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“Figured we’d do a bit of traveling in our twilight years. I mean, hours. See the world, that sort of thing. So we need all the supplies we can get. And no one has supplies like you,” said Kip.
Cassa spat. “And if you hadn’t rolled on us, we might be bringing you along. Think about that while you wait for the Pinball. Alone.”
I kicked at them, once, and Cassa responded by plopping down on top of my legs. Normally I’d have been able to deal with that, but nothing about today was normal, and I had to settle for growling at her. Somehow, that made me feel even more helpless. My face was abruptly hot, and I gave myself temporary permission to hold my breath. If I cried, I’d never get over it.
I didn’t breathe until I had to. Gradually, my head cleared. “Don’t tell me you’re going hunting for the Remnant. They don’t exist.”
Cassa paused, just for an instant, and Kip gave me a hard look. “She couldn’t possibly know that.”
“She’s friends with the Mole.”
Kip rolled his eyes. “He couldn’t possibly know that. He doesn’t know everything, Cass.”
“You sure about that?” I said. “He knows the way out. He wouldn’t still be here if they exist. If there were even a chance.”
Cassa bit her lip, but Kip ignored me and continued his search. He was a bit rougher than before. “Ah, what have we here? Little blade-stick-doohickey?” He pulled a makeshift knife from the leg of my pants and twisted it in his fingers. “Fair enough. Not your best work though, if I’m honest.”
“Hello, what’s this?” Cassa yanked me forward and pulled my shirt up in the back. There was a tearing pain as she ripped the duct tape off my shoulder blades. “Bingo. Char, you never disappoint.”
Kip held the gun up to my face and grinned while peeling the remainder of the tape from the barrel. It had been my finest moment. The guard I stole it from never saw it coming. I consoled myself with the thought that, in a few short hours, I would never need a gun again. The thought was a lot more comforting than it should have been. It was probably the only silver lining I would cling to, in the end. No more guns, no more eternally disappointed family members. No more pitying glances from judges or lawyers or parole boards. Or West.
“I believe our work here is done,” Cassa said. She couldn’t get away from me soon enough. “Time to make our way in the world.”
“Good luck with that,” I muttered.
They stood to leave, but Kip stopped at the door. “Here,” he said, pulling my shoebox off the bed and tossing it to the ground in front of me. “For old times’ sake.”
And then they were gone.
Two (#ua8e59aee-4d27-5a6e-999d-f9076a19126c)
My panic disappeared quickly. First of all, it never does any good. Years of burglarizing high-level targets taught me that. And secondly, Cassa had actually kicked me pretty hard. I leaned back, letting the cords on my wrists support some of my weight. I barely felt the pain that spread through my forearms. I closed my eyes. The harsh light from the ceiling collapsed into a crescent, then blinked away. It felt good.
But I couldn’t let myself sleep. Not yet.
The usual noise on the block was gone, replaced by an eerie, soundless vacuum. I had been on lockup for so long that I was no longer at ease with total silence.
In her haste to leave, Cassa had missed the blade in my sock. Not that I could blame her. None of us had showered in a week. My leg was heavier than it should have been, but I managed to kick it up toward my mouth. I bit down on my shoelaces and yanked the knot out, then kicked off my shoe.
The blade itself was trickier, and it was several minutes before I had it between my teeth. From there, cutting the cords was nothing. I pulled on my shoe, leaving it untied, and took off for the commissary.
The only thought in my mind was West. West would come for me. He would smile for me, and it would be a sad smile, but it would belong to me. And I would tell him that he had deserved a better sister, and that I had always been proud that he hadn’t turned out like me. And that I would never forget him.
And he would say that he would never forget me, either, and I would know that I wouldn’t be forgotten. That I hadn’t already been forgotten.
I threw open the door to the commissary and was greeted by a total rager. People jumping on tables, singing, laughing, sobbing. The air was sour with the smell of liquor, which some kind benefactor must have brought in for our final hours. This was no place for my little brother.
My parents must have had the same thought.
When I finally saw them, huddled in a corner, backs pressed against the wall, they were alone in a sea of dirty prison scrubs. West was nowhere to be found. My father had his arm around my mother, but I could tell they had been fighting. Her arm was clenched across her chest, and her face had that blankly pleasant expression she used in public when something was wrong.
My tongue grew thick as I pressed my way through the crowd. When I was close enough to my parents to touch them, my mother cringed, and my father tightened his grip on her shoulder, pulling her hard against him.
I cleared my throat and forced my tongue to move. “Mom, Dad. It’s me.”
Dad’s brows deepened, and his eyes slid away from my face to focus on a place behind me, as though his real daughter might still emerge from the crowd.
“Where’s West?” I asked.
