by Logan Keys
“Yeah.”
Tommy grabs my hand, his strong fingers linking with mine. “I never thought I’d see it again. Or you.”
“Me, either,” I confess. Which is why I dream it.
As if hearing my thoughts, he asks, “Is this a dream?”
I nod. “Mine,” I reply, and the reality settles in.
The pain threatens to wake me, but I shake it off. “I’m sorry, Tommy. I’m sorry I wasn’t there---here, and I could have been. If I had known you were in LA, that the Underground had returned, I could have done something.”
He frowns. “You think I didn’t feel regret over finding your bloody boot on that hill? I’ve lived thinking you were dead and felt responsible. If only I had been there.”
“Dallas!” a voice calls, shaking the dream existence like an earthquake. “Wake up!”
I open my eyes. Joelle’s standing over me. She’s angry, and her hair is messy from sleep.
“Stop it,” she bites out. “Don’t dream about him if you have to broadcast it. Just make it stop.”
“I’m sorry.” I rub my temples, trying to push away the sadness. “Why are you covered in dirt?” I ask.
Joelle likes living in the houses. She actually avoids sleeping outside now if she can.
“Oh,” she says, as if just now realizing she’s dirty. “Come on, I’ll show you. The sun is low.”
Outside it’s mostly dark, I’ve overslept. We stick to the shaded spots, but move through the city without burning. At Tommy’s headstone, there’s now a small hill of soil next to the grave. “I dug him up,” Joelle says.
I search her face, horrified. “What do you mean?”
She shrugs, crosses her arms, and toes a clod of dirt. “I just don’t think he’d want to be buried here. I mean…” She swallows. “They killed---murdered him. Would you want to stay with the people who murdered you?”
I nod. I get it. But… “Where is he?”
My stomach is twisted with anxiety as I look over the edge. But the hole is empty.
“I had them put the coffin on a transport so when we leave, we can take him with us.”
Joelle’s dark hair has grown over time. It’s almost to the back of her knees now. With the strands wildly messy, it’s like a living part of her makeup now. Joelle is this girl of flowing raven hair and glittering dark eyes.
I wonder, staring at it, who am I? What makes me-me.
“Are we leaving?” I ask.
“Not yet.” Joelle turns to walk away. “Soon.”
“I took out Bradford,” I say to her back.
She stays facing away but stops walking. “I heard.”
“So, what about…”
“My mother?” She sighs mentally. “I just need time. Okay?”
“Okay.”
Chapter Forty-Three
Crystal
I’ve been in this cell so long, I’ve lost track of the days.
I slam a hand against the wall. “Just purge me already and be done, you stupid witch!”
There are cameras inside this room so, Karma knows I’m here. This will be the last purge I ever face. It’s the anticipation that’s killing me. And the fact that I know they won’t kill me---that kills me.
That would only help our cause. A martyr would end Karma’s reign, and she knows it. Turning me is her best opportunity to get all the information too. And I’ve had too much time to think, to worry, to let fear take hold. But loads of contemplation has helped me clarify one thing: I’ve done my best. And even so, it always comes back to this: Will you give it all? Truly?
It’s in this cell that I get to see the span of my life as it truly was. Last time I’d stubbornly refused to believe the end was coming. Now, the end stubbornly refuses to let me go. It peels back the eyelids of my mind and demands that I acknowledge the abyss whispering, “Yes, girl, this is fate.”
Either way. I gave my torch to Goodman. He has it now. My only regret is that I’ll be the monster who faces the rebels. I might be used against my team to make them cower. But I’ve trained my Skulls well. We are all vessels. I’ve been tested and them seeing me fall will only further embolden their cause.
I look up into the camera.
“Hear that, Karma? My Skulls will work twice as hard against you now that you’ve got their leader!”
They know their job.
The cell door opens, and a guard throws in another prisoner. He lands in a heap of bony elbows and knees. This is the first time they’ve given me a cellmate.
They chain him up and he curses at them, struggling. “Bastards. Bastards!”
Once he’s locked in they leave. He slumps down against the wall. “I’m on their side. Don’t they know that?” He searches for a way out while I give a huff of laughter. He gestures at himself. “I’m on their side!”
“What side again?” I ask with a smirk.
He wildly spins this way and that.
“Hey, man,” I say. “There’s no way out. What day is it?”
He focuses on me a moment before his eyes go wide. “What day?”
“Yeah.”
“You aren’t… You can’t be her… Never mind, don’t tell me. I’m on their side don’t they know that!”
I sigh. “In case you haven’t figured it out, they probably don’t care.”
He mutters the date and I flinch. I’ve been in here a whole month rotting away.
He throws his head back and sobs. “I wasn’t part of it. I wasn’t part of the disobedience. Stupid kids. They were just standing there glaring at the guards. Why would they do that? I wasn’t doing it. I was watching the kids. It was so strange. One hand on the face. All of them. Same hand. Same side.”
“What do you mean? What kids?”
He puts a hand to his face. He has to hunch because of his chains. “I dunno, any kids, just random kids. They put one hand over the left side of their face. It’s all the rage now. Started with them. I don’t know what it means but the guards don’t like it.”
