I can’t hide in the forest. It’s too open. I’m too hurt and exhausted to outrun anyone, even a chubby new recruit.
So I make the impossible choice. The deadly choice. With a last gasp of cool shady air I limp into the desert and hope whoever is after me isn’t foolish enough to follow me.
Funny that survival might hinge on being stupider than your enemy.
Within seconds my lungs are burning, scorched. The air is so dry the heat rises up in visible waves around me. It sucks the moisture from my body, and sweat beads and dries almost instantly. My eyes become so dry that my lids stick to my eyeballs on each blink with a gritty feel. Breathing through my nose helps my parched mouth, but it does nothing for the fact that my body temperature seems to be rising with each step.
But I press on, because survival somehow feels less important right now than not getting caught. I spent my life behind a wall. I won’t be a prisoner again. Even if they kill me immediately after capture, even a moment of captivity would be too much. I’d rather die.
That’s big talk, isn’t it?
At first it is easy going. The sand is almost springy under my feet, and such a novel sensation after synthetic surfaces that I almost enjoy it. It cushions my aching feet as I hobble along.
After a while, though, the sand becomes loose and deep. My feet sink past the ankles with each step and I drag along like I’m wading through water. I fall, and the sand scalds my hands, but I drag myself up and forge on through this merciless sea of sand.
I start to sink deeper with every step, but in my dehydrated, almost delirious state I don’t realize exactly what is happening. First my feet feel cool, and the sensation is so pleasant I just stop and enjoy it for a moment before moving on. But when I try to pull my foot out the ground seems to grab it and hold on tight. With a supreme effort I pull my leg up and take another step. When I pull my foot out, I can see that the sand is clinging peculiarly to my shoe. I try to brush it off, but it sticks to my hand, too. It almost feels wet, but when I rub a little between my fingertips there’s no moisture.
Baffled, I try to take another step, but it is my bad ankle, and when I pull, it feels like I’m pulling my foot off. I have to bite back a scream. The sand feels like it’s sucking me down! Panicking, I turn, but my body moves while my feet stay still, and I topple in slow motion. I try to catch myself with my hands, but there’s nothing solid. They slide right through the sand to the quicksand below and I pitch down face-first. The muck fills my mouth and nose as I thrash and gasp for breath; it blinds me.
Did I just say I’d rather die than be captured? In the space of an instant I learn better.
I thrash and kick and fail, and manage to get my head above the quicksand for one desperate, blessed breath before sinking down again. I can’t swim; I’ve never been in water deeper than my bath. But I think even if I could, it wouldn’t help in this strange, clinging sand. This is thick, clawing at me. It feels like a living thing trying to swallow me.
Like the Earth itself eating me up.
I can feel my body growing cool and soft. I stop struggling. For a second it almost feels good, to give up, to hang suspended here, to know that I don’t have to run, or fight, or be lonely ever again.
Then something catches my arm, pulling me up. I’m being hauled out of the pit. Someone lays me on the scorching sand and I don’t care if it’s a Greenshirt with a gun to my head. I would kiss his boots if I had the strength, just because he gave me one last breath.
A hand wipes muck away from my mouth, my nose, almost tenderly. My eyes are still crusted with muck, and I can’t open them. My head is swimming, my lungs convulsing so I feel like I still can’t breathe.
Just before I pass out, I hear someone say, “You’re a hard girl to save.”
THE WORLD COMES back to me one piece at a time. In the beginning I can’t move. I hardly even know I have a body. Am I dead? Sounds return before anything else, before I can even feel my own skin. First there’s a rushing, a pulsing in my ears. I imagine the ocean sounds like that, surging to the shore in an endless cycle. My blood is like an ocean, the tides slowly rising in my veins. I lie in darkness, with no real sensation of my body.
A subtle smell comes next, warm and pleasant, an animal smell I would say, if I had ever encountered an animal. It makes me feel almost comfortable . . . until the rest of my body starts to wake. I feel heat in my muscles, coolness on my skin. And still I can’t see, don’t even remember how to open my eyes.
