"Peet! There you are - and already at work for the cause, I see. Very good." Zana hoped her voice was laced with enough false cheer to convince Mano that despite her heated exchange with Lora, she was still a devout follower of Gres' vision. It wouldn't make their escape easier if Mano reported back to Gres that she was trying to pry the girl away from his dirty, manipulative paws.

The human looked up from the machine he was juggling on his knees and frowned at her. "'Work for the Cause'? What did they drug you with?"

"The truth, Peet, just the truth." She saw his eyes widen, and hastily continued, "Yes, I know, they took me by surprise... and by force... but after I listened to what they had to say, about raising the awareness of the people, well. I found I agreed with them."

Peet nodded slowly, sarcasm bright in his eyes. "Uh-huh..."

"Your human doesn't seem very enthusiastic," Mano remarked from the door.

Zana cursed silently; she had hoped he'd gone away by now. Now she had to keep up the act.

"Well, he's a human," she said, "I guess I have to dumb it down a bit more..."

Peet's hands jerked, and the thing he was working on slipped from his knees and clattered on the floor. "Shit!"

Behind her, Mano cackled.

"Language, Peet..." She quickly bent down, scooped up the metal case and smashed it into his palm. The wires in it were sticking out in every direction, biting into her fingers. Play along, she mouthed at him. "And don't be so clumsy - Gres wants to use that thing!"

He shot her a withering glare, but she saw his shoulders relax, and breathed a little lighter. Now she only had to think of a way to tell him where they could meet without a guard hanging on every word she said... She crouched down before him as if she was talking to a little child. The position also had the advantage of completely concealing her face from Mano.

"It's important that you do your best to repair this," she gestured to the eviscerated machine in Peet's hands, "because Gres needs it to defeat the prefect. It's our only chance to liberate the humans under his heel. Do you understand?"

Peet's eyes had an unholy gleam that promised her he'd make her pay for this later, but he just nodded and said, "yes'm" like a good, tame human, and Mano was scratching his belly and not paying too much attention anymore. She rose.

"When you're done with this, I want you to come over to the kitchen - the sink is clogged. Now don't look at me like this," she put on her most imperious tone, "every task is a work for the cause. People have to eat, and they don't want to eat from dirty plates. It's unhygienic." Her eyes bored into Peet's. We can talk there without anyone listening in, don't you get it?

Peet took a deep, calming breath and leaned back to look her in the eye. "At your service, missus." Zana cringed internally at his choice of address. Oh, she'd never hear the end of it...

When they were two steps away from the door, they heard something metallic hitting the wall with a crash. Zana hoped it was that weapon he had been working on.

Mano laughed. "Your boy has a temper."

"I like him that way," Zana said, a sudden fondness constricting her heart.

"Better keep an eye on him then," Mano said casually. "'Cause Kuma likes the fiery ones a bit too much."

Zana shot him an irritated look. "I have no idea what..." her voice trailed away when the meaning of Mano's words sank in. At her stare, he licked his lips and waggled his eyebrows.

Zana stopped in the middle of the corridor. "You can't be serious."

Mano held up his hands. "Hey, I don't judge! Under the old order, they'd have flogged poor Kuma for bestiality. But Gres says the humans are people, too - we're to call them 'the other people'. So why's it wrong now if people express their, ah, feelings for each other?"

"Do they?" Zana couldn't believe it. "Are you saying that the humans are consenting to... that?"

"Sure they are - what else can they do?" Mano said, nonplussed. "Hey, it's better to make love than war, right?"

Slowly, carefully, Zana relaxed her hands. "Does Gres know about this?"

Mano shrugged. "As long as everyone's doing their job, Gres doesn't care how people spend their downtime."

"Where is Kuma now?" She very much didn ' t want to see what Kuma was doing with... or to... the humans around here, but she couldn't go to Gres with this just on hearsay.

All this noble claptrap of yours, those grand visions you used to lure poor Lora in... I'll throw them right back into your face, you bloody hypocrite.

Mano shook his head. "You don't want to disturb him when he's in the middle of something..."

He suddenly found himself against the wall, Zana's face just inches away from his.

"Where?"

The sink really was clogged; Burke had half expected to find that the problem was just as fake as Zana's sudden enthusiasm for "the Cause," but to his dismay, he'd really have to remove the pipe and take care of the gunk inside.

