I say nothing back—just take the biggest breath I can of the ozone-scented air, touch Jeremy’s shoulder with one hand, and walk toward the light.
Everybody said if my mother had lived a bit longer she could have prepared me: for my body changing, for marriage, for life as an adult. She’d been waiting for the right time to explain to me what was expected, everyone said. But sometimes I wonder if my mother would have sat me down and told me to grab as much freedom as I could, as hard as I could, instead of getting stuck in a marriage to a man who called her the Brick, because of the way she slept in a rigid fetal position. Maybe my mom was working on a way to break free of my dad. I’ll never know.
My mother was with a group of managers, inspecting their farmwheel, and the crops burst into flames at the top of the superstructure. Someone had come up with a scheme to raise the farmwheel slightly, expose the food to more light, increase yields. This plan worked for a while, but they didn’t count on one thing: erosion. A few boulders fell off the Young Father, or the peak just grew shorter, and the crops caught a full sunbeam. My mother was one of the people closest to the disaster, and while everybody else screamed and laid blame, she climbed up and stopped the fire from spreading. But the rays of the sun roasted her skin and boiled her eyes, and even if she hadn’t fallen, she would have been dead anyway. Everyone called her a hero, but I always wondered if she had seen a way out of her dead-end life and had taken it, without even stopping to think about me.
The final warning sounds, and I hear the shutters close, but I keep playing shadowseek in these empty streets. I can’t loosen the chokehold inside me. The sky looks like a flat pan of dirty water, which brightens as I make my way. The closer I get to daylight, the higher my risk of arrest for curfew violation. I hear a few patrols, but I always manage to slip out of view before they get close.
The Gymnasium looks the same as ever. The War Monument swallows the same light in which all the whitestone buildings bask. But emptied of students, teachers, and staff, these places look abandoned, as if after some catastrophe. I let the old familiar anxiety claim a few heartbeats, then I touch my new bracelet and remember I’m not alone. And I make my hypervigilance work for me, scanning in all directions. I’ve already seen the worst, and I’m still here.
I unpin my skirt and climb the wall of my old dorm—anybody could see me, awash in pallid light—and swing from sill to sill without making a noise, until I reach my old window. I lean on the shutters with all the strength I’ve developed climbing a mountain so many times, and they go down, with a rusty groan.
Looking into the dorm room where I used to sit and talk after curfew is the most powerful experience of Timefulness I’ve ever known, reminding me that time is real, the past is the past, and part of me really did die when they executed me. I always thought moments of Timefulness should be either practical or wistful—but here’s an acrid chunk of poison lodged in my throat.
Bianca rests on her little shelf, same as always. I almost expect to see myself sleeping there, on the opposite shelf, but it’s empty. Bianca looks so happy and peaceful I almost want to let her sleep. Then I see some shape hidden under the blankets beside her. Something rigid, bulky. A crutch? No, an ancient rifle. She’s cuddling a gun in her bed, as though the fight could begin any moment. Bianca keeps opening one eye, watching for something.
She notices too much light coming in the window and opens both eyes. She reaches for her gun, while I get the window open and stumble inside. By the time she has her gun out of the snarl of blankets, I’m on top of her, with a hand on her mouth.
She looks up and her eyes widen, and I feel her teeth sink into the fat of my thumb. She has too many tears for me to see her reaction. Her nostrils flare, and the bulky stock of her gun juts between us. I freeze, the old tremors rising. I have a million things to say, but I can’t speak. I slowly lift my hand away.
“Sophie.” Bianca’s breath feels hot enough to scald the skin off my hand. “You’re— You’re— Am I going delirious at last? Is this delirium? Am I just dreaming? Say something. Fuck you, say something now.”
“I’m alive,” I whisper. “It’s me. I’m alive. I’m here.” Everything in this room smells of laundry detergent and stale cakes and tea and comfort.
“How? How can you…” Bianca bites her tongue, the way she always used to when she worked through a logic problem, twice as fast as anybody else. “Oh shit. They locked you up. Didn’t they? You’ve been in some dark cell this whole time. I thought they killed you, forced you outside, but all along you’ve been in some dark hole, and I didn’t even look for you. Did you only just escape? What happened?” She wheezes a little. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. I should have searched for you.”
I shake my head. “It’s not… they didn’t lock me up. They tried—they tried to execute me, but I didn’t… I got away.”
I’m still sitting on top of Bianca, half straddling her. I feel her heart convulse, as the realization spreads across her face: I was alive and free this whole time, and I chose to let her think I was dead.
“It’s not like that.” I’m still juddering, unsteadying myself. “I just couldn’t come back to you. I didn’t want to put you in harm’s way, and I…” I don’t have the words to explain how the fear immobilized me whenever I tried to reveal myself to her.
Bianca looks forlorn through the sheen of tears, as if she just lost me in a whole new way. Or even worse, as if she’s just realized that I was never really hers, and this realization is costing her some part of herself. Her expression resolves into something as blunt and unbending as the rifle in her bed.
“Fucking… I would have broken everything, I would have killed anybody, to have you back here with me. I would have torn it all down. I can’t even tell you. And you were just alive the whole time, and you, what? You didn’t bother to let me know.”
“I’m sorry,” I stammer-whisper.
My mouth is a desert, but the rest of me is chilled. I know for sure that even if we survive this, she’ll never smile at me the way she used to.
Bianca sits up, though I’m still pinioning her lower half, and she raises her arms as if she wants to embrace me, but she can’t.
“I would have torn it all down,” she says again. “I still might.”
I’m clutching her bedcovers with one hand. “I came to warn you. You can’t trust that smuggler. Mouth. She’s just using you. I heard her telling her friend.”
Another moment of Timefulness—because everything has changed, the world is all askew, and it will never turn back.
“I should have known. That bitch. I should have seen the signs, but I wanted this too much.” Bianca pushes me off her and jumps out of bed, already dressed, including boots and a belt crammed with supplies. “She knows the whole plan. We have to warn everyone.” Bianca heads for the open window, gun slung over one shoulder, with its long handle and fluted barrel.
“Wait,” I say, but she’s already swinging herself out the window and pulling herself down, the same way I climbed up.
Bianca is already halfway across the residential quarter of campus by the time I catch up with her. “I seriously have been living in a dark tunnel since they took you away,” Bianca hisses. “I can’t even tell you. Where the hell have you been hiding?”
Bianca walks too fast for me to catch up, talks too loud for curfew. She doesn’t wait for an answer, if I even had one.
“How long have you been hanging around, and just not letting me out of all this grief? How long?” She spits on the ground. “And then you decide to show up, right when I’m finally ready to avenge you. Why couldn’t you have just come back to me?”