Fear My Mortality Read online

  The words tumbled out of my mouth. “I need you to be there.”

  He didn’t look at me, his expression hooded and unreadable, as his hands tightened on the wheel. He was quiet for so long that exasperation bubbled up inside me.

  “How can playing at the Terminal be more important than my first death?”

  “Because I’d rather kill than watch you be killed.” He glared at me as we stopped at an intersection, a deep darkness behind his eyes.

  I struggled to understand. “Implosion’s important … ”

  “You’re a freak, Ava. It’s a stupid ceremony that lets people sleep at night. Seversand isn’t coming to kill us. Because we can’t die. Nobody can.”

  He tapped his temple and pressed his finger there, his eyes boring holes into me. “The only war we fight is the one in here.”

  I struggled against the burn of tears behind my eyes. A long time ago, our country, Evereach, had been attacked by Seversand. At school, we’d learned about the old world war that was fought over control of Evereach’s rich soil and water supplies. It lasted a hundred years while both countries raced to create a nuclear bomb. In the end, when Seversand dropped the bomb on Dell city—the city where I now lived—it didn’t kill anybody. After that, they drew up an international treaty: as long as each country’s children regenerated at Implosion each year, no country would try to conquer another again. There was no point in wasting resources on a war that couldn’t be won.

  But it wasn’t the past that bothered me. It was the look in my brother’s eyes. I’d practically said aloud that I was scared to die and now he knew my deepest fear.

  I didn’t understand why I felt this way, why death bothered me so much.

  Why am I like this?

  It was a question I’d asked myself a thousand times and I still didn’t have any answers. All I knew for sure was that I was alone. Alone and different. I couldn’t stand to see the pity in Josh’s expression. I slumped in the seat for the rest of the trip, until we pulled into the driveway.

  Josh was out of the car before I had time to gather my things. I dragged myself toward the front door as the local neighborhood watch drone coasted by the house. There was a happy shout behind me and the little boy pedaled past on a shiny, new tricycle, his fine hair puffed up and wafting as he picked up speed. His mom gave me a wave. I tried to smile as I headed inside, down the corridor, past the connecting door to the garage, and around the corner to the bottom of the stairs.

  Mom was sitting at the computer, visible through the open door opposite the stairwell. She jumped out of her seat as soon as she saw me. “Ava?”

  I was already part way up the stairs. “Yeah?”

  “Get ready, sweetie. We’ll have a bite to eat and then we’ll go.”

  I dragged myself to the landing halfway up, pausing as the air screen in Mom’s study blared after me, the excitement in the female newsreader’s voice palpable.

  “Sixteen-year-olds all around Evereach are preparing for Implosion tonight. At exactly six p.m. in each time zone, young people of every nation have proven their ability to regenerate, including teens in Seversand.” A hint of derision crept into the newsreader’s voice as she mentioned Seversand, but she continued without pause. “In other news, Starsgard has refused to extradite the computer hacker known as Arachne … ”

  Starsgard. It was the only country that didn’t take part in the world war or Implosion and its borders were heavily protected. On a map, the three countries reminded me of a set of lungs. Evereach and Seversand formed the lungs on either side, a wide sea between them, but they were joined at the top by a backbone of impassable mountains. Starsgard was those mountains.

  The newsreader’s voice faded as I made it to the top of the stairs, turned left, and headed to my room, passing Josh’s closed door on the way. Further down the hall was the upstairs lounge. I wanted to run through it to the deck beyond, push open the sliding doors, and gulp fresh air. Instead, I turned into my room where I found the black dress, pressed and clean, lying on my bed next to a pair of dark stockings. Shiny black heels waited on the floor.

  Next door, Mrs. Hubert’s lights weren’t on. Normally, her flickering television turned my bedroom into a disco, a kaleidoscope of moving lights. I peered out to see that her blinds were drawn and shuttered, and at the side of her house, the garbage can was overturned, spilling white plastic bags across the side path. I frowned as I headed to the bathroom across the hall to wash up.

