There’s not much left for me here.

I thought I would have a moment, an epiphany, and find myself as I was.

        I look around at the ashen fields and empty highways and I feel nothing. Nothing of the grief, or of the bittersweet nostalgia, or of the fear I felt here long ago.

        I sit on the pavement, close my eyes, and beg myself to feel.

  Kat screamed out the sunroof, standing on the armrests between James and I.

  “Would you sit your ass down?” I shouted up at her. I was trying to drive. Key word ‘trying.’ “We’re not free, yet.”

  James slapped her leg. She crouched back in and tumbled into the back seat, her shoulder-length blonde hair flying around like it was alive.

  “But it feels so good, the wind, the sky!” she said.

  Watching the highway fly below the SUV and the endless cornfields whizzing past, I could understand every bit of her elation, but I wasn’t ready to feel it yet. This outside world was like nothing I’d ever seen, but it would be like nothing I would ever see again if we didn’t keep the miles on the odometer ticking higher.

  “We can’t stop until we get somewhere a little more populated- they wouldn’t dare do anything where they would be seen,” said James. I closed the sunroof to hear him better, and he patted his blond curls back into place, spitting out hairs that got caught on his tongue.

  The three of us lived our lives inside of a highly classified Facility.

  We were only three of thousands. Thousands we wished we could have saved. Hundreds we knew personally. Dozens we’ll cry about at night.

  There was a chunk of time that I had no memory of. With injections running through my veins, I went to James and Kat, the other two in the same testing group as me for this particular round of ‘medication.’ I told them we had to go, go, go, now, run away. The same frantic energy ran in their blood, too. Something was activated within us, we had to go, and immediately.

  “Do either of you remember actually leaving?” I asked them.

  “Not really,” said James.

  “Nope,” said Kat.

  It was never unusual to have side effects like this- to forget all of an event or period of time. But I would have liked to remember escaping.

  “But, hey, that’s probably for the best,” said James, “We don’t know what happened on the top levels. You know those guys have guns.”

  “I still want to remember how we did it,” I said, “What if we get caught? We’ll have no idea where to start for next time.”

  “I don’t think there would be a next time,” said Kat.

  “Why not?” asked James. I was thinking the same thing.

  “Well,” she said, “I think we can all agree that this-” she gestures at the three of us in the stolen SUV and the surrounding farms. “Is only happening because of whatever they were testing on us back there. There was no way we could have gotten up the guts to do this without that… odd frenzy.”

  “That may be,” I said, “But now that we’ve seen this, and once we’ve seen more, don’t you think that would make us want to leave again?”

  She smiled out the window. “Yeah,” she said, “yeah, it sure would.”

  I drove until night. I only barely figured out how to do it in the first place, and sleep made my hands on the wheel wobbly. James, who slept for a little while in the passenger seat, took my place. I offered to show him how, and he shrugged me off.

  “I’ve watched the same movies as you have, if you could figure it out, so will I.”

  Kat moved up to the front and I tucked into the bench seat at the back, using all three of our pale blue button-down sweaters as a pillow.

  My eyes closed, and I was asleep.

  We were pulling to a stop somewhere well lit when I woke up. I peered at bright bug-littered ceilings through the tinted back window.

  “It was beeping,” James explained to an equally sleepy Kat, “I think we need gasoline.”

  “James, we don’t have money,” I said to him. I sat up and inspected the dingy gas station around us. There were no other buildings in sight. The corn swayed, menacing in the dark distance.

  “Nope,” he said, “We don’t.”

  We sat and looked at each other in the dreary interior.

  The car rolled forward and we all jumped.

  “James, put it in park!” Kat shouted.

  “It was!” He said back. He slammed on the brakes and nothing happened.

  “Shit,” I said. I repeated it as I tried the door handles.

  “Why did they let us get this fucking far if they can just remotely control the SUV?” said James. He drooped, as though we were already descending the stairs to our dorms.  

  “To teach us a lesson about high hopes,” Kat said.

  I couldn’t believe they were giving up so easily. I fell back onto my back and stomped at the windows with bare feet.

  “Leah, stop,” said Kat, “there’s no way you’re going to break it.”

  “Well, I’m not giving up!” I said, “I- there’s-” I sat up, “Did you try to roll open the windows? Or- um- uh- I can-”

  “Leah!” James shouted.

  “No! I’m not going back. And see the sky once a year? Wait for something they stick up our asses to finally kill us? You can’t make me sit here and take it,” I yelled at him.

  Suddenly there was a whirring. We turned to Kat, who was pressing a button and looking up at the sky.

  “The sunroof,” she said. As soon as the words left her mouth, it stopped opening and started closing.

  Kat jumped up, and James and I were quick to follow. With Kat’s body in the way, the window stopped closing about halfway. She pried at it. The metal bent, the window snapped free.

  We climbed, one at a time, onto the roof. The car was on the highway back and going full speed.

  I jumped first.

  We all tumbled across the pavement and into the ditch.

  We laid there breathing as the car disappeared into the distance.

  “Guys?” I said between gasps of pain, “Don’t call me Leah.”

  We climbed slowly to our feet, bleeding and bent out of shape.

  Down the road, we heard a screech.

  “Wait, shit, fuck, they’re coming back to kill us off,” said James, voice thick with mucous.

  We limped into the corn as the sound of the engine came closer. It drove slowly past where we landed and stopped just beside us. I turned from the road and tried my best to sprint away. As I walked, the pain started to fade. Soon, the three of us were running.

  For hours through the dark we ran, and stopped, and ran again. We reached a dusty path between two fields as the sun rose.

  “We should be hurt, right?” said Kat, “I’m not the only one who’s thinking that that jump should have killed us?”

  James and I nodded. Of course it should have killed us. It hurt like it should have, too.

  “Thank you, Leah, for being the first to jump,” said James, “I wouldn’t have had the courage to even think of it.”

  “Don’t call her Leah,” said Kat, “She just told you.”

  “Right, sorry. That was hours ago, I forgot.”

  “What would you rather be called?” Kat turned to me, “It will make it easier to remember.” James agreed.

  “Sparrow,” I said, “I know it’s dumb-”

  “Nope,” said Kat.

  “Not dumb,” said James, “Let’s walk. I’m starving, and this road has to lead somewhere.”

  We bickered for a few long seconds about whether to go left or right, but Kat started walking right, so we followed. None of us had the energy to debate her.

  We walked for longer than we ran, and still came across nothing. My stomach growled every few minutes to remind me of the hunger I was nowhere close to forgetting.

  “I wonder if the corn is ripe,” I said. In front of me, the other two paused as if they hadn’t considered it. I didn’t blame them. I didn’t think of it until then, either. All our food came in packages.

  We stared at the plants on either side of us, wondering how to start.

  I reached out first, and pulled off one of the green bundles with blackened strands dangling off one end. It looked the most like it could contain a cob of corn.

  With the other two over each of my shoulders, I peeled away the leaves.

  “Corn!” said James. And so it was, hidden beneath the leaves and golden hairs. Hunger made me frantic and I ripped apart its casing and tore into the flesh with my teeth.

  “It’s harder than cooked corn, but it’s sweet,” I said, muffled.

  The pair jumped for their own cobs, tearing the outsides off and eating the kernels in record time. We all ate three each, leaving the nine empty cobs by the roadside for the birds and mice to finish.

  It was much easier to walk when I didn’t feel so hollow.

  “I wish we’d been clearer-minded,” said Kat, “I wish we invited Timothy and Cleo with us.”

  That hit me like a punch. Cleo and Timothy were still inside, and we wouldn’t see them again.

  “Goddamnit,” I muttered. We didn’t have much inside that place, but we did have each other. Now they didn’t even have that, and we had the whole outside world.

  “We’ll get them,” said James. I understood the feeling behind his words, but I knew we didn’t have a chance. The Facility was massive. They were spread across the world, or at least the country, in underground compounds and unassuming offices.

  “How,” said Kat, “for real James, how?”

  And, more glib and cheerful than usual, he said he was going to kill every last one of the assholes who kept us in there.

  I agreed, of course.

  But to me, that seemed impossible.

  We came upon an abandoned farmhouse, tall and weathered. Most of the windows were hollow and paneless, and the door hung half-collapsed. Something inside banged with the gusts of wind.

  “Well,” said Kat, “We’ll be safe from the rain in there.”

  I looked up at the sky, something I hadn’t been doing much of, and saw puffy clouds. They dotted the blue up until they got to the western horizon. There, they melted into a dark gray and menacing mass.

  Inside, it smelled of mold and earth. The floorboards creaked with every step the three of us took.

  “Oh,” said Kat, “I love it.”

  I loved it, too.

  It was nothing like the sterile nursery we were raised in, or the white laboratories, or classrooms.

  This was old.

  It was rotting.

  It was so, so, human.

  We found the room with the least amount of water damage and moved some old furniture out of the way to give us some empty floor. Yes, we would sleep here.

  “Maybe there’s still some stuff in the house? In the closets and stuff?” said Kat.

  “Maybe we can catch the plague, too, huh Kat? Gross,” said James. I guess he found age-old blankets as unappealing as I did.

  At a clap of thunder, rain started to pour down. The room we picked had no windows, so we peeked through the door at the rest of the house.

  Aside from the front door and the handful of windows, there wasn’t much rain coming in. A few spots of the ceiling dripped onto the ratty floorboards, and along one wall there was a steady stream of grayish water, but otherwise, it was still cozy, and we could walk through without getting our bare feet wet.

  “I wish we had shoes,” I said. Kat tiptoed out to brave the stairs.

  “Why would they have any reason to give us shoes?” asked James.

  I shrugged.

  “I don’t know how things were in your dorms, but they gave us all kinds of things we didn’t need on our birthdays and stuff,” I said. Plus it’s not like I actually thought they should for some sort of reason, I was just making a wish.

  Kat’s footsteps moved upstairs with a series of frightening creaks.

  “That’s because the dickhead doctors thought you’d suck them off if they were nice enough,” James said with a rueful laugh. I hit him on the shoulder.

  “Come on, James, if they wanted to get sucked off, all they’d have to do is offer double doses of morphine to dorm 302.”

  James laughed.

  “Hey guys!” Kat said, muffled through the ceiling, “Come here.”

  We carefully scaled the steps, one at a time, and found the room she was in at the end of the hallway.

  The room was the most full of all of them, with a bed, chairs, a desk, and a dresser. Kat stood over the desk, holding a wrinkled paperback.

  She turned and leaned back against the desk and flourished a wrist. “Desiree looked at her lover,” read Kat, “And she said something he would never have wanted to hear from her lips. ‘Alex,’ she panted, ‘I don’t love you… not anymore.’ Alex gasped, holding back masculine tears. ‘But, Desiree,’ he replied, ‘we look so good together. Who else will I find who looks so good standing next to me?’”

  I raised my hand. “Kat-”

  She held up a finger. “Desiree turned from Alex and fled the scene. She shed no tears. Instead, she climbed the stairs to the top of her apartment building and leapt off. Alex was just, so, so stupid.”

  James laughed.

  “There’s no way it actually says that,” I said. Kat threw the book out the window behind her, and the wind took it away.

  “Of course it doesn’t,” she said, “I may have been performing a dramatic reading, but I took poetic liberties to save your sanities. You’re welcome.”

  “And, what did you call us for, again?” asked James. With every breeze the house rattled and moaned, like we were making it uncomfortable. I would have felt much safer downstairs.

  Kat rolled her eyes. “Fine, ok. If you’re not a fan of the arts, then. I found blankets in the closet. And they seem clean enough.”

  I opened the doors and she was right, they weren’t bad. I didn’t trust the pillows on the top shelf, though. Too much loose fluff. Probably mice.

  We took bundles of blankets down to the room we picked, which seemed to be staying dry. The wind had been steadily picking up, and thunder crackled louder than we’d ever heard it.

  “The things you don’t think about living underground,” said James, “I never knew thunderstorms were this loud. I thought the movies were exaggerating. I wonder what else they were telling the truth about.”

  We had set out blankets on the floor. They smelled only a little, and our noses got used to the must quickly. I stretched out my legs and arms on mine, laid out flat upon the floor.

  “They’re still so soft,” I said with a smile. I rubbed my feet along it a few times.

  “It won’t take long to get to sleep if the storm lets up,” said Kat, “But I don’t know how I’m going to ignore all this noise.”

  Something upstairs banged around a few times in the wind before slamming to the floor, and James screamed.

  I bundled tighter in my blanket and we all scooted closer.

  “It’s ok,” I said, “This house has been here for like one hundred years and it’s got to be here for one hundred more, right?”

  Kat shivered. “Maybe.”

  We leaned on each other in the middle of the room for hours before falling asleep.

  My dreams were filled with unease; With cars who drove themselves to chase me, and who plowed down the people I left behind. Cleo cried for my help as a blue sports car dragged her body away into the dark. Smears of blood dyed the road, and when I stood far away on a bamboo tower, I could see that they spelled “The end.”

  In the morning, the raindrops shone in the sunlight. We stepped out of the rotting house with red, purple, and white blankets still draped around our shoulders. Our feet squished in the mud.

  “I guess we keep walking,” I said, “We can’t exactly stay here.”

  “And none of the other rooms upstairs really had anything interesting,” said Kat.

  “Are you sure, Kat?” said James, “You consider paperback romance novels interesting, I’m not going to trust your judgment, sorry.”

  She rolled her eyes, a signature Kat move, and we walked past the house.

  There was nothing but mud for hours. We had corn for breakfast, and for lunch.

  “This is ridiculous,” said James, “How much corn could there be?”

  “If I overheard correctly, and this was years ago, the doctors made sure the land for acres around couldn’t be zoned residentially. Farms only. For all we know, this goes on for miles,” I said.

  The two sighed.

  “Hey, it’s not that bad. At least it’s not winter. Then we could see how endless our journey really is. And no corn to eat. This way, we get surprised when we find civilization,” I said.

  “I wish we still had the car,” said Kat.

  “Yeah. Me, too,” said James, “Ow!”

  We both turned to him. He lifted a foot to reveal a metal shard, about an inch long.

  “Ow, ow ow ow ow OW.” Tears streamed down his face.

  “Uhhhh, Ok, ok, just, here, sit down,” I said.

  Kat tore the satin edging off her blanket and held it at the ready.

  “Ok, James?” I said, “I’m going to pull this out, and then Kat will wrap it up. Ready?”

  He shook his head no.
 “Well, oh well,” I said. I took the metal between my fingers and pulled.

  James screamed. Blood stained the mud.

  “Ok,” said Kat, “Here we go.” She wrapped him quickly with the satin. It didn’t absorb much of the blood, but she wrapped it tightly enough that the bleeding stopped. Blood squeezed uncomfortably through some tattered holes in the fabric.

  “It’s ok,” said James to himself, “It’s ok, I’m fine. I’m all right.”

  I inspected the metal that cut him. Besides James’ blood, there was another sort of red on the metal. I wiped it on the red cotton of my blanket and looked. It was just rust and paint.

  “I think it was farm equipment,” I said, “Broke off.”

  “Well, that would make sense, captain obvious,” said Kat, “Do you think James will get tetanus or something?”

  I shrugged and threw the shard of metal. “Do you think you can walk, James?” I asked.

  “Not by myself,” he said.

  Kat and I took turns letting James lean on us. We left our blankets behind.

  “Oh thank god,” said Kat. I looked up, readjusting James’ weight on my shoulder.

  It’s a general store.

  “Praise be,” croaked James. He tested his weight on his foot.

  “Hold on,” he said. He tested it again, then released my shoulder.

  “Wait, James,” said Kat, “Do you think you should?”

  “No, Kat, it doesn’t hurt at all.”

  We followed him to the parking lot of the general store, where he sat and untied his foot.

  “Guys, look!” he said. The bottom of his foot had a scar that looked more than a week old.

  “No way,” Kat and I said. She picked it up to look at it closer.

  “So it’s official,” I said, “We can totally super hero fast-heal.”

  “I was hesitant to say it when we jumped out of the car, but this?” Kat shook James’ foot, “This is pretty much irrefutable.”

  I pulled up my sleeves to look at my arms. The needle scars I’d always had were faded. Kat and James checked, too.

  “What does this mean?” asked James. We shrugged.

  “Does it have to mean anything?” I said.

  “Besides that maybe they finally did what they wanted?” James said.

  We both looked at him. “What do you mean, James?” said Kat.

  “That’s why we were there. Well, besides illegal human testing,” he said, “That was how they made money, but the real endgame was, like, a Captain America thing.”

  “You mean they wanted to make us strong?” I said.

  “Not quite the same, I just meant kind of,” he said, “They wanted to improve the human experience or whatever.”

  “And you think the injections we got were ‘the ones?’” Kat said, “That us going crazy and running away was just a side effect of something else?”

  “You thought they injected us just to make us crazy and run away?” he said, “Of course that was a side effect!”

  “Wow, ok, you don’t have to yell,” she pouted.

  “So what do we do know?” I said, “Do you think they know?”

  “I have no idea,” said James, “You know I only barely know what I’m talking about.”

  “Cause dorm 105 had the Confidant,” teases Kat.

  James shrugs. “You’re just envious I had a girlfriend.”

  The door to the General store opened and someone peered out at us from the dim interior.

  “Guys,” I whispered, “We still don’t have any money.”

  “Well,” said Kat, “We can look for some?”

  James laughed.

  “If you’re about to make fun of me Jimothy I swear to god,” said Kat

  We all burst out laughing, but then James got more serious.

  “James, please,” said James, “Never ever ‘Jimothy.’ That’s not even a name, let alone my name.”

  I knew why he was touchy about it, but I could also tell that he understood it was a joke. We walked down the main street in companionable silence.

  Though the lonely general store was an indicator of some civilization, it didn’t lead to much. A mechanic, a closed down movie theater, a church, and grocery store sat nearby each other surrounded by scattered homes. People seemed to peer out of every window, and yet no one came to say anything to us.

  “I’m getting some seriously creepy vibes from this place,” whispered Kat.

  “Maybe they recognize the pale blue uniforms,” I whispered back. I shivered. We all remembered the other breakouts and the carnage they supposedly left behind.

  We scurried faster.

  “Hey!” someone called out to us. It was an older teenager in his driveway, watering flowers. Upon closer inspection, it seemed like he was yelling to his dog. The small fluffy creature waddled up to us across the narrow street and wagged its tail at our feet.

  “Hi!” I greeted them, “Hi, hello there! Good dog!”

  The dog’s owner bounded across to us in three long strides and scooped up the waggling pile of dark brown fluff. The boy’s curly hair almost matched the dog’s messy coat.

  “Hi!” he said to us, showing none of the eerie wariness the rest of the town had. “I’m Elliot, and this is Patricia!” He seemed not much older than us, maybe nineteen or twenty.

  “Patricia is the sweetest girl I’ve ever met,” Kat yelped. We had never seen a dog in person before.

  “And what are your names? And why don’t you have shoes,” Elliot asked us, noticing for the first time what a disheveled state we were in.

  “I’m Katrina, but you can call me Kat,” she said.

  “I’m Sparrow,” I said.

  “And I’m James, nice to meet you,” James held out his hand.

  This was the first outside person we’d talked to. We were trying to make a good impression.

  “Well, Kat, Sparrow, and James, would you like to come inside and meet my other pets? You seem so enamored with Patricia, and I’m lonely when my mom’s not home.”

  “Yes please!” shouted Kat. She followed him in without looking back to see if we had followed.

  James and I just looked at each other and wondered why he trusted us so quickly.

  The interior of his house was heavily cluttered and smelled like sawdust. Every flat surface was topped with sheets of paper, letters, dishes, and clothes. I wondered how often his mother was out.

  “Do you live here by yourself?” asked James.

  “Nope, it’s me and my mom,” Elliot replied, “She works out of town, so she only comes back on the weekends. I’m kind of like a housesitter, and in return, I have very low rent payments.”

  I nodded.

  “I’ll give you guys the tour! These parts of the house are the messiest because my mom doesn’t like when her stuff gets moved around. But I usually do tidy up a little on Friday before she comes home. The rest of the house stays pretty clean.”

  Elliot lead us through the living room past a TV that was running the news on mute. Patricia wagged happily behind her boy.

  “This is the hallway,” he said to us. We looked around at it with smiles. We had never been in anyone’s house before, besides the farmhouse we stayed at last night. Houses look much different when they’re being lived in.

  “This is bathroom number one,” said Elliot. The room is the cleanest we’d seen so far, besides a cat’s litter box surrounded by grains of litter. “It’s the one I use, and you guys can use if you want.”

  It had been a while since any of us had had a chance to relieve ourselves in the corn. I took the first turn and Elliot pointed to his room, where they’d be when I came out.

  In the bathroom mirror I looked into my own eyes. The overly bright fluorescent lighting didn’t do anything good to my face. It only added to the out-of-body feeling I was having. Was any of this real?

  I absently reached up to touch my cheek and my fingers hit the cold mirror with a gentle sound that snapped me back to reality. I rested my fingertips on the cold glass for only a second more, before washing my hands and using a small paper cup Elliot had by the sink to drink several times from the faucet.

  I found the three in Elliot’s bedroom. Kat was holding a long white snake.

  “This is my Ball Python, Angel,” Elliot told me. James pushed past me to go to the bathroom.

  “James didn’t seem very fond of her,” Elliot whispered.

  “I don’t think James likes snakes,” I replied, though this was as much news to me as it was to Elliot.

  “Elliot, do you know why everyone in town was looking at us from their windows?” asked Kat.

  I wanted to know the answer, too, but I wasn’t about to just ask him.

  “Maybe it’s because you’re wearing matching sweatsuits and you don’t have shoes?” he said, “this town is pretty traditional. They probably think you’re weird.”

  I looked around Elliot’s room. The walls were pale orange and the trim was dark red. The ceiling was white and dotted with blue paper stars. Elliot’s bed stood on stilts and a desk and several terrariums on pedestals stood below it. His carpet was cream with a few faded stains, and he had a TV on the wall opposite his bed. His room was easily the most organized out of all of the ones I’d seen.

  I crossed the room to peer into his terrariums. One of them was open, and I assumed it was for Angel. Another one had water and a tiny cave inside. Three frogs dotted the glass and two more sat on rocks. The third terrarium was dustier and appeared to be empty. There was a hole in the sand under a rock.

  “It’s a spider,” Elliot whispered behind me, making me jump. “Her name is Theresa.”

  I looked back at the hole in the sand and shivered.

  “Do you want to hold her?” he asked me, “If I throw a cricket in there, she’d come out.”

  I shook my head. “No thanks, buddy, I’m good over here, without a spider on me.” I took three steps back and turned to Kat.

  “How about Angel?” he smiled at me. The look on Kat’s face said she wasn’t ready to give up holding the snake yet, but I still nodded.

  Elliot gently led Angel’s head to my arm, and she slowly shifted her weight to me. She twisted up my arm and around my shoulders.

  “She’ll squeeze, but I promise she won’t hurt you,” said Elliot, “It’s just how she holds on.”

  My grin widened as Angel made herself comfortable on my shoulders. She wound her way up to the top of my head over my shaved-short hair.

  “Oh, I love her,” I told Elliot. Her little face, snout dotted with holes, came up to inspect me. Elliot reached out a finger.

  “Boop,” he said, touching her on the nose. Moving quicker than I’d seen her, Angel headed towards Elliot and climbed his arm to rest on his shoulders instead of mine.
 “I guess she doesn’t like strangers,” he said, “I don’t get many visitors who my pets don’t already know, so she’s probably just a little shy.” He lifted her coils from his neck and shoulders and set her back in the terrarium as James reappeared in the door.

  “Your turn, Kat,” he said.

  “Hey, we’ll be down the hallway when you come back,” said Elliot as Kat took her turn for the bathroom. “I’ll show you guys my mom’s workshop,” he said.

  This turned out to be the room at the very end of the hallway, and he showed us his mom’s bedroom and her attached bathroom along the way.

  The workshop was pretty cluttered as well, but not as bad as the living and dining rooms. A warm light shone on a workbench and directly under it, a tiny village sat.

  “This is just mom’s hobby,” Elliot told us, “She’s usually an advertiser. Have you guys ever seen the Toothypops commercials?”

  We nod. We didn’t have much, but we did have public programming and the news. Toothypops sponsored one of the littles’ favorite cartoons, so we had the pleasure of seeing that advertisement every morning.

  “My mom helped work on that one. She was one of the main artists involved with developing Toothy as a character. Before her, they were going to have some kind of ‘dentist-sponsored’ parent-centered Ad, but my mom wanted to put a spin on it to make it appealing to kids, like candy companies do.”

  I didn’t catch half of what he said, but I could tell he was a proud son.

  James took a few steps towards the tiny village.

  “This is amazing,” he said. Looking closer, I agreed.

  Kat joined us as Elliot explained the process of building the fence, painting the houses, and- as he lifted the roof off one of the houses- where they bought the tiny furniture building kits.

  “That’s super cool,” said Kat. We had never seen anything like this place in our lives, not even on TV. Elliot grinned from ear to ear and pushed his curly hair out of his eyes.

  “That’s pretty much the whole tour,” he said, “Except my mom has a cat somewhere. She doesn’t like me, though. She only sleeps in my bed at night and that’s pretty much the only time I see her. When my mom comes home, though, she’s always underfoot. Are you guys hungry? I was gonna order a pizza.”

  Our jaws all dropped. This was it. This was the moment. We were going to get a pizza delivery. I was giddy with excitement.

  After Elliot is satisfied we’ll like the toppings he suggested, he called and placed his order. Once he hung up, he looked around at the mess.

  “It will take them, like 45 minutes, cause they’re in the next town over. I’ll tidy.”

  I could tell Elliot was trying not to ask why we were walking through their town in the state we were. James and Kat were sitting on the floor in the living room inspecting James’ now completely healed foot.

  I stand by the kitchen counter as Elliot cleaned off the dining table.

  “So,” he said to me, “What's up with you three?”

  I wasn’t sure how much I should tell him. I glanced at the other two for support, but they were preoccupied with the news and and James’ foot.

  “Well,” I said, “We’re runaways, I guess you could say.”

  At this he squinted.

  “Runaways?” he repeated.

  “Of a sort,” I said, “You can’t tell anyone, though.”

  “No, no,” he said, “Your secret is safe with me. But can I ask you something?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “There’s this urban legend around here,” he said, “About this group of teens like eight years ago who came through here and burned the town next to ours to the ground.”

  I think of the empty farmhouse and a shiver runs down my spine.

  “What does the story say about them?” I probed.

  “That they wore matching clothes and no shoes,” he said flatly. I think he knew exactly who we were. So why wasn’t he afraid of us, if we’re supposedly the type to burn towns down.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, “I’m still not going to tell anyone. Plus the rest of the story is more absurd than that, so I don’t know if I trust the part about the fire.”

  “What’s the more absurd part?” I asked.

  “The adults all claim the kids came from that Pharmaceuticals site out in the cornfields, the one that closed down back in 2008,” he laughed, “And that one of them could shoot fire out of his eyes.”

  My eyebrows scrunch together all on their own, and I look back to Kat and James, and our unbroken bones and healed cuts.

  “That does sound absurd,” I said, “But I think the part about the closed down pharmaceuticals company was true. The upstairs of the Facility did look really closed down.”

  “The Facility?” Elliot asked. He sounded serious but not frightened.

  “Yeah, that’s what we called it from the inside,” I said, “But I don’t know what it was called, really.”

  “Hey, Sparrow,” said Kat. “Is this about us you think?”

  There was a segment on the news about a trio of missing children. Elliot unmuted it for us.
 “I don’t know,” I said, “Would they call us children?”

  The screen popped up images of three younger teens, looking very frightened and disheveled. They were on a subway platform, looking at the camera as though it was exactly what they were running away from. Their eyes were shockingly bright shades of red, green, and lavender, and they wore matching outfits. Pale blue from head to toe.

  “That’s not us,” said Kat, “But I think we need to find them.”

  James and I nod.

  “Well,” said Elliot, “That’s all the way over in Maryland. Hundreds of miles away. Are you going to walk?”

  We jump to our feet. “If we are, we better start,” said James.

  “No,” said Elliot, “You don’t understand, your feet would fall off before you got there. Let me make a phone call. And we can at least wait for the pizza, ok?”

  The gust of wind we got under our wings faded a little. Something in the last round of needles had given us more spontaneity than we had had before. Elliot escaped to his bedroom, and we could hear him talking on his phone.

  The news cycled through a few more stories and a few ads before returning to the Missing Children case. There wasn’t much to update us on, just that they were confirmed to be on a northbound train, but when the train was seized by the police, they had already gotten off at a previous stop.

  “So they aren’t caught yet,” said Kat.

  “It seems like they can take care of themselves,” said James, “Maybe we don’t need to find them after all?”

  “Are you kidding,” I said, “They’re like fourteen. They need our help.”

  I can’t help but look at their image on the screen and picture all the littles we had left behind.

  “Yeah, James,” said Kat. She climbed off the floor to join me on the couch.

  “Well, Elliot seems to think that the idea of us getting to them is impossible. And I think he has more knowledge about that kind of thing than us.”

  “What kind of thing, James?” asked Kat, “Running off to save missing children? I may not know much about the upside, but I have to imagine that’s not common.”

  James rolled his eyes at her.

  The news cycled through two more times before the doorbell rang and Elliot came sprinting through.

  “Pizza!” he shouted to himself, pulling out his wallet and opening up the front door.

  “How much will it be?” he asked, but the voice on the other side of the door was blunt.

  “We have reason to believe you’re harboring fugitives of the law, son,” she said.

  Kat, James, and I jumped from our seats and scurried into the hallway before she could look in and see us. Through the window to the backyard, I could see two figures in heavy armor. I stick close to Kat and James.

  We close ourselves in the workshop and look around like panicked rabbits. We can only hope Elliot can charm his way through his part of their investigation. The hiding was up to us.

  “Here!” Hissed Kat, Pulling away a small wooden hatch to reveal the underbelly of the house. We squeezed around a boiler of some sort to stand in the dust and dark. James carefully pulled the hatch closed behind us.

  We could hear muffled voices and footsteps above.

  There wasn’t enough space to stand, so we fell from our crouches into crawls and ventured deeper into the crawlspace.

  “It gets a little taller here,” whispered Kat ahead of me. I couldn’t see her, but I could hear her shuffling. “If we lay down, we’ll probably be out of sight from the workshop.”

  “And if they crawl in with us?” I asked.

  “We can bite them I guess?” said James, “You know that we don’t have much of a chance.”

  I tried not to let the thought panic me.

  The footsteps continued, and we all found each other’s hands and squeezed.

  After a while, the house grew more still. Only one set of footsteps wandered around, but we bickered about whether it was Elliot, or an officer. Did they arrest Elliot and take him away?

