The shortest distance to Sergio’s is of course straight through downtown Culmination. I’ll take my chances. Riding by the lavender field, we come to the fresh food market that borders on downtown—canopy tents with tables lined up along Main Street. These shops are owned and operated by Advisors, like so many other small businesses in town. The main differences between Advisors and Masters are that they can’t vote, they can’t hold political positions, and they can’t own property. Most Advisors run businesses like these, become teachers, or work in the service or hospitality industry.
Riding past the Culmination Justice Building—a structure built to emulate the Parthenon, but constructed entirely of glass—I see Savage Run protesters camped out on the stairs. I recognize several of them—Masters I have delivered medication to at one time or another.
Laborers shadow their Masters, carrying groceries or their Masters’ personal items. Just as we approach Michelangelo Street, we bike past a Master beating her Laborer with a Palka—a short, flexible iron rod commonly used to remind us of our place. Another Master Douglas. I feel the iron against the palms of my hands, but like everyone else passing by, I don’t interfere.
I steer down a dark side alley: our first safe place. I can hear glass breaking beneath my tires, but it’s difficult to avoid. The overhang darkens the whole passageway. We pass an abandoned transporter, and I jump when I think I see a rat scuttling deeper into the darkness. The closer we get to the dumpsters, the stronger the smell of rotten fish and moldy bread becomes, and the harder it is to see even the large pieces of trash in my way.
Gemma’s muffled sobs echo against the gray concrete walls. Once I reach the dumpsters, there’s a narrow ray of light shining from above. I stop the bike and hop off.
“Your hands,” Gemma gasps, climbing off the bike. “And your leg.” I look down and the bottom half of my black pant leg is saturated with blood.
“I’m fine.” I stoop down beside her to look at her wound. The dog bite isn’t too deep; I’ve seen much worse than this one at the hospital. From the looks of it, she probably won’t need stitches. Not that we’d be able to find a doctor for her anyway. “We just need to clean it, or it could become infected. Are you hurt anywhere else?”
She shakes her head as she wipes a tear from her bruised cheek.
“We’ll be fine,” I say with a thin smile.
“No, he’ll kill us.” She buries her face in her hands and moans.
I wrap my arms around her, noticing that she’s a mere ghost compared to before, so thin, so fragile, so weak. When Gemma lived at home with her mother, she was sturdier and wore a constant smile on her face. Her hair was thick and golden, but now it’s thin and matted and her cheeks are sunken—pallid. “The worst is behind us.” But I get a sinking feeling that we’ve only seen the first of many evils.
I open my mouth to tell her what I have planned but words fail me. Gemma has always been the type of person who knows exactly what to say—just like how she knew what to say when we first met.
That day I had been delivering medicine for my father. I was ten, and new to the job. And I didn’t really understand all the crazy long codes or colors or different types of bags. Although my Pharmaceutical Scantron did help a lot. Don’t get me wrong, the training was extremely thorough—a Master would never send out anyone to another Master without it being up to standards. Impossibly high standards. Keeping up with all the biking and never receiving enough food to have the strength when I needed it, I felt like I was falling farther and farther behind. Yet, there was simply no choice other than to keep moving and hope—pray—for the best. If I asked too many questions, I’d receive an angry reprimand from my supervisor. If I, heaven forbid, was late for a delivery and my father heard about it, he’d bring out his Palka the second I walked in the door and use it on me, the iron stick thrashing against my ten-year-old palms. He would deliberately hit the insides of my hands so that no one else would see. “Can’t be looking like that delivering to our superiors, now, can we?”
On the day I met Gemma, I had been working at the hospital for six days. It was in the dead of winter, and the snow was coming down like a solid white curtain. Biking around kept me from freezing to death, but my knuckles and toes were numb. I had just finished dropping off thirty-one deliveries—the most I’d ever had. I returned to the hospital well after dark. The snow was coming down hard, my legs felt like overstretched elastics, and all I wanted was to sink myself into bed and get warm. But just as I was leaving to go home, an emergency delivery came in on my Pharmaceutical Scantron for Mistress Johansen—the chief surgeon’s mother. Of course I couldn’t go home, but I wanted to, oh, I wanted to. Dragging my feet to the pharmacy, my PS stopped working—I think the battery ran out. I told the apothecary I was there to pick up the prescription for Mrs. Johnson. Coincidentally, there was a prescription there for that very person. Since the names were so similar, and I was exhausted and hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast, I didn’t notice that I had pronounced the name wrong.
