Luna

I was not supposed to find out everyone outside the Academy would die. That night started just like any other: the glare of the moon preventing my eyes from closing into a much-needed slumber; the heart-shaped locket around my neck, colder and heavier than usual, interrupting my breathing; the picture inside the necklace, the one of my family before The Great Storm years ago took half of them away and left the rest of us with injured souls.

I laid on the bed Sequoia Academy had provided me, a mattress plush against my back, once sore from the piercing springs of the old bed I used to share with my sister, Luna. The moon was looking at me -Luna was. Before the storm, way before, when she was just nine and I was six, she used to say she was the moon. We laughed about it as we grew older, but now her words feel true. Ever since I moved into the academy a month ago, the moon had been whispering to me: you left mom and I behind, Tabitha.

Like any other night, I commanded my mind to stop thinking about my family and let my bare feet tiptoe across the cold wooden floor -a material the storm had left scarce and only royal entities like the Academy could afford. The door of my single-person dormitory creaked open, and I found the urge to hush it, afraid to wake up the assistants. It was way past the designated bedtime: students, most of us between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, were ‘still in development and therefore needed their full eight hours of sleep’. “To be as strong as the world needs you to be when we propel them forward, away from that horrible catastrophe that took more than half of the invaluable human lives around us,” Director Marko had exclaimed into his microphone, his grip tight and red around it, after giving students of all kinds of disciplines a long list of rules during orientation day.

One rule prohibited me from being out in the hallway without the assistants to monitor us, squinting my eyes through the darkness and using my hands to decipher the animals carved on the smooth walls around me.

“That’s the lion.”

I felt the warmth of a candle against my back. I could already picture Ray Sukendro’s broad smile as he waited for me to turn around, his brown eyes reflecting the light he held in his bronze-colored hands.

“Where did you get that?” I asked, admiring how the flame of the candle danced against the darkness.

“I have my ways,” he replied, his free hand holding mine.

I was also not supposed to have a boyfriend. I was not supposed to walk with him down the hallways and whisper conversations, but we always did. I told him the stories of my family and heard the fairytale that his life was. Like me, the Planet Council -the form of government that rose after the storm destroyed everything six years ago -selected him to become part of the academy for his musical ability. He played the piano, his long fingers producing sweet melodies that expressed the love he grew up in, how the rain had not killed any of his family members.

I was selected for my skill with the guitar, how I could make the instrument cry with the memory of my lost father and grandparents, of my mother’s fragile will to survive, and my sister’s broken emotions, the ones that made her shake as if her body was going to crumble and rendered her unable to speak for bouts of time, just like my mom. After the storm, I lived in a house of eternal stillness. The few wrinkled pictures on our plastic stool were the only source of life: the ghost of my father’s off-tune voice singing some old boleros, the sweet smell of my grandma’s arepas for breakfast, and my grandpa’s raspy laughter as he read off some old newspaper jokes.

“Have you talked to the assistants about your insomnia?” Ray asked me.

“Please, they probably have it too. I mean, who is able to sleep after what happened? Only a quarter of the world left, all the technology gone, all of us crammed in the only chunk of land that did not show signs of flooding,” I chuckled.

I could feel again how the storm shook my old house, how the wind screeched and picked up the palm trees from my former country and crashed them against what was once a colorful city overflowing with music and art. I could smell the blood coming from my grandma’s head wound as I struggled to pull her body up to the roof, wet strands of my hair and the grey clouds blurring my vision.

“It will get better,” Ray promised, squeezing my hand and erasing those memories from my consciousness. “That’s what the academy is for, right? The council said that Sequoia Academy will bring us back to the future our ancestors once dreamed about, that we dreamed about. Sure, it won’t be immediate… but imagine, the best of us training to become leaders. Doesn’t that give you hope?”

“Is it really the best of us? Luna used to be amazing with the guitar… way better than me. If it weren’t for her trauma, maybe she would be here instead of me.”

Ray halted our walk. “Tabitha, stop. She wants you here, and so does your mom. Luna gave you that necklace to remind you that you two will see each other once everything is better.”

That was the other part that kept me awake. I did not tell Ray, but even though my arms craved for my mom’s body to hug and my fingers ached for my sister’s hands, I also feared going back to our house. I could still remember the last time I saw my sister smile, her dimple glowing as her frail hands presented me the necklace. Then the pang of the first raindrop leaking through the roof landed on our room’s bucket and a look of horror froze on her grey face.

