I imagine what it would be like to take it, to finally be safe from my own body, to be Pure. What would happen if I was cured? Would I be taken back to the Inner Sector? Would I see my parents again? Would the Outer Sector be rebuilt, the slums replaced with houses, the crematoriums with hospitals?
Could I live a normal life again?
I lie down with my back to the wall, my eyes nervously scanning the room, watching the other girls stir in their sleep, bewitched by the images behind their eyes.
Normal life. I’m not sure I remember what that means anymore. It’s been ten years since I’ve had anything remotely normal. Ten years since I was diagnosed as a Dormant. Ten years since my parents abandoned me here, seven years old, trembling with fear.
Fear is an understatement. Terror doesn’t even begin to explain the way my heart raced and my gut twisted inside of me when I had to pull on the rough grey uniform of the Dormants and find a way to live this half-life. That first week was the worst. I was that girl asleep on the stairs, cowering in a corner in the hopes of being left alone. But I wasn’t left alone.
I got into my first fight three days after arriving, when a girl with dark hair and blotchy skin tried to steal my food. I pushed her, knocking her to the ground. When I saw her move to get up, before I knew what I was doing, I smashed my boot into her face, the crunch of cartilage running up my spine, freezing my blood.
And when she lay there, coughing and spluttering around the blood pouring into her mouth, I didn’t say anything.
No one touched me after that. No one tried to talk to me, and no one tried to steal from me. I did what I had to do to keep myself alive, and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since. I keep my head down, I trust no one, and I wait.
Wait for the Cure, and for the day I can get out of this hell-hole.
2
I wake up before dawn, when the shadows hold the Outer Sector down like chains. I pull my sleeve over my hand and wipe the dirt from the window behind me, looking out at the Celian City. It’s bright over there, like the dawn has already come, but it only makes the Outer Sector look darker in comparison.
I sit quietly, watching the sky turn pink, absorbed in my own thoughts. I always wake up before the other girls; I don’t like being woken by their feet stomping by my head in the morning.
I don’t like this place before everyone is awake, when the world is so quiet that the only thing I can hear are my own thoughts. I want to do something, anything. This unsettling stillness is unbearable.
An hour later, everyone is up and awake. I stay in the room long after everyone else is gone, staring at the holes in the plaster as I count down the minutes until I have to leave for work.
The room is finally cleared, and I stand up, replacing my knife in the pocket I have sewn into the inside of my uniform. I’m not allowed weapons at work, but the walk there and back is too dangerous to go without them, so I improvised.
Eventually I have to grit my teeth and face the rest of the day. As I’m jogging down the steps I hear a crash below me, and before I realise what I’m doing I’ve broken into a sprint, skidding to a halt at the door to the cafeteria.
I see the girl I found on the stairs last night being thrown against the wall, blood dripping down her chin. She pushes off the concrete, trying to slip by the girl with the black hair who seems so intent on fighting with her. I stop at the door and watch the fight play out. I can’t afford to step forward. I can’t afford to do anything but blink at them blankly, as if it doesn’t touch me.
The girl with the black curls grabs the other girl by the hair, and as she reaches out I see the Brands on her arms: red, raised skin in the shape of triangles along her forearms, marking her as a criminal. By now, a crowd has gathered around them, swaying with their movements, vying to see, deathly silent. She yanks the girl towards her viciously and I want to look away, but I can’t. The other girl, the one from the stairs, pushes away from her and finally builds up the courage to throw a punch.
It hits the girl in the face, grinding her teeth against her lip, causing blood to burst from her mouth as she releases a feral scream. The Branded girl launches herself forward, but just as she does so the crowd of girls jostles to see, moving as one and blocking my view. I take a step forward, standing on the tips of my toes to see over their heads, my heart pounding in my chest.
But when I see what’s happened, I step back again quickly, my back hitting against the wall.
The Branded girl drops something as the other girl slumps to the floor, gasping for air as blood spurts from her neck. She is spasming on the ground as the Branded girl takes a step back, the insane smile on her face more like a snarl than a grin.
I look down at what she dropped, watching as a pen rolls across the floor, smearing blood as it goes. My legs feel weak beneath me, my stomach churning and my eyes squeezing shut as I try to keep myself from vomiting.
Someone has called an Officer from outside, and suddenly everyone takes several steps back as the guards come in through the double doors, guns aimed at our heads, bellowing at us, ‘Don’t move!’ They catch the Branded girl by the arm and drag her backwards, towards the door. Now, everyone is scrambling to get away from the centre of the action, not wanting to be targeted by the guards. A crowd of girls stampedes towards and then past me, pushing and shoving and running to get away. My satchel is knocked from my hand and my things fly across the floor, but the other girls ignore it, their fear of the Officers overtaking anything else.
I drop to my knees, forcing my eyes away from the girl bleeding out on the floor, and begin picking up the few items I actually own. I am so focused on keeping my vision straight and my hands from shaking that it takes me a moment to register the slim, pale fingers handing me the items too far for me to reach.
