Logan tugs on my hand. “Let’s just go,” he says.
I don’t move for another second. I watch Grady, pleading silently for him to come with us. He doesn’t belong here with these people.
He wraps his arms around his legs.
Logan starts to walk away, still holding my hand, and this time I follow him. I pull my eyes away from Grady and try not to focus on the growing emptiness in my stomach.
This feeling that something unbreakable has jammed itself between us and Grady, and things will never be the same.
*
I sit on the straw cot inside my shack. Logan ties a strip of fabric around the cut on my forearm. His fingers move deftly in the dim light seeping through holes in the ceiling.
If the cut were bigger, I might worry about infection, but I’ve had worse. We’ve always had to sleep off fevers and bind wounds ourselves. If the sickness is bad enough, officials bring a medi-bot to assess the situation. A life-threatening illness usually lands a sick kid in the sanitarium. But even then, that’s only if the kid has a high enough Promise that the Developers don’t want to lose his skills just yet. Promise is everything.
In the Core and in the adult cities in each sector, where everyone has high Promise, things are different. No one ever gets that sick. They’re vaccinated to prevent diseases before they happen.
Logan finishes tying the knot. “Is your side okay?” I ask.
“It’s fine,” he says, and stands and crosses the room. In the makeshift fire pit where Laila’s cot used to rest, a muckrat roasts on a skewer over sticks and dull flames. The stale bread and salty soup the wardens gave us for our daily rations didn’t fill my stomach, as usual. So we caught the rat in a ditch on our way home.
When we were younger, Logan and I made a game out of catching them. We would hide in the sewers, pretending we were statues, until the creatures scampered close enough for us to grab them. Whoever caught the fattest muckrat won. Then we would race home along the train tracks and kill the animal with a sharp stick before we showed it to Laila. I always did the killing because Logan was squeamish.
These days, he’s gotten better at it. While he tests the meat and removes it, I stand and crack the door open to check how low the sun is. It’s barely burning in the sky, a splotch of pale red in the approaching darkness. Officials send their bots to check the shacks an hour after sunset to keep the boys and girls separate, but we have some time. We have our ways of sneaking around after dark, anyway. All that matters is that we don’t do anything stupid enough to get caught.
“Hungry?” Logan asks.
“Very.” I shut the door and take half the muckrat from him. The tough meat burns my fingertips, and I gasp. But I don’t drop it.
He smiles and rips into his portion. “Will this be your last muckrat? What do you think?”
“I don’t want to think.” I drop onto the cot again and pick at my meat. When I swallow, it doesn’t settle well in my stomach.
Logan watches me. There’s something soft and wanting in his gaze, like I’m just out of reach.
He takes a step. I push my free hand into the bed, ready to stand if he takes another. I’m scared. But I want him to.
Something scrapes at the door. We freeze.
It’s not a cam-bot; they beep or buzz loudly before coming inside. Which means it must be a human. We don’t have visitors, ever. Unless it’s Grady—but he raps his knuckles twice every time—or officials. They only check inside shacks themselves when there’s a serious problem. When someone is in trouble.
“Don’t open it,” I say.
“It’ll be worse if we don’t.”
I’m not sure he’s right, but I don’t argue. He moves to the door. I slide my fingers under the cot for the sharpened stick hidden there.
Logan peers through a crack and frowns. Slowly, he pushes the door open.
A tiny girl with curly black hair stares up at him. She stands unevenly; one leg is shorter than the other. Tears stain her cheeks. Her face is so flushed, she must have a fever.
“Please?” she whispers, pointing at the bit of muckrat meat still in his hand.
I hesitate. When I was as little as her, I used to do this. I used to go around and ask people to share their rations or their extra food sometimes, until I got clever enough to catch muckrats myself. But we barely have enough food as it is, and there are two of us.
“I’m sorry, but there isn’t enough,” I say.
She whimpers.
“Here, you can have it.” Logan hands her the rest of his portion.
“Logan—” I reach to stop him, but he grabs my wrist and pushes me behind him.
“It’s okay. Enjoy.” He gives her a smile.
She scampers off with her treat without thanking him. The other children lingering in the street turn to us, their eyes hungry.
I shut the door. “There’s no use starving for them.”
“They could die if we don’t help them.” The hollowness in Logan’s voice surprises me. “I bet she hasn’t got any friends, with that deformity of hers. I bet kids make fun of her. I was like her once. So were you.”
“I know, I didn’t say I wasn’t.”
“You should know better, then. You should be kinder.” He turns away and kicks dirt onto the fire to kill it.
I stare at him, my fists clenched and my jaw trembling. How could he say that? If I’m selfish, it’s because I want to survive. It’s because there’s no way I’ll ever escape this place if I care too much about anyone else.
Sitting on the cot, Logan presses his fists into his forehead. The wind whistles over the roof. A krail caws somewhere in the sky.
I unclench my hands and force my jaw to be still. I force the anger away—I try to, at least. It’s foolish to be mad at him tonight. This could be our last night together, though I don’t expect it to be. But it could be.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper.
He sighs, staring at the ground, and runs his fingers through his hair.
I watch him for another moment, gathering my courage to sit beside him. Of all the things to be afraid of.
