《Dark Places》

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My feeble attempt at smoothing out the wrinkles in my shirt fools no one. We pass dozens of people huddled together, splashes of light blue and green from each others' visors making them resemble walking works of abstract art.

As we walk, we're bombarded with a dozen sounds, a hundred different smells, from sweet to rich and smokey, to the unsavory stench that clings to every city, no matter what it's National Cleanliness Ranking might lead you to believe otherwise.

Myriads of holographic signs drown us in muted-shades of holidays no longer celebrated - the soft yellows from the floating caution lights, the diffused lilac tones coming from the Sunshine Vitamin adverts overhead to the more violent shades of red, orange, and acidic green, a shade that matches the poison Marava's words always come dipped in.

There's so much in the Brights to distract anyone yet I can't help but think they can sense it - that the seven of us don't belong. That they can smell the musky odor of the trunk wafting off us in repellent waves, and know, just by looking into our eyes, that we're Liars. 

It's absolutely insane, of course, but regardless, my fingers continue to pluck and tug at the hem of my shirt. 

"You need to stop," Nol says as he strides down the street, in that all-to-familiar slouched state of his that reminds me of amoeba just before it splits in two. If he's feeling apprehensive, he manages to keep it below his surface. Maybe that's why he's got his hands in his pockets, pressing down on that nervous part of him that would give everything away. Or maybe he's just fearless, though, that's doubtful. Of course, none of that matters because my body language is so stiff, and antsy, that every muscle is practically screaming, 'we don't belong here!'

"You're overthinking it."

Once again, thanks for pointing out the obvious, Nol.

Despite knowing he's right, I don't want it to go to his head, so I shrug and slide my hands into my jean pockets. I began picking at pocket lint, which is at least one nervous tick probing eyes can't see.

Nol picks up his pace, walks a little further ahead of the rest of us while maintaining enough berth from the Collective to unmistakably be the seventh Liar.

Confidence guides Marava's walk, her head held high, her eyes glazed over as if the excitement of Sect Seven buzzing around her was nothing more than a fly she wanted to swat dead. "No one's looking at you, anyways," she says, and just then, she walks under a neon green sign, and the sickly way it glows against her skin makes her look delightfully witchy. I scowl, tasting the vitriol on my tongue as a comeback begins to percolate, but Mars' nods toward an oncoming crowd and everything drips away. 

Her words, the world. Within seconds, I'm standing back in the Facility. Immaculate, tile flooring props me up. Bleach and pine fresh cleaners clings to the air. A crowd rushes toward me, plowing through those of us gathered at the opposite end of the corridor, as though we were a roadblock easily broken.

People fall like bricks to the ground, blood oozing from crushed skulls. I catch a glimpse of the cleaning woman's pleading eyes, her outstretched hand. She'd wanted help, wanted my help, and I'd clung to the wall too afraid to move, to reach out and--

Then I see a hundred different faces, some so vivid it's like they were etched in stone while others remain soft, blurred, nothing more than fleshy blobs stuffed in long, white lab coats that flutter about them like angels' wings. The tops of their heads smoke as fire claims their hair, burning it to the roots. It melts them, one by one, and each face or blur twists in agony. Rubble falls from above, ruthless in the way it leaves behind no survivors.

Some of these people, the Techs, the Cleaners, the low-level clearance employees who'd taken a job ferrying our urine samples to different labs just to provide for their families, had to be good people. Believers in the FUA, praisers of the miracles worked at the fingertips of the Council. People like that, people who lived in the dark simply because they'd been denied the light, hadn't deserved to die when the Facility's walls had come crashing down.

Oomph!

A barrel-chested man slams into me and knocks me to the ground. The part of his face not hidden behind a sleek, holographic visor, frowns. His large, square jaw snaps open, his teeth filed to predatory points. "Watch where you're going." With fat, gnarled fingers he reaches up, presses a dot that rests on his temple and the visor fades.

