inDIVISIBLE

by Hunter, Ryan

  He smiled so his dimple showed and the fluttering returned to my stomach. “Yes.”

  I looked away, fingers digging into the cool dirt floor. “What about traveling? Sailing across the ocean? Discussing anything you want in your own home?”

  He cocked one eyebrow and smirked. “I don’t have a home, Brynn.”

  I’d forgotten about that.

  “We’re not near the ocean—I’m broke … no money—so traveling’s out.” He leaned back on his hands and stared at the cliff wall where it now disappeared into darkness. His face fell to shadows until I could see just the outline of him. “But that wall is right here and it’s calling me.”

  Convinced he could no longer see the burning in my cheeks, I decided to be bold and flirtatious. “I’m right here.”

  I felt him look at me, really study me as if the darkness hadn’t blinded him at all. “I didn’t say that wall was the only thing I’d do.”

  Now I knew he must at least be feeling the heat emanating from my face. I ducked my head and suppressed a smile, stomach growling loudly, making us both jump.

  I giggled. T unzipped the backpack and pulled a package of dried meat free. “I’m not sure how long we’ll have to survive on this,” he said, handing me several pieces of meat, “so let’s take it easy until we study that map closer.”

  I bit off a thick piece—the juices that formed in my mouth oozed into my belly, setting off a second round of rumbles. I wrapped one arm around my middle and laid back, relishing the nourishment that seemed to seep into each muscle. “I feel like I haven’t eaten in days,” I mumbled.

  T lay next to me and our arms brushed, the warmth from his arm comforting and yet distracting. “Tastes like heaven, huh?”

  I nodded. “Like heaven,” the words caught in my throat, and I swallowed the last of the meat. “Can I ask you something, T?”

  He rolled to his side, propping himself up on one elbow. “What is it?”

  “Do you believe there’s a heaven? God?”

  He shrugged. “I’ve never thought too much about it.”

  Somehow his answer left me empty. “I’ve always learned the science behind life, but some of it just doesn’t click for me, you know? I guess I was kind of hoping for more,” I said, shrugging. “It would be really nice to know there was something else out there …”

  “What would it really change?” he asked.

  I couldn’t really say for sure. I scrunched my forehead and thought about it. “I don’t know,” I finally admitted. “It would take away the fear of death I guess, maybe even make me try harder so I didn’t disappoint God.”

  T trailed his fingers over my forehead, brushing my hair aside. “What about you? Don’t you try hard to not disappoint yourself?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “I learned a long time ago that trying my hardest brought on too much attention and it’s better to hide in the crowd.”

  A dry laugh echoed between the towering walls. “I should know that … as an Olympic competitor, I became property of One United. They told me where to be and when, what to eat, how hard to work out … well, everything. I felt like I was in prison.”

  “And you couldn’t talk about it,” I whispered, still nervous to voice the thoughts that seemed to flow easier now.

  “No, I couldn’t. We were to be grateful for all we were given, indebted and loyal.”

  I sat up again and leaned toward him. “I don’t like being indebted.”

  He rolled to his back and rested his wrist on my knee, his fingers making circles across my thigh. “Then don’t be.”

  “I won’t.” I set my jaw and felt real power in saying the words, but somehow wasn’t even sure what they meant.

  “Live like they aren’t watching you, or aren’t monitoring what you say and how you say it.”

  I bit my lip, tears stinging my eyes. It’s what I wanted, but how could I really achieve it? I was staring at death right now, not a long term evasion from the Alliance. I closed my eyes and relished the silence, no matter how fleeting.

  He smiled lazily, fingers stilling. “I guess that answers my question,” he said.

  “What question?”

  “What you’d do.”

  I swallowed hard and placed my hand on his chest. He covered it with his free hand, warming it against his body.

  “You want to taste complete and utter freedom, freedom of speech, religion and thought …” He silenced and I thought about his words. The truth of them pulsed through me, sending a warmth to my core. My chills disappeared and I felt strength in my resolve like I’d never experienced before.

  “I want to live my own life, T.”

  “As you should.”

  “And I want to believe there’s a God who’s taken my father somewhere beautiful.”

  “Then believe it,” he encouraged.

  I lay down again and took his hand in mine. The bulges in the earth below me put pressure on my left shoulder blade and right hip and yet, I don’t think I’d ever felt as comfortable and at peace. “I will believe it.”

  “Then there’s one more thing you’ve got to do,” he whispered.

  I turned my head to find him watching me, his eyes clear as our faces nearly touched. “You’ve got to live to your potential. Honor yourself and you’ll honor God.”

  My heart swelled. I had to look away, up at the sky and the vast expanse of universe that somewhere, somehow, housed God.

  CHAPTER 22

  When being followed, silence is often more unsettling than the sound of pursuit. We both felt that unease deep inside and it manifested in our pacing up and down the little crevice. The sound of foot on stone rattled our nerves until T told me to stand guard while he came up with a plan.

