I think I’ve been shot.
It happens that fast; the pain slices clean through me, and I imagine the bullet hits my heart at an angle. There are snipers on the roof of the Control Tower. They are always watching, always adjusting their aim. It’s intolerable. The hurt takes away my breath. Sinks my feet in place.
But I’m not bleeding. I touch a hand to my chest, just to be sure.
Sammy. I can hear him say it even now. I’ve fought so hard to keep the sound of his voice from disappearing. Sammy Sunshine.
I’m not dying. Hallucinating, maybe. Because I think I just—I think I just saw—
Vanessa is the one that ultimately moves me forward again, driving her knee into the back of mine. The sting of it eases as I convince myself I imagined it. My fingers curl and uncurl into and out of fists and I feel like I’m somehow running inside of my own skin. I can’t settle myself. I’m going to scream. The only way I can keep it from escaping is to press a fist against my mouth.
By the time we’re inside the cloud of warm air drifting out from the open Mess Hall doors, the urge to look again is like a rubber band snapping and snapping and snapping against my skin. I wish I had resisted, not looked up at the boy posted at the door, his hands clasped in front of him, his stance steady and strong. Our eyes meet and dart away, and I hear his stiff black gloves creak as his fingers tighten around each other. The Mess is heated, yes, but it feels only lukewarm compared to the heat that’s coming off him. A twinge of dread-stained recognition creeps down my spine, bone by bone, until I think my legs will dissolve under me. I recognize him the way you know the feel of sun on your skin after spending too long in the shade.
My mind doesn’t let me forget faces. Sometimes it feels like a tiny miracle. A blessing. Others, a curse, some kind of punishment for all those times I disobeyed my parents and ran wild around the neighborhood. Good kids go to heaven; bad kids need to be rehabilitated. Now I know that must be true; I know that someone, whether they’re up in paradise or down here in this little slice of hell, is trying to break me. I am being tested.
The years between us have thinned out his round face, made good on the promise of inheriting his father’s chiseled features. Dark eyes sit below dark brows, thick dark hair. The rest of us are so drained of life after a sunless winter, we may as well blend into the snow, but he is lit from within. He is the best thing I have ever seen in my life. The worst thing.
I can’t—I swallow the bile, try to shove away the last image my mind’s preserved of him. Ten years old, calling up the singsong password to get into our imaginary castle in Greenwood—that secret kingdom he invented in the thick cluster of trees behind our houses. His hair shines like a raven’s wing as he climbs up the rope to the tree platform his father had helped us build, takes his seat on the pillow we stole from one of their couches, and starts to read the story of the lost prince of Greenwood and a young knight—me—setting out to find him. He’d spent all day in school writing it; it made my chest tight to picture it, one arm wrapped around the notebook, protecting it from the cruel eyes of the boys sitting around us.
If I could, I’d spend my days locked inside the fantasy of our stolen time there, but I’d never been able to disappear so completely into my imagination the way he could. It was stupid to be so hung up on it now. Even then, we should have been too old for play like that, or at least old and clever enough to name our magic land after something other than our neighborhood street. But it hadn’t mattered then, and it didn’t matter now, and what surprised me, more than almost anything, was how badly it hurt to realize by our own rules I would be denied access to Greenwood, anyway—the requirements were kindness and goodness in your heart, and I barely know what those words mean anymore. I think of them and I see him. So how did they do this—to the boy who’d struggled not to cry when we found the overturned nest of eggs in Greenwood? They didn’t even have a chance, he’d said.
I want to cry, I want to cry so badly, but the helpless fury that’s been threatening to choke me for years has finally burnt through the last soft part of me. I want to give up.
Even in another life—another world—where everything was good and sweetly normal, seven years would never have been enough time to forget the face that belonged to Lucas Orfeo.