Then the pain comes, hitting me like a stone wall, and I groan, a deep, guttural sound. Everything hurts, with every kind of pain. Muscle aches and tendon tears, cuts and scrapes and sunburn and . . . a broken heart.
“Open your eyes.” I can’t tell if the voice is inside or outside my head. I feel fingers brushing the crust of dried quicksand away from my lids. Big hands. Gentle hands.
My lashes flutter. It is dark. Was I unconscious all day? I blink, and the world snaps into place as I come fully conscious.
Golden kaleidoscope orbs look back at me, a mesmerizing mix of brown and hazel and copper. Second-child eyes. I know these eyes, I think. But they’re in the wrong face.
I saw them before in the ragged hobo. But these incredible eyes are in a young man about my age, with longish chestnut hair pushed back from a broad brow and a long crescent scar curving on his left cheekbone. I’ve seen that scar before, I think, though I can’t remember . . .
I frown in confusion, and the young man laughs at me.
It makes me angry to see his mocking face, so carefree beside all of my suffering. He’s too close to me, too. It makes me uncomfortable to feel the heat of his body on my skin. Without thinking of the consequences I shove him away from me as hard as I can and try to scramble to my feet.
It doesn’t go so well. My body seems to have locked up. I stumble over my backpack, then just sort of crawl and collapse.
I’m sure he’ll fight me, but when I shoved him he just let himself roll backward like he was playing a game with a clumsy child. He’s still laughing, damn him! Laughing at my pain and my inability to fight.
“Who are you?” I demand to know. I’m crouched awkwardly a few feet away, and feel a little more comfortable with some distance between us.
He rolls to an easy sitting position, still smiling. “I guess I need to explain a few things. You know what I am, right?” He stares intently, meaningfully, his golden eyes open wide.
I nod. “I know what you are. I want to know who you are.”
“My name is . . . Lachlan.” I notice the pause. Was he deciding whether or not to lie? Which did he choose?
I think about the familiar eyes and take a guess. “And you’re the son of that old man in rags I met earlier?”
A hint of a smile twitches at the corner of his mouth, but he catches himself. “Not quite. I am the man in rags.”
My mouth gapes.
“Pretty effective disguise, wouldn’t you say?”
I can only barely believe it. In my mind I try to layer him in grime and stink, make his hair dirty and wild, clothe him in rags. If I squint, I can just see it.
“I use a few different disguises. Hobo, student, Bestial, woman. It makes it easier for someone like me to move around Eden without attracting notice.” The smile twitches again. “Unlike you, I can’t always outrun the Greenshirts. That was some impressive work.”
“You saw me?”
Again, there’s the slightest hesitation. I think if it wasn’t for the fact that people are so new to me, so alternately fascinating and frightening, I wouldn’t be paying as close attention. What is he hiding?
“I saw part of your escape. Just at the end. I’d been looking for you, you know.”
I stare at him. “You knew about me?” He nods, and the pieces start to come together in my brain. “You’re Rook’s brother?”
Lachlan nods. “You should have heard the way he told the story. There you come out of nowhere, a second child, with his giant shoulders the only thing
between you and that securitybot’s cameras. Stop, he says, to keep you from getting in the bot’s line of sight. And what do you do?”
I hang my head when I remember how I shoved Rook. He was helping me! I thought I was being so brave, and after all that was the thing that almost got me caught. Maybe it was what initially alerted the Center to my very existence.
“And he had to tackle the bot and hope that it couldn’t get a good scan of you. His supervisor was so angry with him that he got transferred to the outer circles for a six-week punishment detail. Which, as it turned out, was fortunate.”
“They would have killed me if Rook hadn’t knocked out that other Greenshirt today.”
“My brother is a good man. He joined the Greenshirts just to help . . . me.” I want to tell him I notice the pauses, realize that there are things he’s not saying, but I bite my tongue.
