by P. S. Lurie
“Thanks,” I say. “It’s been so long up here and I still haven’t quite got my bearings sorted out.”
“Six months in,” the woman says. “Not long now and we’ll be down by the seaside. How pleasant that will be. Hopefully, you’ll be bandaged up in time to join your classmates for lunch.”
There’s so much to take in about what I’ve just learnt. It appears that despite the thousands of lives lost inside the Utopia, certain people were spared and they’re building up a new society and, to my disbelief, they look forward to being by the water. Decades ago it used to be where people would go for fun but my whole life was spent dreading it, that is, until I learnt that the water was receding. The memory of standing on top of the Fence and learning the dreadful truth about the flood still makes me shudder. And then I think about the people on the other side of our barrier. “They’re coming,” Ronan said to me.
Who and where are they?
I want to ask the woman but I can’t risk giving her cause to suspect that I’m not who she thinks I am and head in the direction she was suggesting. I don’t want to go to the hospital but I could hardly ask her for a way out. Besides, I’m not leaving without Leda and Ronan so I carry on blindly, hoping for good luck to come my way but expecting pretty much anything but that.
Melissa
I pack medical equipment, mostly bandages and other light items that I can use in the field, in other words nothing that will be much help if any of us are found. I spare a thought to the hospital in the Upperlands. I worked there year-long, becoming more skilled in paediatrics and then general medicine. Surgeries and techniques that doctors such as Theia’s mother wanted to perform but could only dream of were happening with ease up there. It would be good to keep that knowledge going but most of our skilled medical staff was killed in the cull. I’ve trained a few but I’m hardly the most proficient to start with. The hospital here has either run out of supplies or never had them in the first place and it would be good to stock up but there’s no time for a detour. If we manage to live through this day then there will be plenty of opportunities for a clear run later on.
Considering who’s coming with us, there is one reason I’d like to venture to the hospital but I’ll have to think about it delicately.
Selene is already outside with the others before I look around my bedroom and decide that there’s nothing else I want to take. I judder at the thought of returning to the Upperlands, where I first entered under false pretences that I would be given a better life. Anything I was attached to is in the barracks; I didn’t have time to retrieve it because I was tending to Selene. Jack and Ruskin tried to salvage my belongings when I mentioned Theia left a gun there but they never found the room despite my directions.
There may be some possessions at my old house in the Middlelands, unless it was ransacked when the seafarers returned but I’ve never been able to face it. I haven’t reclaimed any photos of my family although I know some hang on the walls. Ruskin told me that someone has cleared my parents’ bodies but I still can’t face entering, even if I avoid the room where they died. No one wholeheartedly knows what happened that night. Most of my time was spent watching Theia bounding between hers and her neighbours’ houses, feeling selfish in my gratitude that I was an only child. I only disclosed part of what happened to my parents in their final few hours as the sun began to rise to Selma during one miserable night in the barracks, when I couldn’t hold the tears back. I didn’t finish the story but maybe she worked it out. What little she did learn of my secret she took to the grave.
I bid farewell to the house I have made a home for the last few months that I’ve always known was going to be a temporary measure until the Upperlanders forced our hand. I’m relieved that we’ve been given a chance to retaliate before we were wiped out. Theia would be proud of her brother.
She will be proud of him.
I’m the last to join my group of five on the street, and Tess and Samuel are also there telling Ronan in their sardonic manner about how they survived. I already know this from working with Tess at the hospital. They’re a couple in their early-twenties who started dating just before the cull. “We moved in together the night before the Surge,” Samuel says. “Our house wasn’t brilliant, two streets from the sea but we wanted privacy from our families so claimed it when the inhabitants gave up and moved to a tent by the Fence. Even if we didn’t have much time we wanted to enjoy pretending for a few weeks.”
“We had one night,” Tess takes over. “We watched the announcement and took a boat before any guards patrolled the coast.”
Neither finishes the story, which is that their families were wiped out and it was that stroke of fortune, or misfortune, in their timing that allowed them to escape.
Actually, the story goes on but only Tess and I know this next part and it concerns my reason for wanting to go to the hospital. She’s pregnant. Samuel is oblivious, clearly, or he’d never let her come with.
Tess catches my eye but I promised her I wouldn’t say anything. She’s worried about the baby and didn’t want him to find out until further into her pregnancy.
“Where are we meeting the others?” I ask.
“Here,” Claire says, as she and Travis approach from the west. Claire’s eyes are swollen so I guess she did say goodbye to her children before they were separated.
“Dante?” Ronan asks.
“He lives some way out, closer to the Fence,” Ruskin explains. “He keeps to himself, except for appearing at some of the strategy meetings.”
Travis lets out a hearty laugh. “Strategy meetings. Nice choice of phrase. Very formal.”
“Healthy discussions,” Jack says.
No one remembers Dante from before the cull and he’s never revealed what happened that night but we all have our traumas and the unspoken agreement has always been that no one has to admit anything. I welcome that more than most.
