I didn’t feel bad about sneaking out of Penny’s window. I’d done it once already, and the second time was even easier. Penny had fallen dead asleep almost immediately after her dinner of microwaved chicken nuggets. The run-in with Boss Lady had sapped all her energy.
I ate the last of the cold nuggets and walked Downhill, the streetlamps automatically flickering on with each forward step I took. I brushed nugget dust off my pants and walked through the cemetery to the Night Market, and then I got on the bus.
“Thank you for taking Amaris Shuttle Service, Name,” the voice intoned from hidden speakers. The bus sped off in a familiar winding loop. I bought blackberry candy from the beeping trolley, picking every sugar granule from between my teeth, savoring the taste for as long as I could.
Outside the window, the landscape changed. A row of vendor stalls transformed into glitzy, neon-lit bars. And then we were at the edge of the city, which was the edge of my world as I knew it.
Tourists were departing for another shuttle, which would take them on planes back to different continents. I was thinking very hard about a potential next step for myself; it was an idea both enticing and completely unhinged.
I stood at the bustling waiting station, jockeying for a position among the tourists with oversized suitcases. It was still relatively early in the evening. Puzzled travelers glanced back at me from the airplane shuttle because I carried no luggage and I wasn’t leaving with them. Rain pattered against the metal roof. Bus after bus sped here and then away.
I thought about sneaking aboard a plane to take the same overseas route that Father had over a week ago. I’d even worked out the best way to do it: knock someone out around my own height who was traveling alone, hide them in a bathroom stall, and board the plane under their identity.
I wanted to confront Father at his own conference about the holes in my Cog. Those gaps that he himself created. And I wanted him to acknowledge me—in front of all those people—as his daughter.
Considering this so soon after the shitshow at the lab earlier today felt sort of unhinged. I even thought about learning Mandarin on my own, so that maybe I’d finally understand whatever song it was that Father had embedded in me.
Maybe if I could decrypt his native language, there wouldn’t be this wide gap between us. Maybe the food I so quickly devoured—sweet sesame balls and pineapple buns and rice noodle rolls—would be that much sweeter, that much more delicious. If only I knew the language, if only I visited this home country, if only I had the right knowledge, the endless gnawing would finally go away.
But deep in my heart, I knew it was probably wishful thinking. Father hadn’t instilled the language in me on purpose. Mandarin wasn’t needed for working at the Institute. It was only a distraction from his goal of making me into his assistant. English was the only language I needed in his world.
He didn’t even bother to fill in the gaps of his personal history. Outside of what had come downloaded to my Cog, all I knew about him came from the wall of personal achievements above his office desk. And outside of performance checks, Father would barely even speak to me.
He used Penny as a shield and surrogate. Penny, who was twenty-three and subsisted off mostly beer and cigarettes. Not exactly a parental figure, honestly.
I wanted to mean something to Father, in a palpable way. Something more than I’d ever been shown by him. It wasn’t that I wanted his approval—I didn’t want to be an extension of him. I wanted one single scrap of affection. For being me, just the way I was.
I felt like a lone object, bobbing in the middle of vast nothingness. I wanted desperately to be tethered to something, someone. I knew I deserved that; everyone did.
I heard wheels rolling on the tarmac in the distance, then the roar of the takeoff. Lights blinkered in the darkness. Planes were departing for cities across the world.
I could fly to North America too. Amaris was between East Asia and North America. There were options to consider. I could hop a plane, change my name once again, and start over.
The urge to get away from Amaris was tempting.
This wasn’t the right time for my freakout, though. It was a bad idea to leave, especially now that Hugo was waiting. Me wanting to fly away and fight Father—and somehow win—was an escapist fantasy. I had to come here and almost do it to realize that. The only thing left was to get on the night bus and go back Uphill. Crawl through Penny’s window. Go to sleep. Wake up. Make it through another day while progressing with Hugo. Repeat, until Father came home.
He would have to stand up to the Institute; he would have to side with me over them regarding their horrible new plans.
If you really think he’s on your side, then why did you make Hugo? My Cog gurgled.
“I need to be sure,” I muttered to myself. “I need someone in my life.” Even Penny had agreed to my plan because she didn’t quite know what Father would do.
The possibility of true love. That was the only thing on this whole damn planet that kept me going despite the obstacles stacked against me—which included the Institute, the whole of Uphill, and maybe even my own father.
What if you never get that love? my Cog murmured. Sneaky thing, whispering snidely like that. What happens then?
“Revenge,” I whispered, which made the tourists at the waiting station jolt away, visibly disturbed by my mutterings.
I pulled up my hoodie, shuffled into the back corner, where no one else was standing, and reassured myself it wasn’t that weird of a thing to say out loud. Plenty of girls probably said it from time to time.
At least no one waiting at the bus stop was local to Amaris City. No one could’ve recognized me in this outfit either. I didn’t look like myself—not with this hoodie on, and pants that didn’t even come with one fun chain or strap. I was totally not Helga.
Tourists stepped around me, to either depart for airplanes or head into the island. Headlights flared in the dark; it meant another bus was coming soon. I could get on it and head back with the people who’d just arrived in from the airport.
