Page 79 of Our Last Resort

“See you tonight?” he whispered on our way out.

“Yep.”

The plan was to leave in the middle of the night.

First, the youngest children went to bed. Then, the older kids. Finally, the adults.

With each minute, my unease grew.

Packing was quick. Gabriel and I barely owned anything worth bringing. Whatever we decided to take with us would fit in the pockets of our thin coats.

Me: a single dollar bill retrieved from the hole in my mattress, and the little woodenFGabriel had carved for me. Gabriel: a stopwatch he had stolen, for good this time. Not that we’d need one, but the stopwatches had made our conquest of outside-outside possible. It made a kind of sense to bring one as a good-luck charm.

When I arrived at the red oak tree, Gabriel was already there. Calm. Resolute, as if he’d already said goodbye.

Me, I was a mess. Émile was behind every tree, in every shadow. My legs were shaking. My thoughts were cloudy. I was all fear, no bravado.

“Let’s go,” Gabriel said.

He headed not toward outside-outside, but toward the main building. Toward Émile’s office and his living quarters.

Gabriel walked up to one of the first-floor windows and bent his arm, positioning his elbow in front of the glass. That part, we hadn’t discussed.

“Stop,” I whispered.

I turned the knob on the front door.

“He doesn’t lock his doors,” I mumbled.

Gabriel’s face fell.

Seriously?

Seriously.

We padded our way to Émile’s office. Gabriel knew where to go. He had been there, like all of us, on the day of his own test, when he was eight. It was like he didn’t need me at all.

“Okay,” he said, shutting the door. He looked around. “Guess we should…”

He grabbed a pile of papers on Émile’s desk and startedscrunching them up, stuffing them at the foot of the bookcase behind the desk. There was no hesitation in his gestures, only resolve.

I remembered what I was supposed to do. From my pocket, I produced a small box of matches, pilfered from Joan’s bar.

The match lit up with a small crack.

“Hold on,” Gabriel said.

I shook the match. The flame went out.

Gabriel was looking at Émile’s desk.

Right.

I opened the wooden box, took out all the cash—didn’t even count it—and stuffed it in my coat pocket.

Gabriel reached under his own coat. He pulled out a small bottle.

We, the good people of Émile’s world, got rid of our trash by burning it. (It’s not like we could have relied on the town’s regular trash pickup.) We’d all seen the smoke, and smelled it, too. But here’s a little thing Gabriel had learned, working as a young man on the compound: It wasn’t enough to bring a flame to the pile of garbage. You had to douse the pile insomethingfirst. This was called an accelerant. There were various kinds, but gasoline—like the gasoline we used for the generators that kept Émile’s office warm and his electric car charged—worked the best.

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