The DollHouse

Chapter Twelve

“Where did the sixth city fit?” Jules asks me the next morning when we are waiting outside The Dollhouse.

“Eh?” I ask, slowly registering that he must have been doing his geography homework.

“Well, North, South, East, West and Center cover The Island pretty well,” Jules explains. “Where was the sixth city?”

“I thought it was part of the North,” I say, waking up. “The North is so expansive. I thought the sixth city was between the second city, on the coast, and the Center.”

Jules nods. “Maybe. I thought it might have been on one of the little islands off the coast.”

I laugh. “They’re far too small. You’ve looked at The Satellite, yeah?” The Satellite is an online map that lets you see a real-time, birdseye view of anywhere in the world. You can scroll all across The Island - over all the five cities - or zoom in on any of the smaller islands. If you’re really bored and lacking in imagination, you can even scroll all the way across the Global Sea until you come back to the other side of The Island. I admit to having done that once or twice. I guess it interests me because I can’t wait to travel. So even though I’ve never been to any of the other cities, I can scroll along and look at them and pretend I have been there. It feels a little more real than looking up information site online. With The Satellite, I can zoom in on markets, castles, and even people, although the resolution is too low to see them as anything but pixelated blurs. I can look at all the places I’ll one day visit.

If they don’t catch me during the next two weeks.

Jules shrugs. “It might have been a really small city.”

I shake my head. “It was big enough to start The Final War. So it couldn’t have been on a little hundred-kilometer diameter island.”

“Fair point,” Jules nods. “Geography isn’t my thing. I don’t really understand how our land is still standing if every other piece sunk below the sea level. We must have been really high up.”

“Then we were really high up,” I say with a shrug. “What does it matter?” The normality of the conversation has brought me back, once again, to just how little every day things like homework matter right now. Least of all to Jules.

I give him a look to suggest as much. He shuts up, but only for a few seconds.

“If we don’t have this,” he waves a hand to take in everything around us: the people, the buildings, the school books under my arm. “All we have is fear. I refuse to live in fear.”

I blink in surprise at the force in his tone. He seems to have been thinking about this a lot. But when you’re falling asleep alone at night, surrounded by snoring students who are blissfully unaware of what you are going through, what else would you think about?

Katrina opens the doors and we file inside. Jess lifts her hand in what I assume to be a wave. I wave back and wonder if we aren’t being total fools for not running while we have the chance. Instead of standing here, discussing homework that may never be graded, we could be getting a plan and getting out of here. But I meant what I said to Jules: where would we go?