Rise An Eve Novel

rain, about leaving the City, about the abandoned house.
    We’d gone seven miles, maybe less. The girls had tired quickly, and the rain was coming down sideways, the wind pushing against us. I knew we wouldn’t get far, but these first few miles outside the City were the most dangerous. As soon as the flooding subsided, the soldiers would be back on the roads, canvassing, looking for us. We’d have to rest now and take one of the back routes out of the development the following morning, before the sun came up.
    The second story of the house was mostly dark, with dim light coming in from the broken windows. One corner of the floor was warped, the wooden boards rotted. A few of the girls sat on a bare mattress, covered by the one sheet we’d found. “I don’t understand,” Helene, the girl with tiny black braids, said to no one in particular. She’d found a pack of T-shirts in a basement closet, and some of the girls had put them on, looking strangely uniform now, with the exception of three girls who’d discovered sweaters in a bottom drawer. Nearly every surface was covered with wet clothes—jumpers and socks laid over the back of the armchair, mud-caked shoes strewn by the bedroom door.
    “It’s impossible to understand,” Beatrice said. She squeezed the ends of her hair, trying to get out the last bit of water. “Lord knows, I have tried.”
    I picked one of the blankets off the floor, opening it up toward the window. Then I passed it to Bette and Lena, the two girls sitting closest to me. “I’ve seen what happens in that compound—I was at my School for twelve years,” I said. “And after I left, whenever I felt scared, or confused, or worried, I just came back to one fact—the Teachers there lied. It was never our life; we were always under their control.”
    Lena took off her black plastic glasses, wiping the scratched lenses on her shirt. “But Teacher Henrietta said—”
    “I know what they said.” I ran my hands over my hair, pushing a few wet strands away from my face. The girls were no older than fourteen, but they’d already undergone some of the initial processes for graduation. “Do you remember the vitamins they gave you? The way they charted your height and weight every month? How the older girls went to the doctors more frequently? Did you know any girls who’d started the injections?”
    Helene’s face changed, revealing some sort of recognition. I remembered what I felt that day when Arden had told me the truth. Every part of me had wanted not to believe, that resistance lingering even after I’d seen the Graduates myself. If everything that happened inside the School was a lie, then who was I now, after having based my identity around it? How could I possibly go on?
    “I did,” Helene said, not looking at the others as she said it.
    “You’re probably convinced you’re going to die out here, that you couldn’t possibly survive in the wild,” I continued. “But that’s not true either.”
    I looked to a few of the girls who were huddled together on the bed. Some had softened toward me, now that we’d made it out of the rain. I knew my position as Princess meant something to them—they had heard my voice before on the broadcasts from the City. They’d sat in a dining hall similar to the one at my School, listening to the parade when I first arrived, listening to the stories about the girl who’d come from the Schools to the Palace, as if that were a possibility for them, too. How many of them must’ve imagined who their parents were, if they had somehow survived and were living somewhere inside the City?
    “We shouldn’t have come here,” Bette said. “We should’ve stayed with the rest of the girls. Now we’ll never see them again.”
    Sarah turned from the window, where she was bringing in another plastic bottle of rainwater. “But we can’t go back now,” she said. Beatrice stepped forward to help her, but she turned away, setting the bottle down against the wall.
    Bette pulled her sweater tighter around her sides. “Why would they do that, though? Maybe it wasn’t at all the Schools—maybe it was just at yours. How do you know?”
    Clara settled into the armchair in the corner. “She knows better than anyone. We were living in the Palace. The King said it himself.”
    Bette shook her head. She whispered something to the girl next to her that I couldn’t quite hear. “I hope you’ll learn to trust me,” I said. “If you went back to