“That’s not true.”
“—and I’m a new adventure for you,” he continued, ignoring my protest. “But guess what? I’m not a pet. I’m not a sideshow. I’m not just your next rule-breaking expedition, Violet.”
He slapped me with the use of my full name, and I stopped walking. He stomped off through the trees, leaving me in pitch blackness.
Alone.
Did I mention it was dark?
11.
On my fifteenth birthday, my mother plunked a plate of steamed cabbage in front of me. “Only one more year.”
I guess that meant “Happy birthday,” in cruel-mother-talk, but I didn’t understand it. So I wolfed down the “meal” and escaped to Zenn’s.
He gave me a watch. Not a piece of tech with alarms and cameras and voice recorders, but just a watch that I could wind when I needed to. He’d found it in the Abandoned Area and fixed it up. The arms were shaped like arrows and pointed to numerals plated in gold. It only told time, but his gift meant more to me than any expensive tech-thing. I must have started crying, because he wiped my cheeks and slid his hands up my sleeves and over my bare arms.
A forbidden touch.
His hands felt rough from his training in school. With his skin on mine, a thrill zinged through my body.
Then we kissed, sealing our commitment to each other. I remembered how warm his lips felt pressed against mine.
Why I was thinking of kissing Zenn while lost in the stupid forest in the City of Water, I don’t know. Maybe because of how he’d always protected me. Or maybe because he understood my need to live an uncontrolled life.
Or maybe because he loves you.
My heart leapt in my chest. In fear. Number one, because the same stupid voice was back. Number two, because I wanted to believe it. And that hurt too much.
The day Zenn left for the Special Forces, we snuck to the edge of the forest before the sun rose. Every step was painful, because each one brought us closer to good-bye.
But he didn’t say it. He crushed me in a desperate hug. I cried into his neck, staining the collar of his starchy new uniform. He cupped my face in his hands and leaned his forehead against mine.
“I’ll come back,” he whispered. “I promise we’ll be together, okay?”
I didn’t answer, because it seemed like he was trying to convince himself as much as me. He kissed away my tears and repeated himself. I thought he’d tell me he loved me. He didn’t. But it was etched in the lines of his face. I felt it in his touch.
I turned around and headed back to the Special Forces compound. Back to Zenn. But every step felt wrong. The voice hissed that it was right, and I stopped.
“Shut up. Leave me alone.” My words sounded so loud in the empty forest. “I’m making my own decisions now.”
I stood there, breathing in and out, in and out. I closed my eyes and filled my thoughts with Zenn. His angular jaw. His warm hands. His mischievous smile.
His image was replaced by Jag and then my dad.
And I knew.
My dad was waiting for me in the Badlands. I could feel it the same way I’d once felt Zenn’s skin against mine.
And Jag was, well, as close to free as I’d ever felt. I wanted to feel that way all the time, and that meant leaving the Goodgrounds.
I pivoted and ran back the way I’d come. Next week my sixteenth birthday would be in the Badlands. Possibly alone, but hopefully free.
I am going to the Badlands, I told the world, the Thinkers, anyone who was listening. Then I imagined what birthdays might be like in the Badlands. How people could make their own choices. I thought of Seaside and how I could finally be free.
Lost in thought, I stumbled and fell. Pain engulfed my knee, matching the strumming loneliness in my heart. The sun would rise soon anyway, so I curled into a ball and tried to push away the agonizing memories of my life before Zenn had been chosen for the Forces.
Sometime later, my stomach woke me. I filled my water bottle and emptied some protein granules into it, leaving just three more packets. But nothing could fill the hole inside—the one Zenn used to fill. Or the one Jag had created when he left.
A bird called, shattering the still evening air. I inhaled deeply, enjoying the crispness of the forest, the thrill of being in a forbidden place. I wondered if Jag was coming back or if he’d leave me to cross the border by myself.
Pushing him from my mind, I packed my stuff and stretched. My whole body ached from sleeping on the hard ground. The eight hours I’d spent walking, running, or sneaking every night didn’t help.
