The Land of the Eternal Sun

The house was dead. It had been for weeks, but the woman's voice still crackled over the wall-mounted radio, blasting warnings and instructions into the hollow plaster shell of a home.

Remember, two meals a day are healthier than three! Help the Society save rations by cutting back today!

Mina wasn't listening.

She pulled a jacket from the hook and threw it over her shoulders, dislodging a layer of dust as she clutched the stiff fabric to herself and yanked the door open.

Muted daylight poured in, as if into a tomb, casting harsh shadows over the dusty furniture and well-worn floorboards. She thought it pierced her bloodshot eyes too, laying bare the desolate rooms inside her head.

She descended the steps, and the house gave its last shuddering breath as she set a brisk pace up the street without locking the door behind her.

The air was heavy with impending rain, wooden shoes clunking against stray pebbles as angry clouds roiled over rows of squat, tile-roofed houses.

Only the mountains looked alive, blue instead of grey in the distance.

"I wish we lived in the mountains," Jae had always said, and Mina always swatted him upside the head, even when he grew tall enough to make it inconvenient.

"Don't talk like that," she would scold. "Someone will hear."

But he would only smile and run off to school, shaking loose the bangs she'd spent all morning combing into place.

Her steps quickened as she passed the empty schoolyard, but her eyes lingered on the bright banner fluttering from the drab concrete building, yellow letters painted over proud red: The sun shines on our prosperous nation.

The sun always seemed to be shining everywhere but the sky.

Images plastered shuttered storefront windows, signs, flyers sailing in the tumultuous breeze, the town sweeper picking yellow papers off the road and holding them reverently in bony hands.

"Mina!"

She spun to see a soldier in uniform jogging after her.

She knew him, vaguely, but she still stiffened, the cool metal of her necklace pressing against her chest as she inhaled. Her fingers went unconsciously to her jacket, clutching it tight around her throat to hide the chain. Luxuries were a sign of moral degeneracy. They only came from the Outside, and the Society had banned them ages ago, claiming the people here didn't need them. They were above them. And she knew exactly what would happen if she was caught.

"Where are you off to?" the soldier asked as he caught up to her.

"Just across town." Her voice was a touch higher than it should have been.

"I haven't seen you in a while. Mind if I join you?"

Was that a friendly offer, or a threat?

Mina smiled, her well-practiced mask sliding into place, just like the televised stage performers in the capital, the perfect image of compliance as they sang the praises of the Society's leaders and their heroic victory in the Last War. She'd been singing their praises all her life, with every polite smile, every carefully skirted subject, every hospitable offer that would invariably be declined. Everyone wore a mask, and they let it slip at their own peril.

"I'm all right on my own."

The soldier's expression went unreadable, his eyes flicking up and down her slight form, and she laughed to deflect the attention.

It wasn't her real laugh. She wasn't even sure what that sounded like anymore. It was only the high, tinkling, pleasant sound she'd practiced ever since she learned a convincing laugh was more effective than armor at stopping bullets.

"I'm visiting the Watch."

The soldier stood a little straighter. Suddenly he was the one running his thumbs over the hem of his uniform, shoulders well back so he could not be called out for slouching. "Sorry to interrupt," he said, and nodded her on her way.

She smiled and altered course to turn down the street that led to the Town Watch's house.

Only when she was well out of sight did she shake from her mind the details she'd taken in habitually: unpolished buttons, scuffed boots, overly friendly speech. The list of things she could report him for.

She never loosened her grip on her jacket as the town changed around her, concrete buildings now imposing their geometric structure over the narrow street, and memories from three weeks ago flooded back as if from another life: the last time she'd been summoned.

"Tell me about Dani." The Watch had steepled her fingers atop her tidy desk, the woman's graying hair tucked into a tight, sterile bun.

"What about him?" Mina had asked, shoulders slumping under the relief that the inquiry wasn't about her. She had nothing to hide, but people could still talk. "He's my brother's friend, you might get better answers from him."

The woman seemed to ignore her last statement. "Has he visited your home recently?"

"Well, yes, he and Jae are always around somewhere."

"And has he said anything about his trips across the border?"

Mina stiffened.

Border crossing was illegal, but that didn't stop the more opportunistic types from smuggling over forbidden luxuries. Somehow they were always in demand, despite what the Society said.

She nodded. It was no use covering for him. If someone else gave a different story, she would be called back in for lying to the state. "He's mentioned it. I only know he crosses at the river, though."

"You haven't heard anything else?"

Mina shook her head.

"And where do they go, him and your brother? When they're not at home?"

"I'm afraid I don't know," she said, and it was the truth.

She'd been dismissed with no further questioning, expecting Dani to take a quick turn in prison or at the work camps further south. He was a tough kid, he would bounce back easily enough.

But it was a firing squad that rolled into town the next day, the telltale black van instantly gathering a crowd in the square.

