"This is dumb. So dumb."

Mark, Tyler's best friend, shoved him forward, his torso hanging out of his bedroom window.

"Come on, it'll be fun," he teased. "We're already late after your freak out this morning. Plus, this is the last time we'll be together before graduation."

Tyler groaned loudly but gave in, grabbing the sturdiest low hanging branch and letting himself fall out the window. The branch bowed but didn't snap and held him in the air while Mark grabbed a different branch and repeated the process.

The two climbed up the tree until it reached the highest window in the wall, where the space was big enough to fit them even though they should've outgrown that spot years ago.

With the sun reaching the tops of the hillside and splitting through dark green trees in the distance, the only sky glimmered with splashes of unfamiliar yet striking color and bright light. In the monotone setting of Dema, the sunrise always captured Tyler's hopes of one day finding a way to create something as beautiful as the start of a new day.

When they were kids, Mark and Tyler would sneak out of their houses early in the morning, climb the large oak tree that grew against the wall in Mark's backyard, and watch the sun rise from the small tinted window. It was the only place they could see a glimpse of color outside of the light bulb lit dome they lived in. They stopped once they got older. Now that graduation was closing in on them, Mark insisted on going one last time.

Tyler, being the softie that he was, agreed.

"I'm going to miss this," Mark sighed, leaning his head against the dark grey brick that shaped the window sill.

Tyler hummed in agreement. "What, sneaking out every morning?"

"No. Being with you."

The sad reality for the two of them was after their graduation at the end of the month, they would most likely never see each other again. Mark would go and become a history professor in a different part of Dema, and Tyler would do... whatever it was that he would be chosen to do.

As the sun rose, something about the landscape caught his eye. Tyler had seen that view many, many times before, but now the ravines that split the hills down the middle looked strikingly familiar to the ones from his dream.

He noticed a river cutting through the bottom. A thick, dark smoke curled from one hillside to the other, creating an unrecognizable pattern. It was too far to know for sure, but Tyler would bet that the smoke was caused by the people that were marching in his dreams. His stomach churned with the fear of the sheer number of those people.

What if they were there to destroy Dema? The only safe haven left after the outside world was safe from the evil of war and death.

Suddenly, the sirens rang out, signaling an invasion from the outside.

Mark grabbed the branch behind him and climbed out of the window sill. He looked back at Tyler, who was too stunned to move.

"We need to go. You know what they do to people who disobey curfew."

Tyler nodded, tearing his eyes away from the smoke and climbing down after Mark. They went their separate ways at the bottom- Mark back into his home and Tyler to his house across the street.

He bolted through Mark's fence and almost immediately fell down to hide behind a line of bushes in the front yard. A handful of the ravine people marched down the road, the gravel under their boots the only sound in the area.

They held up torches that flickered with moving lights that Tyler had never seen before. The movement of the lights seemed so natural and unconfined, unlike the fluorescent bulbs that lit the entirety of Dema.

This was all a huge mistake. Tyler shouldn't be seeing this. Nobody was supposed to be outside after the sirens went off. Then again, it had been so long since the last siren.

Two girls ran out from the street vertical of Tyler's towards the group. They both carried backpacks and handfuls of the same flowers from Tyler's dream, the bright color of the petals mimicked on the patches on their clothes and fabrics covering their faces. The older of the two threw her arms around someone, most likely the leader, and they started to speak in a hushed, excited tone.

A deep thrumming like heavy footsteps shook the ground, and the group visibly tensed. The lights of their torches flickered as a breeze picked up. Tyler crouched down as far as he could.

Every curtain on every house was shut tight as ordered by the Bishops, so the only witness was Tyler. One of the ravine people whispered something to the leader, and they nodded. The group went back the way they came, disappearing just as the Bishops approached from the west.

Only the leader and the younger girl stayed behind, standing their ground despite the threat of being taken away. She took a dark green jacket from the leader's hand and bolted to one of the statues near the corner of the street.

The girl flung the jacket over the shoulders of the statue and ran off with the leader. Once they were both out of sight, the Bishops stopped in their place as if waiting for the two to disappear.

Then, they vanished. There was nobody else in the street, so Tyler took the chance to stand and run across the street to his house.

He climbed through his backyard, up a ladder he'd propped up against his window, and tumbled in just as his mother knocked on the door.

"Tyler, honey, are you awake?"

His groan, mostly of pain from landing on his neck and shoulders, must've registered as a sleepy groan, because she only laughed and told him to get out of bed.

Tyler breathed a sigh of relief and sat up, rubbing his neck. After claiming himself down enough, he dared to glance out the window.

The jacket was gone, probably taken by one of the Bishops, but someone had somehow spray painted a large, brightly colored stripe over the eyes of the obsidian statue.

Underneath it, spray painted in white on the black concrete, was the phrase REJECT VIALISM.

Tyler couldn't help but feel sick. He'd seen that before too often, usually made from rebels sneaking into Dema over the walls. Yet he never saw any people inside Dema go with them willingly before, until then.

He wondered why someone would risk their life for something like that. It must be something worth living for if they're willing to die for it.