A family of three tourists was clumped together. A mother’s hand squeezed a daughter’s shoulder. The father pointed to the oncoming bus. “This’ll be fun!” I heard him say. “A great experience for all of us.”
Jealousy wormed into my heart. I wanted to be in a clump with someone, just like they were. I pushed the thorny, way-too-vulnerable feeling aside. “Stay away from Downhill—unless you want to get robbed … or worse,” I threatened for emphasis. I wriggled my eyebrows as ominously as I could.
The tourists boarded the bus slowly, clutching their bags close to their chests.
I passed time by convincing a couple on their honeymoon to visit dull municipal buildings Uphill. I told a different tourist family to try out the most overpriced bland restaurants I could think of in the Entertainment District. I could’ve happily done this all night if I hadn’t seen the lone raven pecking around outside the waiting station.
I swear, it was the same damn bird that I’d seen before. It even had a little bald spot on one of its wings. It looked at me somewhat inquisitively, with a bite of sandwich in its mouth. It was going through all the garbage.
“Hello?” I tried again.
Now all the tourists were staring at me.
The bird hopped away from the station, into the dark. I followed it, vaguely aware that someone was coming after me too. A security officer, most likely, given how brisk their pace was. In any case, I would definitely outrun them.
I rushed through tangles of downward sloping rock and sand. Blackberry thickets nicked my pant legs, tearing holes in the fabric. The bird hopped along, occasionally even trying to take flight. The black wings stretched wide, but it couldn’t quite get there. It couldn’t quite get skyborne.
I was now too invested not to go in all the way to the shore. I ran past “Danger” and “Do Not Enter” signs in bright orange and yellow while someone dimly shouted after me. But I just wanted to see if it was the same raven I’d already seen or not, dammit.
Even I was starting to get out of breath, despite my well-honed muscles. I panted and continued down the slope, too determined to stop now. Salt air entered my lungs; I found myself at the very edge of the island.
“Hey!” I said, waving my arms wildly. “Could you just turn around?”
The bird looked into the water, ignoring me. It did not care that I’d chased it to the tip of Amaris City to make sure it was doing okay. It did not care that I’d torn my pants and risked acquiring a fine if some city official could catch me.
I just needed it to look around once so that I could confirm if it was the same bird or not. Then I could go back Uphill in peace.
But the bird continued to stare into the water. In the distance, I saw commercial fishing ships, which I recognized by their vast nets. A foghorn sounded a long, low warning, somewhere far in the ocean. Something was insistently bumping into the side of one of the ships—a large shape in the water, one much larger than any animal I’d ever seen before.
It was much warmer down here than I anticipated. Summer was coming earlier than I thought. The ocean wind stroked my face like a warm, feverish hand. I removed my platforms and walked over as tentatively as I could, closer to the raven.
There was an abandoned bird coop at the edge of the sand, a dark enclosure covered in washed-up debris, sun-worn and decayed. I remembered Penny telling me that the ravens had been a failed Uphill experiment. Like me, they’d ventured elsewhere. Gone wild.
And then I saw more shapes in the water: swimming shadows that looked like fish but weren’t. Pockets of water glowed with bioluminescent jellyfish. Ethereal, long armed, and toxic.
I watched as the raven bobbed up and down, beak darting between the undulating jellyfish and shoals of small red fish that looked like long trails of blood in the water. When the bird finally came up, there was a wriggling shape in its mouth. Its catch had acid-green webbed feet.
I didn’t know if I felt relieved or not when the raven finally turned to look at me. There was no way the raven I’d seen had grown so much in a few days. This bird’s eyes were different too. It tilted its head, as if to ask me, What’s your problem?
“Enjoy your meal,” I told it, feeling a bit embarrassed about the whole ordeal.
This evening had been a long diversion. It was dawning on me that I was avoiding the reality of my own life. Wanting to fly away and fight Father and then running down to the coast to see a bird was probably a normal response to being stressed though.
It was hard to think too long about what the Institute wanted to turn me into. Even if Father did side with me, I didn’t know how we’d stand up to a group with that much influence. I mean, the Institute practically defined Uphill—and it was beginning to do the same to Downhill too.
All this running around, all this trying to make things better for myself, and my future still seemed so bleak.
The bird was taking off. It had no trouble with flying at all; it’d probably been conserving its energy the whole time I’d spent chasing it. I watched as it soared away, high above the glimmering green ocean.
There was a large dark outline in the distant water, which the raven was heading toward.
“That’s one of the other islands,” a familiar voice said.
The person who’d followed me from the waiting station had finally caught up. She sounded extremely winded.
“The other islands are practically overrun with ravens. No one trims or manages the blackberries, so it’s becoming a paradise for them,” she wheezed. “More fish have been coming up the coast too. It’s like, basically a buffet for the freaking birds. I stepped on a freaking snakeskin on the way here, by the way.”
Anna glared at me, arms folded across her chest, her chin defiantly jutting out. Her matching black jacket and skirt were wrecked. There was a long scratch across her cheek. Her patent shoes were filthy. She was pretty cute, even when she looked mad.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you some questions,” she huffed, “Helga.”