I’m glancing sideways at a window, where I think I see a curtain twitching as if someone is watching us, when Kole suddenly catches my hand, pulling me in between a gap in the buildings. He pushes me up against one of the walls as I gasp, and he covers my mouth with his hand, pointing to patrols as they pass through the street we were just on, their flashlights casting harsh shadows against the walls.
His arms are placed either side of my head against the concrete, and he’s holding very still, waiting for the Officers to move on, his breath huffing gently into my hair.
I swallow.
I can feel his heart beating like a jackhammer in his chest, keeping time with my own as he finally pulls back, glancing out between the buildings.
‘You okay?’ Kole whispers, looking back to me.
‘I’m fine,’ I breathe, but my hands are shaking as we step back onto the street.
The Outer Sector never really stops moving, because the power station never stops running. People’s shifts differ so much that there are people who don’t ever see daylight, working straight through the night and sleeping during the day.
I breathe in the familiar air as Kole gestures for us to follow him. He winds down familiar streets, keeping his head low and we follow suit, attempting to blend into the crowd as we push forward. We keep together, Kole drawing us down alleys and streets he obviously knows well, his shadowy figure moving quickly in front of us.
Something grabs my sleeve and I jerk back, shocked, but I can’t move, the grip on my sleeve is too tight.
When I look back I’m faced with a vaguely familiar sight, the white-grey hair of an old man, hunched over as he holds onto me.
‘I know you,’ he croaks, showing the gaps in his teeth as he pulls me closer. I tug hard against him, but he’s holding me in a vice-grip.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I say, and I hate myself for the wobble in my voice.
‘You’re that girl—’ He stops speaking as the tip of a knife presses to the skin of his throat.
‘You’re hallucinating,’ Jay says, his knife smile snapping across his face. ‘You’ve clearly been taking too many happy pills, old man.’
The man’s hand drops from my sleeve and I pull away, my breathing fast as I push back into the shadows. Jay says something else to the old man quietly, flicking his knife back in a gesture more threatening than pushing it closer would have been, and moves back to join us. Kole shoots us a questioning glance, but keeps moving forward.
My heart is thundering in my chest, but we keep going, keep walking steadily like wind-up toys as we follow Kole down ever darker alleys, until he stops in front of a ladder leading up to a fire escape.
‘This is it,’ he says, and I take a steadying breath, trying to be prepared for whatever awaits us inside.
2
I catch hold of one of the cold, rusted rungs and start pulling myself up.
Kole doesn’t stop for several stories, so far up that even I start to feel a little dizzy. When he does stop, he swings himself under an overhanging pipe, then knocks on the peeling paint of a blood red door. It makes me wonder. All the government regulation doors in the last eighty years are steel, not flimsy wood, which was constantly needing to be replaced.
After a few moments a barrel-chested man with a shaven head tugs the door open, only a crack, and grunts something unintelligible at Kole.
‘Nails, it’s me,’ Kole says under his breath.
The door jerks open, and the barrel-chested man’s eyes are so wide, I’m afraid they’re about to fall out of his head. He has a scraggly beard, a bright orange colour that seems wildly incongruous for some reason, but I can see him grinning through it.
Nails? I think, as the man pulls Kole inside, slapping him on the back so hard it has to be painful.
‘My God, Kole, I thought you were dead.’
‘Not yet,’ Kole says, and though his smile seems to be genuine, he seems to flinch at the man’s statement. ‘Nails, these are a few of my friends,’ Kole says smoothly, gesturing to us, huddled outside the door.
‘Come in, come in!’ Nails ushers, and we all rush inside, the nip in the air somehow worse inside of Oasis. He closes the door behind us, but I can’t help noticing the way he glances outside the door before he does so, like he’s checking for something.
Or maybe waiting for something.
The room within is small and tight, with a beaten-up sofa pushed against the wall, the stuffing pushing out of it as the ceiling leans in on top of us, like it’s eavesdropping.
‘You all smell like death,’ he says, pulling his head backwards with a look of disgust on his face. And we do smell bad. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘We’re in town for a while. We need somewhere to lay low for a few days.’
Nails releases a bark of laughter so loud it’s almost violent, and I jump back a step, bumping into Lauren. I pull back, murmuring an apology, but she just smiles, shaking her head.
‘In town for a few days?’ he asks. ‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’
‘Come on, Nails,’ Kole says, smiling at him across the room. ‘You don’t ask questions, remember?’
‘I didn’t ask questions,’ Nails corrects him, his tone suddenly sober. ‘Things change.’
Kole’s eyes widen the smallest fraction, and I can see him processing the information, trying to find a new angle to approach the situation.
‘But for you …’ Nails concedes.
‘You’re a life-saver.’ Kole smiles, releasing an all-too-real sigh of relief. Life-saver is a more accurate term than any of us cares to admit.
‘I need you and your friends,’ Nails says, glancing around at each of us, ‘out of here within a few days, though. I’m not taking on any more long-terms, got it?’
‘Got it.’ Kole nods, his lips flattening. He’s trying to calculate how long the mission will take, but he can’t. There are too many variables.