“Let’s go,” Jack says, after we have assembled. All of us bar Travis and Claire have been through the tunnel that leads past the Fence. It’s in an unsuspecting house that enters straight into the apartment block where Jack and Ruskin were first smuggled in before the cull, without the Upperlanders having to open the Fence gates and deal with the homeless wanting to push through. When we tried to escape from the Upperlands after leaving the prison we gave up on finding the tunnel, wrongly assuming that the flood made that route impossible. It took a while whilst I was treating Selene for Jack and Ruskin to rediscover it but, when they did, they found that it was bone dry and never in threat of being submerged.
The nine of us walk towards the Fence. It’s some way up and still concealed by houses; I figure that the Middlelanders based themselves far away enough for it to be obscured, deeming it better to not witness such a painful reminder of the past on a daily basis.
Mostly we walk in silence and I’m unable to catch Tess alone because either Samuel won’t leave her side or she’s using him to block a conversation she doesn’t want to have with me, but then Ronan asks a question we weren’t expecting. “How far is the house?”
“Isn’t that the way you came?” Jack asks.
“I assumed there was a tunnel but I never learnt that intelligence and had no time to search for it.”
Ruskin’s the next to question him. “So how did you get here?”
“The only other way. I went over the Fence.”
Zeke
There’s not enough space to stand inside the air vent and crouching is too painful but I can crawl, trying to ignore the problem that my leg has gone limp and I have to drag it, which slows me down. I tell myself it could have been worse and that I have to keep going as the soldiers are smaller than me and can easily follow, and then I think of how insane this whole situation is.
I go to check the time but remember I’m not wearing my watch so I push the screen on one of the others that I stashed in my pocket. It’s nearly midday and I rack my brains for the heating regulation timetable. My father would know but I c
an’t think right now. It’s warm in here but not uncomfortably so.
I’m exhausted and stop to listen if anyone is following me but there’s nothing except a mechanical rumbling and I’m too disoriented to picture where I must be. I need to rest but it’s as safe up here as anywhere in the fortress. Still, I sit for a second and regain my breath.
The absence of a watch feels funny and I rub the skin that has toughened from underneath of where it used to be in place for my entire life. I take out all of the other watches from my pocket but it’s impossible to know who, if anyone, they belong to. Maybe I took down the system when I destroyed the computer and I don’t need any of these to move through the usually-monitored doors but at least I can no longer be traced or heard, like when my father and I spoke together for the last time. I suppose that I could be listened in on but then they would need to know who to tune into and I’m not expecting to talk any time soon. I push the screens one by one and all but the last of them lights up.
I’m dead if I’m caught so the only thing for me to do is escape... from the top of an impenetrable mountain housing an army. Being moved up here was secretive to the point that I didn’t understand it until long after we arrived. We were holed up in our new apartment, having entered from an elevator shaft the morning before President Callister’s final announcement in the Upperlands. Eventually we were ordered to a concert hall where she greeted us and gave an impassioned speech about how we were the privileged few, chosen for our abilities to create a new world. The true Utopia. My father’s genius kept him, and me, alive. We had heard the ship explode a few days earlier and guessed at the noise. My father promised he had nothing to do with the bombs. He did however know about the sea and told me with the utmost of pressure that I shouldn’t disclose that I knew about it.
I lost friends the day of the second cull. Callously, at first, I felt superior to them for being selected but at the back of my mind I knew that if I stopped to think about it I would’ve been appalled by what had happened. For peace of mind, it was easier to look forward rather than back. It was, as President Callister explained, little different to those who sacrificed their lives for a lack of resources during the first cull; moving up here meant even less space, which became secondary to brilliance and we were showered with such praise that we bought into it. She forgot to mention the water receding. That was a secret she, my father and I kept. That was, until this morning.
The guards, children of the Middlelands, that were trained to protect us then began to monitor us, sifting out anyone not in line with President Callister’s worldview. I realised my life had always existed under a cloud of insincerity and, for the first time, I thought about the Middlelanders who died in the great cull. Explained to us as a glorious event in our schooling, this skewed revisionist history became clearer by the second and I began to detest my education, having to bite my lip through lecture after lecture for my survival.
Now that I’m in the firing line, empathy is my only friend. A little too late, selfishly only just now caring that I’m the one in danger and I find myself on my own without any to defend me, in a vent, being hunted or hiding here until I’m burnt to death.
It might be my imagination but it already feels warmer inside and I guess that explains why the soldiers aren’t perturbed by my disappearance, probably more focused on calming the peace that I disturbed.
I wriggle my toes and roll up the fabric to my knee. My wound isn’t as bad as I first thought and doesn’t require a tourniquet to stop the blood. The bullet must have grazed me so I put it to the bottom of my list of concerns and start back on my crawl. The vent creaks a little but I learn that as long as I sweep along the floor I barely make any noise. My chief concern is the air that is warming up around me. We’re at an altitude much higher than should be tolerable so heating the fortress is one of my father’s – was one of my father’s – primary focuses. I’m sweating profusely, from the remnants of the morning blast and if the furnace kicks in whilst I’m up here or the guards decide to turn it on in order to flush me out then I’m done for.