I reopened my pack and dug through the first aid kit. I stuck the pain stick in my mouth. It tasted awful—bitter and chalky, though Ty had said this was a side effect because of my sensitivity to tech. But I sucked the meds for the full ten seconds. By the time I’d applied more ointment to my cut and had my bag repacked, the aches were receding.
I approached the Abandoned Area as the rising sun painted the sky gold and pink. I hurried down the hill and crawled into a decrepit mansion before the first rays of dawn peeked over the mountains.
The air inside the house smelled musty. I climbed into the attic and looked out the window toward the Badlands, half-expecting to see Jag striding forward to help me. I finally gave in and admitted that I missed him.
The earth appeared red and brown in the shadows but shone golden in the sunlight. No green fields, no major sources of water, the buildings old and broken down. Beyond that, a glimmer of sun bouncing off glass marked the real edge of the Badlands. No one lived in the settlement closest to the Goodgrounds. They don’t want our transmissions infiltrating their minds.
I shivered, but for the first time it wasn’t from fear of the Badlands. No, just thinking about what someone must be like to be a Thinker unsettled me. The blazing, controlling eyes of the middle Greenie flashed in my memory.
Yeah, Thinkers are not my cup of tea. At least I have that in common with the Baddies.
* * *
A guard tower on the edge of the Abandoned Area barred the way between the Badlands and the Goodgrounds. I had no ID card, and the tag would scream Fugitive! if I got too close to a scanner.
So, chicken that I am, I stayed in the mansion another day, brooding about Jag.
Did I really only like him because he’s bad? No way I believed that. I spent most of the afternoon staring at the Badlands, thinking about him, his tortuous nightmares, and what it meant to be bad.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said out loud to the house.
It was so low-class, it didn’t answer back. Thankfully, neither did the voice, which surely would’ve argued that it did matter.
The next night I prepared myself mentally to leave. Never to come back. Never to see my sweet Zenn again. Never be a Goodie again. If I ever had kids, they’d be bad. I almost turned around right then, prison or not.
The guards faced north into the Badlands, but the only road leading west ran right behind the station. I slipped behind it, only a few yards from the boundary. This was the closest I’d ever been to the Badlands, and my heartbeat strummed in my ears.
Just when I thought I was in the clear, an alarm sounded. The door banged open, making the beeping louder. I sprinted down the road and into the western ruins of the Aban-doned Area. The buildings crowded close to the cliffs on this side of the old city, but I didn’t want to hide. I had to leave, now.
Directly in front of me, the ground sloped almost straight down into a dry riverbed with a nearly vertical climb up the other side. If only I could jump ten yards, I could leap over the chasm. Yeah, I don’t have any superpowers.
I also had no idea how to get down this ridiculously steep hill without breaking my neck. I started on my feet, which I found is not the right way to start. After one step, I landed hard on my butt. A landslide of rocks and dirt accompanied me down the slope. The noise added to the panic already swirling inside. My heart pounded Get-up, get-up, get-up.
I didn’t wait for the red flashes of i
ris recognizers or the buzzing pack of hovercopters. I heaved myself up and climbed the other side of the hill. Rocks and dirt and dust showered to the ground behind me. My fingers bled and sweat dripped down my face. But I made it to the top.
I’d made it across the border.
I ran until I collapsed in my I’m-invisible-and-you-can’t-find-me state, repeating the words as I tried to catch my breath. My muscles refused to move. I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew, something licked my face.
12.
Ty brought home a dog once. That’s all it takes with my mother. She reported the incident to Them. They came and took the dog away.
Pets are against the rules, of course. Animals require care, and They only want you to care about who They tell you to care about.
Ty cried for a few days, and then she told me she didn’t want a dog anyway. We were sitting next to the lake, Ty shredding a fern leaf and me feeding ducks—both illegal activities. I didn’t believe her. She did want a pet. The real Ty did anyway. That night, after she fell asleep, I unclipped her link and plugged it into my comm. The brainwashing voice articulated the evils of pets and, hey, did you know dogs carry diseases?
