Chapter 2

Oh, fine. More NaNo. I kind of don't really want to post it anymore, but I suppose I will. The beginning of this chapter is garbage. The middle of this chapter is garbage. The end of this chapter is redeemable garbage. There are already several plot discrepancies. I know. Editing is later. Don't judge me. On the upside, I at least have a plot now and kinda know where I'm going with it. If it makes no sense to you... quit reading. Save yourself from this torture. :)

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Piper never thought she’d see the day when she missed sharing a room with her brother.
The spiraling oak tree, the one responsible for her loneliness, for her deaf ear, scratched at her windowpane with its branches, as if trying to torment her. She was used to Branson’s heavy breathing in the next bed over, and the shrill shriek of wood on glass proved to be much more unsettling. She sat up to let the lateral sensors know she was awake and they should turn on the light. The rays made her eyes ache within seconds, but she knew her chances of sleeping tonight were slim.
Yawning widely, she turned to her bedside table and picked up Nana’s book. She ran her finger over the black letters on the first page again. “1776… Revolution or Evolution?” Her finger left a pile of dust in its wake. She fanned the book through the air and blew on the pages. Finally, she turned the page.
As the first shots of the Revolutionary War flew through the night at Lexington and Concord, no one could have known the impact they would have on the world as a whole. No one could have known that a new nation would be born out of bloody rebellion, and in fact, no one expected it to survive. Such a revolution was unprecedented. Revolutionaries had everything to lose, but everything to gain.
Mother England had oppressed the Patriot colonists enough. They would gain their freedom, or they would die trying.
Piper was vaguely reminded of the current war, the Rebels, the Backwinders… but these Revolutionaries were different. The Backwinders deserved what they were getting, they were dangerous… but the Revolutionaries had been wronged.
The next part was a blur of names she had never heard before… George Washington, Patrick Henry, Samuel Adams… she assumed they were the main characters. One of the names very nearly gave her a heart attack—Branson Conrad.
“What?” she said aloud in confusion.
“Of course I was there, sis. You were too.”
She looked up to see Branson standing in front of her. Her brother looked good in his uniform: green for prosperity and change with white buttons for hope. The national symbol, a light bulb surrounded by a wreath made of wires, was stitched on the breast of his jacket.
Jumping up from her bed, Piper ran to her twin and threw her arms around his neck. “You’re back! You’re back, the war’s over! It has to be, right? Oh, you didn’t even have to fight and I was so scared—“
“What are you talking about, twaze?” She laughed at her old nickname, but cocked her head in confusion. “Neither one of us is home. We left this morning, remember?”
She narrowed her eyes in wonderment. “But I couldn’t… my ear… I was just at Nana’s…”
“Nana’s here too,” he said, pointing to the corner of Piper’s room. It was Nana, alright, but over a hundred years younger. Her short white hair had returned to its original reddish brown, every wrinkled had disappeared, and her eyes were more blue than gray. She was more beautiful than Piper had ever seen her, even in the old memographs. She, too, was dressed in uniform.
“Nana would never be in the military… she hates it…”
CRASH.
The house quaked.
“The Backwinders are coming, Piper. With bombs.”
“This isn’t a battlefield, they wouldn’t bomb here.”
CRASH. She gripped Branson’s arm in terror. “Tell me they wouldn’t come here, Branson. Promise me.”
He gave her a sad, knowing look
“TELL ME!” she screamed in panic. “THEY WOULDN’T COME HERE, IT’S A CIVILIAN AREA!” She tried to shake his shoulders, but she wasn’t strong enough. She ran to the window. The neighborhood glowed with firelight as flames consumed the house across the street. CRASH. Dirt clods and wood flew through the air as a third bomb went off. Sirens began to blare.
“NO!” she screamed. “YOU LIAR!” She pointed at Nana. “YOU SAID IT WOULD BE OKAY, YOU SAID IT WOULD BE OVER!”
But before Nana could answer, a piece of the neighbor’s wall flew through the window and hit Piper in the head. The smell of smoke filling her nostrils, she slipped into the darkness…
And awoke in her bed. Thank goodness it was only a dream. She sat up, telling the lateral sensors she was awake… turn off the alarm…
But there was no alarm. It was the sirens.