The apothecary said she knew about the delivery, and she handed me the prescription. I rode all the way to the very uppermost house on Mount Zalo, delivered the medicine, and returned to the hospital with the old lady’s signature. When I came back, there was a different apothecary. He noticed the mistake almost before I had walked through the door, and contacted Mrs. Johansen right away.
Thankfully, she hadn’t taken the drugs yet. Not that it mattered. It would only have knocked her out for the night with no damage done. The apothecary was nice enough about it, letting me off with only a few harsh words.
I hopped on my bike and headed home. But the closer I got to the Laborer sector, the stronger the nervous gnawing feeling grew in my gut. I knew that my father would find out sooner or later, if he hadn’t already. I waited outside the entrance to our sector, tall steel gates guarded by Unifers twenty four seven.
I couldn’t go home because I knew what was in store for me, and I thought it might be better to stay outside and die than to face what was coming. But a Unifer noticed me hiding behind the bush and fired a couple of shots in my direction so I’d come out. He didn’t hit me, but it scared me half to death. Grabbing me by the arm, he escorted me home.
Walking through the narrow mud-packed streets to our trailer, I passed a woman I had never seen. She smiled at me with an encouraging and warm expression before vanishing into a trailer close to ours. Approaching home, I saw my father waiting at the front door, beating the Palka in his hand. He thanked the Unifer and apologized profusely on my behalf for being such a defiant, ignorant child. I still remember watching as the Unifer walked away, and wishing that I could go with him. Instead, I forced myself to walk inside, terror coursing through my veins. Had I just had some strength left in my legs, I would have run away, but my legs didn’t have an ounce of strength left in them.
The physical punishment wasn’t as bad as I imagined, an angry fist in my face and a few dozen Palka lashes in my palms. But there are some punishments that last so much longer than physical pain. With each whip, my father repeated over and over, how all these years, he wanted a boy, but he only had me. A girl who had murdered the love between him, and the woman he loved. Murderer! Murderer! He shouted again and again as the lashes slowly drew out the blood from my palms.
At age ten, I wasn’t mature enough to realize that I didn’t murder my mother. That the circumstances that led up to her being dragged away by the Unifers weren’t my fault. Nothing was. All I knew was that he believed it was true, so I did too. I didn’t have the wisdom to see the lie he was telling me. And himself. I couldn’t see how much he was hurting, and that the only way he could find relief was to put the blame on others. After that night, my father threw the Palka away—I think he felt bad about what he did, though not so bad that he didn’t get another one later.
After lying in my bed awake for hours, pressing my cheek against the expanding wet spot on my pillow, I decided to run away. I climbed out of my window, found a secluded spot in the woods, and tried to figure out a plan. When Gemma walked by, it was well past midnight. My fingers and toes had frozen stiff, and I had grown weary of watching the white vapors of breath rising from my mouth. The first thing she said was that she liked to walk outside at night to watch the stars—it made her feel connected, as if everything had purpose. Her comment took me off guard. Purpose? There was no purpose to this. She asked me if it was all right if she sat down next to me, and I nodded. Sitting so close she studied my face for a moment. I know she saw the bruise on my cheek, and by the way her face warmed with compassion, I even think she had her suspicions about what had transpired between my father and me. But she didn’t prod—just stated that she was so glad she’d found someone to talk to.
She explained that she and her mother had just moved to our street that day from another Laborer sector right off the East Coast. Several had been relocated because there was simply no more room. The Unifers went through the city and handpicked the women and children to be sent to Culmination. The oil rigs don’t need pretty faces, they had told them, but the cultural hub of Newland does. When they arrived, the Unifers crammed her and her mother in with the Porter family. They were nice enough—a little too involved in the neighborhood gossip, but decent folks.
