EIGHT

Today is a day like every other. I wonder during my waking moments if my life is merely a dream, because it feels so much like a dream. The vagueness of it and the way that it seems so fleeting, as if everything—who I am, where I live, the people that I know—might just evaporate from me. Everything that came before is suddenly not quite so real as maybe it once was. Perhaps it’s not this day that I am dreaming but the past that I now barely remember. I try and call back to mind who I was once but it’s gone.

It’s a shape I can’t quite form, no matter how hard I try.

I can’t make out the angles, the lines.

Instead, I understand the nature of truth. That is what’s presented now. The truth is not vague and it is not slight. The truth is what’s directly in front of me when I wake up, and absolutely nothing more.

“Good morning,” everybody says (without fail, every single person here). That is good manners.

“Good morning,” I reply. We are all so polite. Sometimes people say my name. My name—sewn into the back of my clothes, written in the front of my books. printed on my door, my private space, my room. Everything with my name on it is mine.

Chan. This belongs to Chan.

What do you feel? asks Gaia when I wake up. Every day, I hear the alarm first and then her voice, which for some reason is inside my head. I thought it was a mistake, that I was broken, the first time; and then it was explained. It’s just for me. Talk to her, because she won’t be there forever. Gaia’s voice is cold. She sounds female, and she must live here as well, but I have never met her. But she is always here—every morning and every evening—and she is kind, and I’m told not to be scared of her. I’m told to open up to her, that talking with her is a private opportunity just for me, for the moment.

So I do. I tell her if I have had a dream, and I tell her if I am unsettled. I can imagine her nodding while I talk, listening carefully and really attempting to understand every little thing that I am saying.

We are assigned different tables for mealtimes because we’re told we have to socialize. We talk about our days and we discuss issues that have arisen. Sometimes we tell each other secrets and sometimes we talk about our morning conversations with Gaia.

Everything is as open as it can be.

One night I am at a table with people that I don’t know, the next with more people that I do not know, the next with somebody from the first night again and two people from the second, the next with new people. Over and over. In the morning, the voice in the rooms asks us who we like, who we enjoy spending time with. “Do you think you form attachments easily?” Gaia asks. “Do you enjoy the time you spend with this person?”

They ask us to remember the names of our friends. Names are important, they say. They have power and they have meaning. A name is an identity. It’s so much more than just a word.

Every few days we have a meeting with Doctor Gibson. He’s a doctor, “But of the mind,” he says.

“Any doctor can mend a broken bone. We’ve gotten to be so good with them, you understand. We can heal those in minutes—moments even, as fast as it takes to take a breath if the bone isn’t too badly broken. But this is about something else entirely, Chan. This is about what’s wrong with society. Sometimes we have something we can fix, and so we should. We would think nothing of operating on that broken arm. There’s always something that we can smooth over, you know? So think about your art sessions.” In art, we paint and we draw and we sculpt. “The clay you use? It’s rough, isn’t it?”

I agree with him. A lot of being here and succeeding is about agreeing.

“So when it’s done and you want it to be pleasing to look at, to touch, to be something that is useable? That’s when you smooth it down. That’s when you have to make it what it can be. You see that? Not what it is, but what it can be.”

I agree again.

“We are all like that clay, Chan. Or we’re like a canvas, if you prefer. Do you like to paint? What happens if we make a spill, if we paint something that we don’t want to have painted, something that we need to get rid of?”

I tell him that we paint over it, that we start again.

“Exactly. Exactly!” He points into the air, like a punctuation mark. He chuckles. It’s a fun little chuckle, quite sweet, nice to listen to. “We start again. I was trapped once, so I started again. Now I’ve got a family. Do you want a family?”

I want to say that I’ve got one, but . . . no. That’s not true.

I want one.

“I’ve got children,” Gibson tells me. “Two of them, because they’re twins, which makes us rare, you know? That’s like nature’s way of giving you special dispensation to get around the rules. But if you want a child, if you want a family, you’ve got to succeed and get out of here. Become a part of the infrastructure. That’s all any of us wants.” He sits in a leather chair and I sit on one that’s exactly the same, directly opposite him. There’s a table between us with a bottle of fresh water and two metal mugs. He pours the water out, like a ritual, even if I’ve only drunk a few sips from my cup. “So, you should tell me what you remember. Tell me about your childhood, if that helps.”

I tell him that I remember being a child. He nods as if that’s progress and he asks me to tell him more. But all I know is that I was. I was myself but smaller, and I was cared for.

I absolutely remember that I was cared for.

I remember that I perhaps used to sleep badly. It’s less a specific memory of why, but of what used to wake me up (or maybe of whatever it was that used to keep me from sleeping)—but I did have trouble sleeping at one time. That’s over now. This—waking up when I do, when I want to, feeling fine, sleeping safely—is the only truth worth considering. Now when I sleep, I don’t wake up until it’s morning, until that alarm rings out—when I hear the sound of birds and insects and then Gaia’s voice. I pass the day and then it’s evening again, the same as the night before. I put my head down, I shut my eyes, and I go to sleep. They tell us to go over what we’ve done that day, to think about what’s happened and who we are. I do this, and it never takes long before I’m asleep.

And then I am awake again.

Every morning the room is exactly the same as it was the morning before. I think of it as being home, my home. This place is all that I have.

I dream, but when I wake up I can’t remember what exactly it was that I dreamed—just the feeling that I’ve been somewhere else, that I was somewhere else, doing something that wasn’t this. That I was a different person.

At breakfast, I’m with three people I’ve sat with before. We all say hello and we introduce ourselves because we’re bad with names. There are so many people to meet and so much to remember. And memories seem slippery, like they’re hard to cling onto. You have to really try. You have to say names under your breath, until they properly take hold.

“I’m Cassie,” one girl says. She’s younger than me by a few years—pretty, but with a look of permanent confusion on her face. Almost everything she says is like a question, lifting up at the end of sentences. “You’re Chan?” I nod. “I remember you,” she says, “from before. You’re new here, right?”

“I don’t know how long you have to be here before you’re not new anymore,” one of the other diners says. His name is Tom, and he’s enormous, aggressive, bearded (and it’s scraggly even though they cut our hair for us—it grows quickly on him, I think). “I’m still new to some people and I’ve been here for months now. Longer.” He scratches at his face through the hair while he thinks. “I don’t remember.” We are told to not worry about things that we don’t remember; that they don’t matter, not in the grand scheme of things. That’s Doctor Gibson’s philosophy. We’re here now.

I think: But where were we before?

“Anyway. New details this week. That’s good. That’s what I’ve been thinking about. Where I’d like to be working. I’d like to get something inside. I’ve been learning programming, which is good. That’s a job I would like when I’m out of here.” Tom scratches as if he’s got lice. He needs to have his beard shaved, but they only do that every few days. Hair itches when it’s growing back in, I know. I don’t know why I know that. “Gibson says we should have a job that is practical, you know, because we can get a placement if we have a skill.”

“That’s what we should focus on?” Cassie asks, or says. One or the other. She doesn’t let anybody take the reins afterward. “Because I’ve been thinking about art, you know? That might be something that I could do?”

“That’s hard,” Tom says. “It’s not practical. To paint, you know. Do you have a viewpoint? Do you have something to say?”

“I think I do?”

I push my food around in its bowl: cereal, brightly colored and so sweet it hurts my teeth. They cleaned my teeth a few weeks ago—sat me in a chair, sedated, and blasted away the dirt on my teeth with this precision laser held in the shaking hand of a dentist who didn’t seem entirely sure about his job, like he was too young or too old or just not trained enough. My gums still hurt. Cold food, warm food, sweet food: It seems as if everything makes my mouth ache.

“You’ve got to be sure. It’s hard. That’s what Doctor Gibson says.”

“I should get a proper job when I leave here?”

“Yeah, for certain. Something serious.”

Every conversation here is the same, I think. They sound the same. They start the same, end the same, drift off with no sense that anything’s finished. Everything is in progress.

The other boy at the table doesn’t say anything or even look at the rest of us. He has stubble on his head and the red fuzz of it on his face—a beard, or the beginnings of one. It’s nothing like Tom’s though, which is patchy. This one is even. He stares down at his bowl just as I do—lifting the spoon, letting the milk run off it onto the grains. Circles of pink and green swim in the white. I catch him staring at me, trying not to let me see. But he looks and then he looks away. We both let Tom and Cassie talk, and they go on and on until the bell rings, and then we walk to our classes.

My stomach rumbles because I didn’t eat.

I ask Gibson what I should do for a job.

“You think about that?”

I tell him that everybody else does.

