In the early morning hours, a stillness came over the house. The sun wasn't up yet, but a faint glow was seeping out from beneath the slightly ajar door to a nearby room, followed a moment later by voices—soft, murmuring voices that sounded too polished, somehow, to be coming from anyone in the group I had met. I rolled over on the hard pallet they had given me to sleep on, hearing my back crack as I did so. The pallet was on the ground near a dirty window, pungent with mildew and the chalky smell of that inescapable yellow dirt.

The voices seeped through the air to me, incongruously perky. I stepped over the two other bodies that snored obliviously from other pallets on the floor—two of the men that had been in Jeffrey's entourage—and made my way to the room.

Now I could see that the warm light from under the door was artificial, and it surprised me because I hadn't been sure if they even had electricity on this side of the dome.

I pushed the door open to find Tina sitting on her own pallet in what must have been her bedroom. She had set it up as nicely as possible, considering that she hadn't had much to work with. There were some old pictures on the wall, clearly ripped out of old magazines she must have found from years before—advertisements for things like make-up and winter clothes, all with smiling, beautiful women and men in fancy coats.

She didn't notice me at first as I came into the room, returning the door to the same position behind me in order to keep the light from escaping and waking the others.

Instead, she was watching a screen under a tent of sheets in front of her. She giggled a few times as a woman's voice talked, and it took a moment to recognize the cadence and the laugh track. It was an old episode of a TV show I had seen a few times as a kid, about a girl who was a normal high-school student by day but a spy by night.

Tina laughed again at one of the jokes on the show, and then turned her head just slightly, enough to see my shadow there. She almost jumped out of her skin.

"Sorry," I whispered.

She quickly turned off the device and buried it under her covers, the words "Don't tell" escaping her lips almost involuntarily.

"Don't tell what?" I asked.

"Don't tell anyone in the dome."

My face must have revealed my confusion, and she just sighed and spun around in her bed to face me more fully. "Right," she said to herself, her tone low enough as to not wake the others just outside the door. "I guess you wouldn't know. You've never been on this side before."

I nodded, encouraging her to continue.

"We're not supposed to have them," she explained, nodding towards her sheets, where the device was buried. "I don't use it for anything bad, though. I just watch old shows."

"I didn't know you had electricity," I admitted.

"There's a generator in the back. My dad keeps it charged in case of emergency. Like I said, though, there's nothing contraband on it. It's my stepmom's old phone, and it's mostly just shows her kid used to watch."

"Your stepmom?"

"The tall lady. Patty."

I waited a beat, not wanting to force my way into the room if I wasn't welcome. But this was already more information than anyone else had given me about this side of the dome. What else could I get her to tell me? "I'm not going to turn you in," I promised her. "I wouldn't even know who to tell."

She smiled in acknowledgement, seeming to trust me again, and pulled the device out from under the sheets. She nodded to her pallet, indicating that I should sit and watch with her. "Have you ever seen this show?" she asked, her eyes turning bright.

I shrugged as I sat down, realizing that if I'd really come from this time period, like I said I had, the answer would probably have been no.

"It's so funny. She's, like, a spy but nobody knows it and so she has all these disguises. It's the best show."

"Sounds great," I offered. "What else is on there?"

"Well, there's a show about horses. Have you ever seen a horse?"

"Yeah, sure," I said, figuring that was safe.

"I don't really like that one, though."

"Can you make calls with it?"

She looked at me strangely, then snorted back a laugh so hard to she had to cover her nose. "Oh my god," she whispered to herself, then laughed again silently.

"What?" I asked, playing dumb. Although, honestly, there wasn't much playing involved since I literally had no idea what she was laughing at. I could only assume it was because the answer to my question was a resounding no. After all, if no one was supposed to have phones on this side of the dome, then there probably weren't any service providers.

"What do they teach you in that bubble anyway?"

I shrugged, clenching my mouth shut. Maybe if she thought I was an idiot, she'd explain it to me.

"No," she finally answered, "talking to people over the air is for boltheads like you." Her eyes flashed from the phone to me, checking to see how I had received her insult. It felt like a test—I was supposed to prove I had a sense of humor and could take it. So I smiled back.

"So it's just got the shows then?"

"And photos of my stepmom and her ex-boyfriend." Her voice turned into a more conspiratorial whisper as she leaned closer. "Which she refuses to delete even though she left him for Dad, like, five years ago. You should hear the fights about that one."

"Oh, wow," I said softly, glad that we seemed to be sharing confidences.

We sat and watched the sitcom for a few minutes, the tinny and obviously fake laugh track adding an absurd element to this otherwise depressing landscape.

When the show ended, Tina turned the device off. "There's not much battery left, sorry. I don't think we can watch another one."

"That's okay."

The old phone lay on her lap, as useless now as all those old pieces of radios and plastic knobs that had littered the streets and the pyramid house.

"Tina?" I asked in a low whisper, just as her eyes were beginning to close.

"Mmm?"

"Why can't you have real phones?"

She looked at me with tired eyes and shrugged. "That was the deal they made, I guess. We refused to put those things in our heads, and so they took everything else away. Figured we'd come crawling back at some point and begging to be let in, but we never did. Daddy says you're all robots in there. I don't want to be a robot."

I bit my lip, trying not to take what she was saying personally. But it was personal, wasn't it? It was because of me that they lived like this. Because of me that the world had been split in two: inside the dome, and outside of it.