When I finally do, he slips an arm around me, pulling me close to him.
“You have nothing to be sorry for,” he says.
I close my eyes and lean into his chest. His skin is warm against mine. His body is solid and present. Usually when we sit like this, I wish he would kiss me. Too many times I’ve thought he was about to, but something always gets in the way. Something always makes him stop, and makes me too nervous to follow through with it.
I wish I were brave enough. I wish I could fold into him until there was no space left, until there was nothing but our breaths and our lips and our clumsy hands.
But tonight is different. Tonight, even just sitting here in his arms makes me terrified—not of him, but of tomorrow. Of the announcement and what will happen afterward.
“I’m scared,” I tell him, and my voice shakes.
“It’s going to be okay,” he says, and lays down on the straw and pulls me close to him.
We lie side by side. His chest rises and falls against mine. His strong arms keep me secure. Safe.
Later that night, after the cam-bots have gone down all the streets in the work camp and checked that all the children are safely inside their shacks, Logan sneaks back in through the loose board in the wall and slips onto the cot beside me again.
Even after his breathing slows and steadies, I’m still awake, afraid to dream. The dark hides a tomorrow when I’m certain to lose something dear to me.
For a second night, I don’t sleep.
5
We head for the Extraction ceremony at sundown.
Logan and I move hand in hand through the Pavilion streets with the others old enough to attend, escorted by officials and cam-bots. We’ve already passed the education towers and the sanitarium. Our destination lies a few blocks ahead of us, a block west of the security hub and two blocks east of the main flight departure bay, where the Ext
ractions chosen tonight will depart for the Core.
I’m covered in sweat from working in the fields for twelve hours instead of eight. For the first time, I didn’t have four hours of intensive study in school this morning. It’s no longer necessary. Either I’ve learned enough that my Promise is high enough for Extraction, or my years of education were a waste.
The dirt on Logan’s face makes the circles darker under his eyes, giving him a weary look. But his jaw is hard, his lips pressed together. He holds my hand with such a firm grip, I’m not sure he’ll ever let go of me. I hope he won’t.
Thunder rumbles in the distance. Spotlights sweep the city streets. CorpoBot screens are lit up on every corner, spewing a crackling melody from their speakers and showing the symbol of the Core: a full moon embossed in bronze.
The real moon hasn’t risen yet, though small dots of stars already shimmer through the acid shield. The red sun fragments into darkness at my back as it dips toward the world outside the settlement.
“What do you think is really out there?” I ask Logan.
He raises an eyebrow. “Out where?”
“Outside our settlement.”
He laughs. “Don’t you remember the maps in school? There are oceans, rivers, mountains, research facilities…”
I nod, biting the inside of my cheek as a small fear grows in the back of my mind. “And the lower sectors?”
“Work camps and cities, same as here. Except in the Core.” His fingers squeeze mine harder. I’m sure he can feel my rapid pulse in my fingertips. “But you knew that already. What’s this really about?”
A hovercraft passes by overhead, above the skyscrapers.
I take a deep, shaky breath. “They could be lying about the Core.”
He’s silent for a moment. Then he says, “They’ve shown us video footage of the people down there, including Extractions. Do you really think it’s all fake?”
I remember the footage: smiling people and laughing children. Some of them feasted in crowded cafeterias, while others played simulation games and worked in laboratories.
Freedom. That’s the word instructors use to describe that kind of life. I don’t really understand what it means, but I’d like to.
“I guess I don’t think it’s fake,” I say quietly. “It just scares me a little, is all.”
“It’s everything we dreamed about,” Logan says. “Trust me. You’ll see when you get there.”
I glance at him. His smile is genuine. There’s only a flicker of sadness in his eyes.
I think he actually believes he’s going to lose me tonight. It makes my heart crack into a million pieces of something that feels like glass—whether because I think he’s wrong or because I’m worried he’s right, I don’t know.
“Logan—”
A scream cuts me off. It came from around the corner of a nearby building. A girl’s voice. She screams again, and the hairs rise on the back of my neck.
A pod engine roars in the distance.
“Get back!” officials shout. We all clump together, bumping shoulders. I grab on to Logan’s arm.
The pod comes flying into view, a blur of silver. My eyes are wide and I’m clutching Logan and I can barely breathe because the pod’s moving so fast, I’m sure it’s going to hit us. I’m sure it’s going to smack into us and smash us into a thousand worthless pieces. But it halts just in time, not ten feet from where I stand.
Steam seeps from the top of the pod as its side door zips open and a ramp slides out. The bronze insignia of the Core blazes on the pod’s silver side. But the girl the officials drag through the doorway is the one who steals my attention.
Bone-thin, dressed in rags, her skin is pale and wrinkled, though she’s only sixteen. I know her, or I used to. Before she was like this. When she was Rebecca, sitting in front of me in Sector History, braiding her hair and never saying a word but doing better than everyone on every test. She’s the same age as me. She tested for Extraction yesterday.
Now, shackles bind her wrists, and black foam gathers at her lips.
I take three steps back, pulling Logan with me deeper into the crowd. Unstable. That’s what she is—she must be.
