Run.

It has been decades since that night, yet I can still remember the day I was brought here, to New Solas. It seemed too good to be true, which I knew meant it wasn’t, but all I could see was a beautiful shining city, with a government of honest, true men. It wasn’t until later I began to see it’s flaws, as I was patrolling the Destitute like I am now. I trudge past the poor; their teeth rotting, clothes reeking of sweat and alcohol. A young woman reaches out and grabs my coat. I turn, grasping my gun, but her ghastly countenance stops me.

 “Please,” she says, clinging to my clothing, “Do you have something for my baby to eat?” She gestures to the sidewalk next to her, where a tiny baby rests in a bundle of old sheets. “The last time she ate was days ago.” Even from where I stand, I can see how frail she and her baby are. 

“Yes,” I reply, holding out my lunch. “What’s her name?” I ask. 

“Alina,” the girl says, “And I am Aadya,” she adds. “Thank you for the food.” 

I smile. “You’re welcome,” I say. 

As I walk on, my mind is stuck on the fact of the girl’s age. She couldn’t have been much older than I was when I came here. I was stuck in the Destitute, too, until the Grahams adopted me, but I didn’t have a child. I wonder how old she really is since it’s illegal here to have a child if you’re under eighteen. Maybe that’s why she was banned to the Destitute. I glance up, surprised as the bell tolls midnight, signaling that my shift is over. I walk as far as Fifth Street, then, making sure no one sees, I break into a run. Running is greatly frowned upon, though it’s not against the rules. It shows a ‘lack of dignity’ apparently. I reach my street in a matter of minutes, counting towards my house, remembering that it’s the seventh one. All these houses look the same to me. A message appears on my watch, and I stop to read it, turn and run in the opposite direction, stopping at Eighth Street. A hand reaches out of an abandoned house and beckons to me. I reach forward and grasp their wrist, and the person attached to the hand pulls me in through a hole in the wall. I hear scuffling as someone lights a candle, casting an eerie glow on the face of the person attached to the arm that grabs me. “Tora,” the girl whose hand is now turning a brilliant shade of maroon says. “Tora, will you let go of my wrist please?” I look down, tell my hand to relax, but I can’t. Because if there’s one thing that’s not good when you’re in this group, it’s emergency meetings.                                                                                  “What happened?” I fight to keep my voice steady. The girl, Elenora, El for short, glances at Alana, her shadow, and when she looks at me sadness darkens her bright green eyes. “What happened?” I ask again, more forcefully with and easily distinguishable panic rising in my voice.                                               “They know.” is all El says, but I understand perfectly. The fear must show on my face, as El puts an arm around my shoulders, and I’ve never seen her touch anyone. Touching people is not something I generally do, and not something I generally like, making it uncomfortable to have her arm around me.                  

“Will they find us?” is all I can get out. If they do, all our plans, all our labor, everything we have done in this group will have been for naught.  “Intelligence thinks no, but there is a possibility,” El says. No. This group is my rescue. Even if we work on dreams, plotting to overthrow the government, even if we only have twenty members, even if we know it won’t work, we could dream, and we worked on improving the Destitute, we did. Now the people there have morals, somewhat, and they aren’t just a bunch of yahoos eating each other. But now, the Supreme Leaders know about us, and our efforts to bring them down.

"But how?"                                                                                              

 “I don’t know, but I suspect a traitor in our midst,”  says El. She has barely finished her sentence when a gunshot sounds overhead. “EVERYONE SCATTER!” El shouts, her voice sending people sprinting in different directions. While El and I tear through walls, windows, and doors,  we hear people screaming, the rev of an engine, gunshots, and soon the linger of blood smothers the screams. 

My lungs threaten to burst, but El looks determined to get out of town, so I try to take the pain in stride. My mind dwells on what just happened, trying to sort through the confusion. I wonder how many of those girls died, how many survived. I hear heavy footsteps behind us, pull out my emergency gun, and stop, pointing behind us. “Who’s there?” I call through the dark. “Show yourself!” A girl steps into the light, and I look at her. Her ice-blue eyes lack her usual humor, her happy face now lined with sadness, blonde hair limp and tangled, and blood covering her neck and leg. “Caya!” I shout, running towards my half-sister. I touch her arm, as close to an embrace as I get. “What happened to you?” El appears beside me, as eager as I am to find out who, in this peaceful city, would hurt her.                                                                                            “Mother wanted me to find you, she was worried, so I went the long way to your post, and I walked right into havoc, officers shooting girls, girls shooting officers, girls screaming, officers yelling,” Her face drops even more. “I knew right away it was you guys, so I ran right in, grabbed a dead girl’s gun, and started shooting officers. They got me in the leg and neck, but I killed four.” I raise my eyebrows, surprised my thirteen-year-old sister had the guts to do that. Caya starts crying, but silently, tears dripping from her chin onto her bloodied shirt. 