"Can I ask you something else?"

She stretched out on her pallet before answering, making me wonder if I was overstepping my bounds with my questions. But she mumbled something along the lines of "Go ahead," and I cleared my throat and continued.

"Do you know a family named Martel?"

Her eyes jutted open then, and she sat up with a sharp inhale, her lips curling in towards her teeth. "Did Jonah Martel send you here?"

"What? No."

But it wasn't Tina's voice that exploded next into the room with the words, "I knew it." Her stepmother came barreling through the open door, silhouetted against the bright brown window of the living room. The sun must have been rising somewhere behind the avalanche of dirt.

"She is a spy," the woman continued.

"Patty, stop," Tina begged her, but it was too late as Patty was already upon me.

Her large, cold hands grasped my upper arms and had me levitating to meet her face-to-face. "You pick up rats off the street," she continued, her eyes flitting to Tina on the pallet and then back to me. I gasped from the pain of it, and she finally dropped me again.

I cowered on the floor before her. "Please..." I begged. "I was only asking..."

"What's going on here?" Jeffrey Garrison grumbled from the doorway, his eyes red and puffy with sleep.

"She was asking about Jonah," Patty answered for me.

"I don't know Jonah Martel," I insisted, still rubbing my sore arms on the floor where Patty had dropped me. "Please, I wasn't asking about him."

"She must'a meant Caleb then," Jeffrey said, yawning now and considerably less upset about my apparent transgression than his wife was.

"Caleb Martel lives clear out in the boonies. Ain't no way he sent some bolthead to spy on us. No, this is Jonah's work."

"That true, girl?" he asked me now, his hulking body stepping closer and casting a long shadow over my trembling body on the floor.

"No, sir," I answered quickly, my voice unsteady. I wasn't sure if I'd make it out of this house alive, but at least they had confirmed one thing for me: one of Adam's two brothers was still in town.

Jeffrey considered me for a moment, his hand absently scratching the underside of his considerable belly, before turning back to his wife. "I dunno, Patty. If Jonah was gonna send a spy, I should think he'd do a lot better than a boltheaded little waif from the dome. What's he got to spy on us for now, anyhow?"

"Jealous," she spat, and I detected a hint of pride in the way her chin jutted out with the word.

"Of what?"

"Of you, you jackass," Patty said, that hint of pride dissolving into a pool of resentment. She approached her husband, hovering an inch or so taller than him, strands of wiry blond hair weaving their way down her back. "'Cause I'm with you now instead'a him."

"That ship sailed five years ago, Patty. Should think he'd'a come to terms with it by now."

Tina shuffled to the wall side of her pallet while the adults argued, her knees pulled up to her chest. I tried to catch her eye, but she wouldn't look at me.

"You really think a Martel is gonna let go of a grudge?" Patty demanded now, her long body billowing with the words like a ship mast in a storm. "After how long your families've been at each other's throats?"

"Enough, Patty," Jeffrey said, losing his cool finally. "It's too early for this. I'm hungry. Kick the girl out if you want. I don' care."

"She didn't do anything," Tina protested weakly from the pallet, but either Patty didn't hear her or didn't care.

Patty's hands were on my arms again before I had a chance to stand on my own, and the next thing I knew she was practically carrying me out through the living room and out the front door of the house. Her claw-like hands were pinching the flesh of my bare upper arms so tightly that all I could do was cringe in pain and wait for it to be over.

Finally, it was, as Patty had delivered me to the outside of the chain-link fence that surrounded their property. She practically shoved me into the street, where I stumbled over some hard object on the ground and landed on my butt, catching myself at the last second with my hands. I had tripped over a plastic bassinette, deserted on its side in the middle of the road. A soiled baby blanket was spilling out of it, as though the baby itself had been thrown away.

"You tell Jonah Martel I ain't ever comin' back," Patty's deep, scratchy voice boomed above me. "Not after the way he treated me."

I shook my head, opening my dry mouth to try and protest, but she was already spinning on her heel and heading back into the house.

There was nothing to do but walk down the empty yellow street. I had no idea where I was going, but I figured there must have been some way to find people in this place. I didn't think I'd get so lucky as to find a Yellow Pages lying around, but maybe if I could find the old high school...

I didn't have time to finish the thought before a gentle set of fingers touched my upper arm. I spun around, my body bracing to defend itself. But it was just Tina.

"I'm sorry," she said, and I wasn't sure if she was apologizing for scaring me or for not stopping me from being kicked out.

"It's not your fault," I said, straightening my shirt. "Thank you for everything you did for me." I nodded a kind of weak goodbye, then spun and started to walk away.

She watched me go for a moment, her feet planted in the dirt of the road like an ancient tree. But then her voice carried on the dead air between us. "You really wanna find Jonah Martel?"

I stopped mid-step, and turned to face her. "Yes."

She held up the old phone, the scratches in its glass cover giving the distinct impression that the phone was crying from overuse. "There's an old map on here," she said. "It's from, like, thirty years ago, so it's wrong more often than it's right. But I could show you where his house used to be."

I could feel the dirt on my face cracking with my smile, and my body doubled over a bit as I rested my hands on my thighs. And then I walked back to Tina and she handed me the phone.

****

Fun fact: This scene--which seems so simple on the page--was probably the hardest one for me to write since Down World. Don't know why. Lots of moving parts, I guess. To everyone out there writing a book, I salute you. It's not easy! 

XO, Rebecca