Downburst by Katie Robison Page B

in trouble and drawing attention to myself. “I’m really tired,” I tell them. “I think I’ll just go to bed.”
    “Suit yourself,” she replies.
    When we’ve finished eating, we take our trays to a conveyor belt at the edge of the room and exit through the tunnel. Holly and Lila walk me back to the bunkhouse then head to wakemo twenty for the campfire, leaving me standing on the porch listening to the crickets, wondering what I’m going to do for the rest of the night.
    Suddenly, I hear singing. A group of initiates is walking through the forest below, their clear voices bouncing off the trees. The song is in that Yakone language. I close my eyes, and for a moment it’s like I’m a child again, trying to decipher fragments of French music on the radio.
    I enter the bunkhouse—there’s nothing for me to do out here. There’s nothing to do inside either, so I brush my teeth and get ready for bed.
    When I return to my bunk, I push aside the pile of trash on my mattress then slip under the sheets. Before my eyes seal themselves shut, I look at the sturdy walls around me, grateful that at least I have somewhere to sleep, that I’m safe from the cops.
    I wake up several times the next morning but only for brief intervals—my dreams have too firm a grasp. My nightmares, I should say. In one nightmare, I’m in a shooting contest, and Diva shoots me instead of the target. In another, a zombie version of Aura exposes me as an imposter, and Naira shoots me. In yet another, I get lost in the woods, and men in black tattoos shoot me. After eons of this, I finally force my eyes to open all the way and make myself sit up, exhaling as I lean against the wood panels, blinking in the sunlight, remembering that no one is going to shoot me.
    I look at my Quil. My number, 273 , still circles the band. I slide my finger along the screen, the way Lila did, and the time appears in its place. 12:07. I rub my head. How did I manage to sleep for so long? I climb out of bed and grab my towel.
    On my way to the showers, I glance at Lila’s bunk. It’s empty. Most of the bunks are. Two of them contain sleeping occupants—late arrivals, probably—and one of them has never been touched, as the pile of clothes testifies.
    When I return to my corner of the bunkhouse, I dress in a green shirt and a new pair of pants, and by the time I’ve plaited my hair and brushed my teeth, it’s almost one.
    I enter the dining hall through the glass tunnel again. The sun playing in the leaves makes the outside world shimmer, and I stop to admire the craftsmanship of the tunnel, the way it feels like I’m floating with the pine boughs and the birds.
    Lila is inside. When she sees me, she waves me over to her table.
    “There you are!” she exclaims. “You’re quite the heavy sleeper. I threw a pillow at you this morning, but it didn’t even faze you.”
    “I guess I was tired.”
    “I’ll say,” she agrees. “Don’t worry though. You didn’t miss anything.”
    We eat our lunch, making small talk about the weather, about how warm it is, how windy it is. I glance around, meaning to look for Charity, but instead, I find myself caught up in the design of the room. Last night I didn’t fully appreciate how perfect the details were, how comfortable the furniture was. I relax into my curvy chair, listen to the popping fire by my feet, and stare out the window at the resplendent landscape. The ground slopes gradually downward from the meetinghouse, and everywhere I look I see trees. Endless evergreens beneath a sapphire sky.
    We finish our meal much too quickly. “Ready to go to the Aerie?” Lila asks.
    “All right,” I say. Let’s see what this is all about. We leave the meetinghouse, and Lila leads the way, breaking every now and then into a skip. We cross the first rope bridge, which leads to wakemo one, and take the next bridge to wakemo two.
    As we walk, I begin to understand the layout of the camp. There are five clusters of