Chapter 4: Evaleigh

After a nursing shift, my PED delivered the news I had been waiting months for: the government had approved my hiking permit. The relief was overwhelming, and I didn't mind. I had been saving for this since the last time, rationing small amounts from a budget that didn't have extra to spare, like saving water during a drought — carefully, with full awareness of what I was going without.

I needed this. In the mountains, I could stop looking over my shoulder. I could let my nervous system do what it almost never gets to do: nothing. People rarely went into the forest north of the city, which was, for my purposes, the most important thing about it. The plants, fresh tree-filtered air, water and exercise were restorative in a way that few things were.

The morning drone stirred me awake as always, but something was different — I had slept more deeply than usual, the unguarded kind of sleep that requires some baseline of safety to arrive. Sam being nearby must have permitted it, his presence a low-grade anchor I hadn't consciously registered until its effect was already in my body. Martin, Beth, Nathan, and a few others had already departed. Sam was in the dim kitchen eating something cold, moving quietly in the way of people who have learned that the world rewards quietness and have made peace with that.

I got up. Green light. Clothes changed. Hair fixed. Morning hygiene was completed with the efficiency of a routine so well-practised that it required no thought — the point being: the body executing its sequence while the mind prepared for the day ahead. I packed my knapsack carefully: food, water, the usual survival gear. And the other items — keepsakes, nostalgic small objects that had no practical use but reminded me I had a past, a before, people who loved me. The photo of Mom and Dad, before the drone. Before everything changed. Days that weren’t as difficult.

Everything I needed for the day fit in this bag. Everything I would need to leave and not return fits in this bag as well. I had checked this. I checked it every time, the way you check an exit you might need in the dark. The one thing that would not fit was Grandma’s blanket, so I straightened it respectably on my cot, a silent promise of return.

I retrieved my thermos from under the cot, filled it with brown-tinged water from the kitchen tap, and tucked it into the pack alongside the small supply of Mom's vitamins — Reina Soberana, she called them. I was only beginning to understand they might matter for reasons I hadn't been told yet.

I left the shared room by the uneven, creaky staircase. Pulled my hat down. Prepared my usual downward gaze.

I nodded at the lilac tree as I passed it.

The taxi was old and rusty and smelled of other people's exhaustion. I watched the city scroll past the window in its familiar palette — grey concrete, polluted air, people mistreating each other, heads uniformly aimed downward. The treadmill of a society that had decided the safest thing a person could do was make themselves small, look at the ground, and keep moving. I had been a student of this moil my whole life. I knew it the way you know a language you were raised in — not because you chose it, but because it was simply the medium through which everything was interpreted.

Then, finally — trees.

I try to do something for myself on my birthday every year. Not because I expected celebration — I had no social network to offer it, Beth was perpetually stretched thin, and my mother couldn't leave the care home — but because I had decided, in the practical and unsentimental way I decided most things, that my nervous system deserved one day a year of something that wasn't survival. One day, that was just mine. I viewed my solitude not as the absence of company but as a gift I gave myself — the gift of rest, however brief.

"I only turn twenty-six once," I said to no one.

I sent the same message to my mother and Beth: I'm going on a hike. I'll see you soon. Short, warm, informative, but not oversharing. A message designed to reassure without revealing — the same calibration I applied to everything.

My PED chirped.

"ELITE GENETIC PRIORITY SELECTION: Evaleigh Anna Oberle. Your profile has been flagged for the Priority Matching Program, a rare opportunity. Further instructions to come."

The flag in my PED was the first step in a process that dressed itself in the language of science and public good while functioning as something far older and simpler – to satisfy dragons. They would scan your DNA, build a profile, and if you qualified — a word that meant nothing except that someone with power had decided you were useful — the rest followed with the efficient indifference of a system that had decided your body was a resource to be allocated. I had spent twenty-six years navigating away from exactly this. The message on my screen meant the navigation had failed.

My heart stopped. Not metaphorically — I felt the actual pause, the body's refusal for one terrible second to continue its business as usual in the face of what I had just read.

I stared at the message. Let it land. Let it become real.

Flagged. By who? Shane? Verity?

I had never heard of anyone receiving this specific message before — mandating notices usually arrived without preamble, a door kicked in rather than knocked on. This was something else. Something earlier in the process, or something running alongside it, like there was a strategic plan being enacted rather than a cold directive— a hand on the shoulder before the handcuffs. I wondered if this was Verity's doing. She had said, with saliva on my eyelid and absolute authority in her voice, that I might become her next project. She was not a woman who used words carelessly. I wonder if Beth was right – something else was beneath the surface that I could not anticipate.

