Fifteen years later...

My fingers trembled slightly. I told them adamantly in my head to still, and they did. Good I thought, pleasure coursing through my mind. My body is beginning to obey me, just like Lessi said it would. It'd been just Lessi and I out here, alone, for a very long time. Lessi had taught me everything that I knew.

It was Lessi who saved me from Patella those many years ago. Lessi who'd been old enough to understand what was happening there, whereas my memories were vague and filled with urgent grasps of fear and sadness. Without Lessi there, I would have died then.

Without Lessi here, I would be dead by now. Sooner than now. It wouldn't have taken long for me to run out of food. If that hadn't gotten me, then the patrols would have. If not that, then the rebel recruits would have, and I doubt that I would have survived that. The rebels weren't the most lenient with those that they admitted into their group, although they were getting slightly more desperate as time passed.

Well, that's what Lessi always told me anyway.

I shook myself mentally, clearing my thoughts. Right now was training time, and I needed to only think about that. I felt my eyes slip closed, each little bit of dust and grit grating uncomfortably on them as I did so. I sniffed delicately out of one nostril, trying to sense the land around me instead of seeing it. Somehow, I could still visualize the gentle movement of the branches in front of me. I felt the tree press into me from behind, and I leaned into it for balance. My ears detected the light, pit-pattering footsteps of the woodland creatures; the heavy, more solid ones of Lessi that were approaching my spot rapidly.

I wanted to reach for my hunting knife, but doing so would have given me away in a heartbeat. That was a mistake I'd made too many times already. I needed her to think that I hadn't noticed her yet. "Too many people underestimate me," was what Lessi always said. I had to use that to my advantage, even against her. If I could fool Lessi into believing that I was weaker than I was, then I could fool anyone.

I waited for a long time. Much longer than I was comfortable with; longer than I normally would have. Then my hands instantly flickered around my knife, coming up to block the strike that I somehow knew was already there.

The metal clanged out, the sound an acrid blare against the little woodland chirps, and I let my eyes fly open to assess the situation. I heard several animals let out frightened calls and flee towards their respective homes. Others merely seemed slightly confused as they muddled about for a moment or so, gaining more balance as they went along. Still more appeared entirely unaffected by our dispute. The infinite numbers of animals in the forest, as well as their endless ways with coping with different situations, was always something that added to my fascination with the forest.

I knew that it was one of the things that I would miss most about leaving here. We had to leave tonight, Lessi told me, if we wanted to stay ahead of the patrol. That meant we had to tear apart our house, burying it and everything that was in it before they came looking for places such as the one we lived in. Politicians were incredibly fond of the mountain quadrant for their luxury resorts and decadent retreats. It was one of the things about it that made it so deadly.

Shaking my head back into reality, I twisted around to face Lessi. Her face registered only a small amount of surprise. We both withdrew our knives, circling for several moments, each looking desperately for an opening. I found one first, and dove for it. Lessi was caught off guard and stumbled back slightly under my onslaught. I glanced up at her face, even though I already had it memorized.

Her face was pale, I knew, but it was so smudged with dirt and mud that she looked to be of a different race. Her green eyes flashed wildly when she fought, the red that laced around them a sign of her sheer exhaustion. There was limited clothing to wear, so she always wore the same torn, disgusting jacket that barely fit anymore. Underneath she wore a fairly new shirt, recently salvaged. Her jeans were in the same state as her jacket. They were now cut to the knee, and so covered in dirt that they didn't provide the most comfortable range of movement. Her hair was the only salvageable thing. She'd taken her knife a few months ago and jaggedly cut it so it hung to the top of her throat. However, this had kept it relatively manageable, and it always gleamed a deep red that sparkled in the sunlight. It was now getting longer than she liked, and I knew she would hack it short again. Even so, she was stunningly beautiful.

I, on the other hand, was of no comparison to her beauty. I was fairly short; had been for as long as I could remember. I could only claim about five feet. I was pretty skinny, which may have been considered pretty at one time. Now it was just proof of the hard life that I lived. My hands were gritty and calloused, formed from holding a knife or dagger in my hand since I knew where we were. My thin brown hair hung in greasy sheets around my face, twisted into indiscernible knots that intertwined one with another—it would be impossible to find where one began and one ended, even if I had the time and wanted to spend the effort it would involve. I mostly pulled it into a giant knot at the base of my neck to keep it out of the way, and then wrapped it all in the bandana that Lessi had given to me to try and protect the top. My eyes weren't anything of interest, being a bland brown color.

My shirt wasn't much in the way of clothes; a mere rag that served to keep a semblance of modesty, which Lessi firmly insisted on, and preserved heat during the cold times. My pants were in a better way, being relatively new. When I'd come out here, I'd been wearing an enormous shirt. I'd never needed to get a new one, because it always fit. My pants were another story. A couple of weeks ago, we came across a dead woman about my size lying in the middle of the woods. It was a necessity. We took her clothes, dressed her with what we left behind, and then buried her.