  We heard the doorbell ring again, and Elliot’s muffled voice.

  “Mm,” he said, loud enough that we could hear it, “Thanks for the pizza!”

  We crawled back along the length of the house and escaped our dusty prison.

  “Where the hell did you get so dirty?” Elliot asked us when we emerged in his living room.

  “The underside of your house is just dirt,” said James, “We climbed through a hole in the workshop.”

  “Amazing,” said Elliot, “You learn something new every day, even about your own house. I was so worried they’d look under a bed, or in a closet, and there you’d be. But they didn’t find you anywhere. They went to some of the houses next door before the pizza came.”

  He opened the door and stuck his head out. He came back and shrugged. “I don’t see them now, though.”

  He opened the pizza boxes and offered them to us with a flourish.

  While we ate, Elliot questioned us. We answered him as best we could, about where we came from, why we ran, and why we felt so sure something similar had happened to those kids we saw on the news.

  “Well, before I was interrupted,” he said, “I was talking to my friend Ryan. He lives about twenty minutes from here at the sheep farm? He would be totally down to watch all the pets while I’m gone.”

  “Elliot, we can’t ask you to come with us,” James said.

  “Why not?” Elliot replied, “You need me. Plus I have money, which you do not have, and a driver’s license, which you also do not have. I’m a valuable asset and it’s about time I have some kind of crazy adventure.”

  “Are you sure?” asked Kat. She seemed close to tears.

  I was feeling emotional, too. He had no reason to help us. He had no reason to trust us. And yet, here he was, offering us so much more than he knew.

  “It’s the right thing to do,” he said, “and I’m totally selfish, too. I want to get out of here and see the world a little.”

  “What will you tell your mom,” I asked. If I had a mom, I would want to make sure she knew I was safe.

  “We can drop by her office on our way to the highway,” Elliot said. “There isn’t any access to it until we get to the city anyways.”

  We ate our pizza and made plans. According to Elliot, he’d pack a few things and then we’d leave town that night. When we go through the next town, Elliot said he’d get us all new outfits at the thrift store there.

  “They’re open until eight, though,” he said, “So we’ll have to leave before six thirty to give ourselves enough time.”

  We looked at the clock. It was only three.

  “Will it take you that long to pack?” asked James. I was wondering the same thing.

  “No,” Elliot said, “Probably not. Especially with you guys’ help.”

  He wrapped up the leftover pizza and closed it in the fridge. “We have a lot of snacks and stuff in the pantry, so you guys can fill up a tote. Here-” Elliot throws a tote covered in pictures of fruits at Kat. “And one of you can make sure all the lights are turned off. And the third of you can make sure I have everything I need in my toiletries bag.”

  “How will we know what you would need in a ‘toiletries bag,’” asked James, a question all three of us were wondering.

  “Well, I’ll need shampoo, conditioner, toothbrush, toothpaste- Oh!” Elliot raced past us into the hallway. We followed him to the bathroom. He dug around under the sink before emerging triumphantly.

  “Spare toothbrushes!” he said, holding up a package. I picked the blue one.

  “We’ll have to share my toothpaste, though,” Elliot said. He pulled a small pack out of the drawer under the sink. “This is my toiletries bag,” he said. He hands it to me.

  “So that means, James, you’ll make sure the lights get turned off.”

  “Sounds good,” replied James. We all scurried around to do our jobs.

  By five, everything was packed in the car. Every second I spent outside was uneasy, and I checked over my shoulder more times than I probably needed to. I didn’t want to get swarmed by those officers, jumping out of the bushes and off the roof and dragging us all back to the Facility.

  “Load up,” said Elliot, “Let’s go get you some clothes. And shoes.”

  On the way there, I wondered how much Elliot had to spend. Did any of us tell him that we wouldn’t be able to pay him back?
 As if he were thinking of the same thing, Elliot held up a hand in front of him.

  “Onward,” he said, “And don’t any of you dare worry about money this trip. I never do anything, so my summer jobs just sit in my bank account.”

  “Elliot,” said Kat, “You really have to stop being so nice, I’m going to cry.”

  She was in the passenger seat, so he reached right over and patted her shoulder.

  “It’s not every day you get a chance to help someone this much,” said Elliot, “My mom raised me to try my hardest, not for myself, but for others. She said to me once, ‘you can give up on yourself sometimes. That’s healthy, to say ‘I can’t do this right now’ and sit down and give yourself a break. But giving up on people who genuinely need you won’t get you anywhere but bad places.”

  “Your mom sounds nice,” said James. Kat and I nodded in agreement.

  “Thanks,” he said, “She is nice. Nicest person I know. But not at work. She doesn’t let herself get stepped over, she can be pushy when she needs to.”

  Pushy when she needs to. I wished I was like that.

  We pull into the thrift store Elliot mentioned, Promised Lands Donation Center. The exterior was brick that could use a good scrub and three dying bushes dotted the sidewalk. Inside wasn’t much better- but the selection of clothes. I turned to Elliot with anticipation.

  “What do we get to pick?” I asked him. It was his money, I didn’t want to be rude.

  “What you want to,” he said, “You’ll probably need like five outfits. We can stop at the department store across the street from my mom’s work for stuff like socks and underwear, and, like-” he lowered his voice to a whisper, “bras. Stuff you wouldn’t want to buy used. But go wild. Get a cart each, I don’t care. My only other friend is Ryan and he has his own money from working on his parents’ sheep farm and apprenticing at the mechanic’s, so I never spend any except on my car and my pets.”

  I look around at the colors and I don’t know where to start.

  James taps Elliot’s shoulder and asked if he could have some help looking around the men’s clothing section. None of us had any experience with any of this, and James less still. He hadn’t always been a man, and the clothes the facility gave him were still the girls’ clothes.

  Kat and I insisted we could fend for ourselves and shooed them off.

  “What kind of clothes do you want to look for?” I asked her. She shrugged.

  “I don’t know. What kind of clothes do you what to look for?” She said. I shrugged, too.

  We decided to start with jeans, as we both agreed that we had always liked the look of them on TV. We had no idea what the sizes meant, and held them up to our waists until we were pretty sure we’d found some that fit. Kat fetched a cart and we piled our jeans in.

  I also threw in a few long, flowing, skirts, though I wasn’t sure whether I would like them or not. Kat seemed to like a lot of sweaters, even though it was pretty warm outside.

  “The weather on Elliot’s TV said it was supposed to be getting colder,” she said, “And also, isn’t it colder where we’re going?”

  I didn’t remember anyone mentioning anything about that. I’m sure Elliot would say something about it if that weren’t the case though. And maybe suggest lighter clothes.

  All the same, I looked through the outerwear section. I found something I had always wanted- a hoodie. There were actually a lot of hoodies, I would find, but the first one I saw was a mishmash of shades of red with “Raytown High School Senior Trip 2011” printed on the front in white. The fabric was softer than the outfit I was wearing. I put it in the cart.

  I also found an assortment of T-shirts, in all different colors, and none of them pale blue. Kat was gravitating more towards frilly clothes and blouses in dark colors. I found the more utilitarian button-downs more comfortable, in a collection of plaids. I really liked the plaids. I also found some burgundy sweatpants that almost matched the darker shades of red on the hoodie I’d chosen.

  With our clothes carefully separated down the middle, Kat and I set off in search of a dressing room we were fairly sure existed. No shopping scene in a movie was complete without a trip to the dressing room, so we had a faint idea of them and how they were used. Kat went first, telling me she was going to skip the part where she showed me everything and just make sure the stuff fit. When one of the other booths was unoccupied, I decided to do the same thing, though I would have loved the part where I show off my new clothes to my friends. James and Elliot were off somewhere else though, and it wouldn’t have been as fun without them anyways.

  I liked my outfits, but there was something missing about them. I wanted to keep the hoodie, and the jeans. Definitely not the skirts. They made me feel too exposed, like a cool breeze could scoop it away and leave me standing there, naked. I didn’t like all the plain T-shirts, either. I overestimated the way they would affect the outfits.

  I wanted more. More colors and patterns.

  I left the cart with Kat, who was already satisfied with her clothes, and went back to look again. This time I picked some dress shirts, simple, but colorful. I found one in the men’s section covered with tiny bananas, and three with dots all over them in the women’s shirts. I found a really nice jacket in dark brown that looked nice over the banana shirt, and asked Kat if she was looking for me to come out and show her.

  Kat, Elliot, and James, were all out there looking when I opened the door.

  “Amazing!” said Elliot with a wide grin, “I’ve never seen an outfit like that before, but I already love it!”

  “Yeah, Sparrow!” said James, “You look super cool.”

  Kat held two thumbs up. Something in my stomach wanted to float away.

  Elliot held up a hand. “Can I make a suggestion, though?” he said. The floating feeling faded a little, but I nodded because I wanted to hear what he had to say.

  “Maybe darker jeans. Those are pretty pale and I think it takes the attention away from that amazing banana shirt and suit jacket. Here, let me look,” he said. His long strides take him all the way across the store in a matter of seconds, where he scours the racks and holds up one pair of dark-colored jeans after another, squinting at me from the distance.

  He legs it back with three pairs.

  “See if any of these fit,” he said.

  I go back in, excited that I was now getting the full experience of ‘shopping.’ I liked a pair of dark blue jeans with tattered and torn knees. It fit the feeling of the rest of the outfit, and especially matched the dark blue background of the banana shirt.

  “And they all clapped,” said Elliot. Kat and James followed his instructions.

  I did a spin for them before returning to the pale blue and dirty clothes that I was beginning to hate.

  Elliot led us to the shoes, next.

  “This is going to be more difficult,” he said, “Cause usually anything other than high heels gets worn out before people donate them. But we can try!”

  Kat looked enamored with the high heels anyway, and tries a few pairs on her bare and grubby feet.

  “Shoe sizes seem to vary a lot more than clothes sizes do,” she said. Elliot looked up from where he was helping James try on a pair of boots.

  “Yeah,” he said, “Also I don’t suggest heels be your only pair of shoes. I’ve heard nothing but curses about them from my mom, and I wore them one day for spirit week my senior year of high school and I fractured a bone in my foot and had to have my foot in a cast during graduation.”

  He grinned lopsidedly, but Kat took him seriously and put the heels back.

  I couldn't find any shoes that I liked or wanted on the women’s racks. There was a pair of brown leather boots on the men’s side, but they were far too big on me.

  “You have very small feet,” said Elliot, “Follow me for a second.”

  He led me to the kid’s section, where there were a lot more shoes than there were for adults.

  “Maybe some of these will fit you,” he gestured.

  I hesitated, feeling overwhelmed and a little embarrassed.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, “I wear kid sized shoes a lot of the time, too. That’s how I thought of it.”

  I got a little closer and immediately found a pair of boy’s shoes that seemed both big enough for me, and really cool. They were made of canvas, with a rubber toe, and neon green laces. They fit nicely.

  “Skater shoes, huh?” he said of them, “Pretty cool, but not great for walking. I’ll put them in the cart and you pick one more, ok?”

  I looked back at the shoes. There were a lot of plain sneakers that I didn’t much like, but then I found some in the girl’s section that were adorned with sparkles. They were brown, so I imagined they’d match most of my other clothes.

  Elliot grinned through his curls when he saw them.

  “You were thinking about your banana outfit, weren’t you,” he said, “They’re perfect.”

  We all walked the store for one last round of searching. We were running out of time until the store closed.

  No one saw anything much they wanted, except James found a black vest that was very dapper, and I picked up a bright red clip-on bow tie that might look good with some of my plaid and polka-dotted shirts.

  Elliot made us wait outside in the car while he bought the clothes so we didn’t feel guilty about the price. I called the front seat this time, much to Kat’s disappointment.

  “We’re only about ten minutes to my mom’s city apartment,” Elliot told us when we were back on the road, “and the place across the street from her work is open until, like, ten, so we aren’t in any rush. Also, for the record, the clothes were cheaper than I thought.”

  That did make me feel more comfortable accepting them.

  “Thank you, Elliot,” I said quietly after a minute.

  “Of course,” he said, “Besides what I said earlier about you needing help, I like you guys now. I think we’re friends.”

  He turned on the radio and swirling fiddle tumbled out like a warm breeze.

  “What kind of music is that?” James asked him. He seemed enamored.

  “It’s Irish folk music,” he said, “It makes me feel… so alive. We’re all so alive.”

  The music jumped and danced all the way into town. I could see the lights of it far before we reached the city itself. The roads leading up to it built slowly, lanes joining it until it was more of a highway. Elliot weaved through the cars around us like he had done it a hundred times before and took exit 8A, Downtown. He pulled into a parking garage under a tall building.

  “I have a parking pass here,” he said, “But my mom has probably gone home by now. We can get what we need at the place across the street, then walk from there. If you put the outfits you want to wear into one bag, we can take them with us and change at the apartment.”

  We shuffled through our new clothes for a few minutes, picking what we’d like.

  As much as I would have loved to wear my best outfit with the brown jacket and the banana shirt, I felt like it was better to save that one for later. I went with blue jeans and a black button down with small white dots instead. I also took the red bow tie.

  “It’s hard to choose,” Kat told Elliot in explanation, “The blue is all we’ve ever had.”

  At this Elliot’s demeanor changed. Where before he seemed friendly and kind, he now seemed to understand a little more how much he was doing for us.

  “I didn’t think of that,” he said, “I’m glad I could be here for this.”

  All three of us smiled at him.

  “You have to wear your shoes without socks for now,” he said, “They won’t let you in without them.”

  I definitely chose the black ones with neon green laces.

  We packed our outfits into one of the plastic shopping bags and exited into the buzzing atmosphere of the parking garage. James sticks close to Elliot, but Kat skipped around.

  “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t!” she sang, “I can’t believe we’re here, we’re out and free!”

  The tune didn’t make much of a song, but I was glad she was so happy. I was happy, too. I followed behind Elliot and James and watched their dark and light curls bounce in sync. James grabbed Elliot’s hand and my heart warmed.

  Kat ran up beside me as we exited to the street. Cars raced past.

  “Never seen anything like this, huh?” said Kat, “Never seen anything even close.”

  She was right. Movies and books could never have prepared me for the magnitude of the concrete and light and metal that was around us. It hummed like a living thing, and people passed, and talked, and moved in every direction.

  “It’s pretty busy out here,” said Elliot, “But cities are good for something- no one really cares what you’re doing, or what you look like.”

  Still holding James’ hand, he showed us how crosswalks worked. The store across the street was large and cleaner than the thrift shop could ever hope to be. Even if the people who polished these windows were hired to clean Promised Lands Donation Center, I got the feeling that it would still look as grey and feel as dingy next to this shining beast.

  “Three stories,” said Elliot, “We should find the map. We’re only here for a few things.”

  We stayed close to him as he found his way to an employee and she pointed up at floor two.

  “Ok,” said Elliot, “Be careful on the escalator.” He jumped onto it without issue, but it took each of us a little longer to trust our feet would stay under us.

  At the underwear section, we all felt a little overwhelmed. There were rows and rows of packages, and racks and racks of bras.

  I’d never even worn a bra.

  “Hello! You look lost,” said a smiling employee in a blue shirt and brown pants. Elliot and James snuck away while we asked her how bra sizing worked.

  I didn’t like the look of them.

  “Do you have anything that will make them look… smaller?” I asked. I didn’t like the outline under my shirt, and nothing she showed me was very comfortable. Kat, however, had already found three she liked, and had run off to find Elliot and James to show them off.

  “Actually, we do,” she said, smile never leaving her face.

  She showed me a section far from the other bras that included all kinds of tops, shirts, and binders meant to change your shape so you feel more comfortable. James was already standing there, looking.

  We looked, side by side.

  I tried on many of them before I decided I liked one. Kat also convinced me to get a plain T-shirt bra.

  “Just because you feel like this now-” she gestured to the binders, “doesn’t mean you will tomorrow. I know you better than that, Sparrow.”

  She was probably right.

  James looked so comfortable with himself as we walked out of the store, laden with bags.

  “I can’t wait to wear those,” he said, pointing to the bag Elliot held with our binders within.

  “You can’t wear them all the time,” Elliot said, “It’s not safe. You could get hurt. But for like eight hours a day- no dysphoria for you.”

  “What’s dysphoria?” asked Kat.

  “Well, if you ever feel like a part of you doesn’t belong there, or like something is missing, but, like, specifically to do with gender, that’s dysphoria. I’m not the best at explaining things. But when James wants to flatten things out, that’s because of dysphoria.”

  James stares at Elliot like a new world has opened up to him.

  “So there’s a name for it?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” said Elliot, “You’re transgender. There’s like a million of you. More.”

  James stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, and we all watched him tear up.

  “Aww, James,” said Kat. She grabbed his hand and held on to his shoulder, starting up our walking pace again. “I’m glad you’re not alone.”

  I thought about speaking up. What about when you only feel dysphoria sometimes? Is it still real?

  “Is there anyone who’s only transgender sometimes?” Kat asked Elliot, looking at me several times to assure it didn’t make me uncomfortable.

  “Yeah, I think so.” He ran a hand through his curls. “I’m not exactly the best one to ask about this stuff. But I think that’s called genderfluid. There’s a million different names for this kind of stuff, you just have to find something that fits right for you.”

  “What about you, Elliot?” I asked.

  “Well, I’ve never told anyone before,” he said, “Ryan is a good friend, but we’re the sit-quietly-and-play-video-games-together type of friends.”

  “Well, we won’t tell anyone,” said Kat.

  “I’m pretty sure I pansexual,” he said.

  “What does that mean?” James asked.

  “When I’m looking at people who I want to date, it doesn’t matter to me what their gender is. I’m interested in any end of the spectrum. It took me a while to find out. Back when I was in elementary school, I hated the idea of being locked into my future- picket fence, wife, job. I wanted something else. Once I figured out I was pan, it made so much more sense to me. Life, and stuff. It’s not like I’ve ever dated anyone- we cross at this light up here- but once I knew it could be anyone, life just fit a lot better for me.”

  James had caught up with Elliot again and was holding his hand like before.

  “That’s great,” he said, “So you can have a huge family with lots of people in it.”

  “Well, no. That’s not exactly what I meant. That’s called being poly. That’s a thing too, but that’s not exactly something I’m interested in. If I had a partner who also had another partner, then that might be fine? I guess I don’t know yet. But I’m mostly monogamous.”

  We all nodded like we understood him completely, when really this was all a whirlwind of information, and we’d need a lot more time to adjust.

  Once we’d crossed the street, Elliot entered a pass-code to the front door of a tall, mostly glass building.

  “I probably should have called her first,” he said, “But I’m sure it will be fine.”

  We entered an elevator and he pressed the button for the twenty-second floor. We whizzed up. The elevator had one glass wall, and we all stood near it, looking out as the city fell far away below us. We had traded the noise of cars and voices and the dimly illuminated nighttime streets for a stark and clean little chamber with gently tinkling music and a shiny floor.

  At our stop, we left the elevator and entered a long tan hallway. The floor was beige tile and the walls were beige paint. In the corners of the hallway’s every turn sat a leafy plant, as though the building were trying to trick us into thinking we were still on the ground floor, and the outside was leaking in.

  At a door labelled with V17, Elliot knocked. In only a few seconds, the door swung open.

  The woman in the doorway in her pajamas stared at Elliot stared at the woman in the doorway in her pajamas.

  “Ladies and gentlemen and everything in between,” he said, “This is not my mom.”

  “Are you Elliot?” she asked. A wide smile spread across her dark face.

  “I might be, depending on who’s asking,” he replied.

  “Kimberly, your son is at the door!” the stranger called into the house behind her.

  There was a shuffling sound and a woman who looked very similar to Elliot approached us.

  “Oh my god,” she said, “Elliot, you didn’t even call.”

  He shrugged. “I thought about that once I got here, but I figured it was too late by then.”

  “And who are these people?” she asked, gesturing to us.

  “They’re friends of mine. New friends. Can we borrow your bathroom for a while, they need to change out of these clothes and we only just bought new ones,” he said. He pushed his way past her into the apartment, leaving us on the doorstep. The two women smiled at us.

  “Well, come in then,” said Elliot’s mom. “I’m Kimberly. And this is Pura. Though, my son doesn’t seem very interested in the introductions. Pura is just staying the night… tonight… and the past few nights. Elliot! Come back here and invite your friends in! Come on in, guys, my bathroom is to the left down the hallway at the end.”

  James takes the bathroom first, and we don’t argue with him about it because he was easily the most excited to wear his new clothes.

  Kat and I sit awkwardly on the couch in a living room that faces a wall of windows. The city twinkles below us.

  “May I get closer to the window?” I asked Kimberly. She looked amused.

  “Make yourself at home here, kid. You can move around, dance, eat my food. And you can definitely look out at the amazing view.”

  I wasn’t about to tell her that that didn’t sound anything like the ‘home’ I was used to. Instead I smiled widely and got closer to the glass.

  I could feel someone standing next to me, but I couldn’t take my eyes away.

  “I’ve never seen anything like this in my whole life,” I said.

  “Is that why Elliot took you here?” Pura’s voice beside me asked.

  “Maybe,” I said, “He might have said something like that.” Or at least he implied it, in the way he talked about wanting to see the world and take us with him. I don’t think he knew how much more of the world he’d already seen than us.

  “He’s a sweet kid,” Kimberly said, somewhere behind us.

  The lights of cars moved by. Something darted across the sky with red and white flashing lights. Pillars of pinpoints of light marked people. So many people, small and far away, living their regular-sized lives and having no idea what we’d gone through. What the others were still going through.

  God it hurt my heart.

  We stood together like that until I heard James exit the bathroom. We applauded his jeans, hoodie, and all-around more masculine appearance. The pale blue wasn’t flattering on any of us, but least of all James. His darker skin and blond curls just didn’t work well with a blue that was only a little lighter than his skin, and the ruffles they put on the edges of the sweaters ‘for girls’ had always made him self-conscious. Self-conscious enough to ask the doctors for a change, the other clothes, please. They locked him in solitary for a month and he was quieter ever since then.

  “What are your names, by the way?” Elliot’s mom asked us.

  We introduced ourselves, and I quietly took my clothes into the bathroom while everyone chatted.

  I stripped quickly of the blue and threw it on top of James’ in the bathroom trash can- a sleek and tall thing that I almost didn’t recognize at first. The whole bathroom was strange. The soap dispenser was a silver orb with a nozzle on top, and the sink was a large stainless-steel bowl attached to the counter and a faucet that looked like a stalk of bamboo.

  I liked it.

  I put on my binder and looked from several different angles. I liked it. I slid my hands down my chest with closed eyes and felt the flatness there. It felt like me.

  With the black and white button down, you could hardly tell that I’d had breasts just moments ago at all. The jeans fit nicely. They didn’t hang loosely enough to hide my hips, but my hips were never the part that bothered me. They were just there. I liked the binder, though.

  I exited with my bow tie in place and they all gushed over me as much as they did over James. Even though Kimberly and Pura hadn’t heard the whole story, it seemed to me they understood some of what this meant to us.

  I sat on the couch and I felt so comfortable I could cry.

  Kat came out wearing a flowing burgundy top and black pants and we all applauded her outfit. The brown flats looked nice with it, too, even though the white socks did seem to stick out.

  “May I give you a tip, my darling?” said Pura, using sweet tones, “Those sorts of shoes don’t usually need socks with them.”

  Kat and Pura discussed other things Kat had questions about. In the corner, Elliot explained us to his mom, and she eyed us warily. I couldn’t hear much of their conversation, besides his mom wanting him to be safe, and him assuring her that he trusted us. It made me feel warm inside, both that his mom loved him so much, and that Elliot was already willing to stand up for us.

  “Have you eaten?” Pura asked Kat. It caught my attention. The pizza we’d had for lunch was long forgotten by my stomach.

  “We had lunch,” said Kat.

  “Well, I was about to cook something up for Kimberly and I, but I’m sure I can figure something out for all of us. Is anyone willing to help?” she said. I’m slowly realizing that the roundness of her voice is some kind of accent, and a beautiful and soothing one. It’s gentle and faded, as though her voice had almost forgotten that it had once belonged somewhere else.

  Kimberly surprised me by leaning on the couch chair I was sitting in and resting her hands on either side of the headrest.

  “What was it you planned on making?” James asked, joining us from where he had been looking both out the windows and at his reflection in them. He took up a seat at the bar and spun in his seat.

  “Spinny seats,” he said.

  I got up and joined him. I wanted to try the spinny seats.

  Soon, Kat, James, and I all spun in place while Pura finely chopped potatoes and carrots.

  “Who would like to stir the pot for me while I add our ingredients?” she asked, “I’m making a quick stew. It’s getting cold out there.”

  If it was, I hadn’t felt it on the walk here.

  “It’s not supposed to until the weekend,” Elliot said.

  “But the spirit!” Pura said, “The feeling in the air! The vibes are cold, and autumn. And autumn means stew.” She pours a carton of chicken broth in the pot and adds her potatoes and carrots. They’re cut into tiny cubes, smaller than my teeth.

  No one hand-made any of our food in the Facility. I had never stirred a pot before.

  “Are there any rules to this?” I asked Pura, “Am I doing this right?”

  “Just stir how your heart tells you.” She pats me on the shoulder.

  So I did. I didn’t like the sound of the spoon clanging against the sides, so I stirred with purpose. I didn’t want to scrape the bottom. I didn’t want to hit the sides.

  The kitchen filled with the scent of onions, and she appeared at my side with the cutting board and scraped them into our stew.

  “Lets let it breathe,” she said. She put a plate beside me. I kept stirring.

  “I meant, put the spoon here and it can start to simmer on its own,” she said.

  “Oh.” I felt embarrassed. I did what she said and took a few steps back.

  “Where do you come from?” she asked me then. I looked back to the others, but they were no longer anywhere I could see them.

  “It’s a long story,” I said, “A sad story.”

  “Well,” she said, “Stew takes a while. And I have a long sad story, too. Maybe we can trade.”

  Her smile is genuine. I look worriedly to the stew.

  “The stew will be fine. Here.” She took two of the spinny stools from the other side of the counter and put them within sight of the oven. “We can keep an eye on it if it makes you feel better.”

  It did.

  “I don’t know where to start,” I said.

  “The beginning? We can take turns if you would like to.”

  “I would like that,” I said. “I’ll start. The place I’m from is only a little ways from Elliot’s house. And none of us had ever left it until we escaped yesterday.”

  She looked surprised, and moved to ask a question.

  “Your turn,” I said, hopefully interrupting a string of questions I knew I wouldn’t have had answers to.

  “I come from somewhere very far from here,” she said, “and though I was born there, I left when I was very young. Your turn.”

  “I feel so small out here,” I said. I glanced at the window. “I feel like I’m a mile inside myself instead of at the surface interacting with people- people I’ve only just met? That’s insane. Before Elliot and the people at the store and you two, I talked to the same groups of people my whole life. The newest of us were ten, so that’s ten years without new faces. I mean, there were some new Doctors, and the fancyman could basically have been a new face with how rarely we saw him, but it’s not like they ever talked to us. We were the oldest ones there, too. Eighteen and under.” I swallowed a building tension. My voice broke when I told Pura it was her turn.

  “I left my family behind,” she said, “Completely on accident. We got here and they were sent back. I was hiding under the bed and no one found me. I’ve been on my own since then.”

  Our experiences were very different, but I could understand the sound in her voice. It had an unsaid goodbye behind it.

  “We left our family behind, too,” I said. Because truly, Cleo and Timothy, and the littles, and everyone I fell asleep next to in dorm 225- they were my family. The only one I’d ever had. And now I only had James and Kat left of that family. “And I don’t know if they’d forgive me, even if I ever saw them again. We left them behind.”

  A tear escaped without any permission of mine and I closed my eyes to bar any more from having the audacity.

  Pura put a hand on my shoulder. “I’m sure they would,” she said, “If they’re any kind of family worth the name.” She stood up and checked on our stew.

  “I think we should make the chicken, now,” she said. She pulled out a pan and put in on the stove. She put oil in it and started to cut open a package of pink uncooked chicken breasts.

  “Watch that pan and tell me when it starts to get hot,” she said, “splash a little water in it, just a drop, and when it pops, it’s ready.”

  I’m not sure what she meant by ‘pop,’ but the first few drops I added did nothing. I told Pura it was her turn to tell her story.

  “I tried to find my mother and father a few years ago, but the only thing I could remember about the place we lived was that it was green and there was a river… too many places in Brazil match that description, and too many people match my mother and father’s names. Regina and Toro.”

  I added another drop to the pan and I could only describe the sound it made as a crackle.

  “Good,” Pura said, “Because the chicken is ready.” She turned the stove down and added the cubed and seasoned chicken. As quickly as she could, she turned them all over until all the edges were brown.

  “Are they done already?” I asked.

  “No, no,” she said, “The middle is still raw, you would get sick. Now we let them cook through. The edges are nice and seared.” She put lids over both.

  The food is starting to smell delicious.

  “Where did you learn to cook?” I asked Pura. She smiled.

  “Taught myself, mostly. But I took a few culinary classes in college.”

  College. If there was anywhere I’d like to go- if I manage not to get caught and dragged back to the Facility- it would be college. Any of them, I don’t care. A place I can learn? Make friends? My heart ached for the life I never got to have.

  “Tell me more about this place you come from,” she said.

  “It was… strict. And dangerous. All rules all the time, and if you broke them, punishment was severe. Those of us who decided they didn’t care about the punishment eventually died. They gave us needles and pills- testing them. So the ones who didn’t cooperate got the more… experimental ones.”

  Pura looked at me like she was going to start yelling at someone.

  “Sparrow-” she said. But the others rejoined us, and she didn’t have a chance to say whatever it was she meant to.

  After a little while, she added the chicken to our stew and left the lid off. She added some kind of powder, and the broth began to thicken. She had me stir, and excused herself to talk with Kimberly.

  “This has been really nice,” said Kat. I looked more closely at her face. She was wearing makeup. I looked more closely at James, too, and shadows had been added to his face to change the shape of it. He looked more like himself as he wanted to be.

  “That’s amazing,” I said to them. The idea of someone getting that close to my face and plastering stuff all over it didn’t appeal to me, so I didn’t ask if I got a turn. I would gladly stay there and cook instead. Kimberly and Pura roped Elliot into their conversation, and I got the feeling they were angry.

  “The food smells amazing,” said James.

  “Thanks!” I said. I went back to the pot and stirred it again.

  “Have you guys been thinking about the others?” asked Kat. She was zoning out, staring at the oven clock.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Of course,” said James.

  “They’d be screaming at us about lights out right now,” Kat said.