Mina's heart dropped.

She shoved her way to the front, just as the soldiers pulled two boys out of the trunk, beaten and bruised but instantly recognizable.

Dani's buzzed head, and Jae's floppy curls, windswept over a purple cheek and cut lip.

"No, wait, what's going-"

Someone grabbed her and yanked her back. She must have lurched forward, but she hadn't noticed, all she saw were those messy bangs, and those terrified, hazel eyes as they locked onto hers.

Jae, she wanted to scream, but no sound came from her closed throat. She could only stare, mouthing his name as they forced him to his knees.

"Sentenced for the facilitation and transportation of human cargo over our sovereign borders. Found guilty of treason, and sentenced to death."

Human cargo.

Dani wasn't just smuggling merchandise in. He was smuggling people out.

And Jae was part of it.

How hadn't she noticed? Why hadn't he told her? What did he think he was doing? There had to be some kind of mistake.

But the apology that flashed across his olive face told her there was no mistake, and reality crashed over her just as the first gunshot split the air.

That was the day she'd learned heads explode when you shoot them, like pomegranates, their fleshy seeds spilling out over the pavement.

Mina turned sharply before she reached the Watch's house.

The streets were eerily silent now, curtains drawn in every window, not even a child played in the mud of the back alleys. Instead, small faces peered through doorways and around corners, bloodshot eyes sunken into their cheekbones.

Only the buzz of a radio through an open door accompanied her footsteps.

Remember, two meals a day are healthier than three!

"Do they really expect us to buy that?" Jae had asked the first time it played.

Mina had scolded him, but wished now that she hadn't. She should have seen the hardness in his boyish face, while on television their capital boomed with life and traffic and shelves stocked with produce.

Even then, the supply trucks hadn't come in weeks.

The radio never said "famine," just like it never said "border town," or "criminals," or "expendable."

Help the Society save rations by cutting back today!

She turned one last corner as the houses gave way to industrial buildings, and the road turned to ash beneath her feet.

The stench of rot struck her before the smoke did.

Her jacket fell from her shoulders.

Blackened bodies filled deep trenches carved out between her and the tall perimeter fence, not even disguised among the rest of the burning refuse, bodies with nobody left to bury them, nobody to lay their souls to rest.

Their sulfurous ghosts clung to her skin in the humidity and crawled down her throat, threatening to drag her into the ash with them as she side-stepped the remains and instead crinkled a half-buried yellow flyer.

The sun shines on our prosperous nation.

She stumbled forward, fingers scrambling to pry up a slat the second they found purchase on the wooden fence, the stiff boards snagging at her clothes, sharp corners bruising her ribs as she squeezed through, until at last dry grass crunched under her hands and knees and she collapsed out onto the other side.

All at once the suffocating town disappeared, replaced by nothing but low, yellow hills that stretched along the fence for miles under a churning grey sky.

She staggered away from the wisps of smoke that still snatched at her between blackened boards, and pulled the necklace from beneath her shirt: a tiny, silver, heart-shaped locket.

The glossy stock photos were still inside it, a model family smiling against a garish pink background.

She couldn't even remember how she'd noticed it in the merchant's stall, hidden amongst an array of forbidden items under a mat, but in the blur of days following the execution she found herself enraptured by it, the last fistful of coins she'd been saving for food weighing pointlessly at her side.

The careful drudge of survival no longer seemed to matter. Only that useless piece of metal, that sinful extravagance from another world.

She clutched it to her chest as she reached the top of the hill, and the ground dropped off sharply into the river below, frothing and churning against the cliff, against the low green land on the other side, Jae's mountains singing blue in the distance.

The rumble of a patrol vehicle somewhere behind her steeled her nerves.

And she jumped.

For a moment there was nothing but air.

Her heart skipped a beat.

Then the water rushed up and she plunged below its icy surface, thrashing out against the current, emaciated limbs scrambling for purchase on the opposite shore, strength nearly spent, body stiff and stinging from the force of the waves.

And for a moment she thought she would give out before she reached it, but at last she scrambled up onto dry land, gasping for air she'd never tasted, fingers digging into the earth and grass of a foreign land, of the Outside.

Wheels screeched up on the cliffs and someone shouted.

She'd been seen.

But it didn't matter.

She hauled herself up just as gunshots exploded above her and she hit the ground, head slamming into earth, chest numb with impact, her warmth leaking out into the tilting colors, sky, cliff, trees.

The first raindrops struck her cheek, tracing paths through the sweat and ash. And then the skies unleashed, bleeding with her, burying her, singing the lullabies of a green land she'd never known.

Fire seemed a distant memory now, the horror of a fading nightmare. Her body was free of it. Free of everything.

They would leave her here, unable to cross the river by their own law.

The sun is shining, they would say as their town decayed behind flower-print curtains.

The sun is shining, they would say as they drowned in the rain.