A series of police barricades has been erected just outside the laboratory gates. Several regulators move them aside so we can pass into the small paved parking lot just in front of the lab’s main entrance. I recognize Fred’s family’s car. He must be here already.
My stomach gives a weird twist. I haven’t been to the labs since my procedure was completed, since I entered a miserable, chewed-up girl, full of guilt and hurt and anger, and emerged something different, cleaner and less confused. That was the day they cut Lena away from me, and Steve Hilt, too, and all those sweaty, dark nights, when I wasn’t sure of anything.
But that was really only the beginning of the cure. This—the pairing, the wedding, and Fred—is its conclusion.
The gates have been locked behind us again, and the barricades restored. Still, as I climb out of the car, I can feel the crowd pressing closer, closer—itching to come in, to watch, to see me pledge my life and future to the path that has been chosen for me. But the ceremony will not begin for another fifteen minutes, and the gates will remain closed until then.
Behind the revolving glass doors, I can see Fred waiting for me, unsmiling, arms folded. His face is distorted by the glare and the glass. From this distance, it looks as though his skin is full of holes.
“It’s time,” my mother says.
“I know,” I say, and I pass in front of her, into the building.
Lena
It’s time. The rifle shots explode simultaneously in the distance—a dozen of them at least—and just like that, we are moving as one. We are running out of the trees, hundreds of us, drumming up mud and dirt, the rhythm of our feet like a single, swollen heartbeat. Two rope ladders appear over the side of the wall, then another two, and then three more—so far, so good. The first of our group reaches a ladder, jumps, and swings upward.
In the distance, a band is playing a wedding march.
Hana
Outside the laboratories, the guards—nearly two dozen of them, arrayed in spotless uniforms—fire off their rifle salute, signaling that the ceremony can proceed. The large windows of the conference room are open, and through them we can hear the band begin to play a wedding march. Most of the onlookers have not been able to squeeze into the labs and will be clustered outside, listening, straining to see through the windows. The priest is wearing a microphone so his voice will be amplified, so it will reach every member of the assembled crowd, touch them with his words of perfection and honor, of duty and safety.
A platform has been erected in the center of the room, just in front of the podium where the priest will conduct the ceremony. Two participants, both dressed symbolically, in lab coats, help me onto it.
When Fred takes my hands in his and lays them on top of The Book of Shhh, a small sigh travels the room, an exhalation of relief.
This is what we are made for: promises, pledges, and sworn oaths of obedience.
Lena
I’m halfway up the ladder when the alarms begin to sound. A second later there is another explosion of gunfire. There is nothing coordinated about these shots; they explode in rapid staccato, deafeningly close, and just like that the air is a symphony of shouts and shots and screams. A woman straddling the wall topples backward and tumbles to the ground with a sickening thud, blood bubbling from her chest.
Only a tenth of our number has made it over the wall. The air is suddenly thick with gun smoke. People are yelling—go, stop, move, stop where you are or I’ll shoot! For a second I freeze on the ladder, swinging, petrified—my hands slip a little, and I barely manage to right myself before falling. I can’t remember how to move. At the top of the ladder, a regulator is hacking at the ropes with a knife.
“Go. Lena, go!” Julian is beneath me on the ladder. He reaches up and pushes, jolting me back into my body. I begin working my way upward again, ignoring the searing pain in my palms. Better to fight the regulators on the ground, where we have a chance—anything is better than swinging here, exposed, like a fish on a line.
The ladder shudders. The regulator is still working feverishly with his knife. He is young—he looks somehow familiar—and sweat is matting his blond hair to his forehead. Beast has just made it to the top of the wall. There’s a crack, and a small yelp, as he drives his elbow into the regulator’s nose.
The rest happens quickly: Beast gets his fist around the man’s knife and thrusts; the regulator slumps forward, eyes unseeing, and Beast heaves him unceremoniously over the wall, as though he is a sack of garbage. He, too, thuds when he hits the ground: Only then do I recognize him as a boy from Joffrey’s Academy, someone Hana once spoke to at the beach. My age—we were evaluated on the same day.
No time to think about that now.