I always felt bad when we had to take things from other people, and I knew that Lessi did too. We reasoned that, since they were dead, they didn't need it. Somehow, though, that didn't make it any easier to stomach. Lessi had raised me to have the same morals and values that she did, and there was something inside of me that immediately rejected stealing as inherently wrong. I knew that same feeling was inside of Lessi.

But we still did things like that. We took what we needed to survive. There wasn't anything else that we could do. Whenever we found something that we could use, we took it. Lessi and I didn't come across things very often, but every now and then we would find a discarded item that some politician had left. Neither of us felt nearly as bad about taking things from the politicians as we did when we took from a dead slicker or rebel.

We'd been doing things like that ever since I came out here. We took a couple of things for Lessi too, but not nearly as much. She always said that I needed them more than she did. In some ways she was right. She'd come out here with more of the items she needed, she had taken more of the things early on, and she was far more careful than I was, so her items stayed nicer longer. But I still wanted her to have the things she needed. That's why I insisted on her taking the shirt from the slicker lady.

My wrist flicked slightly to the left, dragging an imaginary cut across her stomach. Lessi flinched, but her wild eyes remained concentrated on her efforts. She hacked her knife down, meaning to slice my back, but I saw it coming, and rolled to the left. Branches cracked under my weight, and entwined themselves in the knots of my hair. I'd left it down today, and now I regretted it. It would take at least an hour to pluck all of the leaves and twigs from my hair, not that I usually even cared. There wasn't anyone out here that I maintained my beauty for, although Lessi usually reprimanded me when I didn't maintain a certain level of hygiene. Since she'd been risen in the COMPOUND for a good portion of her life, her standards of dress often differed from mine.

Lessi's swing thudded against the tree I had just been leaning against, vibrating the leaves in the canopy above us, causing a couple of the dying ones to rain down. I picked myself up into a low crouch, holding my knife away from my body a little. Lessi collected herself and assessed her situation, then gave me a nod. I lowered my knife slowly, until Lessi reluctantly dropped her knife to the ground. I held mine at my waist, wanting to make sure that this wasn't a joke or tease. Something about the hunch of her shoulders told me that she was being honest in her defeat. A swell of pride began in my chest, but I pushed it down. This was the first time I'd actually beaten Lessi, and something about it felt wrong.

"Lessi, what's wrong?"

Lessi shook her head. I could see it now, for sure. Her eyes were welling up with moisture, the red that encircled them seemed more pronounced than it did before. Her hands rested on her hips, wringing at the fabric that rested there. I walked to her, taking her hands from her ruined jacket. Her fingers trembled in my grip, which was very strange. Lessi was always the stronger one, when it came to the two of us. It was always her that comforted me.

I'd never seen her like this before. It was very strange and foreign.

Her full, red lips began to tremble slightly, and she bit her lower one as if to control its movement. Her green eyes reached my face as a tear leaked out of the corner of her eye. She quickly pulled one of her hands out of mine to wipe it away. A faint coloring added a flush to her normally pale cheeks. She was embarrassed to be seen crying.

I held her other hand in my two, and again asked, "Lessi, what is it?"

"Fifteen years," Lessi whispered. "I can't believe it's been fifteen years." Her voice caught, and she didn't seem able to continue for a long time. I just sat there, staring at her. She trembled for several minutes, her green eyes staring off blankly into the distance.

"It was fifteen years ago today," she repeated suddenly, sitting upright and steeling her voice. Her eyes blinked away any tears, and she was back to being her tough self. The transformation took place in the matter of a few seconds. "The day that we got away," she clarified. Her eyes flicked over to me, stressed.

I blinked up at her. I never knew that she had kept track of the time so religiously. It had never seemed important to worry about such a frivolous thing as the passing of the years. But, I suppose, to someone who had left everything they had ever known, it would be far more of a major event. I sympathized, but that didn't mean that I was going to relate to the significance of it. I was only two when Lessi helped me escape. I started when I realized that meant that I was now seventeen. That meant that Lessi was twenty-six. It seemed too strange to think of her being that age. There was nothing about her that suggested it. Her body suggested someone closer to my age while her mentality suggested a woman that was much older than her years.

I studied Lessi, and was surprised to find a great deal of conflict inside her. Her shoulders hunched over, and her eyes constantly wavered between looking at me nervously, and surveying the ground. Her fingers knotted themselves together, then pulled apart, only to tie themselves into the same position. She seemed to be struggling with this, even more than I would have thought. A sudden flush of defeat colored her cheeks rosy, and she slumped over. "I promised—I promised myself that I would tell you when you turned seventeen, if not before. You'd be old enough to be considered an adult by then. I told myself that you'd be ready, that you could handle it. I just hope that I'm right..."

She trailed off, her hand absently smoothing the locks of hair that draped around her face. She would need to cut it again soon, I thought to myself in passing as I waited for her to tell me whatever it was that she was going to. I thought it looked beautiful, but I knew that she liked it shorter so that it wasn't in her face as much.

"I guess waiting won't help any," she whispered, her voice cracking because it was drying out. I nodded in encouragement for her to continue. She fidgeted awkwardly, trying to find where to being. Finally, she opened her mouth to speak. "It was really scary that night. I was only eleven, and even though I acted like I knew everything, the idea of actually having to go out there and prove that I did terrified me. I just wished that I could take my family with me, you know? I wanted proof that they were real, not just some sort of dream... Anyway, it was on the night that I was leaving when I first saw you..." Lessi trailed off in remembrance.