I jerk up my head and see a blonde head and the small frame of a little girl, her face blocked out by her hair. She looks up, her wide blue eyes staring at me, as if she’s been caught doing something that she shouldn’t. She couldn’t be more than nine or ten, skinny and pale with thin lips and eyes too big for her face.
She must be new. I don’t recognise her. The serial number on the shoulder of her uniform reads 3462, but I won’t ask her her first name. There are rules you follow if you want to stay alive in here, and number one is don’t let anyone get inside your head. Once you let them into your brain, you start learning things about them – their name, their history, the things that matter to them – and suddenly you’re trying to keep two people safe in this place.
It doesn’t work like that. You don’t get to defend two people. You choose who matters most, and that’s who’s going to survive.
The only person I need to keep alive is myself.
‘Will that girl be okay?’ she asks, her voice small against the chattering backdrop of the other voices in the room, her eyes now carefully trained on the floor.
‘It’s a thirty-minute drive to the closest hospital,’ I say, in lieu of something harsher, watching the Officers carry the dying girl out through the door.
She stares at me for a moment. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Shut up,’ I snap, snatching the last of my things from her hands. She looks a little shocked, but mutedly so, like I’m looking at her through a glass window, some nuance left out of her expression.
She stands up slowly, leaving me to scramble to my feet as she looks at me for a moment before turning and walking away, head down. I can see the knobs of her spine through the thin grey cotton of her uniform shirt, the shaking of her small hands as she walks by the pool of blood, the hollows in her cheeks screaming of either illness or abuse. But I have no reason to feel sorry for her, I remind myself. There are ten other girls in this room exactly like her, and I’ve never had it in me to feel anything for them.
I am snapped out of my thoughts when I remember the time. Propelling myself into motion, I grab my bag off the floor, swerving away from the pool of blood and towards the door. Towards work. Towards anywhere but here
.
3
I remember ten years ago, seeing the Outer Sector for the first time, and thinking the air was dark.
The Outer Sector is dependent on the Inner Sector for most of its resources, but there’s little we can contribute in return without threat of contamination. Over the years the Outer Sector has developed into the main factory sector in Oasis, producing mostly electricity and vehicles, among other things. But over time the heavy factory count has left a thick smog coating the sector, or the Black Fog, as the locals call it. A lot of the time, newly tested Dormants’ weak lungs – bred on the clean, fresh air of the Inner Sector and Celian City – don’t last more than a few weeks out here. But some of us are different. Some of us are strong. Sometimes, it’s not just our minds that want to survive. It’s our body, our blood and bones that press us forward, always gasping for one more breath, one more beat of our trembling hearts.
I stand at the corner of the main street, where hundreds of people jostle and push as they attempt to make their way to work. I take a deep breath, glancing up at the Oasis insignia printed on the wall of an apartment building in front of me. Three circles, each one bigger than the first, enveloping each other, like the layout of Oasis. They represent the Peace Wall, the Sector Wall and the Celian City.
My eyes catch on an X on the lower left-hand corner of the image, painted in red, but before I can see it clearly I’m swept along by the crowd, and I have to grit my teeth as I am surrounded. The crush of people on every side raises the hairs on the back of my neck as I feel each touch like insects crawling along my skin. I’m surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of Dormants, and all it would take would be for a single one of them to have an activated X gene, and we’d all be dead within days.
Every single person in the Outer Sector knows this. I can tell by the way they twitch, by the paranoid glances and the way they hunch their shoulders as they walk, as if they can protect themselves from the Virus simply by shielding their faces.
But they can’t. The Virus, as much as we’d like to pretend it isn’t, is part of us. It’s in our blood and our bones, in the beat of our hearts and the swell of our chests as we breathe.
Years ago, people thought the Virus infected people. But that’s not really true. Today we know that it’s more than that. The Virus doesn’t infect people, it is people.
The Virus is me, and I am the Virus.
I’m a block from work when I slam into the person in front of me, my breath catching in my throat. My head shoots up, along with everyone else’s, and suddenly I’m looking at the OP, his smile broad and calm as he looks down on us from the broadcast screen, as if he can actually see each one of us.
‘Citizens of Oasis,’ he says, his voice so calm and warm that the entire crowd slows to a stop, faces upturned to their President. ‘Every quarter, six individuals are chosen from among us, six Subjects who give up their lives in the search for the Cure.’
My heart slows down, and I flex my hands at my sides.
The Quarterly Selection is routine, and I’m more focused on getting this over with so I can get to work than I am with the Subjects.
‘To maintain a world like ours, sacrifices must be made. Sacrifices must be made to defeat the Virus, so we may live in complete peace, that our minds will be worried no more with thoughts of contagion, so we can press forward, into the bright future of Oasis.’
Beneath the image of his face on the screen, the Oasis motto is printed in block capitals, a stark black against the blue of the OP’s suit, offset by the white wall behind him. Without Order, there can be no Prosperity – without Justice, there is no Peace.
I hear the people beside me, pressed in on all sides, take a deep breath, waiting for the faces to appear.
‘Oasis, I give you this quarter’s Subjects.’
The OP disappears, his face replaced by six others, first names and serial numbers listed beside them.