  She was right, it was nine. No more reading our censored history books in the buzzing fluorescent light. We always bunked right above each other. We switched every once and awhile, but as long as we changed the medical charts sitting at the heads of our beds, it didn’t matter to them. There were so many of us, it’s not like they cared enough to keep track.

  Some of them cared, but none who were in charge of our dorm. James always had a string of visitors, all of which eventually got themselves fired. He was underage for a lot of the time he had his suitors- it’s no wonder they disappeared one by one.

  The most recent one was fresh and new, and horrified by what she had stepped into. She told James everything- when the next medication was coming, what it was supposed to do, etc. She was lucky we left- she would have been harshly punished if she got caught.

  I always got the feeling the doctors were nearly as stuck with us as we were with them. They seemed so restless and trapped. Some tortured us just for the entertainment of it.

  I closed my eyes against the memory, but it battered the inside of my skull anyway- Dr. 21- he hurt me. Dragged me by my ears to a closet and burned me with his taser. I hadn’t done anything wrong, I didn’t deserve it.

  Flashes come back to me, my blue clothes like dead butterflies on the floor, his red and sweaty face, and the word ‘bucket’ written on something in that closet- the only thing that played in my head as it happened, over and over, ‘bucket, bucket, I’m just a bucket and I can be cleaned.’

  I jumped off my chair and ran to the bathroom to throw up. Kat followed quickly behind me, but James was too startled to be fast enough.

  She rubbed my back as I leaned over the bathroom sink, chunks of mostly digested pizza littering the stainless steel.

  “I could see where your train of thought was going,” she murmured, “mine was doing the same thing-”

  “Do you think we’ll ever forget him?” I rasped. My stomach constricted but nothing more was expelled.

  She petted my fuzzy head. “I don’t know if we’ll get the chance. But your hair will grow out, and we’ll get older, and our skin will be new, and we’ll have parts of us that have never touched him- and that is some comfort. To me, at least.”

  I nodded, resting my face against the basin after spitting into the mess in the sink. “That is a comfort,” I said.

  They cut our hair as punishment. My punishment was reporting Dr.21 and him finding out about it.

  Kimberly came to the door. “You all right, Kiddo?” she asked. She held out a tissue box.

  “I think I will be,” I said. I smiled smally at Kat. “It’ll take time.”

  “It’ll take time to fix that door, too,” she said. She said it kindly. I had no idea what she was talking about.

  Kat and I emerged to find the bathroom door off its hinges on the floor.

  “What?” I said.

  “How did that happen?” asked Kat.

  “You literally just did that,” said James, who stood at the end of the hallway.

  “Me?” I said. I looked at the way the metal had been twisted and broke.

  “Yeah, when you ran off,” James said.

  Kimberly made sure I knew she didn’t blame me, plus that it was probably broken anyway to just come off like that, but I stared down at my hands. I stared and I thought about that story Elliot told. The boy with fire in his eyes and the burnt husk of a town.

  Even as we went to the dining table and Pura served our stew, I just kept looking at my hands.

  I caught Kat and James watching me watching my hands, and smiled to try and soothe their worried looks. They kept the conversation going with the adults, but altogether the atmosphere felt strained.

  “We have to do something about this,” Pura finally said, sounding angry.

  “What, exactly?” said Kimberly, “They’re the rich, Pura. They have more power than we could dream of.”

  “We could go to the police?” she said.

  “From the sounds of what Elliot’s told me, they own the police. You think with all this going on this long, they would never have been caught if they weren’t paying off the people who were supposed to catch them? It sounds to me like this is literally the US government, buying kids to test shit on them,” Kimberly said. She was shouting, and I tucked my hands away under the table to concentrate on the conversation at hand.

  Pura started to say something, but James interrupted.

  “It probably is the government, by the way,” he said, “They wanted to make us stronger. They wanted the next best weapon.”

  None of them looked skeptical. I guess it’s believable. What a sad country to live in, that they jumped to believe the worst about those in charge.

  “Can we please.” I swallowed some saliva caught in my throat. “Can we please eat this amazing soup and go back to being happy? I’ve only been out for two days, I don’t really want to worry about anything like that yet.”

  Kat and James looked relieved. Elliot looked sad. Kimberly and Pura still looked angry, but we all ate our soup.

  Afterwards, we talked for a while. The two adults had a lot of questions about what it was like inside. I asked Kimberly if she wanted me to clean the bathroom sink, and she just lifted a hand.

  “I can manage,” she said.

  “We should really get going,” said Elliot.

  “You’re not staying the night?” Kimberly asked, “We can pull out the couch bed?”

  “No, that’s ok,” he said, “We should really get more road behind us. Long way to go.”

  “And why were you going east again?” she asked him. Pura stood up and went to the kitchen.

  “I wanted to show them more world than just the corn fields,” he said. I felt relieved that he hadn’t told her about the runaway children. I looked at my hands again. Were we all like this? Were their brightly colored eyes some kind of indication? Were we even human anymore, after all the doctors had done to us?

  I shook it off as Pura returned. She had our soup in a small plastic bin, a lid securely latched to the top.

  “For your trip,” she said, “If you ever get the chance to heat it up.”

  “Nah,” said James, “It was so good it won’t last long enough to cool down.”

  They laugh and I smile. It felt amazing to have done something like that. I helped make that soup. As we grabbed our things and headed back out the door, I thanked Pura for cooking with me, and Kimberly for not getting mad about the door.

  “It was my pleasure,” said Pura. She fuzzied the top of my head.

  “And forget about the door,” said Kimberly, “Friends of Elliot don’t owe me a thing.”

  As the door closed, I wondered what it might have been like to be raised by someone like Kimberly. Elliot seemed very fond of her. There wasn’t one doctor in the whole Facility I could think of like that. I didn’t like any of them. There were some that didn’t matter to me, and then there were some that I hated. I wasn’t James, I couldn't seduce them into compliance with me, and I wasn’t Kat, I couldn’t laugh and joke with them. I didn’t have a single one I really liked. But to be fair, I don’t think they did, either. We used them like they used us, and that was the end of it. As much as James joked about having a girlfriend, we were all just kids. James didn’t love them any more than they loved us, his romances were just a means to an end.

  But, damn if he didn’t play that part well.

  We were all pretty quiet as we made our way back to the car. Elliot unlocked it and let us in.

  “On the road?” he asked us, and we agreed wholeheartedly. Kat and I sat beside each other in the back. James and Elliot talked about all kinds of things.

  The hum of the road, and the sound of their voices lulled me to sleep on Kat’s shoulder.

  I opened my eyes to a still-dark sky and quieter conversation. James was telling Elliot about the Facility. Elliot listened for the most part.

  Then James sighed.

  “I just don’t know if we’ll be ok,” he said.

  “It’s not up to you to take care of them, James,” Elliot replied, “You have a lot of weight on you that you don’t necessarily need to carry. If this journey isn’t what you want, I can drop you off somewhere. Every one of you is capable of taking care of yourselves.”

  “You say that, but I don’t know if I believe it,” James replied. He glanced back at us and I closed my eyes, still listening.

  “I want them to be safe. All of them, not just Kat and Lea- I mean Kat and Sparrow,” he said, “Sorry, I’m still getting used to the name.”

  “She wouldn’t blame you. She told me earlier that she just picked it when you all broke free,” Elliot said, “There’s a ton of new. A ton of change. Sparrow wouldn’t blame you for mixing it up every once in awhile. Did you blame them for getting it wrong when you picked James?”

  “That’s the thing,” James said, “None of them ever got it wrong. Well, there was Cleo. She needed me to explain first. But she was two years younger than all of us, and easily the most stubborn one in my dorm.”

  “Tell me about her,” Elliot said, changing the subject like an expert.

  He was right, though. I didn’t mind that James got it wrong. Especially because he apologized, even though he thought I couldn’t hear him. It meant a lot.

  “Cleo is… She’s Cleo. She won’t change her mind for anyone, it has to be for herself, only. Which makes sense, I guess. That’s her way of coping. Just like Kat got loud and Sparrow got quiet.”

  “What else do you remember about her?”

  James thought for a second, then laughed.

  “Once she had a nightmare and jumped out of bed. She was on the top bunk. The doctors came to scream at us about going back to sleep, but we were all laughing so hard, especially Cleo-” James’ tone changed quickly, “She said later that the nightmare was about sinking down into inky fog and having to climb back out- she was one of the ones who had had a really bad experiment done on them, they all died and only a few got brought back. She never talked about it but I know it did some shit to her head.”

  Elliot didn’t say anything.

  “There was a lot of shit down there, Elliot,” James said, “Maybe it would have been better if they hadn’t gotten brought back. Maybe it would be better for the whole place to come down. Better than living.”

  “No,” Elliot said, “Never.”

  Now it’s James’ turn to be quiet.

  “Wouldn’t you rather free them?”

  “But if we can’t?” James said, “If it’s between letting them stay there and letting them rest? You weren’t there, Elliot! You have no idea what we’ve been through.”

  “Of course not,” he replied, “Of course not, James. I don’t claim to. But I know the value of life. Any kind of life.”

  “I guess we’ll have to disagree, then,” James replied. I felt Kat stiffen against me, and I knew she was listening, too. And we both disagreed with James.

  Of the two of us, Kat would have been the one to speak up, but we both feigned sleep.

  “I’m sorry you had to leave them behind,” said Elliot, “But you don’t get to say whether dying is better than living down there. It’s not fair to them.”

  James didn’t say anything more.

  I drifted in and out of sleep, and Elliot kept driving. For hours he did. At some point the radio turned on and played his Irish fiddling again.

  I woke with a start in a bright place, and my memories of the last car I slept in made me jump up.

  Oh, Elliot. It was Elliot’s car. It wouldn’t drive itself away with us in it. It wasn’t new enough to have that kind of technology.

  He parked and we all peered out the windows with sleepy eyes.

  “It’s time for a bathroom break,” said Elliot, turning off the car. We stepped out into the parking lot and saw, to our surprise, a brightening on the horizon. The landscape had also changed. Where before the land was flat enough you could see things miles before you came on them, now there were rolling slopes, like ripples on water.

  “How long have we been driving?” I asked Elliot.

  “Well,” he said, “It’s 5, so probably six hours?”

  “Don’t you need sleep?” Kat asked.

  “I usually stay up all night,” he said, “Playing video games with Ryan. But I am getting tired. Three or four is usually my limit, so this is pushing it.”

  “Maybe we can sleep in the parking lot here?” James said, “It’s darker over there by the edge.”

  “We could,” he said, “But I have a plan.”

  We were curious, and all of us asked him about the plan at least once. He wouldn’t say a thing, so we just followed him inside.

  The place he stopped us was a dimly lit rest area. An aged concrete structure with glass doors contained dusty vending machines. James’ face lit up.

  “Can we try the vending machines?” he said, grabbing Elliot’s arm.

  “I really have to pee first, come on.”

  They had two bathrooms on the opposite sides of the room, one with a large M, and the other with a large W.

  After hesitating for a second, James followed Elliot.

  Good. I would have scolded him for coming into the women’s room.

  The bathrooms were considerably newer than the rest of the building, making me think they remodeled them. The toilets were black and shiny, and the floor, though littered with some loose paper and a little scuffed, was relatively in good shape. The water was warm on my hands, which was nice, as the air was very cold. I had taken off my bow tie hours ago, and had my prized hoodie on over my buttondown.

  We reconverged in the middle of the room, looking around at all the vending machines. There were two for sodas, three for snack, and one for coffee.

  “Well, if you’re not going to decide,” said Elliot. He went up to one of the soda machines and picked one that was brown and probably filled with caffeine. We watched with glee as the machine rattled around and dispensed it out the bottom.

  James was close behind him, and asked what he suggested. We only ever got soda on very special occasions, like the bigwigs’ birthdays, or Founding Day. It wasn’t exactly like we remembered what kinds they were, and how they tasted compared to other kinds.

  “I like the brown ones,” he said, “Just in general. But the brightly colored ones are usually fruit flavored.”

  “And the, um, ‘brown ones?’” James asked.

  “I think they kind of made up their own flavors for those. Here, try mine,” he said.

  James decided he would much rather have something fruit flavored, and got a strawberry soda.

  Kat and I tried Elliot’s soda, too, and Kat got the cherry version of the same thing, and I settled on an orange soda.

  It’s absolutely delicious.

  In the snacks section, James picked trail mix and watched closely as metal spirals within the machine turned and dropped his package into the bottom. He pushed the door in and took it, amazed.

  Kat got a packaged chocolate swirl cake with frosting and impossible amounts of sugar. I went for some cheesy potato chips. Elliot stared indecisively at the three machines until he finally went with some pretzels.

  Then we were back in the car and on the road. Elliot started to describe his plan, to drive until morning and then stop somewhere - he wouldn’t tell us where, but he promised it would be amazingly fun, and that we weren’t allowed to worry about how long it would take, or about the price, and he said we’d sleep in a hotel for the night.

  He told us to sleep, and that he’d wake us when we got there.

  I didn’t understand how he had been awake for so long.

  But, a few hours later, I opened my eyes to the car rolling to a stop in an empty parking lot.

  “I have a little time to nap,” he said quietly. I was the only one to wake. We were in a grocery store parking lot.

  “If you want, you can go in. Here,” he said. He pulled out his wallet and handed me a crisp piece of green paper. A $20 bill.

  “Why don’t you get us breakfast?” he whispered. The other two didn’t move at all as I opened the door and stepped out into the parking lot.

  I stood for a minute or two before I heard Elliot tapping on the window behind me. I looked and he gave me a thumbs up and a tired grin before bundling up his sweater on the middle seat rest and twisting around to get comfortable.

  The sun was well on its way to rising, now, and people were in the parking lot around us. Strangers. A lot of them. Going about their business, and getting groceries, and drinking coffee, and talking to each other.

  The inside of me was trembling. I was alone. I had no idea what any of these people were doing here. What if they were hired by the Facility to make us think everything was going well and normally?

  I got memories as I walked, one by one, of the doctors hiding pills in our favorite foods, of our once-a-year time outside when they left the door open and we danced in the corn only to be chased back by gunfire and dogs and told the open gate was a test we’d failed, and of our dorms being switched around if we hugged each other too much or acted too friendly.

  What if this is that again? Finding something so wonderful, and feeling so happy. Being in love with something, with running, and being free, only to have a dog rip the flesh of your arms and gunfire to rattle in your ears for months to come whenever someone dropped a tray or closed a door too hard.

  I realized then I was stopped in the middle of the parking lot, and I hurried into the store.

  Before my eyes spread rows and rows of shelves, laden with hundreds of different kinds of food.

  “This was another thing the movies didn’t lie about,” I whispered to myself.

  Evidently an employee saw how overwhelmed I was and came to my rescue.

  “Do you know what you’re looking for, honey?” she asked. She was elderly and looked kind.

  “My friend Elliot sent me here to get breakfast, and- I’ve never been in a grocery store before.”

  She looked at me like I was making it up, but I was already distracted again by the sheer amount of food here.

  “You’re kidding,” she said, no longer looking, or sounding, kind.

  “I’m not, I’ve-”

  “Don’t waste my time,” she said, and walked away. I felt more alone than before.

  I wandered straight into the aisle ahead which seemed only to contain larger versions of the bags of snacks we saw in the vending machines. The next aisle was sodas, so to myself, I called those two the Vending Machine Aisles. Next to them was canned food. And more. And more.

  I wasn’t sure if Elliot had a can opener in the car, so I skipped those aisles.

  I wound up in the fresh fruits and vegetables. As much as I would have loved to be able to try and cook them something for breakfast- we were in a car. Maybe next time.

  At the front of the grocery section, there were breads and cakes. And doughnuts! Doughnuts count as breakfast, right?

  I watched a few people ahead of me fill a bag with a few doughnuts, careful to use tissue paper to grab them, and to only touch the ones they took.

  I got three chocolate ones, three vanilla ones with chocolate icing, and three just vanilla ones covered in sticky stuff that was probably pretty sweet. I also grabbed one with sprinkles, one with walnuts, and three different ones that said they had jam or cream inside.

  The bag was pretty heavy after that, but I was careful to add up the price and we’d be under twenty dollars.

  The lady at the register asked me how many doughnuts were in the bag and I counted in my head for a minute before I could say for sure. She seemed patient enough with me, though her voice just sounded bored.

  I took my spoils, and fifty extra cents, back to the car, where Elliot had fallen asleep, and the other two were still soundly asleep. I climbed back in and set the bag by my feet, sure they’d be pleased with me once we all woke.

  I curled up against Kat and closed my eyes for a little more sleep.

  The car was stuffy with all of us breathing in it, and soon enough we all roused.

  “Good,” said Elliot, checking the time, “I slept for two hours, and we should get to my Plan by the time it opens.”

  He looked back at me. “Our breakfast?” he said. I gave him the bag of doughnuts, very proud of myself.

  “Hell yeah!” said Elliot, “Doughnuts are easily the best breakfast.”

  “When did you get those,” asked Kat.

  “When we parked, Elliot asked me if I would go pick us out some breakfast. You guys were sleeping.” I was terrified, I wanted to add. I kept my mouth shut. I was very proud of myself.

  We all grabbed some out of the top. I mostly wanted the one with walnuts. I was pleased it was still in there when the boys handed the bag back.

  Kat, unsurprisingly, squealed when she saw the one with the rainbow sprinkles.

  “I got it for you,” I said to her. She smiled every second as she was eating it.

  There were still a lot of doughnuts left in the bag once we were done, and Elliot bundled it up and put it in the back.

  “Let's get to our destination,” he said. We licked our sticky fingers and settled down for more of a drive.

  It wasn’t even an hour before Elliot pointed out a few signs. We had no idea what they meant, but they were bright and colorful.

  He pulled off the highway and onto a smaller road that quickly split into six lanes, each one with a booth on it, and a bar to stop us entering, very similar to the parking garage we parked in back in the city.

  He paid someone in one of the booths and the bar lifted to let us through.

  “Where are we, Elliot?” asked Kat.

  “This,” he said, “Is an amusement park. And I’ve been wanting to come here for years but I never ended up going because it’s so far from the house.”

  “What’s an amusement park?” I asked. If I’d ever read about one, I didn’t remember.

  “You’ll see.”

  I didn’t see much other than trees until the road wound its way to a parking lot. Then, the sky opened up to reveal hulking metal spirals in a myriad of colors.

  “Are those roller coasters?” asked James.

  Elliot grinned. “Yup!”

  “I didn’t expect them to be so huge,” said Kat, sounding afraid.

  “Come on!” said Elliot. We all jumped out of the car after him. My excitement built quickly. Then it halted.

  “That’s longer than the line for clean blankets,” said James.

  “We have to go over here first,” said Elliot, “These people have all bought their tickets.”

  He pointed towards another, equally long, line.

  “Don’t worry, though,” he said, “They’re just opening now, once people start getting let in, this line will get a lot shorter. By the time I’ve bought our tickets, there will be probably half as many people!”

  The line moved slowly as we heard music and advertisements over the speakers inside. Elliot was right about the other line, though. It started moving quickly once the gates opened.

  Though the air was cold around us, the sun warmed our heads and soon it felt muggy and hot.

  “I thought it was supposed to get cold,” Elliot said.

  “I’m pretty sure you already said that,” said James, “and I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to get cold next week.”

  Elliot shrugged. “Yeah, but don’t you think it would at least get cool in preparation for it to get cold?”

  We all shrugged, though I think the question was rhetorical.

  Eventually, we found ourselves at the register. She smiled at us and asked how many tickets, and what ages we were.

  “Ok,” she said, “Luckily for you, we’re having a sort of special event today. I’m technically not supposed to tell people who don’t already know about it, since they sent out emails to people who have already been here and that’s sort of the ‘gimmick.’” She outlined some quotes around gimmick with her fingers. “But the deal is, if you get more than two tickets today, which means you all have to buy them with one card, you get an upgrade to our premium tickets for free. And this is all week. But, you have to know the secret word.” She gestured we come closer. “I have a secret for you.”

  We leaned in.

  “The secret word is ‘Banner.’ Cause we’re fifty banners amusement park! They’re geniuses.” She rolled her eyes, still grinning.

  “Thanks for giving me the secret word,” she said, “Your total will be two hundred and forty-five dollars, and you’re saving one hundred and fifty-two on those premium tickets today. That includes these Premium T Shirts,” she handed us all T Shirts that were absurdly oversized and that we all donned immediately, “and these pins with today's date on them. All day you can go up to any food vendor and get free drinks of any kind, excluding alcoholic beverages. You also get discounts on food, one free ride photo each, and up to ten dollars off any merchandise purchase you make today. Any questions?”

  None of us had any questions. Elliot thanked her four times for the upgrade and gladly paid for the tickets. Then we went to the gates.

  The line had shrunk considerably from the time we had arrived and within a few minutes we made it to the security checkpoint. The three of us from the Facility were very familiar with metal detectors like these. James and I looked nervously at Kat. She rubbed the back of her head absentmindedly.

  “Hey,” she said to one of the guards near us, “I have some metal on my bones… will that make the thingy go off?”

  The machines between every room always went off for her back at the Facility.

  “Uhhh, yeah, just come through and we’ll check you with our wands, okay?” he said.

  It buzzed as she passed under, but the wands didn’t find anything dense enough to count as a weapon.

  “You’re good to go. Have a great day.”

  They might not have questioned the vagueness of Kat ‘having metal on her bones,’ but Elliot did.

  “Well,” Kat said. I could tell she was going to have trouble explaining. We waited in another short line to be let in the main gates.

  “Well?” asked Elliot. I could tell he didn’t quite notice Kat’s discomfort.

  “It was an experiment,” she said, “To see if bones could get stronger. It’s just my legs. They stripped away all the muscle tissue and plated the bones of my calves and knees with titanium.”

  Elliot looked pained. Kat pulled up the leg of her black pants and showed him her scars. The flesh was mottled red.

  “It doesn’t hurt that much anymore,” she said, “But it used to. Especially my knees. The ligaments didn’t take well to being moved around that much.”

  “God, Kat,” said Elliot, “I’m so sorry.”

  She shrugged. “It is what it is.”

  We made it to the front of the line.

  The buttons we had pinned to our chests were equipped with bar codes that the attendees at the gate scanned for us.

  “Go right in!” one said, “Have fun!”

  We entered onto a main street lined with stores. In the distance, fun.

  “So, do we want a map, or do we want to just flub it?” asked Elliot, “What are we feeling?”

  “I’m feeling ‘flub it,’” I said. Kat agreed and James shrugged.

  “Flub it, it is, on a majority vote. We’ll start left and wander around to the other side. Any rides you see you want to try?” asked Elliot, “Personally, I know I want to try the Eviscerator. I’ve heard good things from Ryan.”

  “Ryan’s been here?” asked Kat.

  “Yeah, once. I think it was his cousin that took him or something,” he said.

  We turn out of the main street and immediately see a spinning teacups ride.

  “Hell yeah,” said James, and we all sprinted after him. We waited in line for one round of spinning, and got to see how dizzying it looked.

  “I’m so hyped,” said Kat as the gate was opened to let us on. We piled into a red teacup, and Elliot explained that we had to spin ourselves by tugging on the handle in the middle.

  Music started to blast around us, and we struggled to organize our tugging. When we managed to all pull in the same direction, the cup spun wildly. Colors, and faces, and screams blurred into a melting haze of fog around us as my eyes darted in my sockets to keep track. My chest compressed and I couldn’t help but laugh like a madman.

  Almost as soon as it begun, it seemed it was over. We held onto each other as we stumbled together off the platform with a dozen other dizzy patrons.

  Once we emerged into the sunlight, and my stomach settled, I felt like I had just passed through a portal and become a newer, shinier version of myself.

  Past a few more spinny-looking rides that we opted out of, the theme of the park changed. Where before it seemed more full of lights and colors, here it changed to grays, and bode of a mechanical danger. A sculpture of a robot of some kind guarded the entrance to a part of the park labelled ‘Apocalypse Tech.’

  “Oh, there it is!” shouted Elliot, “The Eviscerator!”

  Before us lay a behemoth of blue metal, blocking out the sky with its track.

  “That thing looks terrifying,” said Kat.

  “I know!” said Elliot, “But think about it, if you don’t go on it, you’ll always wonder about how it would have felt if you had!”

  We all stopped at the gate. Elliot stopped a few steps ahead of us.

  “I’m not going to force any of you to go on it,” he said, “But if you’re worried about dying, it’s nearly impossible. These things are so safe if you follow the rules.”

  “I don’t know, Elliot,” said James. Elliot grabbed his hand.

  “You can sit next to me, my dude. We’ll hold hands the whole time,” he said.

  “I’ll come too,” I said, “But if I regret this, you owe me.”

  “I’d expect nothing less,” Elliot said with a grin, “You better hold me to that, too.”

  I nodded.

  We all turned to Kat.

  “I still don’t know-” she said. She was pale.

  Behind us, the monster growled.

  “Here, look,” said Elliot, “They’re sending one up, you can watch and see what you think.”

  With a clacking, the coaster climbed the hill. It was comfortingly slow, and I bet the view from the hill was wonderful. Then, they plummeted off the end, and swirled into a corkscrew before weaving out of sight behind some bushes and warehouse-themed buildings.

  “I bet you can see the whole park from up there,” I told her, putting an arm over her shoulder to comfort her.

  “And I’ll get us all snacks after. Something more filling than the doughnuts, to hold hunger off,” Elliot said.

  “Ok,” Kat said, “I’ll do it.”

  We cheered for her, and she stayed close to me as we got into line.

  When we got there, all the lines for seats were full, but only of a few people.

  “Looks like we just have a few cars before it’s our turn,” Elliot said.

  The excitement that was in my stomach slowly corrupted and turned into icy fear. From there, the hill seemed steeper, and the car moved faster up it than previously anticipated.

  Kat grabbed my hand and squeezed.

  When it came to our turn, I had seen enough people get on to understand how the straps worked. Sit down, one across the waist, and the big cushy-looking ones click over your neck and lock into place. Then, the employees checked every seat, before giving a thumbs up, and graciously throwing everyone off a cliff.

  “I’m no longer ready,” I told Elliot as I sat down. The belt shook in my nervous hands as I tried to clasp it, and I saw that Kat was in much the same condition.

  “This is the first time I’ve ever done ANYTHING like this,” Kat yelled to the employee as he checked Elliot’s seat in front of us. Her nervousness made her louder than she meant to be.

  “You’re gonna love it,” the guy said, “Seriously, my favorite coaster here. Don’t let the name scare you.”

  “I am already scared,” she said, as he checked her seat, “But thank you for your input.”

  We heard them checking the last of the seats and then the car lurched to a start. Kat screamed and started to hyperventilate.

  “I’m not ready, I’m not ready, go back!” she yelled. The coaster did not listen. It turned out of the station and sped up as we reached the hill.

  “Oh god. Oh, fuck,” I heard James say, as land fell behind us. All I could manage to do was grab the foam padding with my fingernails and look at the rides around us.

  Something  gentle. Something gentle, next. Something not so tall or so scary. Something gentle, please.

  Time froze as we reached the top, and we plummeted back to earth.

  And we flew.

  I didn’t hear Kat’s scream more than I felt it. I agreed with it. I understood it. My mouth, however, remained clamped shut as we twirled into that corkscrew and around several turns. Ahead of us, hands still clasped, James and Elliot lifted their arms.

  Beyond a shadow of a doubt, I already knew I wanted to go on it again. As we finished the gliding slopes back to the station and rolled to a stop, Kat and I looked at each other. Her shoulder-length hair was a halo of gold around her head, the static of the winter air and the terrible wind throwing it into hysterics.

  “That was amazing,” she said with chattering teeth, “that was the best thing I’ve ever done.”

  “How did you guys like it!” Elliot shouted back at us, his face peering as best it could from the seat ahead of Kat.

  Kat just whooped in response.

  “I agree with her,” I said.

  “Great!” Elliot said, “Then you’re gonna love the next one over. It used to be called the Crash, but they renamed it. I think the Aviator? It’s smoother than this one.”

  “Can we still get that snack, though?” asked Kat. They rolled us into the station and the restraints hissed open.

  We crossed the path to a restaurant. My hands were chilled from the autumnal wind. Though the sun was warm as we waited in line, the top of the roller coaster was an entirely different story, and the trees we darted through chilled the air enough to make me shiver now that I’d escaped it.

  “This looks good,” Elliot said, looking around at the nearly empty booths, “I guess people don’t generally come here and eat right away.”

  “Are there usually more people?” I asked.

  “Yup,” he said, “Usually places like this never have an off day. They’re really popular, they get swamped. Especially with a deal like this-” he pointed at his button and the oversized TShirt he wore- “going on. People usually eat this up. Unless the weather calls for rain or something. But it doesn’t look like it. Maybe we’re just lucky.”

  But the idea that this was abnormal just made me anxious. I bet it was the facility. I bet they were turning people away at the gates and waiting for the right moment to corner us.

  I forced myself to look at the menu with the others.

  “Chicken tenders,” Elliot said, “Hell yeah. What about you guys?”

  “I’ll have chicken, too,” I said.

  “I want a salad,” said James, “I was so scared in line for the Eviscerator, I kind of lost my appetite for heavy stuff.”

  “Am I allowed to just have fries?” Kat asked.

  “For sure,” Elliot said. He pointed to a booth and went to take our order. We sat down and waited for him to return.

  “Do you guys think they’re still after us?” I asked them, “I’m having a lot of fun here, but is it safe to waste this much time? What if they’re chasing us.”

  “I wouldn’t lie to you,” Kat said, “The thought has crossed my mind. But I don’t think they’re chasing us in Elliot’s car. I think they still believe we’re somewhere in those corn fields.”

  “But how long is that liable to last?” asked James, “They only have to go so far before they realize one of the kids they questioned went out of town not long after. And do you think Elliot’s mom would lie for us if they tracked her down and asked her where we went?”

  “I think she would,” I said, “And even if she wouldn’t, she would definitely lie to protect Elliot.”

  Elliot arrived with sauce packets and an empty tray.
 “They had to cook more fries. The chicken comes with them, too. So, they’ll bring us the food in a minute.”

  We asked Elliot what he thought about the Facility chasing us, recapping our worries.

  “I honestly don’t know what they’d do. But I know my mom would lie to protect every one of you.”

  That made me warm inside, even though my fingers were still chilled from the ride and my rapid heartbeat.

  A friendly employee brought over our food, and the jittery feeling went away as I ate my chicken tenders. There was no way all these workers were in on it, after all. They were too nice to work at the facility.

  The rest of the day was full of rides and screaming and laughing and fun. Elliot insisted on buying us all hoodies before we left, and I liked the one I got even better than the one I had before. It was white, but dotted with banners of all different colors. The sticker on the front claimed there were all fifty, true to the park’s name, and that some of them glowed in the dark.

