Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
As the two clean-suited enforcers marched me through from the exit pod into the magnificent bright, I considered my inevitable death. I'd never seen the sun before - none of us had, other than in videos the director showed on weekends - and I had never seen anything so bright or beautiful. I couldn't even look at it, not directly, and I longed to feel its heat on my skin. Assuming Gurney was right.
Stalks of grass greener than any green I'd ever seen swayed in the gentle wind, rising to my thighs. They brushed against the legs of my clean-suit as they brushed the round, rusted domes of the exit pod. That pod and the long elevator shaft inside it was the only link between Sanctuary Twelve and the surface world.
I took a long look at the world the Overseer had assured me would kill me, the world his oldest and most trusted servant, Gurney Maynard, had assured me would not. I had to act shocked, because this world did not match the dead plains the Overseer showed us so often below. I felt one enforcer push his staff into the small of my back.
"Move," the enforcer said.
"Or what?" The head part of my clean-suit wouldn't turn to look back at him, but I didn't need to look back to express my disdain. "You'll execute me twice?
A holo screen flashed in front of me. It was a recording of my son, now thirteen and wiry, as he worked beside the others dredging energy fragments out of the deep shafts. The enforcer made it disappear.
The threat was obvious, and I walked without another push from the enforcer's staff. I'd already taken steps to ensure the Overseer could never punish Matty for what I was about to do, but I couldn't let him know that. I had to act like another outspoken problem marching to my inevitable comeuppance.
The outside world was poison without a suit - the sun, the grass, the air - and questioning that was the only way one escaped the drudgery of the crystal mines. We were safe in the mines, the Overseer assured us. We lived by his grace, his generosity. Everyone outside Sanctuary Twelve was doomed.
Soon the enforcers marched me to a clearing, a down swept field of brown stalks crushed beneath dozens of robotic feet, likely less than a day ago. After they poisoned the grass. That streak of death sat in stark contrast to the simple beauty around us. It was a naked, pus-filled scar on a glistening grass plain, but that was the advantage of a narrow camera lens. You could focus on so little and block out so much.
The Overseer had constructed a fake exit pod at the top of the descending plain of dead grass, and I recognized that pod and the dead field from the videos I had seen of the others who dared question the Overseer. People who insisted the world above was alive and safe, like me. Murdered people.
The enforcers would force me inside that dome and strip me of my clean-suit, with dire warnings of what would happen if I went outside. When they were ready for me to make my entrance, they would pump the pod full of something noxious - tear gas? Toxic fumes? - until my heaving gut and shriveled lungs forced me to stumble out of the front door, into the camera frame.