When we test positive for the X gene, our original surnames are stripped from us, replaced with a unique four-digit serial number, a much easier way to keep track of us.
My eyes drift over the faces now, the serial numbers blurring into the background.
A man, young, with dark hair and a firm set to his jaw.
A blank-looking young woman, her hair curling around her shoulders in thick red waves.
Another man, a little older than the first, dark-skinned and calm looking.
A young girl, my age, with sharp features and dark brown hair, cut sharply at her shoulders.
My heart stops. I take an involuntary step forward, bumping into people and not caring.
The girl. Green eyes blaze from her face, a look of indignation setting her features in a scowl.
I lose the ability to pull air into my lungs.
An indignant, dark-haired girl with green eyes and a sharp jaw – different, and yet so impossibly the same.
The name beside her picture feels like it’s engraving itself into my bones, as if I can feel the drag of a knife writing that name through my flesh: Quincy.
I am the fourth Subject.
4
The room I work in at the Outer Sector power station is made of black glass, so that no light gets in to create a glare that could obscure the surveillance images. I can see nothing through the glass, but my supervisors, sitting beyond the glass, can see me, constantly watching to make sure I’m doing my job correctly.
Right now, the darkness offers protection. I sit in the quiet stillness of the surveillance room, waiting to wake up, to be notified of a mistake, for some kind of explanation. But it doesn’t come, no matter how long I sit, and my heart won’t slow down.
Subjects don’t return. The OP said it himself. When people speak of the Subjects, they speak of sacrifice, of heroism, but never of return. The Subjects are chosen, they are sent to the Labs, and they are never seen again.
The hunt for the Cure is as harsh as it is incessant. The Virus has no mercy, so in the fight against it, we are left with no option but to be as ruthless as it was, as it is.
I can never know when I’m being watched at work, so I keep my fists tight and watch the monitors, attempting to keep my face blank of emotion.
But all I’m thinking is how I’m going to explain this to Aaron?
Hours later I am still watching the screens quietly. My shift is nearly over, and my eagerness to get out of this room is making the blood zing in my veins. This small, dark room feels like a prison now, panic breeding claustrophobia, and I can barely keep from walking out this instant. There are only forty minutes left in my shift, but it stretches out in front of me like a lifetime.
I force myself to sit still. The bank of screens in front of me shows the Celian City in all its glory, but I’m not here to admire it. I’m watching for the signs, the lights flashing on and off, dimming, any sign of damage to the outlets. I keep staring hard at the scene, as if I’ll melt through the screen and into their world, a world that used to be mine as well.
The City of Light was built of celian – a clear, glass-like material so strong that nothing could shatter it, a substance created solely for the purpose of crafting the most beautiful, most impregnable city mankind had ever seen. But from the Outer Sector, the Celian City looks as if it’s been built of diamonds, the perfect lines of the Founding Towers glittering in the sunlight. The city and its Towers were meant to symbolise what Oasis stood for, that beauty and strength could go hand-in-hand, that perfection wasn’t impossible but was achievable, as long as each citizen adhered carefully to its principles.
The Founding Towers were built to represent a physical manifestation of the four pillars of Oasis: Order, Prosperity, Justice, Peace, each building named after the virtue it upholds. The Towers are so tall and so bright that you can see them from anywhere in Oasis, no matter how far you go or what time of day it is.
But all that light has to come from somewhere. The power station’s Grid delivers over twenty-thousand megawatts to the Celian City every day, enough energy
to power over two million homes in the Outer Sector. But in there, electricity runs everything. The lights are brighter, bigger and more elaborate. Light is everywhere in the Celian City, in every crack and crevice until there is no room for darkness, no room for the shadows that the rest of us live in. And all of that light comes at a price.
The system is so complex, and so delicate, it has to be highly monitored at all times. My job is to make sure that the Grid doesn’t go down inside the Celian City. With everything powered by electricity, if it ever did, they’d be plunged into chaos. If that does happen, it’s my job to make sure it’s fixed as soon as humanly possible.
There is one person with my job in each power station, of which there are six across the Outer Sector. Each of us is assigned a section of either the Celian City or the Inner Sector to monitor. The Inner Sector is broken into four sections, North, South, East and West. The Celian City itself is broken into only two sections: East and West. Somewhere on the other side of the Outer Sector, someone else is watching a similar screen to mine, carefully monitoring for changes so that their side never loses power. Even though I’ve been doing this job for three years, when I stare at the city lights, I can still feel my heart rate picking up. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. It’s the most beautiful thing anyone’s ever seen. It’s like diamonds and gold have been melted together to create the kind of paradise people couldn’t even imagine in the old world.
And now people exist inside of it. They live and breathe and work inside this bubble of light and power, and they take it for granted. The Celian City isn’t like the Inner Sector – there are no houses or apartments – but it is where the most important, most powerful people in Oasis do business. It’s where new laws are passed, where justice is served, it is the axis on which the entirety of Oasis spins.
And now I’m never going to see it. Not properly, not up close. I dreamt for so many years of the day I’d get to walk through the streets of the City of Light, but now, as a Subject, another sacrifice to the Cure, I’ll never see it —
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