awhile before he speaks again.

“We never had a chance in Hollywood but that’s fine. It’ll implode on its —"

“N��.”

Even Hana’s surprised she said it. But she’s angry. Bush-league? Clumsy?

She eyeballs the Vanity Fair article, its quote by Tortyr: “She failed here. Then she went looking for someone — anyone —  to gift her success.”

She pictures Tortyr smugly entertaining critics in his office lair. She thinks of all those times she’s felt useless, a mere storyteller. She thinks of everything she’s learned and lands on a truth: Creativity has many applications.

“It’s time,” she says, “for revenge.”

*

“My daughter,” he says. “My beautiful daughter. I thought I’d lost you.”

He takes her hand.

For Hana, time stops. Of course she knew this, but now it’s been said.

But she can’t forget: Freddie at the stake, his face obliterated by elephant guns. The scarecrow, the coveralls sized to fit her.

“Why?” she said.

Her father scrutinizes her face. Then he understands.

“You had to earn it,” he says.

What Hana doesn’t do is flinch. She buries this one deep, this death of her belief that finding family meant finding unconditional acceptance. Her heart, it fractures.

Tokonoko studies her.

“You’re lucky,” he laughs. “You look like your mother.”

Hana pictures the dismembered bronze foot on the jetty.

*

Hana knows what happens next, just as she foresaw the plot of her screenplay.

TOKONOKO
Brave girl. Let’s go over it one last time.

HANA
Easy. I “escape” (air quotes) to a nearby island and am rescued. The media goes crazy, and I offer an exclusive interview to the highest bidder. Tortyr still wants his hermit kingdom movie of course, now more than ever, and my condition is simple: he rehire me.

TOKONOKO
And then?

HANA
I steal Viñeta’s IP, infect their servers, and come home.

*

TOKONOKO
It wasn’t a kidnapping.

HANA
What?

TOKONOKO
Your mother and me. We loved each other.

HANA
I know it.

TOKONOKO
I sent my best guard with her.

HANA
It wasn’t enough.

TOKONOKO
Be strong. We’ll see each other soon, yes?

TOKONOKO
When you’re back, we’ll anoint you our Beloved Leader.

*

The first thing she notices — how couldn’t she — is Tortyr’s new bull sculpture, built-to-scale.

Hana isn’t impressed. She of course has seen bigger.

“I must say,” Tortyr says, “I hardly recognize you.”

Hana checks her reflection in the window. Teased hair. Tailored clothes. Bollywood bombshell.

He says, “I hope we can start fresh.” He unscrews a bottle of bourbon and pours a glass, then points the bottle her way.

She shrugs.

“I’m very interested to hear —” he finishes the second pour “— about your experience. The executions. The giant statues. I want to reboot that horrible film he made you write. We’ll even call ours the same name … rewrite history, if you will.”

Hana knows by now how to keep a mask intact.

“I love it,” she says.

*

Hana’s nose is bleeding again. The climate is drier than she remembers, and she reaches to her nightstand for tissues.

Her homecoming has been atrocious. There’ve been the greedy military generals and their questions about silo locations and military technology. Then the bespectacled spooks from intelligence agencies and their questions about Tokonoko and his sexual preferences, toothpaste brands, and social media passwords. But the politicians were the worst, rushing in for pictures under detonating flashbulbs, asking zero questions, just talking, talking, spewing rhetoric to their frothing, red-faced sycophants.

Hana, still a tiny boat in a tempest.

She first sought purpose through art, she realizes, but she’s no artist — at least, not of the caliber she had in mind. In blundering into this escape, she thought purpose would reveal itself, an ethereal hand appearing from the darkness to lead her down a meaningful path. But she is nowhere now, adrift among warring weatherstorms, destined for shipwreck.

Hana reaches for another tissue and her hand grazes Freddie’s bottle of nail polish and its secrets, still hers. But its resonance in these times, she now knows, is that of an autumn day, mere cloud cover on Tokonoko’s life. People already believe what Freddie learned, the evidence doesn’t matter.

Sitting beside the nail polish is a thumbdrive with a computer virus promising rhapsodic annihilation of Tortyr’s digital infrastructure. But it promises only a similar cosmic ripple — the rich will recover, then become yet more ruthless.

Hana feels her hope for a new world splintering under the deadfall left by narcissistic goliaths and their mindless followers.

And yet.

Hana won’t be defeated. A time will come when she’ll sweep them off their feet. She pictures her statue, her mother’s too, on the breakwater in that far-away land, overlooking the sea. Towards the promise of a new day, the dawn of that time in Mérikah when there’s only the Beloved Leader. This world will be of her making.

The thumbdrive it is.

THE END

---

About the Author

Sean Marciniak is a former crime reporter. His fiction has appeared in The Best Mystery Stories of the Year, the Mystery Tribune, J Journal, Shooter Literary Magazine, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for Pushcart, PEN America, and other awards. He lives in San Francisco.