With no need to hide any longer, I kept my head up so I could run faster, and I saw over the lip of the ditch that the first tractor was backing up and making a slow turn to follow. The second machine bore down on the breach in the fence; the pursuit was converging on the most logical point of escape—the same bad idea that had brought us all together that night.
After another flurry of pops sounded from behind, I felt something pinch my thigh. I hobbled for a few steps, thinking I’d been shot, but the pain wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be. Ahead of me, the dark shapes of my fellow escapees came into view, and then the floodlights of the second tractor lit them up like what I imagined raw unfiltered daylight to be like.
More shots, followed by the zing of metal on metal. I noticed the group had grown smaller than when I’d left them and hoped that meant the hole was open. Running as fast as I could, my lungs burning from the effort, I glanced back at the enforcers and saw they weren’t moving much faster. They were just as winded as me.
Up the berm I went, scrambling for the hole as the cluster of bodies at the top seemed to have been whittled down to just a few. I pushed up behind someone, urging them forward as dirt exploded around us. Another shot ricocheted off the fence above us with a loud zing. The legs ahead of me flew out of sight and I fell forward, pressing myself flat against the dirt, throwing my arms through the hole. All around me was the loud buzzing of a quick death. One touch and my body would be cooked, smoking and burning like the falling heads of my nightmares, like all my vat-mates who hadn’t made it—
Several pairs of hands grasped me from outside. I couldn’t even kick my legs to help; they just yanked me through, all of us tumbling down the other side of the berm, where we rolled through the dirt, panting and wheezing.
Before we could take stock or enjoy the weak thrill of freedom, we found ourselves running again, wary of the chance of pursuit from behind, overcome with the odd sensation of a fenceless horizon as we stumbled into darkness and the perilous unknown.
• 16 •
Old Friends
Morning came, its feeble rays slanting through the dense canopy overhead, and winding around trees that rose up in great cliffs of wood. Our group lay together in a tight cluster, our heads on various parts of each other. Exhaustion had overtaken a few of us just an hour into our hike through the blackness. Despite protestations, I had been unwilling to hazard the light, for fear of being spotted. Of the three flashlights that had been brought between all the escapees, mine was the only one that had survived our mad push through the fence.
Sitting up, I noticed a few others had awoken before me. Kelvin, Vincent, and Britny—the last a girl I hardly knew—sat together a dozen paces away, whispering and allowing the rest of us to enjoy our sleep. I disentangled myself from Tarsi and tried to stand, only to feel a stabbing pain in the back of my thigh. Hobbling away from the other sleepers, I moved halfway to Kelvin before collapsing.
“Are you okay?” he whispered, coming to my side.
“I think I got shot last night,” I told him. “Forgot all about it. Didn’t hurt much ’til now.”
“Roll over,” he said, trying to keep his voice low, his worry threatening to wake the others.
I lay facedown in the mossy groundcover and saw Vincent and Britny casting me confused looks. I waved—partly from embarrassment—as Kelvin pulled my trousers down to inspect the wound. They both waved back, and something in the normalcy of the gesture amused me. We were failed planetary colonists on the run from our own people, out in the middle of an unexplored planet that supposedly teetered between viability and abort. And there we were, waving at one another with sheepish grins, taking stock of who had made the break, who had been fed up with their lives enough to chance throwing them away.
“Ow,” I hissed, as Kelvin found my wound and probed it with his hand. He brought something up in front of my face.
“A shard of rock,” he said, holding the bloody stone dart up for me to see. “Barely a scratch.”
I rolled over and worked my pants back into place. Kelvin helped me up, and it felt like a lot more than a scratch on the back of my leg. I limped over to the others, who shifted in place to include me.
“Doesn’t feel like a scratch,” I told Kelvin, enjoying the sensation of being half carried and half escorted by him.
“There might be a little bruising as well,” he admitted. “But trust me, your little legs will be fine.”
I rolled my eyes.
“Hello, Porter,” Vincent said as I joined them on the ground.
I smiled and greeted them both. “So, the disenfranchised among us make themselves known,” I said.
“Yeah, and I’m sure there’ll be more,” Britny said, frowning.
I looked to Kelvin. “Speaking of which, we need to find Mica and Peter. I can’t stand the thought of them out here alone.” I looked over my shoulder. “There’s what? Nearly ten of us?”
“Maybe this will be enough to change the way things are running around base,” Vincent said. “This many people gone—using another half dozen for enforcement—the timetables are gonna go to shit.”
“Chances are it’ll just make things at camp worse for the rest,” I said.
“How?” Britny asked.
“A dozen ways. They could tighten the perimeter now that the farms have been abandoned and the fuel depot has been picked apart. There’s enough fencing there for two smaller nested circuits if they wanted to do that. Or they could pack everyone into a few modules every night and lock them. And if I can think of these things, I’m sure Hickson can come up with even worse.”
“I don’t know it’s all Hickson,” Vincent said. “I think he’s just Colony’s muscle.”
Kelvin shook his head.
“No way,” he said. “Everything went south when Stevens died.”
“And I’m not convinced Hickson killed Stevens,” Vincent told him.
“We need to start worrying about ourselves,” Britny said. “The next few weeks are gonna make the last few seem like a night in the vats.”
“And Colony was predicting rain for tonight. I heard it from Myra.”
Someone squeezed my shoulder from behind. I turned as Tarsi sat down beside me. She leaned her head against my shoulder and I glanced up in time to see the pained expression on Kelvin’s face, which he quickly wiped away.
“How did you sleep?” I asked her.
“Bad dreams, but otherwise… okay. How are you?”
“He’s got a boo-boo on his girly little leg,” Kelvin said, pointing and smiling.
“Are you hurt?”
I shrugged. “It’s nothing.”
“That’s not what you just said,” said Kelvin.
I glared at him. His smile broadened, but he raised his hands in mock surrender.
Britny stood and rested her hands on her hips. “When you boys are done fooling around, we need to make some decisions. How far do we go before we start digging in? Everybody seems to have grabbed a thing or two before they left, so how are we dividing these things up? Or are we?”
Tarsi, Kelvin, and I looked at one another. We hadn’t planned on any of that. The three of us were family, so there was no question on what belonged to whom. As much as we needed and supported everyone else, the idea of submitting to another collective when the goal of that new group might one day turn out to be as sensible as building rockets—it didn’t sit well with me. I could see similar worries on the faces of my friends.
“We are in this together, aren’t we?” Britny asked.
We sat silent for a moment.
Several of us nodded slightly, as we looked to one another. I turned at the sound of people moving behind me and saw some of the sleepers stirring and stretching, pointing up to the new patch of open sky overhead created by last night’s missile.