  Too soon, I was dressed and ready and Mom was calling. “Ava? Josh? Time to go.”

  Dad met me at the bottom of the stairs, dressed in a new black suit and Mom in a dress similar to mine. Dad held out his hands for me.

  I didn’t know what to say, so I blurted. “I don’t feel like eating.”

  “That’s okay, honey, let’s just go. There’s been a change of venue, so we have further to travel.”

  I followed Mom and Dad to the car and seconds later Josh thumped down the stairs behind us. Climbing into the car, I tried not to crush my dress, smoothing it out in my lap.

  Dad spoke to the navigation system and the serene female voice confirmed: The Terminal. I started, glanced at Josh, and he smirked back at me.

  As the car passed the darkness shrouding our neighbor’s house, I said, “Mrs. Hubert’s place is dark tonight. Is she out?”

  In the front seat, Mom tilted toward me. “I’m sorry, sweetie. Mrs. Hubert had her final death today.”

  I stared at the window, frowning at my own reflection, as Mom said, “We mustn’t be sad. She had a wonderful life. I’m sure all her descendants will come to the wake.”

  “She just didn’t seem that old. I mean, her hair was longer than anybody’s, but … ” I remembered her braid slapping her thigh. Halfway down the back meant fifty years old. To the waist was one hundred. To the top of the thigh was two hundred and after that people stopped measuring as long as it stayed long.

  Dad said, “There isn’t always warning. Our bodies just stop regenerating. She must have been at least 350 years old.”

  Mom gave me a calming smile as the car continued out onto the main street. “I’m sure we’ll be invited to the wake. Come on now, it’s time to enjoy the evening.”

  Thirty minutes later, the entertainment precinct glowed ahead. Movie theaters, malls, and restaurants surrounded the massive Terminal skyscraper like ants swarming around a dirt mound. Once there, we pulled into a multi-level parking lot and followed the complicated neon signs to the entrance. The glass walkway opened into what looked like a living room, lined with plush leather couches and fine wooden coffee tables. A security camera drone floated in each corner of the room and on the opposite side, a big mahogany door advertised the entrance, with a touchscreen in the middle.

  There was a short line, with other people dressed like us, all in black. Mom tapped in a code and tugged me through with Dad and Josh close behind. Moving across a walkway, we entered an enormous, dimly-lit room, with people already milling about—500 kids and their parents—all of the sixteen-year-olds in Dell city. The room was flat across the floor, but the sides curved up and over like a dome around us.

  Surveillance drones hummed across the ceiling, recording what was happening for the eyes only of each country’s highest authorities: Presidents, Prime Ministers, and monarchs. Somewhere in the heart of Evereach, President Scott would be watching, flanked by the Head of the Hazards and the High Justice. The Seversandian President would be watching too. I’d seen pictures of her, standing at the head of an army amassed across shimmering sand dunes, her dark brown hair tied into a high ponytail and a row of jewels strung across her cheek from a ring in the side of her nose.

  To one side of the room, a group of kids stood praying, heads bowed, all wearing identical white cloaks that made them stand out like glow-in-the-dark figurines. I wished I could see the world the way they did—that our fate was decided by a woman in a garden who told a serpent to get lost and was rewarde
d for her faith with eternal life. Implosion for the faith community was a part of remembering and giving thanks. But the drones hummed and the room was like a crypt and it was impossible to think about new beginnings when the whole world waited for us to die.

  “Hey, buddy!” Josh’s friend, Aaron, appeared out of nowhere, fist thumping with my brother.

  Dad looked surprised. “Aaron, I didn’t know you had a sibling here tonight.”

  Aaron pointed over his shoulder and I noticed for the first time the Hazard officers standing at intervals around the room. They were covered from neck to foot in fitted green uniform, designed to allow them to move fast. Each wore a pair of drone-control visors, so transparent I could barely see them from that distance.

  The man Aaron pointed to had the same color red hair as Aaron and a drone hovering at his shoulder. “My brother’s with the Hazards, so I got to help set up.”