  We left at night, and I saw that the claim was true. Some did glow. They glowed in the shape of a heart, and I was happy.

  Elliot searched for local hotels on his phone and turned on the directions. It didn’t take long for us to arrive at a large, but welcoming building. Elliot did all the talking at the desk, while we stood tiredly behind him, holding our plastic bags of clothes and the bin of soup.

  Elliot handed Kat and I a card and told us we had the room next to theirs.

  “It’s too bad they don’t have any rooms with doors that connect,” Elliot said, “I’ve never gotten two hotel rooms before, and that would have been super cool.”

  We climbed into an elevator and Elliot pressed the button for the third floor.

  “Are you getting tired of us?” asked Kat. It would be like her to go right out and say what we all were thinking.

  “Nope! Of course not,” Elliot said, “I’m having a blast. You guys are some of the coolest people I’ve ever met- and I met you on accident! It’s radical. And don’t you dare think I mind any of your questions. I like answering them. And honestly? You guys make me look at the world different. The way you ask about things I’ve always known about kind of reminds me of how cool everything is. The world is pretty bright and big, and I forgot, mostly. It’s awesome. I love you guys.”

  I didn’t expect to ever cry in an elevator again, but here I am. I wipe my tears on the sleeve of my new hoodie.

  “We love you, too,” James said. We squished into a group hug as the doors opened on our floor.

  Elliot showed Kat and I how to use the key card, and pointed to an ice dispenser down the hall.

  “And if you need anything else, you can knock on the door,” he said, “Though, I’m probably going to take a shower and fall immediately asleep. I’ll come knock on the door when it’s time to leave in the morning, ok?”

  After we entered and closed the door, Kat and I stood on the carpeted hallway for a solid minute or two, getting comfortable with our surroundings. Kat moved first, dumping her bag of clothes out on the dark blue bedspread and rifling through them for a few seconds.

  “I think I’ll take a shower, too,” she said. She gingerly pushed open the door beside me and flicked on the light switch.

  “That’s a nice bathtub,” I commented. I dumped my clothes out on the bed, too, as Kat closed the door. Soon the sound of running water started, and I settled into the bed to wait for my turn.

  There was a TV facing me, and bright red velvety chair between it and the window. On the other side, near the door, there was a dresser with a coffee machine on top. I dragged the velvet chair around beside the bed and turned it to face the TV. Once I figured out the remotes, I flipped until I recognized a cartoon movie I hadn’t seen in years.

  I was too wrapped up in the movie to notice that Kat had come out and joined me.

  After a few more scenes passed, I gave up my chair and took my sweatpants and underwear into the bathroom with me. I would wear the new TShirt, too, I decided.

  The hot water was decadent, and the tiny soap, shampoo, and conditioner provided smelled amazing. The giant bottles in the bathrooms at the facility always smelled too strongly of plastic flowers and oranges. This soap was more delicate, and floated around my head as I dried off and slipped into my comfortable clothes.

   I dumped the clothes I changed out of onto the bed and started to add them back to my bag before Kat shushed me. She sat in the red chair, holding up a finger. I noticed then that she had muted the TV.

  “What?” I asked her. She pointed to the wall the boys’ room and ours shared.

  There came a suspicious sound.

  “What!” I said.

  “I think they’re- um.”

  “What!” I said. I definitely already understood.

  “They’re totally-”

  The wall interrupted us with a moan.

  We froze only for a few seconds before Kat stood. “Let's go take a long walk.”

  I nodded in vigorous agreement, and we slipped our shoes on and escaped.

  Kat and I each had a room key in our pockets as we wandered the floors, taking the elevator down one floor at a time, and finding that they were all almost identical. The ground floor had much more to see.

   Instead of there being rooms like the rest of the hotel, there were a lot more empty halls, with Employee doors, and dark glass doorways to conference rooms. There was an outdoor pool, hidden under a tarp, and an outdoor hot tub, well lit and happily bubbling. Kat and I quickly took it for ourselves, taking off our shoes to dip our feet in.

  I fetched towels from a rack for us to sit on to keep our butts from getting wet, and we sunk our toes into the water.

  “That’s amazing,” Kat said, “I never expected a hot tub to be this amazing.”

  “I never expected anything to be this amazing,” I said, “The world is amazing.”

  She looked up at the chilly stars above us and nodded. “Yeah,” she said, “It is.”

  We looked out at the night sky for a while.

  “So what do you think of James and Elliot?” I asked.

  “I think it’s nice,” she said, “I really think it is. James may have had relationships before- but none of them were good for him. I think this one will be.”

  “I really like Elliot,” I said. I already knew I would do anything to protect him.

  “I do, too,” she said.

  “And do we want to talk about me ripping that door off its hinges,” I asked.

  “That, I’m going to say no to,” she said, “I’m not ready to think about that.”

  Me neither. If the facility did something right, and they knew it- they were never going to let us be free. Not easily.

  “And I also don’t want to talk about Cleo. Or Timothy. Or Joey or Catherine or Knox.”

  I shook my head, too. I didn’t want to talk about them, either. As much as they wanted to occupy my mind, I couldn’t let them live there without wanting to cry.

  “Do you think it’s safe to go up now?” she asked me.

  “Maybe. I’m at least tired enough now to be able to fall asleep before I really hear it again. And we can let the TV play and drown it out, hopefully.”

  We dried our feet off and made our way back to bed. There weren’t any more sounds from the other room, and we tumbled into our beds and fell asleep.

  In the morning, Elliot woke us with a knock on the door.

  “They have free breakfast!” he said, far too cheerful.

  “Free?” Kat said, “Just breakfast for free?”

  “Yup!” said Elliot, “Get dressed and packed up! We’ll bring our stuff out to the car first.”

  Free breakfast turned out to be a small buffet, with toast, fruit, muffins, cereal, eggs, bacon, sausage, waffles, juice, coffee, and whipped cream.

  I, of course, had a waffle. With peanut butter, syrup, and whipped cream.

  The others had all kinds of combinations, but every one of us had a waffle. Elliot, strangest of all of us, topped his with bacon and sausage and eggs.

  “It’s delicious,” he said, “And if later you try it, you’ll thank me.”

  I decidedly didn’t believe him.

  We piled back into the car with full stomachs and struggled to breathe as we hit the highway again- this time at a much more reasonable hour.

  “I swear,” said Elliot, “I just needed a good night’s sleep and I’m so ready for hours of driving.”

  I looked at the back of James’ head in front of me. Was Kat going to say something? Because I wasn’t about to.

  “What did you say?” asked James.

  “Nobody said anything,” Kat said.

  “No, I swear, Sparrow just said something about you.”

  I flushed heavily. Did I say that out loud?

  “Yeah, you did,” he said, “but what were you talking about?”

  “Ok, James,” said Kat, “Definitely no one said anything to you that time. Are you ok?”

  “I’m fine,” James said, frustrated, “I just definitely heard Sparrow ask if you were going to say something.”

  Then we were both flustered. I was more caught up with his hearing what I thought towards him rather than what we overheard last night.

  “James,” I said, “I think… I think I just thought that to you.”

  His reaction to that revelation was far more embarrassed than I expected, and I realized I was doing it again.

  “Yes you’re doing it again,” he said, “And you better stop.”

  I turned quickly away from him. “Did that help?”

  “Maybe?” he said, “Were you thinking something? Because I didn’t hear it.”

  I’m glad James and Elliot are a thing. I really am. I just hope neither of their hearts break.

  There’s a lot of silence.

  “Ok,” said James, “I think it’s working.” He was pointedly avoiding my gaze, and not saying a thing about the fact that we overheard their sex last night. If before I had any doubts, though, they were certainly laid to rest.

  Now, what’s this about thinking towards James’ brain?

  What’s this I just learned how to do?

  It started to hit me and I threw open the window to get some fresh air. I felt Kat grab my shoulder.

  “It’s ok, Sparrow,” she said to me, barely audible over the sound of the wind.

  I pulled my head back inside the car, closed the window, and collapsed into Kat’s lap.

  “What the fuck,” I said to her, eyes filling with tears. I could maybe ignore the healing, and I could maybe ignore ripping a door off it’s hinges, but I could not ignore this.

  “You and me, both,” said Kat, before looking shocked. “Oh, so that’s what he meant.”

  So I’m doing it to Kat, now, too. Great.

  “Wow, um,” said Kat. She lifted her hands off me were I laid my head on her lap, and I reluctantly sat up.

  “You guys ok?” asked Elliot. There was silence in the car, but my brain repeated, no. No we’re not ok, not one bit. The Facility made us freaks, and now they’ll want us forever.

  “Whoa, ok,” said Elliot, “Slow down, you’re all talking at once.”

  None of us had said anything.

  “Huh.”

  He pulled over into a gravel pull off and sat with his hands on the wheel for a while.

  “I don’t like it,” said James.

  Me neither.

  “Nope,” said Kat.

  “How exactly did you get it to stop, earlier?” James asked me.

  “I stopped looking at you.”

  “Huh.”

  So does that mean that by focusing on you you can hear my thoughts too? I hope Elliot’s ok, he’s still really pale. Why did this happen all at once? God this is so dumb, we try and act normal but that’s never going to happen.

  “James, I can hear all of that,” I said, shaking my head as if it would get the foreign voice out.

  Oh, god, what if this will happen to everyone, now? When I look at a stranger they’ll hear my thoughts for the rest of my life.

  He put both hands over his face.

  “Hey, hey,” I said to everyone in the car. They were quiet. “We just figured this out, ok? It’s probably a skill like any other, and we’ll get better at controlling it as we have it. And, as much as I’d like to stop and freak out, there are still those three kids out there somewhere, and as scared as we are, I bet they’re a million times more scared. Lets go help them, Ok?”

  “Yeah,” said Elliot, the first words he’d said since he parked. He released his grip on the

 steering wheel and shook his hands to recover blood flow. “Lets keep going and we can talk about it- if you’re comfortable with that- along the way. It’s a long way to the city they’re in, and we have no idea if they’ve left it.”

  He pulled back onto the road.

  Hey James, if you can hear this, I like your voice. The one inside, I mean. It’s more fitting. It’s strong and confident and sounds more like you look.

  In the seat in front of me, he pulled his feet up and looked out the window.

  Thanks.

  We didn’t talk about anything for a while. I looked out the window at the passing landscape- hills and trees and farmland.

  You ok, Leah? 

  It was Kat. I know she didn’t mean to misname me. It was probably tons harder in your thoughts.

  Sorry, Sparrow. It is so much harder in your thoughts. And my thoughts always kind of do what they want. I’m super scared that this will just be normal now, when I think at someone they’ll hear it, when I think about James, he’ll-

  I don’t hear her anymore. I wonder if it went to James. I turn from the window to the two of them.

  “Ok, yes,” said James, exasperated. “Since you both asked - mentally, but you still asked - Yes Elliot and I fucked last night. And Yes, he used a condom. Happy, Kat?”

  God, you’re such a blabbermouth.

  It was James. But it sounded like that one was directed to Kat. How did I hear that?

  “James, that’s not nice,” said Elliot, still recovering from being outed like that. “Kat’s not a blabbermouth when you were the only one who could hear her.”

  “Elliot, I didn’t think that at you- god, why does this have to be so fucking complicated?” 

  “We all heard you call Kat a blabbermouth, though, James,” I said.

   “Ok, new rule,” said Kat. “We’re not allowed to hold each other’s thoughts against them, cool? Thoughts don’t count, words do. And if we hear someone think something they aren’t willing to say out loud, it means it’s not set in stone and their opinion can change.” Because goddamn, I know I’m a fucking blabbermouth, I don’t know how to fucking stop.

  I took Kat’s hand and squeezed it. “That’s a great idea, Kat.”

  “And maybe we could practice tuning each other out, too,” James said.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  Or maybe we could just resign ourselves to always hearing everything each other thinks at us for the rest of forever.
 “James, are you even aiming those?” Asked Kat, “I feel like that was another one we all heard.”

  I nodded.

  “No?” James said, “I don’t know! This literally just started happening, I have no clue whether it’s even about aiming, or if it’s just developing into something more and more uncontrollable.”

  “Ok, everyone take a deep breath,” said Elliot. “We can work on this. You guys are smart and you can figure this out. It’s just one step at a time.”

  “And what’s step one?” asked Kat.

  “Hmm,” said Elliot.

  “Maybe, we should try and focus a thought for just ourselves and see if it works?” I ventured.

  They all seemed to agree.

  I set my mind to chant to myself, ‘I am Sparrow, I am Sparrow, I am Sparrow.’ No one else’s thoughts interrupted mine.  

  “Did that work for everyone?” Elliot asked. A few more seconds passed.

  “I think so,” said James.

  “Do you want to try it again?” said Elliot, “But this time, think about one of us without sending it to the person you’re thinking about?”

  “Ok,” said Kat.

  I hope Kat is Ok, she’s been louder and more abrupt lately, as if she’s cutting her own thoughts off before they can interrupt her actions.

  Sparrow… quieter than usual…

  It was James’ voice. The two fragments were all I heard from him.

  “I heard a little bit from James,” I said, “Just my name and a few words.”

  “I heard a little from Kat,” said Elliot.

  “But none of us heard the whole thing?” said James. He sounded relieved.

  “Yeah,” said Kat, “None of us heard the whole thing. I actually didn’t hear anything.”

  “Me neither,” said James.

  “Nice,” said Kat, “Good. A good first step. Now what, Elliot?”

  “You could keep practicing?” He said.

  “The same way?” asked James.

  “We could try aiming something at someone while looking at someone else?” Kat said.

  I looked at Kat.

  Hey James. I hope you know I’m happy for you and Elliot, if you’re actually planning on having this be a relationship and not just a one night thing. I really am. You might have had relationships before, but this is your first one now that you’re free… It’s good. I’m happy.

  “Thanks, Sparrow.” James turned around in his seat.

  “It worked?” I asked.

  “I hadn’t realized we’d started,” said Kat. “But it’s probably better to take turns anyway. I’ll try.”

  You can tell me if you’re not sure you want to be anything you used to be, do you know that?

  Kat was looking right at Elliot, but her thoughts made it to me.

  If you want to do what James did and use different pronouns, you don’t have to be afraid to tell me, and I know you only told us your name after we jumped off a car because you knew you’d never have that much courage again and you wanted to have it out in the open. So I just want to say-

  “Is it working?” asked James.

  Kat threw up a finger and shushed him. She turned from Elliot as though to make sure I was hearing the last part.

  I just wanted to say I love you, and nothing will change that. We gotta stick together you and I.

  There were tears threatening to escape my eyes.

  “Yes, James,” I said, “It worked.”

  I scooted closer to Kat and leaned against her, just like she used to do with me when she’d have those dreadful nightmares.

  “My turn,” said James. He looked at me.

  Elliot, if you hear this, take my hand. Please? Elliot? You were amazing last night-

  “James!” I shouted. I didn’t want to hear a single other word.

  “So for you it works and for me it doesn’t?” he said, angry.

  “You probably just have to focus more,” said Kat.

  “I was focusing!”

  “Don’t snap at me!” she said, “I was trying to help.”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” he said, “I’m sorry. I’m just- it’s super frustrating.”

  “Learning new things is super frustrating,” said Elliot. “You can take a break.”

  “How?” asked James, “When I’m not sure if every one of you is hearing my thoughts?”

  “We’d tell you,” I said.

  “Yeah, we totally would,” said Kat.

  “Ok,” he said. Ok, good.

  “Like,” I said, “I just heard that.”

  He was silent.

  “And that?” he asked.

  “Nope,” Kat and I said.

  “Good,” he sighed. He relaxed into his seat.

  The miles passed with no more than a whisper from each other’s thoughts. Which left me to wonder why this popped up all at once?

  The fast healing showed up almost right away, the night we escaped. Me ripping off the door only showed up last night, during a panic attack. And then this? Completely unexpected and three days after we were administered the medicine.

  I guess that could be reasonable.

  But I have to wonder what else could happen. What’s next?

  “Well, that’s weird,” said Elliot, snapping us all out of our heads.

  In the middle of the road sat a folding table, and around it, three chairs. The chairs were empty, but on the table sat three steaming mugs.

  Elliot came to a complete stop, just close enough to see the detail on the mugs.

  I am not me.

  The air was cold in my lungs and was all I could feel.

  The mug, warm.

  We are not us.

  Elliot screamed.

  E- Elliot screamed?

  I looked up. Was I being dragged away? I was. The mug was in my hand, unspilled.

  I was being dragged calmly.

  The world around me came back into focus and I threw the mug back over my head at my attacker.

  Beside me, James and Kat were being led calmly into the back of a car. From the side of the road, Elliot screamed at us to run, to do something. He was forced to kneel by a man with a gun.

  “James!” I screamed, “Kat!” I threw myself in their direction and their mugs spilled all over them. They began to cry out from the heat and they snapped back to themselves the way I did just a moment ago.

  We fought and they could not hold us back. There was a gunshot and we turned with horror towards Elliot.

  The man who held him held his gun in the air. Elliot cowered by his feet.

  “Come on, now,” the man said, “We get paid whether you’re dead or alive, so why don’t you make this easy.”

  It was cliche, but so honest it chilled me. He sounded just like a movie villain, but he sounded like he meant it.

  Elliot looked up at me where I was frozen in the street.

  Did they hurt him?

  He shook his head.

  Well, that’s a relief, at least.

  One of the men grabbed me by the hips from behind and all I could feel was Dr. 21’s calloused hands snaking their way around me.

  I threw an elbow back and broke free of him with a spin. He flew violently to the pavement, a spray of red bursting through his teeth and into the air in an arc. He lay still on the ground.

  While the men nearest James and Kat stood frozen looking at the dented skull of their coworker, I shouted at them to run. All three of us came at the man who hounded Elliot, and before he could react, we vaulted over our friend and tackled the offender to the ground. Behind us, the others chased.

  The gun was nearest my left hand in the underbrush beside the tarmac. I took it up and aimed it at whoever I could see.

  They pulled guns of their own.

  Shit, I’d have to shoot it if they were going to take me seriously.

  I tried to aim for a leg, but my thoughts revisited how we got here - the mugs...

  There was a loud bang and Elliot was standing in front of me. He had the gun, he must have taken it out of my hands.

  “Go, just, go, everyone in the car,” Elliot shouted. He shot again and another man fell to the ground. Only two remained standing. We ran.

  “We’re gonna find you!” the one who spoke before said.

  I looked back to see Elliot, his hands on the gun shaking. He stopped running and looked back at them.

  He lifted the gun.

  “Elliot, come on!” shouted Kat.

  He fired. Twice.

  All of their bodies were still. We froze, in various states of getting away.

  “I don’t think they were trying to kill us,” said Elliot, “or, you. They might have killed me if they knew I wasn’t one of you.”

  “Why do you say that?” I asked. My heart was pounding and I crouched on the pavement to catch my breath.

  “They had guns, don’t you think they would have shot you after you took the first guy down?”

  I shrugged.

  “I’m sorry Elliot,” James said, “We’re still pretty out of it- can we just drive?”

  “Yes,” he said, “Actually, that’s exactly what we should do. Should we take their car?”

  All three of us shouted no, remembering the car that tried to steal us.

  “Let’s just try and drive and not stop for any tables,” Kat said.

  We piled back into our seats. My hands were shaking and my teeth chattered.

  As we pulled around the other car, I looked out the window at the scene. The ground was littered with bodies and cracked ceramic.

  “What happened, Elliot?” asked James.

  His hands were as pale as his skin tone could go on the steering wheel.

  “I don’t know,” he said, “One second, you were here with me, and I stopped for that table, and the next second you were out of the car and approaching it.”

  “It was-” said Kat. Her words drifted out of her faintly, and quieter than I’d ever heard her. “Those… mugs…”

   “What I can only think of was that it was some kind of brainwashing trigger,” Elliot said, “They have you conditioned to approach and sit down for a cup of coffee whenever you see, well something in that scene. Maybe it was the playing card symbols on the mugs.”

  I imagined playing card symbols, which I don’t remember seeing on the mugs. Then I imagined them on mugs of something steaming, and a folding table with chairs.

  Elliot slammed on the brakes.

  “Sparrow!” he shouted. I looked down at myself. My seatbelt was in my hand and one foot was out the open door.

  “Fuck,” I said, “I was just remembering it.”

  “Do me a favor,” he said, “Look on the inside of the door and activate the child lock, please. You too, Kat. The switch goes up.”

  We did as he said. The doors no longer opened from the inside while the doors were locked, and I swallowed my anxiety about being trapped in here. Evidently, this was the safer way.

  “Why does it effect you more than it does us?” asked James.

  I opened my mouth to tell him I don’t know, but Kat interrupted me.

  “Sparrow’s a picture thinker,” she said.

  “What?” asked James.

  “We talked about it at like 3 AM one time, I think in words and numbers and I remember what people said but not so much how they looked while they said it. Sparrow remembered in scenes and pictures and what the sky looked like and what color the grass was. We tried to describe our memories to each other but it was really hard,” she said.

  “Wait, you remember whole pictures?” James asked.

  I shrugged. “Not the whole thing. But I certainly don’t remember specifics like what people said, and it’s certainly not written down like a book like how Kat describes her thoughts.”

  “That’s not that weird,” said Elliot, “People have one or the other. I’m a ‘picture thinker’ too.”

  “But that could be why the trigger is still getting to her,” James said, “It’s imagery based, that makes perfect sense.”

  We can’t trust you.

  It was James. I know he didn’t mean to think it at me. I curled myself up and hid my rattling hands.

  At some point Elliot stopped for gas, and insisted we pick a snack. I was far from hungry and just said I’d stay in the car, and they could pick something for me.

  Kat got me an iced tea and some potato chips. I didn’t know if I’d like potato chips, but I did.

  You feeling any better? It was Kat.

  I looked over at her. Not really, no.

  And it was true. I hadn’t stopped trembling in the hours since we killed those guys who tried to catch us.

  It wasn’t our fault, you know, She thought to me.

  I don’t know if I believe that. Elliot could have gotten hurt and he didn’t do anything wrong.

  Neither did we. We didn’t get sold to the Facility on purpose. Not one of us in this car did any of this on purpose.

  Maybe. I turned back to my car window.

  Sparrow, I choose to believe we’ll be ok.

  I didn’t want her to know what James thought about me. That I couldn’t be trusted because my memories worked differently than theirs. I know he probably didn’t mean to sent it to me. He was the one having the most trouble with that. And Kat was right, we shouldn’t hold any of each other’s thoughts against them.

  But it hurt all the same.

  Eventually the silence was too much for Elliot, even punctuated as it was by the quiet music he’d put on.

  “Do you guys know how the alphabet game works?” he asked.

  Of course we didn’t.

  “You look out your car windows and we have to find each letter of the alphabet. They can only be the beginning of a word. License plates don’t count.”

  I look out at the trees and don’t see any words at all.

  “We can keep score, but usually I don’t. It’s just for fun,” he continued.

  “Are there turns?” asked Kat.

  “Nope! Just start looking. Like, up there! Aberdeen motor care.”

  “And so we don’t need A anymore?” said James.

  “Nope. There’s B! Bed and Breakfast on that sign up there. Pointing into the woods. Creepy. Next?” said Elliot.

  We got absorbed in our game and got stuck on Q and Z. We immediately wanted to play again.

  Soon it definitely time to stop for food. Elliot pulled into a diner with a shiny roof.

  “Four, please,” he said to the woman at the counter. She struggled with her menus.

  “Sorry,” she said, “It’s only my first week. Still getting the hang of it.”

  She showed us to a table.

  “Did you see that?” asked James.

  “See what?” I asked him.
 “Never mind.” Maybe I shouldn’t say it out loud. I could have sworn she was tucking something into her pocket. Do you think she’s one of them?

  Elliot was the only one who couldn’t respond back silently, but he looked sceptical.

  Maybe? Thought Kat, I don’t know, James.

  But we know they know how to follow us, James responded.

  They might, but how would they know we’d stop here? And pay the server off, or take over the restaurant in time. I’m usually the one to imagine the worst, but now that you’ve said something, I find it hard to believe.

  James looked frustrated.

  You would say that. They’ve got their fingers all the way down in your head.

  “James!” said Elliot, “Take that back.”

  “No,” I said, “I’m not going to believe he’d actually say something like that.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “I wouldn’t. I didn’t mean to, I mean.”

  “I understand,” I said, “Really, James, it’s ok.”

  “God I’m sorry,” he repeated. He put his head in his hands. I just want you guys to believe me. There’s something about this place. Can we just go?

  “Yeah,” said Elliot. He left a ten dollar bill on the table for getting the server’s hopes up and we went back out to the car.

  There was a fast food drive through and a bunch of other places just a few miles down the road, and we quickly finished our third round of the alphabet game.

  Elliot ordered for us when we insisted we had no idea what we wanted and he parked in the parking lot after they handed the food through their small delivery window so that we could eat it.

  The chicken sandwiches and fries he ordered for all of us were excellent, and he insisted on pulling through the drive through again after we were finished to get us all ice creams.

  “How close are we now?” asked Kat.

  “We’ve still got days of driving ahead of us,” Elliot said, “But we are closer. Maybe two more days?”

  That sounded fine by me. I enjoyed seeing the world around us.

  I just hoped nothing else happened along the way.

  Nothing did. Two days of changing scenery. Two days of the alphabet game and the license place game and whatever other games with similar premises we could think of. Two more days of me slowly forgiving James for what he thought of me.

  We arrived in the city in question at sundown, and Elliot insisted we get another hotel.

  The last two days of driving, we only stopped and slept in the car on one residential street or another. Elliot insisted the people on the street would all attribute the car to one of their neighbors and we’d be fine if we only stayed one night.

  The hotel he picked for us this time wasn’t as nice as the one we had after the amusement park, but it was right downtown and included parking passes for the garage next door.

  Once we got everything settled and wandered up to our rooms, Kat and I stood in the doorway as overwhelmed as we were the first time.

  This time, though, it’s because of the noise. Outside our window came a cacophony of cars and people. A siren wailed in the distance. After a few minutes, there came a knock on our door.

  It’s me. James’ thoughts came through the door as clearly as if he was here with us. I wonder how far they extended? Just another thing we’d have to find out eventually.

  “Coming!” said Kat. She jumped off her bed where we both sat watching the news, looking for clues. Evidently the story wasn’t as interesting three days later, as we didn’t see them mention the kids once.

  The two of them stood in the doorway, looking at something.

  “Sparrow,” Kat said, “Come here.”

  They had Elliot’s phone, and on it, a video. There was a crowd of kids in a basketball court, the pavement cracked and leaking plants from the ground below.

  The person manning the camera approached the center of the group. Standing in the middle were three kids in tattered and torn pale blue. They were varying heights, and one’s head was shaved. I wonder what they did to warrant the punishment.

  Someone approached the three, twitching and agitated. He got up in each of their faces, and I wish the video included sound.

  As the crowd around them grew frenzied, the tallest of the three stepped forward. The teen who seemed to be itching to fight got closer to them, his pale face red with rage. The tallest one lifted his hands at his sides and started to glow bright green. He lifted off the ground and all else you could see was a flash of light before the one holding the camera sprinted away, the others in the crowd close around them.

  Comments on the video screamed ‘fake,’ but I had an eerie feeling in the pit of my stomach.

  “Can we figure out where they are?” Kat asked.

  “Actually,” said Elliot, coming up behind James with an open laptop, “I think I already have-”

  We gathered on the floor in the boys’ room, looking intently at Elliot’s laptop. He explained that he searched the comments first for a few minutes to see if anyone claimed the place was near them, or that they were there. There was no luck with that.

  “But,” he said, “The video quality was clear enough that for just a few frames you could see the name of the park where the basketball court was. It was on a sign in the background. Now, Glenwood park isn’t exactly a unique name, but there’s only one within walking distance of the city, even if they used the subway to get outside the city bounds. They’re north of us by about an hours drive, if we leave before traffic happens.”

  “It won’t be hard to wake up before anything,” said Kat, “I doubt I’ll be sleeping with all the noise.”

  James and Elliot blushed.

  “All the noise outside,” Kat quickly corrected, “Jesus! How loud do you plan on being? Come on, Sparrow, let's go back to out room to try and sleep before they get started.”

  Sorry, I think towards the mortified two as we exit into the hallway.

  “They better not start right away,” said Kat, “but we can still go explore if you want?”

  “I think I prefer to sleep,” I said. We killed five people a few days ago. I didn’t want to think about it, but once I started, I couldn’t get it to stop.

  How I didn’t even think of what I was doing when I knocked that man to the ground- if it had been any one of my friends in that situation I would have done the same thing and it would have been Kat, James, or Elliot, lying on the ground with the broken skull.

  How I held the gun and couldn’t fire it. How I could have saved us, but someone else had to take over instead.

  I was weak. I was faulty. They brainwashed me, and I didn’t even know it until it was too late. And even after we’d recovered, and been snapped back to life, I was still behind. Slower. More susceptible.

  As Kat turned out the lights and switched off the TV, I let myself cry, silent tears into the white hotel-room pillowcase.

  I fell asleep not long after.

  In the morning, we woke the boys. We were up before them. Kat was right, she hardly slept all night. After the crying put me out, I was mostly sound asleep until sometime in the early morning, where I began to toss and turn and didn’t stop until sunrise.

  They might not have been out to wake us, but they were up. Elliot was in the shower, and after opening the door, James went back to flipping through several news stations with Elliot’s laptop open next to him.

  “Have you found anything?” Kat asked. Both of us had taken the liberty of already packing up all of our things into our plastic bags and leaving the hotel room clean for housekeeping. I also took the liberty of stealing their tiny shampoo and conditioner. I didn’t take them from the last hotel room I stayed in, and I regretted missing out on that opportunity. One of my favorite book characters hopped from hotel to hotel on their adventures and kept the shampoo and conditioner from each one, comparing quality in her blog. I wish I had a laptop like Elliot. Maybe I would figure out how to start a blog.

  James stayed quiet for far too long, and Kat asked her question again.

  “Sorry,” he said, “Zoned out, there. Yeah, no. I haven’t found anything other than a bunch of different versions of the video we watched. A lot of people are analyzing it, but most of them come to the conclusion that it’s fake.”

  “The wrong conclusion, right?” asked Kat.

  “We can assume,” said James, “But we can’t know. Maybe someone made it up following the story of the runaways to try for fame.”

  “I didn’t think of that,” I said. Well, the best we could do is go look and try and figure it out from there.

  I agree, thought James.

  God I had to get my thoughts under control. I usually kept most of this to myself.

  You mean like that tangent about the shampoo and conditioner? He asked.

  “What tangent?” asked Kat.

  “Ok, can we agree that this thinking at each other thing totally sucks?” I said.

  The other two nodded.

