Previously on PHOENIX…Regina Richards, daughter of the leader of the Settlement, has realized that her mother is missing. All the way in the Banks, Myra Laghani is anxiously awaiting her acceptance into Phoenix.
Myra woke with the sun in her eyes, a hazy yellow circle that made her head buzz. She scrubbed at her eyes, realizing the sound did not come from inside her head, but rather from her tablet, which was buzzing repeatedly. Seven missed calls, along with a single message. From Zahir.
“Come outside.”
Myra looked out her window and found the man in question sitting on a box outside the apartment door, looking distinctly perturbed. He was typing furiously on his tablet.
A message pinged through. “Where are you?”
What was he doing here? Was she still dreaming? Myra distinctly remembered being told never to go near him again, and yet here he was, seeking her out. She splashed some water on her face, pulling on the first clothes she found on the floor of her room.
Her mom had already left for work, and the rest of the peaches sat on the table. Myra took one with her as she raced down the stairs. Had something happened? Zahir was a man of his word. She hadn’t imagined that he’d fold so easily, although she had told him that he could ask her for the full story of what she’d done when he was ready to listen. Had he seemingly changed his mind since yesterday? When she threw open the apartment door, he sprang to his feet.
“What took you so long?” he scowled. Definitely not a change of heart.
‘What do you mean, ‘what took you so long?’ I was asleep.” He looked just as haphazardly dressed as she was. “Sleeping quite peacefully before someone showed up unannounced at my door, after he told me that he was never going to speak to me again.”
“I meant it,” he responded, tucking his tablet away into a comically large bag, rustling with its contents.
“Then why are you here? What are you doing?” Myra could not deal with this today. Her letter from Phoenix was going to arrive any time now, and she needed to sit at home to anxiously await its arrival.
“You need to come with me.” He sounded utterly pained.
“Come where?” Their voices were carrying down the street, but Myra did not notice. Zahir did not answer.
“I’m serious, you are acting completely irrational right now.” He was acting so much better than her, like he couldn’t even be bothered to explain himself when he was the one who had shown up outside of her house.
He shoved a collection of coins roughly into her hand.
“That is for yesterday,” he said.
“What?”
“For yesterday, you paid Jude.”
“Is this your type of apology?” She pocketed the change anyway. It was probably from his parents.
“No. This is—Myra, just listen to me. I need your help.” He ran his hands through his hair, making it stick up on the sides. He was keeping it longer now. “I wouldn’t be asking you this if I didn’t have to. I mean what I said yesterday.” The last sentence was a stab to the gut. She tried to remind herself that it was nothing she didn’t know already.
“Then why?”
“It’s my dad. He needs your help.” Ahmed Karib was a powerful man, but his ‘jobs’ in the past had mostly consisted of grocery runs or, at most, sending messages. It was mostly to make Zahir feel useful, even though his father kept him away from the most dangerous jobs.
Myra rolled her eyes. “Again, why?” With how long he was taking to get to the point, she knew he was going to ask her something completely unreasonable. Maybe Ahmed had given him a real job.
“We need to get into the border crossing office.” How was his first mission to get into the most highly secured building in the Banks? “You are the only one who has a reason to be there; you have to make sure your papers are ready, right, before you get the job?” He was right. Myra had been putting it off, thinking it would jinx her chances, or something.
“While you talk to the officers, I will sneak into the overseer’s office.”
“How would that even happen? The place is full of guards,” Myra said. She had only been there once before, when she was ten years old and had her security chip renewed. She still remembered the long hallways and the cold thump of the military boots. There was a reason she hadn’t been eager to see if her crossing papers had been accepted.
“There will be a distraction.”
“What kind of distraction?” Zahir’s father got up to all sorts of things, and depending on the nature of this job, the distraction could be any degree of extreme.
