The Rule of One (The Rule of One #1)(59)

“But we can’t—” Mira begins.

“There’s no time for arguing! Repeat the address to me.”

“968 Paramount Point,” I repeat, breathless.

The car shoots out of the field and skids to a stop on the outskirts of town. No obvious surveillance. No sign of people. A perfect refuge.

“Get out, now!”

Mira grabs our bags and throws open the door. I hold back, hesitating.

“Will we see you again?” I ask, my voice catching in my throat.

I don’t want to let her go. Her fervent green eyes—my eyes, Mira’s eyes, our mother’s eyes—tell me, You are not alone. I instantly feel courage rush into my veins.

“Do not wait for me. Run!”

I spring from the car, slam the door shut, and join my sister in a dead sprint—the light of my family burning inside me—toward a crumbling parking garage twenty yards ahead.

We dive behind a pillar just as the car charges back into the pitch-black field. Our grandmother means to face the hunting patrols, Roth, the government—anyone and everything that stands in our way—head-on. She means to openly resist. To rebel.

And so the revival begins.





MIRA

White wind turbines sprout from the grass all around me like giant pale flowers, their three long blades spinning slow and dream-like in the hot air. They must grow for over one hundred thousand acres. I wonder if I can pry off the petals and play my own version of the old French game, “He loves me, he loves me not.”

“Father’s dead, he is not dead.”

“Rayla’s dead, she is not dead.”

“We are dead, we are not dead.”

There are three petals and two phrases. Every game ends the same way it starts.

“Less than four hundred miles to the coordinates,” Ava says in front of me, her eyes on her paper map.

And we’re just going to walk all that way?

I stare unblinking at my right wrist, visualizing the chip fixed inside me, lying dormant.

“Did you memorize them?” Ava says.

I open my fist and find the crinkled piece of paper inside. I take out a lighter from my rucksack and raise the flame to the coordinates. They disappear into ashes.

“How’s your ankle?” Ava says. “Can you keep up without a break?”

My focus returns to the spinning blades, sluggish and apathetic to their purpose outside this peaceful metal garden.

“Why are you so quiet?” Ava says, spoiling the solitude.

“Why do you keep asking the wrong questions?” I stop short, loose rocks sliding underneath my worn soles.

Ava must feel the pause in our small procession north, but she continues to charge forward. She eventually pauses, folds the map into a tiny thick square, places the paper on top of her head, and covers it with her washed-out, patched-over cap.

“After everything Rayla’s told us,” Ava says, turning to me, “how can you still be so against this?” She flaps her arms as she speaks every grating word. “How can you still be doubting?”

She looks like a miniscule wind turbine. Trying to energize the world. Trying to pick up my slack.

“I’m not going to Canada” is all I say. It’s all I need to say.

Ava drops her hands to her hips and slowly scans the land and sky, forming the best way to coerce me into following her. Her eyes finally make their way to me, convinced that she’s right.

“What do you think is left for you here? There are no more safe houses. No more maps telling us where to go.” She lifts her baseball cap and grabs the map, wielding it like a weapon as she takes a step closer. “Except this one, guiding us to our only option.”

I look back down at my microchip, seeing past the faint crisscrossed lines of my sunburnt skin, past my veins, bulging and blue.

“Enlighten me. What is the logic in running around and hiding out like cowards until we get ourselves caught? How will that help Father? Or us?” The wind picks up, slapping Ava’s hair against her cheek. She throws it back impatiently.

“You’re not going to hand yourself over to Roth, or you would have done it at the checkpoint. So tell me, what’s your plan?” She takes another step closer, her hands again emphasizing every word. “Do you even have one? Or are you just acting impulsively? Just being stubborn and stupid?”

I take a step forward. My turn.

“I know I’m not going to get myself shot or blown up by trying to cross an impassable border. And I know I’m not going to chase after some hopeless rebellion that died decades ago.”

Ava opens her mouth to counter, but I cut her off before she can utter a syllable. “Our mother died to keep us hidden. To keep me alive. And I’m not going to throw my life away by being a poster child for a half-assed revival that will only put a bigger target on our faces. And a blood-red bull’s-eye on our father’s.”

I take another belligerent step toward her, but Ava stands her ground, shaking her head and squeezing her map so hard I can hear the paper crack in protest beneath her fingers.

“Do you really think the public will rally behind a former Family Planning Director and his twin daughters?” I press, arms outspread. “They’ll crucify him. There will be riots for his execution. And the mob will come for us next.”