Chapter 3

After work, I didn't take my usual route home—the darkest alley, the one with no streetlights.

Instead, I wandered through Shoreline City's busiest commercial street.

It was the first time in twenty years I'd walked down a main road at night.

Massive LED billboards blazed everywhere in blinding colors. People walked past with their heads down, glued to phones, Bluetooth buds in their ears. Cars with smart sensors whizzed by.

In my mind, this place was a gas chamber. The deepest circle of hell.

And here I stood, breathing air thick with exhaust fumes, completely fine.

I walked to a brightly lit phone store.

Through the glass doors, shelf after shelf of electronics glowed with soft light.

I clutched the only two hundred dollars I had—the bills I'd found in a corner of the laundry room today, not yet handed over to my mom.

I took a deep breath and pushed open the door to what felt like a whole new world.

The salesgirl took one look at my faded cotton clothes and the faint smell of bleach clinging to me, and her eyes turned dismissive. Still, she came over with a fake smile.

"Buying a phone? We've got the latest models. Starting at six thousand. Refurbished section is in the back corner. Help yourself."

I ignored her and walked straight to the used counter, pointing at the cheapest smartphone—a scratched-up screen, nothing fancy.

"How much is this one?" My voice scraped out like sandpaper.

"One fifty. No haggling. No returns."

With shaking hands, I pulled out the crumpled bills and handed them over.

The cold metal rectangle felt like a live bomb in my palm. I could barely hold it.

I ran—sprinted—into an empty dead-end alley.

The night wind was cold against my thin clothes.

I leaned against a brick wall crusted with moss, and followed the salesgirl's impatient instructions: hold down the side button.

The screen lit up.

White light flooded my face, streaked with tears and grime.

I reached out one rough finger—tentative, painfully slow, just barely grazing the glass.

Cool. Smooth.

The screen glided under my touch.

No welts.

No trouble breathing.

I was alive. Perfectly, absolutely alive.

"Ah... ahhh..."

A sound came out of me—raw, broken, hopeless. I slid down the rough wall and collapsed into the muddy dirt, clutching the cheap phone to my chest, and I sobbed.

Twenty years.

The best years of my life.

Locked in an attic covered in tin foil.

No friends. No school. No world outside. Not even a glimpse of a TV screen.

I thought my parents were protecting me. I thought they loved me. I thought I was a burden dragging the whole family down.

My mom always cried and said, "Sally, Mom doesn't want to lock you up, but the radiation outside will kill you! For your sake, your brother has to hide under the covers just to play on his phone! We've all sacrificed so much for you! You have to be grateful!"

My dad would sigh through his cigarette smoke and say, "Your illness is a bottomless pit. You have to be sensible. Work hard. Make money. Pay the family back for saving your life."

And my brother Lucas would look at me with that smug, pitying superiority.

"Stay in your cave, sis. The high-tech world belongs to me. You're just a caveman."

It was all a lie.

All of it.

They used one absurd, monstrous lie to strip away every right I had as a human being. They turned me into a slave—a money-making machine—to feed their precious son.

Rage. Like wildfire, it burned through my chest. It dried my tears. It burned away the last scrap of feeling I had for that family.

"Done crying yet?"

A low, cold voice came from the mouth of the alley.

I jerked my head up.

Hank stood in the shadows, a cigarette burning between his long fingers, the red glow casting his sharp features in stark relief.

What was he doing here?