“You’re the one who drew attention to yourself!” Ava regains her ground, her voice loud enough for every four-hundred-foot wind turbine to catch and broadcast my mistake throughout the vacant, foreign land. “You kept touching your stupid wrist! You weren’t good enough—”
“You mean I wasn’t good enough being you!”
“Stop acting like the victim! We both had to play the same game, and you lost it for us.”
She pushes two steps closer, brandishing her finger in my face.
“Do you think I wanted to spend my days watching over you, making sure you were happy? Making sure I kept you alive? I knew you were our weakest player, so I indulged you and catered to you and carried you for eighteen years! I knew you’d be the one to mess it all up. So did Father.”
My rage emanates from deep within—thrums across my skin, animates my fingers, balls them into fists.
Ava presses on. “You’re the reason we’re standing here. You’re the reason Father’s imprisoned, and you’re the reason he’s going to die!”
With one violent surge I close the gap between us and thrust Ava backward, sending her flying across the ground. She lands hard, her elbows and hands taking the fall. She lifts her palms and studies the bloody scrapes and shallow gashes of her broken skin. Our broken bond.
I feel no guilt. Only the sky’s spotlight and my smoldering fury.
“Go lead yourself into an unwinnable crusade,” I spit. “I’m not following.”
Ava glares up at me from the dirt like she’s finally seeing my full evolution and hates what I’ve become.
Something other than her.
“The Guard knows we’re in Montana. They’re going to catch you,” she threatens as she rises.
I grab my rucksack. Chuck the strap over my shoulder. “I have just as good a chance to outrun them as you.”
Ava wipes her bloodstained palms against her pants. “You won’t survive without me.”
“I can. I don’t need you anymore to have a life. I have my own microchip now.”
“You’re a coward!” she screams at me.
“And you’re a fucking fool.”
I turn away from Ava and stomp toward the field’s boundary, overgrown with its clairvoyant flowers.
“You will not die; you will die.”
I will not die.
I don’t look back.
PART III
THE ADMISSION
AVA
In Greek mythology, humans were originally created with four arms, four legs, and a head with two faces. One soul in two bodies.
These beings had great strength in this form, and the gods, fearing their power, sent Zeus to divide them into two separate parts, splitting apart the soul. Weakened and consumed with yearning, humans were condemned to spend their lives in search of their other halves in order to feel complete.
I was born with my soulmate. One soul in two bodies. I didn’t have to search the whole world over. But now mine is gone. Mine turned and walked away from me.
In that moment, I learned you could hear a heart break.
Disguised in a dark hooded jacket—the Guard will be looking for a baseball cap now—I stop walking and survey the golden hills that roll across the land as far as I can see. My anger has driven me ten miles from my sister by now. A heavy feeling of loneliness stabs at me, piercing its blade into an already-severed soul.
I never thought I could tire of open land. I dreamt of it all my life in the suffocating urban sprawl of Dallas, and I naïvely used to think that if I could just find enough of it, I could keep Mira there, safe.
You’re a fucking fool.
The cuts on my palms suddenly burn as if submerged in hot coals, and then I’m back at the wind farm again, Mira’s hands on my chest, pushing me to the ground.
Rage rips through my loneliness, and with Mira’s words still ablaze inside my mind, I tear the rucksack from my shoulders and launch it through the quiet, empty air, its contents escaping into the grass.
“You’re the fool, Mira!” I recklessly scream.
Stop it, I chide myself, biting down hard on the inside of my lips, forcing my mouth shut. You’re going to get yourself caught.
Standing alone in this vast field, shaking with a desperate need to do more violence, I’m overwhelmed with the notion that I’m suddenly surrounded by too much space.
I kneel to slowly gather up my spilled supplies and place them carefully back into my bag, one by one, centering my mind.
“Focus on the task at hand,” I say aloud for the sixteenth time.
This has become my battle cry.
A highway looms ahead. I glance down at the map and locate a farm road that will connect with Interstate 90 farther north.
It’s too much of a risk to travel three hundred and seventy-five miles on foot through exposed land now that Roth knows where his fugitives are hiding. The more days I’m on the run, the greater the danger. One surveillance drone flyover and the game is done. I have to find a vehicle to get me to the border. And if there’s a highway, there will be a charging station somewhere nearby.
A glare from something on the road temporarily blinds me. I blink away yellow bursts of light to see a pair of armored military vehicles hurtling south in my direction.
I fall to the ground and crawl, dirt stinging my cut elbows, behind the nearest hill. Tucking my body into a narrow indentation, I sit as still as the air and wait for the cover of darkness.
My anger is my armor, and I am made of steel.
The sun fades to twilight. Fireflies flicker like tiny bolts of lightning, dancing in the soft semidarkness. The temperature drops and the wind disappears. Crickets sing their soft, elegant song, and still I wait.
Night hits, wrapping the world in black.
Only then do I step from my hideout in the earth and point my feet north by the light of the moon.
I chew the last bite of my last kangaroo jerky, my tired, heavy eyes locked on a service road next to I-90. Four vehicle charging stations line a dimly lit rest stop in front of me. All have been empty the hour and a half I’ve been here.
Just outside the surveillance camera’s range—I counted four, one in each corner—I wait unmoving, sandwiched between two benches. I kneel uncomfortably, a sharp corner digging into my lower back, to stay awake.
My stomach growls at me to pay more attention to the 3D food printer I saw posted outside the restrooms. I still have my microchip and my umbrella—the government doesn’t know to track Aeron Rowe yet—so I could grab a few supplies for the rest of my journey. Mira has the megaprotein kits from Rayla’s survival food supply in her bag. But I have all the water—and I can survive up to three weeks without food. Mira will need water within three days.
Despite this biological fact, my belly emits a loud grumble at the thought of the freeze-dried chicken and black beans in Mira’s possession. The label promised the food would taste just as great today as it will in twenty-five years. Be quiet, I scold my stomach. If the cameras detect a lone, skulking figure at a vehicle rest stop, the military might descend upon the area with a drone or an entire company of soldiers.
Suddenly the benches on either side of me begin to vibrate. A harsh, low rumbling of what seems a thousand thunderous engines seeps into my bones, overtaking my eardrums.