Chapter 1
I was sick of being told partial truths. If everyone just told me what I needed to know in the first place, I wouldn’t overthink things.
On the train car to wherever Elion was leading me, people entered and exited as smoothly and mindlessly as cells in the bloodstream. I rocked back and forth in the train, allowing the speeding lights to drown out my buzzing thoughts.
The doors opened one last time and the overwhelming sensation of jumping into a Double Dutch not knowing if you were going to trip or skip washed over me. Elion gripped my wrist and exited the train with the rest of them. I think he knew I would appear out of rhythm with the populus, which was a good call, because I was overthinking how to act like I’d been taught this choreography before the mob started.
We pushed through, but really, expertly weaved through the crowd of disinterested people in an overcrowded street. I held my breath. All of my senses were overwhelmed at once, overloaded with information. My nose smelled nothing but the damp and earthy scent of a land composed of minerals. My eyes saw the tops of heads looking straight, no one talking to people besides them, or on their phones, or distracted. They were all focused with one goal in mind: to get to work.
The people around us brushed past us with mindsets of self above all others. It was because they were adults. Buildings lined the walls as far as the eye could see. Skyscrapers for the place without a sky. The mud walls far above any head bustling past me were carved perfectly and precisely. Door and windows detailed the mud walls that surrounded us, each a little different than the one adjoining.
The only thing not brown or made of mud was a giant silver golf ball seemingly wedged into the mud an acre away. As odd as it was to see, so out of place in this area, no one stopped to look at it. They brushed past it like they saw it every day.
I couldn’t stop to examine it because Elion was still dragging me behind him like I was a toddler. I couldn’t think straight, so maybe that was a justified conclusion. I just escaped a place called ARO. I was a refugee in a place called Recovery with a bunch of kids my age. I didn’t know where I was, where home was, or why Elion had been acting so stiff and jumpy.
Instead of criticizing the impossibly clean and engorged golf ball in the distance, I looked up at the adults that paid me no mind. I didn’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t this. They weren’t wearing clothes.
Pants, surely, but overalls, with no shirts underneath. Even the women, completely bare up top with helmets on their heads and dust and dirt covering nearly every inch of skin on their bodies.
“Elion, why are these people naked?”
“What?” he turned around but did not stop moving. He was fidgeting like he knew someone was following us. “Oh, that. Don’t call attention to it. You’re overdressed. I figured I’d pass you off easily as a boy, anyways. Now keep up!” He added under his breath.
The insult went over my head as I was just as easily distracted by another strange occurrence. The people swarmed like angry wasps and the buildings that were carved out of the walls all felt like a vivid dream. Only then, something that would have made me jolt out of my dream if this really were one, was the sight of children chasing each other through their yard.
No, not playing, exercising. They were dressed in uniformed school clothes, and instead of going to school, were out being kids. I heard the people inside the house yell, which I thought they deserved. But that shout shattered my world view.
They weren’t being ridiculed for rough housing. They were kids that were getting in their required daily physical activity. They were nine years old. Kids aren’t concerned with basic requirements for physical health. But these kids were. When I expanded my view of the street, kids, all in their uniforms, with hair done, and black shoes on, stopped running all at once. Synchronized exercise, exactly the same regardless of child’s age, or parent’s occupation. It was synchronized. It was like they were remote controlled, not real kids.
The kids in the yard stopped running, stood still for a second, then grabbed their helmets, like their parents before them, and disappeared into the darkness.
I felt like I couldn’t breathe. The train, these people, helmets? It was all wrong, peculiar, unlike anything I’d ever seen before. I couldn’t take it. Elion’s palm was slick with sweat and all it took to lose my owner was to stop still in my tracks. The bodies moving around me blurred. The orange, fluorescent lights suspended from the mud ceiling buzzed and drowned out all noise. I tore my eyes away from the blinding lights that looked like a sunrise and stared at my feet. It wasn’t a street, nor a sidewalk. It was a trail on a rainy day. Wet and spongey mud with the tracks of the people before me stamped in it.
The voices bounced and danced in my ears.
“What is this?” my voice was weak.
“What?” Elion turned around. “No, Neila,” he finally realized we were no longer connected and grasped my wrist. “We have to keep moving.” He looked up and past me nervously. I had stopped traffic. The people were swerving around us like ants around an obstacle. We were drawing attention to ourselves.
“I don’t think I can do this,” my breathing was out of control and drowning out all other noise.
“Remember what I told you,” he said under his breath. “You are wanted. Eyes are everywhere. Just breathe. You can get through this.”
“No,” I shook my head. “No. Kids don’t act like that. They can’t be controlled. Those kids were robotic, lifeless, brainwashed. What happened to them Elion? Why is no one helping them?”
“Breathe,” Elion attempted to soothe me, “please, relax.”
My breathing sounded more like wheezing. The more I walked, the more it seemed like I was signing a deal with the devil.
One step.
It’s not 2016.
Another step.
Everything I’ve been told was fabricated.
Another step.
I live under the surface of the Earth,
The last step.
Everyone I’ve ever loved is dead.
“No,” I drew the line there. There were no more truths I could agree to. “We’ve got to go back,” I held onto his hand and led us back to the train.
“We’re not going back,” Elion stood still.
I was breathing hard, trying to deny this reality. My eyes started to burn.
Elion looked down at me then back up quickly. He decided something in that short second. He let go of my hand and placed himself in front of me, blocking my path back to the train.
“Calm down, okay. It’s me. Just look at me.” Elion grabbed my hands and started walking in the right direction, leading me like oil in water, refusing to ebb with the flow.
