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The traffic in the city was loud. Horns blared. Cars zoomed around each other. It made me dizzy. Made my head throb and my breathing come out too fast.
How did people live like this? It was too much. Too everything. It felt like my seams were coming undone, and at any moment, everything inside me would burst out.
We stopped at a red light, and she kept talking to me, on and on and on until I couldn’t take it anymore. My hands fumbled with the handle, but I managed to open the door, unclick the seat belt, and then I ran. A car swerved so it didn’t hit me.
More horns.
More noise.
My name.
I got lost in the crowd.
Home.
I just needed to find the mountain and get home.
It took me five days to get back to Tranquility. I slept on the streets and stole food to eat.
The second I was on the mountain again, I could breathe. I was free. It smelled like trees and fresh air and freedom. I did my best to trap it in my lungs, to hold on to it as tightly as I could.
I knew the way up the mountain like the back of my hand. Chosen had allowed me into town sometimes, but only with elders he trusted. He wanted me to learn about the people we were trying to stay away from, to see what life was like on the outside. He’d even taken me into the city so I could see all the people on the streets, the violence, the ugliness. He’d told me about all the horrible things that went on in the outside world, and I didn’t want any part of it. Everything I had seen proved him right, at least about that part.
I passed the houses lower on the mountain, the ones that weren’t part of The Enlightened. The closer I got to home, the less the weight in my chest bore down on me. The more alive my heart felt.
Mother was gone, Chosen would be too, but the rest of them would be there. They were still Enlightened and would help me understand why Chosen had done it. We could all still be a family.
I ran toward the small community we had built with our hands. The house I’d shared with Mother and Chosen, the building where the others lived…but no one was outside working. No one was tending the gardens, which had all died. Yellow tape covered the entrances, the windows were boarded up.
I didn’t call out for them. I ran into the community building first, but of course it was empty. The main room where everyone slept was lonely—smelling old and musty with layers of dust. Some people had taken their things, but others hadn’t. Some beds were made, others unmade, old food on a table…
I ran to our house next, heart breaking my ribs each time it thumped on them.
The blood had dried into the wooden floors. My mother’s blood. My blood.
But no one was there either.
I was completely alone.
Two days later the police came while I was gardening and took me back to the city. I ran away again, and again and again, every time going home. I didn’t want to be anywhere else. I didn’t understand what Chosen had done, why everyone had abandoned our world and the good work we were supposed to be doing for the Lord, but I didn’t know how to be anywhere else either.
And when I turned eighteen, it was a lawyer who came, looking for me.
Mother had been working with him before she died. She was going to leave The Enlightened. Leave Chosen and take me with her. It was wrong, what she had done. This was our home. Chosen knew the right way. He had been handpicked by the Lord to lead us to Righteousness. We were supposed to follow him. We didn’t use banks and speak to lawyers.
But she had done some of those things, hadn’t she?
She’d come from a wealthy family, the lawyer said. Had inherited money when her parents died. I knew nothing about that, knew nothing about people or family before Mother met Chosen and moved onto the mountain.
But the land had been purchased by my mother, the lawyer told me, and she’d been supporting our community before she was killed, and she’d left a will.
The land was mine.
The money too, not that I cared about that.
All I knew was, no one would force me out of my home again.
CHAPTER ONE