  He sat deep inside the stone walls going over the map and comparing the notes in my father’s books with the markings on the map. I stood near the stream, watching a deer dart to the bank, flick his ears and bend his head down for a drink. I tried to capture T’s attention, but the deer fled before T even looked up from his studies. When I could take it no longer, I blurted, “What’s with the map, anyway?”

  T looked up, hands still and mouth gaping. After a moment, the corners of his lips raised and he motioned me over.

  I didn’t hesitate. I crouched beside him as he smoothed the map with his palms. He cleared his throat and pointed to the yellow X I knew as the shed. “This is where we found the supplies, most of them property of One United, stolen from the City Center where your father worked—probably the reason they were caught.”

  Stealing—one more thing I’d never expected my father to do, but one that made a strange sense in this new world where I wasn’t fed beliefs, thoughts and feelings through my PCA, music and surroundings.

  He chuckled. “Stealing from the Alliance carries the death penalty.”

  “There is no death penalty,” I argued.

  “For regular criminals,” T said. “I think we’ve seen them prove otherwise where the Alliance is concerned.

  “So they’re exempt from their own laws?” I asked.

  T just raised an eyebrow and ignored the question.

  He pulled a knife from his backpack and turned the end of the handle toward me. “See the markings?”

  “Property of One United,” I mumbled upon seeing the familiar stamp. We had it marked into our PCAs, in the concrete floor of our home, school desks and nearly every public bench and vehicle. I hardly noticed it anymore … .

  He shoved it back in the pack and said, “Nearly everything is stamped like that.”

  “So how did they get it all … I mean, they stole it, but how did they get those kinds of things to the City Center to begin with? It’s not like they have weapons and stuff just lying around. It’s an office building.”

  T pushed aside the objects and cocked his head, his dark eyes like stones, the way they always turned when he had something to tell me that he thought I might not like.

  “Your father found more, the schematics of the build
ing—he was a genius, really—and he realized that there were hidden rooms, fortified rooms, and unmarked shipments going to these rooms.”

  I couldn’t tell where he was heading with the story so I just waited, my skin tingling the way it had each time part of my reality had crashed over me during the last few days.

  “He created an access badge that allowed him into any room in the building and he explored. He found a fortress in the building, Brynn, a military bunker with enough ammunition and fortification to hold off an army, along with the food needed to sustain thousands of soldiers.”

  “In the middle of Section Seven, in the City Center?” I asked.

  T nodded. “Right across the street from the city park where babies crawl in the grass and children catch butterflies.”

  “Why?”

  “Security.”

  “Against unarmed people? Against the students who stop there between classes for lunch? Against young lovers?” My throat caught as I remembered T and I in the shade of the picnic tree, playing the role convincingly.

  “Yes,” T said.

  The thought of a fortress in the middle of the City Center sent shocks through my limbs and I folded my arms tightly over my chest to still the tremors.

  “There are nine sections in what used to be the U.S.,” T said. “Two more in Mexico and a few in Canada. Each section is controlled by the Alliance officials in City Centers.” He showed me the map, traced the borders that had separated the countries only a generation before. I knew them, had seen them in history class as the teachers celebrated how opening up the borders had created more commerce, more power. “Each City Center is equipped with the manpower and firepower to stop an army.”

  “Because there’s such a huge threat to the Alliance, I can see that,” I spit. “They should be worried about us, a bunch of sheep following their lead so we don’t get cut off of their special programs …”

  “Shhh,” T said.

  “I don’t want to shhh,” I complained in a whisper. “I want to do something.”

  T scrubbed his face, clearly exasperated, but when he dropped his hands, he smiled. “That’s the point—your father found a way to do something about it.”

  “Finally,” I mumbled, leaning forward, my arms still tight around my torso to keep out the chill that rocked my heart.

  “All fourteen of the men killed during that ‘terrorist’ attack were working together. They’d sneak a few supplies out every day, give it to a courier who would make the occasional drop at the shed—possibly Cray. Someone must have followed him one day and set out to discover who else was involved.”

  I picked a flashlight from the pile of supplies and turned it over in my hand, the handle a rough metal, finished in a crisscross design for grip. The One United insignia was stamped into the grip just as I’d suspected, like everything else. Did any of us actually own anything?

  I tapped the flashlight against my thigh repeatedly, relishing the sting. “I think if people are so convinced, they should at least be allowed to leave, you know? They should be able to move away where they won’t bother anyone and make their own communities.”

  Nonsense, I knew, but when T began speaking again, I realized that nothing would ever surprise me again.

  He pushed the map toward me and pointed at several dots to the south. “That’s what these are—communities of people who’ve fled One United. They’re not protected by the Alliance. They don’t get healthcare. They technically don’t exist. But, the Alliance allows them to live that way so they don’t instill unrest in the rest of the population. These people don’t want to change things. They don’t want to fight. They just want to live in the wilderness in peace.”

  He pointed to the mountains. “The people up here want to fix the system. These are the ones the Alliance wants to destroy. These are the type of people the Alliance has deemed us to be.”

