Terminal

“I love you, mommy.”
Olivia pushed her aching, blistered fingers through her daughter’s silken brown hair, and leaned down to press her lips against her daughter’s forehead. She breathed her little girl in: the golden hair that smelled like pink strawberry shampoo, the forehead that reeked faintly of dry sweat, the eyelashes that smelled like the chocolate chip cookies they had made and burned earlier – an activity, which, had left the kitchen in a state of irreversible mess. Not that cleaning up mattered now. Nothing mattered now. But for some reason, one that Olivia suspected was her motherly instinct, her mind kept wandering back to the patch of splattered yolk next to the sink and the bowl of batter upturned on the counter.
Her bracelet caught on her daughter’s ear. The girl snapped her head up to her mother, her silver eyes wide and moist, as Olivia untangled the bracelet from her soft skin. For the briefest moment, the number ‘30’ flashed against her eyes. Olivia blinked; she forced a smile up her cheeks for her daughter, and patted the girl’s wet cheek reassuringly.
“Do you promise everything will be okay?” her daughter whispered. She winced at the web of cracks unfurling itself across her heart, as if the little girl had picked up a hammer and sunken it into her chest.
You’re a mother; she reminded herself, suck it up. So she said, “Of course it will,” and her smile didn’t even waver.
The girl wasn’t convinced; she had wrapped her hand around her mother’s index finger so tight Olivia was sure she would never be able to feel it again, and her shirt was bunched up in her daughter’s other fist, as if that way, they would remain connected forever.
“Mommy, will you remember me in heaven?” she asked hopefully, her eyes blinking expectantly.
“I’ll remember you forever.”
“Promise?” The fists tightened.
“Promise.”
That was when Olivia heard the thunderstorm of boot steps, and her daughter began to cry.
“It’s okay,” Olivia tried to say, but she knew her voice was shaking. She swallowed. “It’s just like falling asleep.”
The door was struggling against its hinges now. The girl buried her face into Olivia’s stomach, and Olivia closed her eyes, shuddering as she forced herself to breathe.
“I will love you forever and ever and ever, mommy.”
She opened her mouth, but the cracks on her heart had already spread too far, so she simply pressed her thumbs against her daughter’s chocolate chip cookie eyebrows, and mouthed the three words into the air.
When they burst through the door, Olivia was already gone, lost in the middle of remembering.
“Mommy! Mommy!”
That’s why...she had forgotten to add the other half of the batter to the cookies – that’s why they had burned.

2/17/2082: 12:05:25.
On February seventeenth, two thousand eighty two, at twelve A.M, five minutes and twenty-five seconds, James had an identity.
Now it was 12/17/2099.

Two months, he used to think, was a cathedral amount of time – a church brimming with minutes, seconds, nanoseconds, microscopic tick-tocks and clicks, endless loops of spiraling hours that were heaped up to the finely sculpted ceilings and springing out between the doors. He would open up the Bible at the pedestal and pages of crisp time would flutter to the floor. He would kneel before the wooden cross and give thanks to Abundance of Time. There was so much time in two months it was a god.
And then he thought about it. Two months was a simply a miniscule sliver of time, a hairpin slice of a millennium pie. Two months had become the shortest time in the world when it was all there had left.
Now James was sixteen, and feeling regret curled up and sobbing on the bed of his mind.
When James was little and filled up with so much invigorative air he floated, he would claim excitedly that he was going to become an engineer, a doctor, and, even, perhaps – he would turn his head seriously to his caretaker who was a former schoolteacher himself – a teacher. Perhaps, James, perhaps, the caretaker would nod, ruffling his hair with a crooked half-smile that young James could never fully interpret.
The old James interpreted it just fine.
You can dream, but you will never do any of these things.
He himself became the giver of this look: at volunteer work he would twist the half-grin and pat the kid on the head as the kid beamed up at him eagerly. I’m going to be important! I’m going to be the president! I’m going to live forever! A half-smile and a tousle of the hair and the children would walk away, as if their mission had already been accomplished.
Now James was sixteen, and feeling disappointment, bitter blood in his mouth.
