by Tara Brown
I shook my head. He slipped his fingers into mine and we left the house.
In the elevator he pulled me into his arms, hugging me to him. I closed my eyes and sighed. Horror, terror, and pain were taking turns whirling about in my stomach. I understood those emotions now.
When we got outside, I felt a sigh of relief rip from me. He laughed. “I know.” But his hands squeezed even harder on mine. He dragged me down the road, running behind him. We ducked and weaved and ran. He made it look like it was for fun, but I knew he had a plan. We made it into a tunnel. He leaned against the wall of it and pulled me into his thick arms, rubbing my back. He gave me a devilish smile. “I want it to look like we are about to venture into this tunnel to make love. Do you understand what I mean?”
I swallowed. “I know what that is.”
He nodded. “I know you know what that is. I mean we have to look like we can’t get enough of each other. I’m going to pick you up and I want you to look the part. This is serious. There are two men watching us, following us.”
I frowned. “How do you know?”
He pointed. “That face right there could get us caught. Just act like this is the first day of the rest of our lives.”
I wrapped my arms around his neck, pulling him down to my face. I kissed the side of his lips. “I trust you, Lyle.”
His hands slipped under my butt and lifted me into his arms. I wrapped my legs around his waist and kissed along his throat. I opened one eye as he walked us into the tunnel. I saw them, the two men. They wore dark clothing and smiled. One laughed and shook his head. The other nodded and they pressed their backs against the light-gray stone building. They would wait for us.
“This changes everything between us. You can’t see Bran anymore. You can’t sneak out, or it will look like you are cheating on me.”
I frowned. “I am what?”
“Cheating. It is when you give your heart to one person and give your body to another.”
I had a bad feeling I was cheating, but it wasn’t on Lyle. I didn’t have a second to process it, so I pushed it away and thought of only saving my friend.
He walked us into the dark of the tunnel and placed me on the ground. “There is a place to see what is beyond the wall.”
My skin shivered. “Where?”
He looked sickened and haunted. “It’s this way. I found this on a map in the system, that first day we played with the computers.”
I hated the look I saw on his face.
“Are you doing this for me?”
He took my hand and nodded. “I want you to know I would do anything for you.”
My brain whispered a doubt. “But you dragged me into this. You and Bran manipulated me, and two of my friends are beyond the wall because of it. I might have actually been good at this job and happy in my station in life, had you not polluted everything with the truth.”
He swallowed hard. “I hoped you would feel like me and want to destroy it all. You would want justice and to end the suffering of the clueless masses. And I had more confidence in my abilities when I thought it was a simple matter of destroying the wall.”
I gripped his hand and followed him into the darkness. “What is it now?”
“It’s not simple at all. The people in our city are brainwashed. The kids in our class were made to like their jobs. The people in the factories, the orchards, and the farms, they love it. They don’t want rescuing. They are content. I don’t even think they would care that their loved ones were being sent beyond the wall. Everyone is made to love and want the thing they’re supposed to. There is no free thought, and even the babies aren’t made of two people anymore.” He looked back at me and I could barely catch the haunted look in his eyes. “We are genetically made. I didn’t know. My father is only a scientist and a politician, so his knowledge only goes as far as they let it. He knows a bit more because he remembers everything. If he didn’t, he would be clueless. The whole thing is run so one hand doesn’t know what the other is doing. The guards don’t know why they push people out of the wall. They believe something horrid has occurred or they those people are a risk to society. The farmers know about farming but couldn’t work in an orchard or factory. This is run so that we are completely dependent upon one another.”
It felt hopeless. “How are babies made then, if not with two people?”
“That is the most disturbing part of it all. They take your egg and my seed and make a baby, but they add things to the baby. There is nothing of the parents in the child. It is done on rotation and handled so that in the future when the child is older, and he or she wants to marry, the compatibility is tested to see how much of the same DNA they share. You and I would have been approved as a pairing when they checked to make sure we didn’t share DNA. You would have come from one Adam and Eve and I would have come from another. So if we were ever to have a baby, they would tell you that you were already pregnant and that you needed a checkup. The checkup would actually be where they insert a child, who is not your own, into your body.”
I shook my head. “I look just like my mother. I look identical to her.”
He nodded. “Back then, they did it differently. The female egg and the male seed came from our parents. We are enhanced and genetically perfected but we are our parents’ children. They did compatibility testing to ensure you were not related by real blood back then. About fifteen years ago, they were doing the compatibility testing on people and they discovered most people had similarities in their DNA.”
“What does that mean?”
“That we were related to each other. We were inbreeding within the walls, at least by one generation. So they took some of the perfect people who were not related in any way and made them superior engineers. I remember when Lisabeth and Frank became engineers. I remember the first time I saw her on the screen.”
I shook my head. “We are our own worst nightmare. We are not better than the people in the past.”
He nodded. “The monsters are within these walls, not out of them.”