“So many died,” she whispers. “So many.” 

I look at her, confused. 

“Eleven girls died,” Caya explains. My blood runs cold at the thought of all my friends, dead. I’m barely listening as Caya tells El the details, but one sticks out. 

“What do you mean ‘mom doesn’t know’?” I ask Caya. “She’s probably freaking out because neither of us came home!”                                                                                             

Caya looks ashamed even before I finish my sentence. “Well, I couldn’t very well tell her ‘I might not come home because I’ll walk into a riot, kill four officers and have to run’ now could I?” Her voice rising.                                                                                               “Well no, But you could have run, oh, I don’t know, home, maybe?!” Anger is welling up inside me. “Because all we did was run, but you killed four Officers and decided to run after us, and they probably followed you, and now you’ve put us all in danger!”    Caya’s face is red. “Well, I’m sorry! How was I supposed to know that you were in a secret meeting, plotting to overthrow the Leaders, and not at work where you’re supposed to be!”        

 I can feel my face heating up.

 “So you just decided to pick up a gun and start shooting, when you could have just left well enough alone?!”                                                Her face is almost purple now. “Well enough alone?! It didn’t look well enough from where I was standing! Girls being shot left and right, you nowhere to be found, I panicked! I knew that any one of the dead girls on the ground could be you! I didn’t know that you had run! How could I?” Caya is shouting now, glaring at me.               I am shouting, too. “You didn’t need to! All you needed was common sense, which should have told you to run home and tell mom!” The look on her face darkens, and I return her glare.          El, of whom I forgot about, looks awkward. 

“Why don’t we just keep going, because Caya is here now, and we can’t very well send her back,” El says. 

I turn and start walking, not bothering to check and see if they follow. I know my anger is pointless, that it will get me nowhere, but still, I let myself seethe for a moment in the silence. The sound of Caya and El’s footsteps soon follows mine, and it is hours before we rest.

I wake to find Caya curled up beside me, and the sound of El’s heavy breathing close by. I’m momentarily comforted, before I remember where we are and why we’re here, in these dank train tunnels. We’re safe, for now, as these tunnels haven’t been used in sixty years. El sits up and focuses her bleary eyes on me. “We need to move,” she says rustily.                        

 “You think I don’t know that?” I answer. “We’ll move when Caya wakes.”

“But we need to move now.”

“We move when Caya wakes!”

Glaring across the lump that is Caya at each other, it is El who finally relents.

“You’re stubborn as a mule, Tora.”

“Thank you.”

El grins at me, and I try to smile back. My stomach rumbles, and I realize I haven’t eaten since yesterday’s breakfast since I gave my lunch to Aadya and her baby.

“As soon as Caya wakes, let's get some food and head to the Destitute,” I suggest.

“Okay,” El replies. “There’s a storage warehouse a little over thataway.” she points toward 21st street.

“Okay. And now we wait a year and a day for Caya to wake up.”

“What about me waking up?” Caya asks from her position on the ground.

“Finally!” El says with a dramatic sigh. “We’ve been waiting forever!”

I laugh, and Caya grins reluctantly. “Let’s go before we die of old age,” I say jokingly, but the sound of heavy footfalls wipes the smile off my face. 

“Go!” I yell, grabbing my shoes before sprinting in the opposite direction of the footsteps. Caya and El dash in front of me, their instinct to trust me leading them through the winding tunnels. We are fast, but we are loud, and soon we hear the officers falling into step behind us, their shouts resonating off the cement walls. I catch up to the others, gesture for them to take their shoes off. They stop, and in the mere seconds it takes them to rip off their shoes, the officers are too close for our liking. Our feet moving to the beat of our racing hearts, we hurtle past tunnel after tunnel, putting some distance between us and the officers, but never quite losing them. We run for hours, and soon there is a pain in my side. From the looks of it, Caya is suffering from this discomfort, too. But I don’t dare suggest we stop, not now, not ever. I will be on the run for the rest of my life.