MY hand was in Chase’s, and he was pulling, then I was pulling, and we were running, dragging each other farther away from the road, where the woods became so thick that even the moonlight couldn’t reach us. The dry leaves crackled beneath our boots; branches clawed against our clothing and scratched burning lines into our exposed skin. I tripped, but before I had the chance to pick myself up, Chase had already righted me.
They were getting closer.
My heart was pounding, and even in the cold March air, a line of sweat dewed at my hairline. The throbbing whir of the sirens penetrated the barrier of trees and pierced through the breath that crashed in my eardrums. Blue lights flashed in streaks through the tall, black shadows.
Closer.
“Stop!” I yanked Chase down behind an enormous tree trunk, broken by some long-ago storm and now covered with ivy and brambles. He crouched beside me, still and silent, immediately camouflaged by darkness.
They came speeding up the road, silencing the insects and animals with their sirens. I was too petrified to move.
Don’t stop don’t stop don’t stop.
They blared past. One. Two. Three cruisers. Heading toward the Loftons’.
And then we were alone in the woods.
Chase released an unsteady breath, reminding me that I hadn’t done so in some time.
On trembling legs, we hiked again, all the way until we reached the edge of Hinton. It was a slow grind: Neither of us was willing to get any closer to the road, but the path we carved thirty yards inland was pitch black on account of the thick woods. My body became gradually more exhausted—a combination of an adrenaline crash and a sleepless night—but my mind was wound as tightly as a copper coil.
Finally, still well before dawn, we reached the edge of a parking lot, dusted with the trash that overflowed the scattered cans. Across the way I could vaguely make out a stucco strip mall. It was deserted; most of the glass shop fronts were covered with graffiti, but otherwise it seemed safe. No FBR patrol cars. No gangs.
There were four cars in the lot. All of them looked abandoned.
“Can you hotwire any of those?” I asked immediately.
Chase snorted. “We’ll wait until closer to dawn. We can’t drive now, and I don’t want to be pinned out in the open if the MM show up.”
I nodded in grudging agreement. There were still several hours until sunrise.
Far to our left was a great hulking shadow. An old, rusted semitruck bed without the cab. I didn’t like how it blocked the woods behind it. It made me feel too exposed, which reminded me that we shouldn’t have still been out in the open. That we should have been with my mother by now. I twisted my heel into the soil.
“Hey, forget about Lewisburg,” Chase said, not unkindly. “I said I’d get you to the safe house, and I will. I promise.”
Tears I didn’t know had gathered spilled down my cheeks. How? I wanted to scream. How will we get there? How can you promise that? You don’t even know the way! But I knew he didn’t have answers, and asking him would only make us both feel worse. I grabbed for the bag, searching through the darkness for the zipper, and covertly wiped my eyes.
The other clothes we’d stolen from the sporting goods store were near the top. They were still damp from the weather and would be bitingly uncomfortable in the low temperature, but it didn’t matter. We had to change. I handed Chase another flannel, wishing we could ditch our jackets, but it was too cold.
“What happened back at the house?” I asked, after the knot in my throat had gone down. As quickly as I could, I stripped down to my thermal and replaced my sweater with the pink fleece I’d picked up for my mother. The instant the coat was back on, my chin was tucked inside the neck, stifling the cold air that had been needling my face.
“Patrick rode my heels like a lapdog,” answered Chase. “I was trying to pull him away from the back of the house, maybe get him down in the basement with his wife. That’s when the guys he called busted through the front door. Billings, I guess, and three others. I got one good hit in before—”
“You hit a soldier?” I squeaked. This could mean terrible consequences if we were caught.
“Didn’t see too many other options,” he said. I heard him change shirts and grunt as the fabric scraped the wound on his arm. “One of them said, ‘It’s him,’ and reached for his weapon. That bastard and his wife must have known it was us before the news report.”
I nodded but then realized he couldn’t see me. “They thought they’d get a reward,” I said aloud. We got a thousand dollars for the last soldier, Patrick had said. Who knows? Maybe they’ll kick in a bonus for the girl. Knowing our lives had a price tag, one that could keep a family housed and fed, made me nauseous.
Chase swore softly, and I could feel this fact settle on him, sink into his pores. When he continued, his tone was bleak.
“One of them shut the lights off. It didn’t work out like they hoped. I took off out the back, and that’s when I found you.”
“I shut the lights off,” I confessed.