Besides calculated glances behind him, he kept his blue eyes on me. His expression wasn’t light or humorous. It was fearful. I knew because the only other time I’d seen him like that was when he was on the floor like a dog and the two dogs ahead of him had been shot in the head.
I watched him and let him lead me while my heart threatened to leap out of my chest. Glancing down, I gasped in surprise. I spared a look around me to see if anyone besides Elion had noticed that my chest had begun to glow. I sucked on my pouting lower lip and breathed in. Elion’s eyes laid, unchanging, on me. Breathing out, I noticed how fast my heart was pounding.
It’s not real. It can’t be.
One step.
He can’t be dead.
Another step, and another. I looked down at my feet. I watched them tremble. I had an existential crisis, and I’d never felt more human than in that moment, weak, fragile, mortal.
In front of me, Elion bowed his head. He raised it slightly, catching my eyes. He extended his arm, leaving our clasped hands in the air for both of us to see. Slowly, he backed away. I refused to follow him. He released his grip bit by bit, not breaking eye contact.
It pained him physically, but he had to choose. I was dragging him down. I was putting a spotlight on us both. If he stayed with me catatonic like this in the middle of a busy street, he was choosing death.
He didn’t understand that it was breaking my heart, too. He was making me choose this new reality, him, Elion, the present, now, over the life I knew and cherished for sixteen years, the only life I’d ever known. I couldn’t choose. How could he make me choose?
He let go of my hand. In the next moment he disappeared in the flow of traffic. I was a leaf stranded, threatened to be taken by the wind, tossed and turned, its original destination led astray. My hyperventilating drowned out the voices that seemed to cry out. I couldn’t determine if they were in my head or right next to me on the street. The blur of moving people only heightened my focus on Elion, or where he used to be.
The disappointed look on his face, the last thing I ever saw. I was panicking, but that was a different hurt on top of the fear and alienation. I needed to follow him, but I couldn’t move. I wanted to go, but fear froze me in place. Looking down, I saw a crumpled body at my feet. Brown splotches stained the blond head of hair unmoving in front of me.
I couldn’t look at him. Elion was gone. I couldn’t leave him. I couldn’t stay. My breathing picked up as if the rate of my heart had any effect of my motivation to move on or let my past hold me back.
I hugged myself, feeling small and miserable. Pain followed me everywhere I went. If only there was a blanket to ward off pain of the past, present, and future. Maybe then I could consider going on. My other option was to turn around. Deny what following Elion meant and just revert to the person I was before the life I knew could officially be pronounced dead. My past prevented me from going after him, so it would be easy to take the out and abandon ship, never accept that this was my new reality. Leave it for another day or lock it in a drawer forever.
No. No. No. No. No.
I loved Marilyn. Chance and Shad would both be alive on the surface waiting for me. My parents would be there. My house. My cat. The reality I felt comfortable in. The place I knew and dreamt in. It wasn’t gone; it was just somewhere else. I could go there. In order to find it, I needed to follow Elion. I had to step over Chance’s dead body to do it. Chance wouldn’t have wanted his sacrifice to be wasted. He wouldn’t want it to immobilize me; he’d want it to motivate me to keep going.
I closed my eyes and breathed. The surface. The surface.
My eyes opened and I had already taken a step. I looked up. A melancholy head of black hair bobbed in front of me. Once again, my heart was pumping. I took a step, and the pains of needles stuck into my neck. Another step had me shivering when the needles shimmied their way down my body.
I walked like this, stalky and hunched over. Just another dirt-covered person joining the bloodstream. Upon hearing me behind him, Elion turned to face me.
He put his arm across my shoulders, and we walked side by side.
“You’re good,” he said.
I let out a breath. Whatever seemed to be restricting my breathing loosened its grip and the needles retracted.
I continued to breathe and began to feel cool again.
“We’re here,” Elion announced suddenly.
I couldn’t tell where “here” was, seeing nothing that stood out to me, but Elion faced a wall so tall that it was almost endless.
He climbed the stairs that looked like a fire escape, but sure enough, buildings around us used similar methods of accessing the higher floors.
I followed him, remembering how hollow I felt to be stranded down there on my own.
Climbing up, my muscles seized with strain. My arms were shaking by the time Elion stopped on a landing.
I hadn’t spent much time in a big city in my time, but I imagined a high-rise apartment building like this one was a replica of the real thing. Imprints on the mud were meant to impersonate laid brick exteriors. When I climbed up next to him, I almost fell all the way back down again. Elion expected this and held an arm out to catch me.
“Stay behind me,” Elion instructed before he moved around the narrow fire escapes. I walked cautiously behind him, unaware as what to expect. Footsteps approached from behind the door Elion stopped at before it swung inwards and something stuck out of it.
One arm collided with it, one arm held me back, protectively.
“Easy,” Elion warned in a hostile tone.
A startled gasp came from behind the door, then a woman’s face peeked out. Her wide eyes devoured Elion, and then me, back to Elion, then landed on me again. The woman hissed, and we were pulled in forcibly. Like dust into a vacuum.
The door closed and we were in the dark. After a click, we were illuminated in a dim light.
“Elion?” the woman asked. “You imbecile!” she hugged him. Her long white hair moved wildly around her. She was very old and frail. Once she released him, she hit him on the arm with her bat. “You stupid, stupid-” she stopped herself when she remembered I was there. “-Neila?”
I couldn’t believe my eyes, either. It took a moment to study their features but, in the end, their resemblance was undeniable.
“Miss White?”
