Jordan turned the door handle and trudged into her family's apartment. She was exhausted. Her hair was sticky with sweat and her skin smelled like cleaning solvents.

Her parents were sitting on the couch facing the large glass window and looking down on the gardens. They stopped talking when she walked in and her father turned around to smile at her. "Hello, Jordan. You look tired. What chores were you assigned today?"

"All of them."

"Aw, come and sit with us." He patted the couch beside him.

"I'm going to bed. I was assigned breakfast shift." She turned and walked to the door across the room from her parents' room. It clicked lightly behind her and she waited for a count of five before opening it up a crack.

Her father had stood up and was looking down at the crops. Stepping up behind him, her mother wrapped her arms around his middle and rested her head on his back.

"You need to go a little easier on Jordan," her father said. Her mother stiffened and pulled away but he caught her arms and continued, "Maybe it's time to give her a little more space. Maybe even her own suite."

"No. She is not ready for her own suite. She is sixteen years old. Sixteen-year-olds do not have their own suites. Sixteen-year-olds can't even pick their clothes up off their bedroom floors or turn off their lights when they go to bed."

She snatched her hands away from him and sat down on the couch.

"I hear what you are saying, Amanda, but it's different here. There's a different set of rules for raising a teenager. We can't just ground her. And more chores do not necessarily equate with learning responsibility." He took his John Deere hat off and ran a hand through his hair and scratched the back of his head. In exasperation, he plopped the hat back on.

"I understand that, Farmer, but she isn't a grown up. She's a child. There have to be consequences for behavior. Even a child can be made to understand that they have responsibilities and obligations that extend beyond themselves."

Her father sighed and sat down beside her. "Maybe that's the problem, Mandy. You shouldn't be forcing her."

"Don't take her side." She turned away from him coldly. "We are here because of her. No, for her. We took her out of a corrosive environment to help her. Living here isn't a punishment."

"Maybe so, but we need to think about what that means to her. She is away from her friends and from everything that was normal to her. That seems a little excessive for someone going through a phase."

"A phase?" Mandy spun back around. Her eyes had narrowed to slits. "Don't you feel sorry for her. She was stealing everything she could get her hands on, clothes, jewelry, food...it didn't even matter. And it's not like she didn't have allowances and birthday money and...Hell, we would have given her cash if she needed it. She never asked. She just took. And took and took and took. Without any regard for how the things she took affected other people."

"I'm not saying she didn't have a problem, but that doesn't mean she wanted to do what she did or even that she didn't feel bad about it. This was a pretty drastic move. I'm not so sure the punishment fits the crime in this case."

"You keep calling it that. It's not a punishment. Do you feel like you're being punished by living here? Is that why you keep phrasing it that way?"

"No, I'm sorry. That isn't what I mean. It's not a punishment. And you're right. I need to stop calling it that." Farmer stood back up and ran his hands down the tops of his thighs.

"What do you propose, Farmer? Move again? After everything it took to get in here? All those interviews and physicals. We're a special case. They don't usually allow full families in here." Mandy waited for Farmer to answer and continued when he didn't. "I don't want to move. Maybe that's selfish of me, but I'm doing important work here. We're going to solve an impending World crisis...producing resilient crops that will feed millions."

"It's our daughter. There's a crisis in our own home."

"Her situation is not a crisis! It's a result of being spoiled too long. Our mistake. Yours and mine, sure, but she's old enough to understand she isn't the only star in this universe. That we all have to make sacrifices all the time. She has a plate of food at every meal. I'm in a position to help millions of other children on this planet. Children who go without a single bite to eat on a regular basis."

"That's why I'm here, too. It's important work. Look, I'm not proposing a move. We're here. We'll make it work. I just think we need to keep in mind that this is a stressful transition for her." He knelt down and took her clenched hands from her lap. "As well as for us. I don't want to argue about this."

Jordan quietly closed her door and rested against it. A tear slipped down her cheek and fell to the floor. It wasn't fair. They had each other.

"The Regenerist shit." Kylie was pointing at an expensive bottle of eye cream that purported to reduce wrinkles in three days. "Let's get rid of your fine lines."

Jordan gave her a look. "Right beside the security guard? Are you crazy?"

"Well if you can't do it..."

"I didn't say that." Jordan looked around. She pointed at a pink sequined tee shirt. "Your favorite color."

Kylie winked and walked away. She didn't look at Jordan again as she went to the rack and flipped through the shirts to find her size. She was so good at this. She always looked like she belonged there like a regular shopper. Jordan watched her for a moment and then turned her attention to the guard standing by the cosmetics display.

A young mom pushing a stroller had caught the guard's eye. Smart, Jordan thought. Strollers had a million places to hide stuff. As soon as the woman pushed the baby into the cosmetics aisle, Jordan made a bee-line to the shelf with the eye cream. Jordan rolled her eyes when the guard shifted to watch the woman's ass. The make-up was going to be a cake-walk after all.

Jordan reached the shelf and stood before it. The guard was still looking away. She reached up and slipped a box into the pocket of her hoodie.

"Hey!"