We won’t be fed again until dinner, but I couldn’t bring myself to eat a bite of the soggy mashed potatoes or the vegetable stew. We’ve been eating the same tasteless crap for weeks, so it wasn’t like I was missing much. I just didn’t trust my stomach not to send it sailing right back up as soon as I managed to swallow it down.
Fear followed us into the Mess Hall, coating the silence, expanding until I thought it would eventually push the walls out of alignment. It multiplied faster than the weeds in the Garden. This is what makes it so hard—well, one of the many things that puts this place at the corner of bleak and misery. There’s never an explanation. Not for the way we’re supposed to behave, not for why they do the things they do. When they first began work on the Factory, Ruby said—
No. That wasn’t right. Ruby wasn’t here when they began turning the dark dirt over, burrowing down into earth. She hadn’t been the one to wager the guess that the camp controllers were finally going to take care of the problem of us—permanently. Put us where no one would ever be able to find us.
I braced my forehead against my hands, trying to rub away the throb of pain behind my temples. I blinked again, and the image of a little dark-haired girl was gone, replaced by a panicked kind of anger. It grated on my nerves. Sent my heart galloping for no reason at all.
I was thankful for it, though, because the anger was the only thing strong enough to distract me from watching Lucas. The Reds, the five we’d seen before, had entered the Mess Hall and had made steady passes up and down the rows of silent wooden tables and benches. I wondered if they’d sensed as clearly as the rest of us had, that they were still being watched, even as they’d been clearly elevated to watch us. The PSFs clustered in the corners of the large room, heads bending toward each other as they picked and tore apart the firestarters’ every stiff movement. Part of me wondered if they were more afraid of the Reds than we were.
Lucas passed by our table twice, once behind me, once in front of me. Each time I looked away before he could catch me watching him, taking in every inch of his appearance, searching for my friend in him. Trying to convince myself I wasn’t drowning myself in some kind of desperate delusion. It was like not realizing you were starving until a feast was laid out in front of you.
Older, taller, harder Lucas. Lucas with the dimple in his chin.
Red.
The word ran circles around my mind as we walked over to the Factory, a single word that somehow encompassed a whole dark cloud of thoughts. Red, Red, Red, Red.
I’d thought about it, you know, wondered if the two of them were still alive, if they were in a camp like mine. My first few weeks here, I’d daydream about seeing them from across the Mess Hall or Garden, get hit with the false high of warm recognition despite it all being in my head. I clung to the possibility of it, even as the years marched on. Lucas would be Green, like me. I just wouldn’t see him because they kept the boys and girls separate. Mia would be Blue, which would also explain why I hadn’t seen her. They didn’t let the colors mix unless we were in the Garden. I nursed that little hope for years, shielding it, keeping it close to me like a candle in a rainstorm.
And maybe some part of me remembered that story—Sir Sammy, fair knight, off to find and rescue Prince Lucas from the outcropping of rocks that doubled as a dungeon and fortress depending on the day. I’d sing, and he’d answer with a shout, I’d sing and he’d answer again, over and over until we were tired of the game or were called in for dinner. I always found him where I knew he’d be. It was the searching that was the important part.
Eventually, you grow up and you stop pretending. This place beats every last dream out of you.
It clears your head of such stupid things. The truth was simple, not a glossy fairy tale. Lucas was a year older than me and three years older than his sister, Mia, but neither had been hit with IAAN in the time I’d known them. They moved away a few months before I realized I’d already been affected by...the virus, the disease, whatever it was. Their parents had both lost their jobs and headed a ways north to try to find work in a bigger city.
Bedford was a small town made even smaller by the economic crash and the bottomed-out markets that the people on TV couldn’t shut up about. My parents hadn’t let me say good-bye to the Orfeos—they’d never liked their “influence.” They’d whisper that word like it was the devil’s own name. Influence. They didn’t like how I acted when I finally came home, zipping through the rooms, trying to recreate the carefree way we’d run around their house and outside in Greenwood, smacking each other with plastic swords. They didn’t like it when I told them about Mrs. Orfeo giving us snacks, or when I repeated something she had said. It took me a while to understand that when you don’t like someone, nothing they can say or do will ever seem right. Something as harmless as giving a kid a cookie becomes something aggressive, a challenge to their authority.