Ah, the joys of human servitude. He went to find someone to give him a pipe wrench.

One of the humans pointed him to a corridor that led away from the canteen and into the storage area of the organization, and Burke took the opportunity to peek into every room he passed. Whoever was responsible for this department of the resistance company was doing a damn fine job - the shelves were stacked with dried food, blankets, clothes, tools (no wrench, though), and what he supposed were medicinal herbs.

Some doors were locked; maybe they saw the armory as part of their supplies. Or maybe they were storing other things that needed heightened security, though Burke couldn't imagine what they would be, considering the level of civilization this world had fallen back to. Though considering it was led by apes, it was probably a pretty decent achievement to have gotten even this far.

When he turned a corner, he suddenly found himself face to face with a group of three people, one of them Katlin. They paid him no heed, too deeply engrossed in a heated, if whispered, debate.

"You just have to be extra cautious," Katlin was saying. "Only approach after dark, only visit our most reliable supporters..."

"They'll have tightened security around every village now," one of the others argued - a young man with dark, short-cropped hair and a nasty scar on his cheek. It looked like a branding. So it probably was one.

"I know," Katlin said, and laid an encouraging hand on his shoulder. "That's why I'm giving this run to you, Eska. You're our best scout - if someone can detect a gap in their security, it's you."

The boy smiled at her, and Burke saw his shoulders relax. "I'll find a way."

Katlin squeezed his shoulder again before she let go. "I know you will. Be careful, though. I don't want to lose you to these monkeys."

"We wouldn't have this problem if Kuma hadn't shot the prefect's man," the other man growled. He was older, though age was difficult to estimate with these people - the hard life edged itself into their faces early on, and sucked the color from their hair. "Supply runs are getting more dangerous, with worse results. If our scouts come back at all. And now we lost our hideout at Ictala, too..."

"Stop this right now, Marlon!" Katlin snapped. "I don't want to hear another word! Kuma is Gres' second, you'll treat him with the respect that position demands!"

She hadn't demanded respect for the person occupying that position, Burke noted; still...

"He's right, you know?" he said, after the two men had squeezed themselves past him, Marlon still muttering under his breath that he was doing this out of respect for Katlin, not that gorilla. "If any of you had fucked up this bad, I doubt they'd still be second-in-command."

Katlin frowned at him. "What are you doing here?"

He gave her his best innocent smile. "I was tasked with unclogging the pipe under the kitchen sink, for the Good of the People. It's doing the tyrant's work by resisting the glorious cleansing of the revolutionary dishwater. But I need the Wrench of Liberation to begin the Great Work."

Katlin bit her lip. "This way." She turned away from him, still shaking her head, and began to walk down the corridor.

"Why did you rip into the poor fella like that?" Burke wanted to know as he followed her.

Katlin didn't turn her head. "If I allow this kind of mutinous talk to spread, the resistance will tear itself apart in short order. It's my job to uphold discipline."

"And maybe it should be Gres' job to keep his gorilla in check, so that other members of his organization don't feel pissed off so much about that perv," Burke pointed out. "Did he get a demotion for this stunt? He should've been demoted for pulling this kind of shit, you know."

"I'm sure he did get reprimanded."

"You're sure?"

Now she did throw him a glance over her shoulder. Her amusement at his joke had evaporated again. "I trust Gres."

"Why?" Burke exploded. He squeezed past Katlin and blocked her way. "On what basis do you trust that ape? As far as I can see, the conditions for humans in his prefecture are worse than elsewhere, not better, and as your man just pointed out, they're getting still worse. And Kuma plays a not unimportant part in that development, and I don't see Gres reining him in, or kicking his ass for shooting that guard and leading the whole damn posse to your hideout..."

"Kuma had vital information," Katlin interrupted him. "Information that had to reach Gres, no matter what."

Burke stared at her. "No matter what? No matter how many human lives it'd cost, you mean - what do you think will happen to your village? The prefect will punish them for having a rebel hideout in their neighbourhood!"

Katlin brushed her hair out of her face. She looked worn out and defiant. "I know. They're my people, in case you've forgotten!"

Burke huffed, incredulous. "I can understand that Gres doesn't care too much about them - he's an ape - but I can't believe that you'd throw all these people to the wolves for some good-night stories of a damn monkey!"

