TEN

Gibson asks me to tell him about my day, but I ask him about Rex—about Polly.

“What happened?” I ask. He pours himself a glass of water.

“You want some?” he asks, gesturing at the bottle.

“Yes, please,” I say. They’ve taught us good manners here. That’s the first thing they try and get us to learn. I can’t show any signs of slipping now. He hands it over: chilled glass, chilled water. It’s immediately slippery in my warm hands.

“Polly is a difficult case. Do you understand what we’re trying to do here, Chan? I mean, really do. How this works?” He sits down and he drinks from his glass, half of it gone in two gulps. He wipes his mouth.

“You want us to be productive members of society.”

“I’m a doctor,” he says. “I’ve always been a doctor. That’s what I wanted to be from the minute I knew that there was a way to help this world. So that’s what I try to do. There were attempts to deal with criminals before this, you understand.” That’s the first time anybody here has used that word—criminals—to describe what we are. No, what they think we are; how they treat us. He must notice me react to this—something passes across his face so quickly that I almost miss it. I want to say that I’m not a criminal. I haven’t done anything wrong.

“Crime can’t be tolerated now. There’s not enough room in the cities and I mean that quite literally. So we need solutions. This is one.”

He brings up a screen. “Show Brain,” he says, and a picture appears: a lump of something organic, swirled in patterns, like a maze. “This is what’s in your head—in everybody’s heads. And it controls you: all your desires, your fears, your hopes. It develops over your life, and sometimes that development is . . . stunted. There are crucial points—toddler, teenager—where external forces can alter the brain’s growth, changing who you are becoming. That can make you more susceptible to other external forces. It can make you selfish. But we need to make sure everyone understands that it’s not all about you, never is, never will be. Living life in our society is about the people around you, the people who brought you up, the people you’ll bring up. It starts with your home. Do you know where you lived?”

“No,” I say. I wonder what happens to the brain when it’s lying.

“It wasn’t a good place. It wasn’t. I can promise you that. You can choose to believe me or not—but know that I wouldn’t lie to you. We tell you the truth. No sense in us not. What happened to you . . .” He drinks the rest of his water and he holds the empty glass in between his hands, cradling it, swirling the last few drops around the bottom of the glass in a spiral. “There’s a theory, in psychology. The idea of nature versus nurture—one is what’s inherently inside you (your genes, the things that make you who you are) and the other is the external influences I mentioned. So we’re here to see that the nature doesn’t win. You’re genetically predisposed to being a criminal, Chan. You can’t help it. Your ancestors did terrible things and there are triggers, signifiers inside you, that say that you will follow their path. You’re what the people who came before you made you. The environment that you grew up in only made that worse. So here, we change that. We get rid of the only nurture that you’ve known, replacing it with something new, something that can—cross your fingers—balance out the nature part of you, the part that cannot help who you are on a base genetic level. Does that make sense?”

I nod. I don’t know why he’s telling me this. He’s only ever been vague before. He’s telling me all of his secrets, all of the things that go on behind the scenes. That’s a phrase that Ziegler taught me. He took me to see a play on our third meeting, a performance in a park. He said it would help me understand the city a bit more, what people in it are like, what they value—art, music, life itself. It was a comedy hundreds and hundreds of years old. A man dressed as a donkey (“An ass!” Ziegler said, explaining the joke, explaining the dual meaning) and fairies and magic—all set in this world, a world that I barely understood. But I didn’t get it. Before it, I saw the actors in their costumes; when it had finished, one of them spoke to the audience to thank them for coming. That’s not the real world. That’s a story and nothing more. There’s nothing behind it. It’s a lie. Ziegler told me that everything in the city is a lie, really; behind the scenes of everything we’re told is make-believe—layers upon layers of pretense in the stories we tell or that we are told.

Layers of lies.

