by Hunter, Ryan
T squeezed my hand. “How many times were you really encouraged to reach your potential?”
I laughed, but it held no humor. “Are you kidding? Show your potential and you end up a lab rat or worse.”
“Exactly,” he said, standing again. “One United demands mediocrity because a nation of underachievers is easier to control than a society that excels.”
“Because when we excel we’re thinking for ourselves,” I mumbled. T continued up the canyon. The roaring became so loud we would have had to shout over it. We remained silent instead, afraid our voices would carry downstream to alert the officers.
We rounded a corner and encountered a waterfall at least twenty feet high. It filled most of the canyon except for a sloped section of rock a couple of feet wide on one side. The water sprayed through the canyon, soaking the rock we needed to climb if we wanted to continue ahead. “What do you think?” I asked.
T stepped up onto the narrow ledge, easing closer to the falls as the rock sloped upward. “It’s slippery.”
As I stepped up behind him, the tiny tendrils of moss swaying in the water were obvious, and I knew that one wrong step and I’d be flat on my back or worse. T took my hand and braced me as I inched along. As it became too steep to climb, he squatted down and webbed his fingers together to form a step. I placed one foot on his hands and he heaved me upward, standing as I straightened my leg. I teetered and grasped for the rock that had nearly turned to cliff, groping for a handhold anywhere.
The rock jutted just above my hand and I stretched, fingertips gripping the rock. T hollered for me to hold on while he worked my feet up to his shoulders, giving me the extra inches to haul my body up to a plateau a few feet shy of the top.
I dropped to my knees, turned around and reached down for T. He already scrambled up the wall, his feet finding cracks I couldn’t see until he landed next to me and swung up the last bit of rock to stand atop the falls.
He reached down and hauled me up beside him, pulling me to his side as we moved away from the slippery rocks encased in moss. The canyon walls opened up at the top, the ground easing in both directions—dotted in wildflowers and scrub oak.
“We need to hydrate here before we refill the bottles,” he said, slinging his pack from his shoulders to retrieve our drinking water.
We each drained a bottle before T crouched and dipped them under the mountain stream. I glanced behind us, searching the canyon for any sign of security. “Sometimes,” I ventured, still getting used to the idea that I could speak freely now, “I think living in ignorance is easier.”
T added the purification drops and capped off the first bottle. “It may be easier, but is it better?”
I remembered swiping my hand across the sensors, being told what I’d do for my career, where I’d attend school and worst of all, being ripped from my friends each year as one or the other of us was transferred to adjoining schools to keep us from becoming too attached and exploring our own ideas, developing our own personalities. Sure, One United provided our employment, food, housing and healthcare, but what were we giving up to receive it all?
“I don’t want to take the easy way anymore,” I agreed.
T uncapped the second bottle and submerged it. He treated the water and stood, dropping both into his backpack.
“I think we’re about as ready as we can be,” he said.
I braced my shoulders and searched the flattened landscape surrounding us. “Okay,” I said, “but where do we go?”
T pointed into the distance—somewhere to the north—and we set out, walking slowly enough to be quiet, yet quickly enough to put as many miles as possible behind us before night.
CHAPTER 23
“I’ve been thinking about my mother,” I blurted.
T stopped walking and took a seat on a mossy rock. “Sofi?”
I nodded.
“She loved you.”
I sat across from him on a smaller rock, one that jabbed me hard into my left butt cheek, but my feet appreciated the break. “She’s the only mother I’ve ever known.”
“She’s your real mother in every sense of the word,” he said, unzipping the backpack and tossing me a water bottle. I took two swallows to save some for later, my stomach rumbling from hunger.
“I want to find her.”
He studied my face, waited for more but when it didn’t come, he finally spoke. “We’ve got to find this other group first, Brynn. We can’t continue forever on our own.”
I pushed my heels into the soil before realizing the Alliance trackers would see them. I moved my feet back, placed them on a rock and tried to cover my marks by smearing the soil with my palms. “I didn’t mean now. I meant later, when we can go prepared.”
“You want me to help you find Sofi?’
I nodded. “I’d like your help but I wouldn’t think less of you if you didn’t want to give it.”
He smiled a crooked grin. “You know we’ve got a ways to go yet.”
I cocked my head and waited.
“We’ve got to find that group first. They’ll help us, I’m sure of it, then we can go out on our own, but I honestly don’t see how we can find Sofi, even after we get their help.”
I knew he spoke the truth but I didn’t want to hear it. Sofi had loved and protected my father and I needed to do the same for her. “I’d like to try.”
“Then I’ll be there to help.”
“Thank you.”
T dug into his pack again until he found the last of our fruit. He tossed me a bruised apple and took one for himself. He bit into the apple and sighed as he chewed. I rubbed mine absently on my filthy shirt.
“How many people do you think there are?” I asked.
“Hiding out in the mountains?” he asked.
I nodded, taking my first bite, but tasting little.