"But I was two!" I protested, my brow furrowing. I couldn't have been out there alone, unless... Realization sparked in my eyes.

"Exactly. I didn't even know I was going to be escaping with someone else, let alone two people," She glanced at me, and before I could ask anything, she continued. "Your brother was hiding behind a pillar, the exact same one that I needed to hide behind. I had no choice but to keep going and hope he understood. It wasn't until I was getting ready to leave—with Kojo of course—that I realized that he had someone with him. You. I went to our next checkpoint, then Kojo had you crawl over to me. If he'd hesitated only a second or two less, he would have made it over. We all would've been here now. But they caught him. They—they dragged him away before I could see anything, but I have every reason to believe that he's dead," she whispered. She wouldn't meet my eyes for the life of me, so I stopped trying.

I thought back on what she'd said. There was a sudden rush of emotions and half-forgotten memories attacking my mind. A snip of a warm jacket here, the sob of loss there, and the strong determination to carry on after that. I put my palm to my forehead as if I could push back the memories. "Kojo? Was that his name?" I asked, my voice sounding sharper than I'd intended it to.

Lessi nodded her head gently, and placed a hand on my back, between my shoulder blades. "I'm sorry I didn't tell you earlier. I'm so sorry. I just didn't know how..." she whispered. Her hands knotted in her lap, and I glanced up to see tears spilling from her eyes, which were clenched tightly together.

"S'okay," I said, knowing that I wanted it to be. Lessi was the closest thing that I would ever have to a sister or mother, and I didn't want to hurt her at all. And I understood why she did it, even if I didn't necessarily agree with it. She wanted to keep me safe and happy, and to her, not telling me about Kojo was the easiest way to do that. Not only that, but she had no idea how to tell me. I guess that might make sense, especially to someone who had parenthood thrown upon them at such a young age. Forcing an eleven year old to make decisions that even someone in their twenties struggles to make is bound to result in unforeseen consequences.

Lessi turned, her eyes glistening. "You and I both know that what you just said isn't true. But I appreciate it anyway," she laughed quietly at herself, and I allowed myself a small grin, before remembering what was coming up.

I sighed and plucked a blushing green bud off of the tip of a branch, its beauty brightening the patch of area that it knew to be its home. "We really have to leave, don't we?"

Lessi stood, then leaned against a tree trunk. "I don't want to leave any more than you do. But if we stay, we'll be found for sure! You know how it is out here!" she vented, gesturing widely to make a reference to any place outside of the COMPOUND.

"So why don't we try to catch up to the rebels? At least then—," I began, but like always, Lessi cut me off with a sharp look.

"Your brother didn't die for us to come out here, join the rebels, and get ourselves killed too. You know my answer always will be no, until the day I die. Now, come on, we have to start packing up. We leave at dawn tomorrow. I'm starting to feel on edge here," Lessi snapped, running her hands along her arms, trailing across the forming goose bumps.

My shoulders slumped slightly, and I let out of long breath of air, watching it blow my hair around. Lessi had compiled an endless list of excuses as to why she couldn't talk about what really bothered her with the rebels.

To me, their cause was completely just and real. I'd listened to the stories Lessi told me about the COMPOUND. The government had become too powerful. When it got to the point where people were forced to risk their lives for the mere hope of freedom, well, that speaks for itself.

Not only that, but they were lying to the people. They had all of the lower class citizens convinced that the area outside of the COMPOUND, the quadrants that they had created themselves, were now suffering from the after effects of nuclear war. Because of that, they told everyone that the fence now marked the area that was safe for living. Then the politicians converted their favorite quadrants into little luxury resorts. The mountain range was a favorite retreat, and they used it mostly during the winter for activities that Lessi and I didn't know the names of.

The politicians had done similar things with the rest of the quadrants. The beach quadrant was now dotted with towering, spacious houses. They would play and splash in the water in skimpy, unreasonable outfits. Then they would stretch out on the sand, under the baking heat of the sun, and lay there for hours on end while their skin darkened to a desirable color.

The desert quadrant was where they went to play with their new toys. They would drive their massive vehicles out there, and then drive smaller ones out of the bigger ones, to go and play with. Neither Lessi nor I had ever seen one up close, but we knew they were called four-wheelers. We'd seen a picture of them in a discarded magazine from a politician who'd come to visit the mountain resort.

A very small part of the city quadrant had been restored to its original state. Every night, the lights stayed lit the entire time, casting garish shadows on the rest of the city. It seemed as though the party that was the city never ended. Lessi told me that the one time we'd been there, it had smelled strongly of alcohol and tobacco. I'd never drank, or smoked, so I could only rely on her limited knowledge. She told me a neighbor of hers was a smoking alcoholic, so she recognized the smells. We had never returned to the lit up part of the city, and instead remained firmly in the shadowed section of the city quadrant. The contrast between the two was severe, and something that made the city even more frightening when we went there.