A couple of friends had slapped him on the back last year – “Happy birthday, man.” – but he knew what it really meant: happy survive-another-excruciatingly-slow-step-towards-the-end-day.  No one had given presents: it was an unspoken rule: no presents to anyone past the age of ten; it was just too painful. But they had given him looks – looks of pity, sympathy. Poor guy never did a thing. Wasted gifts, that’s all he is. What can he do in a year anyway?
James swiveled the titanium band around his wrist. A slender 17 was etched into the silver surface, as if the band were some exotic designer brand of some sort, a glorifying label to flash about at parties and to brag to friends about. He remembered the day the band had been sealed together, a forever shackle around his left wrist: he had stumbled onto stage, his knobby ten year old knees a knot of helpless tremble, trying to walk straight while squinting past the sharp white lights. The podium had soared into the air then; it so monstrous and he so tiny, and then out of the brilliant whiteness the oldest hand he had ever seen loomed downwards toward him: the hand spotted, wrinkled, and faded until it had become a chalky flakiness, roughed around the edges by an eternity of work, calloused at the fingertips and blistering at the palms. James Keyer, someone read aloud to the crowd. Seventeen. The hand clipped the band around his wrist and the metal melded together. He had been so relieved; so happy, that he had tripped down the stairs in tears. His sister had scooped him up and hugged him, right then and there, they were crying so hard.
James had been the luckiest one – almost all his friends had been eleven and twelve’s. They had walked down the stage in blind shock, confused and disoriented, staring at the number on their bands as if it could somehow morph into another number by the power of sheer will. His sister, a year older than him, had been branded an eleven, and for days afterward she had sat in her room trying to wrap her mind around it. The day after James was branded a seventeen, she had gone. James still missed her, like he missed a piece of his heart.
At age thirteen he had dropped out of school and gone into volunteer work, training young children for the exam. How intelligent and talented the kids were determined the number of years they were to live, and, for some reason, James took it upon himself to help them obtain as the maximum amount of years as possible. If they were skilled enough to score full points, they were awarded ten more years. At twenty, they would undergo another exam, giving them the chance to live until thirty. After eighteen, they were expected to meet certain life criteria: having kids, marriage, caretaking, and tough careers. If they refused any of the above, they were subtracted years. If someone had enough smarts and fight left in them to pass the thirty exams, they would automatically have a position in Government. Over the past decade, only seven people had been accepted into Government, which, James supposed, was a bit depressing, but he founded happiness in the fact that most of the children he took care of were scoring fourteens and fifteens. That alone was was still a low score, but he knew that without his help, most of them would’ve been elevens.
One of the caretakers, George, a mind-blowing age of twenty-two, had wearily questioned James of his motives. Him, a perfectly capable young student with potential talent, deciding to volunteer as a caretaker? It was unheard of, simply ludicrous. Why not graduate early? Why not try a career? Why not party, live hard, die young and wild? To be quite honest, James had didn’t know. He loved watching the children smile, he loved his work, and he had willingly followed his emotions, never questioning himself his motives. He had been perfectly content.
Until now. Now bitterness bit at the edge of his happiness, bitterness and a faint tinge of sour regret. Mostly though, there was sadness. Maybe he should have seized the chance and done something for himself, gone drinking like half his friends had before they had gone. Maybe he should’ve made an effort to make more friends. He hadn’t kept anyone his life: his sister had been his only family (almost no one knew their parents); his old friends were all “gone” since last year, and nobody wanted to be acquainted with a guy that would die within the next two months. So he had remained, for the most part, quietly alone.
Now he was sixteen, and most of all he was feeling lonely: a rupture in his failing lungs.
Perhaps, he spun the band thoughtfully; there was still enough time for one last thing.

“I’m going out.”
George turned, wafts of greasy egg draped around his neck like a scarf. Holding up a spatula, he gave an encouraging wave. “You’d better not come back, man. Go enjoy yourself.”
“Thanks, G.”
“Just…say goodbye before you’re gone!” George called out half-jokingly.
By the time by the time James had reached the nearest maglev stop, dusk had shrunken into shreds of broken orange. His hands were thrust deep into his parka pockets, his band pressed so tight against his wrist he could feel 17 burning on his skin as he slipped into the plastic seats. Some kids piled into the seats in front, glassy eyed, their lips parted in laughter that rang too loud. Their bands flashed as they stumbled. 14. 15. 12. Young enough to make the wrong decisions, old enough to not regret them. He felt a twinge of jealousy.