  As Aaron spoke, his brother’s drone drifted toward us, and Mom wasn’t the only one pointing at it. “That’s new.”

  Smooth and sleek, the drone was striped gold and black and was bigger than any I’d seen before. Silver protrusions dotted its underbelly, tranquilizer darts masquerading as decorative studs. Its movements were calm, wafting close to the ceiling.

  Aaron’s response was indifferent. “It’s a wasp.”

  I’d heard about them on the news. They were Weapons to Apprehend Suspect Persons—the latest police response to the Bashers. This one was the same black and gold as the other wasps, but it had narrow stripes all around its body, and I realized that each was decorated differently.

  Aaron winked at me. “I’ll be taking off now.” He shook my father’s hand. “Have a good evening, Mr. Holland. Mrs. Holland.” A quick glance at Josh and Aaron was gone.

  My skin prickled as Mom and Dad gave me a gentle push forward. Other kids were separating from their families and moving into the center of the room. Somehow, I ended up close to the front as we formed rows in rough arrow shapes across the floor. I hadn’t even had the chance to look for Hannah. What was already dim lighting darkened so I could barely see.

  I looked back for my family, frowning as Josh slid away from my parents, carefully angling his way toward the back of the room. He was taking his chance to leave and part of me sank to the floor. He could have stayed just this once.

  The lights went off and the sudden silence crashed over me.

  I flinched as sound boomed around the curved walls, an explosion in the air. A giant, orange mushroom billowed up around us: an air screen of projected images engulfing us in pictures of an inferno, as though we’d been dropped into the heart of a fireball. I gasped as the shape of the first exploding nuclear bomb splashed color across the height of the walls, swelling around us, a reminder to the world’s authorities that it was our city on which the bomb had fallen hundreds of years ago.

  The image of a woman appeared in front of me, kneeling inside the flames, her body cracking and roiling, separating and pulling together, trembling as she resisted the force of the explosion around her. I shuddered at the realization that I was looking at real footage of the day the bomb exploded.

  The woman opened her eyes as words etched the air around us.

  We are Evereach. We are invincible.

  She struggled to her feet, her voice a whisper that may as well have been a shout. “We aren’t dead. You didn’t hurt us.” Her braid swished around her body, flicking into the air under a force that I could only imagine, lit up by flame and heat.

  She reached to the ground and for the first time, I noticed there was someone at her feet: a teenage girl, her eyes big and dark, fissions forming across her skin and healing all at once like her body was a jigsaw puzzle fighting to stay whole.

  The woman’s voice rose. She threw back her head and shouted into the air, shouting at Seversand and all the countries allied with it. “Look at us! Our children are alive. You cannot hurt us!”

  She gritted her teeth against flame and heat. There was an echo of her words as others appeared, others who’d fallen. They clambered to their feet and joined in her shout against the wind and fire, the dust of exploded buildings, shards of glass and wood whirling around them.

  The people of Evereach roared. “Our children do not die.”

  Suddenly, my parents were beside me, each of them holding one of my wrists. I tried to pull away from them, and they shot me alarmed looks. Nobody else was trying to run. Nobody else was afraid.

  They each held a knife in one hand, gripped one of my wrists in the other, pulling me close. I tried to wrench myself away from them, but the image of the woman and her daughter ghosted through me, leaving me cold and frozen. Above us, the drones swarmed, buzzing like a thousand insects, capturing the flash of steel, exposed skin, determined eyes.

  When I died, I’d find out whether my soul floated or whether it left me or whether there was no such thing as a soul at all. I tried to take deep breaths, tried to stop shaking. We were strong, and we had to show the world that we could never be broken.

  The woman’s voice whispered into the silent dark. “You will never defeat us, for our children do not die.”

  Blades bit my wrists.

  Chapter Two

  My skin tugged and pain pierced me.

  I screamed, yanking out of my parent’s hold, desperate to get away from them, but suddenly there was another explosion.

  This one wasn’t an air screen.