  Elliot came out of the steamy bathroom fully clothed, drying his dark curly hair with a towel.

  “Hey guys, we ready to go?” he asked. We agreed and helped the boys pack up before making our way down to the lobby. We crossed to the parking garage, but quickly, Elliot shushed us.

  “You see that?” he whispered. We could hardly hear him over the sound of traffic, but we looked where he pointed.

  It was a white SUV, parked right next to Elliot’s car in the whole row of empty spaces. In the front and passenger seats, two men with sunglasses, even though it was dim inside.

  “The sunglasses are a ridiculous touch,” Kat said, “Are they trying to look badass? Cause it’s not working.”

  “It’s still suspicious, though, right?” asked Elliot, “Come on, I have an idea.”

  We followed him back, careful to avoid the line of sight from the entrance, and reentered the hotel.

  “Is there a way I can extend my parking in the garage without staying at the hotel another night?” he asked the lady at the desk.

  “There sure is, but it’s a daily charge of $22.95, charged to the same card as your room. Would you like to sign up?”

  Elliot quickly filled in a liability sheet for extended parking, and we were off again.

  “To the subway,” he said. He looked back at us to make sure we were following, and stopped dead in his tracks.

   “Elliot?” I said. I looked quickly behind us to be sure we weren’t being followed. Instead I saw Kat. And behind her, James. And behind both of them, all three of us, blown up and pasted on a giant TV screen.

  “Shit,” said Elliot. The other two turned and joined us in staring up at ourselves.

  The screen said, “Convicts- Extremely Dangerous. Wanted for : Murder, Grand Theft Auto, Kidnapping. Call local police with any information.”

  “Shit,” Kat said.

  “Ok,” Elliot said, “Here’s what we’re going to do. You three are going to wait up here, in this alley. I’m going to go buy us subway passes and sunglasses and you two need hoodies, your other ones are in the car. Sparrow?”

  I pulled my hoodie out of my bag. “I’m on it.”

  “Good. I won’t be very long,” he said. He left us with his cell phone. “I know my own number, I’ll call you if anything goes wrong.” He scurried off and we tucked ourselves into the alley with his suitcase.

  “God, it reeks down here,” Kat said. She sat down on the rung of a rusty ladder that dangled down from a platform two stories above.

  I was terrified. My hands began to shake. What if, around the corner, they had another table waiting for us. Oh, yes, come sit and dine. Enjoy your coffee.

  So warm.

  You good, Sparrow? Asked Kat. She jumped up from her seat on the ladder and came to hold my shoulders and keep me from falling. I didn’t realize I was swaying until suddenly I was still.

  “Could you hear my thoughts again?” I asked, my voice breathy.

  “No?” said Kat, “You just looked spacey. And unbalanced.”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “I don’t believe you,” she said.

  “Leave her alone, Kat,” said James, “Let her breathe.”

  I didn’t want to be left to breathe, but Kat backed away. I leaned against the wall.

  Elliot came back wearing sunglasses and with three additional pairs for us. He also had bright green hoodies with both a pine tree and a moon on the front of them, respectively. Kat chose the moon.

  With our glasses and hoodies donned, we ventured back out. Elliot put a subway card in each of our hands. When we descended the stairs below the city streets, the area grew even more crowded. Noises echoed and people pushed against each other to get where they wanted to go. There was a barrier ahead with a bar you had to push through to get past. Elliot went first and demonstrated putting your card through to unlock the gate.

  We pushed on and deeper into the man made cavern. It was dim, and metal, and hot. I felt my chest tightening.

  It’s like the fire drill, Kat thought to James and I. She moved between us and grabbed both of our hands. James looked about as panicked as I felt. Elliot still led the way.

  “We need the blue line,” he said to us, loudly so as to be heard. He stopped at a digital map and looked over the stations.

  “Looks like we have to go down another level,” he said.

  I nearly shouted. No, please, don’t make me, I’ve been free and I don’t want to go underground again-

  Hey, it’s ok, Kat’s thoughts soothingly interrupted my own, we’ll be ok, I promise. Soon we’ll be climbing back up, somewhere else, and much freer of people.

  I wanted to take her word for it, but my chest still felt tight as we found more stairs down and took them. I was slow, my feet heavy. People behind us cursed and pushed around us.

  We made it down, but I trusted Kat’s hand only for guidance. My eyes were screwed shut.

  Then, a roaring sound.

  My eyes snapped open and my knees collapsed beneath me as the train came into the station. The wind, the sound.

  Kat held me off the floor.

  “Elliot,” she said, “Help.”

  He took my other shoulder and they shuttled me into the train. James wandered dazedly behind.

  They found two seats next to each other and sat me in one, and directed James to the other. They stood in front of us, shielding us from the overwhelming nature of the crowds in the car around us.

  “Are you two ok?” asked Elliot. It was only then that I remembered the sunglasses we all wore and pulled mine up over my face. The illumination around me immediately lifted some of the weight off my chest.

  “Yeah,” I panted, “It’s just a lot.”

  “Sure is,” laughed a woman next to me. She held out a hand.

  “Mallorie Jones,” she introduced herself. I was still shaky, but I took her hand. Everyone else around us completely ignored the interaction.

  “Nice to meet you,” I said, “I’m Sparrow. I don’t have a last name.”

  “Elliot Smithson,” he said, holding out a hand as well.

  “James,” said he, reaching around me.

  “Katrina,” she said, “but please call me Kat.”

  “Nice to meet you. The subway can be a wild place, you’re far from the first to feel overwhelmed.”

  “Yeah,” I said, unsure how to continue the conversation.

  I needn’t worry, though. Mallorie easily carried the whole conversation by herself. She talked about stars, and plants, and her job at the library. She kept us distracted all the way to her stop, the one only three before ours.

  “Well,” she said to us with a smile, “I’m off.” The rest of the car was almost completely empty, except for a teen with headphones in, and a mother with her young child at the far end.

  “Thanks for distracting us,” I said.

  “Of course,” she said, “And keep an eye out. I know who you are, and I doubt I’m the only one.”

  My heart dropped, and I’m sure theirs did too.

  “Oh,” said James.

  “It’s ok,” she said, “I don’t think you did it.”

  She exited and waved as the train took us away.

  Worried, and slightly shaken, we all stood and covered our faces with our glasses and hoods.

  We weren’t being careful enough. We had to be more careful.

  The others nodded. Damn, I was thinking at them again. I wondered if I was thinking at strangers, too. It’s not likely they would react much if they didn’t know what was going on. It might blend into their own thoughts if they didn’t know the voice of the person thinking to them.

  “This is our stop,” Elliot said, “This next one.”

  He snapped me out of my daze.

  Everything that had happened since we escaped was starting to catch up with me, and I could see the toll it was taking on James, too. I wished we could have some quiet, just to sit under a tree and look at the sky. Some time to breathe.

  The subway doors opened and I struggled to my feet.

  Elliot’s phone directed us down several long streets. We walked for hours.

  “Are you sure the subway didn’t get any closer?” asked Kat.

  “It curved East from there,” he said, “The park is straight north. If we saw any bus stops we could use these same transport cards, but I haven’t seen any, so we walk.”

  My feet weren’t used to walking as much as we had in the past few days. We all had exercise, in the form of lifting weights and running on treadmills for thirty minutes a day, but lately we had been walking- to the farmhouse, to Elliot’s town, around the city, and the amusement park, and another city.

  In the Facility, there wasn’t much distance from one end all the way to the other.

  We stopped to sit on a stone wall. Bushes tickled the back of my neck.

  “Everyone holding in there?” asked Elliot. He always seemed to be the one taking care of us.

  “Yeah,” I said, “What about you? This is kind of a crazy thing were doing.”

  “Oh, I’m so down for all this,” he said. I doubt he was thinking of the men we killed yesterday.

  His face fell.

  Damn my fucking thoughts. “I’m sorry Elliot-”

  “No, you’re right. I shouldn’t be so flippant,” he said, “I’m mostly trying not to think about that part? Because when I do, all I can hear is my own voice yelling, and none of you listening. They almost took you back and I was powerless to stop them. Honestly, maybe getting the gun and shooting them was the best thing I could have done in that situation. Because at least now, when I have nightmares about it, I fight back. If you had gotten away, I think they’d look very different. And I’d be a lot worse off, trust me.”

  I didn’t know he had nightmares about it, too.

  I think we’re all dreaming about it. James’ voice was faint. I wonder if he’s learning how to keep his thoughts to himself.

  “In my dreams, I see those mugs,” Kat says. We stood and started walking again. “And in those mugs is something I can never see, but I want it, so badly. Like it’s everything I’ve ever wanted in there. My hands itch to grab it and look inside, but the table spins and the mugs go around and I’m powerless to move my hands.”

  I tried to keep my thoughts removed from the memory.

  “When I dream, I see the blood,” said James, “As I saw it on the ground after Sparrow took the first one out. With grass clippings from the road floating on the edges, and the rich stained color of the dirt in the cracks of the asphalt. It’s like I’m an inch tall and I can just see the blood creeping along, very much outside of that man, and very much where it doesn’t belong.”

  Though I don’t much like how vivid the image this gives me is, I’m glad it’s replaced the mugs.

  “In my dreams,” I said, after swallowing the saliva that had pooled in my throat, “Someone comes up behind me and I hit without looking, and when I turn around, it’s someone I’ve left behind.” I looked down at my hands. “I just don’t know what I’m doing. I ripped a door off it’s hinges without paying attention- I fucking killed a man who grabbed me from behind without even thinking about it- without looking. It didn’t even feel real, I was miles away from the whole thing, still mind-melded or whatever- and his hands just reminded me of…” I couldn’t. Even now, I couldn’t tell them. But Kat could.

  “Of the bastard who raped us?” she said.

  The other two went quiet and I stopped walking. I nodded.

  “So you’re scared you’ll get another flashback and hurt someone else?” asked James.

  I couldn’t meet their eyes. I nodded again. “Yeah,” I said, “And don’t you tell me I couldn’t. None of us know jack shit about any of our abilities.”

  They don’t say anything.

  “I’m sorry, Sparrow,” said James, “I didn’t know.” I’m a bitch. Of course it’s not Sparrow’s fault. If we don’t have each other, what do we have?

  He lifted his arms and asked if it would be ok to hug me.

  “Yes please.”

  They all surrounded me, and I no longer felt small and alone on the sidewalk.

  The sun seemed brighter as we continued the walk.

  Then the sun seemed too bright. And hot.

  For an autumn day, it sure was still able to make us sweat.

  “We’re close,” Elliot said.

  I guess we never did see a bus stop.

  Up to our left, past a few more dingy houses, the sidewalk disappeared in favor of an overgrown field. And behind it, black, scorched, earth. Yellow caution tape waved in the breeze around it and we kept a far distance.

  “Look, over there,” Elliot said, without moving. We saw. It was the police, in a side street by the park entrance.

  “Let’s keep walking,” said James, “We can find somewhere to stay and come back when it’s safer.”

  “Do we need to come back?” asked Kat, “I doubt they survived… that.”

  “That middle kid was the cause of that,” I said, “You can doubt, but I don’t. I bet they’re around here somewhere. But I don’t think we need to come back, either. I think they’re probably as wary of the police as we are.”

  We walked a few streets down and turned right, at Elliot’s instruction.

  “Where do we start now?”

  “We lay low,” he said.

  He led us to a fast food restaurant, but they were closed with shattered windows along one side.

  “I don’t know about you,” Kat said, “But I don’t think this is the best neighborhood in town.”

  We turned to the shopping strip beside the restaurant and perused the stores.

  Elliot’s phone rang in his pocket.

  “Hey mom,” he said. He was so fast we almost didn’t see him take his phone out of his pocket. “There’s what?”

  He closed down the call and sat on the ground, pulling open one app after the other and making searches until he evidently found what he was looking for.

  “Oh, dear lord,” Elliot said. We gathered closer.

  It was video footage, crisp. It was Elliot, holding the gun. It was us, standing around him. We ran to the car, but Elliot stopped and finished the last two of them off. We drove away.

  The caption said, simply, WANTED.

  His phone rang again.

  “Yeah that’s me,” he said. He was shaken. “It’s not as bad as it looks. Yes. We had to. I couldn’t let that happen, he was going to kill us. No. Please don’t.” He puts down the phone for a second. “She doesn't know how to feel, but she wants me to talk to my dad. He went to her apartment and showed her the video.”

  I heard a loud voice over the phone even from my distance, and Elliot lifted it back to his ear.

  “You are?” he asked. He hung up his phone and threw it to the pavement. We all startled and took a few steps back from him.

  “Goddamnit!” he shouted, the loudest he’d ever been with us. I didn’t know how to respond and remained frozen in fear of him turning and blaming us.

  “Hey,” said James, calmly. He took Elliot’s arm in his and stroked his chest. “Shhh, it’s ok, I promise.”

  He evidently saw what I didn’t- tears in Elliot’s eyes.

  “What happened?” asked Kat. Her usually blunt tone was softened by seeing our liveliest friend so distraught.

  “They were with the police,” he said, “My mom just got a confession out of me and I trusted her.”

  Ouch.

  “They were tracking us with my maps app, we have to move.” He wiped away his tears and kissed James on the forehead before pulling away and scurrying down the strip. We reached the end and cut across the road out back, climbing a small path into the foliage behind the stores. The underbrush was littered with plastic and trash, and plants were crushed into submission in several places. A sheet of plastic hung in the distance, draped over a tree branch, and we didn’t get closer lest we disturb the person we were sure lived beneath.

  The path broke through the trees to a school, a foreboding rectangular mammoth, three stories high. There were no children on the playground, so we sat on the swings.

  Elliot sat in the middle of us, Kat and I on one side, and James on the other.

  He looked at his feet and dragged the toes of his shoes through the mulch.

  “I trusted her,” he said.

  “Maybe it wasn’t her fault,” I said, “If I was worried about my kid like that, the first thing I would do would be to call the police.”

  “Really?” asked Kat, “I don’t know if I trust them that much.”

  “I’m just saying, she probably didn’t know what to do. She might not have thought you’d done it. Maybe she hoped they could prove the video wrong.”

  “I can’t believe I finally got to talk to my birth father again, it’s been like three years,” Elliot said. His voice grew quieter by the minute. “And the first thing he tells me is, ‘they’re fucking listening to you Idielliot! Get rid of the damn phone!”

  There are more tears in his eyes.

  “Do you think I’ll get to see them again?” he asked, “Before we get arrested?”

  “You’re not fucking getting arrested, you hear me?” James said. He stood from his swing. “The Facility did this, and they’re going to be the ones to fucking pay.”

  “How?” asked Kat. I think Elliot and I wondered the same thing.

  “I don’t know yet,” he said, “But we start by finding those kids. Safety in numbers.”

  We stayed where we were for a few more minutes, utterly lost as to where to start.

  “Hey,” someone said from behind us, “Are you going to keep swinging or can we ask you for some help?”

  We turned, and there stood two of the kids, bright green and purple eyes wide.

  “How did you find us?” asked Kat. The two led us back through the trees where we’d come from and deeper into them. We passed increasingly dense piles of trash and dangling tarps and cloths.

  “We were just looking for food,” said one.

  “We heard someone yell something about a Facility. You three were on the news,” said the other. They were eerily similar, but not quite the same. One’s hair made it all the way to their shoulders, and the other’s was shaved nearly to the scalp. I knew the feeling.

  They slid down a hill to a dirty riverbank and we followed. They pointed to a pile of branches in the distance. “We hid him in there.”

  The third kid was dirty, and his clothes were practically torn apart. The waistband held intact and the other two had graciously made sure the scraps of remaining fabric covered everything.

  We helped remove the blankets and the boy stirred.

  “Isabella?” he muttered, mouth hardly opening to let the sounds free.

  “No, she’s not here,” the smallest one said, tenderly brushing the boy’s hair off his forehead.

  The one still standing turned to shake our hands.

  “I’m Amber,” they said. We shook their hand and introduced ourselves.

  The other one still crouched. “I’m Zoe,” she said, “And this is Adam.”

  “What’s wrong with him?” asked James.

  “He blew up,” said Amber, “I’m sure you saw the video. That’s how you got here, isn’t it?”

  “And he’s been like this since then?” Elliot asked. He crouched next to Zoe and laid a hand on Adam’s forehead.

  “Yeah,” said Amber, “We had to drag him here after all the other kids ran away- the ones who still could run anyway. And now the police are over there, so we couldn’t even wait around to see if anyone would come help us who’d seen the video.”

  “That’s probably good,” I said, “I bet the Facility have seen the video, too.”

  “That’s true,” said Zoe.

  We all stand and look at each other.

  “So there’s another Facility,” Amber said.

  “I guess so,” Kat said.

  I wonder how many there are.

  The two whip their heads towards James.

  “Sorry,” he said, “I can’t control it yet.”

  The looks on their faces said they weren’t ready for that in the slightest.

  “How did you do that?” asked Zoe. Amber nodded. They took Zoe’s hand.

  “You guys can’t think at each other?” asked James.

  They shook their heads. Adam muttered from the ground. Elliot opened one of his eyes with his thumb as if somehow he could assess Adam medically.

  “So they were using different medications on you than on us?” I said, “How come we both got some that worked at the same time, then?”

  “I imagine they were just getting close. Or maybe it was the same shot with just a little small difference that meant it still did kind of what it was supposed to to each of us,” said Amber.

  Up close, the kids seemed even younger. Where before I had guessed thirteen, I wondered now if Zoe was even older than nine, and Amber maybe eleven or twelve. Adam seemed like he could still be thirteen, though.

  “How did you guys get out?” asked Kat.

  “We don’t remember,” shrugged Zoe, “One second we were inside with some really bad side effects, and then Amber took my hand and we were running, and then we were outside, near a shopping mall.”

  “I don’t even remember grabbing Zoe’s hand,” said Amber.

  “What about Adam?” I asked.

  They both shrugged. “We all liked Adam, so I guess fuzzy medicine brain said, take him too. And I’m super glad because we wouldn’t have made it this far without him,” said Amber.

  “How long has it  been since you’ve eaten?” asked Elliot, “Had clean water?”

  “We’ve been drinking from this stream,” Zoe pointed to the muddy runoff beside us.

  Elliot shook his head. “I wouldn’t let my dog drink from this stream.”

  “They let you guys have dogs!” said Zoe with enthusiasm.

  “No,” said Elliot, “I’m not from the Facility.”

  Zoe took a step back and looked him up and down. “I couldn’t even tell,” she said, “I guess we’re not too far off from normal people.”

  “No,” Elliot said, “You’re not. And if I have anything to do with it, you’ll grow up and fit in just fine with everyone else. I’m gonna go get some food from that grocery store down there.”

  “Can I come with you!” Zoe took his hand.

  “Sure,” he said, “But wear some sunglasses.”

  I gave her mine and they climbed back through the woods.

  “What’s your dog’s name?” I heard Zoe ask him.

  Amber turned back to Adam.

  “Adam didn’t mean to hurt all of them,” they said, “That guy was trying to get him to fight, and he got overwhelmed. None of us knew what was happening to him, not even him.”

  I can imagine what that’s going to hurt like when he woke up and realized what he’d done.

  “It’s sad that even after we escape, we still can’t be normal. No matter what your friend Elliot says, we’ll still be different,” they said.

  She’s right, we won’t be.

  Amber scrunched up her nose at James. “I don’t like it when you talk in my head. And also I don’t like ‘she.’ Call me ‘they’ please.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m having a lot of trouble controlling it. And I’ll try my best to use the right pronouns, but it’s hard to control your thoughts.”

  “We’ve been saying, if it’s not something you meant to send to someone, they can’t hold it against you,” Kat explained.

  “That’s probably a good idea,” said Amber, “If you keep sending things you don’t mean to all the time.”

  I laughed once. “Yeah, we sure do.”

  Adam stirred again. “Amber?” he said, clearly. His eyes were still closed.

  “Maybe he just used all his energy blowing up like that,” said Kat, “I bet if Elliot gets some food that we can manage to feed him, it will help. And clean water. I don’t know what your medicine did to you, but that water could probably still get you sick.”

  “We’ve been healing really fast, if that’s what you mean,” said Amber, “Zoe couldn’t even move her leg after Adam blew up, but it healed in just, like, an hour.”

  “Yeah, us too,” said James, “Had anything else happened to you guys?”

  They looked at us sideways. “Well, our eyes didn’t used to come in neon.”

  “Has that had any side effects?” I asked.

  “Yup.” They walked a few feet away to demonstrate. As we watched, they started to vibrate, then, they were right in front of us again.

  “You can fucking teleport!” said James. We all agreed with his tone.

  “Yeah,” they said, “but only where I’m looking.”

  “Can Zoe and Adam do that?” Kat asked.

  “Zoe can see heat if she wants to,” they said, “and as far as we know, Adam can just blow up.”

  As if he heard his name, Adam struggled into a sitting position, eyes still closed.

  “Amber?” he said. He lifted one shaky hand.

  “Hey, I’m here Adam.” They took his hand and kneeled beside him. They protected his head and gently laid him back down.

  “I can’t see,” Adam muttered. Amber took their blue sweater off and laid it over Adam. Now that the heat of the day had passed, it was chilled under these leaves.

  I sat on the ground next to them. Kat and James joined us.

  “Tell us about your Facility,” I said, “If you can. What was it like in there?”

  “Terrible,” they said, “I’m sure you know, I doubt yours was much different.” They looked up at the bright undersides of the autumn leaves above them and sighed.

  “There were some good doctors,” they said, “But mostly bad ones. Who got high on the power and stuff.” They closed their eyes.

  “We had that too,” Kat said, a whisper. She cleared her throat. “We had that too. And they’d pretend no one was dying from their shots when they were, and people would go missing and be replaced by brand new babies, bought from someone who couldn’t afford to say no to however much they were offering.” Amber was nodding to all this.

  “I wonder how many of the same there were,” they said, “And how many were run different.”

  “Did you have the same head dude who would come and visit every few- years I guess it was? With the suit and that kid that followed him around?”

  “Charles and his son. He lived somewhere around here, he was in all the time. Liked to give speeches,” they said.

  “We were out in the middle of nowhere,” said Kat, “I wonder if he ever kind of forgot we were out there.”

  “Corn for miles,” James laughed. “We know. We walked.”

  “We had a car at first,” I said, “We don’t remember how we got it. But once we stopped somewhere for gas it locked us inside and started driving us back. We opened the sunroof, though. Jumped for it. Healed pretty much right away and have been figuring out what else is wrong with us since then.”

  “I wouldn’t say it was wrong with us,” said Amber with a half smile, “Think about it, this is what they wanted to happen to us, right? But we made it super hard for them. Right what they always wanted, but right out of their grip.”

  We all smile. “They couldn’t handle us,” said Kat.

  I donated my other hoodie to Adam, and James helped me put it on him. We easily tore off the rags that were the clothes he used to have.

  “Red looks good on him,” Amber said enviously. Their blue is still torn and a little blackened.

  “Elliot has money,” said Kat, “He’ll get you more clothes.”

  In James’ bag were a pair of jeans he could bear to part with that looked like they’d just about fit Adam. We struggled to get them up and repurposed the old waistband of his pants as a tied belt.

  “You can wear one of my new button-downs if you want,” I offered Amber. They were a thin kid, but maybe the dark purple one would work. They tried it on, and didn’t return it, even if it was a bit large.

  Elliot and Zoe crunched through the woods towards us, both laden with bags.

  “Good news, I planned ahead,” he said, “Bad news, we have to move again.”

  “Pardon?” said Kat.

  “Well, I was thinking, they’ll be able to track my debit card, so I went to the bank and paid a shit ton of ATM fees to get it all in cash. That’s in here,” He held out a pink plastic purse with a cartoon character on the side. “It’s all I could find, and if Zoe carries it, it’s gonna blend in and no one will suspect there’s thousands in cash in there.”

  “So you think they’ll find that bank and subsequently find us, right?” said James.

  “Yeah,” he said, “But first we have to get some strength up. I got an eight pack of waters, and some pre-wrapped sandwiches, and protein bars for later. Pick your flavors.”

  I didn't know what I would like, but I went with the sandwich with the freshest looking lettuce on it, and the protein bar with strawberries on the side.

  As we all ate, Zoe and Amber also tried to feed Adam. Elliot also got a little kid’s ‘meal shake’ in a bottle, so they could pour and wait for him to swallow.

  He finished it faster than any of us expected.

  Elliot gathered the wrappings of our sandwiches and the empty grocery bags together.

  “This place may be full of trash,” he said, “But I’m not adding to it.”

  We all sat around Adam, and hoped he would get up before Elliot decided it was time to leave.

  “Adam?” said Elliot, “Are you awake?”

  “Who are you?” Adam muttered. Elliot looked around at us and shrugged.

  “I’m Elliot,” he said, “We need your help.”

  “Zoe? And Amber?” he asked.

  “They need you, too,” said Elliot.

  Adam opened his eyes with great pain. The bright red was dimmed by a film of creamy white.

  “I can’t see,” he said.

  Amber took his face with one hand. “There’s something wrong with your eyes. But I bet it will heal- we have super healing, remember? But for now, you have to trust us, and we have to go, ok?”

  Adam nodded and Elliot and James helped him to his feet. Amber wrang their hands behind him. I held out my hand for them.

  “We’ll be ok, you’ll see,” I said.

  Adam mostly took his own steps, so we made good time, though I’m not sure how lucid he was. He asked several times for Isabella, and if they cut off his hair for exploding. Elliot patiently answered all his questions. No, Isabella isn’t here. Your hair is all still there, and standing straight on end. We’re trying to help you. Amber and Zoe are safe, etc.

  “I don’t know what’s taking him so long to heal,” said Amber. They watched worriedly Adam’s every stumbling step, and still hadn’t let go of my hand. I looked over at Zoe, who held James and Kat’s hands and talked non-stop about the things she’d seen since they got out.

  “I’m sure he’ll be ok,” I said, though I was sure of no such thing, “I bet when he blew up it would have killed him. Takes a lot of healing to come back from being dead.”

  “That makes sense,” they said.

  “Do you guys know why you have different powers from each other?” I asked.

  “Nope,” they said, “We had the same dosages of the same thing, I’m pretty sure. Maybe it’s just something that’s different in us, if it’s not a difference in what they put in it.”

  “Maybe,” I said. Even in Kat, James, and I, who mostly had the same powers so far, there had been differences. Kat seemed to handle thinking at each other much better from the get-go, and James for sure healed faster. And who knows, maybe there’s even more different between us to come. I’m the only one who’s actually demonstrated being so strong, though Kat and James fought off those guys pretty well on their own.

  I wonder if these three were brainwashed, too? I wonder if it’s the same trigger? Would we all abandon Elliot and run into the arms of our captors?

  “You’re thinking at me, Sparrow,” said Elliot.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  I hear James ask what I said under his breath and Elliot shook his head at him.

  We took a break after a few hours. We talked some, but mostly focused on walking. After a while, Kat and I took a turn having Adam lean on us. We made it this far staying in stands of trees behind houses, and I think we’re making progress on our way out of the suburbs.

  We sat cross-legged in a circle, watching Adam gently sway and nearly fall over several times.

  “Do you think he’s ok?” Kat asked me. I shrugged.

  “He didn’t blow up that long ago. Maybe his fast healing got overwhelmed,” I said. We ate our snacks.

  After a lot more walking, it started growing dark, and Elliot insisted on another hotel stay.

  “We’ll have to share a few rooms,” he said, “I don’t think I want to get more than two.” He gave us a head count and said someone would have to share three to a bed if he got a room with a queen sized bed, and a room with two.

  Turned out, he didn’t have a choice but to buy more rooms.

  The nearest place he could find was a one-story motel with rooms a bed apiece. He got himself and James one, Me and Kat one, and the other three one to share.

  “I’m sorry you’ll be so squished,” he told them, but they mostly seemed overwhelmed by the commodities the place had, like their own bathroom right there in the room, and a full window with curtains and an air conditioner.

  I showed them how the TV worked while Kat helped James and Elliot wash Adam. According to the sounds of struggle, they needed all three of them to accomplish it. He had fallen quite limp by the time we arrived, so I can’t imagine.

  “Did you have a TV at your Facility?” I asked Zoe and Amber. They’d sprawled out on the queen bed and looked very comfortable.

  “Yeah,” said Zoe, “But only every once in awhile, and the movies always had missing pieces.”

  “We had it more, like once a day,” I said, “but it was all on disc so they could edit out things they didn’t agree with.”

  “That sounds about right,” said Amber, “and all the books had pages missing.”

  “Did you ever get to go outside?” I asked.

  “No?” said Amber, “Did you?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “Once a year we’d be let out to see the sun. Sometimes the sunset.”

  “We never once went outside until we escaped,” said Amber, “The sky was so big, I didn’t even know.”

  “So you’ve never seen the stars?” asked Elliot. I hadn’t noticed they’d joined us. Kat and James had Adam halfway back out of the bathroom.

  “I guess not. The sky was never clear enough,” they said, “Too much light.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “The city will do that.”

  I got the TV to a good channel full of the kinds of kids shows I loved. “Here, you’ll probably like these,” I said, “But if you want to change it, push the up and down buttons. And the Power button is the Red one.”

  “Thank you for your help,” Amber said.

  “If you need us, we’re just to the right of you,” Kat said, “Just make sure you don’t leave your key inside, you need it to get back in.”

  Kat and I collapsed into the bed we would share and laid there in the quiet for a while.

  “I want a shower,” I said. Since the hotel room that morning, so much had transpired that I felt like I’d never been relaxed in my life. I stepped into the bathroom and locked the door, just looking at my feet on the cold tiles below them.

  I took my time getting undressed and just stood and looked at myself in the mirror.

  “I’m not so bad,” I said quietly. I ran my hands over my head and remembered the hair I used to have, long and dark. I wasn’t the type to get in trouble. I’d wished I’d never said anything, when I saw the long waves on the stainless steel operating table.

  But then, hundreds of miles from there, and a million new experiences wiser, I changed my mind. I looked at myself in the mirror and I appreciated my hairline, my jaw, my eyebrows. I looked closely into my brown eyes and told myself I could see so much more of me now and I liked it.

  I wish telling them about Dr. 21 did something, but even if it didn’t, the punishment didn’t hurt that bad, and at least I knew what would happen if I said something. Otherwise, I know I would have wondered, even now.

  I was magnificent. I smiled.

  I took my shower and crawled into bed.

  I was sad to find out there was no free breakfast here.

  “We can order chinese, though,” said Elliot in the morning, as we all congregated into one room. Everyone looked happier after a good night’s rest. Adam was up, and walking on his own.

  He claimed he was starting to see again, but his eyes remained foggy.

  None of us had any suggestions for Elliot to order, so he just listed a great deal of things and we waited on the delivery.

