But I keep running. I can’t stop. We’re past the minefield now, into guards’ quarters—where the guards would be if they weren’t dead or hunting—and down the endless dock where their boat is tied up.
I climb up and over the boat’s side, collapse just long enough to catch my breath. I’m vaguely aware of the three other girls as they join me, one of them a blonde who works to untie the knotted rope, our only anchor to the dock. The sky starts to sway as the tide pulls us out to sea. It hurts to breathe, it hurts to think. Everything hurts.
It is worth it.
TWO
I CAN’T TELL my own tears from the sweat.
I could easily spend hours lying limp on this deck, looking like death, but after only a few breaths, I peel myself up. Break over.
“Either of you know how to sail?” the boardwalk girl says to the two girls who followed us here.
“I know how,” I say, before either of them has the chance to take over. My dreams of this moment never included anyone’s agenda but my own.
“Do it, then.”
The boardwalk girl turns her back on us and stalks to the far end of the boat, which isn’t all that far, but is probably enough distance for us to whisper about her without her hearing.
We don’t. Yet.
One of the girls, the blonde, raises her eyebrows at me. “Would you like some help? I used to sail with my family, before . . .”
So many sentences end that way in our post-peace world. Before, ellipsis. No one ever needs to say anything else. We fill in the blanks with our own unspeakable memories.
“Yes.” The boom is familiar in my hand, as if I never stopped sailing. “Yes, please.” She moves to help me, and the other girl—beach-wave hair the color of a penny, a splash of dark freckles across her cheeks and nose, silver-gray eyes—looks on in earnest.
Before, ellipsis: sunny summer days we all assumed would go on forever, filled with smiles that came easily. I sailed every day that summer, sometimes with Dad, and sometimes with Emma, but mostly with Birch. Birch was salt and sand and starlight kisses, refreshing like spring rain: easily my favorite part of every day.
How drastically things have changed.
“I’m Hope, by the way,” the blonde girl says. Her friendliness catches me off guard. It isn’t something you see every day. Really, it isn’t something you see anymore at all.
I glance down at her left hand out of habit, and there it is, tattooed on her pinky in thin, wide letters: H-O-P-E. Red ink, unlike mine, which is green. Our barracks are on opposite ends of the New Port Isabel gulag, then—I’m not surprised. Not one of these girls looks familiar, save for the past few days at the seawall.
“And yours?” she prods, when I say nothing.
“Eden.” As in, the Garden of, I silently add, like I always used to say. It’s been so long since anyone’s asked my name, or even bothered to use it, I’d almost forgotten what it felt like on my tongue.
It feels like freedom.
“You’re steering us in the wrong direction.”
I look over my shoulder. The boardwalk girl stands beside copper-hair-freckle-splash, her arms crossed. A-L-E-X-A, the letters on her pinky read. They are violet: I’ve never seen anyone with violet letters before. I didn’t know violet was even an option.
“Seems like any direction away from barracks is the right direction,” I say, making no move to adjust the sail.
“They’ll come after us,” Alexa says, not missing a beat. “We need a faster boat.”
“And how are we going to get a faster boat?” It’s copper-hair-freckle-splash speaking now. I’d started to wonder if she’d gone mute from shock, but mute she is not. “Sail straight into HQ and ask them for one?”
Alexa’s glare is sharp. “Yes. This is one of their own boats, so I think we could pull it off.”
“And then what?” the girl continues. F-I-N-N-L-E-Y. Red letters like Hope’s. “Dodge their bullets when they realize we’re not in uniform? Even if we manage to steal one of their speedboats, what are we going to do, try to outrun them? What do you plan to do when we burn off all the boat’s fuel? I guess we could swim until our arms give out, but—”
“I get it,” Alexa snaps. “You know better than the rest of us. You have a better idea, I’m sure.”
Finnley’s jaw twitches. She meets Alexa’s glare, a challenge. “Matamoros.”
I bite back a laugh. Even if the Wolfpack hasn’t spilled over into Mexico, which I highly doubt, people say it’s been a cartel kingdom for as long as I’ve been alive.
“What?” Finnley says, turning her steely eyes on me. “It would work. I know exactly which route—”
“It would never work,” Alexa spits back. “You’re delusional if you think it would.”
“Eden?” Hope’s voice is quiet, but cuts through with as much force as Alexa’s. “Matamoros?”
Her thoughts are written all over her face: she and I are the only ones who know how to sail. We could override Alexa, if we want. If I want.
I try, really try, to look like I’m giving it actual consideration. “We’d make it to shore,” I say. “They’d shoot us with heroin needles, not guns, dress us up then strip us down, and we’d be caught in a living nightmare until they’re done with us. That’s what I think.”
Hope knows it’s true, I can tell, and so does Finnley. Thick hopes, thin plans.
“I was thinking,” I say, bracing myself for Matamoros-level disbelief, “we could sail out to Sanctuary.”
Their stares burn hotter than the sun, Alexa’s in particular. She puts a hand on her hip and cocks her head. “You are aware Sanctuary is just a myth, right?”
Everyone knows the rumors. I know the truth.
“You have no way of knowing that,” I say. I adjust the sail, mainly to avoid looking at her.
“And you do?” Alexa fires back.
“Even if Sanctuary is a myth, where else are we going to go?” Finnley says. “Not Matamoros, apparently, and for sure not back to barracks. I think Eden has a point. We shouldn’t rule out the possibility of the amnesty island—why else would they go to the trouble of planting so many mines on the beach if they weren’t trying to keep people from escaping to it?”
“Because they’re sadistic?” Alexa says. “Because who the hell puts anything worth anything on an island anymore?”
“It’s not a myth,” I say. But I’m not about to spill the details of how I know this.