KJS DC 3.26

Marcus Chen was seventeen and mostly thinking about lunch when Ms. Abernethy asked the class what it would take to cancel an American election.

He wrote down four words — that can’t happen here — and went to sleep that night without another thought about it.

Then he started dreaming.

In the dream it was six months later and he was reading headlines the way you read them now, fast and half-believing, hoping each one is the last one that surprises you. The SAVE Act had passed — new ID requirements that quietly removed 21 million voters from the rolls, most of them young, most of them brown, most of them in cities. Redistricting maps had been redrawn so fast that three federal courts were still arguing about which ones were legal. National Guard deployments had tripled in Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania. Not for disasters. Just — there.

In the dream Marcus read a thread on Instagram from someone with 3 million followers who said the Vice President had died. Tragically. Suddenly. The kind of suddenly that arrives at convenient moments in history.

And with no Vice President confirmed, the thread argued, and war powers extended from the Iran operation still active, and a compliant Congress that had already surrendered its tariff authority without a whisper, the President could declare a national security emergency. Could postpone. Could suspend. Could call it temporary.

In the dream Marcus remembered what Ms. Abernethy had taught about martial law. About how it had never been used to cancel an election in America. About the word never and how it depended entirely on the people around the person holding the power deciding that some things were simply not done.

He looked up Pete Hegseth. Looked up Pam Bondi. Looked up the fourteen people in the room where decisions like that would be made.

In the dream he didn’t feel angry. He felt something worse. He felt like he finally understood the assignment.

He thought about the Cabal — that was what he called them in the dream, capital C, like a word from a history book he hadn’t gotten to yet. He thought about how it would require all of them. Every one of them choosing, on the same morning, to be the kind of person who did that.

And in the dream he wasn’t sure they wouldn’t.

Marcus Chen woke up at 6:47 a.m. on a Tuesday in March 2026, his phone buzzing with notifications.

He got up. Got dressed. Went to school.

Civics was third period.