We walked down the hall in silence. It had been years since I saw the place. The door to their lab stood in front of us. Lilly pushed on through, but I hesitated and felt my fear turn on me.
I wanted that cure more than anything. If it wasn't in this room, it wouldn't be anywhere. I'd be forced to accept the unacceptable. I'd stay a mutant forever.
“What's the matter? You afraid?" Lilly asked.
Cold sweat lined my forehead. I cleared my throat and shook my head. "I'm fine."
Shattered glass crunched beneath our boots. Tools had been scattered and flung across the room, left behind by our parents. Their lab-coats were still hung up on the wall as if nothing had ever happened. It was eerie as fuck, but I knew that we had to keep searching.
We continued through another set of doors and found a set of metal drawers. Resting on top was an old bouquet of flowers.
"Wait a minute," she said, turning toward me. "Give me your bag. I need to grab something."
I swung the bag off my shoulder and handed it to her. Quickly, she dug inside and revealed a small key. "Did my dad know I’d come here with you?"
I held my breath. This was it, the moment I’d been waiting for.
Lilly carefully opened the drawers, but she did not find what I expected. Inside sat a small diary.
She gazed back at me with caution. "Open it," I said.
She took the leather booklet in her hand and opened to the first page. I gazed over her shoulder with concern. "What does it say?" I asked.
She shook her head and quickly scrolled through. "The pages are blank," she said. "All except… this last one, right here. Look. It's a map with coordinates."
I observed the crude drawing of the forest. There was the Great Divide, our two plots of land, and the dense woods that surrounded us. But in the distance, there was something else. It was something I had yet to see. A blue halo encompassed the green. Written in perfect cursive, her mother had written, "Barrier."
"Let's head to the rooftop," I said. "We'll be able to see everything from up there. Do you have a compass?"
She reached into her bag and pulled one out. "My mom left this for me," she said.
I smiled. "Of course she did."
We ran up eleven stories to the roof. Lilly took out a set of binoculars and searched for the barrier. "No fucking way," she whispered. "It can't be…"
The barrier wasn't a figment of her imagination. As soon as I looked into those binoculars, I saw it too. The forest itself was dense and long, stretching for miles upon miles. Further away, the trees turned thinner. The landscape changed into mud and water. The wetlands. That place was the entranceway to a monolithic concrete barrier, a wall that stretched around the entire forest. In the center was a great watchtower.
I spun around and looked in the other direction. It was more of the same.
We were still under their watch. My father was right. We had all been quarantined. For life. There was no way out.
"The coordinates lead to that watchtower," I said.
"Sure. But what happens when we get there?" she asked.
"I don't know," I admitted.
I felt boxed in, like a rat in a fucking cage. For her, I stayed strong, but inside my head, I was going crazy. Why didn't anyone tell me about a massive, concrete-fortified wall?
My father warned me not to leave, but I didn't listen. We were too far into this to turn back. Such was our pilgrimage.
"We've been given a direction. We can't stay here any longer. We must leave," I said.
She hugged me. "What if it's a trap?"
It could have been set up by anyone. Onyx Laboratories. The U.S. government. Both.
The chance of walking into a trap was high, but this place was uninhabitable. We couldn't stay inside these woods. Maybe, behind those walls, I could find the cure to my mutation.