He shrugged and swallowed. “Your father gave no indication in his writing.”
I leaned my elbows on my knees and rolled the fruit in my hands. “Do you think they’ve been there a while or that they’ve recently defected?”
He shrugged and kicked his feet out in front of him, crossing them at the ankles. “Could be either way. The settlements to the south, they sound big, real cities built up where old ones used to exist.”
I pried the silence for any disturbance and found nothing, not even the scurry of animals. It made me nervous and I bit a large chunk of the apple free, chewing loudly.
“I still wonder how we got here,” I mumbled when I swallowed. “I mean, there had to be a point when people said ‘enough.’”
“Most people didn’t even realize what was going on,” he ventured, repeating what he’d learned in my father’s journals. “Changes occurred gradually until one day people woke up without their own lives—missing their own agency. Along the way they were pressured into accepting the new ways, feeling like bad parents if they didn’t implant their children with tracking devices that would keep them safe from kidnapping or guarantee them healthcare. They succumbed, each battle becoming easier and easier for the Alliance. And along the way, they brought the people into a world of dependency …”
“My father abhorred dependency.”
“Like many others,” T said, tossing his apple core far into the brush. “It’s common among the strong, the people born to be leaders.”
“The ones they label as terrorists,” I said softly.
T stood to go again when I stopped him. “Wait.”
He lowered back down. “What?”
“Where are they?”
He pointed through the trees but I stopped him.
“I don’t mean the people. I mean the officers. They should have found us by now, killed us.”
He scrubbed his hands over his face, his fingernails black with dirt, his hair darker than it had been yesterday because of the filth. “I have a theory.”
When he didn’t continue, I offered mine, “They’re following us with satellites, projecting our images on a big screen in a room
with air conditioning and betting how long we’ll survive out here without food?”
“You forgot the popcorn.”
My stomach howled and T grimaced. “Sorry.”
“For being hungry? Really?”
“This would be a whole lot easier if I were immune to it.”
T’s humor waned. “I think they realize we know where we’re going, that we’re meeting others like us.”
“So that should make them hurry to kills us faster, so we don’t make contact.”
He shook his head. “It makes them watch us, with satellites—heat goggles—whatever until we lead them to the others.”
Somehow, starving by ourselves sounded better than killing an entire colony by stumbling into it. “I don’t like your theory.”
T played in the dirt with his foot, making a dent in the soil. “I don’t either.”
“Why don’t they just take our map?” I asked.
“They’re monitoring our location but they’re not listening to us, not seeing every little move we’re making, which means, they may not realize we have a map, but they do know we know where we’re going.”
“They could bring us in, torture it out of us …” the idea sent fear down my spine but I knew it could happen and even feared that’s how we’d end up.
“That’s why the Freemen don’t put their location on a map. Maybe the officers have tried torture before and they’re using a new approach, realizing people like us are just going to a meeting point, not the actual settlement.”
I pushed my filthy hair behind an ear and asked. “What do we do?”
“Avoid any direct route to that first checkpoint. We also lead them away from the other settlements. We don’t want them to think those people are involved any more than we want to take them to the Freemen. There are families there—children.”
“Checkpoints?”
His mouth opened to speak and he closed it, swallowing before opening it again. “I’ll explain in a minute.”
My stomach felt like a vice already, clenching tighter each time we stopped. “How long?”
“However long it takes.”
“If we went right there,” I ventured. “How long would it take us?”
He scratched the back of his neck as he calculated. “A few days?”
A few days—did we have the food or water to last a few days?
T picked up a long, pointed stick and drew a rough map in the dirt between us. “Here’s the problem.” He added dots like the ones I’d seen on the paper map. “These are not colonies. They’re checkpoints, of a sort.”
“Checkpoints—”
“So the guards can see who’s coming. You’ve got to go through each one the right way or they’ll dispatch men to kill you, then when you get close enough and you’ve passed their tests, they send someone to bring you in. That way their location is never mapped. They can move freely. They just put their guards where they can observe the checkpoints.”
Discouragement warred with hope. Even if we went straight through all the checkpoints, the chances of arriving without starving were slim. Taking the officers on a cross country in the process would kill us. But did we even have a choice?
“Brynn, this one,” he touched a rock in the soil and traced cliffs on two sides, then drew a tall mountain on the third, “is where we’re headed. It’s the final checkpoint for the settlement your father planned to join.” He filled in a few other blanks and pointed to a stick that sat only a few inches from his ‘river.’ “This is us. We can stay along the river, keep hydrated and look for berries …”
I arched my back, hoping to displace the soreness but the rock only dug deeper into my rear. “If we’re sure they’re not going to swoop in and kill us, don’t you think we can slow our pace a bit?”
“This is where we’ll lead them.” T added a large X several miles upriver before he swiped his foot over the drawing, obliterating the map. “We’re not sure about anything.”
“So they could still be out there, just a few feet away, waiting for the perfect opportunity?”