London, a neon jungle of sparkling ads and business steeples, flowed endlessly across his window. Half the signs were barely flickering, their fluorescent bodies empty; entire towers were lost, fallen to masters of entropy. The remaining lights lit up the smoky city in an unnatural half-day sort of way, as if trying to breathe some energy into the disintegrating streets. The creation of aging, an old, blonde woman inside a high news board nodded to her invisible audience. Was ingenious. We can confidently say that the human race has taken incredible leaps…James strained to follow her as she rolled away, wondering how old she was.
“Horrible, isn’t she?” said a voice behind him.
Through the seat gap, James could just barely make out the outline of a body submerged in shadow, the corners of a face streaked with slashes of light.
“The creation of aging,” the voice – whom now James was certain was a girl’s – rocketed an octave higher. “Higher death rates! A round of applause; we can now live for an even shorter amount of time! Oh please.”
James pictured an eye roll, deep and heavy with sarcasm, maybe an amused grin. The light shifted, and a lock of blue hair, curled against a cheek, came into focus. Her wrist was still in darkness; he flattened his face between the seat gaps.
“Does it matter who I am?” the girl asked.
“Everything matters.”
“Everyone says nothing ever matters, yet you say it does.”
“So what they say matters, huh?” When the girl didn’t reply, James continued, “They say if you live longer, you have to be more careful. What’s the difference if you live a shorter life? I think everything should matter more.”
“Really.”
“Yeah, I mean, living for that same amount of time matters just as much as – ”
“Stop,” the girl interrupted. “You sound like a dying philosopher.”
James supposed that he should have found that offensive, but he didn’t. “Everyone’s dying,” he pointed out.
“That,” she leaned forward, the shadows pooling around her face, revealing her hair highlighted with frighteningly vivid colors, “Is the most cliché line I’ve ever heard in my entire life.” Veins of blue and red snaked down the side of her hair, clashing against stripes of yellow, green, pink, and purple that were unnatural against her skin, a dark and glowing tan left too long in the sun. The more she leaned forward, the more colors came into focus, until he couldn’t tell how many colors her hair was in.
He couldn’t help himself; he leaned back, sucking in a breath to steady him.
James had never been to Up before, but he had, like everyone else, heard the stories. The city that never slept, that raged on day and night with part and wild crime? Yes, he had watched the news. The city that had the lowest life span, where almost everyone was an eleven, where no cop dared to roam, the city where the Government had left in chaos because it was much easier than cleaning up the mess? The city where the people were the richest, the happiest, the saddest, and died the earliest? Yes, James knew about Up, the city otherwise dubbed as the “capital of hell” by George.
And here he was, face to face with a live specimen from the dirtiest city of the century, enjoying it, even.
His fingers curled into his palms as he spun back around, turning his back to her.
“Hey,” she said, and he felt his chair tilt back as she leaned on it. “We aren’t done talking, you know.”
He closed his eyes, and began to count softly.
“What are you doing?”
Nine, ten. She was still there.
“I can’t talk to you,” James said, without looking.
“You just did. Come on, at least tell me your name.”
He felt the maglev slow. The lights outside his window dribbled to a glowing standstill. “I have to go, it’s my stop.”
The doors hissed open. Peals of laughter rose from the front; it was the kids, laughing as they teetered towards the doors.
“You can’t just leave,” she called out from behind.
“I am,” he replied.
“Really? We’re dying and you care about ethnic and race and sexuality?” she yelled.
The kids were blocking the door. He sighed, tossed the bot-driver his coins, and was adjusting himself to angle through the teens when the blur, black and fast, struck him on the shoulder.
It happened so fast, then.
He was on the floor, watching booted feet leap over his face. He heard the startled scream of the drugged, the violent feet flooding into the maglev, the plastic little world vibrating in their wake. Flashlights were swept into his eyes, he squinted, and in a fit of desperate survival threw up his arms, struggling to roll onto his front, and when he did, he kept his head down and arm-crawled under the nearest seat and flattened his chest to the floor, shaking –
Two months, two months. His wrist burned, he was barely breathing.