“You what?”
“I cut the power to the generator.”
“You…” A long beat passed before he slowly approached and placed his hands on my shoulders. The confusion reflecting from his dark eyes made me uncomfortable. Here he was again, touching me while his mind disagreed with his actions.
“You’re shivering,” he said anxiously. I shook out of his grip, but it was too late. All the feelings I’d been trying to stuff away since his good-bye kiss came pouring back. The longing and the hope. The rejection. All magnified by the fact that we were now barred from Lewisburg and, it felt, my mother, too. He seemed to sense something was off and lowered his face to mine.
“Hey, are you —”
I slapped him.
We sat in stunned silence for a full three seconds before he spoke.
“Damn. That was fast.”
“That’s all you’ve got to say for yourself?” I nearly shouted at him. My hand stung just enough to tell me it hadn’t shattered in the cold.
He floundered. “I… I guess. What exactly was that for?”
“You know what it’s for,” I accused furiously. “How dare you do… that… after… you know!”
“I don’t know,” he said bluntly. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You kissed me!”
He faltered back a step, and I heard the breath whistle through his teeth.
“You didn’t seem to mind so much at the time.”
I growled at him and then grabbed the bag and violently zipped it shut. “I was thinking you were someone else.” The old you.
He snatched the bag out of my hands and shoved it onto his back. Then he shook it off, remembering we weren’t going anywhere, and slammed it down on the ground.
“I told you,” he said in a low voice. “He’s gone. That’s over.”
I fought back the tears and spun away from him. Chase’s acknowledgment of the two separate entities within himself should have made me feel better, but it only made me feel worse. I couldn’t stand being near him any longer. Dawn couldn’t come fast enough.
“Ember, wait,” Chase called. He snagged my arm and held fast. Reluctantly, I turned, but I refused to look up and meet his eyes.
“Look… I know you’re torn up about him. He’s probably fine,” he said, frustrated.
He’s probably fine?
“What do you… who are you talking about?” I thought he’d understood that we were talking about the Chase who cared for me and the Chase who didn’t, but he was referring to someone else entirely. I felt the slow burn of oncoming humiliation.
“The guard from reform school. Isn’t that who you’re talking about?”
“Sean?” I asked, baffled. And then I remembered. Randolph, in the shack, had insinuated that I’d messed around with a guard when Chase had inquired, and then later I’d reinforced that fallacy when I’d asked Chase what would happen to a soldier caught with a resident. With everything that had happened, he remembered that?
I felt only a breath of embarrassment, because immediately after that came my awareness of the insult.
“You think I would have let you kiss me if I was with somebody else?”
“It’s not like you had much of a choice,” he said indignantly.
“I’m not some three-dollar hooker!” I blurted. “I don’t know who you’re used to spending your time with, but—”
“Hold on—”
“You! You kissed me thinking I was with someone else! What kind of person does that make you, huh?”
“Hold on!” he interrupted. I had encroached on his personal space in my anger, and now we were only inches apart. “First, I know you’re not easy; you’re actually the most difficult person I’ve ever met. Second, I never claimed to be a good person. And third, if you weren’t talking about Sean, who the hell were you talking about?”
“That’s…” I stammered. “That’s none of your business,” I said evasively.
“If you’re thinking of another guy while I’m kissing you, I’m pretty sure it is my business,” he said heatedly.
“Not anymore it’s not! Why do you care anyway?”
He straightened, making me look up nearly a foot to see his eyes.
“I don’t.”
“Doesn’t sound like it.”
He kicked the ground. Seconds passed. They felt like hours.
“You’re right. It doesn’t matter,” he said coldly.
My stomach plummeted, but he was right. It was better this way. He was leaving when we got to the safe house, and caring about him only complicated things.
He blew out a long breath, and we both faced the parking lot, stamping our feet impatiently. He attempted to turn on the radio, but it didn’t even hiss; the battery had gotten wet in the rain or had simply died. If he could pick up a local frequency, we might be able to track the MM’s movement. As it was, we were flying blind.
The anxiety settled my temper. The cold numbed my nerves. And when I glanced his way, I was surprised to see that he was already watching me. Just the outline of his face was visible in the moonlight.
“Thanks. For saving my life tonight.”
He didn’t add anything to it, and I didn’t press. Instead I sat, and he sat beside me. I pulled my knees to my chest, tucked the jacket hood over my head, and waited for the dawn.