Instead I say, “I can’t believe I’m actually looking at an-other second child. I always assumed there must be others, but I never thought I’d meet one. How many of us are there?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know.” Before I can ask whether he’s met another second child, he asks, “How did you wind up so far from home?”
A spark of suspicion. “You know where I live?”
“One of the inner circles, I’d guess. That’s where Rook ran into you. Or you ran into him.”
I can’t help smiling, and his answering smile makes my cheeks flush. I can’t look away from his eyes. Another person like me! Meeting Lark was amazing, but this is something on an entirely different level. This is like finding family. My people. Well, my person, anyway.
“Where were you headed when the Greenshirts found you?” he presses. I open my mouth to tell him, but something urges me to be cautious. I’m almost overwhelmed by this incredible feeling of camaraderie, and I want to trust him, but I know that’s just caused by the fact that he’s also a second child. Or seems to be. Everything that’s happened has made me suspicious. I met a man with eyes like a snake’s. If he could do that, why couldn’t Lachlan get contact lenses that make him look like a second child? What if this is a trap?
“I just went out to explore,” I say cautiously. “I took an autoloop, and got lost, and . . . wound up out here.”
He nods, but I can’t tell if he really believes me. “It’s tough out there for people like us.”
“How have you managed this long?” I ask. “Do you live with your family?”
He bites his lip, and the gesture makes him look so much younger. “No,” he says, a tiny word that speaks volumes.
“Tell me,” I say softly.
He does, and by the end I have tears in eyes that I thought were all cried out.
He wasn’t a twin, but an accident. Most women are sterilized after giving birth, but if there’s any doubt about the first child’s survival, they remain fertile until the danger is thought to have passed, several years at least, to be sure. They’re supposed to be on infallible birth control, but apparently nothing is infallible. Rook was premature (though he certainly made up for it) and weak as an infant. Lachlan was conceived two years after Rook was born, and the parents—middle circle merchants, owners of a small chain of grocery stores—decided to keep him, to hide him.
“I lived like you must have lived—alone, always anxious, always a little angry, hearing about the world from the brother who was welcomed into it with open arms. My parents loved me, as far as I could tell, nurtured me. I was happy—mostly. But I know now how hard it was for them to live in constant fear of arrest. They were brave . . . but not brave enough. All along they were looking for a foster family for me.”
“As they should have,” I say, nodding approval. “It’s the only way a second child can have a normal life.”
“Until we change what normal is,” he says, a fierce passion in his eyes.
So he left his loving home at age ten, and went to his new family. It was hard enough thinking about the prospect at sixteen. I can’t imagine being torn from my family at the tender age of ten. His parents told him what a wonderful life he would have, hid their tears, and little Lachlan tried to put on a brave face. Maybe it wouldn’t be too bad, he told himself.
It was worse. So much worse.
He didn’t give me details. Part of me didn’t want them anyway. But judging from the tension in his entire body, it was probably worse than anything I could imagine.
“They made me do things,” he said flatly. “They said if I told, they’d turn me in. Me and my whole family. I couldn’t say no. At least, not when I was ten.”
They were supposed to get him the black market lenses so he could live a normal life. But they never did. He thinks they just pocketed the money his parents gave them. So even in his new home he was trapped, though he was often out at night, he said, doing the things they made him do.
When he was sixteen, though, his foster father died, and Lachlan left his foster home for good. He didn’t say it, but I get the impression that he might have had something to do with the man’s death. His big hands clench and unclench methodically when he speaks of it.
He went home again, maybe not expecting that everything would be like it was before, but believing that they would help him, hide him, that they’d had no idea what kind of life they sent him to. Rook welcomed him with tears and laughter. He’d been searching for Lachlan ever since he left. The parents, though . . .
The ten years of fear had been too much for them, and the last six had been a relief. They told Lachlan flatly that he was not welcome. They shut the door in his face.
“After that I lived on the street, getting what help Rook could manage. I’ve made a few friends, learned my way around. It’s not so bad now.”