It was a dream, it was a dream, it had to be another dream!
“SISSY!”
Baylor.
The five year old came running into her room in a panic. He leaped onto her bed and into her arms.
“What are the scary noises?” he shouted, more an exclamation than a question. “They won’t stop!! Make them stop, Sissy!!” He buried his head in her shoulder.
“I don’t know, bud, but it’s going to be okay, okay? We’re going to go get Mom and she’ll know what to do.”
No sooner had she stood up than another CRASH shook the house so violently that the floor shook. She fell with a thud on her back, holding the boy on her chest. He sobbed uncontrollably, screaming through his tears.
“Hush, buddy, it’s ok,” she said, stroking his hair and standing up. She opened the door to her room and entered the hallway toward her mother’s room.
CRASH. Crackle.
She’d never heard the sound before, but she’d been taught about it in Current Events class. Fire. It was orange and red, and sizzled and popped like bacon cooking on an electric stove. And it was dangerous. Very dangerous. Fire.
She steadied Baylor’s head deeper into her shoulder, hoping he wouldn’t see. She couldn’t bear to see the boy anymore frightened. She dashed into her mother’s room to find an empty bed and nothing more.
“PIPER!”
She heard the voice from her room. “PIPER! BAYLOR!” How had they missed each other? She ran back down the hallway to meet a wall of fire.
“MOM! MOM, CAN YOU HEAR ME?” she shouted over the sirens and flames.
“GO! GO TO THE STATION!”
“No,” Piper whispered under her breath. “NO! I’M NOT LEAVING YOU HERE!”
“TAKE BAYLOR!”
Piper looked from the flames to the little boy in her arms. The time for crying was gone, but a lump in her throat kept her from speaking. The flames crackled in a steady rhythm, like the ticking of Nana’s clock... Time’s running out, dear heart…
“I LOVE YOU!” Piper shouted into the flames. She could only hear tears. Fighting her own, she flew down the yet un-scorched stairs and into the darkness.
“It’s okay, Baylor, we’re going to be okay,” she said to the little boy as they stepped into the night air. Though riddled with smoke, it still felt like salvation to her lungs.
Baylor wriggled out of her arms. “MOMMY!” He began to run back toward the house.
It was like watching a clip in Current Events class. She knew exactly what was coming, but felt herself powerless to stop it or react in any way. Her brain tried to force her vocal chords to wake up, to scream. It tried to force her legs to run toward her brother, to scoop him into her arms and save him from what was coming. Maybe fate stopped her. Maybe it was fear.
CRASH.
Piper lost her brother behind a cherry red wall of flame and ash.
Reality kicked in. This wasn’t a film clip. This was her life. A life that had become hell.
“BAYLOR!” She screamed into the inferno, but she heard no answer. She dashed toward the flame, hoping to snatch the boy out of its grasp. She recoiled as her arm grew so hot it was almost cold, and turned red and raw. Frozen to the spot, she watched as her childhood house went up in flames, along with her mother and brother.
There was nothing she could do.
At last she could bear it no longer. So she ran. She ran and ran and ran. She ran to the station. Because if anyone was left, if anyone else had survived this nightmare, that’s where they would be.
The station was the most ominous beacon of hope Piper had ever seen. Sitting in the dead center of the city square, it was formally the station for the Lex cars, but on occasions such as these it had the capacity to hold the entire town. Its reddish copper plated walls glistened in the firelight, as though laughing at the pain and turmoil that could not harm it.
There were at least five hundred people inside, and all of them were silent. The only sound reflecting off the metallic walls was the collective breath of hundreds who were only just learning how to use their lungs again. Piper searched the room for Nana. She couldn’t find her.
I need peace. I’ll be ready whenever my time comes, if sooner or later.
Had Nana known somehow? Had she known this would happen when they talked this afternoon? That seemed so far in the past… and it didn’t matter. She would never know. Nana wouldn’t have left her house, she wouldn’t have run to the station. She wanted to go.