‘Great.’ Nails grins, slapping Kole on the back again as he moves towards the back of the room, where there’s another red door, this one with several locks running down the side of its peeling paint.
Once he has all of the locks undone, he pulls the door open, revealing a dark staircase leading downwards. Nails walks straight down without hesitation, and the others follow, but I pause at the threshold, unsure.
‘Trust me,’ Kole says from behind. ‘This is our best bet.’
I look back at him, reading the sincerity on his face. Kole seems to know this guy, and trust him enough to keep us safe, and if Kole trusts him, I guess that’s enough for me.
I step downwards, moving deeper into the darkness, and pray that I’m right.
3
I stop at the bottom of the stairs and Kole almost smacks into me. I’m facing a long hallway, but to my left there is an arch, which I pass under with bated breath. The room is large and open, with two ratty sofas facing each other in the middle of the floor, but that’s not what has shocked me into silence.
There are people milling around the room, sitting on the sofas and talking to each other in groups. A few of them glance up as I walk in. My breath is knocked from my lungs as I look back at Kole, my eyes wide.
‘Not everyone escapes,’ he says. ‘But that doesn’t mean they’re not there.’
A tall guy with white hair walks up to us, trailed by a short girl, her hair cropped close to her head, her eyes sharp as she watches us.
‘This is my second-in-command, Lyonel,’ Nails says. ‘And this is Kerrin.’
‘You can call me Ly,’ the white-haired one says, shaking my hand. He seems to already know Kole, and they nod silently at each other.
The girl, Kerrin, reaches out and shakes both of our hands, but her expression doesn’t change.
‘Kole, you can get your people settled in one of the back rooms,’ Nails says, and Kole nods. ‘There are showers at the end of the hall, on your left, but they only run for three minutes at a time, so you better be quick.’
‘We’ll be out of your hair as fast as we can,’ Kole assures him, and Nails nods at him, his smile tense.
A few moments later Kole is leading us down the hallway, stopping in front of the last door. He pulls it open, revealing a small room with mattresses lying directly on the floor. It has no windows and will barely fit all six of us, but it seems luxurious after a week of sleeping on the cold ground.
There are two showers, so I have to wait several minutes before I get to clean off, and when I do, the water is ice cold. With a lumpy bar of dark, homemade soap, I clean up as best as I can before the water shuts off.
Once we’re all relatively clean and changed into our Oasis uniforms, Kole pulls us aside.
‘Okay,’ he says. ‘We’ll start moving tomorrow. Tonight just get some rest, and please,’ he says, speaking slowly, ‘no one get in a fight.’
‘Sure thing,’ Jay says, grinning, a glint in his eye.
‘Ninety percent of that warning is for you, Jay, alright?’
‘I’m very offended,’ Jay says, a lazy smile on his face.
‘I’m sure you are.’ Kole drops his bags on the floor. ‘I’m going to go sort out food with Nails.’
I follow Kole into the hall, and he pauses for a moment to let me catch up.
‘What is up with this place?’ I say, glancing around nervously.
‘We’re not in danger here,’ he says. ‘Nails set up this place as a refuge for people to stay when they’re hiding from Oasis. Most of them are pretty low profile, though, unlike us.’
‘Nails?’
He laughs at my expression.
‘Tough as,’ he explains. ‘He once took out three Officers while holding back the blood from a knife wound on his side.’
I reflexively touch the wound on my own side, which has mostly healed.
‘What about the girl? Kerrin. Do you know her?’
‘No. She must be new. It’s been a while since I was back.’
‘And the other guy? The one with the white hair?’
Kole stops in the hall, turning to face me. ‘Ly. Stay away from him. He’s … unstable. He’s an escaped Subject.’
‘What?’ My breath catches in my throat.
‘He’s twenty-five and his hair is pure white, Quincy. That didn’t just happen.’ Kole glances away, looking down the hall. ‘Don’t tell anyone I told you that,’ he warns suddenly.
‘I won’t, I promise.’ I’m still shocked. I’ve never heard of anyone surviving the Labs. No one survives the Labs.
‘He doesn’t talk much about what went on at the Labs, but from what I’ve heard—’ Kole swallows, looking up at the ceiling before dropping his eyes back to me. ‘It’s not the kind of place people come back from without scars. Of every kind.’
Kole leaves me standing in the hall, trying to process everything he’s told me, everything I’ve seen, and I wonder how I ever thought I knew what was going on around me. How I spent my entire life listening to Oasis, and never once questioned what they were telling me or why they were telling it to me.
I’m walking down the hall an hour later when I bump into the girl I met earlier.
‘Oh, sorry,’ I murmur.
‘You’re the one from the Dorms,’ she says, her eyes searching my face.
‘What?’
‘The Dorms. Kole said that’s where you were, before you escaped.’
‘What does it matter to you?’ I ask, prickling.
‘It doesn’t,’ she says. ‘But I was in the South Dorms before I met Nails. You’re that girl who disappeared, aren’t you?’.’
I remember Kole telling me she must be new, and a question pushes itself forward.
‘When did you leave?’ I ask, ignoring her question.
‘About a month ago, why?’