“Julie McCarthy? I’m afraid your time is up.”
“What, didn’t I have, like, another ten minutes?” a drugged voice slurred.
He heard himself exhale. It wasn’t her. It wasn’t him.
“Julie McCarthy: please, come with us.”
“Dude, hold on. She has ten more minutes.” “Yeah, she goes at thirty.” “We were going to grab a beer.”
The boots shuffled, and suddenly there were frightened screams. The plastic seats shook.
Click.
A burst of screams – James could barely hear the sound of the body hitting the ground, but he could see it perfectly fine: a head of black hair bounced against the floor and thrashed around to face him. Her face contorted, her muscles jerked into a hysterical dance as blood trickled through her eyebrow and pooled into the corner of her vacant eye. A pair of black, gloved hands yanked back the hair and began to drag the convulsing girl towards the exit.
He waited for the other booted feet to follow, but they didn’t, and for some reason he was suddenly hearing his name being said over and over again through the screams: “James Keyer? James Keyer?”
Impossible. It was impossible. James Keyer was 2/17/2082: 12:05:25, February seventeenth, two thousand eighty two, twelve A.M, five minutes and twenty-five seconds. If he wasn’t February seventeenth, two thousand eighty two, twelve A.M, five minutes and twenty-five seconds, then he was nothing, and then nothing was someone he had no idea what to do with.
“There’s nobody else on the bus,” he heard the girl’s voice say.
He squeezed his eyes shut, and opened them again. A bead of sweat rolled across his eyelash onto the floor.
“Our sources clearly state the location of James Keyer,” the voice replied coolly.
“Then oops, your sources are wrong,” the girl shot back, not missing a beat. “Look, I don’t want to waste my life, okay? People need to get going.”
The boot stepped forward. James held his breath. The air was so tense with suspense he swore he could have reached up into the air and shattered it with his fist.
Then the boots swiveled on its heels, a haughty hiss of defeat, and clopped out of the maglev train. James didn’t move until the doors slid shut.
Cold sweat had soaked his shirt; he could taste the fear, salty between his teeth. He got to his feet unsteadily, shaking off his sticky parka. She was standing a few feet away, clutching the back of a chair, and for a fleeting moment he studied her: the choppy rainbow hair, the leather jacket and boots, the piercings and tattoos that ran along her skin like another shirt. Then his eyes were pulled towards the scenery of city whipping past the window.
He realized he had no idea where the maglev was headed.
“I’m guessing you’re James,” the girl said.
  Was he? He didn’t know. Maybe. “Yeah,” he said aloud. Then, because he couldn’t leave it unmentioned, “Thanks for, uh…saving me back there.”
“Don’t thank me. They’ll get you eventually,” she said.
He looked at her. “Right.” He turned his head towards the window. “How did you know it was me back there, anyway?”
She smiled. “The way you talked – you talked like someone whose days were numbered, and the number was one too short for your liking.”
He swung back around to face her. “I have two months left.”
“Really.”
“I’m serious! They’ve made a mistake. I have much longer to live, I swear.”
The maglev took a sweeping turn, and they leaned to one side, clutching the backs of the seats to keep themselves steady.
“They do that sometimes,” she said, flicking her eyes in his direction. “Sometimes it’s a few days off. Sometimes months or even years get taken off.” She adjusted herself as the maglev straightened. “In case you haven’t noticed, it’s not a mistake done by accident.”
James shook his head. “Oh please – what you’re stating is a common mistake of ‘Up-logic’. You people believe in fatalism and gods and predestination, and the fact that somehow our inevitable deaths are meant to be avoided, when, in fact, it’s simply just a process of enhanced nature…”
She reeled backwards, her lips scrunching into a thin line of disgust. “Process of enhanced nature? You ‘people’? Fatalism? Just listen to yourself. As if we weren’t part of the human race, as if the government never makes up any rules! The rest of you need to start facing reality, James, you need to start facing reality. Who do you think creates the rules? Who – ”
“The system!” James yelled, waving a hand. “Overpopulation and indefinite aging is a mistake of nature, but the system fixed this! You can’t break the laws created by the system, all right? It’s pure science; it’s been integrated into nature. You can’t outlive your assigned number of days, it’ll throw the entire system off balance, you can’t be taken early, and you can’t cheat nature.” He stopped, realizing that he had his hand raised defiantly in the air in a jabbing gesture. The girl had shrunken back against the seats with a face clouded with anger. Quietly he withdrew his fingers and wriggled them into his pockets. “You just can’t.”
