Taken (Erin Bowman)

stars with nothing more than tents and campfires for company?”
    “Who knows? He has a lot on his hands,” our father says. “And we are a small threat in comparison to AmWest. The poor man is extremely overextended. If he doesn’t watch it, everything is going to go crashing out of control on him.”
    I laugh. “Wouldn’t that be tragic.”
    It is sometimes hard to believe that Crevice Valley flourished into its current state so quickly, but then I remember how Claysoot sprung from those dirt streets in under twelve months. When there was a need, the Rebels found a way, and the military officials that had previously engineered Crevice Valley had provided extremely sturdy building blocks.
    Since replanting the crop fields, the land thrives. Sunlight and rain make their way into the Basin, giving way to corn and grain and endless rows of fruits and vegetables. The livestock fields are busy and dairy products always available. The hospital is all too often filled with injured or disabled soldiers, but a sizable field beside it houses much play, people joining together to kick a ball or host friendly archery matches. The laughter of their games drowns out cries of the injured.
    There’s also a school system for the youngest ones. I see one girl often, with curls so vibrant she reminds me of Kale. I imagine at some point later in their lives, this girl and all the children of Crevice Valley will look back and understand what took place here. They will come to see they were not just living, they were resisting. They burrowed into the earth by way of their parents and grew up amid a revolution. People here chose this life. Kale, however, will never have that luxury. Her life will always be a part of someone else’s plan.
    My absolute favorite place in Crevice Valley is the Technology Center. It is a mess of buildings, testing grounds, and storage facilities that begin in the Basin and roll their way into a set of tunnels piercing the mountain’s depths. There is a weapons unit—where workers clean, repair, and improve upon any firearm, bow, arrow, spear, or ax that walks its way through the Crevice—and a monitoring room, where Harvey can not only survey the areas surrounding Mount Martyr but also keep tabs on all the motion sensors.
    I like to walk through the center on my more quiet evenings and admire the various screens, the glowing dials. Sometimes I watch from afar, noting Harvey’s patience as he works on the intricate equipment. He sits with poor posture, his shoulders arched awkwardly and his glasses resting on the tip of his crooked nose. When he catches me looking, he always smiles and gives me a feeble wave.
    On one of those calm nights, I approach Harvey and ask him a question that has been swimming in my head since he first told me about Frank’s labs.
    “If a Forgery is just a copy—a physical and mental duplicate of a Heisted boy—why is it so loyal to Frank?”
    Harvey pulls his glasses off and lays them on the table. “That, Gray, is a fantastic question, and not one that many people think to ask. It is, after all, the reason that none of Frank’s lab workers could create a stable Forgery before me. If they managed to create one at all, its mind was too free. It would question Frank, and he disposed of those replicas swiftly. But I, on the other hand, had a passion for technology—a love for code, a way with software—and that is what made the difference.”
    “I’m missing something.”
    “A Forgery is similar to you and me,” he continues. “It contains all the same organs, pumps the same type of blood, is built of the same bones. But you and I have free thought, Gray. A Forgery runs off software, data implanted in its brain that tells it how to act and who to listen to.”
    Harvey’s smile, the one that exists when he talks about his passions, has faded. “This was really phenomenal when I created it. Now it mostly scares me that I was responsible for something so powerful.”
    “So why’d you do it, Harvey? Why work for him?”
    He thinks about that for a moment. “I was young and impressionable, I suppose. Frank plucked me from my childhood orphanage and brought me to Union Central, where there were state-of-the-art labs and technology and more water than I could ever drink. He treated me so well, and for the first time in my life I felt like I had family. Someone was caring for me. Someone was acting like my father. I wanted to please him, wanted to show him I could do