“But if we can create a brain and a body that mimic ours, what’s left that makes us human? If the only thing that makes us human is our failings, what’s the point of our existence?”

—Della van Natta, Artificial Life or Artificial Hope?

It was going to be today. I was ready. My heart knew it was the right choice.

I’d been a fool to think I could ever live without them. Even after everything they’d done to me, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t stop loving them.

I couldn’t live like this, underground, in a world with no sun and no hope. Simply waiting. For what? Mil and Lexa were talking in the hallway. They said they’d called the others home. I didn’t know who these others were.

They said we were free now, able to live openly as we were. I didn’t want that freedom. I wanted to be home, in my own bed, waking up to the odor of steaming dough and fresh chives. I wanted to argue with my mother about my unruly hair, hear her mourn the thickness of my waist.

I wanted my father to peer over his glasses and newspaper at me and ask me where I was going. I’d say the library, but we’d both know I was going to meet Julien. I wanted him to sigh and shake his head and wonder what would become of me.

Julien. I didn’t love him then, but I did now. His crooked smile and bad-boy haircut. The way he knew I was too good for him.

Part of me wanted to leave here, to go and find them all. If anyone was strong enough to survive a war, it was my mother—purely out of spite, if nothing else. But I wasn’t strong enough. I’d never been strong enough for anything. Not to be the woman my parents had wanted me to be, but not to be my own woman either. It was a simple truth: I wasn’t able to survive.

A boy lived on the other side of my wall. Adrian. He was going to help me. We were going to help each other.

A soft tapping echoed on the wall next to my head. It was time.