“You don’t strike me as somebody who cares what others think,” he says. “Do you have any desire about what you want to do?” I don’t say anything. That’s the easiest way to get the conversation moving if you want it to, if you want to know what Gibson’s angling toward when he asks you a question that he doesn’t really expect you to have an answer for. “So there’s working with your hands or your head. Either of those seem like something you’d enjoy doing?”

Head, I tell him.

“I don’t know. You’re pretty athletic,” he replies, “maybe that’s in your favor. Strong as well.” I don’t ask him how he knows that because I don’t care. “You’ll work it out. We’ll work it out together. You believe that, don’t you?”

I do, I say. He makes a note of that. I think he’s watching how fast I reply; what my face does when I reply. I don’t know why he would care.

“Tomorrow, I’ve got another test for you. You feel ready for one?”

I do, I say. Of course.

“Good. Because I think we should step things up a little, see some real progress.” He smiles. Smiles make you trust somebody. Smiles are easy to understand.

The test begins the same way the previous one did. A warden leads me to one of the shops in the town. This is where they sell food that comes from the cities. We earn money through working and then we spend it here. Commerce, they say, is a lesson in itself. He stands me outside the shop and he says that I’m to go inside and buy myself something. It doesn’t matter what. I can choose. He gives me a card loaded with money. I ask him how much money.

“Your choice,” he says. “You buy whatever you think you can pay for.” He stands back and folds his arms across his chest and he watches as I walk forward. There’s no direct sunlight in this part of the town because we’re inside what used to be a mall and there’s a roof over us. There’s a huge entrance at one end, and they keep all the doors and windows open at all times. The air outside might be nearly too hot to bear, but they need ventilation—that’s what they say. The ventilation lets the wind from outside in, and it brings sand with it that whips around into shoes and eyes and hair. The shops are different. They’re air-conditioned, cool and welcoming—a respite. It makes you want to open their doors.

“Good morning,” the shopkeeper says. I smile at him. “You have a look around,” he tells me, and he whistles something—a song I’ve heard before, in this shop. “You mind if I put some music on?” He doesn’t wait for me to answer. The sound system in the shop turns up, some old song. I don’t know instruments. Some people here learn them, play them, write songs, play in the band that performs every Sunday evening in front of the center. The song jangles. And your bird can sing, the singer goes. The shopkeeper sings along.

I look at the shelves: pastries, the scent of chocolate wafting from them. I love that smell. It reminds me of something that I don’t remember. In the corner of the room, a whirring fan; a counter for the shopkeeper to stand behind; expensive items on rails and racks: clothes, shoes. More expensive still: technology, tablets and drones. And then, a locked cabinet—a new-model striker, a knife. I recognize it. I feel like I know it.

“Any idea what you’re after?” the shopkeeper asks. I think I recognize him. He’s a warden, I’m sure. Working here on his days off, or maybe the other way around.

I tell him that I’m not sure.

“When you are . . .” he says, and the sentence ends like that—trailing off.

I find a shirt. It reminds me of something from before. Memories like this, they’re like a knot in my gut—I don’t know where they come from or when, but there’s something about them, an echo deep inside me. This one has a hood. I am drawn to these things—something to pull over my head, to cover my eyes. It feels like something I’ve worn before. I look at the rest of the shelves and the memories that feel like they’re trying to surface. Everything here feels like I should remember it.

“That’s nice,” he says. He’s watching me touch the shirt with the hood, watching me take it from the hanger and pull it around me, and discover that it fits me. They said to buy anything.

I tell him that I want this. He smiles.

“You want to wear it now?” he asks.

I do. He reaches over and finds the tag, and he keys the price into his tablet.

“Got a card?” I hand it over, and he scans it. He frowns, scans it again. “There’s not enough funds here,” he says. “I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to keep this.” He reaches over and pulls the hoodie from my back, yanking my arms out. He puts it on the counter. “Maybe don’t try to spend money you don’t have in my shop, okay?”

I apologize. He puts the top on the counter, right in front of me, and he coughs.

“Excuse me,” he says. He coughs harder, and then he covers his mouth, and he walks to the doorway that leads to the back of the shop. He coughs, and I hear him cough louder and louder. He can’t see me. I can’t see him. There’s nobody else in the shop. The hoodie is in front of me—teasing me, taunting me.

I don’t pick it up. I leave the shop. Outside, the guard asks how it went.

I didn’t want anything, I tell him. He nods, tightens his lips, and squints his eyes.

“Let’s go,” he says.

Gibson asks about the shop. He’s interested, desperately interested in everything I have to say. He records the conversation and a small camera drone buzzes around the office, zooming in, noting everything.

“Did you not want to take the clothes?”

I say that I didn’t.

“But they were there. And he wouldn’t have known.” I don’t tell Gibson that he would have known, and that’s just the same. And it’s a test. It’s not a real situation. And beyond that, I wouldn’t take them. They aren’t mine to take. The shopkeeper was nice to me, didn’t do anything to bother me. Why should I hurt him in any way? “Did you change your mind about them?”

I say that they weren’t mine to take. That’s stealing.

He nods. “Excellent work,” he tells me. “From where you were to here. You’re really doing so very well.”

That’s the end of the meeting. He smiles at me to let me know that I’m free to leave. But I sit there for just a little while longer in case I think of something else to say.

I notice that somebody’s watching me while I’m sitting in the library in my downtime, sorting the books people have checked out. I go through them and return them to the shelves where they belong. It’s a job, one that I volunteered for. I like the stories: I glance at the backs, trying to feel if they are something that I will fall into or something that will push me away. And then I file them alphabetically back into the racks. The ones that capture me, I sit and I read the first few pages and I try to imagine where the story is going to go, where it’s going to end up. The best ones take you away from where they begin and then back again. They understand that it’s the journey, not the ending. The end can be the same as the beginning, and that’s okay.

The boy watching is pale, his skin the color of dust. We are not allowed to bring dust here, that’s a rule. Some people clean and they make sure it stays clean. Dust is skin itself—and hair, and tiny parts of us that we abandon. We shed our skin and grow new skin, like snakes (as I have read). I know him. I saw him at breakfast. It’s been two days, and his hair has grown more. Now it’s a thin red sheen, a glow upon his scalp. He comes up to me when I’m reading a book about myths, things that we used to believe on Earth but now we know aren’t real: vampires, werewolves, mermaids. Lies, all of them.

“Chan,” he says.

He knows my name. I tell him I’m surprised.

“I’ve got a memory for names,” he tells me. “My name is Jonah.” He holds out his hand to shake mine; his skin is somehow colder than I thought it would be. It’s nice. Everything here is so hot all the time, and he’s not.

I have a feeling that I’ve known him. Like the items in the shop. There’s something in the past. But as Gibson says, that doesn’t matter. What matters is the truth of being here, of being now.

I tell Jonah that it’s nice to meet him.

At dinner, I see Jonah in the corridor, heading to the same room as I am. Dinner takes place across three large rooms, each with multiple tables set out. Tonight Jonah and I share a room, not a table. He stares at his food, pushes it around the plate. Eats some of it, but not all. He looks over at me but doesn’t stare, just a few glances.

As we’re leaving, he hands me a note. We’re shuffling out the door to get back to whatever activity we’re filling our evenings with, and he slips it into my hand. I don’t read it until I get back to my room.

I feel like I know you, it says. Isn’t that strange?

He comes to the library and he hands over a book. He opens the pages to show me a line from it. We appreciate the words. He sits on the floor opposite where I am, where I’m putting the books back and taking my time with it. I give him some books for him to take away. Ones that I have enjoyed.

I ask him about the note, where he thinks he knows me from.

“I can’t say,” he tells me. It’s not a refusal, just that he doesn’t know. I don’t know either. They tell us when we first get here that it’s to be expected—because we’ve been somewhere before, we all know that. Different places, different lives. They say, You are here because there was something terrible that happened to you, something that is beyond your control, something that’s too bad to think about. Trust us, they say; you don’t want to. Sometimes you’ll wonder what it was that happened to you before, they say, what your life was like. There’ll be a gnawing in your gut and a tugging in your mind that you’re forgetting something that should be remembered. Well, trust us: You should not remember it. The truth that is in front of you is all that matters.

When they first woke me up here, they asked me if I remembered my name. It’s the first thing that they said to me. Do you know who you are? I was in a room with devices that I have never seen since and don’t want to see again. The memory of them—dense black boxes whirring away, something medical and evil about them—makes me feel sick. I told them my name and they were happy with that. They asked me my favorite color. I remembered that. They asked me why I was there, and it was gone. I told them that I didn’t remember, that I couldn’t quite reach the memory. Explain that to us, they asked.