As he speaks, I know that Gibson is wrong. I’m not a bad person and my mother wasn’t a bad person. Most people on the ship were not bad people. They were trying and they were surviving. My father was a bad person however, but he wasn’t from Australia. I never knew him. He was nothing to me. I survived Australia and it made me who I am. And that’s what Gibson wants to take away from me.

He can’t. I won’t let him.

“This program,” he says, “is hugely important. We don’t have the space in this world for people who can’t contribute. Do you understand that we cannot sustain the lifestyles we used to live? Can you believe that we used to pack our criminals into prisons, into fortresses, huge concrete castles where we isolated those people we saw as a threat? We didn’t try to help them, or work with them, or make them better, or discover what went wrong with our own society to keep it from happening again. Instead we locked them up. Some people even got locked up on spaceships. Can you believe that?” He examines my face closely as he says this. Does he know? I am careful and give away nothing.

“We sent them into space to orbit the Earth, and then . . . Well, then the collapse of everything here happened and we forgot about them. Can you imagine that? What it must have been like, growing up there?” I look around his office for a way to escape. There’s the door and the window. What happens if I run? What happens if I’m chased out of here, into the desert? How long could I survive? “One of those ships landed. It came from a country far away but it landed here because we’re the only place that still has the program active that would guide it back to Earth. That country doesn’t even exist now, so the people the ship brought to us . . . They became our problem. Some of them were beyond saving, but some of them? I knew we could make them better. Give them to me, I said. I can revise them. I can fix them, turn them into constructive members of society.”

“But what if they didn’t need fixing?” I hear myself saying, my voice small and quiet. I could hurl myself through the window. I’d probably have a minute before they were onto me. The guards, maybe I could outrun them. They’ve got vehicles but I could hide. Do they have birds? I haven’t seen any—doesn’t mean they’re not lying dormant somewhere for a worst-case scenario. Ziegler would tell me to be careful, to come up with a plan before I rush into anything. But I haven’t got the time to make a plan. Back on Australia, I would have improvised. Taking the time to plan something was time that would get you killed.

“They did,” he says, “oh, they did. Everybody needs fixing. Even I do. We all have baggage, Chan, but they had so much . . . Some of them weren’t able to be saved, like I said. And that is where we come to Polly. She was up there on that ship—came to us scarred and broken, barely even human as we understand it. And we have tried, but there’s something about how ingrained it is with her, how deep her rot runs. She’s been here six months longer than you and we’ve barely cracked her. We’ve removed what she remembers, but how she wants to act? Her drive? That’s exactly the same as it was before. When we brought her here she was nearly dead, yet she still found the strength to fight us. Bit us—she had no weapons so she used herself. We clamped her jaw until she calmed down.” He puts the glass down on the table between us, right next to mine, so close that they’re touching. “Do you want more water?”

“No,” I say. I can feel my fists balling. I remember this feeling—the tension welling up, needing to come out. The desire to act.

“Did you recognize her?” He swipes away the holo of the brain. “Show Polly A,” he says, and her image comes up between us. Or, images—her now, as she looked outside: frantic, her hair torn, her skin scratched and broken. And her when I last saw her, when we landed here: the marks on her face from our fight, her eyes lolling backward, looking dead or as close to it as a person can be while still breathing. And then a holo of her at some point between then and now: hair, clear skin, tight lips, wide eyes.

“How long have I been here?” I ask Gibson.

“Half a year, give or take. Some patients fight really hard against the help we offer. Your friend Polly, for example.” He rolls his sleeve back, to show me the scars of a bite on his forearm, thick indents that must have gone so deep they drew blood. “And she’s still fighting. Not you, though. You didn’t fight at all. It was like you gave yourself up to us as soon as you arrived. Like you were relieved to have us take your memories away. But then, you were tired. You kept telling us that, how tired you were.”

“I still am.”

“And yet you haven’t been sleeping.” He puts his hand to his mouth, covers it. Rubs his chin. “You remember her? Polly, I mean.”

“Yes,” I say, and I realize that this was never the comfortable normal conversation it was presented as. This is a trick, an interrogation.

