Departures

by E. J. Wenstrom

  “Everyone is safe,” Evie says. “Even the Intel crew was finalizing their precautions when I snuck out. That was at least an hour ago. Probably more.” She rubs sweat off her forehead with her sleeve.

  “Snuck out?” Kate-Kinlee grins. “Look at you. But seriously. You gotta get out. Now-ish.”

  “That’s what I was trying to find you for,” I exclaim, butting in. “You’ve got to get out. This Tad guy told the Directorate everything. They’re coming for you.”

  Kate-Kinlee turns to me, one eyebrow raised. “How do you know that?”

  “It doesn’t matter now. You have to get somewhere safe,” I say.

  “I had to find you first,” Evie says, reaching out to me. “Gracelyn, you’ve got to come with me.”

  I almost take her hand, but then her words register: Go with her? Something slams down around me. That wasn’t the plan. The air feels suddenly cold and clingy with dampness.

  I stumble back.

  “What?”

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Evie

  Gracelyn pulls away, and the entire world stalls to a standstill.

  Come with me. It’s like the words are still hanging in the air, creating a wall between us.

  Her brow pulls together into a frown. She shakes her head. Suddenly it’s like the earth is teetering below me. My mind reaches for the right words, but like so often, now that I need them most, I can’t find them.

  “Please. You have to. The Directorate – there’s an entire world out there, you have no idea – I know it’s different for you in here, that the system works for you…” Gracelyn’s eyes break with mine and her gaze drops to the floor. Again I reach for her and again she pulls away. “But there’s so much more.”

  I want to explain the more to her, but how can I explain stars? How can I explain love? How can I explain freedom? The idea would only frighten her, now.

  But it’s too late. She takes another step back. She’s already frightened.

  “Please, Gracelyn…”

  She has to understand. She has to come. She just has to.

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Gracelyn

  Go with her? The idea feels impossible, like breaking through a wall. Evie’s stare presses into me, her eyes wide with the weight of all she’s promising. But I struggle to come to terms with the idea, and find it is an unwelcome one, jarring and invasive.

  “I can’t.”

  Regret pools around the edges of my words.

  Evie’s eyes flicker with confusion. “You can. Just follow me. That’s all you have to do.”

  Oh, how to explain.

  I thought, because I had strayed so far, I had cut my ties to the Quads. But leave? I realize now it’s not a tie, but an elastic band, and I have stretched this mess as far as I am able. Any further, and I will snap apart. What lies beyond that to put me back together? I don’t know. It’s not enough.

  This wasn’t the plan.

  There is no option left but to let go. To give in to the band’s tug and allow it pull me back in. Back to where I belong.

  Go with her? Evie might as well ask me to leap off a cliff.

  As this truth sinks in, my hands begin to shake. My fingers throb from the punches I threw at Quinn, and all I want is to curl up on the ground and wait to be cared for.

  I want to go with Evie. I do. But I look in her eyes and I see the resilience that made her into this person before me now, and I cannot find it in myself. What seems to have made her stronger in these past weeks has almost broken me apart. It will break me, if I don’t let go of it.

  “No,” I whisper.

  And it is as if I have smashed everything into pieces.

  The pain spreads over Evie’s face slowly, in waves, knocking away her smile, wrinkling her forehead, extinguishing the light from her eyes.

  Joyce’s word – grief. It comes to my mind as the familiar, ugly darkness spreads through me again. It is so much worse than the first time, when I thought Evie was departed, a pain that seeps into my core in a way I am sure will scar and reshape me permanently. Because this time, it did not just happen. This time, I have failed her.

  Evie reaches out her hand one more time, and her eyes beg me to take it.

  Instead, I shrink away, unable to look her in the eye. Even with the Licentia still to face back home, this is far more terrifying – something that shakes me to the core and threatens everything I know.

  “I’m sorry,” I whisper.