So I said it’s a like a fog, and there in the fog are the things that I’m trying to say to you. They are there somewhere, and I can see them, I can nearly catch them, touch them; but they’re running, and faster than I am. That’s how it feels. I know I was somewhere before this, and I know it was a place other than this. But the details? They’re gone. I can’t remember.

I cried and they comforted me. They told me that it would all get better. This is the worst part, they told me. Before this, things were bad for you. Everything after this will be good. You forget the bad things. Why would you want to remember them?

I wonder if Jonah is my bad thing that I’ve forgotten.

Or maybe if I am his.

Here is my room. I have a space all my own. There are four walls and a door. The door has a lock that I can control, but so can the people who work here, and that’s important. We’re taught it’s for our safety. We understand that, because those are the rules. One door opens and another one shuts. Not literally, but inside us. We are able to protect ourselves, but sometimes we need someone or something else to protect us.

I have pictures on the walls of what this place was like before. It’s sweltering hot outside, so hot that you can only cope for minutes at a time. Your skin will crackle and pulse, your sweat will pool, your lips will dry out, and you’ll suffer. We’re told a healthy fear of death is something worth having. I’ve been out there—because we’re taught that freedom is allowed and isn’t to be feared. But inside is safe—or safer, certainly. So the room has a device, a small box that maintains the temperature for me. I can change it, but only a little—if I’m too cold or too warm. Depending on the day, I could be both. Sometimes I just can’t seem to settle on one side. I have a few things: a table for my books, a lamp on the wall, and a mirror on one wall that’s dark and hard for me to see myself clearly in. I don’t like to look into it. But it’s mine. And bed sheets which we are encouraged to embroider ourselves: to build up designs, to thread needles through them into patterns, words. Mine has flowers, stars, the faces of a family that I don’t remember, but that I know.

Agatha. I told the doctors that one of them was called Agatha, and they asked me where that came from, but I didn’t know. They asked me to try and remember, and I have tried. But not too hard, because she is not here.

We all contribute to dinner. Everybody here has a job and we all bring what we can to the table. Family style, we eat. Some of the farmers bring their vegetables. From the growing rooms, they bring us beef and chicken, and it’s roasted by the people who work in the kitchen. I don’t have a job yet because I haven’t been here long enough. I volunteer with the books, but it’s not a real job. I’m still learning, they tell me.

If you say that you’re tired or that something’s wrong, the wardens ask, “Don’t you want to be productive?” Because sometimes something does go wrong. Sometimes my head buzzes and I’m not here. I’m standing somewhere else and looking at my scars and running my hands through my hair and remembering when it was shorn, when I was another person. Blood on my hands and stuck underneath the bitten-down fingernails. Then they tell me that it was all a dream. They say, The problem with dreams is how easily they slip out, how easily they become a part of who you are, how unlike the truth of our reality they are when you really examine them. Dreams are what make us individuals, they are what make us special. You are special, we are all special.

I want to tell them that I’m not. I could be anybody.

Jonah comes to me in the morning. He knocks on my door.

“I’ve been told to take you to your assignment,” he says. Which means that they’ve finally decided where I’ll be doing my proper job, and that I’m ready to contribute. “You’re on the roads,” he says.

I don’t want that. I tell him that I don’t want to go, not today. Another day.

“That’s not how it works,” he says. He hands me a suit to wear that will keep the heat off. It goes over me, over every part of my body. It even covers the shoes that they gave me. There are fasteners right up the neck—to my hair—and Jonah helps me with them. “It’s not so bad,” he says. “There are worse work details.” I help him with his suit, and my fingers touch the scars on his neck that run all the way along it like puncture marks, like rows of teeth.

I ask him how they happened.

“I don’t know,” he says. I can feel the grooves of them, the scarred flesh.

I have my own scars, I tell him. Strange, isn’t it.

“What?”

I say that we should probably remember them because they were enough to damage us completely. When you’re that damaged, how can you forget it?

“Maybe you need to? To move on. To deal with whatever happened.”

We walk out of the barracks, down through the streets covered with tarps. No sky here, but the heat is overwhelming already. The suits don’t stop the heat, they just stop the sun. They protect us from real damage, but they don’t stop the discomfort. We sweat as soon as we’re outside the safety of the enclave, a gulf of heat blasting toward us. We head down the streets around where we live—swept clean by the bots, kept as pristine as can be—all the way to the outskirts. We don’t really talk when we’re out of the buildings because it’s harder to breathe—at least until we’ve got the masks on, and they’re reserved for those working on the road. Besides, it’s easier to be quiet, to conserve your energy. Those are the first rules I learned here and I never forget them.

WELCOME TO PINE CITY, a sign at the edge of the road says. It’s a message from another time, when this was a proper town, when people lived here. People who weren’t part of this facility worked here and went to school here, but the population number on the sign is lost, scratched away. The town was abandoned, like so many towns. It was too expensive to convert them, to make them habitable. All we have access to now is the main street, which is where our facility sits: the town’s abandoned shops, a few houses, and the entrance to a mall on one side. There used to be much more but it’s all in disrepair. The streets are overgrown or they’re barricaded off. We don’t care—we don’t need them.

I look at the sky as the tarps end, as we walk out into the open. There’s a box full of helmets with masks that hang from the front of them. Jonah hands me one. It’s dark mostly, with an entire front made of something like glass. But they’re all caked with mud and dirt; the only thing you can really see through them are the eyes.

“On your face, like this,” he says. When he speaks it’s muffled, distorted. “Just put it on and breathe normally. It’s fine,” he tells me. He reaches out and touches my shoulder to reassure me. He knows that he should be protecting me from any fears I have because that’s what we’re told. Don’t rely on yourself alone. Trust your friends, the people around you. Everybody wants you to succeed.

I tug the mask down over my face. It’s so close, so tight. It’s unsettling, because then all you can see is grime through the glass. But I can still see Jonah. He mimes breathing deeply, and so I do, too. The air comes through. It’s bitter and stale—filtered. We need the air so we can breathe if we get too hot. There’s coolant and repellent in the lining of the masks, and it’s a relief. It’s not like being in the cool of air conditioning, but it’s nice. Out here when you’re working, you need something to keep you going. I’ll be out here half a day, nothing more, Jonah has explained. They make us start before the sun gets highest, before it properly begins to cook the landscape. Then we go back and they run cold baths for us. We recover, relax.

But first, we fix the road. The hard surface has bubbled and broken up, which means that supplies can’t get here from the cities. There are only a few cities left now. They taught us that the world roasted and collapsed. Everything went back a hundred years—more even—and there was murder and violence, but then it started going forward again—but at a creep, a crawl. We can’t just reset to where we were. So now we are here. Here is Pine City—not a city at all, but a town that was lost, and now we are remaking it as we ourselves are remade. We are only here until we’ve been revised, that’s what Gibson keeps telling us; then, one day, we’ll be taken somewhere else—to one of the cities, or maybe even abroad. Some other countries need a lot of help. They’re worse off than we are. They’ve got people who haven’t started going forward again. No patches, yet. You’re person two-point-oh, Gibson says. None of us really understand what that means.

“Through here,” Jonah says. There’s a path in between two rocks, like a vein in the side of the road, leading toward crates covered in reflective stuff that shines and spins the sun’s heat off in every single direction. There are tools here. “These are what we use to break down the road and then later—tomorrow—we go over that part, and we fill it in. Okay? It’s a two-day cycle. Today, tomorrow. Always today and tomorrow. Three times we do that, then a day off. Take this.” His muffled voice is hard to hear. He hands me something that looks like a shovel but is pointed and sharp at the end. I can tell he’s smiling; I can see it in his eyes. Even though his face is mostly hidden behind the filthy glass, somehow I know exactly what he looks like.

We walk back up the path and then follow the road—him in front, me lagging behind. There are already people working here: four of them, working in pairs. One of each pair is digging into the road, the other is picking up the shards and throwing them to the side. The road itself is hacked and ruined, huge holes and cracks along it.

“It’s all about infrastructure,” Jonah says, as if that’s something he’s thought of. But it’s from our lessons, we’re told that. A road is infrastructure. So that’s what we’re doing, what everybody is doing: trying to rebuild infrastructure. Right now, we are the ground force; we do the really crucial stuff, the work that allows the rest of it to happen. “Watch them. Do what they do; it’s pretty easy work. And then we get out of here.”

I lift the shovel, jam it down right into the ground. I push it down harder than I thought I might, putting real force behind it. The ground shatters, it seems. Bits of the old covering and stone and mud flying up.

Jonah nods at me, that I’m doing this properly. Again and again, over and over. Something about this work makes me feel better. It’s cathartic, is what Agatha would say.

No. Who’s Agatha?

Everything goes blank for a second. A moment. I stand. There’s wind, which I can’t feel through the suit but I can see—the bushes at the side of the road are moving in it, pushing themselves this way and that.

