Taken (Erin Bowman)

her here when I ran to the Rebels.”
    Bree steps between us. “Was this your motive when you volunteered for the mission?” she asks. “Are you risking all our hides right now for some girl none of us have ever heard of?”
    “I can’t leave Emma again. I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to get her out of Taem, and I wasn’t going to ignore my chance when it finally arrived.”
    “Please, I want to come,” Emma says. “Take me with you. I can’t stay here any longer.”
    Bree snorts and steps closer to me, so close I can feel the warmth of her breath as she exhales. She presses a finger into my chest. “She can come if she’s that important to you, but we are not spending another moment bickering in this hallway.”
    I look over Bree’s head at Emma. “She’s coming.”
    Bree scowls, but then motions for us to follow her. “This way.”
    Bo tails Bree, and as I move to do the same, Emma grabs my arm. “Thank you,” she says. “For my second chance.”
    For a split second I contemplate kissing her, grabbing her face and pulling it to mine. But then I think that the last hands holding her face were likely Craw’s, that his lips were the last to press against hers. Something hardens in the pit of my stomach.
    “Second chances are not the same as forgiveness, Emma.” I shake her hand from mine. “Don’t slow us down.”
    We race on, following Bree down a stairwell. On the bottom floor, we find ourselves in what must be Frank’s surveillance quarters. Screens split the room into a variety of aisles, each display showing a different corner of Union Central: corridors, bedrooms, fields, the dining hall. It’s eerie, the visuals flickering solemnly as we watch Order members sprint through the frames. Some even show select areas of downtown Taem. Fighting and smoke fill the ones focused on the public square. As we pause to catch our breath, I see a dark flash move beyond a series of screens.
    “Someone’s here,” I whisper. We steal silently down the row, moving away from our pursuer. From behind us, another pattering of feet. We cut down a different aisle. Soon we are so deep in the rows that Bree becomes uncertain which way we came from and which way leads to the garage. The feet keep trailing us, flicking around corners and tracking our moves.
    “Here,” I whisper, pointing to a room off one of the corridors. We step in quickly and bolt the door behind us. It flattens the alarm into a duller echo. Emma leans against the wall in relief and lights click on.
    The room becomes visible, bluish lighting flickering overhead. It is a lengthy room, much like the aisles we’ve left, but its contents are far more important. It doesn’t take long for us to know what we are looking at. There must be hundreds of screens, but their visuals are unmistakable. Dirty streets. Island sand. Huts and livestock fields and town squares.
    “This is the control room,” Bree says, her hand running over a screen that shows two young boys playing along a sandy shoreline.
    I step up to a screen that houses familiar visuals: the steps leading to the Council building in Claysoot. Kale is hopping up and down them, pulling her wooden duck behind her. There is no sound coming from the screen, and she could be a memory, a daydream, something not even happening. It has been just three months, and yet I feel I’ve been gone for decades longer. So much has changed since I called those clay streets my home. Kale hears something, and hops down the steps and out of the frame.
    Another screen is eerily labeled Group C: Maude. Within its borders I can see the inside of her home: the simple wooden table, the faucet that could be pumped for running water. But what’s most unsettling is that these things are in the background, visible beyond her bedroom doorframe. The bulk of the image is focused on Maude’s bed, on the place I saw her standing the night I ran from Claysoot, the place she had discussed things with a voice I’m now certain belonged to Frank. If she was talking to him that night, does that mean she was in on it all along?
    Bo moves to my side and taps at the corner of Maude’s visuals. I think it is his customary twitch until I notice the objects beneath his fingers: five strawberries, lined up with precision on the nightstand beside Maude’s bed. He’s not tapping. He is counting.
    My voice comes out a whisper. “Five red berries in a row.”
    “Sown with love so that they’ll grow,” Bo sings. But this