It’s dark and musty in here, crowded with the dense smell of the earth from the ground beneath us. As I adjust to the darkness, I notice a yellow line tracing the top of the otherwise naked white of the plaster wall.
“Where are we?” I ask.
“A tunnel,” the girl says.
I roll my eyes. “Well, right. But where?”
She shrugs.
I blink. “Your face is covered in ash.” It’s even smudged into her hair, turning it even darker around her hairline and making the blue of her eyes spark brighter.
She tilts her head and grins. “What, you think you’re immune?”
I swipe the back of my hand across my cheek. When I look down at it, it’s smudged in black.
“Crap!” I do it again, and then realize I have nothing to clean my hand on. “Double crap.”
The girl giggles. “Come on, this way.”
Then she heads off deeper into the tunnels. I wipe the dirt off my hands the best I can and rush after her.
“Where are we going?” My voice is getting that whiney tone I really hate, but I need answers. “Why am I even here?”
“Calm down,” the girl says.
Calm down? Suddenly the weight of this day sinks into my gut with a burning anger.
“No. I won't calm down. I was supposed to depart last night, and no one will tell me why I didn’t. I’m tired, and I’m hungry, and I haven’t been given a proper meal or explanation all day long.”
“Shhh, cool it,” she says.
And I want to, I really do. But I am so far past cool. I lost cool about the time I woke up this morning. The shock is still fading, peeling away in phases, and now that I finally seem safe, all the confusion and terror of this awful day is clawing out against my will.
“Cool it? I’ve been carried around in body bags, been given cryptic, secret messages that make no sense, locked up in basically a dungeon, and set on fire. And now here I am, underground in some tunnel with some strange girl who doesn’t even have a digipad.” I turn on her and whisper-shout right into her face. “Who the hell even are you?”
The girl flinches at my volume and presses her finger to her lips. My eyes widen and I pop a hand over my mouth. She takes hold of my arm.
“I really need you to be quiet. Or it's both our asses,” she says. “I’m Kinlee. Didn’t Mara tell you?”
I blink. Kinlee. Mara did say something like that, now that I think about it.
“Maybe? Okay yes, but…” I shut my eyes and shake my head. “Your name isn’t the point. What is all this? Where’s your departure date? Where are you leading me?”
She glances up towards the room cautiously, but must decide the greater risk would be to wait and see if I explode again. “The short answer is that we're a group called the Alliance. We're a co-op of a few governments outside the Directorate who feel it’s important to monitor them, among other things. That's why I don't have that number on my arm. I'm not from there.”
The words jam up in my head. “But that's not possible. There’s nothing else out there. The Directorate’s all that was left after the Final War.”
Kinlee shrugs. “They lie to you guys. A lot. But we need to keep moving. I'm supposed to have you back before sunset, which is probably happening right now.”
Kinlee leads us deeper into the tunnels. Eventually a blue line joins with the yellow line at the top of the wall, and then a green, and a red. We keep following it.
But my brain is still turned up with adrenaline, and it won’t stop churning on the implications of what Kinlee said. I’m too exhausted and confused to keep my thoughts to myself. “But this Alliance you mentioned – if you’re not hurting anyone, surely the Directorate wouldn’t – ”
“No, you don’t get it.” Kinlee whips around in front of me and blocks me like a wall. Under the smears of ash, her eyes are bright with intensity. “Remember the Massacre of 2197?”
“Well, not remember. I wasn’t born. But yeah, I know about what happened. A group of violent rebels tried to overthrow the Directorate and dismantle our order. The Directorate protected us.”
“I wasn’t born then either, obviously, but that’s not what happened. It wasn’t some violent coup. It was a meeting of world leaders. A peaceful one. They were going to limit how much governments could regulate their citizens.” She swats towards my forearm, and the inside of my wrist tingles where the ink marks it. “But the Directorate was so threatened by the mere idea of its control being limited that it tried to bomb us out of existence.”
Kinlee huffs, nostrils flared.