I feel a hand on my arm, and hear a voice. “What’s wrong with you?”

I say that I’m fine, which is only really a reaction, the words that you’re meant to say even when you’re not. When people ask that, they don’t want the truth. But it’s not Jonah’s voice and not his hand. I look up and there’s another girl there. No, not a girl. She’s older than I am, but not by much. I can’t see her face, can’t really see anything but the shape of her silhouetted with the sun high behind her—her dark outline, the pose of how she stands, like she’s broken, barely clinging together, yet somehow still so powerful it’s unsettling.

I know her. I don’t know how or where from, but I know her.

“Don’t fall,” she tells me. Her voice is jagged, the sound of coarse glass in a throat. Her speech isn’t quite right—stilted, her tongue and teeth stumbling over the words as they come out.

I nod.

“I’m Polly,” she says, her voice muffled. I tell her my name. She nods. I see her eyes staring out from the darkness of her mask.

I know her, I’m sure of it.

I watch Polly while we work. I’m okay, I tell myself over and over. It’s like a mantra every time I lower the shovel. I’m okay. Jonah and I work faster than the other pairs, maybe because I’m new to the job. They all talk about how they’ve been out here weeks now. This road—the good, smooth bit that we walked down to get here—that’s been done by them, or a stretch of it has been. Past where we are, the surface is torn up, hacked apart by the heat, by nature, trees and plants growing through. There’s such a long way to go. In the distance, at the end of the road, I can see something of a city on the horizon: towers jutting up, a mass crowded around their base. I wonder what city that is. I wonder if I’ve ever been there.

I ask Jonah if he minds not being able to remember the before.

“No,” he says. He doesn’t pause. “Because it’s for our benefit.” He picks up the lumps of tarmac that I’ve brought up and throws them to the side. We don’t clear them from that part. That’s a waste. They’ll be there until they’re not, until nature swallows them up. The infrastructure is all that matters, not the mess that we leave behind us. “If it wasn’t, then maybe. Maybe. But I know that I can’t have been happy.” He touches his neck, reaching up through the line between the suit and the helmet, his voice wilting. “Some things are markers, I think, of everything that we should be willing to leave behind.” Then he’s quiet.

The others take up the conversation, shouting so that they can be heard. They talk about how they’re happy here, how being in the facility is good for them. They feel well and they feel healthy and they’re learning so much. All of these things that they didn’t know before—gaps that are being filled in—and they think it’ll make life in the city that much easier. All except Polly. She doesn’t speak, but I desperately want her to. I know her, could recognize something in her eyes. It’s like there’s a word on the tip of my tongue that I want to spit out, that won’t quite form for me.

I ask the others if they can remember where they came from. They can’t, not really.

“But I have a sense of what the city was like, sure. That I know,” one of them says.

“When we see the pictures, I remember that. I remember how high the buildings were.”

“And I remember that they were cooler than here. That’s true, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know if this is right,” Polly says, interrupting the others. She stops working, she takes off her helmet, and she stares at me. Like a bell ringing, the memory chimes. Her hair is short, cropped close to her head. There’s a scar on her face, more scars running down her neck. “How can I know if I can’t remember what my life was like before?”

“Because they told us,” one of the others says. “They told us that we were in trouble. The truth is that they are saving us.”

“And we just believe it?” Her words are clunky, like she’s struggling to find them.

“It’s the truth,” Jonah says. “They have given us something to believe in. That’s as good a reason as any.” He looks at my shovel. I’ve stopped working. “It isn’t time to have a break yet,” he says. He waits until I start again, then he picks up the pieces that I break away from the road and throws them to the side.

Doctor Gibson tells me that he’s been listening to my morning conversations with Gaia and that he’s a little concerned about what he’s heard.

“You’ve been dreaming?” he asks.

I tell him that I have. He already knows, so I can’t tell why he’s bothering to ask, what the point of the question is.

“But you can’t remember your dreams? I want to say that’s natural. Some of the things we’re doing here, they’re going to be confusing to you because they’re new. Did you know before you came here you didn’t have the education you’re getting here? You were practically somebody else.”

I ask him who I was, then. He laughs out loud, he slaps his knee.

“You were you. I didn’t mean that literally. I meant . . . You weren’t as whole as you are now. But you were Chan. You’ve always been Chan. That’s crucial, your individuality.” He puts his hands together, like an arrowhead. “You’re special, Chan. We all are.” And then he relaxes again, sits back. He consults his notes with a side-glance. “Are you feeling prepared for the world now? You’re making good friends?”

He’s heard me talk about Jonah, about Polly. I don’t know if they’re friends or what they are. They’re people that I know. Something gnaws at me—about friendship, about trust.

“Look, there are some simple rules here,” he says, “and the biggest one is that we’re working for you. We’re doing all of this for you. This is my program, did you know that? I’m in charge here. We’re all making contributions to society now as we rebuild, and this is mine. You’re working on the roads? That’s yours, for now. Later, you’ll go to a city—probably one of the newer ones, one of the growing cities—and you’ll get a job, you’ll make a family. That will be your contribution. Do you understand?”

I do.

He seems pleased. “You’ll want to think about what you hope to get out of here, as well. This experience that you’re having here, it’s second to none. Without this, you would be somewhere else. In a gutter maybe, or dead. Certainly worse off than you are now.” He pauses then looks at the buzzing camera drone. It flies around, settling in front of my face. “Do you ever think about death?” Gibson asks.

Don’t die.

I tell him that I do, but that I don’t know why. I tell him that I don’t want to.

“That you don’t want to die, or don’t want to think about it?” he asks, but I don’t have an answer. “I think both are perfectly normal—rational, even,” he says. He smiles. The session is over.

It’s been explained repeatedly, because this is what we have to learn: the history of how we got here, as people, to this point. How we ruined our planet because we didn’t care. We overpopulated it, we crowded it, and we robbed it. There’s a story about cities that ran out of water because they acted as if everything wasn’t getting hotter; a story about bits of the world that fell into the sea because the tide rose up and wore away coastlines, lapping chunks out until the land just gave in; a story about how the cities died when the electricity did, and everybody had to try again to build new infrastructures.

Ninety percent of the world’s population gone in less than half a century. Those who were left were crammed into the cities that they built, that they thought they could adapt. Everything about this planet was set back in time. We’re not where we should be. I ask about the stars, about space. Because I want to know why we’re not up there. They say that we never tried, not really. It was too much work. We don’t have the technology. We’re stuck here and we have to make the most of it.

That’s what moving on is: It’s adaptation.

I am out on the road again, this time without Jonah. This time I’ve got Tom, the bearded boy from breakfast a few days back. He’s younger than I am, but he’s been here much longer. He’s used to everything here at this point. He’s preparing to leave, to go to a city, to make a new start. He talks about his potential life while we work, while he shovels and I pick up after him. He prefers the shovel, he tells me.

“Because it’s moving forward, you know? Everything with it, it’s progress. That’s what this is all about. You get going, get moving. Do something. Feels good to do something, that’s what I’ve learned.” He talks and talks, and we stop when the sun is just too hot. We drink water from coolers that barely work in this heat. The water is bath-warm, barely refreshing at all. With my helmet off, I can take only a couple of minutes of the heat, nothing more. Then my skin starts to burn, slowly but surely. An hour of the heat and I’ll be crackling. You lose water from your body quickly. Dehydrate and pass out, then that’s it for us.

Don’t die. I hear that again, a voice that I know. Somewhere deep inside me.

“What about you?” Tom asks me. “You just have to have an idea,” he says, “because that’s how you move forward. Haven’t you had sessions with Gibson? He’s amazing. Really helped me work out what I was doing.”

“Gibson’s a liar,” Polly says. I didn’t even see her. She keeps her head down, focused on her work. But now she stops, pulling her helmet off to join us, yanking the mask from her face. The sun is behind us and makes her squint as she stands and talks to us, her eyes narrowed, her hand raised above her forehead. Those scars. I wonder how she got them. “They say it’s the truth, but the truth would be answers. Did I ask to be here? Do I want to be here?”

“I do,” Tom says.

“Because you’ve been told you do. You’ve been told that this is what you want. They talk to us like we’re children. I do not want to be here. I do not want to sleep here. I do not want to stay here, but they will not let us leave. They say we want to be here, that we are better. They say that they are telling us the truth. But I think that they’re lying to us.”

“You’re just pissed because you aren’t learning as fast as the rest of us,” Tom says. “Not my fault you’re slow.”

