Internment(29)

And I need to see David. For no reason. For all the reasons.

I swing my legs over the side of the bottom bunk, making sure not to hit my head as I get up. It’s a lesson I learned the hard way during the first few days here at Mobius. I brush my teeth and scrub my face, being careful not to use too much water. Everything is rationed. There is food and water for everyone, but no extra. The worst is the shower timer. I miss taking long showers and washing and conditioning my hair. We all get five minutes a day. There is no luxuriating. No luxury, period. You can’t even cheat, because the shower turns off automatically. Another valuable first-week-of-internment lesson: Take a shower at night so you don’t feel like you’re sleeping in a sandstorm. The most important lesson I’ve learned, though? Don’t count all the things that existed for you Then that you don’t have Now. Don’t make that list. It will drive you mad.

There’s a knock at the door. I let Ayesha in. We’ve been hanging out, doing our best to escape the claustrophobia of living behind a guarded electric fence—gabbing, taking circuitous walks around the camp, meeting other kids who have nothing to do.

And plotting how the hell we can get out of this place. Trying to reach David and get him to help feels both childish and impossible. But there’s no other solution we’ve come up with that doesn’t involve death—or at least the chance of it. We’re starting to realize that maybe it’s a risk we have to be willing to accept if we really want to get out of here and aren’t just pretending at escape. I haven’t shared this with Ayesha yet, but I’m giving myself two more weeks to figure it out. I work best with a deadline.

“Is David swoon-worthy?” Her question totally comes out of left field.

“I’m sure he thinks he is.” I laugh. “But I never tell him that, since I don’t want him to get a big head. And is there anyone you find swoon-worthy? Someone in this camp, perhaps? Someone you’ve been talking to in the dinner line? Someone named Soheil?”

Ayesha grins. “Maybe. He seems to go out of his way to talk to me. And I am definitely encouraging him to do so. He’s cute. He’s smart. He’s funny. But what can flirting be in this place besides an exercise in futility? I mean, it’s not like we’re going to go out on a date and then to prom.”

I grab Ayesha’s hand and squeeze. I’m glad she has a little distraction.

I take a long, deep breath while David’s smiling face fixes itself in my mind. “I miss David. A lot. I know it’s only been a couple of weeks since I last saw him, but it feels like I haven’t seen him in years. It’s this place. It messes with time.”

“I know. And I swear if I hear the Director’s word vomit of Unity, Security, Prosperity again, I’m going to scream. People are so scared of getting tased and disappearing that they’re all keeping quiet. My parents are at the meeting, too, and my little brother is playing soccer with a bunch of kids from this block and a couple of others. Some of the minders are the coaches. It’s fucked up.”

The disappearances started last week. At first I didn’t notice, but there’s been talk. The whisper network, Soheil called it. Someone goes missing, taken in the night or ordered to report to the Hub for questioning for some reason, and that person never comes back. I guess they—the Director, his private security detail, the guards—try to keep their actions quiet. Except when they don’t.

Three days ago, I heard that two guards caught a man leaving the Hub after curfew. Apparently, he’d snuck in and attempted to access a computer. They stopped him as he was trying to get back to his trailer undetected, and he slashed one of them in the arm with a knife he’d stolen from the Mess. When his partner tried to find him, the guards said he was gone. Not taken to a hospital, not in the brig. Gone. That’s all they told him. I saw that man, the partner of the one who’d gone missing. I was walking toward the Hub, and there was a crowd watching him run from guard to guard, frantic, asking questions about his boyfriend—where he was, when he’d return. The guards ignored him for a couple of minutes. Then one of them lost his patience with the man. The guard butted the man in the shoulder with his rifle. The man fell to the ground. The guards handcuffed him and took him away, too. The thing is, he didn’t even fight back. And the rest of us who saw it happen just stood there. Doing nothing. Saying nothing. And then we dispersed. Two men, vanished.

That’s why I have to figure some way to get out of here—to escape. When people lose hope, that’s when the Authority knows they’ve broken you.

“Soheil is in, right?” I ask.

“What?”

“He’ll help us?”

“I don’t know. I think so, but I haven’t asked him directly. We mostly talk about, like, our favorite fandoms and the crappy food here.”

“I saw him arguing with his parents when they were walking out of the Mess last night. His mom tried to shut him down, but I heard him say he wasn’t going to play dead when our rights were being trampled.”

Ayesha whispersings, “‘You say you want a revolution—’”

“What’s up with you and the golden oldies? It’s like an affliction.”

“It’s my parents. They skipped the lullabies and started us with the Beatles, and then worked their way up to Nirvana, which is where their extensive knowledge of music comes to a screeching halt.”