But seriously. “Government conspiracies? Secret organizations? How stupid do I look?” I fold my arms, trying to press the date on my wrist against my body to hide it.
“Yes. And yes. And only moderately.” She smirks.
I blink. I'm exhausted and confused and in no mood for this.
“So the Directorate's been blatantly lying to us about this major historic event for fifty-six years? More than my entire life?”
“Yes.”
“They took out an entire group of people, who weren’t doing anything wrong, because they had some different ideas?”
“Well, it sounds dumb when you say it like that.” She frowns, crossing her arms over her chest. “But yes. That's what happened.”
It doesn’t make sense. “Why would they do that? No one would be interested in a group like that anyway. It's inhumane to leave people to their own devices like that. People are happier being taken care of and protected. We have a good life in the Quads – everything is in order, and bad things like cancer and car crashes and heart attacks, they don't happen anymore. No one wants to disrupt that. No one would even listen.”
“Are you sure about that?” Kinlee snaps. “Do you even get it, what the other countries were advocating for? There’s no way you could.”
She starts off, walking faster, so that her back is to me.
“Come on,” she calls back, “You’re not going to get it until you see.”
I scoff. But I’m already following after her, more curious than I’d care to admit. After all, if the Directorate lied about the departures, what else have they lied about? It doesn’t seem like so much of a stretch, really, after all I’ve seen today. And besides, where else am I going to go?
“By the way,” she says. “What’s your name?”
“Evalee,” I say.
She laughs in such a sudden burst. Then she covers her mouth with her hand. “Sorry. That's a real, um, interesting name.”
“Shut up.” I agree, it’s offensively girly. But I’m not about to let Kinlee know it. “Call me Evie.”
“Whatever,” she shrugs.
And then she leaps up into the air and grabs hold of a pipe overhead.
“Careful!” I exclaim.
She pauses for a moment, shifting her grip and kicks her legs out to swing. “Why?”
She kicks out to swing harder, lets go with one hand and flies forward to grab another.
“Stop! You’re going to hurt yourself!”
“You Directees,” she laughs.
She swings back and forth on the pipe, then releases, propelling herself forward to the ground. “So what? So what if I, say, fall and scratch my knee? Please. Tell me what happens.”
She picks up the pulley for the pallet again and stares at me.
“You’d be hurt.”
My heart is still pounding against my ribs from what she did. You don’t do that, put yourself at unnecessary risk. In the Quads, we’re careful with ourselves. The twice-yearly medical checkups, the elimination of individual vehicles, the carefully-prescribed fitness plans… the Directorate built everything around optimally preserving lives and preventing pain.
When someone departs before their date, in an accident or a fight or anything preventable, it’s devastating. The entire Quad comes to a halt. It’s only happened once in my lifetime, and once was enough. No one hardly even gets a paper cut in the Directorate.
But
Kinlee stares at me blankly, like I've told her to stop breathing.
“Fine,” I retort. “Fine.”
To prove I’m no wuss, I jump up and reach for a pipe overhead, reaching to grab it like Kinlee did – it didn't look so hard. But my fingers barely brush against it, and then I fall away. Kinlee bursts into giggles. I land with a thud, my ankle turns over, and floods with piercing heat. I end up in a heap on the ground.
I choke on a gasp. So this is real pain. It’s more intense than anything I have felt before. I press my lips together hard and try not look any weaker than I already do.
But as Kinlee runs to my side, even she looks rattled.
“Shit, shit, shit, they’re never going to let me do a run alone again,” she mutters, pushing her hair back from her face. “Does it hurt?”
“Umm. Yeah. It hurts.” I try to play it cool, but the pain is thick and sharp and pulsing up my leg. It's the worst thing I've ever felt. I blink to fight back tears.
She gently moves my injured leg until it’s stretched out in front of me, and I clench my fists to keep from gasping. As she rolls up the leg of my trousers, I glance down and immediately regret it – my ankle is horribly blue and purple and swelling.
