Privileged like Tristan. And his father.

It isn’t the first time I’ve had a crush on a boy. From Year Eight to Year Ten I liked this guy, Torrin. Funny his name starts with a T, too, and sounds a bit like Tristan. I’m not the type of girl to run around in a tight, low-cut tunic, batting my eyes and winking and carrying on—there are plenty of other girls to do that—so instead I tried to just be at the same places as him. You know, take the same classes, join the same after-school work crews, that sort of thing. But either he never noticed me, or he was just as shy as I am. In any case, I never said one word to him.

Not that my crush on Tristan is really a crush. At least, it doesn’t feel like one. But I know how it will end. Just like with Torrin. I will never say one word to him. Which is probably a good thing, given how poorly I’d conversed with my new friends.

I think about Tawni. She’ll be getting out of the Pen in six months. It seems like a blink of an eye compared to my sentence. But there’s something about her story that doesn’t make sense to me. For one, she never explained why she was trying to illegally travel interdistrict. She’d also said very little about her parents—except that she didn’t think that people should be judged by who their parents are. I have a feeling her crime is linked to what she’d said about her parents, like two puzzle pieces that look so different until you fit them together, at which point they look like they’ve always been joined.

Once she is gone it will be just me and Cole. Which will be fine because I like Cole. Although I am still shocked by what he did for me earlier, during the riot.

But then Cole will be gone six months after Tawni. And I will be alone again. Not that it matters, because I will be leaving the Pen, too, headed for whatever prison I will spend the rest of my life in.

I use the palm of my hand to smack the side of my head a few times. I feel my brain jostle back and forth a bit, feel a dull headache start to form in my skull. I probably killed a few brain cells, but it is worth it. A little bit of physical pain always seems to help with the mental pain, helps me to forget about the reality of my life, like a shot of whiskey helps the miners forget about the monotony of the mines.

It also helps me focus. On the puzzles. For the past six months I’ve felt sorry for myself, and there was really nothing in my life to take my mind off of my sorrows. With Cole and Tawni’s sudden entrance into my life, I now have puzzles to solve. Clearly they haven’t told me everything. I mean, who would? They’ve just met me, barely know me. I certainly haven’t told them everything about my past, although I’ve told them a lot more than I planned to.

Another thing Tawni said was, “I don’t think he’s a bad guy,” when she was talking about Tristan. Her statement is a mystery to me. I mean, she doesn’t seem like the type to give anyone from the ruling party the benefit of the doubt, especially the President’s eldest son. And yet the way she’d said it, I feel like she was confident in her statement, like she added the words I think just to make it sound like she was unsure, when really, behind her words is a certain knowledge that only comes from firsthand experience. Like I said, it is a mystery. One I am determined to get to the bottom of.

My thoughts are interrupted when an electronic voice blares through the speaker in my ceiling. “All guests are in their rooms. Lights out in exactly five minutes.”

I roll my eyes like I usually do when I hear the announcement. They are always trying to make us feel better about our situation. It is like just because we are juveniles, the so-called adults can’t be honest with us. Guests? Really? We are locked up, our freedoms restricted beyond recognition. Everyone knows we are inmates, plain and simple.

And rooms? Come on. I look around my “room” as if I am seeing it for the first time. No windows. A thin slat in the door is used to let air in and to speak through. It’s a cell. Sometimes I awake from a restless sleep and find the walls closing in on me, threatening to suffocate me, crush me. Sometimes I wish they would.

I’ve heard they named it the Pen after the word playpen, like a young child’s little safety enclosure, full of toys and bright-colored bobbles and trinkets. But it just makes me think of the longer version of the word it is really short for: penitentiary.

I’m not sure whether they sugarcoat everything to help us sleep at night, or to help them sleep at night. Either way, it is a waste of time.

I feel tired, but not sleepy. I am exhausted from the day’s activities. Not the lounging around in the yard all day, weighing the pros and cons of giving myself the shock of my life; rather, my interaction (if that’s what you call it) with Tristan, the conversations with my two new friends, and my near escape from the riot. For some reason I feel like I can’t hold the weight of my body up for one more second. But I can’t sleep either, because there is too much to think about. Oh yeah, and I have to pee, too. Which is difficult when I feel too drained to even stand up.

The lights go out and I’m thrust into abject darkness.

I learned in school about the biological changes that humans have slowly undergone, generation after generation, since moving underground. We gained improved night vision due to long exposure to dim or no lighting. Our senses of hearing and smell have been heightened, making us less reliant on our slightly improved sight. Our skin has become paler and dustier. Human lungs are now more resistant to the constant intake of rock dust. Evidently, average life expectancies are about twenty years shorter than when humans lived aboveground, but no one really talks about it. Long story short: we’ve adapted, for better or worse.

I manage to half-roll off the thin padding on my stone cot and stumble to the corner, where there is a small hole in the floor. I squat and manage to relieve myself before collapsing back into bed.

I try to take my mind off of the puzzles that have been presented to me. For one, I know I won’t be able to solve them just by thinking about them. Not yet, anyway. I need more facts, need to ask Tawni and Cole some subtle questions. And listen to them. Both their words and the true meaning behind their words. It’s something my dad taught me. He’d say, “You’ll learn far more by listening than you ever will by speaking, Adele. Don’t just focus on the words. Listen to the tone, to the emotion, to the hidden words—the ones that are unspoken.”

So I think about something else to help me fall asleep. There isn’t much to think about except my past. I remember when I was a little girl, in Year Three, and the teacher asked each of us what we wanted to be when we grew up. Most of the boys said miners, like their dads, and most of the girls said mothers. I said I wanted to be a writer, traveling across the Tri-Realms in search of the inspiration for my next novel. The kids laughed at me. Only sun dwellers could be writers, they said. They were safe laughing at me in the classroom—I think the teacher even smirked a little. But after class was a different story. A boy named Garon had laughed the loudest in class. I knocked him over and bloodied his nose. He wasn’t laughing anymore.

I read a lot as a kid. But not the crap written by the sun dweller novelists. Old books. Ones that had been saved by my family when people started going underground. They’d been passed down for generations, their covers worn and torn, their pages yellowed and brittle. Magical books written during another time, when a good imagination was considered valuable. My favorites were the Harry Potter books. Like me, my grandmother had grown up with the witches and wizards of Hogwarts. We used to talk about Harry Potter together. How we wished we had magic wands that we could use to change things, to make life better for everyone. Now I feel even closer to Harry than I did as a kid. After all, we both lost our parents. He lost his to death, and I lost mine to the government.