  “I don’t know what it is,” I said, “But you all look brighter this morning.”

  “I feel brighter. Brighter and lighter and happy!” said Kat, “While you were in the bathroom last night I got this wave of just, I don’t know how to describe it, but I just loved myself, all of a sudden.”

  Though this was a pleasant realization, it seemed odd. That was the exact moment I was feeling the same way, looking over my face and hair in the mirror.

  “That’s weird,” said James, “I was definitely feeling more like myself last night, too. Like, no matter what I looked like, I was still me, and how much I loved being me.”  

  “Yeah,” said Elliot, “We were talking about it, about body image and how I may have been bullied for my skin and hair when I was younger, but how now I appreciate it, and the south american culture my father came from, though I don’t know nearly enough about the place or the people. We had a really long talk about loving ourselves and it was really wholesome.”

  We all looked at each other.

  “I always love me,” said Zoe, “And I definitely love my new eyes! Not boring blue.”

  “I was also feeling exceptionally happy with myself last night,” said Amber, “For, like, no reason.”

  “I was looking in the mirror,” I said, “Before my shower, and convincing myself I was amazing.”

  They all looked at me. And I could understand why- their moods came out of nowhere. Mine, I worked hard on.

  “Sparrow, you don’t think you were thinking those feelings at us?” asked Kat.

  “You ask me like I know,” I said, “But I guess it’s possible?”

  “Try it with something else,” said Amber.

  I tried to think of happy things, but only sad things came to mind- the people left at the facility, the other young victims of Dr. 21, the mounds of dead locked behind closed doors until sanitary pickup came to take them away.

  The mood around me, so bright, tarnished quickly, even though I hadn’t said a word.

  “Did you guys hear any thoughts?” I asked. No, they hadn’t. Maybe Kat was right. Maybe it was feelings.

  The food came and I tried not to think of sad things anymore.

  After we ate (Chinese food is delicious), we sat in an assortment of places and tried to gather ideas of what to do. Adam quickly fell back asleep.

  “That’s ok,” said James, “He probably needed it.”

  “So,” said Kat, “What now? We can’t exactly stay at this hotel another night, I don’t think Elliot can afford it.”

  Elliot shrugged, “I could afford it,” he said, “But it would eat into what we have left way too quickly, and we need that for food, and gas if we ever get back to my car.”

  “I don’t think we can get back to your car,” I said, “You’re a criminal, I bet they took it in for evidence.”

  “And we did drive through some of those guys’ blood, I bet they’ll find it,” Kat said.

  Elliot looked glum, but nodded.

  “Well, we should go find the kids facility and break everyone out,” said James, like it was the obvious choice.

  “Pardon?” I said.

  “Well, think about it, we have these powers-”

  “That we hardly know how to use,” interrupted Kat.

  “And we have-”

  There’s another knock at the door, and I looked at the empty chinese food containers, as if to prove to myself that we had already gotten the food, and this was some other intruder.

  I started to panic as Elliot approached the door.

  Wait, no.

  I looked around at them all, and they all looked as panicked as I felt. It was Kat’s thoughts that interrupted Elliot.

  That was probably my fault, the panic. I should be more careful of what I feel.

  Don’t open it, James thought. We all agreed.

  We should escape, out the window in the back, or through the drop ceiling to the next room over to hide. We have to hide. We have to go, I know who’s outside that door and I do not want to let them in.

  Around me, the room erupted into chaos as everyone scurried around like trapped rats. Zoe even climbed the dresser and scratched away at the ceiling, moving a panel and crawling away, only to fall through a second later. The window at the back was screwed shut before Kat got to it. She opened it, hard, and shattered the pane when it hit the top too hard.

  “Come on!” she said. We followed her out, cut by glass and shoved by each other. Adam had jumped awake when Zoe fell through the ceiling, and was nearly last out the window. Elliot followed him close behind.

  We made it all the way down the slope behind the motel, and turned swiftly right to follow a concrete runway with about an inch of leafy water at the bottom.

  We had left our clothes behind, our shoes. Our money. We had what was on our backs, and a few dollars Elliot had in his pocket from paying the delivery driver.

  We stopped a few miles away when finally our panic waned. Elliot hissed and looked over his hands.

  “Elliot!” said James, “You’re bleeding.”

  Our cuts from the window pane had already healed, but Elliot’s wouldn’t be that fast. Blood dripped from the palms of his hands into the leaves.

  “I need bandages,” he said, “and antibiotics.”

  We looked around at the forest around us.

  “I’ll go looking,” Kat said, “for a store of some kind.”

  “We should stick together,” he said. We walked, as he clasped his hands into fists to slow the bleeding.

  “There’s houses,” pointed Zoe. We made it through their backyards and onto a sidewalk out front.

  “Thank god, a pharmacy,” said Elliot.

  We followed him through the doors, looking nervously around at the bright fluorescents around us and the rows of cosmetics and medicine.

  “James, can you get them?” said Elliot, “I’m going to the restroom to wash my hands.” He led James to his pocket where his last few dollars were.

  He dripped blood into the carpet a few more times as he ran to the bathroom.

  We wandered behind James to the aisle with first aid things in it. He looked over the boxes of bandages.

  “I’m sorry,” he said to no one in particular, “I don’t think this is going to be enough.”

  “Hey Sparrow?” said Kat behind me, “Can we talk real fast?”

  We stepped away from the others and went a few aisles down.

  “I don’t know if you meant me to hear it, but you thought something back in the hotel room. Something along the lines of blaming yourself for the panic and having to watch what you feel, and let me just say, please don’t do that?” she said. She put a hand on each of my shoulders to make sure I was looking right into her face. “You’re allowed to feel, and just like we’ve all been getting slowly better at keeping our thoughts to ourselves, I’m sure you’ll get better at not sharing your feelings, if that’s actually what’s going on here- we don’t have much proof yet.”

  I nodded. “I guess so,” I said.

  “Nope,” said Kat, “I know so. Since I was little and decided I wasn’t going to let the place we lived determine the person I was. I don’t want the thing they made us to define the person you are. You can be you, all of you, and if that affects the people around you, it’s up to them how they handle it, not you. And trust me, Sparrow, we still love you.” She pulled me forward into a hug and I graciously accepted it, though I knew it would be hard to take her advice and put it into play.

  Elliot had returned from the bathroom when we got back, paper towels clenched in each fist.

  We stood together, lost, and unable to pay for his bandages.

  “Maybe I can help?” we heard behind us. Uneasy, we turned. It was Mallorie, from the subway. She appeared out-of-breath, as though she had run to arrive here. Close behind her came two others, young, but by far older than all of us. They smiled as if they had been told about us, and were glad to finally meet us.

  Knowing what Mallorie said to us earlier, about knowing we were criminals, put me at unease.

  “It’s ok,” she said. I wondered if she heard me thinking at her.

  “We did,” said one of the two behind her, “Both now, and earlier- at the motel room.”

  “We took the liberty of leaving some of your money to pay for the damages you caused,” said the other, shaking her head, “You freaked right out of there. It was impressive.”

  At this point, we were all on high alert.

  “What do you want with us?” asked Amber, pushing Zoe behind them to keep her safe.

  “Let me buy your friend here those bandages, then we can talk,” said Mallorie, “but I promise you, I mean you no harm.”

  I don’t trust them, but what choice do we have? Thought James. With that, we slowly followed them out of the store. Mallorie stayed behind to buy the bandages and some healing cream.

  While she bandaged Elliot’s hands, she explained.

  “I couldn’t talk with you on the subway,” she said, “But I was following you since you got into town, and I had to step in when I saw you panic there. I can’t bear not to help sometimes.”

  “Plus,” one of the two with her said, “She had to warn you to cover up, some. One of the other patrons on the same car as you was an off-duty cop.”

  “How do you know?” asked Kat, a reasonable question.

  “We were there, too,” the other one said, “I’m Lillian.” She held out a hand.

  “Lillian likes to introduce herself before she ever mentions a thing about her abilities,” said the first.

  “It makes me feel human,” she protested. She turned back to us, “I can intercept the internet. He was answering a text about work.”

  “You can... what now?” asked James.

  “Catch the wifi, my dude,” she said. She snapped her fingers and pointed finger guns at us.

  “Huh,” he said.

  “That makes my powers seem a lot less cool,” I said.

  “I don’t know,” she said, “You can do a lot of good with that emotion thing you’ve got going on there. Especially where we’re taking you.”

  “Are you taking us somewhere?” said Kat, “Because I don’t remember agreeing to that for even one second.”

  “She’s right, Lil,” Mallorie said, “We should ask.”

  “Can we go get the car at least?” she asked, “I have my laptop in there, we can show them pictures.”

  “It’s probably safer we hide in the woods again,” James said.

  That’s where we went, as Mallorie and Lil walked back to the motel.

  “That walk will take them at least an hour,” the guy they left with us said tiredly.

  “Gives us time for introductions, then,” Elliot said.

  “But I already know who you are,” he said. He pointed at us one by one. “Patient 1875 Louise, Patient 1884 Katrina, Patient 90976 Zoe, Patient 25340 Amber, Patient 13029 Adam, and Patient 1900 Leah.”

  We all bristled more as his list went on. He seemed to realize he’d made a mistake.

  James was the one who stepped forward. “My name,” he said, “is James.”

  “Right,” he said, “Of course. How about we forget I said any of that, and you guys introduce yourselves, like you first suggested.”

  Begrudgingly, we did. He seemed to know he made a bad first impression.

  “I don’t know why they let me go on welcome missions,” he said to himself, “I somehow manage to fuck them up, time and time again. I’m Luke.”

  We mostly sat in silence, lost in our own memories, until Lillian scrambled down the slope to find us and lead us back to their car.

  “There’s not quite enough room in here,” she said, looking at the minivan, “So we also called in a friend. We didn’t quite expect to find all six of you. Or, seven including our Outsider, Elliot.”

  She pulled out her computer and showed us pictures of where they wanted to take us.

  It was nice. When Mallorie explained earlier that they worked with people who fought against the Facility, she called it ‘the Underground.’

  This, however, wasn’t underground. It was rolling hills, a farm-sized runway for small airplanes, and a firepit surrounded by smiling strangers. It was a tall white house, and three squat bunkers, and a gymnasium that was almost finished construction.

  “They have their benefactors,” Lil said, “And we have ours.” I wanted to ask her more, but I expected that she'd been vague on purpose.

  We explained we’d need a few minutes to talk it over together, and scurried over to the side of the pharmacy. We stepped into the shade of a small tree, and I was glad my eyes were shielded from the bright of the reflection off the concrete parking lot.

  “What do we think?” asked Elliot. I’m glad he didn’t give an opinion right away, seeing as he was far more likely to trust them than us. In general, his personality was a trusting one, demonstrated by his trust in us, as we wandered, disheveled, down the street outside his house.

  “I think we should go,” said James. This surprised me.

  “Oh yeah?” Kat said.

  “Yeah,” he said, “I think we should trust them. They can help us. And obviously, we’re not the first ones they’ve helped. It might be really good there.”

  “Might,” said Kat, “I don’t know if I want to jump into a van with strangers on the promise of a might.”

  “I think we should, too,” said Zoe.

  “Oh yeah?” said Elliot. He petted her shaved head.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “What makes you think that?” asked Kat.

  “Because they have a place to sleep, and all our money, and they probably have food, and clothes, and can keep us safe, and can teach us about the outside, and can maybe even help us get our friends out!” She smiled, proud of the points she’d made. Sometimes, with the depth in her eyes, I forgot how much younger than us she was.

  “That’s true,” I said, “But they could also be part of the Facility, and bring us back there.”

  She hardly deflated at all. “That could happen if we say no, too,” she said.

  She was right, and we pondered it. As we discussed, the other car arrived.

  “Have you guys made a decision?” asked Luke, leaning on the hood of their minivan like he was tired of standing and ready to leave.

  We looked around at each other, nodding one at a time.

  “All right,” said Elliot, “We’ll go.”

  They checked us over for electronics and tracking devices before we got in. We were glad to see our stuff in the back, but Elliot quickly opened his suitcase and threw his laptop out the side door. We piled into the van with Mallorie, and Lil, Luke, and the other three joined the new driver in the other van.

  I was glad Lil and Luke went with them. At least the three would have somewhat familiar faces for the drive.

  For the fourth time, we drove for a long while. It was fun the first few times, but not as fun now. It reminded me too much of how cramped it felt when there were too many of us in a room back at the Facility. But at least I got a window seat now, and could watch the world through its tinted glass.

  When we got there, and it looked like the pictures, I felt more relieved than I could have imagined. The difference between the pictures and reality, was that there were more buildings, and more people.

  Mallorie parked and we all got out.

  “You got them!” said a woman on the stairs. She wore her bright red hair up in a bun at the very top center of her head, tied with a green scarf. Her sweater matched the scarf, and her pants were a neutral beige. She wore no shoes.

  “Sure did,” said Mallorie, “We have to figure out why they’re letting so many of them go.”

  Every head in our group whipped around to them.

  “Pardon me?” said Kat.

  “Do any of you remember escaping,” the redheaded woman said to us, smiling kindly and descending the steps from the house.

  “Well, no,” said James.

  “They’re letting the success stories go,” she said, “They knew your serum would work before they gave it to you. The memory loss was intentional, though it took them a long time to perfect it. Luke here doesn’t remember a moment of his time in a Facility. He was found wandering around in upper state New York with the mind of a very young child.”

  We looked at him and he shrugged. “I’ve come a long way,” he said.

  “There are a few others here in similar conditions,” she said, “Though they haven’t made that mistake in a long time.”

  “We’ve been picking up the broken pieces of whatever it is they’re trying to do for years,” said Mallorie, “and we’re still not much closer to understanding why they let you guys loose once they’ve got the serum working on you.”

  “Though,” said the woman on the stairs, “We’re starting to understand that you’re meant to be scooped up by someone other than us. Come inside, we can show you around, and then, if you’re interested, we can talk all the theories. I’m Alyson, I run the rehabilitation center since it was founded eleven years ago.”

  The seven of us followed, but Mallorie called Elliot back.

  “Can we talk just really fast,” she said, “I promise I’ll give you the same tour in a second.”

  I thought in his direction to make sure he was OK with us going on without him.

  “Yeah, you guys go ahead,” he said, “I’ll see what Mallorie has to say.”

  We were led, first, through a kitchen with a large open dining room beside it, full of small and large tables, some occupied. The kids and teens watched us as we passed through. I couldn’t keep my eyes off the picture windows on the far wall, and the rolling hills beyond. In the distance, a group exited the woods, laughing and leaning on each other.

  I was excited to picture that being us.

  “We have a bigger dining hall than this, too,” said Alyson, “This one used to be the one we used all the time, but now it’s just for snacks, really.”

  We followed her in a row up some stairs. She pointed down the hall beside them. “There’s my office down there, and a bathroom, and the side door,” she said, “and up here used to be our first bedrooms, but now it’s Mallorie’s room, and the planning room. And another bathroom.”

  There was another set of stairs that she just pointed up. “The attic is up there, it’s nice and roomy. We play a movie every evening for anyone who wants to sit down and watch, we have lots of comfy pillows up there and it’s basically a giant slumber party, but there are also games and other stuff like that up there, and as long as you sign them out, you can take them back to your room with you.”

  We shuffled around to let her back down the stairs and we followed again. None of us had said a word. It made me worried I was dreaming.

  Kat pinched me. “There, see?” she whispered, “Not dreaming.”

  “Thanks,” I said. The pinch grounded me back in my own two feet.

  We followed Alyson down the hallway and out the side door, finding room to spread out on the field of gently browning grass.

  “That down there is thirteen acres of woods, with walking paths and I think a few of the kids built a treehouse down there this summer- I haven’t had a chance to look. Over there, those buildings dotting the hill are all bedrooms- we’ll get you yours in a minute. It wasn’t cost effective to give everyone their own bedrooms, but after having dorms their whole lives.” Alyson shook her head, “I convinced them that we had to do it, we had to give everyone their own rooms. The halls are separated by age, so as you get older, the room sizes change. We generally don’t want teens staying up all night talking right next to Kiddos who have a bedtime.”

  We held each others’ hands. All of us.

  I was trying my hardest not to cry.

  “This is our new gym,” said Alyson. Inside was a big, flat, wooden floor. Basketball hoops stood at either end, but at the moment, two little girls with rollerskates rolled circles around each other, their giggling echoing around in the high ceilings and out the open skylights. Alyson peered at the cloudy sky, which had grown cloudier on the drive here, and pressed a switch on the wall. The skylights closed, the lighting softened, and a few light bulbs switched on.

  “Over there, that thing that looks like a long road is actually a runway. We have three retired military jets donated by an anonymous friend. Mallorie and I have training to fly them, but we give lessons to a few of our older residents, and we have two more around here somewhere who have surpassed us, and easily take care of the planes all on their own.”

  “Why do you have military jets?” asked Kat, “Why do you need them?”

  “Just in case, I like to think,” Alyson said, “They’re still fully equipped with the missiles they came with. We’re not highly militaristic, but some of our benefactors like to- overcompensate, lets just say. They want us to be as safe as possible.”

  I wonder how hard it is to fly a jet, really, thought James. From the look of it, I was the only one to hear him.

  “Down the way, we have a bomb shelter,” said Alyson, “We’re going to walk to it so that you know where it is. If there’s ever any emergency, we like to gather everyone there, be it a storm, wildfire, or in the case of an attack.”

  We walked down the hill and through some trees before reaching a stairway into the ground, marked by a tall, thin, concrete pillar.

  She pointed down, “You can go in if you want, the code is 0505, nice and easy to remember, and it rarely changes. If it changes, you’ll be told.”

  James went down the steps first, and I followed at a distance. I didn’t like the darkness of the steps, or the sludgy fallen leaves that adorned them.

  He tried the code and it beeped. I saw a tiny green light on the handle.

  Inside, it looked well lit. It was empty of people, but full of bunk beds, a long counter, and a row of three doors at the far end. As we entered, motion sensing lights flicked on in the doors, and we saw a row of showers in one, some machinery in the second, and shelves and shelves of boxes in the third.

  Alyson made us jump when she told us about the place, as we hadn’t realized she’d followed us down.

  “We couldn’t stay forever,” she said, “But we could long enough to be bailed out by someone on the outside, which is the best we could hope for in the worst case.”

  She didn’t elaborate and instead lead us back to the main white house.

  “This right here is the dining hall, and behind it, the assembly. Up the road, you probably saw some of our other buildings,” she said, “We hold classes fairly frequently. There are a lot of volunteers who are willing to come and help people like you guys. Psychologists and professors, and even retired Doctors who left Facilities, though if that makes you uncomfortable, you don’t have to take their classes. We have a lot of people who have experience helping victims cope with their abilities.”

  “How do you know you can trust them?” asked James, “Especially the doctors.”

  “Everyone we recruit we research extensively, and we watch them for months before we even approach them to say anything,” she said, “And, now we have Lillian. She watches their wifi and cellular activity before we take them in, and while they’re here. The last thing we would want is to put anyone here in danger.”

  Mallorie and Elliot caught up with us, and Elliot was bouncing on his heels.

  “How much do you love this place? Cause I love this place,” he said.

  “Do you guys want to find yourselves some rooms?” asked Mallorie. Zoe skipped ahead to where the sleeping halls had been pointed out to us. The rest of us followed behind, buzzing with excitement.

  The rooms for the youngest residents were first, and Zoe was so pleased with her choices. Alyson insisted that if she didn’t like any of the colors, they could repaint it- once, and with only one color- but Zoe found one in lavender, and melted into the bed there.

  “It matches my eyes!” she said. Her grin spread from one rosy cheek to the other.

  “There are only a few rules before we go off and find rooms for everyone else,” Alyson said, “Rule one, we have fences with big yellow signs on all edges of the property. Please don’t touch them, they’re electric. If you ever want to leave, we’ll let you right out the front gate, or you could let yourself out, but we encourage our residents to stay here, where it’s safe. Rule two, please sign out any games you take from the attic of the main house, or books from the library down in building 4, or if you take snacks outside of mealtime, etc. It helps us keep track of everything and know when to get more of certain things.”

  She paused, trying to remember if there were more than just two rules.

  “Ah, three, we don’t tolerate bullying or teasing or anything of the sort. Most here just keep their distance from those they don’t like, but sometimes we have issues, which should always be brought to Mallory’s or my attention so that we can talk through the problem. A close friend of mine is a licensed counsellor, and usually we have a few sessions with everyone involved, and that seemed to help most of the time.”

  “And when it hasn’t?” Kat asked.

  “We don’t punish like the Facility does, if that’s what you’re implying,” Alyson said, “for discipline, we’ll restrict access to games and movies for short periods, sitting out of group activities like bonfires or parties, or, in extreme cases, expulsion from the rehabilitation center. That’s only happened once, and he’s since returned to be a teacher. The time outside helped him grow, and we couldn’t be happier to have him back.”

  We left Zoe to her room, and she waved goodbye to us as we left.

  “At the end of the hall on the left there’s a laundry room. The closets in there are full of clothes that are kiddo sized,” Alyson told her, “Feel free to look through them and take the ones you want.”

  We heard her footsteps sprinting down the hall from outside, and her chipper “Hi!” to anyone she passed.

  “She’ll be happy here,” said Amber.

  The next hall was for them and Adam. Adam hadn’t yet recovered completely, though the cloudiness in his eyes was almost gone.

  The rooms here were less bright. There were subdued notes of rust and teal and ash. Amber liked the ash. Adam still couldn’t see the colors. He picked teal.

  Then, there were four. We looked at each other as Alyson led us a few buildings down.

  “The older dorms come with a lot more extra rooms,” she said, “here, I’ll show you.”

  There was a fully stocked medicine cabinet. She made sure to point out the condoms, and tampons, and painkillers. “You have to sign this stuff out, too,” she said, “But not with your name or anything. Just the amount, so we know when to replace them.”

  She also showed us the laundry room, and the large storage space for donated clothes.

  “They’re free for the taking,” she said, “It’s kind of an event when new ones come in, you have to be there early to get the really cool looking stuff.”

  I raised my hand, “am I allowed to keep the clothes I already got?”

  James raised his hand, too, “are there differences between boys’ and girls’ rooms?”

  “When do we get to meet everyone!” Kat burst out and said.

  “One at a time,” said Alyson, “Sparrow, yes, of course you can. If you need to wash them, I can show you how, or anyone else in the hall. The other residents are very understanding of your situation. They came from the same place, after all. James, there aren’t any differences. When you’re eighteen or older, there is some paperwork you have to fill out just so that you get an ID, and that you’re not being forced to stay here, stuff like that. We’re working with the State, here, we have some lower-level local government officials who help file the paperwork and keep it quiet. We know that higher up, they’re in with the Facility. We even have a few names, if we ever get a chance to talk with someone who can help.”

  Kat was still bouncing, waiting for her question to be answered. “When do we get to meet everyone!” she said. Alyson looked at her watch.

  “You just missed lunch, but if you’re comfortable, we could introduce you at an assembly? We usually try to do something like that.” she said.

  “I won’t know if I’m comfortable with that until later,” I said.

  Amber showed us which rooms were available, and there were a lot more than there were in the other halls.

  “We filled up the hall up the hill from you, so we just started placing here,” she said.

  There were a great deal of subdued colors, similar to the ones in the hall Amber and Adam were.

  “Green,” said Kat, “It’s minty and nice.” She went in and stood, looking around at the space that was now hers.

  “I think I like the beige,” said James. He, too, didn’t touch anything, just stood in the middle of the room.

  I didn’t know what color I wanted. There was violet, and grey, and forest green. There was rosy, and peachy, and white.

  I wanted the color of the sky.

  “We can do that,” said Alyson. “How about you stick with grey for now and we can repaint it soon?”

  “You heard my thoughts?” I asked.

  “Were those thoughts?” she said, “That’s pretty cool. We don’t have anyone who can do that, yet.”

  “All three of us can,” I said, “We were having trouble not doing it, actually.”

  She smiled. “I’m certain we can find a way to help. You get settled in. I’ll see you at the gym at five thirty for the assembly.”

  The door closed behind her and I looked around my new room.

  There was a bed with a tall curved headboard, gently used and like none of the ones I’d seen in any of the other rooms. It seemed to me their furniture was all gently used, scoured from antique stores and consignments. There was a bedside shelf instead of a table, a round half circle with two layers and thin silver posts between them, holding them at a distance wide enough to welcome a small lamp and an alarm clock. The top shelf was bare, ready for whatever I wanted to place there.

  The dresser was dark brown wood, scratched and well loved. The drawers were all empty aside from the bottom, which contained a pink square bead. I put it on the nightstand to rest. I had a desk, glass-topped, and a matching lamp there. At the foot of the bed there was an aged chest, instantly reminding me of a pirate’s treasure, aside from the roses appliqued on each side and crawling over the very left and right edges of the lid.

  Already, it felt like home.

  A few hours later, at four, a knock came at my door. My brief panic faded as I remember where I was, and I was pleased to see a familiar face; Mallorie, with my clothes. All of them.

  “We fetched Elliot’s car,” she said, “This should be everything.”

  I already knew what I wanted to wear to the assembly.

  “I’m sure you’ve seen,” said Alyson, once everyone was gathered in the gymnasium. Sometime since our tour, they’d unfolded the bleachers and set up a short landing at one end of the court to serve as a stage. “We have seven brand new friends.”

  Everyone seemed as excited that we were here as we were to be here. We sat on the front row of the bleacher to Alyson’s left.

  Her outfit had changed from the bright green and beige she’d worn before to a navy blouse and matching skirt. She appeared to be taking this very seriously.

  She wasn’t the only one. A great deal of the crowd were wearing their favorite outfits, the evidence in the shine on their faces and the confidence they collectively exuded. There were a great many suits, and a great many fancy gowns. There were also plenty of bright sweaters and cool hats. It made me happy to know they were themselves, and so we could be.

  Mallorie, sitting with us, asked if we were ready. Our nodding was pale and anxious, but she gave Alyson the thumbs up all the same.

  “It is at this time that I am going to introduce them one by one, and they can say something, if they’re comfortable. We’ll start with the outsider. Elliot?”

  Elliot, all smiles, bounded onstage.

  “I’m Elliot,” he said with a grin, “I’m glad to be here, even though I’m an outsider. Never been to a facility. From what I’ve heard, never want to go. I’m just happy to have somewhere where I’m welcomed, and where I can see my amazing new friends welcomed, too. We got into some trouble on the way here, but we totally made it, and that's the best part. So thank you guys!”

  They applauded.

  “Next we have Katrina,” smiled Alyson.

  Kat skipped into place. “That is me, but please call me Kat! I super love it here already, even though I’m still getting used to trusting that this is real? Any of it? I’m sure you guys get it-” she laughed, “but I love my new room, and I’m excited to get to know this place, and all of you.”

  “Zoe?”

  “Oh boy,” she said beside me. She sprinted.

  “I’m Zoe! I have purple eyes now, and my room matches! I already met Lillian and Luke, and also some of the kids in my hall, they’re all nice, hi guys!” she waved and sprinted back.

  “Oh wait!” She turned on her heel and ran back up. “Also I love you!”

  She sprinted back again and this time made it all the way back to her seat.

  “Adam?”

  He stepped slower than the rest of us had. “I’m Adam,” he said, “I usually am not so… tired? I’m still recovering from an incident I had a few days ago. But I swear I’m glad to meet you guys. Honest.” He came back faster than he went up.

  “James,” said Alyson.

  His blonde curls were tied back in buns. It suited him.

  “I’m James,” he said, “and I didn’t know the world could be so big. I didn’t know we weren’t alone. And I certainly didn’t think anyone would ever offer to help us. The stress I had has melted off since I got here- well, mostly- and I can’t thank you enough for welcoming us like this. Alyson, Mallorie, and all of you- thank you.”

  James was a good speaker. The applause was louder for him.

  “Amber?”

  They looked like they were about to collapse in on themself, and I understood. I felt nearly the same, ending up last like this. How could we say anything they hadn’t already said? And how could we stand up in front of all these people?

  Amber cleared their throat. “My name is Amber. I go by they/them pronouns, and I am glad there are woods here. I like the woods. Um, I guess I mean to say, I can’t wait to feel like this is home.” They came back, looking like they regretted what they’d said- or maybe that they hadn’t said more.

  “And last but for certain not the least, Sparrow.” Alyson held out her hand in a grand gesture of welcome.

  As I approached her, I felt the nervous energy choking me and threatening to transform into tears- because they were all right. This place was beautiful, and I, too, can’t wait for it to feel like home.

  As I got to center stage, I burst into tears.

  “It’s like a dream come true,” I said, “Just to have a room, and colorful clothes. I’m wearing a shirt with bananas on it and I could only be happier if we’d brought the rest of our facility with us. I just want to figure out who I am here, whether I like chocolate or vanilla, whether I want to draw or write or dance or play baseball. I don’t know how I could ever have been as much of me as I’ll have the chance to be here. And you can’t imagine how much it means to me.”

  Coming out of my tears, I saw that the others were crying, too- all of them.

  Alyson put an arm around my shoulders, wiping tears herself.

  “I guess-” she said, “Even after all this time, it still didn’t hit me how much everyone here found when they got here.”

  You sent it around, thought James.

  “It’s an ability,” I told them, but Alyson cut off my explanation.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said, “Thank you.”

   We went straight from the assembly into the dining hall, en masse. The food smells that wafted out made my stomach growl, though only minutes before, stage fright had me too tied in knots to be hungry.

  Alyson took me aside before I went inside.

  “You have a gift,” she said to me, “Walk with me for a minute. There will be plenty of food left.”

  We walked around the back of the dining hall, and in the setting sun, made our way down a slope to a small stream exiting a crack in the rocky hillside.

  “I have a proposition for you,” she said, “If you would like to stay, we will always have a place for you, regardless of your answer to my question, but if it was something that interested you, would you like to come on rescue missions with us, when the time comes for another one?”

  I considered it for only a moment. Helping those like us who were lost and with nowhere to go? Count me in.

  “I would love to,” I said.

  “We’ll have to work hard with you until you get to a point you’re comfortable enough with your abilities. Are you up to the challenge?”

  “I think so,” I told her, after a moment’s thought. “Do I have time?”

  “Yes,” she said, “As much as you’d like.”

  Good. Because I would like to recover before I do anything ‘challenging.’

  The interior of the dining hall was flooded with warm light and friendly chatter. The noise levels stayed comfortable, aside from the occasional swell. I joined the line at the end.

  The food was spread buffet-style along a counter at the far end of the hall. On the other side, I could see a flurry of chefs, changing out empty trays of mac-and-cheese and chicken tenders for new, hot ones. I made sure my meal was well balanced. Which, to the best of my knowledge, mean having vegetables at least.