“What is that bump!” I reach down to touch it but Kinlee pushes my arm away.
“Leave it alone.” She frowns. “We need to get you to camp.”
“You want me to walk on this? Hell no.”
“We’re almost there,” Kinlee says. “You can ride the pallet. I’ll help you on.”
Before I understand what she means, she’s wrapped one of my arms around her shoulders, and her own is tight around my waist. She lifts me to my feet.
“Don’t put any weight on it,” she says. “Lean on me.”
I huff and wobble and cling to Kinlee for the love of all that is good and pain-free. For a flash, I have great love for the Directorate again, for protecting me from this all my life, even if it was a short one. And then, for the second time in one day, I find myself transported by a means generally reserved for the dead.
Finally Kinlee stops in front of a ladder, which leads us up a hatch in the ceiling.
“This might be tricky,” she says, frowning up at it.
“You mean I have to go up that thing?” I exclaim. “No way.”
“Oh, you can do it,” she sighs. “Use your arms. Only step up with your good foot.”
“That's not – ” I cut myself off, unwilling to say the rest of it out loud: That's not even the entire problem. Me? Up a ladder? This is exactly the type of thing we avoid in the Quads. You could fall and hit your head, break a leg, snap your back, any number of things. And while already injured? Forget it. There are specialists for that, with safety equipment.
“Well. Up is where the help is. And the beds. And the food.”
And then Kinlee turns away and climbs up the ladder like it's nothing. She pushes herself up over the ledge, and then her head pops back over and she calls down to me, “Come on!”
“I don't know…”
“It’s the ladder or camping in the tunnel ’til your leg is healed up.”
I sigh. Kinlee may be strange, but she has a point.
“Or you could follow the line down the tunnels. Leads back to the Directorate, if you follow it all the way back.” She points to the blue line that traces the top of the tunnel wall. “I bet they'd love to see you right now.”
I take a slow, steadying breath and place a hand on a rung. The metal is cool and slippery under my sweaty palm. I squeeze it tight and place my other hand on the next rung. Already my heart is trying to pound its way out of me.
“Stop thinking and get up here,” Kinlee calls down. Then, she calls out beyond the tunnel, “Hoi! A little help? Medical help.”
I shift my weight to place my good foot on the first rung, and a burst of pain swells around my bad ankle. I gasp and pull myself up to relieve the pressure. One down, I guess.
As I climb, I try to focus on placing my foot steadily, staring up at the rung ahead. I try to block out the pain, how high up I am, the way my hands and knees are shaking worse with each step. When I reach the top and pull myself out onto the floor, I’ve never been more grateful for flat ground. Much like the tunnels, the room at the top is metal. But this place is populated with desks and computers and chairs. I lay out and take a breath, relieved to be able to rest my leg.
A tall, lean woman kneels next to me. Her light brown hair is tied back in a messy knot, and thin strands fall around her face. Her forehead is creased.
She looks at Kinlee. “You’re late.”
“Mom!” Kinlee exclaims, rolling her eyes. “Runners get an hour of leeway. Besides, injured dead girl here?”
Kinlee’s mom raises her eyebrows at her, but then turns her attention to me. She takes a quick look at my outstretched ankle, then assesses my face.
“Okay. We got you, honey. Kin, get Sue. I’ll get her up there.”
Like Kinlee did, the woman wraps my arm over her shoulders and takes hold of me around the waist. She’s stronger than she looks, and the relief – of the pain in my leg, and the anxiety buzzing through my head – is instant.
I lean onto her and let her guide me through another room, filled with long tables and large machinery, and then she talks me into going up another ladder. At this point, I’m too overwhelmed to think, overfull with the pain and the adrenaline and the disorientation, and I give in and just do what she tells me to. When I get to the top, I have to push away furious tears.
“I know, I know,” Kinlee’s mom says as she comes up the ladder behind me, and finds me sprawled out on the ground. “It’s going to be okay. Promise.”
