“We heard that,” I yell back. “It’s a good thing you don’t value your berries.” Bri started a Theranberry pool to predict our Cleave date, and I believe everyone over sixteen (with the exception of Bailey) has entered since berry season ends soon. It’ll be a long summer for those without good stock. Bri bounces over to Blake and me, dragging Tristan along.
“Come on guys. Help me out,” Bri says, eyes twinkling. Her usual heavy makeup is doubled and particularly sparkly tonight, the effect being pretty sultry, and I wonder if she’s going to make a play for a Cleaving of her own with Tristan by morn. She pleads with Blake, “My summer party schedule depends on you. Blake, how can you possibly resist her dressed like that?” Tristan scans me, thinking he’s safe holding Bri from behind, but Bri’s sixth sense kicks in, and she grinds her heel into his foot. Tristan whimpers like a dog.
“I think it safest to not answer that,” Blake responds. “I do agree that Kira’s pretty hot in her party attire. Especially when she does all those flips and stuff.”
“Seriously, you two.” Bri’s voice is a bit pushy and urgent. “Get with the program. Cleave. Have wicked cute babies.” Blake tenses at the mention of babies because of his concern of mini “Bliras” being grown in the Garden City labs. I think the concerns are unfounded. The doctors showed me ultrasound pictures of the lesion before and after my surgery. How would Ted know the specifics anyway? He’s just guessing and spreading his unhealthy psychosis.
I dismiss her marketing campaign. “Sorry. I’m programmed differently.” She purses her lips in disgust at my values. I always suspected she didn’t share my views on waiting until marriage, but she wasn’t one to kiss and tell either. She’d dig into my affairs—particularly where Tristan was concerned—but glossed over her own relationships. She’d dated Lucas for four months before her death. I have no clue what they did behind closed doors. Never asked. Didn’t want to know.
Bailey pipes in. “Yeah, you’ve got the 50s housewife programming.” My head whips around to face her, and I’m not the only one. What did she just say? She shouldn’t know squat about 50s housewives. Blake clearly heard as well. Bailey’s eyes jet around nervously, but then she lets out a squeal before I can ask her about it. Good thing. I could have exposed Blake and myself to the Second Chancers had I confronted her in front of everyone.
“Oooh. Lara and Johnnie came. She looks so cute pregnant!” Bailey says, waving her arms to get the couple’s attention. She successfully lures them our way. I’ll have to get Bailey alone later and subtly figure out what she knows.
Lara Stewart and Johnnie Sanders had been crowned royalty at Carmel Valley High…Homecoming Royalty, that is. Both seniors, they’d dated since freshman year and applied to the same colleges. I believe they’d been accepted and agreed to go to University of California Riverside before attending the Goodington Winter Formal After Party. Now here on Thera, they’re Cleaved and have Assisted Pregnancy Baby Number One on the way. Lara’s working towards a degree in teaching administration, and Johnnie’s got a security gig of some sort.
While Blake plucks Johnnie’s brain about Garden City security protocol, I politely listen to Lara dish about completely unnatural methods to get pregnant on Thera. The more she describes, the whiter I get, fainter I feel. Shots. Abdominal ultrasounds. Minor surgical procedure to remove the eggs. She might as well have been dictating my medical file. Our experiences vary on two fronts. First, she agreed to her egg removal. And second, a few nights after they removed her eggs they implanted an embryo, which took, making her pregnant.
Whereas Briella laps up every detail of Lara’s story, my brain attempts to reject the similarities to disprove Ted and Blake’s theories of Petri dish-generated posterity. If they really did take my eggs and Blake’s sperm, what happened to the embryos? Are they hoping Blake and I will Cleave soon so they can impregnate me? Or do they have some other plan?
I need air. The throngs of teens on the field seem to be closing in and cutting off my air supply. Without explanation to Bri, Lara, or Blake, I sprint out into the open air and down a path deep into the canyon. The air feels heavy and sticky, different from usual, but I don’t know what to attribute the change to. I look to the dark sky for clues, but the canyon lights mask my view.