Polly hits him. She’s so fast I barely see it. Her hand is suddenly in his gut, buried in the belly of his suit, and then he’s winded, on his knees, sobbing. He’s desperately trying to take in breath, but it’s hard with the heat, with the air as thin as it is. I help him by putting the bit from his mask into his mouth, pushing his helmet back onto his head. He rolls back onto the floor, clutching himself.

Polly doesn’t say anything. She steps back. Her face is blank. Her partner runs up and bends down to help Tom to his feet. Tom’s coughing now and there’s blood bubbling between his lips, pooling in the mask near his chin. Washing out the mud that was in there first.

In Polly’s hand, I see a shard of something sharp. She opens her fingers and drops it. Tom’s suit is a mess of blood soaking through the fabric.

“Help me!” Polly’s partner screams and I do, as do the others—lifting Tom up, supporting him as best we can. He sobs, and in his helmet the sobs echo around, amplified and muffled at the same time. We carry him back, his weight immense.

Polly walks behind us. I step away from Tom as we get closer to town, as he starts to shake—trembling and twitching—and the others begin to run with him. They head to the compound, bursting through the doors, howling for help.

“I did that,” Polly says. She’s quiet and speaks so slowly, every word carefully chosen. She doesn’t get anything wrong, though; she’s just measured. Her own breathing is hard, so I help her with her helmet, with her mask. We put them to one side and we go indoors. There’s a trail of blood on the floor and the sounds of panic from further in. I take my outer suit off and I wipe my sweat down with the towels left by the door. I’ll shower, but not now. I feel like Polly needs me, and I don’t want to leave her alone. “I have hurt him,” she says, finally.

I say that he might be dead. From the look on her face, in her eyes, I can tell that she hadn’t even considered that she might have gone that far, done that much damage. She takes off her own suit and I notice her arm. It’s been cut off just below the elbow, and there’s a replacement, an augment that pulses with wet-looking metal and skin grafts where it meets her flesh. My brain hurts. It swims, clouding my vision. She wipes her forehead then the skin on that arm, and she flexes the metal fingers that held the shiv that cut Tom. She walks away from me down the corridor, both hands raised, as if she’s surrendering to something that she knows they’ll want her to pay for.

I don’t see Polly or Jonah for the next few days. I keep my head down and I work outside with new people who either don’t want to talk or insist on asking me about who I am, how long I’ve been here, if I remember anything from who I was before.

I tell them nothing—that’s all I feel I have to offer.

Polly is being held in solitary, go the whispers. She’s been taken off for more drastic teaching. She’s not quite right, not working with the system here. She’s been here six months and she should be—the phrase that people seem to use a lot, far too much—revised by now. I don’t even know what that means. I feel healthy. I feel fine. Even as I look at my scars, I can see that I’m not ill. There’s no redness to the flesh anymore, nothing that hasn’t healed up. My eyesight isn’t good, so they give me glasses and I wear them when they ask me to, when they remind me to. They say that they’ll fix my eyes so I don’t have to wear glasses someday. I wonder what else they’ll try to fix, or maybe they already have.

Gibson tries to start as we always do: a summary of what I’ve been doing, how I’ve been feeling. I give him what he wants, because that’s surely the fastest way out of the meeting. I keep thinking about Polly. That spills over into my story. I tell him that I’ve been wondering about her, where she is. I was working with her, the day that she stabbed Tom.

“Regrettable,” Gibson says. “Sometimes people are uncontrollable. You saw what happened. How did that affect you?”

I tell him that I didn’t notice it until it had happened. I don’t say how it made me feel. Honestly, I’m not really sure. I felt dull, that’s the best way to describe it.

“Did you think that she was right to attack him?”

He didn’t do anything, I say.

“No, he didn’t. Not that we could see or hear.” We. We could see or hear. “But there are often so many other things going on underneath the surface of us, aren’t there? What he was saying to Polly, maybe that affected her in a way that’s different than how it affected you. And me, as well. Maybe I would have reacted differently.” He smiles, the corners of his mouth gently pleased with the thought that’s come into his head. “What was the more truthful moment, do you think—what Tom was saying or how Polly reacted?”

Polly’s reaction. I don’t even have to think about it.

“Because it was from her gut,” he says, trying to be reassuring. “So, which was more interesting to you? Which made you ask more questions?”

Polly, again.

“Because it was so violent, so senseless,” he says, pleased that he knew the answer. That I am as predictable as he would hope.

I tell him no. I tell him that it was because I didn’t see where the blade came from. It felt familiar, I say, watching Polly stab him. He glances up at me, and at my hands. Then he sits back, folding his own hands into his lap.

“Chan, what do you remember about where you come from?”

I tell him that I don’t remember anything. I’m not sure how true that is. Faces, names, those words in that voice that digs deep into me and makes me feel sad and hopeful at the same time. But I don’t tell him that.

“That’s good. That’s good. This is where you come from now, it’s the truth. And this is where Polly comes from, and Tom. You’re like brothers and sisters, really. That’s it, all in this together, in this new beginning. We won’t lie to you about that. But you have to remember: What Polly did, that was wrong. It wasn’t here; it wasn’t the person that she is now, you get that?”

I nod.

“I would hate to see anything thrown away, from her or from you. This is progression for you. You’ve been here such a short amount of time and you’ve made such great strides. I see excellence in you, Chan.”

And with that, the session is over. Waiting outside to go in is Jonah. He smiles at me as I pass, then digs into his pockets, hands me another note, and then he rushes inside. I don’t read the note until I’m back in my room. His handwriting is this beautiful, delicate style—joined up and looped around like one long, unbroken trail of ink.

I want to see you, the note says. Find me.

“Time for another trial,” the guard says. He leads me down the corridor, letting me walk a little ways in front of him. I know where we’re going.

I ask him how long he’s worked here and he seems surprised.

“Inmates usually don’t take an interest in us,” he says. “Not saying it’s not welcomed, but you’re pretty much the first to ever ask me.” He pronounces everything drawled, his words sloppy, losing letters, changing others. Intres, priddy, ax. “Three years now. Gibson brought me personally. We worked together before.”

I ask where.

“Now that’s a secret. I mean, it’s not, but it is for you. Loose lips sink ships.” We head to the outside, to the shell of the mall. “So this time, you’re just going to look around, okay? You go in there and you see if there’s anything you like the look of. Come back and tell me and we’ll see what we can do.” He folds his arms and stands at a real distance, the stretch of the mall between me and the shop. He shoves his hand through the air, like he’s wafting something. “Go on, haven’t got all day,” he says.

The shop door is propped open. Inside, the stock is different. It’s not stuff that I would want, not immediately. There are more expensive things in here—cases with jewels and gold bands. Nothing but shining, glittering gemstones throughout. Bright lights, so bright they’re almost blinding. I’ve never seen anything like it.

I had a stone, once. I remember that. I was given it. I don’t know what happened to it, or where it is now.

“I help you?” the shopkeeper asks. A different one. She’s younger, much younger. Shaky delivery of her lines, a tiny bit too unnatural. Everything rehearsed for show.

I smile, say that I’m okay. She’s uneasy and I don’t want her to be. I wonder if she’s afraid of me, or of something else. Is this a test for her or for me, I wonder. Her nervousness makes me nervous and I feel my hands balling into fists. My nails dig into my palms just enough to hurt.

There’s a noise behind us. Somebody else in the shop. I turn and there’s the butt of a striker in my face. The man holding it is wearing a mask, fully covered, not even a tiny sliver of his skin showing. He’s out of shape, I can see that, but strong. Big arms, big chest, thick neck. Paunch where there shouldn’t be one.

“Get down,” he says. He waves the weapon at the shopkeeper. “Get down, hands behind your head.” The shopkeeper screams, and I—

I react. I grab the end of the striker while it’s pointed away from me, and I yank it down. He’s taller than me by a lot, and his arm bends. I whack his hand with my other fist, and he lets the striker go. He swings for me but I duck away.

I’m acting instinctively. He can’t get close. He’s slow. I know that it doesn’t matter how strong you are when you’re this slow.

I flip the striker and lash out with the end, squeezing it so that it fizzes into life—but it doesn’t, it’s neutered. He moves backward, but I go again, bringing it up into the bottom of his jaw. I hear his teeth clatter together—the crunch of something shifting, giving way—and he howls with his mouth closed, this guttural sound from deep in his throat. I kick him in the knee straight on and there’s another click, another sound of something giving way. I wrap my fist around the striker, using it like reinforcement. I swing it as he stumbles, as he slumps toward the ground—his bad knee shaking until he’s fallen onto it, which probably hurts even more. I slam my other hand into the side of his face. There’s another sharp crack, and he passes out. He falls to the side.

“Jesus Christ!” the shopkeeper screams. The guard runs inside. He checks on the man on the floor, pulls his mask off, puts his hand across his mouth to feel for breath, stabs two fingers at the man’s neck.