Overhead, I don’t find the usual blank dome of the Quads, but a dark stretch dotted with teeny lights and a fade of yellow light against a vast violet sky. Staring up at it, I get caught in vertigo, then gasp as I realize what I am looking at – sky. It’s the actual, real-life sky, with stars and clouds and outer space.
“We’re outside?” I thought the sky was supposed to be blue. What happened to it? No, I know what happened to it: the same thing that happened to everything else.
My chest tightens and I try not to breathe in. The Earth went bad ages ago. Pollution. Wars. Climate change. It all added up to a thinning ozone and heavy contamination. That’s why the Directorate built the Quad domes in the first place.
“We are,” she says. She is far too calm about it. “And we can get into the science of it all sometime if you like, but for now just know that you’re safe. We breathe this air all the time.”
All the time? This air is thick with sticky humidity, and I can feel its dampness pressing against my skin. This is far from okay. But I’m also far from prepared to deal with anything more right now. I take a breath and let her guide me through a string of randomly-placed trees.
Farther out, they cluster into a thick forest. Cabins are scattered through them. It's getting darker as the sun sets – the actual, UV-laced sun – and overhead a dusky navy-purple sky already reveals more stars than I've ever seen in my life. A way off, in a cleared-out circle, is the flickering glow of a large fire. Around it is a cluster of tables and benches.
Kinlee's mom leads me to it, and sets me down on one of the benches.
She squats down in front of me, smiling, but serious. “I’m Raina.”
“Evie.”
“Well, Evie, hang in there. We're gonna take care of you.” She glances down to my swollen ankle, and her eyebrows crease together.
“What’s this about a new Directee?” The voice is terse.
“Over here, Sue,” Raina calls.
Sue squats by my feet and lifts the injured one onto her knee. She runs her fingers firmly over the swelling. Then she presses into it, and I flinch.
“Ow!”
“Hmmm,” she says, raising an eyebrow as she assesses. “Good news. Looks like only a sprain.”
This throbbing pain isn’t only anything, but I don’t dare argue. It’s embarr
assing enough to have this bustle of attention over me, and all for a stupid klutz moment. I don't want them to think this girl they saved is more trouble than she’s worth.
And after this particular day, I’m nowhere near ready to let my guard down around anyone. Who are these people, anyway? They behave completely differently from anyone I’ve ever met, and all I really know about them is that they’re some kind of alliance of woods-people who are against letting me burn to death. Good start, but still.
Kinlee rushes back carrying a thick translucent cuff. Raina takes it and wraps it around my ankle until it clicks into place. It’s frozen.
“Now sit tight for a bit,” Sue says, standing up. “Let that ice do its work. Then I’ll come back and wrap it for you.”
Sue nods and both women turn and leave. Kinlee hops onto the log and perches next to me.
“You might wanna get the ice away from the fire,” she says. “Ice isn’t as effective when it melts.”
I take the point and slide my leg to the side as much as I can.
“Why am I even doing this?” I ask.
“Seriously?” Kinlee asks. “Ice helps with the swelling.”
“Oh.”
My ankle is starting to feel some relief, now that I think about it. Kind of numb. Which is a nice break from the pain.
A voice comes from behind us. “The dead keep getting younger.”
I twist around to take a look, causing a pinch in my leg. A boy about the same age as Kinlee and me is standing there, arms crossed over his chest and a goofy grin on his face.
“Shouldn’t you be, like, feeding a cow or something?” Kinlee says.
“A cow? There’s real cows here?” I exclaim.
“Did that already,” he says, playfully pushing Kinlee out of his way as he wiggles onto the log between us.
Kinlee sighs. “Yeah, there’s cows. This is Connor. Connor, Evie.”
“And chickens,” Connor adds. He’s tall and gangly, his build slight. His hair is wavy and disheveled, curling in loose swooshes all over his head and at the nape of his neck, and falling into his eyes. Once he settles onto the log, he looks at me. There is a directness in his gaze that makes me uncomfortable.
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