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Evie

  Gracelyn steps back, tears brimming, and pulls her wounded hands close to her chest. As if I might pull at her again. As if I might hurt her.

  And that look in her eyes. Like I’ve betrayed her. It’s a look I never expected, not from Gracelyn. Never in a million years.

  No.

  Her word hangs in the air between us, stiff and final and shattering.

  “Please, Gracelyn. You’ve got to. There is so much more than the Directorate out there. You can’t begin to imagine. There’s a whole world. And it’s incredible.”

  I scramble to find the right words, the ones that will convince her. I realize now I wasn’t prepared to explain. I thought that somehow, she’d understand, like she has always understood me. But of course she can’t – she hasn’t had all these weeks to live it like I have. And I am pathetically unprepared to show it to her.

  I’ve lost her, I realize. I’ve failed her.

  In a single, slow split, my heart breaks.

  Kinlee’s digipad buzzes. She checks it, then looks to me. “Time’s up.”

  As if the sound of the alert broke a spell, Gracelyn draws back, still shaking her head. Then she turns and runs, stumbling down the tunnel, back towards the Quad.

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Evie

  All I can do is stare as Gracelyn disappears into the tunnel’s darkness. I don’t know how I can ever learn to accept Gracelyn’s choice.

  But that’s what I wanted for her, after all, isn’t it? Choice?

  “Evie, now, damnit!” Kinlee isn’t asking. She’s ordering.

  And she’s right. Gracelyn’s gone. I can’t accept it, but somehow, I’ll have to. That’s one thing I have learned these past weeks: life goes on. Even when you think it can’t. I don’t need to accept it right now. Right now, all I have to do is run.

  “What about you?” I ask.

  “You know I’m staying,” she says.

  “But what will you report back to the Directorate?”

  Kinlee – Kate – nudges Quinn’s limp body, still unconscious. “Looks to me like a lone Licentia was stirring up trouble. But how about that, I caught her. I’ll probably get a promotion soon, high performer like that. Now go.”

  She shoves me, and I let the momentum carries me down the tunnel towards the camp.

  I run as hard as I can, run from the limits, the fears, the heartbreak of Gracelyn’s choice. Run for Connor, for nights in the stars, for zip lines and cinnamon rolls and possibility so open and bright it’s blinding. I run until my lungs burn and the pounding in my head forces out all thought, until the immediacy of my body’s strain drowns out everything else.

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Gracelyn

  My breaths heave like I have never experienced before. I fixate on the force of the in and out of the air in my chest and follow the blue line back towards comfort and safety, blurry through my tears.

  With each step, a tearing pain shoots through me, as if my heart was splitting. A pain so deep and all-consuming it blocks out the throbbing of my swelling fingers. All else falls away, and I am left with only a desperate need for the pain to end. As I reach the ladder, I collapse against it. Something like a sob escapes me.

  “You made the right choice, Gracelyn.”

  The unexpected voice makes me jump. It’s distorted by the echo of the tunnels… and yet it is familiar – the voice of the loudspeaker announcements that ring through the Quads, and the Directorate orders that feed throu
gh the screen in my living room. A voice that trails from down the hall at the office and reverberates through my house.

  I turn to it to find a glint of glasses over a dark moustache, hovering in the darkness of the cover near the ladder. Finally, it all comes together, that strange sense of recognition this voice has always given me.

  “Father! What are you – ”

  He shakes his head. “No more questions, Gracelyn. You’re done with that now. Aren’t you?”

  He’s not wrong. I am so tired. All my questions led to was problems, which led to pain. I only have a few left in me now.

  “You knew, didn’t you? This whole time.”

  “Of course.”

  “And Evie? You knew she was alive? That she was out here?”

  Father blinks. “I knew about the failed departures. They don’t trouble me with the details of whom or when.”

  The details. I let it slide, too defeated to fight back anymore after all that’s happened.

  “Are you in charge of it all? The Quad? The Directorate?”

  “Not alone. A group of us.”