Ray brought us to a stop. “Are we near the kitchen?”

I could smell the chamomile tea accompany the whispers of some of the assistants.

Ray tugged at my arm. "Let's go before they catch us."

"Wait." Something about their whispers made me walk closer to the kitchen. Their voices carried the weight of a secret.

“I just can’t believe everyone outside the academy is going to die,” one of the assistants said, turning my hands cold.

I could see her shadow. She was leaning against the kitchen counter, the glow of her candle drawing her silhouette against the wall.

“Maybe not. The council predicted a famine but it doesn’t necessarily have to occur-“

I felt a hand grasp my shoulder, long nails almost piercing through my sleeping robes. “What are you two doing here?” It was the Head Assistant Zhiyin.

I heard a teacup fall and break into pieces against the floor. Two assistants rushed from the kitchen, their eyes wide and scared. One of them shook me, demanding to know how much I’d heard. Ray was pale as the Head Assistant dragged us through numerous hallways and into Director Marko’s office.

“He’ll be here shortly,” she said, puckering her wrinkly lips into a snarl before banging the door close in front of us.

“I’m sure it’ll be okay,” Ray stammered. He buried his body deep into the seat.

I noticed the green leather wrapped around his wooden chair. Then I saw the golden leaves embroidered on my armrest, the same color as the chandelier hanging from the tall roof above me. It smelled like new books and flowers and nothing like the smell of mold that Luna and my mom had to endure every day in their little cabin.

“Kids.”

Ray stood up and I followed suit as Director Marko, in a velvet sleep robe, glided into his seat. His eyes were as light as his hair and skin. He looked almost transparent, like smoke.

“Ray Sukendro and Tabitha Gonzalez, correct?” he asked, taking notes on his crisp white paper. I instantly pictured my mom sitting on the crooked kitchen table, writing on some scraps she’d found around the streets. The storm had not killed the poet inside her.

“You heard about the famine, right?” he asked, his emotions veiled by a stoic expression.

Ray and I nodded.

“It is true… it is a possibility,” he mumbled, his eyes glued to his hands, covered in golden hair. “We can’t be 100% but there is a possibility. Which is why you are all here. We collected the most talented, intellectual members of the youth in case we had to… rebuild civilization.”

“What about our families?” I asked, my throat tight.

“Not everybody dies in a famine,” was his response.

“You didn’t tell my mom about this when you recruited me,” I continued.

Ray kicked my foot underneath the table.

“Nobody is supposed to know. Like I said, we are not 100% certain and we don’t want to cause public unrest,” Marko sighed. “Once -if -the drought occurs, you will all be protected inside here from anything that happens outside, since people might get… rowdy. You will have food, shelter, and a future, regardless of what happens.”

I caressed Luna’s necklace, wondering how she’d react to this.

Marko stood up, his chair screeching loudly against the floor. “It is not like I want this but The Great Storm taught us that we can't control nature. I am being realistic here... there are not enough resources for all of us to survive if this were to happen. The council needed to make a decision." He avoided our wide-eyed gaze. "I will let this pass if you don’t tell anyone. And, I can assure you, if you tried… you’d probably be silenced in a way that none of us would like.”

Ray and I left the room, stunned into a lack of words. We travelled to our dormitories, like zombies, our lips sown together, until I saw the lion carved near my room.

“Our families will die,” I whispered.

“You don’t know that. The famine might not occur.”

“Then why are they investing so much in us?”

“Famine or no famine, we are the future.”

“You are not worried about your family?”

Ray did not reply. He blew his candle off, grey smoke forming a sad line against our black surroundings. “What can we do, Tabitha? If we stay, we live. You and I stay together, doing what we love, facing a beautiful future. If we leave, they either silence us or the famine takes us away. Don’t you think our families would rather we stay?”

“I don’t know…”

“You are ready to face death?”

That question followed me into my room like a shadow. I snuggled into my bed, gazing out at my window. Half of me had faced death already. My father and grandparents leaving this world burned me. Seeing my mom’s eyes sink into tears, witnessing my sister’s breakdowns suffocated me. The silence of my house was torture.

But my room here was also silent. The only sound came from my necklace: the laughter Luna sang and the words of love in Spanish my mom whispered when the picture was taken. Their deaths would finish killing me.

I opened the window and looked at the moon. I knew Luna was still there, somewhere trying to stay afloat among the raging storm inside her. There was only one way to live, and it was if both of us did. So I climbed out the window.