“There’s so much more to this than you could possibly understand,” Scott finally answered—it was a lazy move by a cowardly parent: expressing that she couldn’t understand and so therefore didn’t deserve answers. He had always been better than that. Always.

“I want to see Grant,” Lucy stated and put her hands on her hips. “Please?”

With a deep sigh, Scott looked at his oldest daughter and then scratched at the stubble on his chin. “You can’t.”

“I have to.”

“No.”

“His letter says he’s dead. Is he dead?”

“I can’t answer that—”

She took a defiant step closer. “You owe me an answer. You owe me that much.”

“Lucy…” Scott closed his eyes. “Grant is gone. Grant is gone and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

She hadn’t moved in over an hour. Her mother put away the food items—collections of grains and fruits that Maxine planned to use for a special family dinner—in the small cupboards and stepped over Lucy’s body on her way to make beds in the two bedrooms. It was like Lucy didn’t exist. She didn’t have any energy to cry or fight; instead she just stayed on the floor and hoped someone would kill her.

Maybe someone would step on her head on accident. Maybe someone would come and tank her anyway.

Lucy hugged Grant’s letter to her chest.

Maxine wandered over and stood above Lucy, with her arms over her chest.

“Get up,” she instructed.

Without reacting, Lucy stayed where she was.

“I’m taking you to the Center. It’s not healthy to stay cooped up in this apartment.”

“You think so?” Lucy stated, dripping with all the facetiousness she could muster, and then she rolled on her side, away from her mother.

For her entire life, Lucy had loved and adored her parents. While the rest of her teen friends wallowed in angst about over-protectiveness and fought ad nauseam about cell phones, grades, dating, and privacy, Lucy thought of her mother as one of her closest friends and looked up to her father as a wise leader. The strangest part was how quickly the facade tumbled, and how instantaneously her disillusionment took over. When she felt a tug of remorse for judging them too harshly, her mind pulled her back into the grim reality of the System. Housed inside these walls, walking freely and comfortably were people who, at the very least, were complicit in the release of a virus that killed billions of people. Billions.

With the loss so staggering, it was difficult to comprehend.

She had no answers, no understanding of why. She only had a face of evil: Huck. And her own father. And now, she realized, her mother too.

“I’m serious,” Maxine stated. She reached down to lift Lucy off of the ground, but Lucy yanked her arm back and tucked herself into a ball.

“The Center. The System. The Sky Room.”

Maxine stood directly over her daughter, both legs on either side, and peered down with her hands on her hips. She was seething, her chest rising and falling in rapid bursts, her eyes narrowed. “Why are you acting like this?”

“Because I’m a teenager,” Lucy replied with a flippant eye-roll. She was unafraid of being slapped again.

“I want to help. But you have to let me in,” Maxine replied. Lucy looked at her mother and felt a twinge of remorse for her flippancy. Her mother was worried. She’d never catered to Lucy before.

There was a knock on the door. Lucy knew that the doors in the pods were unlocked, so a knock was strange—someone from outside their family was waiting to be let inside. Feigning disinterest, Lucy kept her eyes on the door as her mother, with a sigh, left her post to answer it.

As Maxine opened the door wide, Lucy, from her vantage point on the floor, saw the girl from her first day standing outside in the hall. The one who had peered at her and closed the door.

“Hello, Cassandra,” Maxine said with a sigh. “Galen went to the Center…then he’s an assistant cook in the Sky Room today. He’s not here, if that’s who you’re looking for.”

The girl named Cassandra ignored Maxine’s exasperated expression and clear dismissal. Unlike anyone Lucy had ever met before, the girl disregarded Maxine’s outstretched arm across the threshold and slithered her way into the King family residence.

“No, no,” the girl said and she walked straight up to Lucy. “I came to see her.”

Maxine’s shoulders slumped, and she looked back out into the now-empty hallway, and then shut the door. “Come in, of course,” she said to the closed door before turning around.

Lucy was able to get a good look at the girl without moving. Her sleek black hair was parted down the middle and braided into two long plaits; large golden hoops dangled from her ears, and pale pink lipstick glistened on her lips. Despite all the surrounding factors of their living situation, the girl—Cassandra—was stylish in a red shirt-dress and a yellow belt. She spoke with a slight accent, although Lucy couldn’t place it.  She had to be close to Lucy’s age, although even age seemed relative in the System. Her dark skin was flawless and smooth.

But it was her eyes that caused Lucy pause. One eye was the color of night and it was so dark that even the pupil blended into the iris: just a dark black circle. Her other eye was a kaleidoscope of color: one half started off as brown, but toyed with turning green or gold, before settling on a sky blue. The effect was so arresting that Lucy couldn’t stop staring.

“So. We meet. The girl who arrived late to the party,” the girl said, looking down on Lucy’s rolled up body. “Come on. Get up. Let’s go.”

Lucy shifted into a sitting position and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “Go where?”

“Around. Don’t you want to?”

“Not really,” Lucy answered to the stranger. “I don’t know you.” She stole a look to her mother who stood back, but appraised the situation with a look of annoyance rather than relief. It was written all over her face: Don’t come in here and achieve what I could not. Lucy looked between her mother and the new girl and back again.

Cassandra raised her eyebrows and smirked. “Of course not. That’s why you should come. You won’t ever meet anyone like this. Consider me your welcoming committee.”

With one final look to her mom, Lucy nodded. “Sure,” she agreed out of spite and rose to her feet. Tucking Grant’s letter into the waistband of her pants, she looked over at her mother again for permission—with raised eyebrows and an expectant silence—and after a long stare, Maxine motioned for the door.

“When will you be back?” her mother asked crossing her arms.

Cassandra shrugged. “By curfew?” she suggested, but Maxine laughed at her reply. The girl didn’t cower. “Fine, fine, Mrs. King. Let’s say by dinner. Lucy has a lot to see.”

With visible frustration, Maxine relented. Turning away and placing her palms flat on the apartment’s small kitchen table. She bent over, as if in prayer, and didn’t say anything else as Cassandra and Lucy exited the apartment and walked out into the sterile hallway. The elation Lucy felt at winning against her mother’s will was quickly replaced by confusion and apprehension—did she really want to follow this girl blindly throughout the System?

After the door was shut and they had meandered a few feet away, the girl flipped her long braids over her shoulders and smiled. “Parents in this place have become so predictable. They want you to buy in to the same lie they have. So much so that they’re eager to do things they never would have before. They’re permissive, to a point, and to a fault.”

“I’m not sure I’ve found that to be the case,” Lucy said, thinking only of Grant.

“Cass,” she said, sticking out her hand toward Lucy’s middle. Lucy grabbed her palm and gave it a small pump. “Your next door neighbor.”