I responded with the single word acknowledged and deleted the message with hands that were not quite steady. Deleting it was a gesture, not an action — a way of managing the sensation of powerlessness rather than the powerlessness itself. They did not forget. The flag remained, planted in whatever database held my DNA profile and the government's assessment of what I was worth to them, regardless of what I did with my PED.

I didn’t breathe a word to Mom or Beth. Saying it out loud made it sound like I was giving it more oxygen.

"¡Feliz cumpleaños!" came from Mom.

"Gracias, Mamá,"

I shoved the device to the bottom of my pack. I would be out of range soon. Temporarily untracked — not free, never free, but outside their reach long enough to breathe.

"I'm taking my DNA and your uterus into the mountains, Verity," I said under my breath, converting fear into contempt because contempt was easier to carry. Like I was asking permission to briefly sequester a state asset. Like my body was a relic on temporary loan.

I was deliberately vague in my message — no specific trail, no estimated duration. I didn't want anyone to find me alone. The government's network sometimes dropped out entirely on this trail, and when I returned to range, the messages would flood in all at once, trying to catch up, the surveillance machine momentarily breathless. That silence was something I looked forward to the way other people looked forward to rest.

The trail was not well-groomed. It had the overgrown, half-erased quality of a path slowly being reclaimed — branches growing across it, sections washed out, the forest pressing in from both sides as if completing a project begun long ago. Elites had their manicured parks, their controlled simulations of wilderness, with surveillance intact and benches placed at regular intervals. This trail had been forgotten, and its forgetting was what made it mine.

I stopped at the trailhead, checked my laces — double-knotted — and pulled my hat from my head. Let my hair fall, long and wavy and frost-coloured, loosening itself around my shoulders and down my back like something exhaling after a long confinement.

The breeze moved through my waves, and I let it. I turned my face up to the sun and closed my eyes and breathed — slowly, pulling in layers of pine and earth and the faint distant suggestion of ocean buried somewhere beneath it all. Birds called through the canopy. The treetops moved in long unhurried waves. The chatter of chipmunks somewhere in the trees. The buzz of an insect. I stood in that moment and let it be a moment rather than a threat assessment. These sounds did not exist in the city.

I wore a fitted white tank top beneath my jacket, and I knew I'd shed it once I got moving. I usually wore shapeless, forgettable clothes — designed to offer as little surface area for attention as possible, to render me unreadable and unremarkable. Today I wore what fit. Today I got to be myself — whatever had survived intact beneath the years of making myself grey and small and invisible. I was quietly glad to find it still there, still recognizably mine.

No drones since the trailhead. I noticed their absence the way you notice the cessation of a sound you had stopped consciously hearing — a negative space where chronic noise had been. My shoulders were lower than usual. My jaw had unclenched without my asking it to. My posture was straighter.

I paid close attention to navigation — the directional signs had fallen and not been replaced, the trail requiring interpretation rather than just following, reading broken branches and compressed earth and the subtle logic of a path made by feet that had passed this way before mine. I found I didn't mind the effort. It required presence, and presence out here felt like a gift rather than a demand.

Here and there, I noticed small things that didn't belong on the official trail — a branch arranged as if almost deliberate, a flat stone placed at the fork of two overgrown paths, as if someone had left it as a guide. I assumed it was my imagination or the remnants of previous hikers. I filed it away without conclusion and kept walking.

I found a clearing with an inviting log and decided it was a good place for lunch. My jacket was tied around my waist. The temperature had climbed with the morning, and my muscles were warm, working in the uncomplicated and satisfying way a body is built to.

I ate my bun. Then, carefully, I unwrapped the small piece of cake I had bought at the bakery a few days earlier — a deliberate extravagance, because I had decided that turning twenty-six deserved one thing that was entirely unnecessary. The cake was not special. The act of choosing it in advance, of planning for pleasure, had been.

I noticed, sitting in the clearing with the river audible below the ravine, that I was not afraid. The anxiety that had become so structural it no longer felt like anxiety — just the background frequency of being me, being alive in this city, being a body the state had decided it owned — had quieted to something close to nothing. I sat in the quiet and let it be strange and good.

I closed my eyes. The rushing river below. The birds. The wind is moving through the canopy.

I lazily opened my eyes.

A bear cub sat in my periphery to the right, small and impossibly soft-looking, investigating something near the treeline with the concentrated curiosity of something that had not yet learned to be afraid of someone different.

Then — a low growl. Behind me. Close.

The cub explained the growl. The growl explained everything else.

