My brother, Ewan, should be overdosing on marshmallows and chocolate, running around with his best friend, Mike, red-faced and sweating, finishing ends of beer bottles, needing to go home early with a stomachache. I see my sister, Juniper, in the corner with a friend, her eye on it all, always in the corner, analyzing everything with a content, quiet smile, always watching and understanding everything better than anyone else.
I see me. I should be dancing with Art. I should be happy. But it doesn’t feel right. I look up at him and he’s not the same. He’s thinner; he looks older, tired, unwashed, and scruffy. He’s looking at me, eyes on me, but his head is somewhere else. His touch is limp—a whisper of a touch—and his hands are clammy. It feels like the last time I saw him. It’s not how it’s supposed to be, not how it ever was, which was perfect, but I can’t even summon up those old feelings in my daydreams anymore. That time of my life feels so far away from now. I left perfection behind a long time ago.
I open my eyes and I’m back in Granddad’s house. There’s a store-bought cold apple tart in a foil tin sitting before me with a single candle in it. There’s the person I think I should be, though I can’t even dream about it properly without reality’s interruptions, and there’s the person I really am now.
This girl, on the run but frozen still, staring at the cold apple tart. Neither Granddad nor I are pretending things can continue like this. Granddad’s real; there’s no smoke and mirrors with him. He’s looking at me, sadly. He knows not to avoid the subject. Things are too serious for that now. We talk daily of a plan, and that plan changes daily. I have escaped my home; escaped my Whistleblower Mary May, a guard of the Guild, whose job it is to monitor my every move and assure that I’m complying with Flawed rules; and I’m now off the radar. I’m officially an “evader.” But the longer I stay here, the higher the chance I will eventually be found.
My mom told me to run away two weeks ago, an urgent whispered command in my ear that still gives me goose bumps when I recall it. The head of the Guild, Bosco Crevan, was sitting in our home, demanding my parents hand me over. Bosco is my ex-boyfriend’s dad, and we have been neighbors for a decade. Only a few weeks previously we’d been enjoying dinner together in our home. Now my mom would rather I disappear than be in his care again.
It can take a lifetime to build up a friendship—it can take a second to make an enemy.
There was only one important item that I needed with me when I ran: a note that had been given to my sister, Juniper, for me. The note was from Carrick. Carrick had been my holding-cell neighbor at Highland Castle, the home of the Guild. He watched my trial while he awaited his; he witnessed my brandings. All of my brandings, including the secret sixth on my spine. He is the only person who can possibly understand how I feel right now, because he’s going through the same thing.
My desire to find Carrick is immense, but it has been difficult. He managed to evade his Whistleblower as soon as he was released from the castle, and I’m guessing my profile didn’t make it easy for him to seek me out, either. Just before I ran away, he found me, rescued me from a riot in a supermarket. He brought me home—I was out cold at the time, our long-wished-for reunion not exactly what I’d imagined. He left me the note and vanished.
But I couldn’t get to him. Afraid of being recognized, I’d no way of finding my way around the city. So I called Granddad. I knew that his farm would be the Guild’s first port of call in finding me. I should be hiding somewhere else, somewhere safer, but on this land Granddad has the upper hand.
At least, that was the theory. I don’t think either of us thought that the Whistleblowers would be so relentless in their search for me. Since I arrived at the farm, there have been countless searches. So far they’ve failed to uncover my hiding place, but they come again and again, and I know my luck will eventually run out.
Each time, the Whistleblowers come so close to my hiding place I can barely breathe. I hear their footsteps, sometimes their breaths, as I’m crammed, jammed, into spaces, above and below, sometimes in places so obvious they don’t even look, sometimes so dangerous they wouldn’t dare to look.
I blink away my thoughts of them.
I look at the single flame flickering in the cold apple tart.
“Make a wish,” Granddad says.
I close my eyes and think hard. I have too many wishes and feel that none of them are within my reach. But I also believe that the moment we’re beyond making wishes is either the moment we’re truly happy, or the moment to give up.
Well, I’m not happy. But I’m not about to give up.
I don’t believe in magic, yet I see making wishes as a nod to hope, an acknowledgment of the power of will, the recognition of a goal. Maybe saying what you want to yourself makes it real, gives you a target to aim for, can help you make it happen. Channel your positive thoughts: Think it, wish it, then make it happen.
I blow out the flame.
I’ve barely opened my eyes when we hear footsteps in the hallway.
Dahy, Granddad’s trusted farm manager, appears in the kitchen.
“Whistleblowers are here. Move.”
FOUR
GRANDDAD JUMPS UP from the table so fast his chair falls backward to the stone floor. Nobody picks it up. We’re not ready for this visit. Just yesterday the Whistleblowers searched the farm from top to bottom; we thought we’d be safe at least for today. Where is the siren that usually calls out in warning? The sound that freezes every soul in every home until the vehicles have passed by, leaving the lucky ones drenched with relief.
There is no discussion. The three of us hurry from the house. We instinctively know we have run out of luck with hiding me inside. We turn right, away from the driveway lined with cherry blossom trees. I don’t know where we’re going, but it’s away, as far from the entrance as possible.
Dahy talks as we run. “Arlene saw them from the tower. She called me. No sirens. Element of surprise.”
There’s a ruined Norman tower on the land, which serves Granddad well as a lookout tower for Whistleblowers. Ever since I arrived he’s had somebody on duty day and night, each of the farmworkers taking shifts.
“And they’re definitely coming here?” Granddad asks, looking around fast, thinking hard. Plotting, planning. And I regret to admit I detect panic in his movements. I’ve never seen it in Granddad before.
Dahy nods.
I step up my pace to keep up with them. “Where are we going?”
They’re silent. Granddad is still looking around as he strides through his land. Dahy watches Granddad, trying to read him. Their expressions make me panic. I feel it in the pit of my stomach, the alarming rate of my heartbeat. We’re moving at top speed to the farthest point of Granddad’s land, not because he has a plan but because he doesn’t. He needs time to think of one.
We rush through the fields, through the strawberry beds that we were working in only hours ago.