Brown eyes sit behind mounds of unkempt black eyebrows. He runs his gaze over me, up and down, up again, down again, his frown worsening each time. "Bloody Scorcher," he spits, his annoyance made clear by the lines across his forehead and the vein writhing underneath the leathery skin of his neck.

Quint rushes to my side, accompanied by Rima, who both offer their hands. The man canvasses them too, dismissing Quint as quickly as he dismissed me, but when he sees Rima, he lingers on her face, his sleazy gaze wandering over her neck to stop at her chest and the way it heaves from lack of breath under the baggy cotton shirt.

He licks his lips, his leer growing more grotesque by the second. "You got any vids?" His voice and the silky smoothness it exudes makes my insides curl. I take Quint's hand and quickly get to my feet. Rima shuffles backward and shakes her head.

The man runs his gaze languidly over her one more time, drinking in every blond ringlet, every lithe limb, and delicate curve. "Ain't that a shame." He sniffs and runs a hand under his bulbous nose, which leaves a nauseating yellow smear across his skin, before activating the dot on his temple. His eyes disappear behind a newly reformed visor.

Rima gulps and I reach for her and pat her hand. She blinks at me, as though she'd just now remembered my existence.

"At least we know we're not in Kansas anymore," I say, as the man ambles down the street, fighting his way through a surge of people headed in the opposite direction.

Rima cocks an eyebrow in confusion. "Kansas?" She shakes her head. "We're far from what had been Kansas. Neon Brights is one of the largest East Coast Av--"

I chuckle and mess the hair on her head. Strands of white-blonde stand to attention, charged by static electricity. "I wasn't literal, Ri--" I gulp the word back. Her name wasn't Rima and come to think of it, her name was never Rima. Not really. What had Izzer called her? "Mason," I say. "It was just something I'd heard said in an archival vid. I just meant that now we know we aren't in the Facility."

She nods slowly, understanding not fully washing over her. In rare instances, the twins were sometimes remarkably similar. Tujo'd had inspired moments of insight and subtlety which were about as frequent as asteroids colliding with Earth, while Rima's skull seemed to grow extra thick and words or phrases took a Tujo amount of time to burrow their way in and start to make sense.

I shake my head and, noticing the glare Keran's shooting me, that in a more isolated place might be as deadly as a bullet, I pick up the pace, dragging Rima behind me. "Perverts like that asshole," I point my chin in the direction he'd gone, though he'd long since been swallowed up by the sea of people. "They weren't in the Facility--"

"To your knowledge," Marava cuts in. She plays with the nail of her forefinger, bending it back and forth, without applying enough pressure to make it snap.

I correct myself for her benefit. "Yes, to my knowledge. That's how you know we're here, we're really here. There're perverts."

Rima looks at her hands. "Sounds like here might be worse."

We're joined by Tujo and Sin, surprisingly enough, who has to hunker down as he walks to avoid disrupting the adverts playing overhead. Guess whoever was in charge of their placement, didn't take into account anybody over six feet.

"Sometimes the grass isn't always greener. Sometimes it's just as brown and dead as everywhere else."

Tujo snorts. "Spewing proverbs?" He shakes his head. "Did the Collective brainwash you on the ride over? Force you to take up their speech?"

Heat rushes to my face. I find myself gazing at Nol, remembering our time in the trunk, that shared moment, that microcosm of space that was just ours alone. Not wanting anyone to think too long about my silence, I look at Tujo and furrow my brow. "Are you guys telling me you weren't forced to listen to some audio of Della prattling on about antiquated speech?"

Tujo chuckles and I play into the joke more and slap my thighs. "Well, that makes me mad as a hatter."

Marava, per usual, snorts and speeds up, probably in an attempt to not catch 'our stupid.' Quint shrugs before starting a slow jog to catch up.

Tujo's eyes dance. He grabs Rima's hand. "Come on, Mas," he says, having no trouble remembering her alias. There's that surprising Tujo awareness that makes an appearance once every thousand days. "There's a V-cafe over there and part of the windows aren't tinted. We can peer in and see what really goes on."

