Page 23 of Trade (After the End #7)

I saw Acer saccharum and Fagus grandifolia and Platanus occidentalis in living color, and a hundred other plants and animals he’s only ever read about in books.

I touched their leaves and bark, climbed their branches, laid in their shade and made love underneath their canopies to a man who is so much stronger and braver and better than him that it doesn’t seem that they can be from the same planet, let alone the same genus and species.

I want to tell my petulant, pasty husband I made a fire and swam in a lake and felt sunshine on my bare skin, but since that’s forbidden, I say, “You know what I figured out when I was Outside? Dad knew you’d make a better head of department because he knew you’d be better than I could ever be at begging and wheedling and licking boots for a smaller and smaller cut of the pie until you had no choice but to realize you are small and weak and inconsequential, and the only way to make yourself feel big would be to fuck an eighteen-year-old.

Did it work? Were you able to convince yourself you weren’t an impotent desk jockey whose greatest accomplishments in life are pushing paper and kissing Neil Jackson’s ass? ”

“Big talk for a woman whose face looks like that,” he snaps back, his face immediately blanching when he realizes he let his good-guy mask slip.

I grin at him, even though it pulls at the suture and hurts like a son of a bitch.

“I’m not allowed to tell you anything about the Outside, but I’ll tell you this”—I lower my voice—“it was worth it. Every second. And I don’t regret it at all.

” I glance around our airless, dim quarters and raise an eyebrow. “Can you say the same?”

* * *

I sleep like the dead, sprawled in the middle of our bed.

Bennett takes the sofa. I spend the next few days while he’s at work poring through Dad’s books, dog-earring the pages with plants and animals I identified Outside.

Based on the flora, the bunker is likely located somewhere in the Alleghany Plateau of Appalachia.

Every hour, I take fifteen minutes to stretch and exercise as best I can with my ribs still so tender.

I’m not sure what I’m doing, but I have a new energy, a restlessness that keeps me up at night rewalking every mile I hiked with Dalton, traveling the neural pathways over and over so every step and sight is seared into my memory.

I stop imagining Dalton breathing. It deflates my drive, and I need this sense of purpose to do—whatever it is I’m going to do.

Come up with a plan, first and foremost, but every idea I have hits a wall almost immediately.

Sneak out.

How? Past the dozens of guards in the corridors leading Outside and then through the bay and its massive metal doors that need two men to open? There’s one exit from the bunker. That fact was drilled into our heads from day one of fire safety.

Fight my way out.

With what weapon?

Take Neil captive and force him to let me go?

In my condition? When he’s never alone?

One day, when Bennett grudgingly tells me he’ll be late with my lunch—he’s been bringing it home from the cafeteria—I duck out of our quarters as soon as he leaves for work and pry open the access hatch we used to climb to the vents.

The access tube is narrower than I remember.

The graffiti we carved in the walls is still there, covered by the scribblings of other kids who’ve passed through since.

John loves Brenda. Fuck Safety and Compliance.

The letter A in a circle. A circle with three lines like a trident.

A cross. Symbols we learned from the older kids and doodled in the margins of our books, even though no one knew what they meant.

The adults hated it. That was good enough for us.

I crane my neck. The ladder goes much, much higher than I remember.

Well, wasting time won’t make the climb any shorter.

I step up the first rung, then the second.

I make good time for the first two floors, but as I get more winded, my ribs ache worse and worse, and I have to rest between each five rungs, then each four, then each three.

Time slows. I can’t look up because the tunnel that leads to the vents isn’t any closer.

I take longer and longer rests, my arm hooked around a rung so if my knees give out, I won’t plummet to my death. Bennett and I used to do this climb in about ten minutes. He’d chase me up, and we’d be laughing all the way. That was a long time ago.

I almost ask myself what happened to him, but it’s no mystery, not anymore. What happened to him is what happened to me—we believed what we were told. We believed the people in charge instead of the evidence in front of our eyes and our common sense and the compassion in our hearts.

The only reason I know the truth is I got lucky and they turned on me.

And that isn’t okay with me. I don’t want to only be lucky. I want to be brave.

I make it to the top, and my thighs and calves are so overworked that I have to lean against the tunnel walls to prop myself upright as I walk the final yards to the huge vent bolted into the wall of the bunker.