His hand is covering half his face, eye peeking through his fingers.
“What does that mean?”
“Something to do with the rebels, I gather. I mean, you should know. You’re… I mean I have no idea who you are. But the gesture, I’m not sure. They’re arresting anyone doing it. But now everyone is doing it. Too many to arrest. That er…group. The…”
“The Skulls?”
He hisses at me with a finger over his lips. “Don’t even say the name! I don’t have anything to do with it. You hear me! I am on your side!”
“Ok. Not that it will help.”
The door opens and the guards come in and unlock my new visitor. They drag him out and he screams, “Where are you taking me?”
But he knows. The purge.
He freaks out crying and moaning, “No no no.” Over and again.
“Told you,” I say in a whisper. Nothing he would do mattered.
A guard stops in front of me. “Karma wants to see you.”
I glare up at the camera. “Does she?”
Chapter Forty-Four
Crystal
The Cromwells haven’t changed whatsoever. That’s not true. Karma has had more work done. She looks like a high gloss painting but through a glowy filter. Not a real person. She barely moves to even breathe.
Her eyes are now purple. Like Jeremy’s.
Aw.
Nostalgia.
I want to spit into them.
She doesn’t beat around the bush like her late husband. Once they force me into a seat across from her at the table, she says, “Tell me, Crystal. Is my son still alive?”
I play confused.
She holds some documents. Shaking them at me, she says, “Come now. I’ve found the pamphlets. Who is this Paper Prophet?”
I try not to let my surprise show. Jeremy’s been writing, and from the looks of it, a lot. Goodman must have gotten to him. I relax knowing Goodman got away, and a fresh energy unfurls inside my worn body at the proof that the re
bellion is still ongoing without me. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
If her face could move, I bet her lip would quiver. I bet her fake eyes would cry. Instead, she just sits there pleased as punch no matter what she’s talking about. But I sense she’s pleading beneath the chemical washes and filled lips. “I need to know if my son still lives. Please.”
“No,” I say as serious as I can. “Jeremy is no longer.” Because he’s not. Not like she knows him. “You can thank your husband for that.”
“My husband is dead. And if you are telling the truth, my son is too. Bring it to me, Carolina.”
The girl comes forward, she’s had more work done too. She’s slimmer, gotten rid of the rack, and she’s in an outfit like the guards, minus helmet.
She turns to look at me and I flinch. One eye is mechanical. Over her left eye that had been hidden from me in profile, there’s now half a visor and a small shield of red. The eye itself is robotic.
And now that she’s closer, I can see the coloring of her skin isn’t quite normal. She’s been purged.
Karma motions at Carolina and my gaping. “Jeremy and my beloved husband were gone, Carolina decided to get some upgrades. She’s now my security advisor. She’s quite good.”
She holds up a pamphlet and begins to read. “Anthem, patriots, wanderers of a lost city.”
Jeremy’s words echo through me and I feel them shake me to my core.
Karma continues, “There is hope in this ever-present darkness. While you were unaware, while you were sleeping still in your section beds, a hero has risen from the city of ash. A phoenix. Do we deserve her? In this fallen place, do we deserve to have such a champion of our cause? No. But she has come nevertheless. And, dear citizens of the blind, we can thank her. As she goes into the blackest of night without a care for herself, as she’s shed the glamour of society—traded silk scarf for scars, a testament to the duty she bears---would that we could cover our faces, not the side with scars, but the side without. The left. For it is in those scars that we find our freedom. In every wound, in every pain inflicted to our cause. In repayment from the city that she loves, proof that we recognize how she forges our way toward the light, with even the renting of her skin and her own blood as payment---too high a price...”
Karma flips the paper and shows me the same girl from before. The one I’d seen, the one I’d longed to be, but she’s been redrawn alone. It’s the powerful fierce girl up close now, revealing a face that’s rugged---not as perfect as before---and her hand covers a side of her face, showing scars on the other, and no doubt hiding the perfect.
The marks on her face… Scars like mine.
I stare at the image in shock. The man from my cell, before, he’d said the kids in the city are doing this. Copying it. Covering half of their face. For me?
Jeremy, he asks this of Anthem?
For me.
I don’t hear his mother, whatever it is that she says. I’m deaf to her nonsense. I’ve come up for air for the first in a very long time. I’m awash in emotions a decade old. Since losing Jeremy, since losing myself, I’ve been holding my breath. I couldn’t breathe. I just suffocated every single day.
I come up for air because, underneath it all, I just wanted to know that he cared. I mean, the city needs me, and I need her, so we are a threesome.
Anthem’s in trouble, but so was I. And so was Jeremy. Somehow he knew that. He knew I needed something, a reminder, and for Anthem to show that she loves me too.
Before, he wrote things, and he chased Liza, and he loved her. I know that. I accepted it. But with this, I know now, just a little, maybe a lot, that he loves me too. But even better, Anthem… she is in love with me scars and all.