I don't stop the twins as they hurry toward the window, despite the fact two blond-haired beauties staring into the window of a virtual sleaze cafe might raise a few passing eyebrows. Sometimes the twins needed to run and burn off some of that childish energy. 

"You're good with them."

Sin's voice splashes over me like a bucket of ice water. I stop dead, something I'm sure will elicit another of Keran's glares.

Sin shrugs and ducks under a floating advert for some electronic teeth whitener. A jingle accompanies the spam, some upbeat guitar strumming alongside a woman's breezy singing about smiling your best. "Work or play, capture the sun, keep it inside you all day..."

The vid fades to black, before returning to the beginning. "The twins," he says.

I shake my head. "No, I heard you."

He raises an eyebrow.

"And that's just it, I heard you."

He rolls his shoulders. All the hunching must be hurting. "I can talk."

"But you don't, usually." I reach up and run my fingers through my hair. "Or if you do, it's a few words and you definitely don't engage someone in conversation." They catch and yank on tangles, and when I pull my hand away, I've got a few curls hanging off them like coils of wire. "Remember the rumors that'd floated around about you having lost your tongue? I used to believed them, until--" I blanch, and swallow back her name. November. She'd been taken from us before Izzer could give her a new identity.

Sin doesn't flinch, though I do see something - loss, anger, guilt? - flit across his gaze. They'd been close. I think November had a crush on him, loved the appeal of the strong, silent ones. She'd said to me one day on the walk back to our rooms that they'd had similar upbringings and that she was glad she'd found someone, besides me, to connect with.

When November had come to the Facility, she'd been a mess. I'll never forget the girl whose bones protruded from her shoulders, whose right arm rested in a sling, whose shirt was covered in blood splatters, and who sported a bruised left eye and busted lip. She'd been taken from her family, we all had been. It took me a while to understand why she'd always said the Facility had rescued her. Maybe the Facility had rescued Sin, too.

Sin's gaze is far off when he speaks to me again, but when he does, his words cause a lump to rise in my throat. "Nove," he says. Not November. Had he ever learned her real name? "She always talked about you like you guys were friends." I want to say that we were friends, or as close to friends as you could be, but Sin doesn't pause long enough to let me speak. His words fall like a waterfall, pouring from his mouth at whitewater speed. "I told her not to trust you. Not to trust anyone. If she wanted to be a Councilor she had to be smart, and in it for herself." He sidesteps a pair of girls who gawk at a blown-up hologram of some sparkly-eyed, white-toothed teen idol. He looks back at me and nods. "She was right to trust you." He clenches his fists at his sides. A shadow creeps onto his face, despite the imitation sun projected on the plate's underside. "And wrong to trust me."

His words stop me dead. The world continues around me, mobs of people surging forward in maddened dashes to wherever it was they needed to be. Until the breakout, I hadn't been close with anyone in the Facility aside from November. Her room had been across from mine, and when the cameras weren't watching, or when the halls were empty, she'd stand in front of her glass wall, and me before mine, and she'd smile or wave or we'd exchange silly glances to pass time. Her disappearance, the lack of her desk in class the next day, the Cleaners turning over her room, wiping down the walls and changing the sheets to expunge all memory of her, never left me. 

Despite Rima's insistence that it'd been the tweezers some Cleaner had found in her room, had that really been all it took for November to get expelled? She'd been one of our batch's best performers, aside from Nol and Marava. If any of us should have gotten the boot for poor grades, it would have been Tujo, and if they expelled solely on not giving a shit, I would have found myself cast outside years ago.

A self-loathing smile fights its way to the surface. Sin'd finally spoken and he had to talk about November. He had to look that way, too, his mask warped by an emotion he couldn't tamper down, couldn't plaster over or rewrite to fit his indifference. Did he have something to do with November's disappearance?

The outline of his back walking away from me, fiercely lit by artificial sunlight and neon reds and yellows, makes him look awash in a sea of flames.

If Sin's words were going to leave me with more questions than answers, I wish he'd kept his damned mouth shut. Nails dig into the fleshy undersides of my palms. They tear into the skin, and I don't bother to stop when they break the surface.