CHASE roused me an hour later. He’d placed the sleeping bag around us when I’d drifted off, but he had stayed up to keep watch. I rubbed my eyes, instantly alert.
Though the sun was coming, it was still dark. The crickets had ceased their chirping, giving way to the second shift of outdoor musicians: a woodpecker tapping away and the high train-whistle buzz of some likely enormous insect. When I felt something crawling on my hand, I jumped up in a flurry of unnecessary movement.
There was nothing crawling on my hand. There was, however, a thin gold band around my left ring finger.
“Where did…”
“They were right to think we were thieves,” Chase said, referring to the ranchers.
I thought of how he’d scoped out their house right after we’d arrived, but I didn’t feel even a little bad after what they had done.
“You married me while I was sleeping?” I asked in amazement. The sky was beginning to bruise with the purple haze, and in it, I could see Chase’s face glow a little deeper copper.
“You hit me for kissing you. It seemed in my best interest to marry you while you were passed out.”
A short laugh caught me by surprise. I wondered when I’d last heard Chase make a joke. I supposed that meant we weren’t fighting anymore. I admired the ring. The Loftons had so much, they probably wouldn’t even notice it was gone.
“My mom will be so surprised.”
His head dropped a little.
“It’s just a cover. It’s nothing serious,” he said, with a twinge of annoyance. Apparently the joking was over. I was just about to bite back about him not having to be so rude, when he stiffened and pointed across the lot.
“Look!”
The dawn brought clarity. There, on the semitruck was a tin sign, nailed askew to the metal siding.
“Do you think…” I began, but he knew what I was going to say before I finished. The corners of his mouth had risen deviously.
The carrier had said to look for the sign. I felt certain that this was what he’d meant.
We scanned the parking lot for any signs of danger, and then ran for the semitruck, a hundred yards away. I couldn’t help but think of the last empty parking lot we’d been in, at the sporting goods store, and I felt the hair on the back of my neck rise up. My wary gaze circled our position.
Just as we approached the eighteen-wheeler, a scuffle came from within.
I snapped back against the metal siding and froze. Though I expected help here, my body was now trained to react. Chase swooped in front of me and removed the baton from his belt. I wished we had the gun and ignored the fleeting awareness that I wouldn’t have thought that two days ago.
It could be an animal. But then we heard the distinct and steady groaning of footfalls on metal.
Chase glanced over his shoulder, making sure I was behind him.
I squatted to look under the truck, past the flattened tires, and saw a person’s legs as they jumped down. Then another, and finally a third, though this one more slowly, waiting for a hand from the other two.
Three of them. Two of us. They must have been sleeping when we arrived. Either that or the truck’s compartment had muted out voices. We wouldn’t be so lucky now. We didn’t know what weapons they had, and it was fifty yards back to the trees. If we made a run for it, they would certainly hear us.
Please let them be friendly.
A moment later, a boy about my age came around the corner—and froze.
He wore an old suit jacket, torn and patched by various fabrics on the stress points, and several layered T-shirts beneath it. His cargo pants were tied on by a length of red twine. He said something we couldn’t hear, and then two girls revealed themselves. One was about his height, wearing a torn long-sleeved thermal. The other was short, with pretty mocha skin and rounded, candy-apple cheeks.
She was at least six months pregnant.
I felt my blood buzzing with the same suspicion these strangers surely felt. They turned their heads to confer with each other quietly. Chase returned the baton to his belt and raised his empty hands in peace. He took a few slow steps forward.
We were twenty feet away, and the trio still had not moved. I saw the male pull back his jacket, revealing a black tire iron tucked into his waistband. My breath caught, but I was somehow relieved that there was neither a gun nor a knife visible. Yet.
Chase scoffed.
“Hold up,” the boy called. We stopped.
“We don’t want trouble,” Chase told him, clearly not intimidated. The tall girl turned to the boy and whispered something in his ear. Closer now, it became obvious that these two were twins. They had the same androgynous face: straight brows, flat cheekbones etched by the shadows of malnourishment, dark hair coming to a widow’s peak in the center of their foreheads.
“Got a trade?” the female twin asked.
“We’re looking for a carrier,” I said.
I felt Chase brace before me and wondered if I’d been too bold. But it wasn’t like these people were going to turn us in to the MM, at least not immediately. Scalping anything that the MM had profit rights to was illegal.