“Get help!” he shouts to the shopkeeper, who runs off into the back; I hear garbled words calling for backup, for a doctor. The guard looks up at me. “What the hell did you do?” he asks, but it’s not a real question. He can see what I did. He snatches the striker from my hand and throws it into the dark of the shop.

I leave the building. I feel sick. I watch to see what happens as the medics arrive, as Doctor Gibson runs past. When he leaves ahead of the stretcher shunting the man who tried to attack me and the shopkeeper to the medical center, he stops and stares at me. He doesn’t look disappointed, or pleased, or anything; not really.

I have trouble sleeping for the first time that I can remember. Usually, there’s a very set pattern: I get into bed, lie down, and the lights go off; and I shut my eyes because there’s no sense having them open when all there is to see is the thin green light of the exit signs coming through the cracks in my door. Tonight I do that, but sleep doesn’t happen. I feel myself getting antsy, itching underneath my blanket. I turn from side to side. I open my eyes because I’m not tired. I shut them and they don’t want to stay closed.

So I stand up. I walk around my room, as little space as there is. I press against the walls and I stretch my muscles. This feels good, natural. I work them, exercising them. It feels like something that I need to do, the same burn in them that I felt outside working on the road. I pace when I’m done. I listen to the sounds of others, shouting in their rooms. They lock the doors at night, apparently. I never knew.

There’s a grinding in the walls from the ventilation ducts. Something is going on inside there. I can hear voices if I stretch up and get close enough. I move my bed and I stand on it and listen. They’re far away, distorted by being carried through to me this way. Little more than whispers.

“. . . when they wake up?”

“Just get it done and they won’t even know. It’s nothing.”

“Losing a day isn’t nothing!” That voice is Gibson. I recognize it, even as angry as it sounds now. “We don’t know what effect that will have on them. It’s crucial we deliver every night, you know that.”

“So tomorrow we find out. Nothing we can do. We’ll get it working.”

“See that you do. There’s going to be . . .”

I hear noises in the corridor: guards opening the doors, checking on us. I drag my bed back to where it should be and lie down, shut my eyes. I don’t know why, but I don’t want them to see that I’m awake.

I sleep eventually, but it comes differently than the other nights. It’s like I have to force myself until it almost hurts, my desire to not be awake anymore. Eventually, my eyes slide shut and I feel them becoming harder to open. It’s exhaustion rather than whatever it is every other night that makes me fall asleep. For the first time since I remember being here, sleep feels natural—as if it’s mine.

In the morning, there is no alarm. For the first time since I got here, Gaia doesn’t talk to me. The guards beat on the doors, telling us to wake up. There’s shouting up and down the corridors for us to obey them.

Gibson interviews us all. He asks us to line up one by one (which we’ve never done before) and he spends the day talking to us—about whether we dreamed last night, about what we remember from before. I’m waiting in line and there’s word going around about the sort of questions that he’s posing—giving us situations and asking us how we would react in them, showing pictures and asking us what we can see in them. What we notice.

Jonah rushes up and pushes into the line behind me.

“Last night,” he says. He looks tired. “You had trouble sleeping as well?”

I tell him that we all did. I explain what Gibson’s asking, what’s going on.

“You seem like you’re excited about this,” he says. And I am, I think. I am. I reach for him, for a second. His hand into mine. I don’t know exactly why, but it’s almost unbearably comforting. He squeezes and I squeeze back, and I find myself wishing I could squeeze even harder.

We sit in the chairs, opposite one another, just like always. Gibson is rattled about something. He’s not his usual self. He looks tired and he’s sweating. The air conditioning isn’t working and every room with windows is stiflingly hot. He’s got a fan in here turned on his face, but it’s barely doing anything. They’re letting me sweat, and the chair that I sit in is wet from the backs of those who were here before me.

“Did you sleep well last night?” he asks me, harried voice, twitchy hands.

I did, I tell him. He nods.

“You were moving around, exercising. You moved your bed.”

I ask him how he knows that. I already know the answer. They’re watching me, all the time. But I ask him because I want to know if he’s going to lie to me.

“Just answer the question, Chan. You were awake?”

Yes.

“Good. Just answer me. Makes both our lives easier. No withholding here, remember? So you were awake. Why?”

I was too hot.

“So you exercised.”

Yes.

“Even though you were hot.”

Yes.

“You also looked at the vents.”

To see if they were working yet.

“But they weren’t. So then you went to sleep.”

Yes.

“And how do you feel today? Different, the same?”

Tired.

“When you finally slept, did you dream?”

I don’t know. I don’t remember.

“But you feel okay? What do you remember?”

I remember yesterday. I remember working on the road. I remember—

“But apart from that. Before this. Do you remember anything?”

No.

“Look at this picture.” He brings up an image on his tablet, black ink on a white background. There are shapes among the swirls and blotches of darkness: a bat, a spaceship, a face that looks like my mother’s.

My mother.

“What do you see?” he asks, and I shake my head.

I tell him that I see a bat. The biggest thing, the most obvious thing. He nods. We’re done. But I can tell—looking at Gibson, stressed and panicked now—that something has changed. I can feel it.

I have to be quick, I know. I have a few minutes between getting into my room at night and lights out, I have to find some way to stay awake. I have to force myself.

I keep my eyes open for as long as possible. I don’t lie down. I stand against the wall and then I slump. I know that I’m slumping, but I can’t help it.

Then my eyes are shut, and I think—before I sleep—how I have failed.

I see Polly while I’m eating breakfast. No sign of Jonah, and I don’t know how to get ahold of him. I want to talk to him. His note, scrunched up in my pocket; I can feel it like it’s hot, burning a hole to my skin. I’m at a table with people who I know but who I don’t need to remember. One of them is enormous, bigger than Tom, bigger than pretty much anybody else I’ve ever seen. He’s so large that the spoon for his cereal looks comically small in his hand, and he has three bowls of the stuff to sustain him. I haven’t seen him before. But I feel like I have. I draw away from him, scared a little. It’s not just his size, it’s what it represents.

So I look away from him, trying to not make eye contact. That’s when I see her in the corridor, being escorted by guards. They’re leading her down toward Gibson’s office. She’s shackled, her hands tied. Her metal hand doesn’t stop twitching the whole time. She’s been tearing at herself, I can tell—scratch marks down her face, across her scalp. She looks sickly, eyes red, mouth drooping. She looks at me. And she knows me, I can tell. Something in our eyes reflects.

On the road, I’m working with a different partner, but Jonah is here as well. I see him on the tarmac working; the shape of him is so familiar to me. I feel calm—only for a second, but I carry that feeling, try to clutch it to my gut. We’re laying pavement today, putting down the new tarmac. There are guns that blow out foam that we use to fill in the holes we made before. It expands and hardens in seconds to fasten the road back together. After it’s sprayed by one person, the other needs to flatten it straight away, dragging a long stick along the line of the road. And that’s it. Repeat that, hundreds of times. I’m the one with the gun. I spray, and Jonah waves at me. When we take a break, he runs over and asks me how I am, even though we’re not partnered. Nice questions. Nothing about the tests. Just concern, and I can tell he wants to say more, but he doesn’t.

I tell him that I’m fine. I want to say so much more but I’m not sure what, so we keep talking, keep asking and answering. When the break is over, my partner asks him if he wants to swap. Jonah doesn’t hesitate to say yes.

As soon as we’re together, we move down the road a little to work on our own section. On his knees, smoothing out sections of the road, he talks again, but more softly this time. At first it’s hard to hear him through the mask, so I move closer to him.

“I’ve missed you,” he says.

I tell him that I have missed him, too. That I don’t understand why. That I don’t even actually know him.

He says, “I’ve wondered if we knew each other before. Haven’t you wondered?”

I tell him that I don’t know what happened before. We’ve been told it’s not important.

“But maybe this is the truth,” he says. “They say the truth is in front of us. And you’re in front of me.” He stops working and looks up at me, wiping the outside of his faceplate so that I can see his eyes. “It’s as if I remember you. I don’t remember much, but sometimes I read something—a book from the library—and it’s familiar, like I’ve known it before. And that’s how I feel when we talk. Familiar. Don’t you remember anything like that?”

I tell him that I remember something from when I was a child. A voice, a woman.

“Your mother?”

I think so, I say.

“Well, maybe more will come,” he says. “Or maybe it stays in the past, faded out. Maybe everything now is about moving forward.” He doesn’t say that he might see me in that moving, but it’s implied. He looks away but I keep staring in case he looks back.

On our way back to the facility, I put the masks back into their box. It’s our duty to make sure that they’re charged and ready for the next day. If they’re not, we won’t have enough air and it’ll be our fault if something goes wrong. That’s one of the things we’re taught—personal responsibility.