I try to keep in one direction, hoping that it will lead me to the outside from where I can figure out how to descend the mountain but the vents turn at right angles and it’s hard to keep track. I look at the floors beneath me whenever I pass a grate but I don’t recognise anything and there’s no point descending any earlier than I need to.
At the next fork, I choose the left-hand path and slide the dead watch as far as I can in the opposite direction; the blood from my leg has left a clear path this far but is barely trickling now, instead seeping into the trousers’ fabric, and this decoy may throw off anyone following me.
Farther along and bright lights shine up into slotted panels on the underside of the vent in front of me. It must be one of the larger rooms in the fortress which will help me get my bearings.
I slide my body along, breathing as quietly as I can and stop as soon as I can see into the room. At first, I only spot guards, at least ten child soldiers in full uniforms lining the outskirts of the room. In the middle is a girl, about my age, looking panicked. I can’t see who she’s facing but then I hear a woman’s voice and I shift my body until I can make out the rest of the room. To my astonishment, it’s President Callister speaking, holding a child in her arms, and all I can do is watch this horrendous scene unfold.
Theia
I stop short when I enter a grand room that I finally recognise from the last trick the Upperlanders played on me, in which President Callister attempted to set me against an illusion of Maddie. It is the spitting image of what I remembered so either I have been here before or it is a figment of my imagination.
I hear the sound of locks moving into place.
I move through quickly to the other side, avoiding the dance floor in the centre, treading lightly on the carpet that skirts the outside but none of the other doors opens. I hold my arm up to the panel. “Theia Silverdale. Status: Gratitude pending, Loyalty pending,” says the same automated voice I heard back in the Upperlands and nothing else happens. I figure that the Upperlanders have managed to reset the locks or that I was always only ever meant to make it this far. Either way, now that I have logged myself into the system they know where I am. I try to retrace my steps but the first door is also locked and I am trapped.
There’s little I can do but search the room and attempt to find a secret exit or something to arm myself with. There are the three chairs that I remember from before but not much else and nothing is behind the fabric when I throw it over myself, just gold-leafed wallpaper. I tug at the purple drape and manage to rip off a sizeable stretch, which I wrap around my wounded wrist and tie into a knot.
There must be something else. What did everyone back home say about me? I’m nothing if not resourceful.
But I come up short.
I crouch by the curtain to the side of a door, ready to conceal myself if anyone passes by. Misfortune or purposefully, it doesn’t take long until the farthest door beeps and a swarm of children in police uniforms march in and circle the room, giving me no time but to lurch out of their way and move into the centre but none advances. I comb their faces and they are a similar age to Ronan or a little older but not one of them is him. Some are much taller than me and bulked up by the training they have been through. I have no chance if they decide to advance, not in the least because they all carry a gun, ready to fire if I try to do anything rash.
“Hello Theia.”
I’m startled and divert my attention to a door, having not noticed President Callister’s arrival. I gasp when I see that she is holding a young girl in her arms. Older, bigger and healthier than the last time I saw her on the day I gave her up in the Upperlanders and was briefly reunited with her in the helicopter.
“I’m so pleased to finally talk to you again.”
“Give me my sister.” I walk forward, the idea of being loyal to President Callister the furthest thing from my mind. “Leda.”
I hear a barrage
of guns being raised in the air.
I stop but still call to my sister. “Leda.”
There’s no response. She gives me a curious stare and then turns her nose up as if I’m a stranger. To rub salt in the wound, President Callister puts her on the ground and she is able to stand. I’ve missed this milestone. Leda has the opportunity to come to me but grabs President Callister’s leg and hides her face.
“She’s shy.”
“What have you done to her?”
“Nothing. She’s well. Talking, when she isn’t around strangers.”
“Why are you doing...” but I catch myself trying to reason with President Callister and try to reframe this situation. I’m convinced that I’m awake and this must be a test, and if I am asleep then I have nothing to lose by swearing allegiance. It doesn’t matter what happens, I just need her to let me hold Leda. “I’ll do whatever you want. That’s what you want to hear. You win.”
President Callister notices me trying to figure it out. “No tricks this time,” she says. “There actually was a fault with the doors. You weren’t supposed to escape. I wish you would stop resisting.” She spots my hand. “What did you do?”
I don’t bother telling her about my self-inflicted injury but if she’s telling the truth that I’m not being drugged then I’ll have this wound indefinitely. “Just let me be with Leda and Ronan. Where is he?”
“Safe.”
“Ronan?” Leda says, hearing his name. She looks at me once more.
My heart skips a beat. “Leda. I’m your sister, Theia. I miss you.”
President Callister scoops my sister up. “Not just yet. One day you’ll realise I’m on your side. I gave you the benefit of the doubt but the other leaders have lost their patience. They no longer have confidence in you. I wish you would trust me.”