“We’re car salesmen, not drivers,” said the female twin. The boy elbowed her.
I didn’t like her tone. Or the way she was staring at Chase.
“Do you know a carrier or not?” I asked.
“There’s one in Lewisburg that goes to Georgia and South—”
“Can’t go to Lewisburg,” Chase interrupted.
“Then Harrisonburg, but that’s farther.”
“Can’t go there, either,” Chase said flatly. I felt my jaw tighten.
“Bad boy,” clucked the girl. She grinned flirtatiously at Chase. I narrowed my eyes at her, and though it was cold out, I rolled up my sleeve to show off the ring on my left hand.
The small girl was whispering something to her boyfriend. When she turned to the side, she placed a hand on her distended abdomen. I felt suddenly sorry for them. She was only fifteen or sixteen—too young to be married—and certainly in violation of the Moral Statutes. That was probably why they were living in a truck.
“MM following you?” she asked.
Neither Chase nor I answered.
“You need Knoxville,” she continued. “Tennessee. You know it?”
My attention perked at this.
“What’s in Knoxville?” Chase asked.
“A carrier?” I clarified, feeling my breath begin to come faster.
“A whole underground system,” said the girl twin. “Lots of people have been heading there. That’s where half our cars have gone. Total liquidation.” She laughed.
“Knoxville,” I repeated. I felt Chase release a slow breath beside me.
We were back on track.
IT was a long day.
The new Red Zones, those cities evacuated from the War, and Yellow Zones, those areas entirely comprised of MM, were marked in bold corresponding colors on highway signs and called for multiple detours throughout Virginia and Northern Tennessee. For brief patches I dozed, never falling fully asleep. I lingered on edge, my heart always beating a little too fast, my mind filled with worries.
The girl twin occasionally popped up in my mind, and I found myself bitter when I thought of her. She’d insisted on a trade for the car, and since we had nothing they wanted, we’d had to pay them. One thousand dollars. Cash. For an item that wasn’t even theirs to begin with. But since they’d siphoned all the gasoline, our hands were tied.
Still, I didn’t regret the interaction.
A whole underground system, the girl had said. A whole resistance movement. My mind couldn’t wrap around what this might look like. People like us. On the run. Scheming against the MM. My fantasies seemed too unrealistic. All that mattered was that someone would take us to South Carolina.
As the day wound on, my chest began to squeeze with that familiar anxiety. My mother was just beyond our grasp, but now when I focused hard on her, I only saw fragmented images. Her short, accessorized hair. Her socked feet on the kitchen floor. I needed to find her soon, or I was afraid even more of her would disappear.
Finally, we came in range. As we closed in on the city of Knoxville, the MM presence on the highway increased. There were other cars as well. Not many, but enough for us to blend in. This fact didn’t ease our minds as the FBR cruisers began flying by with regularity.
Then we saw the sign. YELLOW ZONE. The western half of Knoxville had recently been closed to civilians to make way for an MM base.
“Think they lied?” I asked Chase nervously. “Do you think they sent us here because we didn’t give them enough money?”
“No,” Chase answered, though he didn’t sound very convincing. “I think the safest place is right in the enemy’s shadow. There’s resistance here.”
And so we went to hide beneath the belly of a monster.
He took a busy exit after crossing over the gray waters of the Holston River, and parked in a dark lot behind an outcropping of sandstone medical buildings that belonged to the city hospital. Outside we were flooded by the sounds and scents of a working city during rush hour. Even after just a couple days in the country, being around so many human bodies made me feel crowded and paranoid, like everyone was watching us. I could smell the sewers, the sweat, the smog filling the stagnant air. It did nothing but add to my sense of unease.
It was cool, but not cold. The sky hung low with humidity. Rain was coming. Chase grabbed the bag and rounded the car. He didn’t have to tell me not to leave anything. I already knew we wouldn’t be coming back.
We entered the street and were immediately surrounded by pedestrians. Some rushing, fortunate enough to be wearing their work clothes and therefore employed. Some homeless, begging off to the side with their cardboard signs. Some twitching, scratching, talking to unseen hallucinations. High or mentally ill. The Reformation Act had eliminated treatment programs to fund the FBR.
There was hardly enough room to walk here. Chase came close, and though his expression was dark, I knew he was more comfortable than me. After Chicago had been bombed, he’d survived in places like this. Places where people had congregated after being displaced from the major cities.