I walk down the hall of the center—past the room where they induct people, the showers, the dining halls, past Gibson’s office. The door is shut, which means he’s in conversation with somebody. The corridor continues on to the wing where our rooms are, past the maintenance rooms, the filters for the air conditioner, the electricity generator—we run our own, off the grid of the mainline, too far from the city to tap into theirs—and the laundry.

I want to see where they were taking Polly.

There’s a room at the end of the corridor sealed with a solid door, heavier than the ones on our rooms. There’s no window panel to see through. I try to push it. It’s locked. I can hear noise from inside, though—murmurs. Polly muttering something, I think. I wonder if she’s in trouble, whether she needs my help.

Something feels right about how I’m standing—how I creep backward until I’m flush with the wall opposite the door and then turn my body so that my shoulder is aimed at the wood, ready for impact. I’ve done this before. I can feel the pain in my shoulder already, like an echo from before—an echo of what I’ll feel when I’ve done this again. I put my foot on the wall, ready to kick off as much of a run at the door as possible, and—

“No,” she says. I can see her, then—the light of her body, her face, at the crack underneath the door. “No.” I kneel down and look at her, at the tiniest corner of her eye that I can see. “Why are you here?”

I ask her if she’s okay.

“They’re making me sleep.”

Making you?

“Something from the holes in the walls. Makes me sleep, I think. Why do they want me to forget? What did I do before?”

I don’t know.

“Why can’t they let me remember? I don’t even care how bad it was. I want to know.”

Me too. She tells me that I should go, that I can’t help her, that she’ll be out soon and she’ll find me when she is. I agree to leave. I put my finger under the door and she does the same. Our fingertips touch. Even that feels familiar, as though I’ve felt her skin before, somehow. Somewhere.

In the minute before I sleep, I look at the vent in my room. This is what Polly was talking about. I don’t want Gibson or the guards to see me doing it, so I have to be careful. I don’t know how they’re watching us. Must be something in the walls, in the ceiling. The light, maybe. So I have to hide what I’m up to. I begin by exercising, pushing against the walls, bending my legs, cracking my arms behind my head. Moving as I do it.

Soon I’m close enough to the vent to see that the air coming from it, for a brief moment, is tainted—as pale a smoke as any I’ve ever seen. Like the steam that sometimes rose from the depths of somewhere I was before I was here—I have a memory of it turning to wisps before it reached the higher floors. Or the mist that came off the top of a stream that I know I once saw—where the water beat itself against its own surface briefly, churning, spraying itself upward.

And then I know I’m too close to it. Tiredness comes like a fist to the face and I’m falling, falling down, wondering if I will die. I hit the ground in my room, which shakes me a little. Awake just enough, I crawl to the bed—wanting to wake up there, knowing that will look more natural. On my way I take a pen from my table, and once in bed I hide myself under the cover. On my forearm I write gas from the vents in case whatever happens while I’m asleep means that I could forget what I’ve found. I don’t want to forget it. I can’t.

I see the note on my arm when I go to the showers, ready for the water from the faucet to clean every bit of dirt off me, ready to be put back all over again once I get out there onto the roads. I see it and don’t even have to read it. Something clicks inside me, the note nudging a brick through the wall in my memory that was blocking it off, allowing the events of the night before to rush back to me.

It must have been a pretty weak wall.

I scrub my arm first to get the ink off, watching the water that comes off my skin blacken with it. Agatha used to say that water was purifying, that it had the effect of making you feel cleaner than you actually were, that that cleanliness was a lie worth telling yourself if it helped you sleep better at night.

I remember that, but I don’t know where it came from. I can’t even remember who Agatha was—only that she was, and we lived somewhere very, very different. I know that they are making us sleep, but not for our health; it’s to change our memories, to enable them to rebuild us. Who we are here is not who we are. And they—Gibson, whoever else runs this place—are taking our selves away from us.

I wash my hair, my face. I remember something about my hair. It used to be short because of lice, because of stuff in their bites that could make you sick. That’s why it was short. Why is it longer now? Was that my choice? When I’m clean, I stand underneath the dryer and let it completely buffet my body—pushing my skin, my flesh—forcing the droplets of water off it until I’m totally dry. Get dressed, go to the canteen. Take a seat and sit with people who I know or don’t know, talk about the day. I stay quiet, I eat my food, and I look around. No sign of Jonah. I want to ask him about what he remembers, tell him what happened last night. I want to understand why he’s so familiar to me. We could have grown up together—and I understand now that we wouldn’t know. We look different so I know that we’re not related: our skin color, our hair, everything about us. But we know each other.

Maybe Jonah isn’t his name. Chan, my name—maybe that doesn’t come from who I was before here, either.

Tom comes in. He’s stitched up, healed, and cleaned. He looks like he lost weight, or maybe he’s just sagging from the recovery. He raises his hand to wave to the table, like we’re all waiting for him, all anticipating his return. There’s applause, I don’t see where it starts; then I spy Gibson in the corridor, clapping, grinning. Tom takes a little bow and he winces, something from his injury still stinging. I’m sure I’ve never met him before this time, but I don’t know how I’m so positive of that. There’s something, a niggling feeling, that his presence in my life is new. Doesn’t matter. I feel bad that he was stabbed. I feel bad that Polly is in solitary. Both acts make me feel the same, but one should be worse, I’m sure.

“Tom has made excellent progress.” Gibson steps into the room, half-shouting this to us. “But he won’t be on rotation for a few weeks, okay? So go easy on him. Let him know how pleased you are that he’s back with us. Somebody, give him your seat, would you?” He watches and waits to see who steps away from the table first.

I do. I stand up and I push my chair back, and I smile the biggest smile that I can manage. Gibson nods at me. I’m doing it because it’s the right thing to do, because he was injured and he should have a seat. But also because I want Gibson to see that I’m on his side, that I’m making progress.

And he does. He comes to me, he puts his hand on my shoulder, and he says in a quiet voice, “That was very kind of you, Chan.”

I don’t say a word in reply.

Out on the road and I’m working with strangers. Different partners on a different stretch of tarmac. We’re back to digging up the path, and my partner—a smaller boy called Graham who can’t handle picking up the debris and can barely hack up the road to the extent that it needs to be done to actually feel like we’re making any progress—keeps moaning, whining that he’s hot, that he feels sick in his suit. That he can’t breathe properly. He’s trying to take breaths that are too big. I tell him that, tell him that if he breathes softly and gently he won’t feel nearly as bad. The masks purify the air, make it cooler for us. It’s not like breathing normal air; it’s concentrated. You need to relax into it. If he does that it will help him to keep working. That’s what we’re here for. He hasn’t been at this facility for long—less time than me and this is only his first day on the roads; he’s not prepared for what it takes.

It’s only when he starts to cry that I realize a solution to a problem that I had barely begun trying to solve. I need to not fall asleep at night—it seems like that’s when we forget. The gas makes me fall asleep, makes me forget. But with one of the masks on, I won’t be affected by it.

“I want to go back,” Graham sobs. “I’m going to be sick.” And then he is, all over the suit he’s wearing, all over the road. It fizzes as it hits the blistering tarmac, cooking, evaporating away. I tell him that I’ll escort him back and he nods, pleased. He wears his re-breather until we get back to town and then I tell him to take it off—that I’ll clean it and put it back for him. I do, but for the benefit of anybody watching, it looks as though I’m putting back mine. I’m not. Mine stays inside my suit all day, and after I change it’s hidden away underneath my clothes. Then when I have a chance to go back to my room, I drop onto the bed like I’m exhausted and slide it out and under the covers, slipping it beneath my mattress, ready for when it’s time for bed.

I go to bed the way I always do: on my side, bundled up under the covers. But then I slip my hand between the wall and the mattress, lift it just enough to pull out the re-breather, then slide it back to myself, all under the covers. I put it on my mouth, head hidden from whoever might be watching, and breathe. I hear the sound of the vents, the hiss of oncoming sleep, and I stay awake. I checked the volume of air on the mask earlier, so I know there’s four hours’ worth, but I take light breaths, shallow breaths. I stay awake for an hour or two because I don’t want to make any noise or alarm anybody. I want them to think I’m asleep like the rest of them.

Eventually I feel tired—not fake tired, forced on me—just tired.

