“I see a girl who wants to follow yet another person’s idea of what our lives should be,” I answer. “You’re spewing out words that were fed to you. You’re caught up in your own self-importance, actually believing that anything you do matters.”
“It matters that I try,” Ava says. “Even if we fail, at least we’ll go down showing the people they can defy the government because we ourselves have done it! With no guns, no army—just by the two of us living and existing—our family has proven that we can win.”
“This is winning? Look around you.” I point to the hundreds of metal flowers waiting to be picked. All waiting to tell me another person is dead. “This is victory?”
“Mother guided us here. She led us to Rayla and the Common. She planned all of this with Father. She must have. They both want this,” Ava insists, raising her voice as if I’m just having trouble hearing and will soon reflect her fervor. “I don’t understand! You of all people should want this.”
“Why? Because I’m the second-born? The throwaway?” I fling aside my bangs and toss back the hood of my jacket, suffocating beneath all the layers. “I don’t want any of it!” I hurl my rucksack to the ground, freeing myself from any and all burdens.
“Your guilt is blinding you.”
“My guilt?”
“For getting us caught.”
My eyes turn to slits. “Excuse me?”
She charges toward me, a single step dividing us. “You’re acting like a selfish bitch, considering you’re the one who got us caught!”
Her words detonate inside of me, and I explode toward her, releasing everything I’ve held back and locked away until now. Ava shuffle-steps backward, feeling the force of my pent-up rage.
“Are you serious? You’re the one who broke routine and made me go up for dinner! I would have never been in that greenhouse with Halton if you didn’t always push to get your way.”
Ava tries to speak, but I smother her words.
“You were always the self-anointed tyrant, lording over me, superior about being the firstborn. Ava Goodwin, bearer of our name, owner of our identity and the life-enabling microchip. You made the decision that night in the basement. It was you. You’re the reason we got caught!”
“You’re the one who drew attention to yourself!” Ava regains her ground, her voice loud enough for every four-hundred-foot wind turbine to catch and broadcast my mistake throughout the vacant, foreign land. “You kept touching your stupid wrist! You weren’t good enough—”
“You mean I wasn’t good enough being you!”
“Stop acting like the victim! We both had to play the same game, and you lost it for us.”
She pushes two steps closer, brandishing her finger in my face.
“Do you think I wanted to spend my days watching over you, making sure you were happy? Making sure I kept you alive? I knew you were our weakest player, so I indulged you and catered to you and carried you for eighteen years! I knew you’d be the one to mess it all up. So did Father.”
My rage emanates from deep within—thrums across my skin, animates my fingers, balls them into fists.
Ava presses on. “You’re the reason we’re standing here. You’re the reason Father’s imprisoned, and you’re the reason he’s going to die!”
With one violent surge I close the gap between us and thrust Ava backward, sending her flying across the ground. She lands hard, her elbows and hands taking the fall. She lifts her palms and studies the bloody scrapes and shallow gashes of her broken skin. Our broken bond.
I feel no guilt. Only the sky’s spotlight and my smoldering fury.
“Go lead yourself into an unwinnable crusade,” I spit. “I’m not following.”
Ava glares up at me from the dirt like she’s finally seeing my full evolution and hates what I’ve become.
Something other than her.
“The Guard knows we’re in Montana. They’re going to catch you,” she threatens as she rises.
I grab my rucksack. Chuck the strap over my shoulder. “I have just as good a chance to outrun them as you.”
Ava wipes her bloodstained palms against her pants. “You won’t survive without me.”
“I can. I don’t need you anymore to have a life. I have my own microchip now.”
“You’re a coward!” she screams at me.
“And you’re a fucking fool.”
I turn away from Ava and stomp toward the field’s boundary, overgrown with its clairvoyant flowers.
“You will not die; you will die.”
I will not die.
I don’t look back.
PART III
THE ADMISSION
AVA
In Greek mythology, humans were originally created with four arms, four legs, and a head with two faces. One soul in two bodies.
These beings had great strength in this form, and the gods, fearing their power, sent Zeus to divide them into two separate parts, splitting apart the soul. Weakened and consumed with yearning, humans were condemned to spend their lives in search of their other halves in order to feel complete.
I was born with my soulmate. One soul in two bodies. I didn’t have to search the whole world over. But now mine is gone. Mine turned and walked away from me.
In that moment, I learned you could hear a heart break.
Disguised in a dark hooded jacket—the Guard will be looking for a baseball cap now—I stop walking and survey the golden hills that roll across the land as far as I can see. My anger has driven me ten miles from my sister by now. A heavy feeling of loneliness stabs at me, piercing its blade into an already-severed soul.
I never thought I could tire of open land. I dreamt of it all my life in the suffocating urban sprawl of Dallas, and I na?vely used to think that if I could just find enough of it, I could keep Mira there, safe.
You’re a fucking fool.
The cuts on my palms suddenly burn as if submerged in hot coals, and then I’m back at the wind farm again, Mira’s hands on my chest, pushing me to the ground.
Rage rips through my loneliness, and with Mira’s words still ablaze inside my mind, I tear the rucksack from my shoulders and launch it through the quiet, empty air, its contents escaping into the grass.
“You’re the fool, Mira!” I recklessly scream.
Stop it, I chide myself, biting down hard on the inside of my lips, forcing my mouth shut. You’re going to get yourself caught.
Standing alone in this vast field, shaking with a desperate need to do more violence, I’m overwhelmed with the notion that I’m suddenly surrounded by too much space.
I kneel to slowly gather up my spilled supplies and place them carefully back into my bag, one by one, centering my mind.
“Focus on the task at hand,” I say aloud for the sixteenth time.
This has become my battle cry.
A highway looms ahead. I glance down at the map and locate a farm road that will connect with Interstate 90 farther north.
It’s too much of a risk to travel three hundred and seventy-five miles on foot through exposed land now that Roth knows where his fugitives are hiding. The more days I’m on the run, the greater the danger. One surveillance drone flyover and the game is done. I have to find a vehicle to get me to the border. And if there’s a highway, there will be a charging station somewhere nearby.
A glare from something on the road temporarily blinds me. I blink away yellow bursts of light to see a pair of armored military vehicles hurtling south in my direction.
I fall to the ground and crawl, dirt stinging my cut elbows, behind the nearest hill. Tucking my body into a narrow indentation, I sit as still as the air and wait for the cover of darkness.
My anger is my armor, and I am made of steel.
The sun fades to twilight. Fireflies flicker like tiny bolts of lightning, dancing in the soft semidarkness. The temperature drops and the wind disappears. Crickets sing their soft, elegant song, and still I wait.
Night hits, wrapping the world in black.
Only then do I step from my hideout in the earth and point my feet north by the light of the moon.