Zahir shook his head. I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” She hadn’t expected him to, but, like everything in this situation, it was making her upset. Ahmed liked to operate with almost complete secrecy. Most people in the Banks didn’t even know they worked for him; that was the stealth of his network. “Your dad expects me to follow this plan, and you don’t even have all the information to convince me?”
“It’s you, he didn’t think I would have to do any convincing at all.”
Myra didn’t have anything to say to that, but she tried not to react before her face revealed something she didn’t want it to. He hadn’t told anyone, either. As far as anyone knew, they were still best of friends.
“What are you going to do if I say no?”
He sighed. “The mission is more than just me. I have to keep going if you aren’t there, but you have to help me, Myra. You know I keep my word. I told myself I wasn’t going to speak to you again, but here you are.”
If that was supposed to make her feel any better, he was failing.
Myra took a deep breath, trying not to scream. Everything in her was trying to do the opposite.
She couldn’t let him go alone. He hadn’t said it outright, but without her, this plan had no chance of succeeding.
The memory of her mother from the night before flashed through her mind. She’d promised to lie low, however much that was possible. This was most definitely not that, but she had an alibi.
“It won’t be obvious that I’m involved?”
“Of course, that’s what you are worried about,” he scoffed.
“Don’t even start, you are the one who needs my help, you’d better act like it.” Myra tried to keep her voice at an appropriate level, even though the street was mostly empty.
“Yes. No one will realize that you are part of the distraction.”
“Thank you.”
She started down the street. “Well? What are you waiting for?”
Zahir didn’t say anything as they walked down the street. Myra, too, stayed silent, even though she had a variety of questions that she usually would have asked in quick succession. The most pressing one, what precisely Zahir was retrieving, almost slipped out of her lips, but she was stubbornly refusing to be the first one to break the silence.
Privately, she wondered to herself at the fact that Zahir had actually managed to score himself a mission. She watched his face as they walked, and apart from the clenched jaw, which she knew was reserved for her, the furrow in his eyebrows was surely due to the fact that this was his first official mission from his father.
Why had Ahmed now decided he was ready for a mission? They had graduated from school, but only barely. Myra tried to tell herself that it was none of her business. Just this one favor, and she would tell Zahir not to ask her again. He would tell his father that they were what? No longer friends? It seemed too shallow an explanation to account for this sudden rupture in their years-long bond.
Myra didn’t even remember when she first met Zahir. As long as she could remember, he’d been there. They sat next to each other in school, trading glances whenever the teacher yelled at their classmates. Walking home together every single day. If things hadn’t changed, she would have been walking with Zahir just like this to get her paperwork.
Except, instead of pointedly staring in the other direction, they would have been going on and on about something that they liked to rehash over and over again.
This was the new normal. Myra supposed the awkwardness would fade. He had been clear in his unwillingness to talk to her. To ask her what had really happened. Had he really seen her, really known her for so long, only to believe the worst without a second thought? But she had told him exactly that, to no avail.
The streets were quiet, just after the morning rush. Just a month ago, Zahir and Myra would have already been sitting at their desks at school. She had never seen the Banks so quiet. They walked towards the wall of the border crossing office. The factories in the distance were already in gear. Outside, a crowd of blue jumpsuits waited to be let into the large factories that covered most of the visible skyline.
In the Banks, there were four sectors. Each sector was responsible for a different factory. Where Myra lived, in the East Quadrant, the main products were agricultural: all types of fruits and vegetables. This meant they had greater access to production than other sectors, but it still paled in comparison to the exports sent to the Settlement.
All the factories in the Banks were imposing buildings that seemed so unnatural, but nothing about food was natural within the Dome. Each leaf, each sprout, each fruit, was the result of tireless work and excessive energy. No longer could humans depend on the soil and sunlight of the past. The former was far too bright, while the latter was filled with radiation and chemicals. What had been effortless was now a hassle-filled procedure.
Myra supposed this was her future if she didn’t make it to the Settlement. Donning the factory clothes, clocking in at sunrise, again at sunset, then home to sleep. Picking fruits, packaging boxes, was that what she was to do? Was that what anyone was meant to do? Only when she reached retirement age could she find alternative employment as a shopkeeper, street vendor, or teacher.