"They're not stories!" Katlin was in his face all of a sudden, face tense. "Gres has a vision! The vision of a better life, a better future for the humans! What kind of vision do you have, huh? To spend your life as Zana's and whatshisname's servant?"

"We're not their servants," Burke muttered.

"So what are you?" Katlin scoffed. "Their pets?"

"For someone who believes in Gres' visions, you're pretty dismissive of the idea that we could be friends," Burke retorted. When had this discussion become about him?

Katlin nodded, her eyes blazing. "So as long as you've secured some nice apes for yourself, who see you as friends, the rest of us can toil away as slaves?"

"I never said that!" Burke protested. "I'm all for freeing all humans, I just don't believe that Gres is, too."

Katlin leaned against the wall and folded her arms. "So how do you plan to go about human liberation? What's your vision?"

Burke gaped at her. He... he had no idea how to answer that question. Ever since he had discovered that ancient surgery book in Zaius' secret stash, he had known they were fucked. There was no way back to their own time - that bastard Hasslein had marooned them in some far future where apes ruled the world.

But he had avoided thinking about what that meant for him and Al, in the long run. As long as they were just one patrol raid ahead of Urko, it just didn't make sense to plan their retirement. He'd give it some thought once they had reached those mountains in the north, where the gorilla's reach supposedly ended.

As for the other humans of this world... Burke didn't really feel a kinship to them. They were strangers, cowering before the fucking monkeys as if that was the natural order of things.

But Katlin didn't. She was the only human he had met so far who seemed... normal. He could imagine her in his own time, walking down the street, head held high, confident, sexy...

She was still glaring at him, a slight, derisive smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.

Burke rubbed his nose. He'd be damned if he'd leave her with that monkey's vision as her only option.

"My vision," he said slowly, "is that you lead that revolution." He ploughed on when she opened her mouth, cutting off her protest. "You're a better leader than Gres will ever be. You'd never tolerate that old perv Kuma abusing the people who follow you. Who trust you. Who put all their hopes in you. Who... who admire you."

He took a deep breath. "I've seen it in their eyes. Even these two guys whose asses you kicked - they love you. They take that kicking, on top of Kuma groping them in a dark corridor or whatever the hell his kink is, and they don't even hold it against you that you're protecting that asshole instead of them."

"I'm not protecting Kuma," Katlin said weakly, but she averted her eyes. A bright red had crept up her throat and into her face. Yeah, poor redheads with their white skin, never able to hide their embarrassment, or excitement...

"Gres thinks that Kuma's usefulness outweighs his... issues," Katlin murmured. "We all put up with Kuma. When I joined the HLF, I agreed to follow Gres' rules, of my own free will, and every human here agreed to it, too." She looked up to meet his eyes. "So we have to honor that agreement." She pushed away from the wall and continued her way down the corridor.

"But Kuma is exploiting and abusing that agreement," Burke argued when he caught up to her, "and Gres isn't stepping in, so he's violating it, too. So you aren't bound to that damn agreement anymore, either!"

Katlin opened a door and stopped to light a torch. Shelves with tools emerged from the darkness; the room looked as if the HLF had raided an hardware store.

"The HLF is our only chance to push back against the prefect," Katlin said, scanning the shelves. " "And it's not just Aken - it's the neighbouring prefects and their guards, and it's Chief General Urko in the City, and his command over all the guards in all prefectures, from here to the Iron Mountains, that we're up against. We need an ape with military experience, or we won't stand a chance."

"And so you pay your way to freedom with even more abuse by apes," Burke muttered. "Just different apes, apes with a vision."

Katlin grabbed the shelf with both hands; she didn't look at him. "I know how just taking each day as it comes is easier than looking at the big picture, Pete. Because the big picture is that humans are lower than the dust under the apes' feet." She shook her head. "But if you never look up while you're living that day, you'll spend it in the dust. And that's something I can't go back to."

She ducked, pulled a wrench from a lower shelf, and slapped it into his hand. "This day of looking up will come for you, too. I just hope it won't happen only at the last day of your life. It's better to look ahead with hope, than to look back with regret."

She didn't wait for his answer. Burke weighed the wrench in his hand, feeling desolate.

I just hope you won't come to regret pinning your hopes on that monkey, lady.