“Your brother couldn’t be here.” My father’s voice was strange, like listening to a once-familiar recording that had grown warped with time.
“What happened to your head?” My mother’s voice was exactly as I recalled: piercing and unhappy. “You’re bleeding. Let me take a look at that.” I flinched as she reached for my face, and she echoed my reaction back to me. “I’m not going to hurt you. It’s going to get infected, the state you’re in.”
“Not if I die first.” My words had the intended effect of shutting her down, but it didn’t feel like I wanted it to. Regret and fear crowded together in my stomach, and I looked away from her. “So, why couldn’t West be here?”
“For Pete’s sake, Charlotte,” my father began, but Mom cut him off.
“His OPT had to leave.”
“You’re not all on the same one?”
“No, we are,” Dad said, and it was Mom’s turn to look away. I stared at her anyway, trying to figure out how they were all going to be together, but West wasn’t here. In this room. “It’s been hard for him,” Dad continued. I flicked my eyes up toward my father, still confused.
“Michael,” Mom whispered.
“It has. It’s been hard for all of us. She should understand that.”
“It’s just not the time.” She turned to me. “But he wrote you a note, sweetheart.”
My mother had not called me sweetheart since I had called myself Charlotte. Dumb, I stared at the torn envelope in her hands. I snapped back to my senses when I saw the attention it was getting from the rest of the room. They were definitely watching us.
My father noticed it too, and stiffened. “We can’t stay here any longer. You were ninety minutes late, anyway.”
Mom wrenched herself from my father’s grip and wrapped her arms around me. I fit my face against her collarbone, exactly like I had as a child. Her voice in my ear was no louder than the slightest whisper. “I never gave up on you. I should have told you that.” Her arms moved down my back, and her grip tightened. “I’m so sorry, Charlotte.”
Everything I had planned to tell them—everything from I never meant to hurt you to please don’t forget me— curdled into a cold wad in my chest, and died in my throat. I tried to breathe in, but I heard myself make a sound like a gasp instead. “Mom. Please don’t leave me here.”
She jerked a little, as though something had knocked against her, and I didn’t feel her breath going in or out anymore.
“Excuse me, Senator,” a voice barked. I opened my eyes to peer over my mother’s shoulder. An armed guard stood a few paces away.
My father reached around my mother, so that for the briefest instant, he was holding me, too. But then he closed his fingers around her wrists, and pulled her arms away from me. “Goodbye, Charlotte. I can’t help but feel responsible for…” he began, then stopped.
I watched them leave, feeling numb, like floating underwater, before sliding the folded paper out of its nest. It was my brother’s handwriting, but not as I remembered it. He’d be thirteen now, not seven or eight, as I always thought of him, so it took a moment to confirm that the lighter, sharper letters were his.
I’m sorry.
Yeah, I thought. Me too, kiddo. Me too.
No one stopped me on the way back to my cellblock, and I was doubly thankful to find it as empty as before. When I slipped West’s envelope into my back pocket, my fingers closed around something sharp and hard. My mom must have put it there.
I pulled the object from my pocket as soon as I was sure I was alone. It was a dark metal card with a single silver band across the top. Raised symbols covered the band, and in my stupor, I ran my thumb over them twice before I realized that they were words.
Stamped across the top of the card was the phrase “North American Off-Planet Transport—Admit One.”
Three (#ua8e59aee-4d27-5a6e-999d-f9076a19126c)
My whole life, I felt trapped. I hated the constant pressure to maintain the appearances that were so crucial to my parents’ lifestyle. I resented every choice they made on my behalf: stuffy uniforms at private school, mind-numbing ballroom lessons at junior cotillion, forced smiles at charity events. No matter where I was or what I was doing, I was never where I wanted to be, and nothing I did made sense, even to me. I baffled the hell out of my parents. But all I wanted was to feel some kind of freedom, some kind of escape. Escape never came.
So my first stint in juvy, at the ripe old age of twelve, was hardly a big adjustment. It was actually more like a relief.
For the first time, I was surrounded by people who didn’t care what I did with my hair or who I hung out with or where I was going, which was always the same answer: nowhere. I was a lost cause, and in here, no one questioned that or tried to change it. Once I got in the system, the only life I could ruin was my own. And everyone here was fine with that.
I knew for a fact I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. Why else did I see the same kids coming in and out of here, for so many years that we had our own holiday traditions? Heck, last year, I had a Secret Santa. I had given myself a name, and they called me by it. So don’t tell me I didn’t belong here.
Except that now, I had to get out.
Standing on the floor of my block, dwarfed by the rows of cells above and around me, I felt, for the first time, like a rat in a cage. And the cage had become a death trap.