The thought of her life so planned out like that was alarming. She could imagine with clarity such a dreary future. Person after person stood in the line, all living the life she so desperately wished to avoid.
She pushed the thoughts aside, looking away from the factories to the looming concern in front of them: the border crossing office. The small brick building loomed large in front of them. To the sides, the guards’ barracks were visible, stretching along the wall and surrounding the entire Banks. While Jude had a particular vengeance for Zahir, they had gotten lucky that it was him on duty and not any one of his superiors. His grievance was petty and childish. Myra had heard far worse stories about othguards.
When the door was just visible, Zahir turned to her for the first time. “You just need to be completely. There’s no need to act, you have a reason for being here.”
“And what are you going to do?” Myra replied.
“Don’t worry about that.”
Myra wanted to worry about that, especially since she’d been roped into this mission; it seemed only right that she should be aware of all the details. But they were too close to the building, and the guards were now within earshot.
A pair flanked the door, rifles in hand as they surveyed the landscape, which was mostly deserted. There were not many reasons that someone would be at the border crossing office, much less during the workday.
Myra tried to avoid their eye contact as she and Zahir slipped through the door.
Those two guards were only the beginning, but Myra was still nervous. Could they tell that they had something to hide?
Inside, the building was sleek and very sharp, which Myra imagined all the buildings in the Settlement looked like. There was a counter in the center with three secretaries, and hallways leading to the back, which Myra assumed were where the officers Zahir needed were. So close, and yet completely impossible with the amount of guards nearby.
She gave him a look, as if to ask if they were really doing this.
He gave a slight nod, so Myra approached the counter.
The woman was clicking away on a keyboard attached to the screen that spanned the entire workspace. Her entire demeanor was sharpened to a point, with skinny glasses and hair pulled back severely from her face.
“I am here to renew my papers,” Myra said, hoping her voice sounded more confident than she felt.
“Just to make sure that everything is in order.”
The woman just nodded, not even taking her eyes off the screen.
“Your ID?”
Myra held up her wrist to the scanner on the counter. Each person, in the Dome or the Settlement, had a chip implanted in their wrist as soon as they were born. It contained all of their identifying information at a glance.
There weren’t many other civilians in the building, just an old couple sitting on an uncomfortable metal bench, waiting for something. The building was, however, not empty at all. As the lady clicked away at her computer, Myra watched Zahir watch the many guards crossing by as they each received a slip of paper from another separate desk of secretaries in the back. They were wearing only the inner part of their uniforms, all black garments, which the overhead lights made look like a sea of darkness about to swallow them whole.
Myra tried to make eye contact with Zahir, trying to see if she could understand what he was about to do, but his eyes revealed nothing. How was his supposed distraction supposed to work when the building was crawling with guards?
The woman at the counter pulled out a paper for Myra to sign, throwing a pen onto the counter. “Sign at the bottom, and then you can go,” she said. Only then did Zahir acknowledge what was happening right in front of him. He shook his head just slightly at Myra.
She needed to take her time. His distraction hadn’t yet arrived.
Myra looked at the words on the paper, her eyes blurring them together. She tried to read each word slowly, pretending she had any idea what she was signing, except that she was renewing her identification for another five years. Every second seemed to go by too fast.
“Are you done yet?” the woman asked. Myra hurriedly shook her head.
She glanced up at Zahir, whose gaze was fixed on the crowd of guards that was only growing, a slight smile on his face. He nudged her foot slightly with his.
Scribbling a quick signature, Myra handed the paper back to the woman, who didn’t bother to hide her annoyance. Before she could say anything else, there was the simultaneous click of several rifles, and one of the guards was shoved onto his knees, multiple barrels pointed straight at his head.
Thanks for reading! Everything’s getting crazy for Myra, I would love to know your thoughts on this latest installment :))