She tilted her head, letting the tangled strings of rainbow fell across her eyes. “Then what do you call me?” And she finally drew back her sleeves.
He stared at her pale sheet of skin for a moment, uncomprehending. Even when he ran his eyes up and down her white, curled fingers and the jutting bones of her wrists wrapped in an unbroken sheet of silken, milky skin, he could not fathom. He reached out to circle his thumb around her ivory wrists – still, he could not understand; and even when he placed his fingers across her tiny pulse that tha-dumped under under his very own skin he could not grasp it.
“Who are you?” his voice shivered with awe.
“My name is Dimension,” she told him, “And I can live forever.”
James stared at her empty, band-less wrists. “But…science. No one can live forever. The law…”
“I’m not bound by the law,” Dimension said. She held out her wrists. “Don’t you see? My life is not limited by anything.”
“But your identity…”
“I’m nineteen now – nine years ago I was assigned a sixteen. But no one ever came came to get me. I don’t know why, but ever since, I’ve been free. Free.” She smiled at him, her eyes glistening. “You can’t imagine what it’s like, living without limits – without knowing when you’d die. You have to be so careful, it’s just like your life is a glass, as thin as paper, and at every little shudder of hurt it’ll disintegrate into dust.”
He closed his eyes, and tried to imagine wrists light enough to take the weight off his chest, and days that lingered by so lazily he could forget his own birthday. “I…can’t imagine,” he admitted.
“I don’t even count the days anymore,” she said.
No counting days? James blinked, furrowing his brows.
“They miscount days, months,” Dimension continued, “And sometimes, years. But it isn’t a mistake.” She closed her eyes, taking in a breath to steady herself. Just as she opened her her mouth, the maglev began to slow, sending the two of them rocking backwards. James reached forward to grip the back of a chair.
“Why isn’t a mistake?!” he shouted above the engines.
“Because my – ”
But the maglev had stopped, the doors already hissing, mechanical beeps being sounded throughout. He knew that when the glass panels opened, a fresh swarm of impatient people would surge in, inevitably flooding them both in an inescapable ocean. A perfect trap.
“Come with me.”
He reached for her arm and moved towards the opening doors. Faces and palms were pressed against the glass and for a moment, he caught a flash of their faces – their fatigued expressions fused into a uniform sea of weariness, their eyes the same anxiety and desperateness that he had seen reflected in his own so many times. Then he pulled Dimension into the torrent of protruding elbows and flailing limbs.
Somehow, above the bedlam, he caught a bot say: Welcome to Up City Station, and his heart plunged to the pit of his stomach.
“Wait – James –”
“Come on, we have to get out of the crowd,” he yelled back, dragging her through the thickening throng of people.
“They’re going to be finding you!”
“Then I can hide,” he called back, “How did you do it?”
He stumbled as the bodies gave way to clear expanse of metal station space.
“That’s the thing.” Dimension moved in front of him. “I didn’t.”
He stared at her. “What do you mean?”
“I mean it wasn’t me who did the real hiding. Look, it isn’t safe here, we need to leave and find somewhere to lay low for a while.”
“That’s what I’m suggesting,” he wiped his forehead; the back of his hand came away dripping. “Do you know anywhere to…lay low?”
Dimension tucked a maroon piece of hair behind her ear and cocked an eyebrow.

“I thought you said you didn’t do any ‘real hiding’.”
James turned the red metal cylinder, a cylinder that screamed a word he did not understand, between his palms. Coca Cola, it claimed in bubbly letters. That was what everything seemed like here: bubbly. The bar at the front still used wood, and the hand-operated front door still had a little chime on the top of it that giggled pleasantly when pushed.
“I don’t do any ‘real hiding’,” Dimension said. She handed him a glass of water.
“Really? Then who the heck comes to these places?” He set the cylinder to one side.