The closer I get, the less stale the air, though it still smells like dust and age.

Forgotten items litter the space—a pencil stub, a shoelace tied into a hair bow, a pair of boxer shorts.

Pale gray light filters through the cracks between the huge black rubber slats. It’s daytime Outside. I collapse on the concrete floor by the vent and pry the levers as far apart as I can get them, pressing my mouth to the gap, drawing in air like I’m sucking a thick shake through a straw.

The vent doesn’t open directly to the Outside. There is another tunnel beyond that goes for about ten feet, and with the angle at which it’s designed, you can’t see anything but shadow at the end. I stare and stare, trying to pick out shapes in the gloom, but it’s hopeless.

I slump against the wall, lean my cheek against the cold slat, close my eyes, and breathe, tears streaming down my face.

The vent is bolted to the wall with screws the size of my head. The steel plate is an inch thick. Despite generations of kids doing their best to dislodge them, the levers are perfectly in place. There’s no escape here.

I knew it, but I had to come anyway. Dalton fought eight armed men. He had no chance of winning, but he fought like he’d known me his whole life, not just a few days.

I don’t know how to get out of here—it’s impossible—but I think it wouldn’t be the worst thing to die trying.

I inhale and fill my lungs with air I thought was sweet when I was sixteen and knew nothing.

It isn’t. The little freshness that makes its way through the vent is saturated by the smell of rubber.

There’s something else, too. Something I don’t remember from when I was a kid. A faint trace of something familiar.

Is it rosemary, lavender, and cedar?

Is it my imagination?

I breathe deeper and harder until my head swims, and still, I can’t tell. It can’t be. The vent must open high on the mountain. The peak was almost a sheer vertical, dense with trees and undergrowth.

I concentrate, trying to unwind the notes, but it’s like being so tired that you’ve reread a passage so many times the words blur into an indecipherable mess.

I fall asleep breathing deeply, and when I wake up sore and stiff on the ground, all I smell is bunker and my own dried sweat.

It takes me twice as long to climb down to Level C. When I limp into our quarters, Bennett is sitting on the sofa, seething. Two trays are on our two-person table—my lunch and dinner.

“Where were you?” he snarls.

“Working late at the office,” I say without missing a beat. “I’m just swamped.”

* * *

The next morning, when Bennett returns to our quarters with my breakfast tray, he says with a smirk, “Neil says since you’re feeling better, you should get back to work. Here.” He throws a new-to-me pair of coveralls on the table.

“Of course.” I bare my teeth at him. “Sounds good.” It really does. My muscles hurt like hell from yesterday’s climb, but I’m so restless, I couldn’t stand another day cooped up in this room.

I gobble down my protein bar and mixed fruit compote, and to Bennett’s apparent surprise, I change right in front of him.

I’m not crouching down behind the bed or something, not with these sore thighs.

I don’t care if he sees me in my underwear.

It’s like getting naked in front of the furniture.

That’s what he is to me now. A crappy old plastic chair.

The coveralls are tight across the breast and hips, but the zipper zips, and that’s the best you can hope for with a new uniform.

I don’t wait for Bennett to go to the atrium.

Despite my aches and pains, I stroll there with a purpose, greeting everyone I pass, meeting their eyes.

That’s what Neil wanted, right? For everyone to see my face and be afraid?

My sense of purpose is even stronger today, although I still have no ideas or direction. It propels me confidently forward until I enter the atrium, and I stop in my tracks.

Everything is so small. I thought the smoked glass roof soared overhead, but it doesn’t.

It looms. Our American elm doesn’t tower at all.

It’s a shrub. And the smell I always loved—dirt and fertilizer, leaves and bark—is wrong.

It should all be stirred by the wind and baked in the sun, but instead the space I always thought was so grand is stagnant and dank.

My chest aches, filled with grief for them. The trees shouldn’t be in here either.

I’m distracted by a shriek from over by the lilac bushes. “Gloria!”

I’m suddenly swarmed by techs—Amy, Alan, Reginald, and Judith—gathering into a tight circle around me, but stopping short of reaching out to hug me. The excitement falls from their faces as they take in the yellowing bruises on my face.

“Oh, Gloria,” Amy gasps, tears filling her eyes.