Page 29 of Our Last Resort

He sprang to his feet. His chair clattered to the floor behind him. Gabriel didn’t notice. He was too busy running toward the door.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

A mother darted over, grabbed his arm, pulled him to a stop. At fifteen, Gabriel was taller than most women on the compound, but he was weak that day. His body crumpled like a sheet falling from the clothesline.

“Please,” he said. “I don’t—”

There was a gurgle, and the sour smell of vomit. The mother released his arm. Gabriel fell to the ground. His rib cage quivered. He dry-heaved between eruptions of yellow bile.

Two mothers grabbed him, a hand under each arm, and headed for the exit. He was only half-conscious by that point. His eyes rolled in their sockets; his head lolled like a newborn’s.

I got up and ran toward the scene.

“Silence!”

There was a loud bang. The mothers who had been dragging Gabriel stopped. The cafeteria went completely quiet. There was not a chair scraping against the floor, not a spoon knocking against the bottom of a bowl.

Émile had gotten up. His right hand rested in a closed fist on the table, where—I realized—he had slammed it.

“Sit. Back. Down,” he said. His gaze swept across the room from Gabriel to me. “Now.”

It was demeaning, somehow—being spoken to directly by him, in front of a crowd.

I scuttled back to my table.

Émile considered the mothers, who were still holding Gabriel.

“Take him away,” he said.

The mothers didn’t point out that they’d been doing just that. They walked Gabriel out of the cafeteria.

Émile leaned forward, gripping the table in front of him.

“Now,” he said. His voice simmered with something.Rage,I thought.Barely contained rage.“Return to your meal. Think good thoughts. By which I don’t mean kind thoughts. Think about what needs to happen for this community to remain in good health. That’s all you can do. Do not seek to control anything else.”

I wanted to scream,What are you even talking about? What does any of this mean?I would have yelled until my throat was raw, if I’d been braver.You just saw how sick he is. Do something. Please.

You’re Émile. You have a car. Get him help.

You love us. You love us so much.

But there were no doctors in Émile’s world. No medications, either. He had told us how it worked, outside. How Big Pharma pushed poisons on people, how crooked companies told lies for profit. It sounded so wretched.

I ate my lentils.

That night, when the girls in my dorm snuck out, I followed them.

Gabriel hadn’t shown up for class that afternoon. He’d missed dinner, too. When I’d gone to pack some orders of Émile’s books, a task Gabriel and I had both signed up for that evening, I’d ended up alone.

Maybe his brain had broken irreparably. Maybe he had died. No one had any information. Anything was possible.

It was a whole new world outside, the night air on my shoulders, the glimmer of the moon on our faces.

I left the girls under a birch tree and kept going. It wasn’t easy, making myself walk all the way to the boys’ dorm. Five years after the Secret Place, my shoulder still didn’t feel right. There was always a pull, a discomfort down my arm to remind me of the consequences if I was caught disobeying.

But I needed to see him.

I opened a door, then another. The boys’ dorm, like the girls’, was a dark, musky place with bunk beds against the walls and rows of twin beds at its center.

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