Follow Your Sol

“Follow Your Sol.”

Sarah ran her fingers over the engraving. She had read those words again and again over the last three years. There hadn’t been anyone to teach her to read; her mother said that written language was inefficient and caused confusion. Confusion led to conflict. And when she said conflict, she meant the end of humanity and the deaths of billions of good people. Reading was a relic of that lost world. Now they had to learn how to live in the new world. She didn’t know. She hadn’t lived it. All there was were stories.

Sarah taught herself to read anyway.

She learned that the Elites, who had taken all of the old cities for themselves, were able to communicate through telepathy. That’s how they had won the war. They could send messages across worlds and through buildings and they shared complex ideas in seconds while the Resistance wasted time writing letters. The Resistance had the inter nets. Computers that talked to each other over great distances; connected through the webs. But that was easily tracked. So the Resistance fighters took to writing letters and sending carriers from one outpost to another. By the time a letter had been received, the information was outdated and caused more harm than good.

That was 300 years ago.

The war officially only lasted three weeks and in that time the Earth population was reduced from 10 billion to less than 3 billion. The story was the same on every colony in the system. The Elites had spread out through the asteroid mining camps, the Mars colony, they had members on every ship, every shuttle, every space station in the solar system. And then in one coordinated attack they waged war against the Norms that resisted their rule. There hadn’t been a Resistance before that. Just normal people who were angry that they couldn’t get a job or get into a good school because their genetics lacked the mutation that made the Elites what they were. But after the first attack, humanity was at war.



As far as Sarah was concerned, the war never ended.

There were still books left from the old world that hadn’t been burned by the Elites or destroyed by weather. They were locked away in secret rooms. That is how Sarah taught herself how to read after her mother was gone and she was left alone in the world. All she had were those hidden stories. It would be too dangerous to carry the books around with her; so every time that Sarah found one of these rooms she would read as many of the books as she could and then replace them on their shelves, being careful to hide the entrance as she left.

Someday she would bring those books out into the world.



Sarah’s mother had taught her how to find the entrances so that they could hide out at night from the highwaymen. It was usually safe to walk during the day. Until it wasn’t. Until a group of starving highwaymen came out in the daylight. Too many travelers were getting smart, finding ways to stay out of sight during the nights. So the highwaymen would stay out of sight in the day, hiding behind deteriorating carcasses of trucks and tanks abandoned by early Resistance fighters. Tools of old wars no longer useful in the new world became traps for travelers looking for supplies.

When the prey adapted, so too did the hunters.

Sarah tried not to think about the day that her mother didn’t come back. She was only supposed to be gone for an hour, scouting the area; then they would keep heading towards where the sun set. Her mom wouldn’t teach her to read; but she had shown her the golden heart shaped locket and told her what the words meant.

“It has a double meaning.” Her mom had said to her late one night. “You see how confusing writing can be? To follow your soul, S.O.U.L., is like following your heart. Doing what your body tells you to do even if your brain tells you something different.” Sarah had nodded her head like she understood. “But whoever made this locket spelled it S.O.L. That means the sun. They are saying to follow the sun and you will find a safe place where people aren’t scared of the highwaymen or the Elites or anyone else. They can just live. Like in the old world.” Sarah could see that her grandparent’s voices still rattled in her mom’s mind as they got further and further from the east coast. It’s not worth that girl getting taken from you. Her grandmother would say. Her grandfather looking down solemn, disappointed that she would even dream of leaving the safe corner he had created in the mad world. Then he would say something like You know, darling, it’s too dangerous - you going out there without your husband to help protect you.

And everyone would cry great big salty tears for Sarah’s father.

Sarah learned from her books that the Sun set in the west. It didn’t seem like it should matter what a direction was called. But she felt a sense of meaning when she was able to define her path. She wasn’t just following a ball of fire in the sky. She was heading west. The colonists of the old world had headed west. And then the settlers. And now she was following the paths that they had laid out for her.

She had to follow her Sol, for her mom.

Sarah didn’t know exactly where she was; but based on the maps that she had studied in the secret rooms, she knew she had to be getting close to the Pacific Ocean. She packed her few belongings into her bag, put the heart shaped locket around her neck, and left the safety of the room to walk as far as she could go. She wouldn’t stop this time. She would walk through the night and into the next day if she had to.

But she didn’t have to.

When the sun was high in the sky, beating down on her slim shoulders, Sarah came over a rocky hill and saw the endless expanse of water stretched out in front of her. She had finally made it as far west as her feet would take her and all that she could see was water in every direction. She ran to the water and collapsed on her knees. The cold water rushed up her legs and chilled her to the bone. It was the most refreshing feeling she had ever had.

She made it.

And there was no one there. No settlement on the beach. No hidden door like the ones she relied on to keep her safe. Sarah grabbed the thin gold chain that hung around her neck, breaking the clasp. She cursed the locket and its engraving, throwing it as far as she could into the water.

The locket didn’t sink.

Instead, it bounced like a rock skipping across a lake until it came to rest on the surface of the ocean nearly 100 feet from where she stood on the beach. Sarah couldn’t think what to do. She stood slowly onto her feet and stared with her mouth hanging open as a metallic object started to rise from the water below her locket. It took her a moment to realize that the object was a door. A secret door - hidden better than any she had ever found. A young man walked out as if he was coming up a set of stairs that extended down into the Pacific Ocean, far below the surface. The man picked up the locket and stared back at Sarah on the beach. His features were strong, and he wore a uniform like the ones she had seen in books about old wars.

There were no books about the Resistance because after the war there was no one left to write them; but this was what she imagined one of their fighters would look like.

He waved to her, and Sarah began to walk over the surface of the water.