Jeremy won’t come riding into Karma’s mansion on a white horse. That’s not his style. So, he wants to save me the best way he knows how. He’s a fatalist. He thinks we all deserve to die for this cause, it’s what makes his words so precious. It’s what makes people believe them. He will die for them. Are the words of a Martyr not the very reason we hear them so much more?
Death was expected in this venture, but it’s life that surprises us, and we are living proof of human perseverance. We are survival incarnate.
But he’d done what he does best… he wrote me back to life. He sent me his best gift: words.
And they went out and spoke to Anthem. To her heart and soul. And now she is blessing me in return. I’m in a fog at the notion. Right now, I’m leagues under the sea of my own thoughts.
As Karma has the guards take me to the balcony, I don’t feel their bruising grip. I no longer feel the fear of being purged into oblivion. I walk without fighting. I stand tall.
As she shows me to the people of Anthem. Her proof of my capture, she thinks is a victory. And as she announces to them that the rebellion is over that the uprising is ended. As Karma talks, it is apparent that her voice falls on deaf ears.
I look into the eyes of every person standing below, a crowd who do not even acknowledge Karma Cromwell. Instead, they keep their gaze focused on me. They watch for a sign. From me.
I smile.
Karma tries harder. Her hands glide through the air. She animates prettily. Her daughter is next to her, back ramrod straight. But they do not command attention.
I do.
My smile turns to a grin and I move closer to the balcony edge. These are my people. Every single one. I inch closer to them. Stories high.
In the gunmetal dusk of the evening, they have come to see me. Dry eyed because they’ve spent their whole lives crying out until they are husks, they shuffle through the ash of a burning world… to see me. And now... a paper prophet reminds them to shuffle toward a new dawn.
I send them that. I send empowerment. Even bound and shackled, I send my people freedom. Because I can do that. Because Karma can never take it away with her abuse.
Trying to regain focus, Carolina attempts to speak. “Resistance is futile, citizens. The rebellion has ended.”
I can’t help it. I start to laugh. Not giggles. Not snorts. I belly laugh with my head thrown back. I take deep gasping breaths of air. The first air I’ve sucked this deeply into my lungs in what feels like forever and I laugh, and I laugh.
Even when the guards strike me. Even when Karma asks Carolina to use a club on me until I fall to my knees. Not even when they beat me down do I stop. Still, I wheeze and laugh.
I find someone in the crowd from my place on the ground. I can see through the balcony’s decorative ledge to a little girl who pushes her way forward. She comes to the front boldly. She stands ahead of her parents. She stares through me with eyes of the next generation. One who won’t be so easily turned into sheep.
She covers half of her face.
Chapter Forty-Five
Liza
I can pinpoint the exact moment where my life changed forever, but I go further back than that. Before all of the things that should shape a girl, I stop the madness, then I guide it forward again by years, but in a new direction. I play piano for the Queen of England and my father watches me compose through my formative years before making my debut at the freshest part of sixteen.
He does not die.
And I never end up on the island.
After a long session of playing in our foyer, I go into the sunny dancing room, where my mother stands at the ballet bar warming up. And I watch her. This time, I don’t notice the judgmental side of my life-giver, instead, I will her to dance, while she still can. And I just enjoy the lithe creature my mother was… is.
She's older, but her lines are perfect, her posture erect to the point of strangeness.
When a body is too straight, you notice how impossible the position of that strain is.
I feel the heat of the old yellow sun through the big windows, and the birds are outside screeching their joy. It is a place where I count my blessings. I don’t hold anything against these two anymore. They were what they were. And the world falling apart was not their faul
t.
Inevitably, I have to wake up, and when I do, I’m back on the island. Cold, damp, and alone, I’m right where Cory has placed me.
It could be a day it could be years. Isolation has squelched my humanity. It has corroded my sense of time.
But even worse.
It has deadened my sense of purpose.
Chapter Forty-Six
Liza
Camp Bodega…
Why this part of my life?
I know why. Because I gave up on that island. Just as Phillip had before me. And Cory sees my failure at Bodega, my soft grip I’d held on my life, he sees the reminder as a sort of punishment.
Memories have taken hold until I am living them again. I am not Liza anymore. Not this version. I’m her. The one who gave up hope. She embraced death.
He’s fascinated by that, and he takes me back there all over again.
Bodega slowly fills with people I once knew, it takes root until I believe that I am there, and not somewhere in the wilds of America headed for Anthem. I can’t recall that this is a dream of his making, or even who “he” is after a time. Eventually, I am unaware that reality ever existed.
I never left the island.
Sometimes Cory makes up things to create a world that scares me. But the worst times are when they are my life relived. They just simply send me back to the real memory…
Bodega isn’t the empty place anymore, it’s alive and flowing with familiar faces. I rise from my bunk. My hair is short, my smock is small. I’m smaller.
Everything is the same….
My friend Lucy runs up to the glass divider and pounds her fists on it emphatically. I’m alive, and she’s happy to see it.
“I thought you were a goner!” she calls.
We both have to stand close to the vents to hear one another. Her side of the compound is where they keep the hyper-contagious people with the super-cancer. We’ve joked a few times about how it sounds heroic, or like a bad vigilante. “Super-cancer!” Dun dun dun duh!