  With a mighty force, it shook the walls and smoke filled the room. A light in the ceiling flashed, a siren wailed, and then I wasn’t the only one shouting.

  Someone screamed. “Bashers! They’ll bury us!”

  People clambered and rushed around me, all shouting into the chaos, tripping and stumbling in the near dark and the flashing red lights, the fear of being trapped alive driving them to the exits.

  A second explosion rattled the ceiling and there was a ripping sound like the walls had come apart. Bashers in full-body brown camouflage gear appeared like dark shadows among the throng. To my right, the white-cloaked kids took up their parents’ swords and slashed at the attackers while their parents fought with their bare hands. For a moment, there were blazes of white through the darkness, falling bodies, and then Mom shouted my name. She grabbed my arm and my parents were beside me again.

  A glowing shape flew near us and with it came the hum of a hunting insect. The Hazards and their wasps were fighting back. They’d clear a way through for us. But before I could blink, the wasp sped, not outward, but toward me and whipped to a halt. In the next second, it fired a dart at Mom and she dropped, a dead weight making me lurch.

  Stunned, I reached for Dad, but he crashed to the floor as the rapid fire continued, two darts protruding from his chest.

  Shock pinned me in place. The wasp’s thin stripes were visible in the flickering light. It was the wasp belonging to Aaron Reid’s brother. I couldn’t understand why he would send his drone to tranquilize both my parents. Before I could move, it swung to me, still firing. In another moment, I’d be a lump on the floor.

  An object flew past, smashing the whirlwind of sound and movement. Pieces of gold and black tore around me as the drone exploded. At the same time, somebody grabbed me up from behind, snatching me into a run.

  A distorted voice spoke into my ear. “It’s not your time to die.”

  My heart withered. My rescuer was a Basher.

  A motley brown and yellow camouflage suit and a face mask concealed his identity. A voice modulator was fitted to his mouth so his words were intelligible but inhuman. Every instinct in my body screamed at me to struggle away from him, but he pounded across the room, taking me with him.

  We were running straight for the wall. I tensed as I expected him to thrash me against it, debris crashing around us, burying me under the weight of wood and concrete. I was scared to die—I was worse than a slow healer. Once he buried me, I wondered whether I’d be strong enough to claw my way out or wheth
er I’d be pinned, trapped in darkness where the Bashers thought the weak belonged. Because that’s what I was and I knew it. Afraid of death. Agonized at the thought of people dying. Weak.

  At the last moment, he heaved me up even closer to him and held me with one arm as he extended his other arm, some kind of device in his hand. He punched numbers into it as we moved. I tried to turn away, but his grip was made of steel. As I braced for the impact, an opening materialized.

  We raced through as the door shut with enough force to take off a limb. The chaos in the Implosion room might have been miles away, it was so silent there. We were in some kind of short hallway, windowless, a door at either end. The Basher turned to the right and pulled me along again.

  “Who are you?” I jerked away from him, but when that didn’t work, I rammed myself against him, pushing us both against the side of the corridor.

  I sensed the air leave his lungs, heard him gasp a breath, but he grabbed me up, not answering my question, dragging me along as I shoved and wrenched against him. “Where are you taking me?”

  This time, he said, “Somewhere safe.”

  I stared in disbelief as we reached the door at the end of the hallway, a door painted blue with a touch screen just like the mahogany door at the front.

  The screen said: Please enter your code.

  He tapped at it and the screen went blank. Maybe he’d triggered some kind of alarm. I waited for the sirens to wail, but in the next instant, the screen flashed again.

  Please proceed to the Mirror Room.

  The Mirror Room. It was supposed to be a myth. Most rooms were open arenas with public viewing booths and video drones everywhere to capture the action. But there were rumors about private rooms, places people went to fight when they didn’t want anyone watching. The Mirror Room was one of them.

  Determination gleamed behind the strip of veil he wore across his eyes. “I’m taking you where nobody can hurt you. Not the Hazards. Not the Bashers, either.”

  “But you’re one of them—”