‘You didn’t … there wasn’t a girl there, Sophia?’ I ask. Her face is blank, but we didn’t know each other’s names. I search my memories for the serial number. ‘7425. Her serial number is 7425.’
Her head starts bobbing up and down rapidly. ‘Yeah, yeah, I remember a 7425. I remember, some girl turned up dead … I think it was her sister or something. But she freaked out in the middle of the yard and the guards ended up dragging her away. Her serial number was announced over the intercom the next day – we were told that she was a potential threat to Dorm security, and she was to be turned in if she did anything suspicious. It went on for weeks, telling us who she was and to turn her in.’
‘She was there? In the South Dorms?’ My heart feels like a caged bird in my chest, and I’m afraid it’s going to pound straight through my ribs.
‘Yeah,’ she says, still nodding. ‘She was there a month ago.’
4
I don’t waste any time. I wind through the streets of Oasis towards a familiar world, towards the world where I grew up, and I don’t know why, but I am not nervous. The fear I thought I would feel when I made the decision to come here is absent. Instead, I feel empty. This place doesn’t mean anything anymore. Or maybe it does, just something different. Something much less powerful.
I had to sneak out past Kole and the others, but none of the people from the base seemed to care if I came or went.
The uniform feels different out here, and I’m suddenly hyper-aware of the rough fabric scratching against my skin. In there, with the others, the uniform felt like clothes, but out here it feels like an old skin, too loose and too tight at the same time. But for now it serves as a ticket and a shield, and as I blend seamlessly into the Outer Sector, I’m grateful for it.
The sun is dipping fast below the horizon, but my path is illuminated by the light of the Celian City. The Dorms are set on the fringes of the tightly packed living complexes of the Outer Sector, closer to the Wall than the other buildings. I have to cross over a short expanse of open ground first, where there are no buildings to hide between, something that I never really thought about until now.
I imagine I can feel a sniper target on my back and start walking faster, dodging the heaps of scrap metal dumped in piles along the way.
And then it comes into view. The building looks the same, even in the low light. The same grey walls, the same shuttered windows. The trees that grew up around the Dorms over the years look like they’re leaning in, trying to overhear what’s going on inside, just like usual. Even the broken glass from when one of the girls threw a piece of rubble through one of the windows is still scattered across the gravel.
But it looks different. Fundamentally shifted and out of place.
I stare at it, and I wait to feel something, but nothing happens. I shake my head and continue forwards, ignoring my own confusion.
I move cautiously towards the fence that loops around the Dorms, to get a better view of what I’m getting myself into. The gun that I took from Kole burns my back where I tucked it into the waist of my trousers, and I am acutely aware of the damage a weapon like that can do. And of the punishment it would incur.
I shift up to the fence as quietly as I can, keeping low to the ground as I move, concealing myself within a crop of trees. The world’s gone quiet now, and my footsteps crunching against the gravel surrounding the fence sound like gunshots to me. I stare through the links in the fence as I watch the silent yard.
I wait for the patrols to cross by, their flashlights skimming the ground as I watch silently from my crouch, waiting until they’ve turned the corner before I move.
I push my fingers through the chainlink fence and pull myself up slowly, watching the guard-house out of the corner of my eye. I use my feet to help steady myself against the wire, but my boots keep slipping, and the wire cuts into my hands as I climb. I throw my leg over the other side of the fence, glance around briefly and jump. I land loudly and unevenly, half falling onto my side as the air is knocked from my lungs, but I don’t have time to worry if they heard me.
I sprint, the stones moving under my feet as I run towards the door, caught in a constant state of falling forward, and I feel my heart beat every
time my boots hit the gravel, keeping time with my movements. I throw my hands up in front of me, unable to slow my momentum as I crash into the door.
I throw my shoulder against the lock, feeling it give beneath my weight. The door cracks open, allowing me to slip through and into the Dorms. I lean my back against the door and look around carefully.
Everything is silent.
The South Dorms was the first to be built, years and years ago, before the Dormant population had grown out of hand, so the security, other than the fence and the guards, is non-existent. In some of the newer Dorms there are internal and external security cameras, night-wardens set up inside the Dorms, and all of the doors are alarmed. But in the South, there’s enough fear of Officer brutality to keep the girls in line, leaving the building itself almost entirely security-free.
I scan the room, adrenaline making me jumpy, shadows jutting from the walls as if there are other things hiding in this room other than me. I slip into the hallway, my fingers skimming the walls as I move silently up the stairs, trying to keep my hands from shaking. It’s too familiar. All of it is too familiar.
There are four rooms, and I start with my old one, because my feet turn that way of their own accord. I push open the door and freeze for a second, because I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know how I thought this was a good idea.
Pull yourself together, I order in my mind, frustrated with my own panic.
I move into the room, my heart in my throat as I scan for blonde heads. Every time I see one my heart almost stops, but once I creep across the floor towards them, their serial numbers prove me wrong.
She’s not in the first room.
I pass through the second room with no luck, and my heart starts pounding in my chest. She’s not here. She’s not here, and I’ve risked everything to find her, and she’s not even here.
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