“No one comes to a twenties bar anymore. But that isn’t what I meant.” She took a sip. “What I meant was, I’m not the one that hid me.”
He glanced at her and lifted the glass to his lips. Under the neon electric lighting her features seemed even crazier, a canvas of clashing color. For a moment he could almost hear George snarling, capital of…
“My mother,” she was saying, “was taken before her time.”
Time. 17 burned against his skin, and his head swam. He winced.
“She was a 30, the eighth one. But she was taken at 22.”
“22!”
“Sh, let me finish. I could never understand why, but I think I’ve figured it out. I’m a 19, right?”
James narrowed his eyes. “You aren’t suggesting…”
“I am. But then again, how am I the one to really know?”
“Impossible,” James countered. “The law is against time transfers – ”
“I’m shielded by my mother’s time-transfer, and until then, they won’t be able to trace me. That alone, breaks every law we’ve ever known.” Dimension shrugged, taking another sip. The icy condensation dripped down her fingers and spattered against the wooden tables. “My mother and I used to bake cookies. And when I complained about the oven taking too long, she would sit me down with a glass of milk and tell me stories to pass the time. The stories I most loved…”
James snorted. “You can’t possibly be talking about those.”
She smiled and cast her eyes to her drink. “I am. The stories of the Legends. She told it differently from other people. You know how each story begins…”
James recited: “ ‘A thousand years ago, the human race lived in freedom, not bound in shackles of time’?”
“ ‘They knew not the days where they would perish,’ ” Dimension nodded, “ ‘and wasted each day trapped in ignorance.’ ”
“ ‘And eventually they multiplied, destroying life and beauty’…all that stuff,” James said. “That’s not so different.”
“Well, you know each story ends with the Legends multiplying and ‘destroying themselves with self-inflicted greed’ or whatever?”
James nodded.
“Well, my mother always said, ‘And eventually they flourished like wild flowers across the earth, living hidden in scattered pockets among the cities of today.’ ”
James stared at her. “You can’t possibly be serious.”
“I’ve been searching for them,” she said quietly.
“Okay. Okay, first of all, the Legends don’t exist,” James groaned, rubbing his hands against his temples. “They’re bedtime stories. Pure fiction! Second, they literally can’t exist. Even if the Legends can age indefinitely, they can’t anymore. Not since the system – ”
“James, I age indefinitely.”
James opened his mouth to respond, but instead found himself gazing at her in dumfounded realization. He closed his mouth, and then managed a weak, “Maybe…time transfer? Time…transfer…I guess it works?”
“Who says what works what way anymore, anyway?” he heard her whisper softly. She was cupping her drink that was making a soggy circle on the wood, her green eyes locking fast into his. “I’m still here, aren’t I?”
He nodded, slowly. “I…” Am 2/17/2082: 12:05:25, James Keyer. Repeated through his head was the same line, a train – a rattling of the tracks of his head, an endless loop.
“James?” Was she was looking at him, were her green eyes swimming in concern?
James closed his eyes. A church steeple, stamped against a sprawl of purple.
“James, get up. Right now, James!”
“I know where I was going…” Dimension was standing, clutching the empty glass.
“I think I saw one of them, through the window,” she whispered.
“Before I saw you, do you know where I was headed?”
“James, I don’t…”
“You don’t know. I was headed for the church. I wasn’t even trying for salvation, I just wanted to see a damn church, that was all I wanted.”
“No. No, no…”
A far-off giggle, a loud, pleasant chime that filled the aching in his ears. James looked up, the corners of his mouth folding upwards, but Dimension was grabbing him, stuffing his head down below the seat.
“Under the table. Now!” she spat, and obediently James slid under the booth, still holding onto his glass of water. He peered through the shadows to see Dimension crouched next to him. She put a finger to her lips. The scuffling of booted feet filled the bar. He could hear people screaming, chairs being scraped against floors, fleshy thumps. He closed his eyes and felt his lungs crumple smaller and smaller into a tiny, wet wad.
Then he felt her lips against his ear – it was so sudden he flinched and turned his head towards her, his cheek colliding with her mouth. He froze, but Dimension either ignored it or hadn’t noticed; she grabbed the corners of his chin and began whispering urgently.