While I love my canyon time with Blake, I don’t find the same appeal being out here alone. We usually walk the canyon as dawn approaches, but it is solidly the middle of the night, and the swirling lights can’t cut through the blackness. Every sound rattles me: the bugs, animals and reptiles camouflaged in the brush, and a rumble I can’t place. It starts softly like fingers tapping on a keyboard but then grows to a stampede of horses. So much for being able to think. Blake yells for me, and then I hear a loud siren. It’s familiar. Oh crap. That’s the same siren they used in the flash flood drill. I scramble to climb the hill before the water assails me.
I’m fifty feet up, a third of the way, when it hits. Knowing I’ll lose all progress if caught in a mudslide, I grab for the thickest bush, a thorny Theranberry. The briers slice through my exposed flesh but keep me from being washed into the growing river below. Mud blankets me as it washes down the hill, and the rain assaults from above. Our emergency drill hadn’t properly prepared me. I’d relied on Blake’s quick thinking and strength. He’d used rope ladders to scale the canyon, but how can I find a ladder if I can’t see? The canyon lights are useless covered with mud. And the zip lines are way too high to reach.
Smaller brush, cacti, and unknown objects join the landslide and pummel me as they make their way towards the river of death below. I can feel the roots of my Theranberry bush loosen and know that they won’t hold me much longer. Where’s a city worker on a zip line when you need one? I scream for Blake and for help until my voice fails me.
Twenty or thirty minutes later the rain abates from barrels to merely buckets and visibility increases. Enough to barely make out a human life form headed my way. The voice reveals that Blake has come to rescue me. He’s on a rope ladder a half dozen feet to my left.
“Kira, listen to me. You’re going to need to dive for it. Wait until I get farther down and I’ll catch hold of you,” he shouts, his voice shaking.
I attempt to dislodge myself from my destabilized Theranberry bush enough to slide sideways towards the rope. I get washed down ten or fifteen feet before I feel Blake’s hand grab me and swing me towards him. Once I feel the rope ladder solidly beneath my feet, I let out a cry of relief and embrace Blake.
“What were you thinking? Why’d you run off by yourself like that?” he asks. I can only see the outline of his face but can tell he’s upset.
“Lara. She explained how she got pregnant. They took her eggs. Just like they took my eggs. You and Spud were right,” I whisper, my throat raw.
“Oh crap.”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe the procedures are similar?” he says. “Maybe we’re jumping to conclusions.”
“It’s possible. I mean they never did a second procedure to implant an embryo back in me like they did with Lara.” Perhaps Blake is right. The procedures could be similar.
“They couldn’t do that anyway until you’re Cleaved. If you got pregnant you’d have to be Exiled.”
“Uh huh. More reasons to avoid Cleaving like the plague,” I say.
“Well, perhaps instead of freaking over something we can’t prove or control, we should try to get out of here, so we can live to see our labies.” He looks upward at the huge climb ahead of us.
“Labies?” I ask, confused.
“Lab babies—labies.” His attempt to make a joke of it is futile.
“Funny,” I respond. “They stole my eggs. You gave them your sperm.”
“That isn’t fair, Kira. They made me. They said they were running fertility tests on me, just like they told you.” He’s clearly upset by my accusation that he was somehow in on their plans when. Obviously. he wasn’t.
Any further dissection of the state of our potentially existent l
abies will have to wait. The dumping of the heavens upon us has resumed with vigor, and we can barely keep hold of the rope with the continuous lash of water and mud. I try to latch onto Blake, so he can ascend the rope, but progress is impossible. Gale force winds pelt the rain at our faces with the force of a fire hose. As I reach up to try to clear my eyes of mud and water, I lose my grip on Blake and free fall towards the river.
Panic overtakes me, and it takes several seconds to regain enough faculties to grasp for something, anything to slow my descent. The rope should still be in reach, I think. I shove my hands into the mud and catch hold, nearly pulling out my elbow sockets as I abruptly halt, legs dangling in the raging river below. My upper body strength may not rival Blake or Tristan’s, but between cheer, my nightly workouts here on Thera, and some major adrenaline, I ratchet myself up a few rungs and get my legs out of the water.
