I stood with Sherry outside the armored vehicles. She had been letting her hair grow since Hogsby and was now forcing it into a small puff with the focused concentration of someone who had decided this was the moment to address it. May and Speed were already in conversation, finding each other with the ease of two people who operated at similar frequencies. 𝐟𝕣𝕖𝐞𝐰𝕖𝚋𝐧𝗼𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝗰𝐨𝐦

Harmione leaned against the car behind us, quiet, watching everything.

General Sinn came through the campus gate. We had been waiting for him. He stopped in front of us and looked at the three vehicles and the assembled team with the expression of a man who had done this kind of accounting before and was doing it again.

"Did I make you wait?" he said, with just enough lightness to signal that he was still the same man from this morning.

"Not really," we said, various versions of it.

"Owen, Harmione, Speed." He pointed at the first vehicle. "That one."

Speed’s face moved slightly. He had been mid-sentence with May and did not want to stop being mid-sentence with May. But an order was an order and he knew it. They went.

"Oddo, Code. With me."

He pointed at the second vehicle and then turned to us. "You three are riding with Mercury."

We got in. May claimed the front seat before anyone had thought about it, which was either instinct or probability at work. Sherry and I settled in the back.

The driver turned around. Mid-thirties. Guardian of the Walls uniform. Glasses. The kind of face that had made decisions and was comfortable with the ones it had made.

"Welcome aboard," she said. "I’m Mercury. You’ll love me more when we’re moving."

The inside of the car was larger than the outside suggested. Through the window I watched Sinn approach the driver of the first vehicle, the one carrying the Central students he wasn’t traveling with. A brief word. The driver nodded and returned to his seat.

Sinn’s car left first. Then the vehicle with the Central students. Ours last.

****

We drove through the city. Past the stray town. Past Hogsby, which sat quiet and dark in the way of things that had recently been emptied. The journey to the capital and then further, to the walls themselves.

May and Mercury discovered each other in the front seat the way certain people discover each other, immediately and with enthusiasm. Sherry and I sat in the back in the silence we had been sharing since the balcony, which was a different silence from the early ones. This one was comfortable and slightly heavy at the same time.

It was already dark when the walls appeared.

I recognized them before I could see them clearly. The specific density of something that has been maintained and reinforced for decades. The guard towers lit at intervals, soldiers visible inside them.

Sinn’s car stopped at the gate. He got out alone, spoke to people we couldn’t see, and the gates opened. An army truck went through first, the forty Guardians, then the vehicles in sequence. Ours last.

The gates closed behind us. We were in the life layer zone.

The cars parked. People started getting out, and the specific quality of their movement told me that Sinn had given them this moment intentionally.

"They want to feel the atmosphere," Mercury said.

"Then let’s go," May said, already at the door handle.

Mercury unlocked it. May was out before the click finished.

I opened my door. Sherry came out through mine without comment, which was its own kind of statement about how we moved together now.

The air was different out here. Not the city air and not the plain air. The life layer had its own atmosphere, something in between, something that existed only in this specific zone between the walls and the world beyond them.

"Ten minutes," Sinn’s voice carried. "Enjoy it before we move."

Mercury stepped out last. She stood for a moment just outside the car, not moving, not speaking, just standing in the life layer air with her glasses on and her hands loose at her sides.

"I’ve never been outside those walls," she said, to no one in particular. Then she looked up at the sky. She exhaled slowly.

"Ten years as a Guardian. Ten years driving people to this gate." A pause. "First time I’ve actually stepped through it."

Nobody said anything. She turned and looked at Sherry and me, something raw and newly awake in her eyes.

"Come on," she said. "Don’t waste it standing next to the car."

She walked forward into the life layer and I watched her go. Sherry stood beside me and looked outward.

"It’s beautiful," she said quietly. "Imagine the world before all of this."

It wasn’t a conversation she needed me to answer. May was already running ahead, moving through the life layer like someone who had been contained for too long, which she had been. The Guardians were scattered across the zone, the specific happiness of people stepping outside something they had been inside their whole lives.

"Let them enjoy it," Sherry said. "Most of them might not come back."

"True," I said.

"Guys." Harmione and Speed, coming from behind us.

Speed, who had been talking to a different girl every time I saw him, had apparently redirected himself toward Harmione for this particular ten minutes. They reached us.

"Have you ever been here before?" Speed asked, then caught himself. "I’m joking."

"I know," I said.

"I have though," he said. "Been outside the walls twice."

I looked at him. Then at Sherry.

Mercury had said she had never stepped outside the walls. She was a Guardian, a soldier, someone whose life existed specifically in relation to the walls. And this boy, who attended School Central, had been outside twice.

Rich family, I thought. Old money. The kind of family for whom the walls were a convenience rather than a necessity.

I kept it to myself.

"I was looking for you," Harmione said, turning to me.

"Back to your vehicles." Sinn’s voice, carrying across the zone with the specific authority of someone who had given exactly the amount of time he said he would. "We move now."

"We’ll talk," I told Harmione.

I looked outward one more time.

Beyond the life layer, barely visible in the dark, the plain began. Flat. Silent. The place where I had spent twenty years surviving. The place that had built everything I was before the system and the walls had built the rest.

I’m coming back, I told it silently.

Not a promise to anyone else. Just a statement of intent directed at the only place that had ever truly tested whether I meant it.

I turned and walked back to the car.