Oasis

by Eilís Barrett

  Without warning, I’m plunged into complete darkness. The monitors all switch off at the same time, and I’m so shocked I jump back, knocking over my chair in the process. All I can hear is my own heartbeat, like a sledgehammer in my chest, for an entire minute.

  I have a sudden, hysterical sense that they’re coming for me, that the scientists from the Cure Research Labs are going to break in here and drag me away, and that I’m powerless to stop them.

  Then the monitors shudder as they come back to life, but as the screens power on, I no longer see the lights of the Celian City. Instead, written across a black screen in a white font, is a single sentence.

  Without Secrets, there is no Peace.

  Beneath it are three circles, each bigger than the first, enveloping each other, and beyond them, towards the bottom left of the screen, a small, insignificant x.

  Except that it’s not. My mind launches me back into the crush of the crowd this morning, reversing me back through my memories. Falling towards the power station, my heart in my throat, my image appearing on the broadcast as one of the Subjects, the Oasis broadcast, a small x just beneath the insignia.

  Before I can process it, the screens go back to normal, showing panning shots of the Celian City. What the hell just happened?

  My breath shudders out of my body, just as an Officer comes bursting through the Exit at my back. I lunge for the door unthinkingly; I just need to get out, to find out what’s happening, to find out what that even was. Before I realise my mistake, the Officer’s nightstick is cracking into my ribcage, sending me crashing into the wall.

  I look up long enough to see it coming towards me again, just before the Officer’s arm is caught from behind him, and suddenly the weapon is across the room, the Officer shoved up against the door.

  ‘Would you like to explain to me,’ a furious voice growls, ‘why you were assaulting a girl at her place of work?’

  Aaron.

  ‘Sir, she was trying to attack me.’ The Officer grunts, his arm twisted up behind his back.

  Aaron looks back at me briefly, and I shake my head minutely, trying to breathe around the pain in my ribs.

  He tightens his hold on the Officer’s arm, making him grunt in pain again, before leaning in to whisper something in his ear.

  ‘No sir,’ the Officer mumbles, agony in his voice.

  Aaron drops the Officer’s arm, pushing him towards the door as he lets him go.

  ‘Tell your supervisor she’ll be hearing from me,’ Aaron says, pushing the officer out the door and slamming it shut behind him.

  I watch his shoulders go up and down as he takes a deep breath, calming himself before he turns to me.

  ‘Are you okay?’ He offers his hand to help me up.

  I stand up gingerly, my side aching.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I lie, gritting my teeth against the pain.

  ‘Good.’ Aaron nods. He blinks at me for a moment, resetting himself. I can see the change in his eyes, the sides of his mouth tilting up as he looks at me.

  ‘Hi.’ He smiles like it’s the first time he’s seen me, like it’s okay, like there isn’t already a bruise blooming across my side.

  ‘Hi.’ I try to smile back, try to mirror the look in his blue eyes. He leans forward, placing his hand on my cheek as he presses his lips gently to mine.

  I try to enjoy it, try to savour his warmth, but there are too many voices in the back of my head, screaming of Infection, of the Virus, of killing the only boy I have ever loved because I was too stupid and too selfish to pull away.

  So I do pull away, and I try to pretend I don’t see the disappointment in his eyes.

  ‘Ready?’ he asks, squeezing my fingers briefly, as if I must give him some form of consolation.

  I glance back at the monitors, running smoothly, and for a moment I wonder if I imagined the whole thing. But I blink and the small red x is printed on the inside of my eyelids, a different sort of brand, sending a shiver up my spine.

  ‘Ready,’ I whisper.

  5

  Does he know?

  I should tell him.

  I scan my ID as we pass through registration, but the ranking marks on Aaron’s blue uniform get him a free pass. Seven black stripes across his upper left arm, placed above seven matching black marks inked into his skin.

  We walk out of the huge grey building in silence, and neither of us says anything as we pass through the gates of the power station. It isn’t until we’re back on the streets of the Outer Sector that Aaron speaks.

  ‘You sure you’re okay?’ He looks down at me, concern in his eyes. His golden hair catches the sunlight as he bends his head towards me, and my breath feels like a weight within my chest.

  I should tell him. Right now. It would be the perfect moment. I could say it, and he would fix it, because Aaron fixes everything.

  I look forward, at the streets of the Outer Sector, darkening as the sun sinks below the wall of buildings on all sides, and though the lack of light blurs the filth of the streets, when I close my eyes it’s still the same place. I can hear people fighting, there’s a child crying somewhere in the distance, and the whole place smells like rot and decay.

  Aaron is still looking at me, a question on his face.

  ‘Tell me what you’re thinking,’ he says. He’s leading me back towards the Dorms, where it’s safer, but down these streets he’s hyper-observant, just waiting for something bad to happen.

  ‘I just–’ I take a deep breath, trying to let the tightness in my chest go, but I can’t. ‘I just can’t wait until they find the Cure.’

  The lie makes my stomach churn.

  Aaron gives me a sharp look. I shouldn’t have said that.

