I didn't sleep that night. Not because of the pain — I was used to pain. My body had been hurting so long that the pain had become background noise. Like the hum of a machine you stop hearing after a while.
I didn't sleep because of the voice.
You are not alone.
It played in my head on a loop. Over and over. A woman I'd never met, speaking from a place I'd been told didn't exist, saying the one thing I needed to hear more than anything.
The world wasn't dead. People were alive out there. Living without brain chips. Without the Calming Signal. Without Malachi watching through every wire. Free. Actually free.
And everyone in this city — every worker, every Sleeper, every kid in the Undercity breathing poison air — had been lied to. Their whole lives. Their parents' lives. Generations of people born into a cage they didn't know was a cage because the walls were painted to look like the edge of the world.
