The water hit me like a hovercar. It folded me backward and slammed into me like something solid. I lost consciousness for a brief moment. When I stole it back my head was ringing and I felt something warm—blood?—running down my face before it was whisked away by the river.

Moments later, everything started to burn.

Everything: my eyes, the insides of my nose, the back of my throat where I must have screamed . . . . I choked. I flailed up to the surface. It was like swimming through amniotic fluid, thick and sticky. My lungs were on fire. I sucked in a desperate breath and was pulled back down again.

I clamped my mouth shut just in time. The poison swirled around my nose, my ears, my face, trying to get in. All around me was movement and the sheer density of the water underneath me, like riding a mountain in the grip of an earthquake. I remembered my mother taking me to see the river when I was young. I remembered it glowing under the flashing lights as people took pictures with their UConns. I remembered it looking beautiful, placid, as it ran through the city.

Now I felt it underneath me, all around me, like some immense, swelling monster. How could Unilox ever have thought that this was something they could tame? I was lucky I even knew how to swim. But there was no point in swimming against this.

The water threw me down. Swirled over my head. Carried me far away from people and their crushable bones, their hovercars and their useless technology. Nothing could keep up with this, this force of nature.

At some point, caught in its grip, I lost consciousness again.

An image; a dream. No, a memory. Our third anniversary. I'd looked at my bank account, double-checked Jake's rates, and then booked him for a whole Saturday. After a morning lazing around in his family's apartment and an afternoon of shopping, we'd taken a picnic out to the river. We'd lounged on the ledge, our backs to Unilox. I'd wanted to sit next to the water, but Jake had been worried about the fumes. He always worried about things like that.

We'd installed PERCO's taste program together and feasted on chicken sandwiches and berries. It had been a pretty good program. The burn of salt was still in my mouth as we lay back on our pile of blankets. We'd gone in the evening, and after everyone who had clamored to watch the sun set on the river's surface had gone, it had been quiet. I'd lain in the circle of his arms as he tucked the blanket around us, staring up at the black, black sky. This close to the river, the air smelled sharp, like something forgotten.

"Can you imagine what it would have been like," he asked softly, "to see the stars?"

I knew about stars, vaguely. Ads mentioned them sometimes. They were rare things, like diamonds. Getting a glimpse of one when the endless smog lifted and you were far enough away from the CBD lights meant that you could wish for something and it would come true. But not many people bothered to look anymore.

I shrugged. "Not really," I said. "But what would you wish for, if you saw one?"

He was silent for a long, long time. I was surprised. My own answer was waiting already, lurking in the cavern of my mouth. I tucked it away because he already knew: to be sold to MERCE in the Auctioning. To become the best paid mech-head in all of Unilox. But him? We'd been dating for years, and I suddenly felt awful that I didn't know.

So I waited. Jake kissed my hair and breathed deeply. "I'd want to make a difference," he said at last. I blinked. What did that even mean?

"I'd want to make a difference," he repeated. "I'd want to change things."

There was something in his whisper that made the city around us fall silent. That made another world shiver gently into being. A secretive world: a world for confessions.

I didn't ask him who or what he was afraid of. It had never occurred to me, until it was too late, to be afraid.

* * *

To my surprise, I woke up.

I was drifting; I could feel that much. The beast of a river that had devoured me now bore me up almost gently, apologetically. I blinked and saw the sky was still blue-black above me. I had no idea how much time had passed. It could have been hours. It could have been moments.

But two seconds later, the pain slammed into me again. Everywhere. The insides of my eye sockets, underneath my fingernails, my throat. I made an awful, animal noise. My muscles jerked. Instinctively, I thrashed out, rolling back over onto my stomach. I squeezed my eyes closed just before they hit the water again but forgot about my gasping mouth until I was choking and sputtering. My stomach heaved. I forced myself to move despite it, crawling through the water. It must have been only about twenty-five, thirty feet to the edge, but it felt longer. Much longer. I reached the edge and tried clawing upward at something, anything. There was nothing. Solid metal lined the riverbanks, so the poison couldn't seep into the ground. I fell back. I couldn't believe it. After all this, I was still going to die.

And then I saw it. A small pipe a few feet away, leading up to the top. Drainage? Infrastructure? Something. I didn't care. I swam toward it, swallowing my panicked sobs. My fingers latched on to it in a death grip and I heaved. The pain hit me again a second later. It was immense. It felt like my skin was buckling, like the ligaments and tissue inside were fraying out at the edges. I whimpered and hauled myself up, inch by shaking inch. As soon as the last bit of me was free of the sucking water, my body shut down. I did cry now, shaking and clinging to the pipe, only inches above the rushing river that had almost killed me. That should have killed me. That could be killing me even now. What living thing could survive this? Despair made my body heavy. I felt myself unraveling, felt my arms and legs slipping away . . .

Until I heard the distant wail of DRAYTH sirens, coming toward me.

Of course.

The realization swam up in me and cut off my air. Of course they were coming. Dead or alive, they wanted me. Wanted to sell me to ANRON. I had no price; I was priceless.

