There was a flash of light, a white hot brilliance too bright for all the darkness it would leave behind.

Lissa ran.

The flames ruptured the earth where the compound had been, reaching out into the night with hot, bright, red tentacles, and then pullinng back into their monster center, dissolving down to blackness, hiding all the secrets forever.

Disoriented by light and fear, she was oblivious to her ragged breath and the beat of her feet as she tried to escape the explosion.

The car was unlocked, the keys left dangling from the ignition, abandoned in haste and panic as her mother tried to warn her father what was going to happen, running to tell him that they had to get out; they had to run as Lissa was doing now.

They had collided in the hallway, just inside the door.

Her mother gripped her shoulders so tightly the bones rubbed together, her eyes wide and bulging in panic, her skin drawn taut against her skull. This terrified Lissa enough without the desperate command, “Get out Lissa! Run until you can’t go any farther and then keep going.”

“No!” Lissa shouted. “I don’t want to leave you, come with me!”

Her mother pushed her away. “I have to try to save your father. You have to remember everything! Look for the others. They’ll help you. They will tell you what you need to know about yourself. If we live, we’ll find you. Now go!”

Lissa had blundered out of the airlock and from behind came a muffled whump that pushed her across the ground, sheering the skin from her knees and elbows and nose. Then the explosion expanded, engulfing the building, and killing the only people she had ever loved.

She started the car, turned on the lights that she didn’t need, not here, where the fire lit the landscape in hellish magenta and orange. She was old enough to drive, more than old enough, she’d been able to drive since she could touch the pedals, but she would never have a driver’s license because she technically did not exist.

She backed up, knocking into a small tower array in her panic. She took a breath, feeling time press down on her, feeling Them coming, soon now. And then she rocketed off into the night, her headlights making dust stripes, illuminating the landmarks that she had been told to memorize to find the highway, the one she had never seen because it was not safe for her to leave the compound.

When she found the highway she marveled at the smoothness of it, the way the tires ran as if greased, the bright yellow lines in the road marking boundaries, order and symmetry here in the empty, secret-keeping desert.

There was nothing in the air, no lights on the road; she might outrun Them after all.

The darkness closed in around her. She did not know where to go but away, pushing the night back as long as she could. The old car, running on hoarded gasoline, gave an odd burp, a little lurch, and she looked at the dashboard, noticing for the first time that the gas tank was empty. Her mother had run it dry trying to get to them.

She considered going back, but something told her that would be walking right into Them, giving herself up for a sacrifice.

Despair filled her blood, her bones, weighted her down, a solid element, a stone unable to act. The car gave a last gasp and she coasted onto the shoulder of the highway.

There was a sound in the distance, just beyond her hearing, the hairs on the back of her neck stood up alerting her. She stumbled out of the car and headed out into the desert, scraping her skin on branches in the dark, falling over rocks. Her pupils opened wide, wider, letting in the lambent light of a gibbous moon. She would have preferred a complete and cloaking darkness, risked breaking her neck rather than being found.

The land sloped up. Hand over hand she climbed the rocks, worn sandpaper under her fingers. She reached a plateau and looked down. In the distance, car lights snaked through the land, coming closer.

She wouldn’t make it, there was nowhere to go.

Everything her parents had worked for, all the knowledge they had fed her from the cradle, wasted.

She did not want to give Them anything, but she was afraid that she didn’t have the strength to keep silent under torture. She looked across the opposite side of the plateau where the edge led off into darkness. She approached the edge cautiously until she stood on its lip. This side did not slope, but sheered down to the desert floor, a lethal drop.

She thought of her parents, dying for their beliefs. She owed it to them to do the same. She could not lose her nerve now, moments from being taken. Still, the desire to live is a strong one, and so she hesitated. Above her, the drone of a helicopter, a black killing insect, came from above. Its spotlight trained on her, a white eye pinning her in her vulnerability.

She made up her mind.

She felt tears running down her face, a nameless terror and sorrow for all she had already lost, and what she was about to lose. She turned and hurried back about twenty feet giving herself enough room to launch into a murderous flight. She took a deep breath, felt the hot air the helicopter kicked up as it descended right over her head. She took three more breaths, fast and desperate, and then with a scream, she bolted toward the edge and threw herself off.

She did not fall, but hung suspended.

She could not tell what was holding her aloft and considered that maybe she hadn’t fallen after all, and this was death, soft and firm holding her up, lifting her to the sky. But she could still hear the helicopter, its breath buffeting her, even as she drifted in the air, and then she felt a strong grip, a warm hand taking her arm and pulling her into the craft.

She was not dead yet.

The helicopter banked left and carried Lissa Trent up and away into the unknown.