“Watch your back,” he warned me. “And mine, while you’re at it,” he added, tightening the straps of the pack. He’d moved the money to his front pocket.
“Where do we start?” I asked. This was the biggest city I’d ever seen. No matter how large the resistance here, we were searching for a needle in a haystack.
“Follow people in dirty clothes,” he said. “They’ll lead us to food, and where there’s food, there’s people talking.”
He was right. We walked for several city blocks, finding ourselves part of a massive stream of hungry people. Every telephone pole, fence, or door displayed a prominent posting of the Moral Statutes. We crossed the train tracks and came to a place called Market Square, a long cement strip lined by flat-faced brick buildings that might once have been shops but were now hostels, medical stations, and abandoned buildings.
The crowd grew denser toward the back of the square. Thousands of people were here for food or shelter. Sisters, too, in their navy skirts and knotted handkerchiefs, bustling around the temporary cots of the Red Cross camp. I swallowed thickly, realizing this could have been me.
A dose of adrenaline shot into my veins when I caught a uniform from the corner of my eye. The clean, neatly pressed blue stuck out amid a sea of shabby garments.
Soldiers.
My eyes lingered, and I saw two more, standing behind an unmarked moving truck, unloading wooden crates of food. Their setup was positioned on the right side of a bottleneck, leading to the open space of the square. They didn’t try to hide their weapons; they were all armed and ready to fire upon anyone who might try to steal.
Chase had seen them, too. He lowered his head, trying not to look so tall. I scanned the crowd. Too many people were shuffling into the square; no one was going out. If we ran now, we’d cause a commotion and our way would be impeded by bodies. Besides, if the MM wanted to pursue us, they had guns. People would get out of their way a lot faster than they’d get out of ours.
We needed to get to the kitchen. Chase thought we’d be safe asking some discreet questions about the carrier there, and the only way to get there was to walk by the soldiers. We wouldn’t be locked in once we passed—there were exits in the back of the square that I could see from my vantage point—but it would be a tremendous risk. The soldiers would only be ten feet away.
I reached for Chase’s hand, and a quick squeeze asked the question I didn’t dare speak aloud. With only the briefest of hesitations, he squeezed mine back. We were going to pass them.
“Pull your collar up,” Chase commanded. I did so quickly. We shuffled forward, bodies bumping against us on all sides as we entered the bottleneck.
Please don’t look this way. I concentrated all my energy on the two soldiers.
“Eyes forward.” Chase’s voice was low enough that only I could hear. “Don’t stop.”
Sweat rained down my face, so contrary to the firm gust of cool evening air that blasted over the crowded square. A vice squeezed my temples.
Keep walking, I told myself.
I saw the soldiers in my peripheral vision, only ten feet away. One of the guards turned quickly, a radio glued to his ear. From the back I caught a glimpse of his light brown hair and narrow build, and an odd sense of familiarity crept over me.
Keep walking.
We passed by the crates of food and the soldiers and headed toward the open area of the square.
I fought the urge to turn around. Chase strode faster, pulling me around the corner on the damp sidewalk, out of the stream of pedestrians. It was quieter here, and I breathed for what felt like the first time in minutes.
“What are they doing here?” I asked. The MM provided the food for the soup kitchens at home but relied on volunteers to deliver it to the sites. I always thought this was because it was below them to mingle with poor people they didn’t have reason to arrest.
“The city must be on a supply crunch.”
“That explains the guns,” I commented wryly. The sooner we could get out of here the better.
As we resumed our path, I became acutely aware of how clean, how well fed, we looked. Single floaters loitering near the sidewalk stared resentfully at us like we were royalty. From their famished condition, I guessed that Chase was right about the supply crunch: There clearly wasn’t enough food to go around in this large city.
We passed a homeless man leaning against a loud generator outside a community restroom with a sign that read “anything helps.” He was emaciated. Ragged, stained clothing hung from his bony frame. Paper-thin skin lidded his deeply set eyes, and his face was masked by the olive-colored blotches of starvation.
Chase paused in front of this man, and for a moment I thought that he was going to give him some money. His generosity scared me. If Chase took out his wallet, these starving people would be on us like a pack of wolves.
An instant later Chase straightened and reached for my hand again, pulling me beside him.
“Stay close,” he said.
