Page 21 of Never Bound

My phone vibrated, jerking me awake. Papers flew off my desk as I scrambled to wipe off the sticky combination of hair and saliva pressed into the side of my face. The sun was much lower in the sky, and the room was gloomy. What time was it?

The display showed four new messages from Corey, but the call was from Erica Muller, and needless to say, that seemed far more important. I raised the phone to my ear in a daze.

“Where is he?” My professor’s voice blared out of the earpiece.

“Who? What? I don’t—”

“You know who I’m talking about. You have to find him, Louisa,” she continued. “Immediately. Normally, I would never betray the confidence of a slave who came to me like this, but I can’t reach him now, so he must have burned the phone. He’s in danger, and so is his sister. Make sure that whatever he does, he does not go to that warehouse.”

“What? Why?” I sputtered incoherently.

“I don’t have time to explain now.” My professor sounded alarmed, her voice so unlike the cool, dry, pedagogical tone she used in the lecture hall.

“But what do I tell him?” I’d be lucky if he’d listen to or believe anything I said, after the words that had been exchanged. Words we could never take back.

“Tell him I can help him and that I know other people who can. But he cannot handle this by himself.”

“What should we do?”

“You both need to come see me as soon as possible, and we’ll take it from there. Can you get to the mirror telescope building on campus today?”

“I think so, but—” There were several “buts,” the first one being that we had both more or less vowed to never speak to each other again. But I had a feeling that Erica, if I tried to explainthat, would slap usbothupside the head and tell us to get over ourselves. People’s lives may be at stake.

Except there was another, even bigger “but.”

I’ll get as far as I need to get, chip or no chip.

A shroud of dread unfolded slowly over me from head to toe. Because there might be a reason,otherthan the fight, that I hadn’t seen him all day.

My father was 400 miles away physically, my mother was 400 miles away mentally, the other slaves were understandably slacking off, and I was avoiding him.

If he was going to take off, this was the best, and maybe the only, opportunity he would ever have to buy himself enough of a head start to succeed.

“Good,” said Erica, whom I’d forgotten was still on the line, and who had apparently already decided that there were no “buts” acceptable. “When you get there, look for one of the volunteer guides with a name tag readingMilagros. She’ll be expecting you.”

7

HIM

Atdawn,underthebarest glimmers of stars, as I dumped the burner phone in the exact spot I’d planned to dump it all along, I stared up at the red-gold mountains that were at last mine to see up close and thought about how running away wasn’t supposed to feel like this.

It wasn’t supposed to feel like anything.

I’d never told Louisa, but this wasn’t my first plan to run. Like most fifteen-year-olds, I’d been as stupid as I thought I was smart, and almost as soon as I’d won over the farm owner’s wife enough for my liking, I’d started conning her into helping me slip out. Of course I’d gotten my arm nearly lopped off before the plan got very far, and I’d been thankful every day since that I had. I’d have been caught within hours, and if I werelucky, I’d still be at the farm. More likely, I’d be in a mine, or dead, and as terrifying as that was—yes, I admitted it, there were things that scared me, okay?—the worst part of it was that there would be no one here now to rescue Maeve.

Have you ever heard the name Resi?I’d asked Erica Muller when I’d got her on the phone.

Yes,she’d said after a pause.

And?I’d prompted.Is there—?

There have been whispers,she’d said.People talking. But people always talk.

So Maeve was right: there was something happening. But at the same time, Erica was right: there was nothing slaves loved more than talking about freedom while refusing to give up whatever minimal safety and security they’d achieved to try to get it. And the few free people who claimed to want to help us were often even worse: armchair activists who spent their days attacking their pro-slavery opponents in online forums in place of actually doing anything concrete.

Maeve was different. She’d started out a dreamer, sure, but by the time she was eleven, the last time I’d seen her, she’d already started talking more and more about rebellion. Real rebellion. She’d just been sold off and abandoned before she’d had a chance to actually rebel.

And as for me? Well. I’d studied history. I knew what happened. The successful rebellions were outnumbered ten to one by those that had ended with all the rebels’ heads on pikes at the city gates. Forgotten names dying for forgotten causes, the ones you never read about in textbooks. And sure, dying for a cause is inspiring and all, but those who die for a cause are still as dead as anyone else. I would bet that even all those failed SLA bombers—Erica’s friends who had gotten thrown in mines, if any were still alive—would now happily sell out all of what they once believed for one more chance to hold the people they loved, or hell, to see daylight.

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