Resist much, obey little;

Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved;

Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city, of this earth, ever afterward resumes its liberty.

-Walt Whitman

Lost in thought, I take in my father’s last instructions. My eyes glaze over, and I stare at nothing for so long the wall across from me turns into Governor Roth’s face. His mouth splits open into a mocking smile before I can blink away his inescapable ghost.

I turn back to the survival box: a bag of makeup, scissors, a pair of silver bottles. A rush of adrenaline courses through my body. I pick up a bottle and squirt a thick, dark liquid into my palm. Hair dye.

Resist much, obey little.

MIRA

Ava moves behind me and raises the pair of scissors to my hair without ceremony.

We flipped a coin I’d found in a shelving unit by the back door. We had to use our work light to determine that the penny, discolored from decades of corrosion, had landed on the tarnished face of Lincoln.

I chose tails.

Seated on the toilet, I keep my back turned to the mirror above the sink. I don’t bother saying good-bye to the image that has represented me for the last eighteen years. That person was gone the moment a handful of black-eyed Susans scattered across the floor of the greenhouse.

I hear a sharp snip and see a long strand of my red hair fall to the ground beside Ava’s boot. Her pace quick, her hands sure, she repeats her methodical process until I am stripped bare, two pounds lighter, left with nothing to hide behind but my own grit.

“The back is rough, but the cut does its job,” Ava says. She stretches vinyl gloves over her fingers, scoops up a wad of dye, and smothers my scalp with the rotting stench of chemicals.

“We let it sit for fifteen minutes.” She peels off the gloves and pulls down the hood of her jacket.

As I rise, careful not to drip any dye on my freshly changed clothes, I catch Ava glimpse her reflection through the haze of the dusty, cracked mirror. It’s hard for her to let go.

She pops the knuckle of her thumb, trying to hide her anxiety from me, and turns to take her place on the porcelain seat. I watch her closely as she sits, her back straight, chin high, and allow myself a final look at my sister. At my old reflection.

There was a fight for who got to keep more length. Who got to keep a closer semblance of our normal selves and the last traces of our mother’s image. Ava won the coin toss, but now she looks up at me with uneasy green eyes as I hold a flame of her red hair between the two blades and snip. The thick strand falls to the ground, joining my own massive pile that surrounds us like the blaze of a hungry fire.

“It’s all just dead weight,” I tell her.

Soft sunlight pours through the window, creating a bright spot on a steel table in the corner. I lie in its warm glow, my right foot propped up on the bulk of my rucksack, and watch the dust above float aimlessly.

Damn these contacts. I try to blink away the stabbing pain that rips across my corneas, but this only causes tears to flood my eyes and spill down my cheeks like a busted faucet. The combination unbearable, I rub out the sting with my fists until the burn dulls to a mild discomfort and the overflow of tears slows to a drip. I test several quick blinks and open my eyes. I find my hands soaked with black paint and realize I smeared my new makeup. Dammit.

I tilt my gaze at the collapsed vending machine that lies beside the table and stare at the pixie blonde glaring back at me through the glass. With the collar of my fresh linen shirt, I wipe the dark stains from my face, grab the eyeliner from my vest pocket, and reapply the black wax along my lids in thick, chunky lines. This simple action is transformative, accentuating the color of my new contacts. Gunmetal blue.

I shift my gaze back to the hollow, seemingly endless ceiling and try to listen for the bird I heard singing earlier. I hear only the faint click of a lighter opening, the muted pops of rising flames, and the quiet work of Ava tossing all evidence of our makeover into her hobo fire.

The public doesn’t know Roth is hunting twins. They will be on the lookout for only one Ava Goodwin, but how much intelligence did the governor disclose to the Guard or his agents? What is his strategy behind keeping my existence a secret? He knows the announcement would set off a bomb, and the shock wave would be felt all across the country. He knows he could stand behind a million screens and point to me as the terrorist who triggered the detonator. So why not set the mob on us and just end the game?

He has Father. And we’re just two city girls stumbling across no-man’s-land with high odds that at least one of us will starve or get killed before his soldiers even find us.

He thinks he’s already won.

I hear a creak of wood, and out of the corner of my eye, I see Ava drop her rucksack to the floor. She slides onto the table and lowers herself down to lie in the circle of light beside me, bringing with her the strong smell of antidrone spray. Mesquite, to mask our scent in the desert. I wait for her to tell me everything is packed and we need to leave, but she remains still, staring up at the ceiling.

“How do you think they’re treating him in prison?” I say, breaking the silence.

She takes her time to answer. “Father was—is—beloved in the city,” she concludes. “He’ll find his allies.”

I don’t know if I believe that. Or if Ava even does.

“Those ideas in the poem . . . They’re words of treason.” I whisper the last word, absurdly afraid the admission might somehow summon a drone or soldiers.

Ava doesn’t respond, just lies stiffly beside me. I know she’s repeating the words of Whitman in her head, speculating what they might mean.

Obedience. Enslaved. Resist.

“Father hid a lot from us,” I say, interrupting her private thoughts.

She turns her eyes toward me, but I keep my own on the ceiling. “He would want us to focus on what’s ahead,” she says.

I release a long sigh through my nose and pull myself up to sit. Hugging my knees, I visualize the details of the map. The path, the houses, all so carefully planned. He knew this would happen.

With another sigh, I finally turn to face my sister. I jolt backward, genuinely startled by the stranger staring up at me. A blunt part splits her raven-colored hair that stops short just above her collarbone. Her bangs slicked to the side, she’s unrecognizable beneath the paint of exaggerated thick brows and dark-red lips. She notices me scrutinizing her new disguise, but she holds her stare and I hold mine, and the more I look, the more I see Ava behind those russet-brown contacts.

She places her palms on the warm metal table and lifts herself to sit level with me. Her fingers lightly touch my shoulder. “Mira, we’re both out of that basement.”

I let her words sink in. They’re so surreal, my head spins. But as their meaning makes its way down past my heart, landing deep in my gut, all I feel is the weight of guilt.

Our freedom for Father’s imprisonment.

“My ankle is better,” I lie, reaching for my rucksack. Ava’s hand slips from my shoulder, and I slide off the table, the dust flying wildly around me. “We should get to the safe house before nightfall.”

We walk side by side, two apparitions in a ghost town.

Beneath our umbrellas we pull our hoods low, but the sun always finds its way in, and Ava’s nose and cheekbones are already turning pink.