I don’t realize how tired I am until I catch myself dozing off in the car and suddenly sit straight up. Trigger chuckles softly.
Margo’s adrenaline didn’t last long, and once we hit the foothills the gentle rocking of the car lulled her right to sleep.
Hennessy held out longer. He wanted to talk, and eventually I pretended to fall asleep so he couldn’t ask me any more questions that might expose my ignorance.
Then I actually fell asleep.
I look to my right and find Hennessy snoring softly on the bench seat, his head propped against the window.
Trigger has been awake and on alert the whole time.
“How much farther is it?” I ask the driver.
“Just a few minutes now,” he answers just as softly, without taking his focus from the road. “We’ll have you home and in bed within half an hour.”
If only that were true…
“Stop the car!” Trigger says, staring out his window, and the driver jumps, startled.
“Why?”
Trigger turns to me, and his eyes practically glow with excitement in the dim light from the dashboard. “Wild apples,” he whispers.
“Stop,” I whisper, smiling. “Please.”
The driver shrugs, then slows the car to a stop in the middle of the road.
“We’ll only be a minute,” Trigger says as he pushes his door open.
Crisp, cold air floods the interior of the car, and I hurriedly climb over Margo so I can close the door without waking either her or her brother.
“I saw them in the headlights,” Trigger says as he leads me through a patch of crunchy, overgrown grass, his hand warm in mine. Weeds catch on the bottom of my dress and scratch my legs, but I can see where we’re headed. Just yards from the car, a cluster of broad trees stand in the moonlight, branches weighed down by round red fruit.
“Spartan apples,” I say as we come to a stop beneath the closest tree. “Historically harvested in the fall.” But I’ve only ever seen them in the hydroponic orchard.
“Pick one,” Trigger says.
He watches my face as I reach up and touch one of the small, almost perfectly round fruits. Its flesh is rougher than I expected. Its leaves are a bright green, even in the dark.
I give the apple a gentle twist, then a tug. The branch bobs as it pulls free. And I am holding my very first fruit plucked straight from the tree.
I hold it to my nose and inhale. The scent is sweet, with a slight tang. The Spartan is a great apple for juicing. Or for eating right from the core.
I take a bite and my teeth burst through the skin into crisp, sweet flesh. Juice drips down my chin. I laugh out loud.
This apple tastes wild. Like earth and wind, with a wonderful natural sweetness. And though it’s red and round like all the others growing in the branches of the same tree, it is subtly different from all of them.
“They’re still asleep,” Trigger whispers as I swallow my first bite.
I glance back at the car to make sure, then I pull Trigger down and kiss him in the moonlight. Under the apple tree. With fresh juice still damp on my lips.
He tastes wild too.
“I don’t want to get back in the car,” I murmur when that first wild kiss ends.
“I know,” he says. “But we have to. You’re already shivering.”
I hadn’t even noticed. But he’s right. It’s too cold to stay outside without supplies.
“We’re almost to Mountainside. We’ll take what we need, then find a way back through the gate. We’ll be back here before you know it.”
“Promise?” I say as we head for the car.
“I swear.”
“Hey.” Hennessy sits up as I climb back into the backseat, still carrying my apple. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” I take another bite, then speak around it. “I got hungry.”
“That thing’s probably dirty,” Margo says, pushing tangled hair back from her face.
“Yeah.” I smile to myself. “It is.”
The car rolls forward again, and the angle of the road steepens sharply. We are driving up the side of the mountain now. Trigger turns in his seat to watch me until Hennessy takes my hand, and for the thousandth time I wonder exactly how close Hennessy and Waverly are. I’ve already deduced that there are no rules against fraternization in Mountainside, which leaves possibilities well beyond what my limited imagination can come up with.
It’s strange and disillusioning to suddenly realize I know very little about the world, and even less about the people in it.
Margo sits straighter when the city comes into view. She stares through the windshield at her home as if the scene means little to her, but it takes every bit of self-control I have not to gasp at the sight.
Mountainside is much bigger than I expected. Much bigger than Lakeview.
From this distance, the buildings don’t look as tall as the dormitories or the Workforce Academy at home, but there are many, many more of them. They seem to climb the side of the mountain, which leaves them in plain view over the city walls, and even in the middle of the night about half of them are lit up.
My heart pounds as we approach the gate. None of my identicals ever left Lakeview. I never expected to see anything of the world beyond the walls of the city where I was designed, created, incubated, and raised.
Hennessy’s driver rolls the car to a stop at the city gate. The road is so steep that I am forced to lean back in my seat, and the windshield seems to face directly up into the sky. The driver presses a button and his window descends into the car door. A guard leans down so he can see inside the vehicle.
I blink, certain my tired eyes are seeing things that aren’t really there.
The guard’s uniform reads GLADIUS 28. But that’s a Lakeview soldier’s name. Does Mountainside use the same names my native city does?
The guard opens his mouth to ask a question, but the words die on his tongue the moment his gaze finds my face. “Ms. Whitmore,” he says, clearly surprised. He lifts a tablet and taps a few keys. “I have no record of you leaving the city tonight….”
Hennessy laughs. “Surely that can’t be a first for you, soldier. Open the gate and let us through.”
Gladius 28 gives him a sharp nod of compliance, then taps something else on his tablet. The gate rolls open smoothly and relatively quickly, and as soon as the opening is wide enough the driver takes us through it.
Just inside the gate, he stops the car and says, “Automatic engage.” The dashboard hums as the steering wheel recedes into its cavity and a panel slides shut over it. “Whitmore estate,” the driver says and the car rolls forward again, this time following the cruise strip on the road, which looks just like the ones painted down every road in Lakeview.