I would express more sympathy for his story, but he tells it flatly, matter-of-factly, and I think somehow he wouldn’t welcome too much emotion right now. For myself, thinking about someone else’s suffering seems to dull my own. I want to tell him about my mother, unburden myself about everything. But I can’t quite bring myself to trust him yet.
“Good thing you have a home, people you can depend on,” he tells me. “You do have that, don’t you?”
“I . . .” Secrecy kept me safe for sixteen years. Only when I abandoned it did my life shatter. I left my safe shelter. I trusted Lark. (No, she would never betray me. I know it. No, I feel it.) Instinct tells me to keep silent now.
“Why should I trust you?” I ask, glaring at him with hostility. Maybe I’m ungrateful. He saved me, after all. But I can’t put my faith in anyone. Mom, Ash, that was all. Now it’s just Ash, and he can’t do anything to help me. Now he’s nearly as alone as I am.
Lachlan doesn’t seem at all surprised or upset at my suspicion. “You shouldn’t. And I shouldn’t trust you. Sure, we’re both second children. We both face the same penalties if we’re caught—and believe me, they’re worse than you think.”
“Worse than death?” I ask. “What could be worse than that?”
He swallows hard, and I can tell he’s trying to control his emotions. “Pray to the Earth you never find out. But I’m sure a second child would betray another one in exchange for a promise of protection. People can be weak, or selfish, or just plain scared, and do terrible things as a consequence. I don’t trust you . . . yet. But I think you can trust me a little bit, can’t you? After all, I saved you, at considerable risk to myself. The nanosand is designed to swallow up any living thing that crosses the wasteland.”
“You mean, someone made that stuff? I thought it was natural.”
“It’s almost exactly like real quicksand, except it travels. It searches out signs of life, tracks them, hunts them . . . and eats them.”
“Eats?”
“Bones and everything,” he says. “After a while the nanosand secretes acids to digest whatever organic material it swallows.”
I start frantically brushing the crumbling mud and sand from my limbs. “Easy, easy!” he says, lunging forward to catch my wrist. I freeze, and he seems to
suddenly become acutely conscious of his fingers on my skin. I know I am. He lets go, but I feel the lingering warmth where his fingers pressed. “It takes a long time, and it becomes inactive in the presence of air. You’re perfectly safe now.”
And the funny thing is, when I look at him, I feel like I am.
He’s the first stranger I’ve ever met, really. Lark wasn’t a stranger, because I’d heard about her for so many years it was like finally being introduced to my best friend. I had casual contact with a few other people, like the other laser tag players. But this is in a way the first time I’ve sat down and looked for a long time into a complete stranger’s eyes.
My brain tells me not to trust him—not to trust anyone at this point, no matter what the evidence says—but some other part of me, my heart, my skin, my blood, tells me that I can rely on Lachlan. Is it an accident of his face? That broad brow that inspires confidence, the straight strength of his nose, the earnest wide set of his eyes—he simply looks honest. Everything about him screams Trust me. That in itself makes me suspicious.
But I’m so tired, so sore, so sad. It would be easiest to lean on him. To trust him.
“And not only did I save you from nanosand,” he continues, and I think I see a hint of a smirk returning. I start to hope for the rest of the smile. “I also carried you back through the desert and more than a mile through the beanstalks. And you’re no featherweight.” He winks. No one has ever actually winked at me before. “And that’s after I chased you through most of the outermost circle. So I really went to great lengths to save you.”
It’s true. I immediately feel ashamed of my suspicions. He’s Rook’s brother, and Rook saved me twice. Lachlan’s a second child himself. There’s no reason to mistrust him. If it wasn’t for him, I’d be slowly digested in a pit of nanosand right now.
And so, haltingly, I tell him about Mom’s arrangement to send me to a foster family after getting the lens implants. I tell him how just a few hours ago I was shaken awake, taken to find the cybersurgeon who would perform the operation. How we were trapped at the roadbock. How Mom gave her life so I could get away.