So I’d watched them drive off from my bedroom window, crying my stupid eyes out, hating everyone and everything. I didn’t stop until I found the bundle of sparklers he’d left for me in the tree fort. The notebook of stories he’d spent three years writing. I kept them there so my parents wouldn’t find them and take them away. I wonder all the time if they’re still there. If Greenwood exists anywhere outside of my head.
My family only got to stay because we lived off the charity of the Church. I don’t know if my parents are in the old house, or if they picked up and moved as far from the memories of their unblessed freak child as they could. I wish I didn’t care.
Lucas and one other Red, a girl with cropped blond hair, served as our escorts. I had to force myself to stare at the back of Ashley’s head to keep from looking at him when he suddenly matched my pace. I swear, he was warm enough that the snow melted before it touched him—that he kept me warm that whole miserable trek through the mud and sleet. But that would have been crazy.
Where had he been sent, if it hadn’t been to Thurmond? Where was Mia? Was she like him, or me, or was she one of the other colors?
The metal Factory doors always sound like they are belching as they are dragged open by the PSFs waiting inside. My hands are useless, cramped and stiff from the cold, but I try squeezing the water from my hair and sweatshirt anyway. We leave a trail of smeared mud and water behind us that the Green cabins on cleanup rotation are going to have to mop up after last meal.
Ice still clouds the skylights—not that there’s any real sun to filter through the clouds of dirt this morning. Winters stretch on forever in this place, dragging out each dark hour until it becomes almost unbearable. There’s one thing I can’t remember: what it feels like to be truly warm.
The building is large enough to swallow several hundred kids whole. The main level is nothing but stretches of work tables and plastic bins. The metal rafters above are usually crowded with figures in black uniforms clutching their large guns, but today there’s only a dozen, maybe less. About that many on the ground, too. A thought begins to solidify at the back of my mind, but I push it away before it can take shape. I need to focus. I need to get through today, and maybe tomorrow will feel easier. It always gets easier as you get used to it.
I see one of the PSFs throw an arm out, pointing to where Lucas needs to stand against the far wall. When he stares at him blankly, the black uniform lets out an explosive cuss and maneuvers him there by force. We see, at the same exact moment the PSFs do, that the Reds need to be shown exactly what to do. And somehow, this scares me more than thinking that these kids have been turned against us, that they might want to voluntarily hurt us. It means that they are nothing more than weapons. Guns. Point, ready. Point, aim. Point, fire. They are like the old metal toy soldiers Lucas was given by his grandpa. Unable to act on their own, but shaped with edges sharp enough to cut your fingers if you’re not careful.
I don’t care what he is. I don’t care what he could do to me—I care about what they’ve done to my Lucas. I’ve seen enough Red kids to know what the ability does to them, how hot they burn inside their own heads. We thought that they took these kids out to kill them, and now I see they’ve done something much worse. They’ve taken the soul out of the body.
Is this the cure? Is this what they’ve been working on?
After all these years, this is what we have to look forward to? Blank faces, blank minds. And their eyes...My stomach clenched. The Reds hadn’t particularly cared who got in the way of their abilities, but when another kid got hurt, it was more often than not an accident. With each escape attempt, each fight they sparked, we knew that when it came down to it, they would be on our side.
I move stiffly into place, fitting into my usual spot at our table. It’s only when they shut the doors that I begin to feel sensation coming back into me, and even then, it’s only because Vanessa and Ava are crammed next to me, shoulder to shoulder. Can’t talk, but at least we can share the heat that comes off our skin as we start moving.