I pressed the starpass deep down into my shoe, inside my sock, where no one could lift it off me without my knowing it, and tried to think. There were no more guards to bribe or threaten. After the meteor was discovered, and the Treaty of Phoenix was signed, everyone who enforced it, from soldiers to street cops to prison guards, was guaranteed a spot on one of the five Arks. Keep the walking dead from rioting, and you get to live. I could hardly blame them; it was a brilliant solution. How else could you get nineteen billion people to die quietly while half a million others escaped to the stars?
I didn’t exactly have a key to the outside, since like I said, getting out had never been a big priority for me. But I knew someone who might.
Isaiah Underwood was a year older than I was, but it might as well have been fifty. He was legendary in our circles, not because he was the only juvy we knew who had escaped, which he was, but because he came back. Deliberately. I vaguely remembered the day he’d gotten out—alarms, total lockdown, the usual drill. Normally the missing prisoner was just hiding someplace halfway clever, like the laundry or whatever. But when Isaiah left, we stayed in our rooms for two straight days, and they never found him. They finally had to concede defeat and let us out.
I was between stays when he came back, but I’d heard the story a hundred times. Months had passed. Someone else had been placed in his cell. Everyone on his row was at lunch, and he just strolled into the commissary like he’d been in the john the whole time. Isaiah was back, except he wasn’t. First thing you noticed was his eyes, or rather, his lack thereof. It was only when you talked to him that you realized something else was missing, too, but you couldn’t pinpoint what it was. He was more thoughtful, less happy. Older.
We called him the Mole after that.
I took off in a dead sprint, hoping no one would see me. Running was an excellent way to make trouble for yourself. The walls smeared past in a blur of blue and gray, and even the barrier to the men’s quarters didn’t slow me down. It was wide open.
The Mole was sitting on his bed with his white cane across his lap. A book lay on the blanket before him, its precise rows of dots skating underneath long, careful fingers.
“A visitor.” He smiled a white smile, and I raised my hand to greet him out of instinct.
“Hi, Mole.”
“Charlotte Turner. You want some company? It’s too late for that. They say we all die alone, but you can read my book with me until then.”
“No, I—thanks, though. I was actually here because—”
“Charlotte, baby. Have a seat. You know what book this is?”
“No.” I sat next to him on the bed. Another moment brushed past us both, too quickly.
“Pilgrim’s Progress. I reckon we all have a journey to take. My journey’s about over. You’re out of breath. Don’t want yours to end just yet?”
“That’s why I’m here. Mole, I need to get out.”
“We all want out of something.”
“Not you.”
“Even me.”
“Then help me get out of here. We can go together.”
“My prison’s made of stronger walls than these.”
I paused. “But you could help me leave mine, if you wanted to.”
He turned his face to me, as though he could still see me. “You were a beautiful child. Someone should have told you that. A small bird in a big cage. I haven’t seen you since you were thirteen.”
“Tell me the way out.”
He sighed and sagged, as though carrying something heavy. “You don’t want to go out there. Ain’t no good out there for folks like us.”
“That why you came back?”
“It’s all the same. Doesn’t matter where I go. Only difference between us and them is that they don’t know they’re broken.”
“Look, I get it. You’re angry. And it burns you, like all the time, and sometimes that’s the only thing you can feel. And you think that if you give up, if you stop fighting it, then maybe it won’t hurt anymore. You think you’ve found peace because you believe that you belong here. But what if it doesn’t have to be this way?”
He didn’t answer, so I played another card. “What if the Remnant exists?”
The Mole leaned back against the rail of the bed. Something about his easy posture made me feel exposed, as though he knew what my future held. “Even if they did, there’s nothing out there for me, Charlotte. You remember when you first got here?”
“Of course. Everyone remembers their first day in.”
“You told me you didn’t care whether your family missed you.”
“They didn’t.”
“Mine didn’t miss me, either.” His voice was so soft, I wondered if I’d imagined it.
I didn’t see what that had to do with anything. I had to get him to help me. “They say your old boss did that to you.” I waved a finger at his eyes. He couldn’t see, but he knew what I was talking about.
“Is that what they say?”
I nodded. “They say he couldn’t stand you being out of the game. So when the Treaty was announced, he blinded you. He knew you’d never get a spot on an OPT if you were disabled.”
The Mole gave a short laugh. “It wasn’t my old boss. Turns out, he didn’t miss me either.”
“Who, then?”
He was quiet for a long time. “I was young enough to enter the lottery. Did they tell you that?” He was referring to the lottery for OPT spots, which was open to “all citizens of upstanding status under the age of forty, with no physical, mental, or moral infirmities.” If you’d been convicted of a crime, you were no longer eligible, unless you were under the age of fourteen when the crime was committed.
I shrugged. “We all were. Until we weren’t.”
