Ignite Me

I nearly fall forward.

“Stay low and buckle up, love. These tanks weren’t built for comfort.”

Warner is smiling as he stares straight ahead, his hands sheathed in black leather gloves, his body draped in a steel-gray overcoat. I duck down in my seat and fumble for the straps, buckling myself in as best I can.

“So you know how to get there?” I ask him.

“Of course.”

“But your father said you couldn’t remember anything about Omega Point.”

Warner glances over, his eyes laughing. “How convenient for us that I’ve regained my memory.”

“Hey—how did you even get out of there?” I ask him. “How did you get past the guards?”

He shrugs. “I told them I had permission to be out of my room.”

I gape at him. “You’re not serious.”

“Very.”

“But how did you find your way out?” I ask. “You got past the guards, fine. But that place is like a labyrinth—I couldn’t find my way around even after I’d been living there for a month.”

Warner checks a display on the dashboard. Hits a few buttons for functions I don’t understand. “I wasn’t completely unconscious when I was carried in,” he says. “I forced myself to pay attention to the entrance,” he says. “I did my best to memorize any obvious landmarks. I also kept track of the amount of time it took to carry me from the entrance to the medical wing, and then from the medical wing to my room. And whenever Castle took me on my rounds to the bathroom,” he says, “I studied my surroundings, trying to gauge how far I was from the exit.”

“So—” I frown. “You could’ve defended yourself against the guards and tried to escape much sooner. Why didn’t you?”

“I already told you,” he says. “It was oddly luxurious, being confined like that. I was able to catch up on weeks of sleep. I didn’t have to work or deal with any military issues. But the most obvious answer,” he says, exhaling, “is that I stayed because I was able to see you every day.”

“Oh.”

Warner laughs, his eyes pressed shut for a second. “You really never wanted to be there, did you?”

“What do you mean?”

He shakes his head. “If you’re going to survive,” he says to me, “you can never be indifferent to your surroundings. You can’t depend on others to take care of you. You cannot presume that someone else will do things right.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You didn’t care,” he says. “You were there, underground for over a month, grouped together with these supernaturally inclined rebels spouting big, lofty ideals about saving the world, and you say you couldn’t even find your way around. It’s because you didn’t care,” he says. “You didn’t want to participate. If you did, you would’ve taken the initiative to learn as much as possible about your new home. You would’ve been beside yourself with excitement. Instead, you were apathetic. Indifferent.”

I open my mouth to protest but I don’t have a chance.

“I don’t blame you,” he says. “Their goals were unrealistic. I don’t care how flexible your limbs are or how many objects you can move with your mind. If you do not understand your opponent—or worse, if you underestimate your opponent—you are going to lose.” His jaw tightens. “I kept trying to tell you,” he says, “that Castle was going to lead your group into a massacre. He was too optimistic to be a proper leader, too hopeful to logically consider the odds stacked against him, and too ignorant of The Reestablishment to truly understand how they deal with voices of opposition.

“The Reestablishment,” Warner says, “is not interested in maintaining a facade of kindness. The civilians are nothing more than peons to them. They want power,” he says to me, “and they want to be entertained. They are not interested in fixing our problems. They only want to make sure that they are as comfortable as possible as we dig our own graves.”

“No.”

“Yes,” he says. “It is exactly that simple. Everything else is just a joke to them. The texts, the artifacts, the languages. They just want to scare people, to keep them submissive, and to strip them of their individuality—to herd them into a singular mentality that serves no purpose but their own. This is why they can and will destroy all rebel movements. And this is a fact that your friends did not fully understand. And now,” he says, “they have suffered for their ignorance.”

He stops the tank.

Turns off the engine.

Unlocks my door.

And I’m still not ready to face this.

THIRTEEN

Anyone would be able to find Omega Point now. Any citizen, any civilian, anyone with working vision would be able to tell you where the large crater in Sector 45 is located.

Warner was right.

I unbuckle myself slowly, reaching blindly for the door handle. I feel like I’m moving through fog, like my legs have been formed from fresh clay. I fail to account for the height of the tank above the ground and stumble into the open air.

This is it.

The empty, barren stretch of land I’d come to recognize as the area just around Omega Point; the land Castle told us was once lush with greenery and vegetation. He said it’d been the ideal hiding place for Omega Point. But this was before things started changing. Before the weather warped and the plants struggled to flourish. Now it’s a graveyard. Skeletal trees and howling winds, a thin layer of snow powdered over the cold, packed earth.

Omega Point is gone.

It’s nothing but a huge, gaping hole in the ground about a mile across and 50 feet deep. It’s a bowlful of innards, of death and destruction, silent in the wake of tragedy. Years of effort, so much time and energy spent toward a specific goal, one purpose: a plan to save humanity.

Obliterated overnight.

A gust of wind climbs into my clothes then, wraps itself around my bones. Icy fingers tiptoe up my pant legs, clench their fists around my knees and pull; suddenly I’m not sure how I’m still standing. My blood feels frozen, brittle. My hands are covering my mouth and I don’t know who put them there.

Something heavy falls onto my shoulders. A coat.

I look back to find that Warner is watching me. He holds out a pair of gloves.

I take the gloves and tug them on over my frozen fingers and wonder why I’m not waking up yet, why no one has reached out to tell me it’s okay, it’s just a bad dream, that everything is going to be fine.