The officials heave her forward. I clench my teeth when I see the torn flesh of her back, hanging in bloody strips. She shrieks and struggles against the armored men, but it does her no good.
In seconds, they get her through the door of the nearest building. They slam it shut behind them. The clang echoes in my ears.
Unstables have high Promise. They have to, or they wouldn’t be marked Unstable—they’d be replaced. But these are people with high intelligence, high obedience, and high physical strength—until they snap. They turn insane and uncontrollable. No one knows why, but the Developers want to understand. They want to fix them, to see if the madness can be cured.
These officials must be prepping Rebecca for her trip to the Unstable treatment facility, Karum. It lies outside the Surface settlement, not far away.
“Settle down,” the officials yell to quiet the mutters among the youth. “Keep moving.”
“Come on,” Logan says.
I turn away, ignore my tightening throat, and let him pull me past the others. It’s awful, though. Rebecca was my partner in lab a few times. She never said very much unless she was answering my question or the instructor’s, but she was almost better than me when it came to mathematics. She could solve Yate’s Equation, the hardest and longest equation to solve, in forty-three seconds, only four seconds slower than me.
Now she’s different—messed up and dangerous. I wish I knew why.
On the next street over, I recognize the structure across the road, and my stomach drops into the gravel. The top of the building has a dome shape similar to the sanitarium, but the whole complex is taller. Thick glass pillars lean against the building at an angle, as if they’re keeping it from toppling over. A high pole stands near the door with a Core flag waving at the top, its fabric unfurling to show blue and black stripes, a silver circle in the center, and words running along the circle’s bottom: INVENTION. PEACE. PROSPERITY.
I watched Logan enter this structure last year.
“All those who tested yesterday, please head inside the Extraction building,” a loud voice crackles through hidden speakers on the street. The rich, deep voice of the woman who tested me yesterday. “The rest of you, follow the officials to the announcement plaza.”
“Don’t go yet,” I say to Logan, tightening my hold on his hand as people move around us.
“I have to,” he says.
Behind us, the sun dips down all the way, as thunder rumbles again and the wind picks up. There are several moments of only stars and dark sky above us, and then pink moonlight touches the roofs of the skyscrapers. I revel in this moment every night. Laila, Logan, and I used to climb up onto our roof sometimes to lie on our backs and stare at the stars. We went there the night before Laila turned twenty and they took her away.
“You know, it wouldn’t be your fault,” Logan says.
“What?”
His fingers slip from mine and close gently around my wrist. His other hand tangles in my curls, sending trickles of fire across the skin of my scalp. My breath falters on my lips.
“If they picked you, and you had to leave me,” he whispers, “it wouldn’t be your fault.”
Rocks fill my throat, and my eyes grow watery. I blink fast. Moonlight trickles onto the street, over the skyscrapers.
“I might be back soon,” I say. The instructors might eliminate me during the final processing, even before the announcement, like they eliminated Logan early last year. If they eliminate me, I’ll be back with him in minutes. This will all be over.
I will have lost everything.
“I hope you won’t be,” Logan says, a sad smile playing around the edges of his mouth.
I hope I won’t be eliminated, either. But when I think of hearing my name called, of Logan hearing it without me on the street, where he’ll watch the
announcement on a CorpoBot screen with everyone else, I remember I’ll lose something either way. My heart trembles beneath my rib cage.
Shoulders bump mine as sixteen-year-olds push past me to head into the building. My shaky, sweaty hand slips away from Logan’s. He steps back without another word and turns. The crowd soon swallows him.
I stand there for a moment, fretting. But the bodies still push past me toward the Extraction building. There isn’t time to wait. The sooner I get tonight over with, the better.
Wiping the sweat from my palms onto my skirt, I follow the sixteen-year-olds through the double doors. I’m hyperaware of their body heat, their heavy breathing, their untrusting eyes. These are the people I grew up with and went to school with. We worked together in the fields. We shared worried glances when others were facing punishment.
Now we’re fighting for ten spots on the pod that will depart for the Core tonight after the ceremony.
Now we’re enemies.
*
Ten minutes later, I’m in an elevator on my way to the fourth floor. My dress sticks to my skin. It’s so hot in here, it feels like someone trapped the sun inside the ceiling.
The female instructor beside me keeps a hand around my wrist. Her hair is blond and curly, twisted into a high bun, and her dress suit is scarlet. “Final processing will be quick and painless,” she says. “We’re just going to take some scans of your brain for a final Promise check before the announcement.”
I nod to show her I understand, but something twists inside my stomach. I can’t even remember the last time I had brain scans. They’re the safest way of determining a Promise score, though there are other methods, like the obedience test I took yesterday.
The elevator bell dings, and the door zips open. We move into a hallway with spare red lights here and there, splashes of color in shadow.
The last time I had brain scans, I would’ve been a new child in the sanitarium. It wouldn’t have been long after my birth, not long after I was taken away from whatever girl in the work camp was forced to give birth to me. Whether she even knew what I looked like, whether she had any other kids besides me, I don’t know and I never will. My mother, whoever she was, was replaced and killed in quarantine long ago. No one has ever told me her name. Or my father’s name.
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