My transmissions had been about helping my neighbors, serving my community and those weaker than me. That night I learned the transmissions are tailored for each person, each subject.
Each slave.
This dog looked exactly like the one Ty had found. Short brown fur matted with golden dirt. His pink tongue hung out of his mouth, almost as low as his floppy ears. He scratched behind one and yawned. Stinky dog breath billowed in my face. I pushed the dog away, disgusted. The transmissions said . . . I shook my head, fighting for control of my own thoughts.
I called the dog back over. “Where’d you come from?” I asked it, feeling lame. First I was talking to houses and now dogs.
The dog panted and sat.
“Nice,” I said, wishing I’d chosen a different word. “Nice” belonged to Jag.
The sun had drifted a quarter of the way through the sky. I’d have to risk traveling during the day. I had to eat something soon or I would die out here. Then nobody would find me and I’d be a nobody-Baddie that nobody missed.
That’s too many nobodies, even for me.
I got up and started trudging through the dirt. The dog trotted next to me, unconcerned about lingering dust trails and possible hovercopters—which never came. We headed toward the Badlands, me talking to the dog like he understood the English language, and the dog sitting when I sat and walking when I walked. He wouldn’t have abandoned me for calling him “different.” Didn’t Jag know different was good?
Obviously not.
I pounded my anger into my footsteps as I passed building after derelict building. Most of them sported charred wood and twisted metal. This area had been abandoned during the fires and never rebuilt. In a few places, the fire ranger rings still shone on the cracked stones.
The powdery red dirt coated my shoes and the back of my throat. Without a hat, my face was burned by the time evening settled in. Without food, my legs trembled and the horizon blinked between white and sunset.
Lights shone a few miles ahead when I found a stream. Forgetting about purification, I practically inhaled that water. It felt cool against my inflamed neck and ears, and I decided that wearing a hat was actually a decent rule.
Green shoots poked through the soil. Dirty purple bulbs came up, and I hardly rinsed them before crunching them down. They tasted like soap and Jag’s hair gel, with a little onion thrown in.
I didn’t complain. I lay on my back, looking at the sky. When I was a child, my dad had told me stories about how he used to wish on the stars. I’d been mesmerized and wanted to wish on the brightest one.
“Can I fly up there and touch it? I could make a wish on the way back down.”
“You can’t, V,” he’d said. “Nobody can fly. And there’s no use wishing for things that won’t come true.”
“Who says they won’t come true?”
“Violet,” Dad said, crouching down and looking into my eyes. “You must learn to be satisfied with what you’re given.”
I just looked at him.
“Sometimes life doesn’t allow us to be free to fly wherever we’d like. Do you understand, honey?”
“Yes,” I said, my voice small. Dad smiled, took my hand, and walked me home, careful to let go before any of the neighbors could see and report that we’d broken the no-touching rule.
But now I wasn’t satisfied with what I’d been given. I wanted more. I wanted to be free to wish on the stars and eat ham (if I could find it).
In memory of my dad, I wished on the brightest star. A single tear trickled over my cheek. Just as quickly, I wiped it away, determined to find him here in the Badlands.
If you can, the voice whispered in my ear.
I sat up, fear pounding in my ears. Suddenly, under this wide-open sky and without any transmissions hanging in the air, I paired the voice with a person. The man who’d spoken to me in the lab where I’d been tagged was the same man who’d been inside my head since the day I went to meet Zenn.
Thane Myers had followed me. The darkness settled over me like a thick blanket, and it took a long time to fall asleep.
The next morning I woke up alone. Great. Dogs couldn’t even stand my company. I chomped through a couple of bulbs, filled my water bottle, and by afternoon, stood on the edge of the Badland city. I wondered if Jag would saunter by with his real friends, his sun-stained skin glinting in the petering light, his mouth curved up in his trademark smile.
