The Rule of One (The Rule of One #1)(25)

My fingers cradle the paper delicately, like I’m handling a relic that requires my greatest caution. There’s something rare and beautiful about the intimacy of the handwritten key in the corner of the map. I run my hand across my father’s small, cramped letters: “Safe houses . . . Danger areas . . . Distance in miles.”

Mira moves in close beside me, and with a light finger—we both can’t resist touching the paper—she traces a thick highlighted route that leads from Dallas to Denver.

I point out the little flags our father drew along the way that symbolize safe houses. People’s names are written below. The first flagged stop is way up in Amarillo: “Arlo Chapman.” The second stop, “Kipling,” is in Dalhart, near the northwest border of Texas.

I use the key to measure the distance with my fingers. “The first safe house is fifteen miles away,” I say.

Mira half listens to me, circling the end of the route with her fingertip. She underlines the name written in bold below the final safe house in Denver: “Rayla.”

“Who the hell are these people?” she asks.

I shake my head and study the map. Logistics flood my mind. Father is leading us out of Texas, through the Panhandle of Oklahoma, and into Colorado. It will take us nearly two weeks to walk there. We don’t have enough supplies. I note the shaded red patches around state lines that Father marked as danger areas, but how are we supposed to elude the Border Guard?

“Ava, a journal,” Mira says, nudging me with her elbow. She holds a thin leather-bound notebook that I must have missed and attempts to scan her fingerprint to unlock its cover. It won’t open.

An infinity symbol is etched on the spine of the journal. Two oblong circles forming one knot, tied together forever.

“It takes two fingerprints to open,” I say. Mira’s and mine.

My heart starts pounding. I place my forefinger next to my sister’s on the lock, and it opens. Mira quickly flips through the pages. All blank. Frustrated, she tries again, this time finding two pages caught together. She peels them apart, revealing a short poem that she reads aloud, her voice slow and captivating.

Resist much, obey little;

Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved;

Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city, of this earth, ever afterward resumes its liberty.

-Walt Whitman

Lost in thought, I take in my father’s last instructions. My eyes glaze over, and I stare at nothing for so long the wall across from me turns into Governor Roth’s face. His mouth splits open into a mocking smile before I can blink away his inescapable ghost.

I turn back to the survival box: a bag of makeup, scissors, a pair of silver bottles. A rush of adrenaline courses through my body. I pick up a bottle and squirt a thick, dark liquid into my palm. Hair dye.

Resist much, obey little.





MIRA

Ava moves behind me and raises the pair of scissors to my hair without ceremony.

We flipped a coin I’d found in a shelving unit by the back door. We had to use our work light to determine that the penny, discolored from decades of corrosion, had landed on the tarnished face of Lincoln.

I chose tails.

Seated on the toilet, I keep my back turned to the mirror above the sink. I don’t bother saying good-bye to the image that has represented me for the last eighteen years. That person was gone the moment a handful of black-eyed Susans scattered across the floor of the greenhouse.

I hear a sharp snip and see a long strand of my red hair fall to the ground beside Ava’s boot. Her pace quick, her hands sure, she repeats her methodical process until I am stripped bare, two pounds lighter, left with nothing to hide behind but my own grit.

“The back is rough, but the cut does its job,” Ava says. She stretches vinyl gloves over her fingers, scoops up a wad of dye, and smothers my scalp with the rotting stench of chemicals.

“We let it sit for fifteen minutes.” She peels off the gloves and pulls down the hood of her jacket.

As I rise, careful not to drip any dye on my freshly changed clothes, I catch Ava glimpse her reflection through the haze of the dusty, cracked mirror. It’s hard for her to let go.

She pops the knuckle of her thumb, trying to hide her anxiety from me, and turns to take her place on the porcelain seat. I watch her closely as she sits, her back straight, chin high, and allow myself a final look at my sister. At my old reflection.

There was a fight for who got to keep more length. Who got to keep a closer semblance of our normal selves and the last traces of our mother’s image. Ava won the coin toss, but now she looks up at me with uneasy green eyes as I hold a flame of her red hair between the two blades and snip. The thick strand falls to the ground, joining my own massive pile that surrounds us like the blaze of a hungry fire.

“It’s all just dead weight,” I tell her.

Soft sunlight pours through the window, creating a bright spot on a steel table in the corner. I lie in its warm glow, my right foot propped up on the bulk of my rucksack, and watch the dust above float aimlessly.

Damn these contacts. I try to blink away the stabbing pain that rips across my corneas, but this only causes tears to flood my eyes and spill down my cheeks like a busted faucet. The combination unbearable, I rub out the sting with my fists until the burn dulls to a mild discomfort and the overflow of tears slows to a drip. I test several quick blinks and open my eyes. I find my hands soaked with black paint and realize I smeared my new makeup. Dammit.