“How does it work?” Chanyeol whispers, leaning over Wufan’s shoulder to peer at the little screen. There’s a static and the image is blurry, unreadable. Wufan slams his fist against the monitor. Once. Twice. The image is clear.
There are two oblong, irregular shapes traced out with dotted white lines. In each shape are tiny squares and boxes lined out in grey. They’re maps, one of Up Above and one of Down Below.
“This is how the border police monitor border traffic,” Wufan presses a finger to the screen, tracing along hundreds, thousands, of blinking green dots, scuttling along the screen like tiny, little bugs. “They only watch the cities, see?” Wufan taps his nail against the dotted white lines. “If you’re not in the city, and you can find a wormhole, you can just hop over and nobody even gives a shit.”
“That’s easy then,” Chanyeol shrugs, “I’ll just go out of the city.”
Wufan laughs, but not because he thinks anything is funny.
“What?”
“Nobody lives outside of the city,” Wufan shrugs, “Every city has their own radar system, so even if you go to the next city over, they’ll still find out.”
“Who said I had to go to a city? I can just stay in the mountains.”
“Yeah, for a couple weeks maybe. The only way you can live up there is if the government is sending you supplies. There’s nothing up there, except those who have been banished from the city. Even they are all dead by now. No one’s been properly exiled for decades.”
“Oh.”
“Either way, the reason you want to go Up Above is to find someone right?”
“Yeah.”
“You think he’s living in the mountains?”
Chanyeol shakes his head slowly.
“Exactly. If you want to find him, you’ll have to go to the city. Look here,” Wufan taps his finger on a huddle of red dots on one of the maps, “Up Above people are red and Down Below people are green.”
“So if I go Up Above, I’ll show up as green?”
“Exactly. That’s how they can tell if there’s someone breaking the rules.”
“Is there a way to switch my color?”
Wufan laughs, “No. Even if there was, don’t you think they would notice if one dot suddenly switched color? Besides, it’s a chip that’s injected at birth. If I wanted to take it out of you I’d have to cut out your heart and rip out the fibers that are built into it. You wouldn’t survive it.”
“Then we just won’t do that.”
“Also, your gravity is set to this world. If you were to go Up Above, you would just fall back here because gravity doesn’t just switch automatically.”
“But you’ve done it before haven’t you?”
“Yeah, but I got caught.”
“But you’ve done it before.”
Wufan sighs, “Yes, I can switch your gravity. I can’t switch your color though.”
“So I can go up?”
“Yeah, but you’ll have to run and hide the entire time.”
“Would they catch me immediately?”
Wufan blinks and slowly shakes his head, “The radar is the only means they have of finding you, and it’s not particularly detailed. I would say it could take days, weeks, even months if you hide well.”