I won’t need a plan. I’m going to have to act now: take my chance, stick with it.

“You knew each other,” Gibson says. His voice is calm and controlled. There’s sweat on his brow. Most of the time here, sweat means you’re hot. Not this time. Now, this is him being tense. “You came from the same place. I gathered, from what you told us when you arrived here, that you even had some . . . conflict.”

“You could say that.”

“One of the worries that’s come up about this little project is that people who knew each other before might break down each other’s barriers. But that’s the test. You can’t run a project like this and run the risk of you bumping into somebody in a city, when you’re healthy, revised, with kids, a family, a job. That would undo all the good you’ve gone through. You have to be perfect. So I had to make you work together.”

“You’ve taken away who we are,” I say. I’m furious now, but anger won’t help me. I don’t know what will, but I know that I have to control myself until I know how to get out of here, how to survive this conversation. “You’ve taken so much.”

“For the better. Have you tried to kill her here? You have not. We took that away from you and you want that instinct back?” He’s exasperated, raised voice, spit on his lips. “You want to be an animal?”

“I want to be me,” I say.

“And you are! Or, you were. You were you, just different. Better. So was she, I thought. She’s too broken, Chan, I know that now. We did six months of reconditioning. Six months! That’s more than anybody else. Some of the Australia survivors, they took weeks before they were on board with the new program. That’s because the brain wants an easy life. It wants simplicity, normality. It rejects the things it wants to reject. It wants to be rid of death and torment and pain. It seeks a baseline of stillness and calm. Yours did. You had three months of the process. That’s it. We had you.”

“You never had me,” I say. I wonder how long Jonah took. I imagine him, fighting to keep ahold of me, of us.

“You can think that, but I tell you, Chan, some things aren’t definite. They aren’t set. You were fluid, receptive. And now look at you.” He’s disgusted. I’m nothing to him now. Not a project, not a success.

To him I’m a criminal.

“You know that I remember everything,” I say. I look at the window, trying to work out how damaged I’ll be if I dive through it—if I’ll even be able to break the glass. I look at the door, wondering if he’s locked it. He’ll have been sensible, too.

“I worked it out. Too much contact. And then we heard about your conversation with Jonah earlier.” Heard about it. How? A camera? Or worse, worst of all—the thought making me lose a breath, the air briefly choking in my throat—from Jonah?

But I can’t show that I’m worried about that. I need to keep control.

“What happens now?” I ask. I’m ready. If he’s going to do something drastic, I’m ready for it. I’ll fight my way out of here if I have to. Don’t die, my mother’s voice says, and there’s something so reassuring about hearing her now, here, in this place.

“Now? We start over again. We spend months helping you, making you better. If it takes twice as long, three times, four times, I don’t care. I’ll fix you.”

“But I’m not broken,” I reply.

“Not yet.” I hear the sound of something in the distance. The same sound as in the cities: birds. I’m almost honored. Gibson knows how dangerous I am. I reach for my glass, my hand faster than his, clasped around it, ready to smash it, to use it as a weapon. “You can’t,” he says, but I absolutely can. I smash it into his head, and it explodes into something like dust, harmlessly clouding his head before falling to the ground. He looks instantly smug that they planned for this, that these glasses couldn’t be used as weapons. The door opens and the wardens are there along with three birds, buzzing into the room, circling us, glowing and primed. “Don’t fight us too much,” Gibson says, “or your story will have to end a different way.” I want to ask what he means but the birds don’t give me a chance. They pulse, and then the whips come from them—the strings of metal which snap and curl around my arms, tightening to coils—then one around my neck, while I’m being held tight. They drag me toward the door. I kick and scream but I can’t make a sound the whip is so tight around my neck. They drag me down the hall and I try to fight back but it’s pointless. They’re too strong. We go down past the dormitories, past the dining halls, all the way to the end where they’re keeping her. Polly, Rex, whatever she calls herself here.