Piper ran to the station door. There was nothing worth staying here for.
“Miss,” one of the Guard said quietly, “miss, I can’t let you go back out there.”
“Then you better turn around,” she said, not even bothering to look at him.
“Let the deserter go,” a boy a little younger than her said with venom in his voice. “She’s not worth anything to us.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Thought you were too good for the war, huh? Thought you were too good to fight for the country that’s let you live within its borders for years, you miserable scum? How’d you fool the draft, huh? Lie about your age?”
Piper threw a hand to her ear.
“Shut up.”
“Go, then!” the boy shouted. “Go out there and die! Maybe dying a civilian death can make up for your lack of honor.”
She wanted to throttle him. She wanted to grip his throat in her fist and squeeze the air right out of his lying lungs. But she couldn’t. She hardly had the strength to pull open the door and run into the night.
She didn’t know where she was running. She didn’t really care. All she knew is that the war was over for her, and a new war had begun: Piper versus the world.
How she managed to survive, she wasn’t quite sure. Debris was flying through the air, miraculously missing her. Adrenaline coursed through her veins like a river. All she knew was that she had to keep running. She just had to. After all, what else was left for her?
The copper roads of the city didn’t give her feet as much traction as she would have liked. She looked back on the flames and saw the towering city that had once been her home. The place that had once glowed with hope and love, with her family, with her friends, with life, now glowed with flames and chaos. Once. As in not anymore. She banished the word from her mind.
Finally shadows and moonlight replaced the brightness of the flames, and the crashes of the bombs disappeared. The road beneath her feet stopped abruptly to meet dirt and grass. An owl sang its eerie song somewhere in the distance, as if it could feel the turmoil rising from the bowels of the land. Wind kissed her cheek in a semblance of comfort, but it only brought her pain and loneliness. She, Piper Conrad, was desperately, utterly alone in the world, standing at the edge of the city she had never left.
She struggled with the idea of stepping across the crack between copper and dirt. Copper said strength, conductivity, progress. Dirt said hard work and little result. Only the Backwinders still paid any attention to dirt. And if there was one thing Piper Conrad wasn’t, it was a Backwinder.
The city had always been big enough for her. It had never bothered her that leaving wasn’t allowed. It was for her own good, after all. Society had become so far removed from the surrounding wilderness that it was no longer safe. The stories that circulated amongst schoolchildren had been enough to keep Piper within the city limits. Some of the milder tales contended that only the brave of heart could face the edge of the wilderness, and it was for this reason that the soldiers could leave for their posts. The more gruesome, and probably more truthful, said that the Guard had set a forcefield around the borders to keep unwanted visitors out. Forcefields themselves were the stuff of legend. Nobody was sure exactly what they did to a person, as they had been developed by the Diviner as a top secret military project. Coltrane Thornton’s older brother had once put his hand through a forcefield, and it just disappeared, disintegrated into ash before his very eyes. Or at least that’s what Coltrane Thornton had said.
She had never given much thought to the matter until now, when her very life might be depending on her crossing of this line. She looked back in the direction of the main square. Armies didn’t bomb a city for no reason. At this very moment the Backwinders were probably taking over the city, destroying the control systems, killing whoever was left…
Her stomach turned. She couldn’t go back. Her only option was to move forward.
Shaking in anxiety, she slowly lifted a hand, looking down at the black crack below her. Slowly but surely she moved, placing the tip of her finger at the edge of the line… then a little further… then a little further…
Nothing happened. Perhaps the forcefield had been taken offline by the bombings. Maybe it had never existed at all. Either way, it was safe to cross.
Piper had felt dirt under her feet before, but never like this. The dirt on this side of the line was as hard as the copper, maybe harder, nothing like the soft, rich Nitro dirt found in Nana’s garden or city park. No, this was firm and rocky, and unhealthy, with its milk chocolate hue. Nitro dirt was so enhanced by its various fertilizers and nitrogen pearls that it was almost navy blue in color. The grass outside of town was yellow and brown, not green like Piper’s eyes. She sighed. How did the Backwinders love this degenerate wilderness? They were even more backwards than the people of the city realized.
