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you help me save hundreds, possibly thousands or even millions of lives.”
    I was so tired and hungry; I couldn’t imagine I’d be able to save anyone like this. All I wanted was to sit down, but only the elderly and very young children sat down to rest in public. Everyone else roamed the streets of Manhattan possessed of an unnatural vigor that made me uneasy. Even Aaron possessed that vigor, that glow of enthusiasm, but he didn’t consume the rations. Or did he?
    “How do you survive?” I asked. “Without the rations? Why aren’t you starving?” The way I am right now.
    “I’ll tell—I’ll show you everything once I have your answer. Are you in? Do you want to know the truth about Darklandia? Do you want to know the truth about your father, Sera?”
    The way he spoke my name with such familiarity, it made me uncomfortable. Or maybe it wasn’t the way he said it. Maybe it was the way I was hearing it, without the power of the rations echoing in my ears. What else had I not perceived correctly?
    I nodded my head quickly before I could change my mind. “I’m in. I want to help.”
    “Why do you want to help?”
    Another “why” question. Aaron was intent on knowing my intentions. My mind drew back to one of my most memorable lessons from Felicity school. “There is power in intention,” my fourth-grade teacher had said. “The power to build and the power to destroy.”
    “I want to destroy them for what they did to my father,” I replied.
    Aaron eyed me warily. “Your thirst for destruction may change once I’ve shown you the truth,” he said. “Drink your ration tonight and tomorrow morning, but don’t drink your noon ration. Pretend as if tomorrow is any other day, but don’t serve your hour after school. Remember your language filters. I’ll pick you up at your home tomorrow at four o’clock. Drink your afternoon ration right before I arrive. Goodnight, Sera.”
    He set off across the courtyard toward Washington and Liberty, the founding father and founding principle of the former America. I was beginning to question if anything I had been taught about American and Atraxian history was true. I never questioned it before, but now it seemed all too easy to alter the past and, in effect, alter the future. If the intent were to pacify the citizens of Atraxia, it would make sense for the government to alter history to make the darklings seem inhuman.
    I reached the front stoop of our apartment building without remembering how my feet had carried me there. Cedar Street seemed unusually sinister tonight and I was struck by a sudden irrational fear that every camera in Manhattan was trained in my direction, every Guardian Angel watching over little Sera Fisk. But tonight the angels weren’t protecting me; they were protecting everyone else from me.
     
     

7
    The nightly ration tasted wonderful, hardly metallic, and I fell asleep instantly, not having slept at all the night before. Aaron instructed me to drink my morning and afternoon rations, which seemed a bit odd to me considering the rations might cause me to change my mind about working with him.
    I gulped my morning ration and made it through the entire school day without rousing further suspicion. Skipping my noon ration during school was difficult. I guzzled down my ration under the watchful eye of Professor Gage then pretended I needed to use the lavatory. Somewhere between all the gagging and streaming tears, I became very familiar with the soft, slippery folds at the back of my throat and soon vomited my afternoon ration into the school toilet.
    With my afternoon ration slithering through the sewers below Manhattan, my morning ration began wearing off and the hunger set in shortly before three in the afternoon during our walk home from school. Darla jabbered on about how unfair it was that she had to help her brother, Darren, with his Evolutionary Science homework.
    “He thinks that if humans evolved from apes there should be no more