  I found my friends together at a table, minus Zoe, who was chatting with a group of people her own age. I smiled at her childlike joy. Everyone found a place here.

  “Well,” said Elliot.

  “Well,” Kat replied, already digging into her food.

  “So it begins,” said Elliot.

  A week passed before I approached Alyson to ask about classes. A week of hot showers in a stall all to myself. A week in a bed that I made every morning with blankets I could wash when I wanted to. A week of signing out any snacks I wanted in a kitchen I could sit and read a book in.

  Speaking of books, I found a history book about a subject we never had any information on. I wanted to know what the Facility didn’t want to tell us.

  It was mostly about rebellion, the French people against their oppressors.

  I could understand why they didn’t want us to have that, back then.

  Back then, I thought, bemused. It was a week and a half ago, but the amount of space in my brain that time took up was far more than a week and a half underground. It felt like years had passed.

  I knocked on Alyson’s office door.

  “Come in,” she said. Mallorie and Alyson leaned over a page on Alyson’s desk. I looked around the room.

  Every wall was covered in bookshelves aside from the one facing the back yard. There, there was a door to a balcony above the sloped hillside. I saw, from the ground, Alyson sitting out on that same balcony almost every evening, with a sweater and a book.

  It seemed to me, she liked it here as much as we did. Maybe her level of comfort was the measure she took for all of us.

  It was more care than I’d ever been shown, aside from what Elliot had shown me.

  Speaking of Elliot, he started classes almost immediately.

  I had asked him what he stood to learn, and he said, “It’s free education. They have classes for things I never thought I would want to try, so why not start now, when it’s free, and I have all the time in the world? I’m taking a pottery class.”

  My memory is split into by Mallorie leaving and closing the door.

  “What brings you to my office today, Sparrow?” Alyson asked me with a smile. She gestured to a comfortable looking blue armchair across from her seat at her desk. I sat.

  “Well,” I said, “I still had a few questions about what you guys know about the Facility, if you don’t mind. And I want to see a list of classes I can sign up for?”

  “Absolutely,” she said, “I can start printing you a copy of the list while we talk.”

  She pulled open her laptop.

  “The first day I came here, you said something about not being the ones who were supposed to pick up the runaways, and I was wondering about that a lot.”

  “Well, especially since the amount of you guys popping out of the ground has increased, Mallorie and I have a theory,” she said, “We think you’re meant to escape as a sort of test. The stories of the escapes are all fairly similar- you ‘wake up’ so to speak, already free. You don’t remember how it happened, but you have some means of survival. In your case, this was the car. A lot of the time, this means is sabotaged at a certain point, pushing you towards civilisation. Often, there’s someone there waiting for you. In your case, you evaded them. Twice.”

 “But why would they do that?” I asked, “What do they have to prove by testing us, if they’re just going to send someone after us anyway?”

  “Oh, those guys weren’t with the Facility,” Alyson said, “We don’t know who they are, but they’re faster than us. They aren’t Facility, but they are in with them. And they pick you guys off like flies.”

  I balked. “They kill us?”

  “No! Not what I meant. I meant they pick you up, snag you, never to be seen again. If you get too much media, like the three you found, or if you fight too hard, we get the chance to make contact. Otherwise, we don’t know where they go.”

  The printer in the corner of the room chugged and I jumped in my seat.

  “Didn’t mean to startle you. It will be done in a minute. It’s listed if you can just jump in with a preexisting class, if they have a space for you, but you can also be tutored one-on-one. They fill up fast, though. We have more than a thousand residents now, you seven brought us just over.”

  She went to the printer and brought me a stack of a few sheets of paper.

  “The class times are here,” she said, pointing, “Or you can find tutoring signup sheets on the bulletin board in the hallway out there.”

  She smiled as I stood to leave, looking over the pages.

  “Hey, Sparrow?” she said. I paused. “Keep an eye on your friends, ok? When you’re from the same facility, it’s good to stick together. You know what you’ve been through. You can talk to each other.”

  I nodded. “Yeah,” I said, “Any reason?”

  She shook her head, red waves swaying. “Not exactly. But your friend James looks distraught most of the time.”

  James always looked distraught when he thought no one was looking, but I told her I’d keep that in mind.

  I looked over the lists when I got back to my room, and started writing out a sort of calendar.

  “Strength training,” I muttered to myself, “Probably good.” I’d found that if I wasn’t careful, I did stupid things like rip the shower curtain off. I had a hole straight through the shoulder of one of my new plaid shirts because I thought it was where my hand was supposed to go through.

  I had put the torn one back on the pile of clothes for free- maybe someone who was good at sewing would pick it up.

  I wondered if there was a sewing class.

  There was a knock at my door.

  “Come in.”

  The door opened fast, slamming back against the wall.

  “Sparrow!” shouted James.

  Remembering what Alyson just told me put me on edge about this outburst.

  “What?” I said, trying to stay calm, but expecting the worst.

  He held out his hands, “Look what I can do!”

  On my desk, my lamp began to rattle. James was still standing four feet away.

  “You can rattle things!” I said, fear fading quickly.

  “No,” he said, “I’m just- gotta focus more-” The rattling ceased as the lamp was lifted off my desk.

  I applauded him.

  “That’s incredible James,” I said, “How did you do that?”

  “Well, it’s an ability, obviously. But I figured it out when someone dropped their plate in the kitchen and I reached out to catch it, but I missed, but I got it anyways!” He panted, and I could now tell that he’d run all the way here. My lamp touched back down. He was straining to make sure it was gentle, I could tell.

  “I’m gonna go show Kat!” he said, sprinting off and slamming my door behind him.

  Maybe Alyson was right to be worried about James. Looking at the fine print on the list in my hands, the only class James was taking was the aviation training. I guess we never talked about interests much, seeing as our time underground didn’t give us much chance for them. But what we had discussed never involved airplanes.

  I guess sometimes the invitation is all you need to start a fire for something.

  I went to a group a few days later that was on the list as a sort of therapy. I asked Mallorie about it and she said it was absolutely a good idea, and stayed pretty small and cozy, and that they just talked. Around the circle was a mix of people. I recognized one of them from the room across the hall from mine.

  I took the seat beside her.

  “You’re Sparrow,” she said. It wasn’t a question. “I’m Vex. You’ll like this.” Again, it wasn’t a question.

  “Vex is a pretty cool name,” I said, for lack of anything else to say. She didn’t leave much room for conversation.

  “Thanks,” she said, “Picked it myself.”

  Someone got up and stood in the center of the circle, and everyone went quiet.

  “Hello everyone,” he said, “I’m Tommy. It’s nice to see familiar faces, it means you liked last week and decided to give me another chance at hosting. Which is great, ‘cause I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  A few people laughed. I was too anxious.

  “You’ll be seeing more of me, though. Emily is moving on to teaching a real class,” he said. A woman behind him waved, and said that she’d miss us.

  “We’re going to start by going in a circle and telling everyone our names. Even if you all probably know each other, I am prone to forget and it will be nice to have a reminder. Your name is all you need, but you can tell us something about yourself if you’d like. Emily?”

  Emily started and they went around the group. When it got to Vex, I was so wrapped up in zoning out and listening, that her voice, so much closer than the rest, startled me.

  I readied myself to answer the question.

  “I’m Vex,” she said, “I’m down with anything, and my room is open 24/7, hit me up.”

  That was vague enough to catch my attention and throw me off my rehearsal of my own answer.

  “Umm,” I said, “I’m Sparrow. I’m new here. And if I start crying, you’ll probably do it too, just a warning.”

  The boy to my left said something about the Assembly before continuing with his name.

  “What did you mean by hit you up?” I whispered to Vex.

  “I meant hit me up,” she said, “I don’t sleep, it gets boring.”

  I wanted to ask more, but the other half of the ring was sparse and they were already back to the beginning.

  “Great!” said Tommy, “We can move on to the activities.”

  The ‘activities,’ it turned out, were strange. We passed a paper butterfly around and told the group an event we wished we could fly away from.

  Though my thoughts immediately went to Dr. 21, I brought up a different memory instead. I wasn’t ready to tell this group something that deep about myself.

  “One of the first really bad experiments they put me through,” I said, “It burned when they stuck it in my arm and it kept burning for almost three weeks.”

  The rest of them nodded. I’m sure they understood the feeling.

  “Sometimes I forget,” said Vex in my ear, “The rest of them like to say something from the past week that they went through. It’s refreshing to talk about the Facility.”

  She was right, though. They did mostly go through current events. Maybe they weren’t ready to talk about the past, yet. Or maybe they already had.

  Walking back to our Hall, Vex told me that she got here just a few months before we did.

  “Me and my old friend Jeremy got out together, but he passed swiftly on after only a day or two out. Bad needles, his whole arm kind of swelled up and then his heart stopped. I was lucky I guess.” She shrugged. “I ran around the countryside for a while before I realized I never had to sleep, never got tired. And then I started doing this-” She held out her hands and they glowed bright red, like someone was holding a bright light below them and it shone through her muscles and bones.

  “Don’t know what their goal was with this one,” she said, “But it got me on TV. And then these guys went to the town where I was in the news. Alyson and Mallorie have been good people to me.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Anyway, I’m literally up all night, so if you ever can’t sleep, just cross the hall. Knock first, though. I use that line about hitting me up in pretty much every class, so sometimes I’ll have company.” She shrugged again, “They give us free condoms and we’re all pretty much sterile anyways. I don’t think STI’s would stick with how well they’ve mastered the healing thing, too. Well, on most of us, anyway.”

  I blushed a bit, but I wasn’t a stranger to that kind of talk. She reminded me of James in a way.

  “Do you want to keep walking?” she asked. We were at our hall. It was nice to know she liked my company.

  “Yeah,” I said, “Talking with you would probably be better therapy than the group would be. For me, at least.”

  “Yeah, I’m like that, too,” she said. We crossed the grass towards the woods. “I like talking to one person way better than I do a whole circle of them.”

  “Why do you go, then?” I asked.

  “I like to listen,” she said, “Plus it’s how I met people when I first got here. And I made it into a habit, now.”

  “I don’t know if I’ll go back,” I said.

  “That’s fine. It won’t bother any of them. What classes are you taking?”

  “I don’t know, yet,” I said, “I wanted to try strength training cause I keep accidentally breaking stuff.”

  “Makes sense. What else can you do?” she asked.

  I tried to think at her that I can also think at her.

  “Oh, that’s weird,” she said, “I thought those might have been my thoughts, but they were in a different voice.”

  “It’s like a cold breeze on your brain, right?” I said.

  She laughed. “That’s one way to put it.”

  “And I can share emotions.”

  “I picked that up during the Assembly,” she said, “Plus it kind of radiated anxiousness in the circle tonight. Even Tommy is usually less awkward than that.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “No, it’s ok. Maybe you can try individual counseling, though,” she said, “Or maybe there’s someone with similar abilities who can give you tips.”

  “I wouldn’t know how to find them,” I said. Our path had wound through the woods until now, where it took a sharp turn to the left and back towards the fields. We passed a shed and broke out into the grass, the sun setting and leaving everything in it’s light basked in orange.

  “The golden hour,” said Vex. “It seems like daylight doesn’t mean anything to me anymore.”

  “It can,” I said, “If you give it something that sets it apart.”

  “I mean, people set it apart,” she said, “Night is pretty lonely. I like to think if Jeremy made it, at least I’d have some company, but as is, almost everyone goes to bed at some point. I have hours to myself. It’s only been maybe three months and I’m already so bored of it.”

  “What about a hobby?” I asked, “My friend Elliot is taking pottery. I bet there are all kinds of things like that.”

  She giggled and the sound startled me. So far, I’d heard several different kinds of laugh from her, and none of them suited her face.

  “I’ve kind of made sex my hobby, hon,” she said. “There’s a lot of trauma in these bones, it’s not easy to settle down and do something like ‘pottery.’”

  “Well,” I said, “What classes do you take, then?”

  “I’m in self defense,” she said, “Mostly because they let you punch stuff. Though I didn’t get the strength thing that was so popular in so many other of their injections, I still like punching stuff. And, I like to be able to defend myself.”

  “I already have a weird amount of trust in you,” I said, “So can I ask a question? Like a personal one, but about advice, about like, something pretty deep and stuff?” In my nervousness I continued to overexplain.

  “Dude, it’s ok, just ask,” she said.

  “Well, something… something real shit happened to me back at my Facility, and I don’t think I’m over it yet. But I’ve never really- this is harder to say than I thought.”

  “Ok, do you want me to guess?” Vex asked, “Because there are only a few things you’re liable to ask for my advice about.”

  “Yes please,” I said. I tried to laugh, but couldn’t manage.

  “Ok, my guess is you have some truama back in the facility, and you’re wondering if I did too, and how I got over it and now have sex all the time?” she said.

  She hit the nail on the head. “Yeah,” I said.

  “It’s a story with a lot of us,” she said, “And yes, I’m one of them. Don’t worry too hard. Everyone copes different. I tell myself, this is my choice, now. I can do what I want with myself, and no one who I say no to can ever touch me again. I turn them away at the door if they look too much like my abusers, and no one ever complains. Because it’s my invitation, and I can take it away.”

  I nodded.    

  “Plus,” she said, “It feels good, and I can’t say no to myself. That’s another reason I take self defence. If I sat on my ass, I’d gain weight.”

  Vex looked strong, but soft. I wondered what it would be like to hold her, and quickly caught the thought in its tracks.

  “No, it’s ok, keep going,” she said, “I’d like to think I’m healing your trauma on the spot.”

  I would have collapsed on my face if my knees hadn’t locked into a standing position.

  “It’s ok, hon,” she said, “I won’t hold it against you. But you should really look for someone who can help train you with that.”

  Vex saw that I wasn’t going to be able to say much more, and excused herself to climb the hill to our hall. “I’ll see you around, though, my dude,” she said, waving goodbye as she climbed into the rays of the setting sun.

  I turned back into the woods. I needed the chance to cool down.

  It was dark by the time I wandered back to my hall. I wondered if Vex could hear my thoughts through the door as I looked at it and considered what could be happening beyond.

  It was nice to relax in my room. Something about the day had my mind set in an odd place, a place where I still lived in my dorm and would have to go back there at the end of the night.

  I took the time to pick the list of classes back up and finish picking them. I’d left it soon after James interrupted the other night, and I hadn’t had the motivation to try again since.

  I kept the strength training, and also chose a history class. I was liking my book about the French, but I would like it more if I had things surrounding it explained to me, and if I had a few chances to ask questions. There was a computer course, which I would like to try. I still hadn’t given up on the thought of starting a blog, just like in that book I’d once loved. I was sad to find the library here didn’t have a copy of the series. I told myself I would look on the tutor board in the morning to see about making my thoughts behave.

  That night as I slept, someone else’s thoughts kept bleeding in, and they were filled with the Facility, and the torture of leaving anyone behind. In my sleep, I couldn’t recognize the voice.

  When I woke, I still couldn’t, but I could bet it was Kat. Her room was close enough.

  I opened my door, and there was Vex, hand lifted to knock.

  “Hey,” she said, “Your thoughts were busy last night and I figured you’d be awake so I could see if you’re ok.”

  “They weren’t mine, actually,” I said, “I think they were my dorm-mate Kat’s. But thank you for coming to worry about me.”

  “They might have been Kat’s, but there were also some of yours,” she said, “You’re not great at controlling them in your sleep, and I figured now that we’ve talked, it would be a-ok for me to say something.”

  “Oh,” I said. I didn’t know.

  “I figured you didn’t,” she said, “But you were going to go talk to your friend, so I won’t interrupt.”

  “No, I don’t mind,” I said. I kind of liked that she worried about me.

  She shrugged, “Don’t mention it. You’re a good egg, I wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to you because no one bothered to say anything.”

  I had never been called a good egg before. Vex smiled, and went off for breakfast.

  I knocked on Kat’s door, and she opened it, half-dressed.

  “Did you have a good sleep?” I asked her, after I had entered and closed the door.

  “No,” she said, “You heard it didn’t you? James gets them almost every night.”

  James was right next door to Kat, on the opposite side.

  “Yeah,” I said, “I heard it.”

  “I’m pretty good at keeping them reigned in when I’m awake, but when I’m asleep, I guess not,” she shrugged. She was now wearing one of the blouses from Promised Land and a pair of jeans. “The dude across the hall was flirting with me after he found out it was me, but I could tell he was worried if I was OK.”

  Of course he was flirting with Kat. Now that she’d been here a little while, she’d gotten some makeup and went all out with it every day. She was easily the prettiest one here, as most of them didn’t try all that hard all the time. The assembly was an exception, and not the rule.

  “And did that flirting go anywhere?” I asked.

  “Nah,” she said, “Except to go pick me up a muffin. It’s weird, I’ve been super good at getting people to do things for me, lately? Like, usually I’ll ask, but now people actually answer.”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “Like, maybe it’s an ability,” she shrugged, “It’s not so hard to buy. I mean, James got telekinesis, and you got that feelings thing. Maybe I’m just disarmingly charming.” She grinned.

  “Walk to breakfast with me?” I asked.

  We knocked on James’ door on the way by, but he was already out.

  “He’s been adamant on studying every day,” Kat told me. “The first day, he signed up for aviation, and for aviation tutoring, too. All day every day, he’s out there, during class time and not. I’m a little worried about him.”

  I remembered what Vex said about everyone coping different.

  “Maybe he just wants to do something that doesn’t remind him about the Facility at all. Even if that means avoiding us,” I said.

  “Yeah, maybe,” she said, “But I still kind of miss him, you know?”

  “Have you seen a lot of Elliot?” I said. It felt like he was avoiding us, too.

  “No,” she said, “But I see him around. He says hi, and babbles on about a million different things before bounding away on those long legs of his. He and James still spend a lot of time together, though. All of James’ free time, actually.”

  “Maybe he’s trying not to remember, too,” I said, “We went through a lot, you can’t blame either of them.”

  “I’m glad they have each other at least,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said, “Me too.”

  Though they had to serve breakfast everyday, they somehow made it interesting. Yesterday, waffles. Today, eggs, with sausage and bacon.

  Elliot joined us at the table, his plate piled high with mostly bacon.

  “Speak of the devil,” said Kat, “Where’ve you been?”

  “Around,” he said, “Where do you think they get the money for all this?”

  “For breakfast?” asked Kat. Growing up in the facility, we got used to mass produced breakfasts.

  “What would this cost, actually?” I asked.

  “A shit ton,” he said.

  Kat shrugged. “You could probably ask Alyson or Mallorie where the money comes from.”

  “That’s the thing, I did. And all they would tell me is that they can’t tell me their name because that would put them in danger, and they would stop paying for anything. But, during my tour back when we got here, Mallorie said they were very personally invested in righting the wrongs the facility has done.”

  “Ok?” said Kat.

  “Well, I bet it’s someone on the inside,” he said, “Who feels bad for what they’re doing, but can’t back out of it.”

  We considered this.

  “I don’t know who,” I said, “The doctors aren’t that rich, otherwise why would they work somewhere so horrible?”

  “Maybe they like it,” said Kat, a scowl on her face.

  “That could be,” said Elliot, “But someone who liked it wouldn't pay to reverse it, so unless there’s some other scenario, I don’t think it would be a Doctor, either.”

  “Again,” I said, “I don’t know who. Maybe it’s just someone who found out about it and decided they didn’t want any news stations to catch on that they were helping us. Someone famous who’s really kindhearted and doesn’t want the recognition.”

  “Plus this place it really secret,” said Kat, “If it was someone famous, it would be better for everyone if no one knew about it.”

  “I still don’t know,” said Elliot. He had finished his breakfast and hopped up to throw his dishes into one of the dish carts.

  “That was weird,” I said, because Kat was right, he did seem to be in and out of conversation with us, like he was avoiding us.

  “I’m gonna go ask him,” said Kat. She jumped up, tossed her dishes into the cart, and chased Elliot down.

  I set my dishes away more gently, and followed them both.

  “No,” said Elliot, when I joined them, “Why would I be avoiding you?”

  “It just seems like it,” she said, “And because James is learning how to fly a damn plane every second, it definitely feels like he is, too.”

  “I think it’s because we went through a lot together, at least in James’ case. You guys were stuck with the same people your whole life, it’s ok for James to want space from that.”

  Kat deflated. “I guess,” she said, “But I miss him.”

  I was tapped on the lower back and startled.

  “Hey Zoe!” said Elliot, “What’s up!”

  I turned.

  “I just wanted to show you guys my new power!” she said. She ran back inside and we looked at each other, wondering if we should follow.

  She came back, only minutes later, with a bottle of orange juice. She took the cap off, looking around at us with one eyebrow raised. She held it out in the middle of our circle with both hands clasped around it.

  “Abracadabra!” she said, and the juice began to steam and burst into bubbles. It boiled over the edges and she quickly dropped it. “Ow!”

  Hot juice splashed on all three of us and we jumped back.

  “Ooh, wow Zoe,” said Kat, holding the front of her shirt off her skin, “You can boil stuff, that’s cool. Maybe be careful not to burn yourself?”

  “Yeah, I’ll set it down next time. But it’s not just boil! I can microwave anything! I learned it in general studies when they were doing abilities testing,” Zoe said.

  “How exactly do they test for abilities?” asked Elliot.

  Zoe shrugged. “They told us to focus real hard on the item in front of us, and my desk started to boil the paint right off it.”

  “Did anyone else find powers that way?” I asked. I didn’t think about someone’s powers going undiscovered.

  “I don’t know, they just had to put the fire out on my desk. I’m gonna go back to breakfast now, bye!” She zipped off, leaving us with more questions than we had before.

  “I wonder how Adam is doing,” I asked, the three of us walking across the lawn to the sleeping halls.

  “I saw him walking to class the other day,” said Elliot, “I think he’s recovered from blowing up. Amber said he got a full medical evaluation and some steroids to boost his healing ability.”

  “That’s crazy,” I said. I guess I never considered they would know more than we did about our abilities. If it was like Vex said, though, the healing thing is pretty common.

  Speaking of Vex, I saw her leaving our building and heading up the hill. I excused myself and ran over to follow.

  “I had a question,” I said.

  “Shoot,” she said.

  “When you said you hear my thoughts in my sleep a lot- what do they say?” I asked.

  “It’s usually names, the two who came with you, or a bunch I don’t know. Cleo is common. Timothy, Knox, Pell- or Pal?”

  “Pell,” I said, “She didn’t like Penelope. She was a dorm mate of mine.”

  “I figured it was something like that. You also say ‘no’ a lot. I don’t know, they just remind me of my own thoughts. I don’t doubt my dreams would be the same- if I slept.”

  “I didn’t think of that. You’re probably better off, though.” I woke up with nightmares more often than I did naturally.

  “Maybe,” she said, “Daydreams are still bad enough.”

  I remembered what she said about her friend who died of infection after they escaped.

  “Have you heard Mallorie and Alyson’s theory about all of the runaways?” I asked.

  “That it was on purpose? I think it’s bullshit.”

  This surprised me. “Why?” I asked.

  “You think they went to all the trouble of getting us like, well, like this if they were going to let us go and, oh, maybe the person who’s supposed to will pick them up in time?” she said, getting loud.

  “I guess,” I said, “But out of all the people in my Facility, no one else got powers. No one who stayed, anyway. I mean, a few years ago a group disappeared, but according to Elliot, they got out, too. And burned down a town, while they were at it.”

  She looked sideways at me. “A town out in Kansas?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know where we were. Very flat. Lots of corn.”

  “You should come with me,” she said.
 I followed her into one of the first classroom buildings, all the way up the gravel drive, and almost covered by trees they planted when they built it. It was easily one of the oldest buildings here, besides the house.

  She pushed open the doors and led me into a classroom full of chemistry equipment. There, a man stood alone, his wild black hair sticking straight up except where it was pinned down by his safety goggles.

  “Geo, can I have you a minute?” asked Vex.

  After a few seconds, he put away the beaker he was holding, neatly tucking it into its place beside a few others, the milky grey liquid within them slightly steaming. I wanted to know what was in them, but was far more interested in whatever Vex was implying by taking me here to meet this guy.

  “Yeah, hey, Vex. What’s up?” he said. He removed his safety goggles to reveal eyes without whites, just a solid blackness from one edge to the other. It startled me, and I lost the ability to speak for a few seconds.

  “This is Sparrow,” she said, “She and a few others just came in a few weeks ago, and I think she’s from the same Facility as you.”

  “Rad!” he said. He approached us and held out a hand. “I’m Geo.”

  I shook it. “I’m Sparrow,” I said, “Like she said.”

  “Rad again!” he said. He ruffled his hair with one hand. “Those will be fine sitting there if I lock up when we leave, if you wanted to walk and talk?”

  I didn’t know what we had to talk about, but I agreed, and we headed outside.

  “I got out when I was eighteen,” he said, “About the same age as you, then. We were the oldest four back then. What dorm were you in?”

  “225,” I said, “My friend Kat was there with me and James was in 105.”

  “I was in 195,” he said, “They were pretty cool there. There were some bad doctors, some good who helped take care of us.”

  I wondered if what Elliot said was true about them burning the town down.

 “It was,” he said, answering my thoughts, “We were young, and we were angry. Me, Jennifer, Ashley, and Ken.”

  “Are the rest of them here, too?” I asked.

  He shook his head.

  “They got caught in the crossfire,” he said, tapping his temple. “I didn’t know how to stop it.”

  He sounded so sad about it, even eight years later.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  I quickly got used to his darkened eyes. It was interesting to get such a different view on the place I had lived my whole life. We talked about things that had changed, and things that hadn’t, wandering all the way around the classroom buildings and back. Vex still leaned on the glass doors, waiting for us to return.

  “I’m super cool, right?” she said as I bid Geo goodbye and we walked back to the heart of the rehabilitation center. “We’re totally friends now?”

  It was cool to have the choice.

  “We’re totally friends now,” I said. She held a thumbs up in front of us in response.

  That night, I had my first strength training class.

  Awkward, I got there early, and stood out in the hallway.

  “Hey!” said a friendly looking woman, coming down the hallway towards me.

  “Can you tell me if I’m in the right place?” I asked. “I’m here for the Strength training.”

  “I hope so,” she said, “Cause I’m the teacher.”

  “Oh!” I said. She looked too pencil-thin to be strong, but I guess the same could be said of Kat, and she’d been having trouble not breaking things, too. When I told her about the class, she stubbornly refused, saying she’d learn it herself, and what could a teacher possibly show her that she couldn’t figure out on her own?

  The woman unlocked the door and turned on the lights.

  “Do you want to help me hang the punching bags?” she said.

  The poor things were battered and full of hastily patched holes. The ropes to hang them were tied back together in several places.

  She laid out mats while I took a step stool around to several hooks around the room to hang the bags.

  “Nice,” she said. She also seemed to have watched me. “You know those things are full of sand, right?”

  “Yeah?” I asked. It certainly felt like sand, anyway.

  “They weigh a lot and you didn’t struggle at all,” she said. “You hung them with one hand, even.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” I said.

  “Are you one of the new kids?” she said.

  I nodded.

  “They get better and better at making those serums,” she said, an incredulous smile spreading across her face, “When are they gonna say ‘it’s done,’ and just sell them already?”

  I didn’t think of that.

  A group of others joined us, and we stopped discussing it. I got the feeling more and more that talking about the Facility in front of people you didn’t know well was just something you didn’t do. Someone overheard Kat and I talking just a few days after we got here and she started crying. Kat said it couldn’t have been because of us, but we were talking about some of the tougher aspects of the Facility, and how much different this place was.

  I don’t think everyone dealt as well as we’re seeming to with the memories.

  “All right,” she said, clapping her hands. “Looking around we’ll have just enough mats, so go ahead and find one in a color you like and we’ll start.”

  There was a mild shuffle, but I just went to the one closest to me. It was brown.

  “We’re gonna start with some stretching,” she said, and we followed her lead, bending and twisting all kinds of ways.

  “Because there are only five punching bags, we’re going to have to take turns, which is fine by me.”

  She pointed to her first five. I was not included.

  “Ok, you guys. Remember the focusing techniques I told you. Breathe before you start, and after you finish, and stop your hand just before you make contact. I wanna see swinging and not hear a sound.”

  Right off the bat, three of them got it wrong, and one of the punching bags swung high and hit the ceiling. The lighting rattled.

  “Nice effort!” The teacher said, “Poor execution. Make sure to put all your focus on the hand going forward. Keep your form loose,” she demonstrated, “but controlled. Stop just short of the bag. If you can’t focus going quickly, try one punch at a time.”

  They tried again, and did much better, though a few still connected. After a few minutes of practice, she dismissed the five to their mats where they could stretch back out. I was one of the next five she called.

  From the distance, I figured it would be easy, but up next to the punching bag, and thinking of how light they seemed to me, I was more concerned.

  “I’m sure you heard me talking to those before you, but as a refresher, take it slow, keep your focus on the hand that’s swinging, and stay loose, but controlled.”

  The other four started, but I just stared. I remembered Kimberly’s bathroom door and I froze up.

  The teacher appeared behind me. “It’s all right,” she said, “Just try one at a time.”

  I held up a hand, swung slowly at the bag, and only brushed it with my knuckles.

  “Good! Now the same thing, but a little faster.”

  I did it again. The bag swayed.

  “Try again.”

  I did. It held still.

  “And again?”

  I swung, and swung. I picked up speed until, with a great crash, I didn’t stop in time, and the bag ripped off its hook and slammed into the far wall, sand skittering across the floor.

  The class was silent.

  “That’s all right,” the teacher said after a second, “It’s happened before. Just, usually when we’re actually meaning to fight the bags.”

  I slinked back to my mat and didn’t say anything else until class was over.

  I got up before everyone else and tried to escape the classroom once the teacher said we were done.

  “Hey wait,” she said, holding out a hand. A few of us stopped, but she singled me out.

  “Stay here just a second.”

  Once the rest of the class left, she held out a hand. “Thanks for your help setting up,” she said, “I’m Max.”

  “I’m Sparrow,” I said, “I’m sorry about your bag.”

  “Nah,” she said, “If you can’t tell by looking at them, they all get pretty beat up. I was just wanting to ask you if you’d be interested in a tutoring slot with me? The class is more for those who want to focus their skills… You seem more like you need some desperate help controlling them.”

  I deflated. “Yeah,” I said, “It’s true.”

  “And that’s ok,” she said. She put a hand on my shoulder, “I’m free just before my usual class time if you’d like? Come in an hour early next week and we’ll see what we can do with you.”

  The smile in her eyes was the only thing that kept me from feeling embarrassed.

  “That sounds good,” I said, “Thank you.”

  “No problem,” she said, “I look forward to it.”