My mind snapped open and the training exercise my mother had taught me kicked in. I shook myself and pictured MERCE's tower, trying to coax my shaking arms to reach for it.

Only this time, I thought of MERCE and its wonders and I felt nothing. I clung to the pipe, torn between laughing and crying. I'd wanted MERCE to buy me so badly for so long, and now it was all meaningless. It was like looking into a different world, a different life. My foot slipped. I shrieked and caught it and tried to not to panic. The river of death flowed inches below me. What now? My mother's exercise had never failed me before. Ever.

My mother . . .

Mom. I thought of her. I pictured her standing on top of the bank looking down at me, darkness in her hollow eyes and love in her breath. I thought about her ever-present cough and how it sometimes got so bad it would fold her up like she'd been punched. ANRON had told her the test had helped them develop a system to extract toxins from people's lungs. They would use it on people who ventured beyond the Wall or who worked too long in the factories. She was proud of that. So proud.

I moved. Anger contracted my arms, wrapped my legs tighter around the pipe, and I pulled.

I thought about my father: his shaking hands, his disbelief, and that cry through the wall. I squeezed my eyes shut and pulled again. I looked up. The top of the bank was no longer so far away. If I could just reach the edge . . .

My fingers burned. My body felt like dead weight. I thought of Jake and his whispered secret, "I'd want to make a difference," and I fought. I pulled. Then my mind leapt to Eleika and I almost lost my grip. Her shattered eyes stared back at me from the Auctioning stage and nausea swallowed me whole. A violent cramp tore through my fingers and arced down into my bowels. I moaned with the pain, helpless against it. But as it ripped through me, it hit something I'd forgotten. A bedrock in my soul, a silent promise I'd made myself years ago. I will not die an Anron. And I closed my eyes again and thought of me, of how I wasn't going to end up like either my mother or my father, and then I was up and out, my shaking fingers clawing at dirt and grass.

Just in time. My body wrenched itself forward, and I spun and vomited onto the ground. My throat was on fire. My eyes burned. River water came up, mixed with the grey paste that had been my dinner. Without a program feeding through my implants, I retched harder just from the taste. I heaved again and again, guts twisting, until nothing else came up. For a moment I wished that I could pass out again, just to escape the pain, but I stayed awake and shaking, looking down at the contents of my stomach spattered across the grass. Perhaps it was my imagination—my eyes were still burning, my implants were dead, I could barely see—but it looked like where I had vomited, the grass had withered and curled up on itself, gone grey with poison.

I stayed like that, shaking and staring, until I heard the sirens again.

They were closer this time. Close enough that I recognized them with a sickening twist. It didn't sound like the sirens of the normal DRAYTH mercs. This one was a high-pitched whine that I recognized with the memory of childhood, from the Ads that had played constantly during the war and from the announcements that had been beamed straight to our ears.

Soldiers were hunting me.

I crawled away into the darkness. I tried to think of somewhere I could hide and came up blank. I didn't even know where I was. Everything was still blurry; I could barely see where I was going. So I just moved. Pulled. Dragged. I felt the sudden rough bite of a road underneath my hands and my arms shook. Sweat burned on my violated skin. I hissed in pain. Pull and drag. The road turned back into grass. I felt like I was going in circles.

Until I hit something hard.

I had no idea what it was, but it was solid enough to hurt and it would have to do, I couldn't go any further. I blindly felt my way around and almost wept with relief when it stopped. I crawled behind it until the river was gone when I looked back. And then I collapsed.

A few minutes later, lights lit up the world behind me. My ruined eyes saw it as the blackness turning to grey, and then to a dirty, terrified white. I heard the hum of a hovercar cruising down the road I'd just crawled across. I was almost too exhausted to hold my breath. If they found me in my pathetic hiding place, that was it. I couldn't move. There was nothing more I could do.

But they didn't stop. They didn't get out. They coasted past, slowly, and I suddenly realized from the Ads what they were doing: scanning for my UConn. The one that was off.

But what about my collar?

My breathing rasped in my ears. I didn't want to move, didn't want to do anything that might scream where I was. But one rebel hand strayed to my throat and cautiously brushed the bump there. I felt the raised cracks my frenzied tearing had left. It was wet against my skin, but there was no humming. My collar was dead. The river must have eaten through the cracks and killed it.

I felt too hollow for relief, too carved out for anything resembling joy. It wasn't until the hovercar had passed and the lights were a distant blur that I stopped shaking and started shivering. I was tired. So tired. Everything burned. I felt sick to the soles of my feet. The river lay like a coiled snake behind me, close enough that I could still smell it. The world was all dark shapes and dying light. I reached out blindly for something, anything. I was past thinking. I just knew that I had to keep moving. That I had to get away.

Pull and drag. Pull and drag. Halfway to nowhere, the adrenaline that had kept me going sputtered out in my veins. And then my body gave out.

A/N: Thank you so much for the votes and comments. You're keeping me writing.