Resist

somehow I don’t think this guy is going to find her entertaining.

“He is,” Dorian says. He points at Silas. I can’t tell if he’s being cowardly or magnanimous.

“Yeah?” The tattooed leader jumps down from the wall. He doesn’t seem to notice the cold. The others, dressed in green fatigues, stay where they are, still aiming for our heads. “Well, you’re trespassing.”

“We’re from The Grove. We’re fellow Resistance,” Silas says.

The man laughs. “Resistance and gasping for air?” Dorian pulls off his mask and leaves it hanging around his neck. I elbow Song, who quickly follows Dorian’s lead. “So what? Some of you can breathe. Maybe Petra’s methods have improved, but you’re wrong about us. We aren’t Resistance. We want nothing to do with you people.” He peels back his balaclava, stuffs it into his back pocket, and crosses his muscled arms in front of his chest. He is handsome, despite a dark scar down one side of his face. But he knows it: he looks at me and cocks his head to one side. I swallow hard and wait for him to look away.

“The Grove’s gone,” Silas says.

“You’re lying,” he says.

“It was destroyed by the Ministry. We have nowhere else to go,” Silas says, and a mild feeling of shame rises in me as I realize how weak we must seem.

“This isn’t a refugee camp. There were hundreds of you at The Grove. We haven’t the space. I suggest you turn around and tell Petra the answer is no.”

Silas drops his head. Dorian and Song exchange a look. Maude and Bruce shrivel into themselves. I step forward, and the man doesn’t warn me to stop. He raises one eyebrow. “We aren’t envoys. Petra’s dead, her people are dead, and the trees are gone. We’re all that’s left.” I feel the others watching me. Was I wrong to say what happened out loud?

The man is silent. He puts a finger to his ear and nods. “The landmines have been deactivated,” he says. He has an earpiece in—he isn’t the leader at all. The other soldiers, all carrying guns, jump down from the walls and surround us, retrieving our weapons from the ground.

“Get your manky hands off my gear!” Maude screeches, but the soldier taking her gun rams her in the ribs with it. She lets out a yelp.

Silas’s eyes widen. “Tell your goons to behave properly,” he says.

But the man smirks. “And why would I do that?” He looks at my airtank and then into my eyes, the only part of my face not covered with the mask, and I can tell he’s unimpressed by my need for it.

“We aren’t useless. We’re all well trained,” Song says. “I’m a biochemist. I can help create a storage system for oxygen.”

“You only need one skill here,” the man says. He steps forward and pulls my mask away from my face. Silas only has to flinch and a soldier cocks his rifle to stop him from intervening. The man holds me by the chin and pulls me closer. I hold his stare, refusing to be intimidated, and he smiles and replaces my mask, gently pulling the straps tight at the back of my head. I take a long, deep breath from my dwindling air supply.

“Let’s go and find out what Vanya wants to do with you,” the man says.

Dorian is the first to follow, but the rest of us hang back, exchanging glances.

“Did we come to the right place?” I ask under my breath.

“We came to the only place left,” Silas reminds me.

We round a bend in the lane and a wall appears. Although the bricks are old, the wall itself isn’t mossy or crumbling or threatening to collapse. It looks newly constructed, the cement cleanly holding the bricks together and the wall itself topped with broken pieces of multicolored broken glass to prevent anyone scrambling over the top. At each corner of the wall is a camera tracing our movements as we file under an archway protected by steel doors and a batch of armed guards. “Coming through,” the tattooed man says, and the guards heave open the screeching doors.

Inside I expect to see an old prison or school or hospital, but Sequoia is none of these things: it is a giant white palace, virtually unspoiled, and sandwiched between two gleaming conservatories. A dry fountain adorned with flying copper angels sits before it, and swirling here and there are orderly pebbled pathways and edgings. Most of the Palladian windows in the palace still have glass in them, and those that don’t are covered in plywood painted over in white, so they blend in with the building. It looks nothing like the heaps of rubble in the city, and for a moment I am transported to what it must have been like before the Switch. Despite this, I don’t feel like smiling. Something’s missing.

I elbow Silas. “No trees,” I say. A burning rises in my throat. I cough and hold on to him to stop myself from collapsing.

“Dorian, your tank,” Silas calls out, holding me up. My empty airtank is unbuckled from my belt and replaced with another. Within seconds, I’m alive again. I blink at Silas. “Why didn’t you say you were low?” he chides. I shrug, and he rolls his eyes.

Most of the soldiers are smirking, standing waiting for us between two undamaged colonnades. “Come on,” Silas says.

We’re ushered up stone steps, through a pair of wooden doors into a cavernous foyer, and whisked up several flights of stairs decorated with faded, gold-framed oil portraits. Although the exterior of the building is virtually undamaged, inside is cold, with damp patches shining like fresh bruises on the ceiling.

When we reach the top floor, the tattooed man flips open a box attached to the wall and pulls out a retractable mask. He presses it to his face and inhales. He sees me watching. “We’ve installed oxyboxes all over the compound. Pure oxygen,” he says. “Saves on pumping into each room.”

“What about those who can’t breathe on a limited supply?” I ask, my hands fingering my airtank.

“We’ve not many like that here,” he says, and passes the mask to another soldier.

The hallway is long and lined with doors. Above each, is a sign: Meditation Room 6 – Yoga Room 10 – Testing 1 – Testing 2 – Dispensary – Propagation. I tug on Silas’s coat and point. He nods. Although we haven’t seen their trees, rooms like this imply that what they do is not all that different to what we did at The Grove. We might be safe here.

The man waves away the soldiers still accompanying us when we get to a set of doors at the end of the hallway. Then he frowns. “Try not to piss her off,” he says.

The room is lit by natural light filtering through vast casement windows, and in front of them, stretched out on a scuffed, velvet daybed, is a slim woman with short hair that looks like she’s haphazardly cut it herself. She’s wearing a plain black shirt and wide-legged pants.

She looks up from a retro pad she’s reading and lazily rolls onto her side. “Maks,” she says, greeting the tattooed man. She stretches her arms to the ceiling, then slowly stands. “What a medley of mortals.”

Maks laughs. “Understatement,” he says.

The woman, Vanya, stops in front of Silas. “Hi,” she says, drawing her finger down his face. He looks away. “Do tell me you don’t need this thing,” she says, tipping her nails against his airtank. Her hands are lined, though her face is smooth and clear.

“They do,” Maks says. He’s standing behind me and places a hand on my shoulder. “We almost lost this one a few minutes ago.” I wriggle but his hand remains where it is.

“Well, we don’t use tanks here,” she says. “We’re close to needing nothing whatsoever.”

“I don’t use one,” Dorian says. His face is awash with pride, and if he were standing closer, I’d kick him. We all had our roles within the Resistance. Silas’s and mine were in the pod. It isn’t our fault we need so much supplemental air.

“I been suckin’ in fake air for fifty years, and no one’s gonna make me give it up now. I am what I am, and I ain’t ashamed of it,” Maude pipes up.

Vanya’s nostrils flare. “Drifters?”

“Actually, I’m a catwalk model,” Maude says. She wiggles her hips.

“And what are we meant to do with them?” Vanya speaks to Maks through clenched teeth. He removes his hand from my shoulder, and I relax enough to check the gauge on the airtank and adjust the levels.

“They’d make excellent benefactors,” Maks says. I have no idea what this means, no one does, but we don’t ask. Instead we listen.

Vanya sniffs and looks at me from top to bottom like I’m something about to be sold. Rather than fighting it, I stand tall and clench my jaw to prove how strong I am. I must be desperate.