Mira's POV
_
The alarm doesn't sound like a warning.
It sounds like a death sentence being read out loud.
One long, hollow wail that stretches across the whole Cratered Zone, bouncing off broken buildings and cracked roads, crawling through walls and windows and settling in your stomach like a stone. Every person in every house knows exactly what it means. One soul per family. Offered to the mutants. No exceptions. No negotiations.
I am standing at the kitchen sink washing a cup I've already washed twice when my father walks in.
I don't turn around.
I already know by the sound of his footsteps. He walks differently when he has made a decision. Slower. Heavier. Like a man who has finished thinking and doesn't want to think anymore.
I hear the soft sound of fabric being placed on the table behind me.
I turn around.
It's a white cloth. Folded into a neat square. The kind they give you to wear to the Dungeon Gate. The kind that means you are the one.
My father is already looking at the window.
Not at me. At the window. Like something outside is very interesting. Like the cracked road and the grey sky are the most important things in the world right now. His jaw is tight. His hands are in his pockets. He looks like a man waiting for something unpleasant to finish.
He doesn't say sorry.
He doesn't say anything.
I look at the white cloth on the table. I think about all the times I told myself I was being unfair to him. All the times I said maybe he just doesn't know how to show it. Maybe he loves me in ways I can't see. Maybe I am asking for too much.
The white cloth on the table says everything he never said out loud.
I was never too much.
I was never anything at all.
I pick it up.
My hands don't shake. They stopped shaking two years ago when I realized no one in this house was coming to save me from anything. My hands learned stillness because stillness was the only thing I had that was entirely mine.
My father finally moves. He turns toward the hallway. He pauses with his back to me and says, "The gate closes at sundown."
Then he walks out.
Not a hug. Not a look. Not even my name.
I stand in the kitchen alone holding a white cloth and I breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth like the school nurse taught me when I was seven years old and kept having panic attacks that nobody at home wanted to deal with. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. You are still here. You are still standing.
A small sound from the hallway.
I look up.
My sister Petra is standing at the door. She is seventeen and she has my mother's eyes and my father's way of looking at things without actually seeing them. She is gripping the doorframe with both hands. Her face is doing something complicated — not quite guilt, not quite grief, not quite relief that it isn't her. All three things at once, tangled together.
For one second I think she is going to say something real. Something that matters.
She opens her mouth.
Then she closes it. She lets go of the doorframe. She disappears back into the hallway.
Upstairs, I can hear my mother moving around in her bedroom. The soft shuffle of her slippers. The click of her bedside lamp. She is not coming downstairs.
I have been sacrificed by my family and the whole thing took less than four minutes.
I fold the white cloth and press it under my arm and walk to my room to get my shoes.
_
I give myself ten minutes to fall apart.
I sit on the edge of my bed and I let the shaking happen, but only in my hands where nobody can see it even though nobody is watching. I let myself feel it — the full weight of it, the unfairness of it, the specific cruelty of being chosen by the people who were supposed to choose you for better things. I feel it all the way down to my feet.
Then I stand up.
Because falling apart is something I can do later. If there is a later. Right now I have shoes to put on and a gate to walk to and a life that has apparently decided to become completely unrecognizable in the span of one morning.
I tie my laces. I check my pockets. A small folded photo of Senna and me from last summer. A piece of hard candy I've been saving. The little silver ring I found in the road when I was twelve and have worn on my right hand ever since because I liked the idea of keeping something I chose for myself.
I put the ring in my pocket instead of leaving it behind.
I'm not leaving anything behind that is actually mine.
_
I am three blocks from the house when I make the decision to go to Cole's first.
I tell myself it is practical. He promised me things. He owes me the chance to say goodbye at minimum. I tell myself I am not hoping he will stop me. I tell myself I am not still, after everything, waiting for him to be the person he said he was.
I knock on his door.
His mother answers.
She looks at the white cloth under my arm and her expression does something strange — a flicker of something that might be pity mixed with something that might be relief and I realize in that moment that she knew. She already knew it would be me.
"He's not here," she says.
And I see the curtain on the second floor window move.
Just slightly. Just enough.
He is standing behind it. He is there. He can see me on the doorstep and he is choosing a curtain over me the same way my father chose a window and my mother chose her bedroom slippers and my sister chose the hallway.
I look up at that curtain for a long moment.
Then I turn around.
I don't run. I don't cry. I walk, and I walk, and I walk.
_
The Dungeon Gate comes into view just as the sun starts going down and the sky turns the color of a bruise.
And that is when it happens.
Something cracks open inside my chest like a door being kicked off its hinges — sharp and sudden and completely without my permission. A feeling that doesn't belong to me floods through my whole body, so intense it stops my feet.
It isn't fear.
It isn't pain.
It is a pull. Like something enormous and very far underground has just noticed me.
And it wants me to come closer.
My legs start moving before I decide to move them.