  It sinks in slowly: a prism shifting to expose new colors of light, a truth that was there all along, hidden from sight.

  “How can you do it? How can you toy with an entire society’s gene pool?” I want to lash out, but I find I am too tired.

  Father’s mouth twitches at the edge. “You’re a smart girl, to figure that out. But you know why you’re so smart? Haven’t you figured out where that perfect memory comes from? The work we do here to advance humanity.”

  “Advance humanity? You’re manipulating us all. Manipulating our genetics.”

  “We prefer the word ‘optimizing,’” Father says, his expression still blank. “Don’t you want to be as smart and healthy as possible? Don’t you want to live longer? You don’t get a photographic memory and a hundred-and-forty-year lifespan by accident. You are old enough to understand that all things come at a price. We make the hard choices necessary so that citizens like you can benefit.”

  “What about the others?” I reply. “What about citizens like Evie? It’s not right.”

  Father shakes his head.

  “‘Right’? ‘Wrong’? These are children’s words, Gracelyn,” he replies. “You’re grown up now. There is what serves the greater population and what does not. There is strong and there is weak. The Directorate is strong. Its people are strong. I tried to tell you. All of this fighting and questioning, it isn’t good for you. You see that now, don’t you?”

  I do.

  What was it all for? Evie was fine – more than fine – this whole time. And I am so tired. I press my forehead against the cool metal of the ladder.

  “How did you know?” I ask.

  His glasses glint as his head tilts. “Do you really think we could allow citizens to break into the tunnels without supervision? Or sneak out at night? Or search our database?”

  No, I realize. The full force of my stupidity wrenches through my chest. Of course not.

  “We allow those who need it an outlet when we can afford to. In fact, I appreciated your help settling the Martin boy situation. Ugly work, but it needed to be done.” He pauses, assessing me. “But that’s over now. Isn’t it?”

  There is nothing left to do, and all I want is to go back to how it was before. I nod, tears dropping from my cheek.

  “Then let me make it better.”

  He stretches out his hand. In his palm rests something small and round. A pill. Joyce promised they would bring me peace. I pick it up and stare at it.

  “The Licentia. They have been following me.”

  Father shakes his head. “We took advantage of their attack today to do a little tidying up. You won’t see them again.”

  As I consider, the pain is chased by something new – a collapse. A stillness. A giving way. And with it, relief.

  Why keep fighting?

  The question hovers in my mind, and nothing rises up against it. There is nothing left to fight for, if I am choosing to stay. And I have made my choice.

  I thrust the pill into my mouth, and even as I swallow it, a sense of peace settles over me. The first peace I’ve had since I heard Evie stirring through the wall that morning. Was it only weeks ago? It feels like a lifetime.

  “Good girl,” Father says.

  With slow, mechanical movements, I pull myself up the ladder, Father behind me. I step out from the darkness and back into the life of order and predictability waiting for me above.

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Evie

  I trace the blue line through the tunnels all the way back to the camp. Between burning breaths, I choke on sobs that are hard and relentless.

  Why wouldn’t Gracelyn come? How could she possibly choose the Directorate after all they have done?

  It doesn’t matter why. She did.

  I reach the ladder. As I climb up, I flash back to the fear I felt the first time I climbed through its portal, and the life I did not yet know waited for me on the other side.

  I open the hatch, half-expecting to find the frenzy of activity I left behind – maybe even for Raina to be there, waiting to scold me for my foolishness, or Connor, pacing anxiously in wait. But the bunker is dark and abandoned. The machines are sleeping, not a single sheet of paper left to hint at the life that filled this place only hours ago. Where did they go? How far have they gotten?

  I dig Raina’s now-crinkled map out of my pocket and trace the pen-lined path she drew on it towards safety.

  I’ll find Connor. And Raina, if I can. And a whole new life.

  And then… Well, I have no idea what comes after that. It’s all open and unknown.

  And for now, that’s okay.

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