Breaking Point

My mother’s face was positively livid. “Don’t tell me how to raise—”

“Now,” continued the soldier. “Is there someone I can talk to? Your husband, maybe? When will he be home?”

I’d never seen her speechless before. The soldiers looked at each other, and the first made a note on the clipboard he was carrying.

“Very well,” said the familiar one. “You’re out of compliance with the Moral Statutes on seventeen counts today. Since it’s the first time we’re just going to issue a warning, but next time, it’ll be a citation for each one. Do you understand what that means?”

I kept staring at him. His features were too sharp, his hair too golden. His eyes were emerald, and hypnotizing, like a snake’s.

“What’s he talking about?” I asked. But I remembered the assembly we’d had last week at school, when a soldier, older than these two, had come to talk to us about the Federal Bureau of Reformation and the Moral Statutes. “New Rules,” he’d called them. “For a better tomorrow.”

I’d told my mother about the new rules, and she’d laughed. That bitter laugh, like when she’d lost her job. Like all of this was some kind of sick joke, one that would never actually be real. I knew right then that I’d have to pay more attention to them, for both of us.

“Of course, we could always make a deal,” said the soldier with the green eyes. He leaned forward and reached for my face, thumb trailing gently down my damp cheek. My gaze lowered to his gold name badge, where MORRIS was typed out in perfect black letters.

I know you. I should have been afraid, but I was so mesmerized by his touch that I didn’t feel his fingers slip around my throat until it was too late.

* * *

I WOKE like a shot, gasping and writhing, ripped from the nightmare by a hand closing around my ankle, evoking another wave of panic. The thin, shredded blanket tightened around my waist. I scrambled back until my head cracked against the wall and I blinked back stars.

“Ember.” The familiarity of Chase’s voice tempted me to lower my guard. “Easy. It’s okay. It was just a dream.”

A dream? I couldn’t trust it. I could still feel that oppressing weight, pinning me in place. I could feel the voice within me, drawing my tongue against my teeth to scream.

It was the last sound I’d heard before Tucker Morris’s fingers tightened around my throat.

I was sitting on the upper corner of the bed, knees locked into my chest. Without the candlelight I could only see a slight differentiation of shadows from where Chase sat on the opposite edge of the mattress.

He flipped on the flashlight, laying it at my feet like a peace offering. In its glow I could see the room clearly. The lumpy, bare mattress and the old chair where he slept. Our shoes and backpack ready by the door. The crumbling drywall wearing away to reveal the wooden bones of my sanctuary.

Tomorrow I’d step outside the front door for the first time in a month, and I might not come back.

“It’s okay to be scared.” It was as if he’d read my mind.

“I’m not,” I lied. I don’t even know why I bothered.

“All right,” he said slowly. “I’m just saying that if you were, it would be okay.”

I rested my chin on my knees, longing for the familiarity of my own bed. The smooth feel of my own sheets and the perfect weight of my blankets. I missed home.

“Why’d he turn me in and not you?” I whispered.

“I don’t know,” he answered with a sigh. “But he wouldn’t have if it didn’t benefit him somehow. I’m just surprised he waited this long.”

It did seem strange that someone would sit on this kind of information for a month before talking.

“How would it help him to fess up that I escaped on his watch?” I wondered aloud. Maybe someone had found out, pressured Tucker to talk. My mind flashed to the civilian woman who’d worked at the detention facility —Delilah. She’d been the only other person to know we’d left, but I doubted she had leaked the information. She was too afraid of Tucker to say anything that might get him in trouble, like the fact that we’d escaped on his shift.

Chase shook his head. “I can’t figure it out.”

We remained quiet, listening to the sirens downtown rounding up the curfew-breakers, and the bursts of raucous laughter from a room at the end of the hall. He shifted, and the rustle of fabric reminded me of the last time we’d been alone together in the dark, of the distance that had settled between us since. I wondered with a pang if he was going to return to the chair or even leave, but instead he faced me, all of him now on the bed. The flashlight made his white socks glow.

“I know this story,” he said with some uncertainty. “Sometimes it helps me sleep.”

I nodded my consent.

“Okay,” he began, inching closer. “I was…”

“Once upon a time,” I prompted. He looked down and smiled, pulling at the strings hanging off the end of his pant leg.

“Right. Once upon a time there was this eight-year-old boy, who had to move to… this faraway town. This all happened a long time ago, when people had lots of junk to cart around, so they had to rent this big truck to carry it all.”

I thought of how all the things we owned could now fit into one bag. He turned so we were facing the same direction, and settled back on his elbows, two feet away. His feet hung off the mattress.

My clasped hands loosened.

“We… I mean they, drove for two days until they got to the place in the pictures his dad had shown them. It seemed all right; big at least. The boy got his own room. But the best part was that there was this old haunted house up the street.” He grinned. “Classic haunted. It even had an old cemetery outside. So he went to check it out but this other boy—in a pink shirt—jumped out of the bushes and told him to get lost, because, get this, the place wasn’t safe.”

Hazily, that shirt appeared in my memory—an artifact from another life.

He laughed dryly, collapsing farther and rolling onto his side so that his head was resting on his knuckles. Tentatively I mirrored his position, laying my head on my bent arm. He was still a couple feet away, but now looking down on me.

“Turns out he was a she; she’d cut her own hair. Something about falling asleep chewing gum. All I’m saying is it must have been a lot of gum….”

I kneed him in the ribs without thinking. He winced. I’d forgotten they’d been broken during his arrest, but he began to laugh, so I didn’t feel the need to apologize.

His hand stayed on my calf though, holding my shin against his body. I swallowed. I could feel him, not from behind a sheet of glass, but here.

“Anyway, this girl was clearly crazy, out there all alone with her pink shirt and boy hair, so our hero let it slide that she was trying to boss him around, and told her she’d better let him in because obviously the place was haunted, and he needed to investigate or else… I don’t know, who knows what would’ve happened. So, they went inside….”

I smiled.

“And it turns out it was the scariest damn place he had ever been in his life. Not safe at all for little girls. He was fine, of course. Perfectly fine. But it wasn’t right to make a girl stay there, so he told her he heard her mom calling. Just so she didn’t feel bad for being such a baby.”

A giggle bubbled up inside of me.

I’d never been brave enough to go into that old house alone, but when Chase had shown up, intent to see beyond the splintering white columns and broken shutters, I couldn’t say no. I hadn’t known that the sour smell was asbestos and the raised veins in the wallpaper were termite highways. You didn’t think of those things at six. You only thought about how fear could be split down the middle like an orange, so both of you could eat half.

He pulled me a little closer and I didn’t even tense.

“You’ll never guess where she lived.”

As our smiles faded I noticed that his hand had moved up to the outside of my thigh, and his fingers were