Gibson comes up behind me as a warden runs to open the door. He leans in and whispers to me, so quiet that the birds won’t hear him and his words won’t be logged. “I can’t do anything to you, legally or ethically,” he says. “But she can. We’ve stopped her treatments entirely, to see how fast her regression is. So this will be a different sort of test. I wonder if she remembers you now?”

Through the door I see her, lying on the floor, facing us. Her new arm is shut down, limp and useless; her hair gone, scraps of it cluttering the floor around her; her clothes torn and those letters on her chest—those scars, freshly opened, traced into the skin anew. She looks up at me, barely moving; I am pushed inside. I hear the coils of the whips untying themselves and I can breathe properly again. I stand there as the door shuts behind me, as the lock fastens.

She slams me hard against the door, which groans—the metal in the frame creaking with an abnormally human sound. It hurts—really, really hurts. I slam my forearm into her head over and over as she pushes me forward, driving into me as if she’s trying to force me through the metal itself. She pushes and I beat her.

Slam, into the side of her head. She moves.

Slam, my arm into her neck. Again.

She pulls back. This isn’t like when we fought on Australia. We’re out of practice. We’re tired and we’re so hot we can barely breathe. This room is sweltering, the air conditioning turned off. She charges again and I move, but not enough. Her shoulder pushes into my side and I gasp, but the air’s too warm in here to give anything like relief. I push back and she stumbles. I swing down, grab her leg, and yank it; she falls backward, her back thudding into the floor, her head colliding a second later with a clang.

Everything sounds louder than it is, more brutal.

I’m on her now, and I’m smashing my fists into her head, over and over. My hands hurt. They’re not used to this. They were calloused on Australia; now they’re clear and clean. She spits blood then pushes upward, heaving me with her. She raises her leg, kicks me off, and I fly back into the wall. Another thump, another fall, and I’m face down on the ground. I feel her hands in my hair and she pulls my head up, grips my hair between her fingers.

She slams my face into the ground. There’s nothing to cushion it, but it doesn’t hurt as much as I know it should. I wonder if I’m just not feeling the pain, if it will hurt in the morning instead. If I will even see the morning.

Don’t die.

I push back and she tries to fight me off but I grab her hand, pull it out from under her, and she falls face down next to me, her nose smashing flat. I smack her straight on, right on her nose. Blood gushes. She scrabbles backward and I crawl toward her, hold her ankle, yank her back toward me, slam my hand—open, using the flat of the palm, closest to my wrist—into her nose again. The blood starts fountaining out, spraying the floor. She cradles her face, screams. She pushes away from me, goes to the corner of the room. The floor is wet—blood and sweat and urine.

“Please,” she says.

I stop. She is not herself. The Rex I knew would never have pleaded, not for anything. We both breathe and we fall into a pattern, inhaling and exhaling at the same time, somehow in perfect unison.

We don’t say anything for hours. There’s no sense in talking. I don’t know what I would have to say to her anyway. She stares at me from under her hand, still cradling her nose. I pull off my shirt, leaving only the vest underneath. She needs to stop the bleeding. I can’t have her die from her injuries and I can’t stand seeing her with blood all over her hands and face. I go to her, shuffling across the floor. She takes her hands away, lets me tend to her. I press the shirt against her face, holding her head back, tell her to stay still, and she does. I hold the bridge of her nose until the blood stops.

“This is going to hurt,” I tell her. I put my hand around the nose. I can see where it’s broken, where it’s bent now. She doesn’t flinch when I touch it, but she howls as I click it back into place, gasps as I let go. Better, I think. I give her the shirt, soaked in dark red, to hold there for a while.

I tell her it’ll be all right, as if that’s what she needs to hear.

I think about how much hurt she has gone through in her life, how many battles she’s fought. She lost a limb and still she fought. And now here, in this room, a broken nose—shattered maybe, because it’s swollen and sore, the skin blackened and bruised—is enough to finish it for her.