She tentatively took a few steps on the dry earth, half afraid it would crack open beneath her feet and send her into some dark abyss. Finally she decided it was safe. But what to do now? Her old life was gone, swallowed up in a ball of fire… her new life was yet to be revealed. The Diviner always said in his addresses that they were to “move forward, at all costs…”
So she took a step. And another. And another.
The Diviner, of course, couldn’t really see the future. However, he was said to be the very soul of the nation, the core of patriotism and honor. His primary duty was to lead the country into his vision, to constantly move toward progress and encourage all others to do the same. In a way, Piper supposed, he could see the future: not the specifics, but merely the ideal. The Diviner saw in his mind’s eye the future that he wished to come to pass, and instilled that vision into every mind in the nation. The Backwinders, the rebels, had no Diviner. No Diviner, no vision, no progress, no victory. The Diviner himself often expressed his surprise that the insolent rebels had managed to keep up the war for so long.
Step. Step. Step. Step.
She wondered if the Diviner knew anything about the bombings, if he had foreseen it in his planning. Maybe she herself had been naïve to believe she was safe, to settle into her complacency. Iretum City, her city, was one of the most prominent and progressive in the entire nation. Of course they would want to capture it, destroy it, take out its power lines. Without cities, without progress, without unification, the entire Nation would fall to pieces.
Maybe those Backwinders were smarter than she gave them credit for.
Step. Step. Step. Step.
The war had all started over a book. She was standing here in the wilderness, alone, because of a stupid book.
She’d heard the story told many times. The Diviner himself had come across the journal in the vault of the capitol city. Legend had it the book itself was a record from thousands of years ago, predicting the end of the world. It told of a threat bigger than anything the Nation had ever seen, a black monster coming to consume and destroy the Nation as it had destroyed its predecessors. The journal, of course, was a lie. The Nation had no predecessors. The Nation was as old as time itself.
The Diviner saw the book for what it really was: a hoax. But his assistant begged to differ. The document deserved further consideration, he said. Perhaps it was right. He insisted it held several details that revealed a fascinating world, without electricity. He wished to study it. If it were true, it could proved to be useful.
The Diviner, of course, saw no point in troubling himself with the fictitious tales of a backward society. Such pursuits wasted time that could be spent moving forward, making new innovations, leaving the past behind. Lyman Windross should have known that the Nation could not be destroyed. After all, that was not a part of the Diviner’s vision for his people. It never had been in the past. It never would be in the future.
Lyman Windross should not have challenged the authority of the Diviner. Lyman Windross should not have started a revolution.
One day Windross disappeared, along with the book. The Diviner didn’t boter to pursue him, the rebel scum. He had wiped the man clean from the slate of his mind, until the others started disappearing too. Throngs of people began flocking to the city limits to start new lives in the wilderness, clinging to supposed traditions drug up from their imaginations. The Diviner continued to insist no danger would come to the Nation, but they refused to listen. They hid inside their makeshift camps, hoping that cloth and wood could protect them better than copper and steel. Even as millions of people fled to the outskirts, the Diviner let them be. A few maniacs in a country of five billion people were to be expected.
But they grew. They convinced people of their insanities. They had children and named them bizarre names, some of them names mentioned in the rebel book of lies itself.
Revolution was unprecedented. Never in 2400 years on Earth had any one man dared to rebel against the government, against the Diviner himself. But there they were, two billion Backwinders, stuck in the ways of a world that had never existed. That’s what a Backwinder was, anyway: a miserable, spineless, cowardly worm with not enough courage to face the coming future. Backwinders lived in the past. Backwinders never moved forward. Backwinders only looked back at a fabricated past that gave them comfort, and never planned for what was to come. And the Backwinders, named for Lyman Windross himself, would never win this war. Victory was always part of the Diviner’s vision, and victory had always come to pass.
She stopped to breathe in the night air. Victory would come to the Nation, there was no doubt of that. But that war was over for her. In the war between Piper Conrad and the world, the outcome was yet to be decided.