  Nine months ago, when I met Aaron for the first time, he never meant to get involved with me. None of this was supposed to happen. Aaron came to the Dorms looking for recruits for a new programme they were setting up, training Dormant kids to be Officers, so the Outer Sector could start policing itself. He had interviews with every girl at the Dorms, but he interviewed me twice.

  Later he told me that I never stood a chance. The programme was seeking out athletically talented OS kids, ones they wouldn’t have to train as extensively. I’m five foot three and slight, not exactly a soldier in the making. But somehow I had caught his attention, and even after the interviews were finished, he kept coming back to see me.

  But I’m still Dormant, and he’s still Pure.

  We are forced into hiding, our relationship an illegality. Eventually they’ll find out. We both know it. You can’t keep something like this a secret forever. Our only hope is that by the time they do find out, I’ll already have been Cured. But still, I hate it. The sneaking and the hiding and the lying; loving him and never really getting to be with him. But any time I tried to convince Aaron that this was a bad idea, he said he couldn’t live without me.

  So instead, we pretend the Virus doesn’t exist. We pretend I’m not Dormant, and he’s not Pure. We pretend that the thick, solid line drawn between the Pure and the Dormant doesn’t exist, that we are the same, and while I’m with him, it feels like that.

  But Oasis reminds us. When he must remain a safe distance from me on the street. When I can’t meet Aaron’s father because he can’t know about us. When Aaron has to go home at night, back to the Inner Sector where he belongs. When Officers hit me with nightsticks for walking towards them too fast, but treat Aaron like royalty the minute he walks in the door, all because I have the X gene and he does not.

  I hate the Virus. I hate the divide it causes between me and the boy I love.

  ‘I need to tell you something,’ Aaron says.

  I can see the Dorms ahead of us.

  ‘What?’

  ‘They’re training kids in the Outer West Sector and they need some people who’ve already been through the programme to give them a hand.’

  My heart drops.

  ‘And you’re going with them?’

  ‘I have to.’ He shrugs. ‘Th
ey need me.’

  I need you, I think, trying to stop myself from crying.

  ‘Hey,’ he says. He glances around, pulling me into a dark alley. He continues pulling me until he stops between two dumpsters, glancing back to make sure no one can see us. But the streets have quietened down since rush hour, and this alley doesn’t lead anywhere.

  He goes still for a moment, taking my face between his hands. ‘I love you,’ he says quietly. ‘And I’ll be back in a week or two, don’t worry.’

  He kisses me, soft and hard at once, his hands in my hair and the heat of his body soaking in to me. I put my hands on his chest to push him away, afraid. Of the Virus, of Infecting him, of every nightmare I’ve had about us becoming a reality. He catches my hand with one of his own, pressing my palm flat against his chest.

  ‘Shh,’ he whispers. ‘Stop worrying.’

  Aaron is like the Celian City. He’s golden and beautiful and perfect, the kind of perfect you don’t think exists until you see it, standing there asking you for something and you can’t bring yourself to say no. He has warm-toned skin and golden hair and eyes that are too blue to be real and high cheekbones and a straight nose and he’s just too perfect.

  I have to remind myself that I’m lucky. He’s an Officer of the Seventh Tier, the highest level Officer there is, an Elite, and he’s beautiful and kind and good to me, and if he has to leave every now and again because he has an important job, then so what? He’s still my Aaron.

  ‘Are you okay now?’ he says, pulling back enough to look at me. ‘All the worries gone?’

  ‘Yes.’ I nod, and smile and smile and smile until he smiles back in a way that makes me know he believes me.

  His phone buzzes in his back pocket and he doesn’t even need to check it to know what it is.

  ‘I need to go.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ I tell him, pressing a kiss to his lips. ‘Go.’

  ‘Thank you.’ He kisses me back quickly, then walks away. Disappearing back into the main street, falling back in to the push and pull of the crowd that makes way for him, leaving me behind.

  I press my back harder against the grubby walls, squeezing my eyes closed and balling my hands into fists as I attempt to gain control over my emotions. There is this indescribable feeling that bubbles up inside me as he walks away – like I can’t catch my breath, like gravity is suddenly trying to drive me into the earth, like the world drains of colour the minute he’s gone – and I wonder if I’ll ever feel okay when he leaves.

  6

  Not long after, I pull myself up on top of the scrap pile left over from the factory, my eyes fixed on the Celian City as I sit down. I try to breathe deeply, to calm my shaking hands as I look out over the city I’ve been in love with for so many years. The four Founding Towers look stark and elegant against the night sky, promising so much. But we are still here, and they are still there, and it seems their promises don’t extend as far as these forgotten shadows we reside within.

  I’ve done this so many times. Sat up here for so many hours, thinking, wondering what my future will be like.

  Now I’m not even sure I’ll have a future.

  I’ve been eligible to be chosen in forty Quarterly Selections in my lifetime, and somewhere along the way I decided it would never be me on that list, until suddenly I was.

  I pull my knees up to my chest as my mind drifts back to my picture on the broadcast on Main Street. There aren’t any mirrors in the Dorms, so the only image I’ve seen of myself in the past ten years have been glimpses of my distorted reflection in windowpanes and in the monitors at the power station.