She pulls the shirt away, the blood ceased, and hands it back to me with a nod. She’s grateful for my help.

I crawl away from her, to the opposite wall. I try to listen to the noises of the rest of the complex, but there’s nothing—no sound of voices, classes, footsteps, whatever. Just the echo of something down the corridors and the hiss of Rex’s—Polly’s—breathing.

“I don’t know who I am,” she says out of nowhere into the darkness. Everybody is asleep, but we’re not. We’re trapped here and they won’t let us out. There’s no food. They want us to starve, or worse. Maybe they want to see how feral we can become. They aren’t pumping the gas in to make us sleep. Neither of us has moved, not since we fought, and this is the first thing she’s said. Her voice is quieter than I’ve ever heard it. I shift to try and see her, to catch any light that’s in the room. I wait to see if she says anything else. That’s it, though. Silence after that.

So I fill the silence. “When I knew you, you were called Rex,” I say. I hear something, I suspect it’s her fingers on her skin, running over the scabbed grooves on her chest, feeling out those letters. “And now you’re called Polly. Why that name?”

Silence, again. Then, “I don’t know. I remembered it.” More silence. Breathing. “I don’t know who I am,” she says. Her voice is desperately sad and small.

“Do you want to?” I ask. She doesn’t answer. I tell her anyway.

I tell her about the people that she killed, the fights that she started, the violence she caused, the nightmares she enacted; I tell her about the wars for territory. I tell her about the night that I helped her—or, the night that my mother’s death helped her, really, in the most terrible way—to take over the Lows from their previous leader. I tell her about everything that she did to me, how somehow she’s the reason that we are here, damaged and ruined and broken. I tell her all of this and she doesn’t say a word in reply.

In the silence, I think about my mother and about how, as a child, I would be given something and I would break it because I would push it too far. She would give me a toy that she had worked hard to get for me, and I would want it to do everything for me—to be everything. It never lasted. Nothing does. And she would tell me: That’s why you take care of what matters. That’s why you don’t push things.

I let Rex take in all that I’ve told her. I want to say that I blame her for everything: for Agatha’s death, for Mae being missing—for the deaths of friends, of people who made my life good, the breaking and bending of lives to fit her own. But I don’t. I let the silence tell her for me. I listen to her breathing and then, I’m sure, the sound of her sniffling, rubbing her eyes. Gibson thought he didn’t get through to her, that she couldn’t be changed. But I wonder if that’s true. I wonder if all it took was removing her from that place.

Because this Rex is not the person she once was.

“I need to leave here,” she whispers at some point in the night. I’ve been asleep and her voice wakes me. For some reason, I’ve slept heavier than any night on the bed. My back feels better. This hardness is what I’m used to; it’s what my body needs. “I have to leave here.”

“So do I,” I say. “They want us to kill each other, though. We won’t get out until they carry us out.” I stretch my body until it aches again, contorting myself to feel the still, cold hardness of the floor doing my muscles good.

I listen to a new sound in the darkness—Rex touches her hand and her now-useless false arm. She plays with it like it’s another scar that she simply cannot stop scratching.

When I wake up again, her hands—the one good hand, the real one; and the fake one, which she’s pressing underneath the other—are around my throat, and she is pushing down at me with all the strength that she can muster. Her grip is too tight. I’m already blacking out, already feeling the room, her, the world swim away from me.

I choke, or try to. I beat the floor with my hands and feet. I try to hit her, but there’s no strength left in me, not even a little bit.

And then I feel Rex’s breath on the skin of my cheek. “Stay still,” she whispers. She’s letting air in, but only slightly. Enough. She shouts, “She’s dead. Chan is dead.” I hear the sounds of feet on concrete, running toward us, shouts. “Get ready,” she says to me. So I am. I want to tell her that it feels like I’m always ready for anything, because I have to be. Now is no different.

