Taken (Erin Bowman)

time doesn’t stop.
    “The first for when your throat is dry
    The next for under rainless skies
    If suns are strong, eat the third
    Need one more? Just say the word
    When water’s scarce, please have the last
    Drink its juice and drink it fast
    And when the thirst has stricken me
    Please sow five new berry seeds
    With luck and faith we’ll watch them bloom
    Else thirst will drive us to our tomb”
    He breaks into tapping again, fingers dancing over Maude’s video.
    “We both knew that song when we woke up in Claysoot,” he says. “Maude said our mother must have sung it to us, even though neither of us could remember her. Or a home that we shared with her, even.”
    “She knows there’s more out here, doesn’t she?” I ask.
    “Yes, and it’s my fault.” He sinks to the floor and leans against the wall, knees pulled in toward his chest. “When the Order caught me running with Ryder, I told them I’d found a way to alert Maude of life beyond the Wall. It was a lie and a foolish one. I thought that if the Order believed Claysoot knew about the project, it all might stop. But that’s not what happened. Someone in the Order made contact with Maude. They discovered she knew nothing, but after revealing themselves, they had to ensure she’d keep quiet. Frank told her I was in his custody and promised to kill me if she let the truth slip.
    “She demanded to see me first. I remember the video session. We saw each other for no more than ten seconds, and she started crying in half that time. After that, they used her as a resource, asked her all sorts of questions, still do I think. She is their eyes behind the Wall. And she goes along with everything, all because of me. She’d do anything for me; it’s her greatest weakness.”
    I’m now positive Maude is the reason I was saved from the Outer Ring. She likely worried Bo would be hurt if Frank believed her responsible for my beating the Heist, for keeping my birth date secret. She must have told him the truth as soon as I admitted it to her.
    “And the berries?” I ask.
    He shrugs. “I’m guessing she leaves them there in case I were to reappear, to show that she’s never forgotten me.”
    “We should go,” Emma says.
    I nod and move for the door, but something catches me off guard. Something odd in one of the topmost screens labeled Group A. “Wait! Did you see that?”
    “See what?” Bree asks, looking at the screen I point to. We wait, and again there is movement, a shadow darting through the frame.
    “That, just there. Did you see that?” Bree nods. So does Emma.
    We spread out in the control room, locating the other screens labeled Group A and wait. While each screen shows havoc—charred buildings and trampled livestock fields—we begin to see life among them: the faintest of silhouettes, darting through the frames. You would miss them if you weren’t deliberately looking for life, which would be easy to do when the screens sit beside the lively pictures of groups B, C, and D.
    “I thought Group A was gone,” I say.
    Bree shrugs. “Our journals are incomplete, so I’m not sure.”
    “No, they killed each other off,” Bo says. “I heard it reported. Occasionally, in the early weeks after I was captured, I became Frank’s favorite test subject. He hated Ryder for escaping and he took that anger out on me. I spent hours on his workers’ tables. Each time I prayed that I would die, but I never got quite that lucky.
    “I remember the day Frank received the report that Group A had died off. They thought I was unconscious, but I heard the whole thing. Dead. Extinct. Gone. Every last one of them.”
    “Maybe Frank’s wrong, though,” Bree says, looking back to the images. “Maybe a few of them made it.”
    “And maybe our eyes are playing tricks on us,” Bo says. “Whatever is left of that ruined place, it is not an area that could easily foster life.”
    “True,” I say. “But even if they were fighting at one point, all it would have taken was a handful of people who had hope, who wanted to keep going. Claysoot formed out of nearly nothing. So did Saltwater and Dextern. These people in Group A had electricity and shelter. If they decided they wanted to live, they did.”
    Bree and Bo nod in agreement, but Emma has grown distracted by a display that shows Carter hunched over medical scrolls in the Clinic.
    “Come on,” Bo says. “We need to keep moving.”
    He checks the door, and after deeming it safe, we open it. The