Everything that happens next is a blur. Nazarin bounds up from his chair and knocks Ensi back.
My mind burns. I’m still conscious—barely—because Ensi hasn’t started the program. It takes all my strength to raise my head a few inches. Ensi is manipulating the fight with Nazarin so he inches closer to the controls. I try to warn Nazarin, but my mouth won’t open. Ensi’s hand snakes back and the program begins. Soon, I’ll be trapped in a dream.
The King of the Ratel knocks Nazarin against the wall. He slumps over, his battered brain out cold again.
With the last of my consciousness, I see Ensi strap Nazarin in the Chair and begin the program, then strap himself into another, starting his own sequence.
He’s grinning like a hunter going in for the kill.
And then we’re gone.
TWENTY-SEVEN
TILA
We really thought we’d succeeded.
The month had passed without any problems. We went to school, we did the chores we could do, we listened to sermons, we did the Meditation and we did our best not to stand out at all. Mom and Dad did their jobs. We tried to act both positive and remorseful at the thought that we would be reentering the Cycle again soon. Our health continued to worsen, and our main fear was that we’d die before we could escape.
We should have been more afraid of Mana-ma.
The morning the supply ship was due to come, we’d gone into the forest to hide near where it would land. It was slow going—we had trouble walking and had to use canes, stopping to rest every few steps. We left before most of the Hearth was awake and kept under cover of the trees, hoping that nobody would see us. We didn’t bring anything with us except a bit of food—no clothes, no trinkets, no journals. I think that hurt Taema more than me. She wanted to bring at least one book. I decided then and there that if we survived and got jobs in San Francisco, I’d buy her all the books I could with my first pay-check.
We waited there in the shade all morning, eating the snacks Mom and Dad had packed us. We wouldn’t have long once Dad gave the signal.
“Are Mom and Dad going to get into trouble if Mana-ma realizes they helped us?” Taema asked. She hadn’t asked the question before, though it must have been on her mind as much as mine.
“Probably, but it shouldn’t be too bad. Mana-ma loves them, and maybe she won’t find out. Maybe they’ll think we went off to die in the woods and then animals ate us.”
“That’s gross, Tila.”
“What? I’d rather be eaten by a fox or a bear then buried in the ground and then eaten by worms. You’re going to be eaten either way.”
I was trying to distract her, though I wasn’t doing a very good job. I thought Mom and Dad would get in big trouble if Mana-ma found out they helped us escape. I didn’t think their lives would be in danger or anything, though. I didn’t know the full story of Mia and her lost lover back then. If I had, I might have been too scared to risk Mom and Dad by running away.
Even to save our lives.
“Maybe we shouldn’t do this,” Taema says. “I … can’t help feeling it’s wrong. That out there we’ll lose ourselves.”
I pressed my cheek against hers, then reached around and stroked her hair. “If we stay, we die. I don’t want you to die.”
Her breath hitched. “I don’t want you to die, either. Maybe it’s better to be damned by Impure things than be dead.”
I shook my head, pushing down my anger that, despite everything, she could still believe in the tenets of the Hearth.
The ship came down, all silver and chrome and the blue fire of its engines. It was so different from anything in the Hearth. So smooth and sleek and futuristic. I remember thinking how strange it would be to be surrounded by a world where everything looked so flawless like that.
The hatch opened and the worker drones went about their business like ants, crawling out of the belly of the beast, lugging crates to be set onto the grass. Once the ship left, the people from the Hearth would slink down the hill and take their essential supplies back to the buildings, trying to have as little contact with the Impure as possible.
“So fucking hypocritical,” I said out loud.
“What is?”
“All that bullshit about the Impure. Yet they still take regular orders of things they can’t make. Never really thought about it before. The Hearth has plenty of Impure stuff that we all use. Light bulbs. Some of the cleaning stuff. Metalwork. We can’t make a lot of that here. It’s all over, but we pretend we’re all Pure and untouched by the outside world. So stupid.”
A pause, and then: “Yeah. It is.” It was the first time she had really agreed with me out loud. Usually when I ranted about the evils of the Hearth she stayed pretty quiet, tacitly agreeing but not really saying anything out loud that could be considered anti-Hearth. It had always annoyed me. Now, she sounded so sad that I felt guilty for all my ranting. I also felt justified.