The door clanks open. Screaming, shouting. Then she wrenches. She pulls back from the false arm, which stays at my neck. I see the stump of her elbow, plugs and sockets exposed in the flesh from where she detached it. She grabs the false arm and, holding it like a club, darts forward and smashes it into the face of the warden closest to us. He screams, falls backward. There’s blood again. She snarls, swings once more.

“Get up!” she screams at me, and I do. I have to even though I can barely breathe, even though my vision is cloudy, swimming in green and purple flashes. I’m dizzy, so I steady myself on the wall. She kicks a warden. He stumbles toward me; on his face I can see deep scratches from the wounds she’s made but I can’t tell if they’re from the false arm or her fingernails. He sways in front of me, then regains control and reaches for his striker. But he’s slow. I kick at his shin really hard and he slams forward, face on the floor. I stamp on the inside of his knee, and he howls as it crunches. Don’t want him getting up again.

By the time I look up, Rex is already gone. I peer cautiously into the corridor, and I see the trail she’s left: three wardens, and now a bird—which she smashes before it can whip her, the enclosed space somehow giving her an advantage. She’s going for freedom and I am going with her.

It’s amazing how fast peace can turn into a riot, how quickly a single violent act can upend the status quo. She makes it to the dining halls, where the rest of the prisoners are eating breakfast, and she throws a warden into one of the serving tables, spilling the food, making the wood shatter. All the prisoners rush into the room to watch, their eyes wide. I recognize so many of them now from Australia. Out of context, out of place, they look almost normal: their hair grown back, their skin clean, free of blood and grime, their tattoos and scars hidden. The wardens pile onto Rex, ignoring me, trying to keep her down, but she’s a fury, unstoppable. I remember that power even if she doesn’t. They try to restrain her and she whips them around. A bird lassos her and she grabs the cable and uses it to swing the drone around. It slams into one of the other prisoners. He lashes back, smashing the bird under foot, piling in toward Rex. The wardens turn to him and he slams his head into their helmets as they try to restrain him; he kicks out, hurls things around. He’s not the man he was just a moment ago and he doesn’t know why. Others join in the fight as if their bones are telling them to: Nothing’s triggered it, not specifically. It’s just a feeling they’ve got that they should. That this is what they do.

Alarms sound, but they’re distant. More wardens run in, clearly having just come from their bunks, pulling on their uniforms. They’re carrying riot shields and weapons. The fight is a mess of bodies, of rioting that I can’t keep track of. This is an opportunity. I run for the outside toward the mall, to the shop that they use to test us. It’s locked up this time, but that’s never stopped me.

The door collapses and I run in and through to the back. Everything I need is here. I wrap some of the clothes I find around my fist and then lay into the glass cabinets, over and over, watching the reinforced glass crack and then shatter. I feel the skin on my knuckles split, feel the fabric on my hand wet with my own blood. I smash them, all of them. Even the ones that don’t hold anything I need I smash, because breaking the glass feels something like relief.

Later I take the knife that they took from me. I’ve had a lot of knives in my life, but this is my favorite—a gift from somebody who wanted me to look after myself. Never be without a knife, I tell myself. I take a striker as well, in case I need it, and I run out of the shop and through the mall toward the main center.

I see Jonah. He’s staring—confused, lost, standing outside the doors, watching the distance. He looks at me and I stop running.

In the distance, there’s a sandstorm rising. Every few weeks they hit, swirls of wind picking up the soil and turning it over and over. The wind here carries the debris, flinging it at us into our eyes, our mouths. We shield our faces with our forearms against it.

“Please don’t do this,” he says.

“I have to,” I reply. “This is a lie, all of it. You’re not who you think you are. You’re Jonah. I know you.”

“Don’t say that.” Anger on his face, eyes red—that wall in his memory, it doesn’t want to be destroyed. But I have to get through, I have to.