The fight or flight engaged before thought completed itself — I was on my feet, pack over my shoulders, knife confirmed, jacket tightened, body turned in one fluid sequence that years of heightened vigilance had made automatic. The startle-response, worn smooth by repetition, executes itself without consultation.

A chocolate brown she-bear. I was respectfully frightened. Unlike my attackers in the city, her motives were noble, understandable and predictable, and not personal. Protect her cub. Find food.

The mother bear was far too close. Massive, determined, unhurried — her gaze locked on me with the unwavering focus of something that had never needed to pretend. She started to move toward me with the patient confidence of an animal that had never been told to make itself small, that had never needed to look at the ground, moving through the world at her full size without apology or hesitation. Everything I had spent my life trying not to be.

I backed away. Controlled. Measured. I tossed what food I had in my hands into the adjacent bush. And then my foot caught a branch, and the ground gave without warning — I landed hard on my back, air driven from my lungs. The bear approached me, standing over me and swiping her massive claws in my direction, catching her massive claws on my flesh, causing wounds from my neck, across my clavicles, to my shoulder and down my right arm. A large vessel was missed, but I was hurt. I felt the chill of torn skin and wetness. I held still with my eyes closed. She turned me over, putting my face in the dirt and scratched my back, shredding my tank top in the back. She paused, gruffing in the direction of her cub. She lost immediate interest in me and turned her attention to her cub, but she was still a present danger.

Bleeding, in pain and cut open, I scrambled upright with the desperate speed of something that understood the situation had fundamentally changed, blood dripping down my arm and off the tips of my fingers, and down my back. I knew I would need to get the bleeding stopped. I took several more backward steps —

And then I understood, too late, what I had been backing toward.

I fell.

The fall was brief and total. My arm hit the ledge first, then my leg — the crack loud and almost impersonal, a structural sound, the sound of something giving way that was not built to give way. White-hot pain detonated through my body. I rolled off the ledge and landed on another, narrower shelf of rock farther down, and pressed myself to the ravine wall, gasping and bleeding.

My femur. The pain was a language I had no prior fluency in — absolute, total, occupying every register of my body simultaneously, leaving no room for anything else.

From the top of the ravine, I was hidden. The bear sniffed. Paced. Eventually, the sounds moved away, then stopped. She had found nothing worth waiting for. She left.

I lay still on the narrow ledge and let the tears come because the pain was too large to manage and there was no one to perform composure for — no drone, no Martin, no Carrington, no Verity, no one whose watchfulness required me to hold myself together. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I was completely, verifiably alone. I was so cold.

This was what I had always wanted. This was what I had built my life around.

I had spent twenty-six years perfecting the art of invisibility — no one knew where I was going, no trace left that could be followed back to me. Every skill I had developed to survive the city, to move through a world that wanted to own me without being found by it, had been applied this morning to this hike. Deliberately vague message. No trail specified. PED shoved to the bottom of my pack, surveillance severed by choice, the most deliberate act of freedom I had allowed myself all year.

The skill that had kept me alive in the city was the precise thing that would kill me in the forest.

I had hidden from the people who wanted to harm me so completely that I had hidden from any possibility of help. The invisibility I had built like armour, worn like a second skin, practised until it was indistinguishable from my actual self — it had worked. It had worked perfectly. No one knew where I was. I had made absolutely sure of that.

I tried to move. The white heat came again, total and specific.

My leg. Broken. My arm. Also broken and bleeding. My body, now using the clinical vocabulary I had spent years learning, turned against me. The diagnosis came with cold, professional precision: shock was imminent, blood loss was a factor, and no one was coming because no one knew to come, because I had made sure of it—on my birthday, in the one place I had come to think of as safe. But it had turned out to be safe from all the wrong things. I had built a life no one could find. I had become unreachable. I had become my own greatest achievement.

Stupid. So fucking stupid.

And now I was going to die at the bottom of a ravine on my twenty-sixth birthday, with a photo of my parents in my pack.

The darkness came in at the edges, the pain becoming something almost abstract, present everywhere and therefore somehow nowhere, the body's last mercy before it stopped arguing. Blackness.

Somewhere below, the river continued its indifferent movement through the ravine, carrying water from somewhere to somewhere else, following channels carved by forces older than any of this.

I vaguely perceived being wrapped in something — warmth, careful hands, the translation of my broken body from the ledge to somewhere else, movement that suggested purpose, someone who knew this ravine, who had found me in a place I had been certain no one would look.

The pain confirmed it was real.

The hands were gentle in a way that felt practiced — not the efficiency of a medical team, but something older than that. Something that knew how to move a broken person through difficult terrain without asking permission, without announcing itself, without leaving a trace.

Then the darkness came, and I went somewhere without questions.