“They could,” he agreed.
“Then we’re no more free than we were before.”
“We’re making our own decisions,” T said. “We’re acting on our own.” The hint of a smile touched his mouth. “We didn’t even get permits for this hike. How do you think they like that?”
I smiled. No hiking permits. That was the least of our worries anymore.
“Do you think my father had a personal contact in the group?”
T shrugged. “He mentions a man named Oliver, but doesn’t say if there’s been personal contact.”
“He could have just found the name in the downloads he was doing from the PCAs,” I said, hoping I was wrong.
Leaves rattled nearby and a large squirrel scurried through the brush. My shoulders relaxed though I hadn’t realized they’d been tensed.
“There’s one more thing,” I began.
T looked up. “What’s that?”
“Once we lead the officers off course, escape their scrutiny, find this colony, convince them we’re friendly and are taken in—I get the first shower.”
He tossed a pebble and it bounced off my shoe. “You’ll have to fight me for it.”
“You’re on.” I stood and scrubbed my finger over my grimy teeth, the closest thing I owned to a toothbrush. “So we’ve got these checkpoints,” I said, following him near the base of the hillside, knowing we should be hiking higher but trying to look casual as we stayed in the foothills. “How do we get to them?”
He had slowed his pace, just enough so I could talk while traveling. “We follow the landmarks,” he explained. “There are little dots along the way and corresponding descriptions in the notebook.”
“Different dots than the checkpoint dots.”
“Yes.”
“They must be small because I only remember seeing the checkpoint dots.”
“I’ll show you when I know it’s safe,” he said.
I bumped shoulders with him, trying to throw him off balance to lighten the mood. “Don’t hold your breath waiting for the perfect moment.”
“Believe me,” he said, looking into the distance rather than at me. “I believe in taking advantage of every opportunity as soon as it rolls around, perfect timing or not.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
The familiar burn returned to my cheeks and I cleared my throat. “I’d like to hear another theory.”
“What?” he asked.
“Once we have these guys going the wrong direction, how do we get away to go the right direction?”
T swallowed hard. “I’m still working on that.”
“Fill me in when you get it worked out?” I asked lightly.
He shook his head. “Naw. I’ll fill you in when it’s over.”
CHAPTER 24
The tent flaps fluttered in the breeze, making a snap, snap, snap as the zipper slapped against a pole. Bleached white, the tent had originally been orange, the seams and the base still sporting the original color—or something close to it.
We crouched behind the bushes and watched, waiting for someone to step out though one end lay flattened on the ground.
The front had been left open, a sleeping bag half dragged into the sunlight, also bleached, the stuffing clinging to the surrounding vegetation. The rest lay too far away to inspect and I wanted to rush forward to explore the abandoned campsite. Someone had been here, in this remote wilderness, there’d been another human being.
I put my hand on T’s arm. “What do you think happened here?”
He silenced me and stepped from behind the bushes. He crept toward the tent, circling so he could peer through the opening without getting too close. When he’d gone full circle, he disappeared into the trees, circling larger until he reappeared once more beside the campsite. He motioned me over but my initial curiosity had already dispelled due to the lines that filled his forehead.
“Let’s see
if there’s anything we can use, then get out of here,” he whispered.
His face looked pale but he stepped in front of the tent and squatted to inspect the inside. I stepped up behind him but something warned me to stay back.
A backpack lay beside the sleeping bag, the zipper open and the clothes half strewn inside the tent. A jacket sprawled inside, half covered by the collapsed end of the tent, a man’s jacket, men’s clothes—one sleeping bag.
A notebook fluttered right outside the door, the pages bleached clean and wrinkled from rain. I picked up the book, looked for a name or any writing that would indicate what had happened, but any writing I found had bled through from page to page to obscure anything that may have helped. I closed it and set it inside the tent. The warped pages pushed the book open, and the cover flopped sprawling next to the rest of the man’s belongings.
“The jacket?” I asked.
T shook his head. “It’s cold at night but it’ll just slow us down in the daytime heat. We’re better off to wrap in our thermal blankets.”
The foil blankets, he meant, but I had to admit, they reflected my body heat enough to keep me alive. “What about the pack?”
T eased into the tent, taking his time not to touch anything other than one handle of the bag as he scooted it closer to the doorway. “Already scavenged. Clothes are torn, filthy.”
I’d hoped to find some food or … I really didn’t know what else, just something useful …
I turned to walk away when I noticed a second bag peaking from beneath the jacket. “What about that bag?” I asked.
T ducked back inside and pulled it out of the tent. The bag looked newer than the other, probably because it had been hidden, protected from the elements. The zipper was still closed as well, so whatever lay inside hadn’t been discovered by any other scavengers. We both stepped back and stared at the navy blue canvas. One handle had been ripped—or cut away—none of it had faded, but then neither had the jacket on top of it. It didn’t move, didn’t look as if it would bite but neither of us wanted to get close enough to find out what it would do when opened.