He didn’t.
My hair was wilder than the teens here. Sure, theirs was on the short side, and they didn’t hold back in the color department. Red, orange, bleached, they had it all. No wonder Jag liked my jet-black do—no one had hair exactly like mine.
I watched the Baddie teens roam the streets, living their own lives, free from the imposing rules of a Thinker. From anyone, really. What would it be like to live that way? To live without the guilt of breaking rules and disappointing my mother?
I didn’t know.
Bad girls wore plenty of earrings. Guys could keep the gel factories in business by themselves. Couples held hands, and one boy pulled his girlfriend close and kissed her on the cheek. She tucked her hand in his back pocket as they walked down the street.
Standing on the outside, I realized something. The Baddies aren’t bad because of their skin or the way they do their hair or even because of the revealing clothes. They’re bad because they’re uncontrolled.
They’re bad because that’s what I’d always been told.
A boom rocked me from my thoughts. My inner criminal urged me to run. I hid behind a cluster of rocks on the outskirts of town, expecting hovercopters, red iris recognizers, and a swarm of Special Forces agents to descend around the plume of smoke rising into the sky.
Of course nothing like that happened. A car approached, with its orange lights blinking lazily. Two men wearing blue uniforms with low-class tech lights on their sleeves questioned a few people before cleaning up a blackened mess of burnt wrappers. One said, “Firecrackers,” but I had no idea what that meant.
No intimidation. No threats. I’d been arrested for walking in the park. Apparently in the Badlands, you can blow things up and then get a coffee. I wasn’t sure if this signaled freedom or chaos.
I crouched behind the rock until the officials drove away. My joints and muscles groaned as I straightened. Tonight looked like another starry sleep.
Until I heard a voice behind me. “Vi! You made it!”
13.
Jag grabbed my hand and pulled me forward. He hugged me, smelling of soap and fresh summer air. I wanted to bury my face in his chest and inhale him right down to my toes. Instead, I pushed him away. The light was not so gone that he couldn’t see my glare. I certainly noticed his perfectly styled hair.
“I’m so glad you made it across the border.” I folded my arms a
nd focused on the horizon. “By yourself.”
“Come on, Vi, don’t be mad.” He smiled slyly, like he knew I wanted to slobber all over him.
“You’re a high-class jerk,” I said. “You left me!”
He had the gall to shrug.
“Don’t you dare shrug!”
He took an uncertain step forward that he should have taken backward.
“Stop,” I said. He’d left me in the woods—alone—to cross the border into the scariest place of my life—alone. “You. Promised.” I shoved him in the chest with every word. “You. Said. You’d. Help.”
“Vi—”
“Don’t ‘Vi’ me,” I snapped. “Why don’t you use my whole name?”
Jag opened his mouth to say something, then shut it.
“Spill it, Barque,” I said.
His mouth opened again. He squeezed his eyes closed and clenched his fists. “Look, you said I was different.” When he opened his eyes, his glare could’ve cut holes through me.
“You are.” I stepped closer to him, and this time he moved back. “It’s not a bad thing, Jag.”
“It is to me.”
“Well, maybe you’re mental.”
“Maybe you are.” He paused, and I took a swing at his pretty face.
He grabbed my wrist before I made contact. “Violet, don’t.” His voice became soft and full of apology. “I’ve been looking for you for two days.”
“That sure makes me feel better.” I tried shaking off his grip. He chuckled, but I wanted to stay mad. “Jag, don’t you get it? I told you my life was better, because of—and then you left me.”
“I know, I came back. You were already—”
“What was I supposed to do? Wait around for you? You deserve to . . . to . . . I don’t know what, but something really, really bad.” My voice cracked, totally ruining the threat.
“Please don’t be mad.” His words wrapped around me like a quilt. My anger faded, replaced by relief. Jag was here. He’d find me somewhere to sleep and something better than gel-flavored tubers to eat. Everything would be okay now.