  The picture printed on the broadcast must be from six months ago. Every year ID photos are taken by the power station to keep track of the workers. That must be where they got the photo. I never even got to see it.

  My breath shudders out of me as I think of the message written across the monitor, and I wrap my arms around my knees, feeling suddenly cold. Someone must have hacked the server. Maybe one of the Branded, angry at their sentence? But still, how could they? The mainframe was built by the Celian City’s top technical security experts, and the technology you’d need to even try to hack it isn’t available in the Outer Sector.

  So who, then? Someone from the Inner Sector? And what did the message mean, anyway? Without Secrets, there is no Peace. I recognise that it’s taken from the Oasis motto, but I don’t understand what it could possibly mean, and why someone would twist it like that.

  I feel ill. I try to focus on the Celian City, try to imagine Aaron living, existing inside of it, but then I remember he’s not.

  I remember he left.

  Then I remember that soon I will leave, to go to the Labs.

  I feel like someone’s strangling me.

  Oasis, the Celian City, the Cure: these were the things I lived for. These were the things that kept me moving, breathing, living, no matter what. These were the things that meant everything to me.

  But how am I supposed to live for something I’m not even going to survive long enough to see?

  7

  When I return to work the next day, there are Officers everywhere. The power-cut was across the entire building, and now the supervisors are watching everyone, sure that it must have come from the inside. You can smell the fear in the air as you walk through the clear glass doors. Even here, in the power station, celian is too expensive to use.

  I am assigned an Officer at registration, who follows me in to the room where I work. She places her hands behind her back and looks straight ahead, her eyes dead, and yet I know she’s watching me like a hawk.

  Everyone knows the Officers are afraid of the Virus. They are sent to work in the Outer Sector as punishment for misdemeanours, or to toughen them up if they seem lacking. They’re afraid of Infection, afraid of being so close to us, afraid that we will activate the Virus and they’ll die alongside our horrible, stinking bodies.

  But I don’t blame them.

  As I stare at the surveillance monitors, I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the screen and stare at myself. I look at my eyes, and I know they’re green but I can’t see that from the monitor. I try to piece together an image between the memory of the photo on the broadcast and this distorted version, but I can’t.

  And even if I could, what would I look like then? Would I look like a girl with a secret? The kind of girl who didn’t tell the boy she loves that she was being taken away? The kind of girl carrying a gene that could wipe out humanity, and is still reluctant to do the one thing she could to help?

  I am a Subject. I say it to myself again, staring at my twisted reflection. I am a Subject.

  I turn away, and stare into the light of the Celian City instead.

  The glistening beauty of the Celian City as the sun begins to set is almost putting me to sleep when it happens again.

  I grip the desk with my hands, which I can’t see in the pitch-black of the room. I hear the Officer behind me inhale sharply, the metallic click of her gun as she raises it, but there’s nothing to fire at.

  Suddenly the screens come alive, blinding me.

  Without Light, there are no Prisoners. 10/12/0000

  The entire building is on lockdown.

  Once the servers restarted and the lights came back on, the supervisors closed the gates and locked the doors until they can figure out who’s doing this.

  But I don’t think it’s someone inside the building.

  The Officers have moved all the workers on to the main floor, where they build generators for the off-Grid buildings, and everyone looks terrified and confused. The Officers line the walls, and the one guarding me an hour ago is talking quietly to the head supervisor at the front of the room.

  All of the workers stand shoulder-to-shoulder in the middle of the room, something we were taught to do during training, and wait with bated breath to see what happens next. Will they interrogate us individually? Surely that would take too long. But if they don’t, how will they figure out what happened?


  Eventually the supervisors turn to us, and the head supervisor nods. For a second I think she nodded at me, but I brush it off, until one of the Officers starts walking directly towards me. Without a word the male Officer, almost a foot taller than me, pulls me from the centre of the crowd, bumping against several other workers as he drags me towards the front of the room. I don’t dare to pull against his grip, but when he stops me in front of the supervisor, a tall, slim woman with greying hair, I begin to wonder if I should just run.

  ‘Explain to me what happened this morning.’ Her voice is gravelly and emotionless.

  For a moment my mind goes blank, and all I can think about is my knife pressed against my hip in the hidden pocket I’ve sewn into my grey trousers, and I feel suddenly paranoid that they can see it.

  But eventually my brain catches up with the request, and I begin fumbling with the seam of my uniform as I speak.

  ‘The building lost power and the monitors shut off.’

  ‘How?’ she snaps.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Were you involved in the loss of power?’

  I glance up, and her eyes are trained so intently on me, I wonder if it matters what I say to her. She looks like she’s already made up her mind.

  ‘No, of course not! I have no idea how it happened.’

  ‘Do you know who was involved?’

  ‘No,’ I say, but there’s something in the back of my mind, something I can’t quite put my finger on, that makes me think I might have an idea.

  ‘And what about the message?’ she says.

  I’m surprised she even mentioned it.

  ‘I—’ my throat suddenly feels tight. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What did it say?’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘Yes, you do.’ Behind her calm expression her brown eyes are like stone.

  ‘Without light, there are no prisoners,’ I choke out.