A plastic bin on the table is filled with what looks like an assortment of old cell phones. There are no instructions given, only three separate bins in front of that one, each a different color. In the Factory, you assemble, sort, or disassemble. They want each phone broken down into three parts—I watch Vanessa take apart the first one to see if her suspicions match mine. Battery in one bin, the storage card in another one, the plastic casing in the third.
The work we do here isn’t important. They can’t give us anything sharp, or anything we may be tempted to take and use later as a weapon—against our soft skin, or theirs. No scissors, even. It’s all just work to tire us out. Make us easier to shuffle around and be prodded into our places. After standing on your feet for six hours each day for weeks on end, there’s not enough fight left in you to resist the pull of sleep at night. Not enough thoughts left in your head to wonder where the uniforms you’ve sewn or phones you’ve dismantled are going.
My fingers seem to be as jumbled and clumsy as my mind today. I can’t get it together—keep it together. I drop the phone case in my hand before I can even pop the battery out, sending it crashing against the concrete floor. Ava stiffens beside me, shrinking away so that any PSF who may be watching will know that it wasn’t her. I drop down onto my knees, quickly patting around blindly under the table until my fingers close around it.
Get it together, Sam. My head feels light enough to drift away from my neck like a balloon. I try to stand up, and my vision flashes white black white. When Vanessa takes my arm, I let her help me back onto my feet. But the grip doesn’t ease up, even after I’m steady.
I feel the approach from behind like a cold wind blowing up the back of my shirt, exposing me. This is what a bird feels like, I think, when they feel a storm coming in the distance. I know my breath is coming out in light gasps, and I hate myself for it. I hate the way I want to crawl under the table and fold myself smaller and smaller until I disappear completely.
I do not know what, in the end, makes a person who they are. If we’re all born one way, or if we only arrive there after a series of choices. The Bible claims that the wicked act on their own desires and impulses, because God is good, only good, and He would never compel a soul to wickedness. That I’m supposed to count on justice in the next life, even if I can’t have it in this one. My father would say that the Devil works us all to his own ends and that we must constantly be on guard to protect ourselves from him. It helps, sometimes, to think of the man behind me as the Devil himself; it’s easier to become the lion I need to be. I can pretend I know his tricks, that he’s not an unpredictable human with a temper he carefully cultivates like a rose with razor thorns.
It helps. Some
times.
He doesn’t say anything at first, but his breath is hot on the back of my neck, and his smell—oil, cigarette smoke, vinegar, and sweat—wraps around me like an embrace, trapping me where I am. My movements become painfully careful. The sweat that comes to my palm makes holding on to each case a challenge, but I won’t let my hands shake. I refuse to give him the pleasure of knowing that he affects me any more than the other PSFs.
He’s one of the few that still wears a full PSF uniform; all black and menace, with the embroidered red Psi symbol over his heart under the stitched name Tildon.
I keep my eyes on the bins in front of me, but I wonder, I wonder all the time, if he or any of them would do these things if we were allowed to meet them eye to eye. Would they feel as free to hurt someone as human as they are? Maybe they just wouldn’t care.
I should know better; he’s not someone who likes to be ignored. The PSF lets out a disgruntled sound that seems to rip through my eardrums. He takes a step back and I’m just about to release the breath I’d held when I feel a hand slip under my sweatshirt. Under my shirt. A thumb rubs down my spine.
It’s me.
I see the thought reflected in the relieved faces of the girls around me. This is the third day in a row since the rotation began that he’s zeroed in on me, come sauntering over like a hunter picking up a bird he’s shot out of the sky. I can’t believe it. I don’t want to believe that it’s me.
My muscles lock first. My head buzzes, emptied of every thought. The sudden shift from badgering bully to—to this actually tilts my world. It’s a soft, delicate touch, and so vile I think my skin is actually crawling to get away from it. I don’t know what to do—I know what I want to do. Scream, shove him away, give in to the burn of bile in my throat. I’ve been hit so many times it’s never occurred to me that this kind of touch could be that much worse than the pain. The hand slides around my hip, down—