  I brought the flashlight down hard enough to make me wince, and T took it from me, placing it back in the pack before handing me a water bottle. The coolness against my fingers triggered my thirst, and the water sloshed down the front of my shirt as I gulped. I swiped my mouth with the back of my hand when I finished. Recapping the bottle, I passed it back to T, who smirked at me while his eyes trailed down the moisture that ran nearly to my belly button. I turned away and stalked back to the opening, determined to get some air on my shirt to dry it, hoping that in the process my cheeks would cool and return to their natural color. T and I had been traveling together, had slept beside one another, so why was I feeling so self-conscious now? I swiped my tongue across my bottom lip and remembered how his lips had felt on mine before shaking the image from my head and shoving my hands into my pockets.

  “We have two choices,” T said.

  I turned back around to face him, fairly certain I no longer blushed. “Okay?”

  T leaned back on his hands and crossed his ankles, legs stretched in front of him. “We’re closer to the southern communities than we are to the rendezvous points in the mountains. We could blend into those communities, make a life for ourselves, date … like we wanted to do in the beginning … remember our safe haven?”

  “Date?” I laughed.

  “Want normal or crazy?” he asked.

  I wanted to date … but … “I don’t think I’ve ever been normal, T.”

  “Me neither.”

  I leaned against the stone wall, watching him fold the map, placing it carefully with the notebooks in the hidden zipper at the back of the pack. “Besides, I can’t settle for anything but real freedom,” I said. “Living in those squatter towns … it would only be a matter of time before the Alliance stepped in.”

  T set the backpack aside and stretched his legs in front of him, crossed at the ankles. “Your father mentions you a lot in his books,” he said.

  I pushed from the wall and strolled toward him, not sure I was ready to hear my father’s sentiments. “What’s he say?”

  “Beware my daughter Brynn. She’s headstrong and temperamental and utterly beautiful—”

  “Liar,” I laughed, “except maybe the beautiful part. I think he may have said that.”

  “He did,” T winked.

  “So what now?” I asked.

  “I need your answer. North or south?”

  “We need to fight,” I replied. “Besides, we have all of my father’s research. It won’t help the southern communities, but it might help in the fight.”

  T threw the backpack over his shoulders and started toward me. “He said you’d say that too.”

  “Right.” I fell into step beside him as we left the shadowed crevice, venturing into the ravine—the stream widening as we climbed deeper into the hillside. The right side of the ravine turned to stone, forcing us into a narrow, slot canyon. Gazing up at the wavy, bulging walls, I wondered how we’d gotten there and how something so beautiful had been neglected from public hiking routes.

  T trailed his hand over the rock. “Brynn,” he whispered, fingers dipping into some letters etched into the stone. “Looks like we aren’t the first to come this way.”

  “S plus J,” I read.

  “I bet this used to be open to the public,” he said. “Look at all the other names in the rock.”

  Names, dates and curse words filled the canyon wall, and I paused. “Do you think the vandalism is why they shut it down?”

  T shrugged and picked up his step. The water dropped deep and clear, slower moving in the canyon and we walked along the right side of the bank to keep our feet as dry as possible. Getting them wet in the mountains wasn’t smart, especially when the temperatures dipped so drastically.

  The shade alone affected the temperature more than I realized it would, and I folded my arms across my chest to fight off my sudden chills.

  T walked silently for a long time before he said, “Your father knew you better than you realized.”

  I ran my filthy hands through my knotted hair, removing sticks that had entangled in it during our flight the da
y before. “Why do you say that?”

  “Why else would he have created a password only you would guess on his work computer? Why else would he have left those files up and that picture of your mother?”

  Tears pressed against the backs of my eyes but I sniffed them back, refusing to show my weakness. Maybe later, when we sat on the beach again and played our flirting games. But not now—I tried a different subject, taking my mind from my father and returning it to our task.

  “Do you think they’re doing anything right—the Alliance?” I asked. “I mean, so many people are so loyal … there’s got to be a reason why.”

  T snapped a dead twig from a tree and broke it between his fingers. He broke it again and again until it was too small to break then threw it into the water. “Do you really need to wonder about their loyalty?”

  I bit my bottom lip, afraid I already knew—the answer so obvious and yet so distant my entire life. The Alliance had stolen our freedom to be ourselves, to voice our opinions, to make our own decisions—yet nobody had made a dent in their plans, because the few people who had the power to do so were silenced.

  A rock rolled beneath my foot and it echoed in the canyon. I placed my next step softer, directly in the center of a rock. “How do they control us so easily?”

  T stopped and listened to the roaring sound filling the canyon walls now. That meant we were about to encounter a waterfall, and I hoped there would be a way around it or we’d be backtracking right into the hands of the Alliance. T shoved his hands into his pockets and shifted his weight. “Fear. They control us with fear of terrorism, fear of pandemics, fear of travel, fear of ourselves.”

  “Ourselves?” I asked.

  T leaned back against the canyon wall. “They want us to believe we can’t make the best decisions for ourselves so they make them for us, but who do those decisions really benefit?”

  “The Alliance.”

  “They tell you what school to go to, dictate what you learn, where you get employed ...”

  “So we don’t waste our potential,” I recited as I’d learned in elementary school, but I no longer believed it.