That is not our fate, I tell myself. We are not racing aimlessly down a road with no final destination. Father is leading us to Denver for a reason. The last safe house on the map will be our answer. Our discovery. We will not always have to keep running. And hiding.
And hurting.
Denver will be the end, and maybe the final name on Father’s map will help make it all stop.
MIRA
Beep. Beep! Beep! The motorcycle lags, then altogether dies.
“Battery’s dead,” I shout behind me. The bike keels over, and Ava and I catch its weight with our legs.
“Let’s drag it from the road,” Ava says, pulling off her helmet.
The headlight shuts off, and the world around us goes black. I’m surprised how unsettled I feel. Surprised by how the steady beam of light made me feel safe. To have it taken from me is unexpectedly jarring. It shakes my confidence, enticing me to keep my helmet on until we find another light.
Ava slides off the back of the bike, but I remain seated, twisting my hands on the sticky black grips of the handlebars.
“We’ll come back for it,” Ava says, sensing my hesitancy. Kipling didn’t have an extra battery for the motorcycle, and we thought this one would last. And it would be too risky to enter a charging station, even if we both did have microchips.
I remove my helmet with a quick jerk before I can use it as my crutch, swing my leg over the leather seat, and together we push the bike toward a dense grove of aspen trees. Their white wood soars above us like nature’s own skyscrapers, guiding Ava and me through their ancient colony until we find ourselves knee-deep in foliage and a quarter mile from the road.
We rest the motorcycle under a bed of leaves and overgrown weeds and use fallen branches to conceal a handlebar and mirror that poke out from the woodland floor. Ava buries our helmets inside the lush vegetation beside a ghostly aspen, its chalky bark riddled with the scars that come from living in the wild.
Bending down, I let my fingers be my eyes as I search the ground for something sharp. My hand finally wraps around a small branch with a sharpened tip, and I move back toward the white tree that guards our hard-earned valuables. I choose a spot above a blackened stub from a missing limb and mark the letter X. I wonder if we will ever find this place again.
Ava nods at our quick work and hands me a bottled water, then turns back for the road. I linger a few moments longer beside the Triumph, my eyes acclimating to the darkness.
We keep leaving things behind.
As I sit on a lopsided tree stump stretching out my right ankle, I watch Ava paint her brows with a coffee-colored powder. The lights of Denver extend for miles behind her, outshining even the brightest of stars.
“The last stop on Father’s map,” Ava says, turning toward the skyline.
I think of the millions of people, the thousands of cameras, and the hundreds of soldiers that wait for us inside that concrete maze. I wonder if Ava and I will be able to locate one specific woman before all those enemies are able to locate us.
Ava turns back to me, her crimson lips raised in an encouraging smile. She tosses me the small bag, and her russet eyes pop with intensity beneath her strong defined brows. There’s fearlessness there. A single-minded purpose toward this one last push, one last stop on this purgatory road until we reach our terminus. And then we can rest and breathe and maybe even live.
I hold the palm-sized mirror up to my face and outline my eyes with a charcoal powder until they are rimmed and shadowed and mask me with my own intensity, like one who is ready to face battle. War paint, I think.
“Are you ready?” Ava asks.
I rise, throw up my hood, and narrow my eyes on the broad cityscape that dazzles the night sky as far as I can see.
“I have to be.”
We blend in easily with the huddled masses that march along the congested path headed north.
Just like in Dallas, the people of Denver walk the nighttime streets cloaked beneath hats, glasses, and the ever-popular umbrellas. But unlike in the urban sprawl of my home metroplex, a constant cloud of smog does not veil this city. The clean air offers me a clear view of every skyrise for several blocks, and I see with my own eyes what I’ve only witnessed in videos: the first great American attempt at sustainable urbanism.
Soaring thousand-foot skyscrapers boast foliage on every terrace, like giant trunks of steel wrapped in vibrant green moss. I peer out from my umbrella canopy as we pass a block of food towers, buildings dedicated solely to feeding the citizens of Denver. Hints of massive vegetable gardens line their roofs, and the tips of immense glass terraces, stacked one hundred stories high, house acres’ worth of organic crops and free-range livestock.
The familiar uproar of a bustling city pulls my focus back to the ground as the infinite flow of bicyclists and autonomous buses zip past in a blur. The crowd pushes Ava and me down the street and pulls us to a stop beside the zebra-striped lines of a crosswalk. The solar traffic light turns red, and the commanding orange hand signals all northbound pedestrians to wait. I scan the other side of the avenue and immediately spot our first objective.
“Two o’clock,” I whisper in Ava’s ear.
A light-rail station. I glimpse the blue-and-yellow glow of a hologram between the crush of arms, torsos, and parasol canopies. A map of downtown. A guide through the city’s wilderness.
The pedestrians press tight around us, elbows sharp and businesslike, jostling against Ava and me for a closer space beside the street. Ava’s fingers grip the bottom of my shirt, anchoring me to her side within this swell of a hundred strangers. A few rogue walkers slip through the horde in front of me and sprint across the crosswalk just as the first wave of oncoming bicycles and autos gain speed.
I blink as a camera flashes overhead, and when I open my eyes, I see a double-decker bus nearly clip one man’s legs before he reaches the safety of the sidewalk. The man seems certain his identity was protected beneath his large mirrored sunglasses, but he only makes it halfway down the pathway before a Colorado State Guard is on him, scanning his wrist.
Ava cracks the knuckle of her thumb, and I reach for my pocket, needing the reassuring touch of the warm blade.
We must remain invisible. A million eyes are on us.
Burying my nose into the high collar of my vest, I turn my focus ahead, toward the countdown of our traffic signal. Another seventy seconds.
I quell my instinct to move by keeping my eyes active. I count the surveillance cameras nearby. One camera atop each traffic light, two just behind us suspended from the first floor of an apartment tower. I glimpse at the glass windows of the building directly across from us and spy a camera stealthily placed inside the eye of an Ava Goodwin “Wanted” hologram three stories tall.
Ava’s face did end up on a skyrise after all.
I squeeze my fingers around my knuckle duster and inspect the crowd once more, confident no one will look too long at my face, because no one has looked at anyone since we’ve been waiting for the light. The people surrounding us gaze only at the screens in their hands, and I fix my gaze on the rail station that is now fifteen seconds away.
But it only takes one pair of eyes to recognize us, and it takes all I have not to look back up at Ava’s dark holographic eyes watching from above. I tune out the barrage of noise bouncing off the towers, keeping my ears open to just one sound. Over the blast of horns from angry vehicles, the chatter, and the screech of tires, as the eastbound light finally turns red, I hear Ava’s warning whisper.