“Listen carefully, we haven’t got much time, and I haven’t told you everything you need to know. First, you need to understand that they’re going to take you - ”
“What?”
“Listen. It isn’t a mistake. They take those who they know will ‘rise against the system’, those who will rebel, and they take them before their time. I don’t know how they know who will do what, but they do. Now you need to understand that there is a way out – ”
“James Keyer. James Keyer.” Shuffling boots, terrified yells.
Tears poured down James’ face. “I don’t – I can’t understand this.”
“James, you need to,” Dimension hissed angrily, shaking him. “Listen. The system isn’t real. You don’t die; they’re going to take you and kill you. When they question you, remain faithful to their beliefs, don’t get upset – they’ll wipe your memory and allow you to continue if your performance is exemplary – ”
The sound of clicking boots was drawing near.
“James, do you understand?” she shook him again.
He didn’t. He was lost, disoriented, confused; all he could feel was the cold knife of fear embedded in his chest, and a crushing sense of dark, numb uncertainty that seemed to be slowly swallowing him…
“They’re going to ask you if you agree with murder as a solution to overpopulation and they’re going to ask you if you think the rigged tests are advantageous to society, and you absolutely must say yes! James?”
“Rigged tests? Murder?” he murmured.
“James, please,” she begged. “You have to believe me…”
She turned his face towards her and jolted in shock.
His face was flooded with tears, his eyes wide and red, clouded with disorientation. He was staring at her blankly, as if he couldn’t see her, his once-friendly face replaced by a ghastly, empty expression that made him disturbingly unrecognizable.
Her heart plummeted. Already James had slipped, had gone beyond her reach. The same blank look he was giving her was the same blank look she had seen a thousand times; a look that signaled the end of a person’s mind, the end of reasoning and existence. He was gone; she had failed. Dimension had broken another one of them.
She dropped her hands away from his face. Immediately his head sunk spinelessly into his chest and he slumped over. His limbs went limp, saliva dripped from the corner of his mouth, and his hollow eyes continued to stare into nothingness. She bit back the wave of tears that so often accompanied this moment of pain and loss, and slunk against the wall as the booted feet dragged the vacant shell of a boy out from under the table and across the floor. Her hands shook violently as she pressed them against her trembling lips.
Then, flashes-
  -her mother, the screams-
  -“I’ll remember you forever…”-
  -Loss-
  -Unbearable pain-
Screams, the scuffling of boots, a chime of the door, and they were gone.

Dimension spent much of the maglev trip in tears, as she usually did after her losses. She snuffled, trying to bury her tears in her hands. Even during the grueling walk home she kept wiping her eyes. She just couldn’t wipe the puffiness away.
  When she arrived at camp, and people asked her how Recruitment went, she burst into tears. The saying “another day, another loss” went around, and she got several pats on the back, but she didn’t feel any better. She trudged up to the living quarters to stare listlessly out the window.
With her legs drawn to her chest and her head in her arms, she felt tranquility gradually being restored within her. The flat, barren orange landscape, alit by the dotted campfires and countless torches, uninterrupted and wild with the prospect of life, was irresistibly soothing. Staring out at something that was not the ruins of a metropolis comforted her, filled her up with some hope…
It would be okay. It would, she told herself as she gazed into the starry stillness. They would, someday, prevail; they would, someday, rise out of the long-forgotten ashes and swarm into the Cities, raising their band-less fists in the air, screaming the words that once only existed in bedtime stories, defying the rules that so many thought true. She would, someday, run wildly into the city, mouth aflame with the words Olivia! Olivia! Olivia! She would, someday, avenge her mother, her family, and her friends that were murdered in cold blood. They would, someday…and she hoped someday wasn’t too far. She hoped she would live to be part of it.
Her eyes flitted across the campfires and rested on a sign that roused her, that invigorated her spirits and gently nudged a slow smile onto her face. Whenever she was desolate or lost, all she needed was to glance at the sign to feel her heart beat faster and her mind become more alert, to remember the true purpose her existence served. A rush of adrenaline surged through her as she raised her eyes to the sign arched over the entrance of the camp in glorious, scratched handwriting –
– The Legends Live On.