Taking some deep breaths to try to get my heart rate down, I survey my situation. Blake didn’t fall with me, so he must still be above. How far, I have no idea, as I’m still blinded by the rain. How much longer can this storm last? Fatigue plagues my muscles, and the rain and mud sting the flesh wounds sustained by the brush and debris. I’ve swallowed enough mud to craft a childhood mud pie. My stomach protests the non-nutritive meal, and I dry heave between belabored breaths.
I work out a rhythm. Inhale ten times facing down to keep the mud out of my mouth. Climb two rungs. Rest. Repeat. Several minutes go by. Eight rungs. Ten rungs. Twelve rungs. It’s progress.
And then Blake and a mass of sludge slam me into the river below.
With no time to react and no way to hold on, I hit the cement floor with enough force to hurt but not kill. The rapids churn us like laundry, sweeping us towards the ocean. Thirty or forty seconds later, I pop my head out of the water and gasp for air. Where’s Blake? He’d been right next to me. A tug at my legs pulls me under for a moment, and then we both rise to the surface. My lungs burn, but I refuse to die this way so I look for options. I motion towards the “shore.”
Swimming against the current, we target anything along the shoreline that we can use to pull ourselves out. The river carries us at least a mile before we can get across ten feet of rapids and grab hold of a dense patch of brush. Blake shoves me up with one arm, his other wrapped around a monstrous cactus. The rain has slowed again enough for me to see his face every few seconds as a strobe flashes around the canyon.
“Stay above the brush and search for a ladder with your hands,” he tells me. “Try to yell out every couple minutes, so they can get a handle on your location.”
“Take my hand, Blake. I can pull you up.”
“They have a well trained rescue team. It shouldn’t be long before they find you. They’ll be using the zip lines.”
“You’re scaring the crap out of me, Blake. Get up here,” I plead. As the light shines on his face, I can tell he won’t be joining me, and that it is by choice. “No, no, no, no, no. You are not leaving me here. You don’t get to leave me and our labies while we suffer an eternity on this cursed planet!”
“Chill. I’ll be back. I promise. Trust me. If I don’t come back, at least you have some great other options here—Tristan or Ethan, the chick-magnet Intern,” he says in a joking tone, although I don’t think it’s funny. “By the way, it’s not fake to me anymore. I’m falling for you, Kira.” Then he lets go, and the river swiftly carries him away.
“What the hell?” I yell, though he may be too far to hear me. How dare he tell me he’s falling for me right before launching into that suicidal stream of sludge? I know him. He has some hare-brained idea that he can get out to the beach and within range of his father. But the far more likely scenario is that he will drown or get pulled out into the ocean by a riptide, and I never see him again.
The agony of his departure paralyzes any action on my part for what seems like hours. I numb myself to the rain and mud as the intensity cycles between brutal and barely noticeable. As dawn approaches the skies shut off, and the drains built into the canyon floor suck up the remaining liquid, leaving behind a graveyard of debris and silt. The clouds dissipate, and the sun sears the mud to my skin. The minuscule remaining rational portion of my brain urges me to scale the canyon, but my angst of not knowing Blake’s fate squashes any upward momentum.
Eventually, rescuers find me. I get hauled to the clinic by way of mule. The mule’s stench and the jarring ride barely register. An unnerved Spud Rosenberg meets my rescue party at the top of the canyon.
“Where’s Blake?” he asks me. No need to look up to know his chin fat is swaying and thin brows are furrowed.
“The river. He pushed me up and out of it but got swept away.” Intentionally, the jerk.
“How long ago?”
“Hours,” I respond, although I have no idea of the exact timing.
“We’ll find him,” he says. “The rescue team will scour the canyons until they do.” Only if he wants to be found. Or if his dead body is amongst the riverbed debris.
Two nights and no news. They’ve kept me drugged most of the time since my wailing “distracts the doctors and nurses.” My wounds are healing. Appetite, not so much. I’ve been stuck in the clinic, hooked to tubes that force nutrition into my body. Bri and Tristan have been swapping shifts to keep me company. I’m surprised Bri trusts Tristan to sit with me, but I guess she figures I’m too distraught over Blake to put up with any crap from Tristan. She’d hate the truth which is that I prefer Tristan’s bedside manner to hers. Bri’s overly sunny “everything will be fine so that you and Blake can finally Cleave” talk drives me insane when the outcome may be much less than okay. The rescue teams have failed to find Blake, dead or alive. Tristan has avoided the topic of Blake altogether, catching me up on every bit of Garden City High gossip.