After telling her story, Gemma invited me over to her home, and her mother offered me a cup of peppermint tea and a bowl of rice and lentils. Ruth was the same woman I had passed on the streets earlier, and I wondered if she had sent Gemma out to me after witnessing my father waiting for me with his Palka. This made me feel embarrassed, but they didn’t bring it up at all. Not once. Sitting up until three a.m., we exchanged stories about our lives and laughed until my cheeks cramped. At the end of the night, Ruth said she would be my substitute mother since I didn’t have one, and ever since that night, she would ask how my day was and how things were at home. It was that night of kindness that made me think that maybe, just maybe, there’s some purpose to this crazy life after all. That it might be worth living for a few rare moments of bliss. Although my father never found out about that first night, he did catch me sneaking out a few months later. That’s when he barb-wired my window. But even though he had taken so many things from me and continued to do so over the years, he could never touch the part of me that holds my most cherished memories.
But I am not Gemma and I don’t have a velvet touch when it comes to difficult conversations. I just lay it all out in one clear, unapologetic statement.
Just as I’m about to tell her my plan, she points at my bike. “You have a flat tire.”
My heart misses a beat. In all my planning, I hadn’t planned for this. I look her straight in the eyes. “I don’t have time to fix it. We’re going to register for the Savage Run.” My lungs constrict as I wait for her reply.
Gemma’s eyes widen. “This isn’t the time to joke around.”
“Sergio can get us fake IDs.”
“Who?”
“Never mind, it’s a long story. Will you do it?” I ask.
“Wait—you’re serious?”
I pause a moment before I answer. “Completely.”
“But they’re not going to let us register.”
“If we get new IDs from Sergio, they will,” I say impatiently.
She shakes her head and her hand hits her temple. “This is so bad. Totally illegal. If they discover us, we’ll be outlaws. Or they’ll take us to Skull Hill.”
“Well, we kind of already are,” I remind her.
She gives me an annoyed look. “And—what—we’re supposed to pretend to be guys?”
“Yes.”
“But…we’ll just…die in the Savage Run. Haven’t you heard that the obstacles are deadly?”
“Well, they estimate that around seventy-five to eighty percent of the participants will make it.”
She pauses as if to think. “I can’t do it.”
“We’ll die if we stay here.” My pulse quickens. Surely, she must see that?
“Was this your plan all along?” Her tone is accusatory.
“Yes.”
“But it’s crazy.” She breathes erratically and paces back and forth. “I should just go back to Master Douglas and beg for his forgiveness before he kills me.”
“This plan is way better than returning to Master Douglas. This way we have a chance to be free.”
Her body goes rigid and she glares at me. “Don’t you remember the time you convinced me to climb a tree and I fell and broke my arm?”
I do and I felt really guilty for pressuring her into doing it. But she’s older now and must be at least a little stronger. “You were twelve.”
“All those dangerous obstacle courses—I don’t have a chance.”
“You do have a chance, and besides, wouldn’t you rather die trying than…just die?”
“I don’t know, Heidi. I remember we joked about something like this before, but I didn’t think we’d actually be considering it.”
I groan and let my head fall back. “Well, do you have a better plan? If we go back to your mother or my father, Master Douglas will find us.”
“What about living in the mountains? I could fish and pick berries.”
“Where would we live? In the trees?”
“I don’t know. But we could work it out.”
“Gemma…”
“We could just move to another country where everyone is free.”
I had thought about it, but in all reality, where would we get the money to travel? Or eat? We would still need fake IDs to get out of the country, and what would we do once we arrived somewhere else, unfamiliar with the language? I figured the chances of making it were much greater if we sign up for Savage Run.
“I don’t want to die.” Her hands flail for a moment before she buries her face in her palms, sinking to the ground, her back against the dumpster.
The ground is covered in trash and is damp from the rain, but still, I sit down next to her.
Her hands drop into her lap and she exhales at length. “Isn’t there any other way? There has to be.”
“Listen, I don’t want to rush your decision, but we have to get going if we’re going to make it. The registration ends at noon.”
She takes a deep breath and remains still for a long time, chewing on her bottom lip.
“We’ll do it together,” I say. “I’ll help you. You’ll help me.”
She pauses for so long that I think I might rip my hair out. Sitting up a little straighter, she says, “Fine. I’ll agree to do it if you promise you’ll stay by my side the entire time.”
“Promise.” Pressing my lips together, I notice that my shoulders relax a little. “Let’s go to Sergio’s.” I grab the bag of clothes from the back rack of my bike, and we’re off.