Jordan laughed and darted up the aisle with the baby stroller. She swung it between her and the guard, then ran down the aisle and led the guard on a short chase out the front door into the mall. Don't dilly-dally. That was Kylie's number one rule. Get it and get out.

Jordan was still laughing when she walked in Kylie's front door and headed up the stairs to her bedroom. She pushed the door open and the smile died on her face. The pink sequined top wasn't the only thing on Kylie.

Kylie lay on her bed, legs wrapped around Briggs' waist. Briggs' eyes met Jordan's. Jordan's heart shattered.

She brushed the tear aside and retrieved her tablet from its dock on the desk. Other than a few pieces of furniture, the room was stark and cold. Before coming to the dome, she'd been encouraged by her mother to donate all of her childhood toys and anything she didn't absolutely need. During one of her mother's many interviews, she had toured the family suites and discovered they were too tiny for everything.

Each suite held two small bedrooms, a living room, a pint-sized kitchenette, and a bathroom. The rest of the living spaces were larger but community-based. They included the cafeteria, a library, and community sitting rooms where people could gather to chat, play games, or discuss their work. Jordan called the community spaces 'sanity rooms.' She once told Jinho, "If I ever got sent to my room, I'd go insane with boredom."

Her mother had come home excited after her initial interview. She told Jordan it would be an adventure to live with people in a community home, but Jordan missed her bedroom. She missed her collection of hats hung on every post and peg in her room and she missed the crystal figures that had adorned every nook and cranny and captured the early morning sunlight through her bedroom windows. She missed waking up to a room filled with slices of rainbows.

She sat down on the edge of her bed, swiped the tablet on and stared at it blankly. The tablet had been her only source of entertainment her first week in the dome. She had explored the games and read some of the pre-loaded books, but the enjoyment of the new toy quickly faded when she discovered there were no social apps and no way to connect with the rest of the world. Only then did she try to befriend Jinho, and it had taken a whole week to convince him to explore outside the dome with her.

Jordan fell back on her bed dropping the tablet beside her. A red, die-cast Mustang slipped from the pocket of her sweatshirt and she held it up to stare at the tiny black wheels and lift the hood. She rolled the wheels with her thumb until a bitter taste formed in her mouth, then stood and walked over to her dresser. The top drawer slid out silently and she dropped the car beside a pair of batteries, and then slid the drawer shut. Her hand rested lightly on the top of the dresser a moment before she finally slid the drawer open again to stare at the car. The metal was still warm when she picked it up and slid it into her pocket.

Next to the dresser, she twisted the doorknob slowly and pulled the door open a crack. Her parents were no longer in the living room, and she opened the door wider. She shut the door quietly behind her.

Someone was using the sink in the bathroom. The burbling of the water stopped, and Jordan sprinted on tiptoe to the front door. The latch snicked softly as she opened it.

The long hall was silent. The dimming of the lights coincided with the onset of night outside the dome. The hall never went completely black, but having all the lights on a computer system that controlled the energy used throughout the day and into the night was a large part of the dome's built-in energy conservation program.

Jordan walked down the hall. All the doors were on the same side of the hall and they each had a metal plate with a number etched into it.

She stopped to contemplate door number 216. The laces of her shoes clicked softly on the floor as she danced from one foot to another and chewed at her lip. She finally raised her hand to knock, but then stopped before her knuckles reached the door. She put her ear to it and listened for a sign that someone was inside, but the room was silent. The quiet hum of the lights in the hallway was all she could hear. Her hand fell to her side and she turned to return to her apartment.

One step away, she turned around and swiftly brought her hand up to rap on the door. It was a long wait while she stared down at her feet and worried at her lip.

She turned to go, and the door cracked opened. Jordan stared into Pierce's startled look. He poked his head out and searched up and down the hallway.

"What are you doing here, Jordan?"

"Can I come in?"

"No, Jordan, you cannot come in. What are you doing here?" He stepped into the hallway and quickly pulled the door shut behind him.

"I thought...I hoped...I..." she started to cry and covered her face.

"What's going on, Jordan? Are you okay?" he asked. He tried to pull her hands from her face.

She shook her head and leaned into his chest until she felt his arms come around her. He smelled like dust, and heat, and like everyone who lived in the dome for any amount of time, but he also smelled of soap and gun oil. Jordan had asked once if he would teach her to shoot, and he had asked her in return, "What would your mom think about that?"

Needless to say, there had been no lessons.

Jordan pressed her face into his shirt and inhaled deeply. "I hate this place."

Pierce pulled away and lifted her chin. She avoided his eyes.

"Jordan, you need to go home. I'm not the right person to help you," he told her quietly.

"Why?" she whispered. "I love you."

"No, Jordan, you don't love me. You don't even know me." He waited for an argument, but she shrugged. "Don't tell a man you love him until you really know him. Don't give yourself up easily. Promise me."

"I promise," she said quietly.

"Come on." He took her hand and led her back to her apartment. "Being in the dome doesn't have to be forever, Jordan. Don't let it get you down. You have a lot of living ahead of you, kiddo."

He tugged the hood of her sweatshirt and turned to walk away.

"I love you, Pierce."

She knew she had said it loud enough to hear, but he didn't turn around. She smiled and wiped at her damp eyes, then opened the door and went inside.