In The Afterlight

“It was planned for months by my friend—he wasn’t my friend then, but he was so nice to everyone. So smart. We knew we would only have one chance to get out, and he was it....” She moved into the finer details of the escape, how they had communicated the details to each other leading up to that night. “Then it was happening...it was working...it snowed the day before, and there were piles of it everywhere. It made it hard to run, but we could see that some of the older kids were already in the booth—the guard box at the electric fence’s gate. They were trying to disable it—get the gate to open. I don’t know what was wrong. The camp controllers must have somehow blocked them. Then we just got...”

Alice let her have a few moments to collect her thoughts before pressing, “You got what? How did the PSFs and camp controllers respond?”

Zu couldn’t bring herself to say it. I remembered the scene so vividly and I had only seen it secondhand in her memory. To have actually experienced it...I snuck a glance at Liam. He hadn’t moved from his rigid pose, but his skin had taken on an ashen quality.

Finally, Zu lifted her hand, made a gun using her fingers, and fired in the direction of the camera. Alice actually flinched.

Why is that surprising? I wondered. Why would they feel any shame in mowing us down? How had they never even considered that possibility when they’d turned their kids over to a branch of the military?

“Are you saying they opened fire on the escaping kids? Are you certain they were using real rounds of ammunition?”

She said in a flat voice. “The snow turned red.”

Alice stared at her notebook in her lap, as if unsure of where to go next with this.

“I don’t think people see us as human,” Zu said. “Otherwise I don’t know how they can do the things they did. You could always see that the PSFs were a little afraid, but also very angry, too. They hated having to be there. They called us all different names—‘animals,’ ‘freaks,’ ‘nightmares,’ bad words I’m not supposed to say. That’s how they could do it. If we weren’t human in their minds, they could treat us that way and not feel bad about it. That night we were like animals in a pen. Most of them shot at us from the windows of the camp’s building. They’d wait until one of the kids got real close to the gate and then...”

I didn’t realize she’d attracted a crowd until I heard someone let out a faint gasp, and found the remaining kids and Cole standing a short distance behind us. Most were focused on Zu’s pale face as she explained this, but Cole was watching his brother.

“How did you escape that same fate?” Alice sounded genuinely invested—engaged.

“My friend—the one who’d planned it? They got the gate open. He came and picked me up and carried me out. I fell and couldn’t force myself to get up and run. He carried me for hours. We found a car, this old minivan, and just drove for days to get away. We’ve been looking for safe places ever since.”

“How did you survive out on the road? How did you find food and shelter?”

“We...I don’t want to say,” Zu said. When Alice sat up in surprise she added, “because there are so many kids who are still out there searching for those things, and I don’t want to tell people where to look for them, or how to wait for them to show up. There were a lot of ways to do it. You just had to learn how to stay invisible—not take bad, big risks.”

“By ‘people looking for them,’ are you talking about skip tracers?” Alice asked. “I looked up your listing in their network. The reward for ‘recovering’ you and returning you to PSF custody is thirty thousand dollars—did you know that?”

Zu nodded.

“Does that make you angry, knowing that someone is profiting off you that way?”

She took a long time for what should have been a very easy answer: Yes, I’m angry, it makes me furious.

“I don’t know,” she said finally. “Sometimes, yes, it makes me very upset. The price isn’t a reflection of how much my life is worth—how could you calculate that? They take a flat amount, ten thousand dollars, and they increase it based on your abilities and how much potential they think you have to fight back. I think I’m okay with that price, because it shows them I won’t give up and just go with them. It says I’m going to fight to protect myself.”

The screen on the back of the camera showed Alice zooming in for a tighter shot of Zu’s face as the girl continued.

“There are some men and women out there who live for it now, not because they need the money, but because they like it, or they think they’re good at it. It’s messed up. They act like it’s hunting season. But I think...more of them have been forced into it. They need the money to survive. The PSFs have to do it because of the draft. I think if they stopped long enough to think about it, they would see that they’re not really angry with us for what happened. Maybe they’re afraid, but they’re angry at the people who didn’t protect them—the government, the president. They have no power to remove those things from their lives, so they transfer the blame. They act like IAAN was our fault, not something that happened to us. So the economy crashing? Us. Losing their houses? Us.”

Alice started to ask another question, but Zu wasn’t quite finished yet.

“I knew someone like that. He was a good person. Great person. The best. The thing is—if you want to be a skip tracer, you have to prove it. You can’t get into their system or get any of their tech until you turn your first kid in,” Zu explained in an avalanche of words. She twisted the notebook in her hands. “I was driving to California with a group of kids and we were being chased by these two skip tracers—real ones, the hungry ones I was talking about. They made our car flip and crash so bad that one of my friends...he died. They were going to take me, but another skip tracer came in and got me out of the car instead—I was trapped by the seat belt. I should have said that before. I couldn’t get out and run like the others.”