I jumped when I heard the scuffle behind us, and turned back, expecting to have to defend myself. My mouth dropped open. The pack of wolves had indeed descended, but they weren’t coming after us, they were closing in upon the man. The starving, homeless man. My anxiety rebounded, ten times more intensely than before, when I realized they intended to rob him. The palms of my hands dewed with sweat, but Chase’s grip held fast.
A man and a woman with sunken cheeks stole the man’s change cup and his cardboard sign. Another took his shoes. Another his soiled sweatshirt. When it was jerked off his body, folded Statute circulars fluttered into the air. He’d been lining his clothing with paper to keep warm.
The crumpled victim’s bare, ashen chest was revealed. His sticklike limbs were bent at awkward, contorted angles, but he remained as supple as a rag doll. Someone had probably knocked him unconscious, or he had been simply too weak to fight back.
“We have to help!” My voice was high with distress. This crime was intolerable. How would the man survive without the warmth of his clothing?
“There’s nothing we can do. If we stay, we’ll be next.” He urged me forward.
“Chase!” I yelped. I dug my heels in but could not pull him to a stop.
“It’s too late,” he said in a hard voice. At once, I knew what he meant.
The man was dead.
How long had he sat there, with no one checking on him, no one noticing how many days had passed since his last meal? A day? Two? A week? How cold and foreign this city seemed, that even death could pass unnoticed.
And where were the soldiers now? Weren’t they meant to stop this?
The answer was all too clear. No. The MM would do nothing. They wanted the poor and unfortunate to kill themselves off. Less work for them that way.
An image of Katelyn Meadows filled my mind. What had the guards at the reformatory done to her body? Had she been taken back to her parents? Were her parents even still alive? I suddenly felt old, far beyond my years.
Chase pulled me through the skirmish. I felt as if I were floating. Like my feet barely touched the ground. I wanted to go to sleep and wake up in my bedroom at home, with my mother singing in the other room. I wanted to go over to Beth’s house to do homework and talk about anything and everything and nothing important. I wanted things that were impossible.
Someone shoved into us, knocked undoubtedly by someone else. Chase’s hand was ripped from mine and I was tossed to the side. I didn’t fall. There were too many people buffering my stumble.
But Chase was gone. Swallowed by the crowd.
My ears rang. The blood pumped through my veins.
“Ch— Jacob!” I screamed, hoping he would respond to his middle name. People were shouting, shoving, pushing now. Were they still moving toward the dead man? Or something else? Chase did not respond.
“Jacob!” It was like shouting under water. No one heard me. A hard slap to my back had me jolting forward, toward the concrete, but I bounced off a body in my path. Someone grasped my arm hard and nearly jerked it out of the socket trying to hold himself up. A sea of chaos took me, flinging my upper half one way while my legs went the other, and then the crunch, the sick, soft feel of flesh and bones beneath my boots.
“Food!” I heard someone yell. “Over there!”
They couldn’t be talking about the soup kitchen: That was at the other end of the square. And the dead man only had so much to steal. It had to be the truck we’d passed earlier. What I couldn’t imagine was how these people expected to break through the barrier of armed soldiers.
Just as I regained my footing, a hand latched hard around my elbow.
“Oh, thank God!” I cried, and turned to see the back of a man with clean-cut brown hair and a navy blue collar. He was dragging me out of the riot.
Not Chase. A soldier.
“No! Wait, please!” I tried, planting my feet and jerking back. “There’s been a mistake.”
“Keep moving, Miller,” I heard him call over his shoulder.
Dread punched through me. This soldier knew who I was. They’d found me. Chase had to run. He was in more danger than I was if he was caught. He could still get to my mother.
It took all my power not to shout Chase’s name at the top of my lungs. But I knew that if I did, and if he came, he was as good as dead.
“I’m not… I don’t know who Miller is!” I said, pulling back with both hands now. No one noticed me. There was too much commotion. Too much chaos.
“Help!” I yelled finally. “Help!”
But even if they heard, they didn’t react. I clutched a man’s coat as the soldier yanked me toward a black alleyway. He shrugged me off. I grabbed a woman’s hair. She punched my shoulder, and my fist returned with loose strands.
The world became suddenly silent. It was as though we’d stepped through some invisible force field. The roar of the crowd remained in the square, but the alley was absolutely still, apart from a few rats scurrying behind an overflowing Dumpster. I saw one or two people glance after us as I was dragged inside, but though their eyes widened, they looked away in fright.
I was alone with the soldier.