I realized I could barely see a thing. His hand in the dark was all I really knew. We were walking up a huge hill. My feet slipped but he pulled me along. The tunnel had grown tiny and was around us, within arm’s reach. I was huffing and puffing when I reached the top of the hill. I stopped, catching my breath.
“Have you been slacking off in fitness classes?”
I nodded. “Amber is pretty lazy, so we would just do what we had to. And it’s early and I’m tired, and I think I hate mornings.”
He laughed. “Look at you, using the big bad-girl words.” He pulled me into him and down the long corridor. I could see light when we rounded a corner. He looked down on me. “You scared?”
I nodded. “I am.”
He frowned. “Me too. I don’t know what to expect. I’ve never seen it.”
His hand shook as he pulled me to the light. It felt like everything slowed down as we neared. I noticed things I might not have noticed if I wasn’t so terrified. The steel of the tunnel we were in was stamped with something shiny. They were letters. EXIT POINT and an arrow pointing to the light. The floor was rounded and made a layer of dust and debris, like old leaves from trees. The light that came in felt different than the light I saw every day. It was brighter, cleaner maybe, or just more terrifying. I squinted, placing my hand above my eyes and tried not to fall down with fear.
His hand was wet with sweat, or maybe it was mine, but our grip was slippery. Panic and imaginations filled my mind. What if we fell from the hole overlooking the word? What if we saw her dead body below? Would I ever heal from that or would I wear it in every moment for the rest of my life?
I almost pulled him back as the breeze came in the hole with the metal bars across it. The tunnel was completely lit up. He gave me a brave smile and stopped walking. In the sunlight his dark-blond hair was beautiful. His blue eyes glistened and his olive skin made me want to touch it, and forget about the overlook in the wall. I watched him take a brea
th and turn his face to see what there was as he broke my stare.
I watched his face for his response.
He put a hand up over his eyes, blocking out the sun that lit him up. He leaned forward, taking a second to process it all. His eyes narrowed in on something. His face tilted forward, as if trying to see better. He swallowed hard and then looked like he was trying to understand it or break it to me. I shook my head, feeling the hopelessness of it.
He turned to me. His eyes filled with moisture.
I stepped forward, nearly shoving him out of the way as he grabbed me. But I grabbed the metal bars in the hole, clinging to them. The landscape was so bizarre to me, I didn’t know what to say or do. I didn’t know how to understand it. It was dry as dust and went on as far as the eye could see. There was a long dusty road that was made of sand maybe that went on forever into the open space. Along the way to nowhere a single, dead tree stood. A bright-red dress hung from a branch on the tree.
Air hitched in my throat, stuck there behind the shock of her swaying body. The train of the dress flapped out in the wind, flowing across the tree and out into the air. It made her sway harder than the other body that hung there next to her.
I might have dropped to my knees but my hands clutched so hard to the bars that I couldn’t fall, even if I wanted to.
Her dark hair hung around her face, limp and messy. Tears streamed down my cheeks, trying to block out my view of what I would never forget.
My cry turned to a wail. He wrapped around me, smothering my face with his arms. Forcing me to be silent.
I didn’t know how long I clung to the cold metal and watched as she swung from the branch, as if playing with the wind. I didn’t know at what point I was no longer watching her, because I saw it whether my eyes were open or closed. I didn’t know at what point he picked me up, cradling me in his arms and carrying me like a child. I blinked and saw the light of the other side of the tunnel. The side we needed to exit from. I had climbed him like I was climbing the tree to untie her from it. My legs wrapped around his torso, my arms wrapped around his neck, and my face was buried in him.
He walked, struggling to continue on. I finally got it all out, nodding into him. “I want to kill them all.”
He nodded back. “We will,” he whispered as he pressed my back into the side of the tunnel.
My breath and heart slowed to a reasonable pace. I looked up into his eyes. “I need to cut her down from that tree.”
He smiled brightly. “We need to get back to our house, Gwyn. We need to look like the most in-love people in the whole world who just consummated their relationship in a tunnel, far from the reaching eyes of the people who watch us. We need to be blissful and relaxed. Can you do that?”
I was about to shake my head, but the faster we got home, the faster we could start searching for an answer to the question of how to get beyond the wall. A slow smile spread across my lips. I nodded. “I am ready to go home.”
He put me down on my feet and kissed the tip of my noise. I gripped his arms, trying not to use my nails as we walked from the tunnel.
I listened as he prattled on about Mother’s love of pasta, and how they got it so infrequently as it was considered something the people in factories and fields ate. The starchy carbs kept them strong and full.
We rounded the corner to our building, and I felt my chest tighten. It was scary inside. The outdoors had never held freedom for me before.
We walked past the doorman and beamed at each other in the elevator.
I saw everything I needed in his eyes. He was strong enough and brave enough for us both.
He led me to our house. When he opened the door, I stopped. It was filled with our things. Color and life had entered our home when we were gone. My mother’s striped blanket from the couch was draped along the stark white of the sofa, making it have shape amongst the rest of the room. Pictures and mirrors and photos filled the walls I hadn’t noticed were bare.
He glanced back at me. “Wow.”