“You are Jonah and I remember everything about you. You were with the Pale Women. You saved my life. You came with me down into the depths of the ship and you helped me save Mae. You and I were—”

“This is my truth!” he shouts, screams almost. “This, here. This is where I am meant to be!” He sinks to his knees and I rush forward, hand on his shoulder, on the skin at the side of his neck, feeling that rough texture under my thumb. He cranes his head toward me, as if that comforts him a little, to feel it there.

“Jonah,” I start to say, but then I hear somebody behind me. The soft crunch of their feet on the sand that’s been thrown here by the storm. They grab my arm and I spin, hand darting to their throat.

It’s Gibson.

“Do you see what you’ve done?” he asks. His hand tightens as mine loosens. He’s no threat. He’s shaking with fear, with sadness. With anger. I can feel his hands tremble against my skin.

“I didn’t do this,” I tell him. He doesn’t let go of me even when I try to shake him off, so I push him gently. He falls onto his backside and sits there like a child, arms in front of him. He’s crying.

“You could have been amazing,” he says. “You could have been so much better. Special, even. I want to make you all special, make you all valuable parts of an infrastructure that abandoned you, that would have left you for dead. But you’re too weak to see that, set in your ways. You think humans don’t change? You think that they can’t? Of course they can! I wanted to make you perfect, a contributor. I wanted to make it so that you could have been anybody. But you chose to fight. Look at you—a broken, sad little girl who thinks she can save everybody.” The words hurt, but only slightly.

“I don’t think I can save everybody,” I say. “Just the person I promised I would.”

There’s a crash from behind me. Rex, dripping with blood, weapons in her hands, ready for more.

She heads for Gibson, eyes fixed on him. Her remaining hand, closing and opening, closing and opening. I know what she used to do to those she found responsible for wronging her. I wonder how deeply set that is inside her.

I step in front of Gibson, put myself between them. “Please,” I say. “No more.” I don’t know if she’s killed anyone inside. I know that it’s quiet in there. I wonder what ended the fighting and yet I really don’t want to know.

“He ruined me,” she spits, “who I was.” Everything about her scares me: the look in her eyes, the gravel in her throat. But I stand firm, feet planted, and even as the sand whips into us, into my eyes, I don’t blink. I feel Gibson tremble behind me and I stare at Rex’s eyes. I let her know that she will not kill him. Not today.

She drops her shoulders. She holds her arm, the stump of what Agatha took from her, that I was so complicit in her losing; she turns, looks down the road out of town.

She starts to walk. I don’t know how far she’ll get without help, in this heat, this storm. We’re not far from the re-breather cabinet, so I let go of Gibson, who slumps to the ground. I run to the box and take as many re-breathers as I can carry and some bottles of water as well. There are backpacks here for when we’re working further away from Pine City. I grab a couple of them and I stuff them full of anything we might need on our journey. No sense in leaving anything behind.

When I get back, Gibson has already gone back inside the facility. Jonah is waiting at the side of the road. He is scratching at his neck, his only tell; he remembers something, even if he claims that he doesn’t. I can’t tell if the redness in his eyes is from the sand or not.

“Gibson told me to leave,” Jonah says. “He said that he doesn’t want me here anymore.”

“It’s for the best,” I tell him, but it feels wrong. Jonah is coming with me but it’s not his choice. I think about reaching for his hand, for his skin—using the warmth of it to comfort me even in this heat—but he holds his arms close to his side, his head down. He doesn’t look at me.

We walk away from the facility, toward where Rex is fading into the distance, framed by the haze of the heat coming from the road. I want Jonah to remember. He will, once he’s out of this place, once he’s had a couple of nights’ sleep without the conditioning. He’ll remember everything about who he is. Who I am.

Of course he will.

YOU ARE NOW LEAVING PINE CITY, the sign says. Rex stoops by the side of the road and grabs a rock in her one good hand. She walks up to the sign and swings the rock hard, denting the sign. She beats it again, over and over, until the sign bends back on its supports; until the letters painted onto it are so badly scratched they can’t be read anymore, until the metal starts to tear and her knuckles are bloody and torn.