  It was dark as I walked back to my room. I paused at the door, though, and turned to knock on Vex’s door instead.

  “Come in!” she called through.

  I did.

  She’d only been here a little longer than we had, and her room still looked vastly different.

  Illustrations, Magazine clippings, and blocks of text plastered large chunks of the wall, and she cut a paragraph from a book as I watched.

  “Do you like it?” she asked. I wondered if she got the books from the library.

  “No,” she replied, “I ask Alyson to get me junk books and magazines and shit from thrift stores when she goes out. I read them, of course, and keep what I think is interesting. Do you want to help?”

  I for sure wanted to help.

  “Just do me a favor and explain why you pick what you do, so I know why I’m gluing them up. I may be bored out of my mind, but I’m not doing this for no reason.”

  With this in mind, I sat on the floor next to her and looked at the glued imagery next to me. A plastic kettle, a broccoli man, a sketched drawing of a flower, the sentence ‘we call that pineapple rain.’

  “If I asked, would you explain any of-”

  “Nope.”

  That’s ok. I liked imagining better, anyway.

  Vex handed me a book and a box cutter. She had a bowl of white water in front of her that she dipped the paragraph in her hand in before sticking it to the pale purple of her wall. I read it while it was still wet.

  ‘I didn’t say much more to him after that. Everything we said felt stale, like we’d reopened it past the use-by date. It wasn’t like I wanted to let him go, but everything in me was bored of him. I couldn’t let him lie there in my bed, waiting for the day I had the motivation to throw him away.’

  “Ouch,” I said, of the paragraph.

  “Sometimes it just be that way,” she said in reply.

  I looked at the book in my hand. It was a non-fiction title on wolves. I didn’t know how much I would be able to find. What would I want to keep pasted on her wall? What would stand out to me that much in a documentary book about wolves.

  In some of the first pictures, I just saw the wolves. I thought about cutting them out, but thought that would just be giving in to the obviousness of it. And how would I explain to Vex why I picked the wolf? My only excuse would be that it was the only thing in there, and, not knowing Vex’s motivation for any of her choices, I didn’t know if that would pass.

  Then, I saw what was around them. They were climbing, eating, fighting, and there were plants, and rocks, and animals around them.

  A dead deer, guts spilled in the snow.

  I readied my knife.

  As careful as I was being, it took a great deal of time to remove the deer. I held it out to her.

  “And your explanation?”

  “I guess, I know how it feels?” I said.

  “Say it surer than that, like an artist who knows they’re right because it’s their art they’re talking about god damn it!” She puffed out her chest.

  I smiled and puffed out my chest in imitation. “I chose this because it reminds me of my childhood, and how it feels to have every bit of you on gruesome, painful display,” I said, with confidence.

  “Incredible,” she said. With a reverence in her face I was sure I didn’t deserve, she pasted the deer up to the left of a drawing of a lantern and three copies of the word ‘down,’ in different fonts.

  She then took what she was cutting out of the same book in her hand and pasted that up above the deer.

  “This author is poetic in a way I really admire,” she said, “I’m almost certain she wouldn’t mind me cutting up her book to use it this way.”

  Looking at the book in her hands, I could tell it was far from the second chunk she’d cut out. Almost every other page before the one she was on was full of holes, and pieces dangled loosely out.

  “You’re probably right,” I said, reading what she glued above my gory deer.

  ‘“You’re different,” my mother said to me, as if I wasn’t the queen of my own domain. As if I didn’t see every crack in my facade, and every perspective I appeared in. As if it mattered to me how different they thought I seemed when brick became cracked became dust. All that was different was how likely they were to notice my changes, when the changes were exactly as they’d always been.’

  I wished I’d been able to read the book whole, but these pieces left enough of a taste in my mouth that I knew why Vex liked to put them here.

  “Add more,” she said.

  I turned back to my book, looking at the words instead of the pictures.

  I cut a phrase free.

  I handed it to Vex, and she read it aloud.

  “The lore serves them well, dripping moonlight in their fur, and ancient magic in their howls. There is certainly a wonder here.”

  She nodded, and needed no explanation. She dipped it in the paste and put it next to an image of a swampy puddle.

  I worked for so long, putting up images and phrases from books and magazines, that I hardly noticed how tired I was.

  “I’ve had fun,” I told Vex.

  “But you have to sleep,” she said, “I know. I’ll see you tomorrow?”

  I stood on creaking legs. I hardly moved for the hours we worked.

  “Yeah, tomorrow,” I said. I thought about the nightmares I had to look forward to, and braved a pause.

  “Can I maybe come see you if-”

  “Yes,” she said, “If you have a nightmare? Yes.”

  I smiled at her.

  “Sorry for interrupting you,” she said, “It’s just when you’ve already thought something at me, and then start to ask it again, it’s hard to keep my mouth shut. You can absolutely come visit me if you’ve had a nightmare. I’ll even cuddle you, if that’s something you want. Or we can go take a walk, or talk, get a snack, whatever.”

  I nodded. Cuddling her might very well be something I wanted.

  I crossed the hall, undressed, and crawled into bed.

  I dreamed of swaying trees with arms for leaves, waving goodbye. Open doors, passing through them to more open doors, more people watching me each time. A gunshot through a window, and sitting at a table, unable to stop the chaos I could see outside.

  Only hours later, I did end up crossing the hall to Vex’s room. She still sat where she was when I left her, a handful more phrases and pictures spreading out from the already large blot.

  “I could hear them,” she said, “So you don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

  “What did you hear, exactly?” I asked.

  “You said goodbye, and no, and stop. You asked why they wouldn’t let you move,” she said, “Nothing exact, but I got the idea.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I didn’t exactly want to say much more.

  “Do you want to help again?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “That’s fine,” she said.

  I sat on her bed and watched her, and as I watched, she started to explain.

  “I wanted to add this giant bean because I like the color. It’s almost red enough to look like an actual kidney, and that’s kind of cool. Plus it has the potential inside it to grow hundreds more beans and like? That’s crazy.”

  I didn’t say anything, but I hoped she could tell I was listening.

  “I also found this-” she held up the picture she was cutting of a pair of baby’s socks, “interesting for a lot of the same reasons. 1. Color. 2. Almost looks like something else, in this case, small chunky boomerangs. 3. There’s huge potential in these socks. The way I see it, babies don’t wear out their socks. These socks could be handed down to hundreds of other babies and not wear out at all, and they grow out of them in like a month so they would only be a few years old and already have lived so many lives.”

  I wondered if this was how her mind thought about everything.

  “Sometimes I wonder, too,” she said, “It’s like half the time I’m making it up as I go along, but it fits so fluidly together, I wonder if I’m actually just like this, and I have to unlock it by saying it out loud before I think.”

  I liked how quickly she heard my thoughts. It’s like she was listening more intently for them.

  “Maybe I am,” she said. She smiled, and whatever was left of my nightmares melted away.

  After she glued the baby socks, she got to her feet and stretched.

  “Do you want to wander?” she asked.

  I definitely wanted to wander.

  We went the long way down the hall, and Vex stopped at the medicine cupboard for a bandaid. She signed it out and stuck it to her finger. She also checked for condoms and sighed when the box was empty.

  “I used the last of them a few nights ago. Tempted to try the other halls later,” she said, “Shall we walk?”

  I didn’t want to tell her I would have liked staying in her room more. Maybe I would even have accepted her offer to cuddle.

  She didn’t seem to hear this thought, and we exited into the cold evening air.

  In the thin pants and T-Shirt I threw on when I woke, I started to shiver.

  “Here, we can hurry over to the supply cabins,” she said. She put an arm over my shoulder and padded through the grass.

  I was glad when we made it to our destination.

  This was a warehouse I hadn’t been in before. A guy sat half-asleep in an office chair just inside the door, and had us sign in before we could walk around.

  “Alyson leaves a box here for me,” she said, “If she finds cheap books.”

  “Does she know what you do with them?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she said, “I definitely showed her.”

  We walked past shelves of items from floor to high ceiling. There were mostly lots of boxes, but some furniture, too. At the back, there was a fridge.

  “Alyson and Mallorie say that as long as we don’t take it out of the rehab center, we’re allowed to take what we want from the warehouse, within reason,” Vex said.

  “So, what are we here for today?” I asked. It was still chilly in there, and reminded me a lot of the Facility’s examination rooms, besides the shelves of supplies.

  “I don’t know,” she said, “What do you think?”

  I looked around at the room and wondered if they had paint.

  “That’s a good question,” Vex said.

  “When I came I told them I wanted my room the color of the sky,” I said.

  “Which one?” said Vex.

  I didn’t understand.

  “Which color of the sky? The deep blue of winter, or the pale blue of summer? The black of night, or the golden sunrise, or the red and pink and purple at the end of the day?” she asked.

  “I didn’t think of that,” I said, “I meant the blue, but any of those would be nice. I just wanted it to mean the sky to me.”

  “Go grab one of those wagons over there,” she said, pointing. “And meet me in the back corner.”

  I found her there, organizing buckets of paint and writing numbers down on her arm.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “You have four walls,” she said, “Let’s go paint the sky.”

  Before we wheeled the wagon out of the door, she wrote the numbers on her arm down at the door.

  “They have to be able to keep track of it,” she said, “The daytime guy will log in the numbers when he gets here later.”

  Vex did most of the pulling as we wheeled the wagon across to our hall.

  “First we have to move your furniture to the middle of the room,” she said.

  I pointed out that the shelf by my bed wouldn't move.

  “That’s where you’ll take this and stick it on the edges to protect it from paint.” She handed me blue tape and I got to work being meticulous with it.

  When I looked up from my completed task, Vex had already moved my bed, and dresser, and desk into the middle of the room, covering them with a vast beige tarp.

  She pried open a bucket of blue paint.

  “Which wall do you want to be the blue wall?” she asked.

  “By the window,” I said, “So the light can serve as the sun.”

  Vex made praises about my decision, and went to work opening several other blue buckets, in varying intensities.

  She left for a few seconds while I readied our paint brushes, and returned with a step stool.

  “Let’s get started,” she said.

  We started at the bottom, with the palest blue. As we made our way up, Vex added brighter and brighter blues to our tray. When we reached the top, the sun was starting to rise, and the blue was deep. The ombre was smooth. We high fived.

  “After it dries, we can add clouds,” she said, “If you wanted?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Across from this by the door should be the night sky.”

  “Good,” she said, “and the sunrise by your bed and the sunset by your dresser?”

  “Perfect,” I said, and that was how we did it.

  We only finished the yellow to orange to red before I swayed and tipped from lack of sleep.

  “Come across to my room,” she said, “You can sleep in my bed while your room is deconstructed.”

  She straightened the blankets and fluffed the pillows as I leaned against her wall and watched with bleary eyes.

  “Here you go,” she said, pulling a corner of her comforter up for me to slip under and tuck in.

  She sat on the edge of the bed. I wanted to reach my arms around her and pull her closer, into the blankets, with me.

  “Then do it,” she said, scooting closer.

  It wasn’t exactly the tone I expected, but I had permission. She tucked under the covers next to me, and I slept without nightmares.

  When I woke up, she was reading a book.

  “It’s only about noon,” she said, “Are you sure you don’t want to sleep more? You were up all night.”

  I shook my head. “I’m too hungry.”

  “That’s fair. Me too.”

  I borrowed a hoodie from her and we wandered up to the dining hall.

  It was just after their normal lunch time, but there were still trays of lukewarm mashed potatoes and hamburger patties. I avoided the corn on the cob.

  When we sat down, Amber appeared behind me.

  “Long time no see,” I said, pulling out the chair next to me. Vex sat across from us. There were few other people in the room.

  “How do you like this place,” they asked me.

  “I really like it,” I said. I felt like I answered that question a lot.

  “Me too,” they said, “Zoe and Adam are really happy.”

  “And you?” I asked. It sounded like they were leaving themself out.

  “Sometimes,” they said, “I like the library, and the woods.”

  “But?” I asked.

  “It’s not big enough,” they said, “It’s great, and pretty big, don’t get me wrong, but I’ve seen everything already. I had the rest of the world where anything could happen. It was terrifying, but beautiful.”

  It was the most I’d heard them say at once in the entire time I knew them.

  Vex cleared her throat.

  “It may be finite,” she said, “And it may be small compared to the world, but it’s a good place to heal, and grow up. It’s not like the facility. You can leave whenever you want to. But give it a chance to be the place you live until you’re old enough to take care of yourself.”

  They milled over this.

  “Plus,” I said, “I can guarantee you haven’t seen everything. Are you taking any classes?”

  They shook their head.
 “That’s a good start,” I said, “And when you’re there, don’t be afraid to start a conversation. Channel your inner Zoe and make friends with everyone there. It’ll be worth it.”

  She smiled. “Yeah. Thanks.”

  The talk stayed small after that, and we ate our food slowly.

  Amber left soon after we finished, but Vex and I stayed seated. It was nice not to have to be anywhere.

  “I’m worried about my friend James,” I said, after debating whether to say anything about it.

  “Why?” asked Vex.

  “Ever since we got here, I haven’t talked to him more than maybe twice. He learned he could move things with his mind, and he showed Kat and I, and that was weeks ago. He’s been so busy, just learning to fly those stupid jets.”

  “Has that been something he was interested in?” she asked. She offered to get me another soda and I refused.

  “I don’t think he’s been interested in planes,” I said, “He never said. He was always more of a seductive, keep-his-hands clean kind of personality. Piloting just doesn't seem like him.”

  “You could always ask him,” she said.  She was right. I knew where his room was.

  “I guess I could,” I said. That was always more Kat’s thing, to go out and do the thing you’re kind of scared of.

  “I’ll go with you if you want? We can check his room and then go over to the runway.”

  I looked at the crumpled napkin on my paper plate.

  “Yeah,” I said, “Let’s do that.”

  There was no answer at the door to his room, so we fetched Kat and went out to the tiny airport.

  “And why are we finding James?” Kat asked.

  “Sparrow was worried about him,” Vex said, “so I told her she should ask him what’s up, and that’s what we’re going to do.”

  Kat grabbed my hand. She knew more than Vex did that this was pretty out of character. If she didn’t know how worried I was about James the last time we talked, she did now.

  We found him in the hangar, watching someone repair the engine of one of the jets.

  “Hey, James,” I said.

  He jumped.

  “Oh!” he said. He grinned at us. “Hi!”

  “Is that all you have to say to us?” asked Kat. She wasn’t angry, per se, but she was fired up.

  “Yes?” he said.

  “We haven’t seen you in weeks,” I said.

  “Oh,” he said. The woman in the engine stopped what she was doing.

  She asked if he needed her to pause the instruction.

  “Yeah, I’ll be back in a few minutes, Candace,” he said.

  He walked away and we followed. Vex stayed behind, sitting down on some kind of crate.

  “James,” said Kat, “what’s up?”

  He stopped walking. His toes rested neatly on a painted line on the smooth pavement below. He took a second lining them up, toes on one edge of the paint, heels just shy of the other.

  “James?” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said, “I’ve been avoiding you.”

  “We figured as much!” Kat said, after a shocked pause.

  “But- I just-” He stops talking for long enough, I wondered if he planned on finishing his sentence at all.

  “I just needed to,” he said.

  We were all quiet, and my eyes burned.

  “Why?” I asked.

  He shrugged, and that was all that was said. After watching his back for more than a minute, Kat turned and walked back. I waited longer, looking carefully over James. He slouched more than he used to. The wind gently rustled my now nearly inch-long hair.

  Then, I turned and left him there, with the wind and the runway and the sound of engines and trees.

  It felt- final.

  Vex met me halfway back to the hall.

  “You left me back there,” she said, but it wasn’t teasing. “Are you ok?”

  I let her question hang in the air, and took her hand instead.

  We weren’t invited when James first flew his plane, but it was a bit of an event around the rehabilitation center. It had only been a few months, after all. He had learned to take care of the jets, had disassembled and reassembled the biplane engine, and had passed every virtual test they could throw at him. Even though the rate at which he learned it all was unprecedented, his instructors shrugged and gave him the go ahead to fly.

  Kat and I didn’t exchange a word about it, but we met on the grass a good distance away from the rest of the spectators. From behind us, with a crunch of the brown winter grass, came Elliot. He took a seat in the space between us. We didn’t say anything for a while.

  “Do you guys talk anymore?” Elliot asked us.

  “With each other, yeah. Some,” Kat said.

  “No,” he said, “With James. We spent a lot of time together at first, but he got obsessed.”

  We heard the sound of the engines start up.

  “I hope he finds what he’s looking for up there,” Kat said.

  The sound of the jet zoomed away down the runway and lifted into the air in the distance past the trees.

  We watched as he rose, and dipped, and took a wide turn back to touch back down. The crowd nearby the runway cheered.

  “Well, he did it,” I said. I wanted to go say something, but feared I wouldn’t be welcomed.

  I would be more afraid if I was welcomed, Kat thought at me.

  I wanted to know what she meant.

  I don’t know what I meant. Never mind.

  We went back to our lives.

  Vex was in my room most nights. Since we finished the painted skies, with all the clouds, birds, and stars we wanted to add, she said she liked mine better. I’m not sure how much I believed her, with how much she kept adding to her eclectic wallpaper.

  But all the same, whenever I was awake, she was around.

  I didn’t know I had so much to talk about.

  I told her about my classes, and how well I was getting to know my strength tutor. I showed her how careful I could be while still being strong. I told her about the internet, and how I was planning on writing a blog whenever my computer class got around to showing me enough to know how to do that.

  “I want to write about all of this,” I gestured to the room around us, and she looked worried.

  “You can’t tell them about the rehabilitation center,” she said.

  “No, that’s not what I meant. I want to write about going on a rollercoaster for the first time, and painting my walls with the sky, and how nice it is to be able to turn your own lamp on and off. They don’t have to know why all that stuff is so new to me, but I don’t know. I think it’s like Elliot said, once. How seeing how someone else sees things can make you appreciate them more. You do that with me sometimes, and I guess I want to do it with the people who stumble on my blog.”

  Vex looked at me with an expression I could not place.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Can I kiss you?” she asked, and I startled into a crouch.

  I remained crouching, thoughts racing around so fast I couldn’t hear them more than feel them like my blood, pounding.

  “What are you doing?” she asked. I didn’t lift from my crouch.

  “Yes,” I squeaked.

  She took my shoulders, lifted me back to my height, and pulled my lips to hers.

  It was warm, and it was nice, and it was nothing like I feared it would be.

  I melted.

  It was late. The cold wind of a late night winter storm blowing past us rattled my window panes.

  “Sparrow?” said someone’s voice at my door.

  I didn’t at first recognize the voice.

  “Who is it?” I asked.

  “Can I come in?”

  Oh, it was James.

  I climbed out of bed and wasted no time going to the door.

  James was a sobbing mess, shirt thrown on backwards and boxers instead of shorts.

  “I want to go back,” he said.

  My mind brought flashes of the facility.

  “Back to when-” his voice warbled and cracked, “It was all so nice and bright, and I didn’t think of them every damn minute.”

  “Think of who?” I asked him. I stepped aside to let him in, but he remained in the doorway.

  “Of them!” he said, “The ones we left behind.”

  The pain on his face echoed the hurt in my heart. I hadn’t thought of them in weeks. It hurt too much.

  “James-”

  “No,” he said, “I can’t-” He started to go back to his room.

  “Please.”

  He paused.

  “There are people you can talk to. Or you can talk to us. I know you want to fill up your time with something else, but-”

  “You don’t get it,” he said, “I can’t do that.”

  “Why?” I stepped out into the hallway to follow him, though he hadn’t moved.

  “Because I can’t! I see you, and I see them. I have to go back and set them free,” he said.

  I blanked, unable to think of what to say. He stalked off and his door closed behind him.

  I stayed where I stood until Vex emerged and brought me back to my bed.

  When I woke up, Vex doodling in the margins of a book beside me, I thought the exchange the night before might have been a dream. Since we had gotten comfortable with each other, it wasn’t unusual for me to fall asleep without Vex, and wake up with her.

  “It wasn’t a dream,” she said, “I overheard some of it. Your friend James isn’t getting any better.”

  I tucked into her arms and let myself feel the hurt. Because it damn hurt that my relationship with James, one of my closest friends for years, had deteriorated within weeks of our escape from the Facility. It was like the only thing holding us together was our proximity. Kat, too, had drifted away. She had new, bright, talkative friends, now. They drifted around the grounds like a cloud of Kat energy, every one of them just as vivid as she was.

  I started to cry.

  “Hey,” she said, “Come here.” She pulled me close and her shirt absorbed every tear.

  “I know what he means,” I said, “About missing it. I miss it too, that first week after we ran away.”

  “And that’s ok.” Vex gently pet my head, sifting her fingers through my hair. “You can miss what you had without insulting what you have now.”

  I squeezed her tighter.

  “They’re still down there, Vex,” I said, “They’re still down there.”

  She kissed my forehead.

  “I never forget it,” she said.

  It was four weeks later when everything fell to shit.

  Kat rammed down my door, splitting it in two, and dragged me from my bed. It was just after dawn, and freezing cold, as she told me James needed us.

  She couldn’t explain to me in words what was about to happen, but her thoughts were busy, sending me bits and pieces.

  James is out of it- we just have to convince him- we should have been talking to him- I hope it’s not too late.

  When we got to the runway, James was nowhere in sight. Candace, one of his three instructors, raced up to us.

  “We have him on the radio,” she said, “I should have known when I saw him come in here with that picture of you four.”

  “Should’ve known what?” I asked, as Kat spoke over me, “What picture?”

  “The picture of y'all on the roller coaster,” she said. She rushed us over to the windowed room with the radios and other equipment flashing and beeping. “I should have known something was up when he brought it with him for his flight. He’s been so quiet, I could have said something.”

  “Can someone tell me what’s going on!” I said.

  “He took the plane up, like normal,” said Kat, “but then he just kept going.”

  “She’s filled up with fuel,” Candace said, “It’s been like, three hours. I figured he had already come back and parked, but the jet’s still out.”

  Kat picked up the radio. “James? Come in James.”

  It crackled. “Kat?” he said.

  “James, what the FUCK are you doing!” she shouted.

  “I have to, Kat.”

  I ripped the radio out of Kat’s hand, my own hands shaking. “Have to do what, exactly, James?”

  “Sparrow?”

  “Yes! Please come back.” I got the sinking feeling I knew where he was going, and I didn’t like it.

  “It’s too late, now,” he said, “Even if I wanted to, which I don’t. I have to be free of this.”

  “James!” I said. Kat took the radio back.

  “Please come back!” she said.

  I turned to Candace while Kat continued to shout.

  “Is it-?” I said. Candace didn’t understand. “Does it have missiles?”

  She nodded. “They all have missiles.”

  I heard a shrill squeal from the radio, and turned instead to some of the screens.

  “Is that him?” I asked, pointing to footage of a shining helmet in a cockpit. Another showed cornfields, racing far below the camera, and my fears were concrete, and heavy in my stomach.

  “James!” I said. I stole the radio back. “James, please don’t do this!”

  Kat looked at the monitor, too, and a sharp sob tore free of her throat.

  He didn’t respond any more. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the image of him, flying. He lifts a rectangle from the dash in front of him, and inspects it for a few moments, before setting it down and pulling on the wheel.

  “No!” I screamed.

  It was only a few seconds before he made contact with the ground, and the footage was no more.

  My hair has grown out into a scruffy mess, but I find myself digging in the communal supply closet until I find clippers.

  When they shaved our heads as punishment before, it felt final, like it would never grow back.

  Now, for some reason, I find myself wishing it never did. That there was no indicator that any time had passed. That it never changed, like my brown eyes and tiny ears. I wanted it to stay short, a symbol of where I’d been, and what they’d done.

  Maybe I wanted to shave it to show, proudly, that I was not good at mourning James.

  Kat hadn’t left her room all week, but somehow she still turned up at my side and searched with me.

  “Your freckles are fading,” I told her, after getting a close look at her face.

  “I haven’t been outside,” she said, her voice somewhere between a croak and a whisper. She pointed out a cardboard box above our heads labeled ‘haircutting.’ I hadn’t been focusing enough to spot it before.

  I didn’t have to tell her what I was looking for. She knew. Before even a whole minute had passed, we’d found a mirror and littered the floor below it with short, dark brown fuzzballs of shorn hair.

  While I looked at myself in the mirror, Kat took the buzzers to her own head. I watched in awe. Her hair had gotten shoulder-length from the last time they’d cut it. Now the blonde layer of fuzz was nearly invisible against her scalp.

  “I miss him,” she said into the silence after the buzzer was turned off. She dropped it into the sink and left me to clean up our mess.

  Alyson took the stage like a candle in a dark room. Backed by teachers, instructors, and coworkers in black attire, her red hair hurt the eyes.

  “We’re gathered here today because- well, we all know why. James was only here for a short time, but already we all knew him by name. He was smart, bright-eyed, and you could feel his presence in a room. I’m going to open the stage to those who knew him best,” she said. I felt her eyes on me, sitting in the back of the auditorium on the folded bleachers. I climbed to the top of the collapsed chairs to have some privacy. The lump in my throat far from let me speak. Some of the crowd within my influence felt the pain too. The younger ones cried.

  Kat stood, in a black skirt and knit top, the open front exposing a messy button down in red, James’ favorite color. The buttons were uneven, making one side hang lower than the other.

  “James,” she said, her voice holding none of the confidence it was famous for, “Was my best friend. He was witty, and always flirting with everything that moved, and he loved to tease me in front of the doctors at the facility, even though he got his head shaved more times than I can count.” She paused and looked down at her hands. I could hardly hear what she said next.

  “We should have been talking to him more. We should have checked up on him. He didn’t heal well from the facility.”

  “It’s not your fault,” I shouted before I knew I was doing it. “James pushed us away.”

  She covered her face with her hands and her shoulders shook.

  When she came up for breath, she could only say, “Maybe,” before leaving the stage and falling into her seat.

  I climbed down from the bleachers.

  I could feel the congregation watching me as I went to the front. I hadn’t dressed for the memorial. I didn’t think I was coming until a few minutes before. I wore dark grey and blue jeans instead of black.

  I couldn’t look at the crowd. I wasn’t up there for them, or even for Kat. I was up there for James.

  “I’m up here for James,” I told them, “I wish I could have been when he was still here to see me, but I guess that’s how things go.”

  I looked down at my hands for an uncomfortable amount of time.

  “James was amazing,” I said, “He took care of us. He might have been wild at times, but when it always came down to it, he held us together. Once we came here, we didn’t stay together. He didn’t have anyone to take care of. He thought he could fix it by worrying about the ones we left behind. If he could take care of them, maybe things would be back in control.” I took a few deep breaths that quickly developed into sobs. Mallorie came up beside me and held out a hand.

  I took it. It was warm. I wish Vex was here. She told me she couldn’t. Memorials- Vex couldn’t handle memorials.

  “I’m going to miss him,” I said, voice now heavy with the burden of tears. “So much, I mean, I already have, but I know it’s going to get worse. James thought he was doing the right thing, trying to go back and free them. Maybe it would have worked if he had asked for help, gotten together a group or something, but he didn’t. So I guess that’s what I’m here to say. Most of you didn’t know James. Or me, for that matter. But if you’re trying to do something that’s too big to do on your own, or that you know is dangerous, remember that if it’s risking your life- the one who’s free, the one who got out safely- it’s not the right thing to do. They’re working so hard to free more, and I’m sorry there are more in the facilities. I don’t know how to say what I want to say.”

  “Don’t do it,” said Kat, from her seat.

  “Don’t do it,” I repeated. “Ask for help when you need it, please.”

 Amber stood up from her seat and quickly left the auditorium. Elliot was nowhere to be seen.

  The crowd scattered after a few words from Alyson and Mallory, and I was left alone in the empty auditorium. It was over now. James would only be mentioned in passing, now. He was gone, and there were no other reasons to gather for him.

  Vex found me there a while later, and we went back to my room.

  I slept.

Characters:

Sparrow

Summary: Sadboi hours, angsty, wants to be free, full of love, lives for the aesthetic, my main character, dark shaved head, brown eyes, gender fluid

Dorm 225

Healing, Strength, Emotional Control, Directed Thoughts

Katrina

Summary: Straightforward, drama, call her Kat but never Kitty, sass up to here, shoulder length blonde hair, green eyes

Dorm 225

Healing, Strength, Superhuman Charm, Directed Thoughts

James

Summary: Terminal slut, lives for sarcasm, a million and one dumb things to say, smartass, trying his best to keep the mood, blonde curls, dark skin, hazel eyes, favorite color red.

Dorm 105

Healing, Strength, Telekinesis, Directed Thoughts

Elliot

Summary: Soft child, trusting, loves animals, instant loyalty just add water, doesn’t know what he’s getting himself into, wow would you look at that, severe ADD, 100% genuine, dark curls, beige skin, brown eyes, lots of pets: Dog Patricia, Ball python angel, Tarantula Theresa, and five frogs.

Kimberly

Elliot’s mom, white, dark curls, Sweet, upper middle class, advertiser, builds tiny villages in her spare time, made a mistake- calling the police when she thought Elliot murdered someone, regrets it.

Elliot’s Dad

Brazilian, calls Elliot Idielliot

Amber

Sweet and Anxious, Neon Green Eyes, Gentle, Wide-eyed, Beautifully honest, agender, they/them pronouns, long dark hair

Healing, Teleportation

Zoe

Innocent child, chatterbox, trusting, if you hurt an animal she will teach you a lesson you won’t forget, purple eyes, shaved head, brown hair

Healing, Sees heat, microwave powers

Adam

Hot head, protective, Red Eyes, Loyal, curses like a sailor, sandy hair

Healing, Can Blow Up

Mallorie

Friendly, absentminded, used to work at a Facility, well trimmed brown hair, blue eyes, co-founded the rehabilitation center with Alyson- see below.

Luke

Speaks before thinking, a bit of a know-it-all, doesn’t remember his Facility at all but tries to make up for it by learning as much as he can about the other ones, black hair, dark eyes, olive skinned

Healing, strength, can change his body temperature in large amounts.

Lillian

Sweetheart, likes to be remembered as human first and her powers second, keeps her head shaved as an act of rebellion, blonde hair, blue eyes, bright, won’t talk about her facility- there’s nothing left of it now, and no one knows how it collapsed.

Healing, Can catch wifi and other similar signals, can go unnoticed in plain sight for short periods of time if she’s focusing on it.

Alyson

Redhead, grey eyes, founded the rehabilitation center after she met Mallorie, who used to work for a facility. Asexual. Hot tea drinker. Great listener. Mallorie believes they’re in an unofficial partnership, Alyson would probably agree if Mallorie ever actually said anything to that effect, but as it is, she thinks they’re great friends who will work and live together until they are very old.