It was a combination of him and me. His belongings being much nicer, but my stuff made me feel like the house was mine.
His hand gripped mine as we looked around. The touches were small and yet substantial in effect. Flowers sat on the table in a glass jar. The burst of color from them made me think of Amber. I choked a tiny bit, gripping him. He pulled me inside and closed the door. We stood for a minute, just taking it all in.
He led me to his bedroom, where his clothes filled the closet. His toothbrush and razor sat on the counter in clean packets. They were newly repaired and ready for a fresh use in a new house.
He wrapped around me. “We need to be excited if they are watching us—I have a feeling they are. So be excited and then go and explore?”
I nodded. “I love it, too. It’s so nice.” I said it good and loud.
He chuckled. “It’s hard to believe we got this lucky. Each other and this amazing house.”
I closed my eyes and forced the smile across my lips.
I don’t have a word for that
I stepped softly on the floor, walking ahead of him. My eyes scanned the shelves. There were thousands upon thousands.
“We couldn’t read them all in one lifetime,” I muttered, dragging my fingers along the spine of a book called The Hundred Years’ War. There were so many books with war in the title. I knew about war. How our violent past brought us to the silence of our future, where nothing was remembered.
“We could try to read them all, but then we wouldn’t have time for what we did earlier.”
I shot him a look, smiling at the grin on his face. The keeper of records gave us an embarrassed look. She blushed and looked down. If only she knew what we had done this afternoon.
I glanced at her. “What is the number of books?”
She cleared her throat, looking up from her screen. “Seven thousand, I believe. They were the only ones saved from the bombs and the fires.”
I nodded. “Wow.”
She smiled. She was older but still so pretty. Dark curls, dark skin, and curious eyes. Her lips were colored as if a berry had been smeared across them. She looked warm, like hugging her could take away all of one’s pain.
He pulled a book off the shelf, giving her a look. She smiled. “You may read anything in here.”
He nodded and leaned over the table to read from it. I glanced at the violent drawings and wrinkled my nose. I walked to the back of the library. There was a staircase that went up top. I climbed it, not making any noises but also not trying to be sneaky. There were books behind glass. They had funny titles and even stranger names. I looked at the thin door to the right as I pretended to look at the books. I trailed my finger along the glass until I reached the door. I tilted my head at the knob and put my hand on it. It would have been a normal response in a place where I had yet to be told not to do something. I stepped out into a hallway that looked like all the others. It was stark white and arched with the bright white lights that made my eyes narrow. There was a wall of glass bricks letting in natural light but preventing someone from seeing out of them. My steps were silent on the shiny floor.
I rounded the corner, tilting my head at the first door I found. I pressed my thumb against it quickly. The door opened. I walked into the dark room which lit up as the door closed. It was like the place where we had desks, but this was larger with more glass beds. I walked along them looking down on the counters filled with things I didn’t know about.
They were shiny and metal or white and made of plastic. The back of the room had another door. I turned the knob, amazed it opened without me pressing my thumb on it. It was dark inside and no light came on when I stepped in. I felt along the wall for a switch but there was none. Across the room, I could see the faintest of pale blue lights. I walked toward it, bumping into something. It banged my hips and abdomen. I winced but felt my way around it. I walked more carefully, feeling out into the dim room. As I crossed it the pale blue light got brighter, not enough to light t
he room though.
It looked like the glass bed I lay on but it was rounded. I stepped up to it, but I didn’t understand what it was inside. I had no words for it. I imagined it was a she. She was pretty, beyond pretty. She was Lisabeth, but not. She was longer. Her head was more pointed at the top and her eyes were larger, much larger. She seemed massive in comparison to me. The blue light gave her pale skin a tinge, like she was underwater at the swimming pool. She floated inside of the glass bed. I pressed my hand against the glass, startled at the warmth of it.
I got lost in the face and the features that seemed so familiar to me.
Lights shone into the room. I turned my head and noticed the door was glowing. I stepped behind the glass bed where the sleeping beauty lay, holding my breath like her. I pressed my hands against the glass and waited. The door opened, flooding the room with light.
“Did she come in here?” a man asked softly.
Another man answered him. “I didn’t see her. Her thumb opened the door to come in, but I don’t know if she came in or not.”
“Why did she leave the library?”
The light flicked on but I was hidden behind the bed.
“What is that thing?” one of the men asked.
“It’s not for us, it’s Lisabeth’s. Her relative, I believe.” The other man spoke with a rude tone and the door closed, taking the light with it. They didn’t know either? Lisabeth’s relative who was a massive monster of a woman? But then she wasn’t. She was pretty, just huge and odd looking.
I waited for a while with my hands pressed against her glass bed. I looked up, seeing a scanner for a thumb. I tapped my fingers against the glass bed, wondering. I swallowed hard as I stood slowly and placed my thumb upon the spot. It flashed red, making a soft beep.
I walked from the room, determined to come back and show Lyle. I made my way back to the library quickly.
Lyle was standing at the desk speaking to Frank when I got back to the staircase.