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  Vincent sat straight up in his bed when he heard the crash. It was the kind of sound that cleared the fatigue from one’s eyes in an instant, even out of a dead sleep. It had come from the Main, from the foyer maybe. But as the silence endured, sitting in the air, its weight pressing down on Vincent from above, it felt impossible that such a sound could ever have disturbed him. He had almost convinced himself to lay back down when the crash sounded a second time. Only this time it didn’t fade into silence. There was a sharper, fracturing pound, and then several smaller ones – footsteps, then shouting. Vincent had barely jumped from his bed when his door burst inward and two men in uniform rushed in after it. Vincent scrambled toward his bathroom, but his legs were weak with sleep, and the nearest man was on him in a blink. Vincent flailed his limbs in vain as he tried to break free, and then the second man was on him too. In a flash, both of Vincent’s arms were pinned behind his back, forcing him to lean forward at the waist to keep his shoulders from popping out of socket. He continued to writhe against the men as they dragged him toward his busted door, but resistance was pointless. The men had vice-like grips and seemed undisturbed by even Vincent’s most violent struggles. They hauled him into the Main easily. Father and Mother were already there, struggling against their own escorts of uniformed, rough looking men. And now, in the light, Vincent could see the men clearly. They wore tight sleeves and collars up the neck like officers of the Guard, but they were clothed not in the normal bleach white, but in a dark, ashen gray. The only trace of white was stitched on their collars: the familiar outline of an eye typically reserved for the darkness of the simulations.

  “Don’t touch my son!” Father shouted when he saw Vincent being dragged into the room. “Don’t you dare touch him!”

  Father began to thrash against his captors. There were three men holding him, but they could hardly keep control. Wordlessly, the man who had first subdued Vincent crossed over to lend a hand. As Father’s escort turned from three to four, Father grew still and the Main grew silent. But the calm seemed to have had little to do with the additional guard. Father had gone still not when he had been met with the extra pair of hands, but when his eyes had fallen in the direction of the foyer door. The door was out of Vincent’s line of sight, but he could hear the footsteps crossing through it just the same, slow, deliberate, and ushering in with them a chill that seemed to slither down Vincent’s spine.

  “Hello, Mr. Smith.” It was a man’s voice, but it struck a pitch with each syllable that seemed to hover somewhere outside the normal masculine range.

  “I have desired your audience for some time now,” the voice continued – Vincent still could not see the man. “What a thrill it is to finally have it.”

  “Let my family go,” said Father. It seemed to require of him a great effort to stay calm. “They did nothing.”

  More footsteps. The man had stepped closer to Father, and Vincent caught a glance of him for the first time. He was just large enough not to be considered frail, the skin of his face was pulled tightly around narrow cheek bones, and his features were sharp, his eyes calculating.

  “You are right,” the man said. “But thanks to you, I have plenty of data that says they have.”

  Father strained against his captors, spurred on by the man’s taunting tone. His eyes were murderous, bloodshot, but the man merely turned away in response, his face now contorted with a smug grin.

  “No,” said Father, resuming his struggle. “No!” he shouted after the man, and the veins in his neck protruded as he strained against the men holding him. One of the men struck out with a club and made contact with Father’s jaw.

  “Dad!” Vincent cried out and tried to twist free of his captor’s grip. The man tightened his hold easily. Vincent kicked out at him, making contact with the man’s shin, but was rewarded only with a strike to the stomach by the man’s fist. He hunched over at the waist even more drastically, his breath stolen.

  Father saw the exchange, and something in him seemed to snap. “Don’t you touch him!” he shouted through blood speckled lips at the man who had dealt the blow. “Let him go!” His struggle resumed with a renewed vigor this time as the men began to drag him to the door. With thrashing limbs he struck out in all directions, mostly striking nothing but air but occasionally making contact with flesh. The men continued to drag him in spite of it all, but they were losing control. Father was a man possessed by strength not his own, by mind, too, not his, but of an animal cornered and trapped. He managed to free an arm and ripped a club from the nearest guard’s hand. He started batting with it madly, at arms, skulls, anything he could reach. One of the men holding Mother relinquished his hold and joined the others in the fray. But he had better fixed his hold on the woman he had just left. Mother kicked backward at her remaining captor so the heel of her foot made contact with the man’s groin. The man buckled, hunched and holding himself. Mother turned, facing the man holding Vincent now, and lunged forward, lashing out with uncoordinated but vicious blows. Vincent twisted and writhed in the man’s grip. The man pulled a hand from him to fend off Mother – Vincent wrenched downward with the arm that was still subdued – and he was free. He turned around to help.

  “Go, Vincent!” Mother shouted at him and pushed him back just before the man grabbed her wrists. “Go!”

  Vincent stood where he was, frozen to the spot, then looked to his father whose mouth seemed barely above the surface in a sea of gray uniforms.

  “Go, son!” he shouted as he continued to struggle. And over the racket, Vincent heard the man Mother had kicked approaching in an uneven gate behind him. “Go!”

  Vincent twisted around just in time to dodge the man’s outstretched arms. He started for the kitchen, his eyes trained on the back door. He sprinted toward it, driven faster by the sound of the man’s footsteps close behind. He felt a rush of cold air on his face when he threw the door open, and he kept running. By the time he reached the next ring of domes, his heart was pounding in his chest nearly as fast as his feet against the pavement. He chanced a look over his shoulder, then began to slow – the man had given up chase. Shrinking into the shadow cast by the dome at his back, he leaned up against the wall to catch his breath. His eyes were fixed on the back door of the dome he had just left, his dome, where his parents had surely been overwhelmed, and where their son had left them to their fate.

  If only to numb himself of the shame quickly rising in his chest, Vincent felt the urge to take off running once again. He may have, too, had his Lenses not flashed white with the small message at their bottom rim.

  Are you awake?

  It was from Jessica. Vincent’s urge to run began to falter. He started composing a message back, eyes fumbling over the letters as he went, but he only got halfway through.

  They took my dad.

  He read the message twice, hoping in vain its letters would rearrange themselves. If he had started running again, Jessica’s dome would have been his destination. Now, it seemed, that was out of the question.

  Vincent took a deep breath. He composed a message back.

  Meet me in the second ring. East.

  A feeling of dread planted itself low in his stomach as soon as he pressed send. After all, after everything he had learned, it was foolish to use the Lenses to communicate. It would have been decidedly more foolish, however, to let Jessica wander into a ransacked dome, the perimeter of which would surely be monitored.

  Vincent took off at a jog through the relative darkness between the domes of the fourth and fifth rings, his eyes combing the depths of every shadow he passed. The gleaming white uniforms of the Guard would have been easy to spot. The smoke-colored ones of Newsight, however, would blend much more seamlessly into the night.