When I sleep, I dream. I don’t remember the dream when I wake up—the mask empty but still on my face, the covers pulled up and over my head—and I don’t remember my dream when I get dressed, when I shower, when I eat my breakfast. I don’t remember it when I head back outside to the road, returning the re-breather to be charged, taking a new one. I don’t remember it as I work all day, pulling up chunks of the road, work that feels as though it’s designed to exhaust you. I try to breathe through the re-breather as little as possible, taking in real air instead—as warm and stale as it is—to make sure I’ve got enough air in the re-breather to get me through most of the night. I don’t remember it at dinner or when I’m reading or getting ready for bed, or looking for Jonah, but somehow failing to find him, feeling a hole, a desire to see him. Through all that, I don’t remember my dream.

But then I’m lying in bed under the covers with the mask on my face, listening to the slow, soft hiss of air that’s designed to send me to sleep and make me forget myself; finally, I remember my dream.

A woman with hair knotted and long down her back, her face damaged from time and years of fighting, of surviving; her lip destroyed and rebuilt, a scar like a plait of muscle and healed tissue; her strong arms holding me as she tells me that I will be all right, as I watch the dead remains of my mother burning at my feet.

I wake up and it’s dark. I don’t remember waking up in the dark before. Here, we go to sleep when the sun’s setting and wake when it’s rising. I’ve never woken in the dark.

Except I have. Just not in this place. I remember opening my eyes into a different sort of darkness and hearing voices, the sounds of others in the distance, the noises of everything I knew shattering and breaking. There’s a voice here now as well, and for a moment I think that they’ve found me out, discovered my mask, that I’ll be joining Polly in solitary. I’ll be forced back into sleeping, into forgetting.

But it’s not that. It’s Gaia’s voice in my head. Like when she asks us questions in the morning, but less gentle—more driven, more forceful. There’s something different in her tone. “Everything begins anew,” she says. “There is no war, only peace. There is no imprisonment, only freedom. There is no cruelty, only kindness.” Words, over and over, repeated in cycles, and then new phrases dropped in. “There is no conflict, only resolution.” Ways to behave, things that I’ve heard Gibson repeat, tell us himself. “There are no lies, only truth.” There’s a tranquility to Gaia’s words. Then it stops—a pause, as if she’s taking a breath.

Her voice is replaced by a screeching, a noise that’s utterly inhuman. It whines its way into my skull as though it’s a part of me—somehow inside me, coming from me and everything around me. I cover my ears but that does no good. I try not to make a sound, not to scream, because I don’t want them to know I can hear it. I wonder if this happens every night, if we just sleep through it. I don’t know what it’s doing to us, what it’s supposed to be doing. My eyes water and my skin itches; I scratch at my head. I can feel my nails digging into the skin, making trenches, pain the only thing to block out the noise.

And then it’s gone. Gaia’s voice comes back, a soothing balm, a relief. “There is no pain, only resignation,” it says. I breathe deeply into the mask. I don’t sleep for the rest of the night. I keep my eyes open until she stops telling me what I should feel and think, who I should be; until I see light and hear birdsong and Gaia casually asks me, as if the night never happened, how I slept.

As I’m walking to breakfast, I see Jonah. He straightens his back when he sees me, opens his eyes wide.

“Chan,” he says. He takes my hands. His palms are warm against mine. I didn’t know how cold my skin was until now. “I tried to find you. They’ve taken me off roads duty—they said it’s for the best.” He pulls me closer so that our heads—our faces—are nearly touching. “I think they’re keeping us apart, and I don’t know why.”

I say that it’s his imagination. I want him to calm down, to feel better. I’m not sure he’s wrong, but I can’t tell him that. I don’t know how he’ll react.

“They put me on comms—said it’ll be good to get me out on the antennas; it might get me a job working the walls when we get put in a city.”

The walls. I can suddenly picture them. I’ve seen them. I know how tall they are and how imposing, how they curve over as they climb to the sky as though they’re cradling the city they enclose like fingers, cupping people into a palm. He keeps talking, telling me about what his new work involves—the wires, the panels. His job is to pull them back, to understand where they run, what makes the radio signals work. He talks about how when it’s all fixed, Pine City will have an easier time sending messages to and from the larger cities.

“I’m not even sure what they know about us up here,” he says. “There are satellites in the sky above us, above the planet, but they’re not connected to us here at the moment. We’re isolated.”

I think about the satellites, drifting somewhere above the clouds. Something clicks. It’s like a light coming on through the fog in my mind. “I asked if they ever send us to the city with people from here, and Gibson said that they try not to—that individuality is easier if you’ve got no baggage. But I want to be sent with you. Is that strange? But I feel like I know—”

“Chan?” A voice from the doorway. It’s Gibson. He’s leaning in, clinging to the frame casually. “May I speak with you?”

Jonah lets go of my hands. My own hands are warm now, heated by his. He doesn’t look at Gibson. We knew each other before this. I know that now. I can tell, I can feel it. It’s so close a memory that it’s almost tangible. But for Jonah, it’s in his gut, nothing more. He’s scrambling for a connection he only barely understands.

I tell Jonah that I’ll be fine, that I’ll find him later, that we can continue talking then; he smiles, reassured. I follow Gibson to his office. He waits for me to go inside first, pulls the door shut tight after me with the closest thing to a slam I’ve ever heard him produce.

There’s a holo in the middle of the room—a glitch-green view of what I know immediately is my bedroom and the shape of me in the bed, facing the wall. The camera cannot see my face, which is good. There’s no sound. Gibson indicates that I should sit down.

I ask him what the video is. I’m playing along. Is that me?

“This is something that we do for your safety,” he tells me. “This is to make sure you’re safe at night.”

I want to know why we wouldn’t be safe. It’s all about saying it in the right way— sounding surprised but not too surprised. Like I trust him, that’s the key. I’m surprised how easily lying comes to me.

“Because you’ve all come from places that you don’t want to remember. We don’t trick you here. We want you to be better. Because if you’re better, the world can be better. You see that, don’t you?”

I nod.

“So now you have to be straight with me. How have you been sleeping?”

I tell him that I sleep well. Every night the same, really. I don’t remember it.

He sighs. “You never wake up? You never dream?” He doesn’t look at me when he waits for my answer, as if he knows how this goes. I know what happens next—he’s got video from last night, of me reacting to the noise that I heard. Sure as anything, he says, “Play,” and the video begins. I move around in the bed, I bring my hands up to my ears—visible through the covers, the shape of them moving, my fingers creeping over the edge of the blanket, mingling with my hair. “You look as though you can hear something,” he says.

I ask him what there would be to hear. I say that I must have been dreaming.

“You’ve already told me that you don’t dream, Chan.”

I reply that I told him I don’t remember if I do. Different thing. He nods. He seems tired. I don’t really have any sympathy for him if he is tired. I ask about where I was before this. Who I was. I say that maybe that will help me remember what my dreams are about. Or don’t they want us to remember our dreams?

“You were you. I’ve already told you that. You were you, but worse. That’s all we do, all I am doing here, trying to make you better. There’s a version of you that you could be—and you haven’t realized it yet. I have. Why wouldn’t you want to be the best you that you can be?”

I ask why we don’t remember the bad things from before—they might be important to help make us who we are.

“Because the brain works hard to forget things that hurt it. It doesn’t want bad things to be remembered. It wants the good. We try and give you the good here. That’s what revision is.” He sighs again and waves his hand. That’s my cue to leave and I do; I work all day on the roads, reserving the air in the re-breather again, staying awake for as long as I can that night, not breathing in the gas, waiting for the voice of Gaia in the night that I now understand I must ignore.

They teach us history as a way of making sure we’re prepared to reenter civilization when we reach the cities. There’s a lot to cover. Some people remember the history but some don’t. They want us to know it before we get back to the cities—wherever we’re sent—because then we can hit the ground running. We can start being productive members of society.

Today we’re talking about the weather, about what’s changed over the centuries here on Earth. There used to be snow, they say. Sometimes it snowed as late as April. The spring began in March, sunlight breaking through the cold ground; it would warm the planet, but not like now. Now the heat is brutal everywhere. Now huge parts of the planet have been lost to it, are nearly uninhabitable. There’s a poem, an old poem that someone tells us. April showers brought May flowers. We have to remember these things we’ve lost because if we strive, maybe we can get them back—see those May flowers again.

May. Mae.

I can feel something, in my head. The fog in there being lifted.

“Chan?”

The teacher has stopped, is trying to get my attention.

I say that I’m listening, I am. I’m trying. But she goes back to talking about the heat, the parts of the world that were hottest even before the worst happened. There was ice in the coldest parts of the world, she says, but the heat melted it and the sea levels rose. Some of the hottest countries—Australia, she says, a country far away from here, nearly the other side of the world—were completely lost to the sea, one of the greatest tragedies in human history. This is what we don’t want to repeat, what we’re trying to avoid.

“Australia,” I say, hearing my own voice out loud for what feels like the first time—mine, mine—and everything is suddenly there, in my grasp.