“You mind if I read you a children’s story?” he asks.
“Is it because I’ve been acting like a child?” I respond.
“Ha ha. No, because the girl in the story reminds me of you,” he says. He shows me pictures from the book on his tablet, and I gasp at the resemblance of the girl in the story. The girl wears her long strawberry blonde hair in ringlets and has pale green eyes ringed in gold. Even her facial structure resembles my heart-shaped face. The boy looks like a cross between Blake and Ethan, if I even correctly remember what Ethan looks like at this point. I must be doomed to a life of loss.
“Yeah sure, a children’s story is about all I can handle right now,” I say, pretending to not be that interested. Far from the truth because Blake and I are supposedly Originals. I am very intrigued about my legendary ancestors. I burrow into my pillow, pull my blanket up, and listen to Tristan bring life to the magical tale.
Centuries ago, a beautiful princess named Helina of Light stood at the precipice of a volcanic crater at dawn. As firstborn daughter, her family had to sacrifice her to the Gads in exchange for seven years of plenty in the lands surrounding the volatile and fiery volcano. As the sun peeked over the Eastern horizon, she boldly dove towards the fiery pits.
Instead of being consumed by flame, Helina found herself engulfed in warm water. She flopped and flailed in the water to keep herself afloat. A strong breeze whisked her to a shell-covered beach. Too weak to move, she awaited death.
Death did not come. Hadrian of Dark found her while fishing. He abandoned his haul, carrying her to his garden home miles away. The garden was lush, fertile and beautiful beyond measure. Helina thought she was in Heaven with the Gads. She fell in love with Hadrian and, in time, agreed to cleave to him.
A year hence, Helina bore twins to the delight of her husband. Csilla favored her mother. Cole, his father. The children thrived in the gardens, though Csilla yearned for adventure. She’d grown hearing stories of the ‘mortal’ land of her mother’s birth. After Cole took his uncle’s daughter to cleave, Csilla set out to find Light. She wove a raft of reeds of the garden and pushed out to sea, never to be seen by Helina and Hadrian again.
Years after her p
arents’ death, Csilla returned to her parent’s garden home with her children and grandchildren. Cole greeted her and marveled at tales of travel between Light and Dark. After nights of feast and celebration Csilla invited Cole to journey to his mother’s birthplace and see Light with his own eyes. He acquiesced to his sister’s pleadings, bringing his own children and grandchildren. They visited the very volcano where Helina was sacrificed before Cole returned to Dark. Despite the lure of Light, he missed his cleave and his father’s gardens.
Generation after generation passed between Dark and Light. Only those of the blood of the Originals could make the journey. Until, that is, Helina’s great-great-great-great granddaughter, Ilana, who lived on Light, struck a deal with the Gads when her husband died before his time. The Gads agreed to bring her husband back to life in the Dark land of her distant grandfather. Eventually, others were granted a second chance at life on Dark.
“Cool story, huh?” Tristan says upon finishing. “I love a good romance.” I envy his naivety. He thought some author imagined the story. Although I imagine much of it to be fiction, the folklore justifies Original domination over Second Chancers. Tristan doesn’t even realize he once lived in Light and his benefactors in Dark Exiled him here by execution.
Choosing my words carefully, I respond, “Kind of grim. I can’t believe someone wrote a story for kids about a girl jumping into a volcano.”
“You wouldn’t jump into a volcano if it meant finding your one true love?” he asks. I might actually jump if I knew I could find Blake. Or see Ethan again. But to jump thinking I would die? Crazy.
“She didn’t know she’d find love. And since when are you such a romantic?” A slip. Not one he’d recognize but a slip nonetheless.
“I’m a regular Prince Hadrian.” His brown eyes sparkle and impish grin shines. And with that, I smile for the first time since Blake disappeared. We talk for hours until Bri arrives, covering every kosher topic on Thera from Cleaving, love and romance, to friendship, sports, exercise and food. It is the Tristan of our early relationship. Fun. Talkative. Charming. Sweet. I fell in love with that Tristan, not the soulless, drunken oaf who cheated on me with my best friend.
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