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big, black in her pallid skin. Her lips arebloodless, gloopy bits of dried spit forming in the cracks, her jaw jutting out.
    The emptiness in my body is vast, wide open spaces with nothing to hold on to.
    I won’t remember any of this tomorrow.

Chapter 5
    We are wound up and wound down, like mechanical dolls. They turn the lamps on, they turn the lamps off. And another day is done.
    “I wish I could just stop time until I’m ready,” I told isabel some night last year when neither of us could sleep. We sat on the floor in her cubicle, our backs against the mirrored wall, legs stretched out in front us, and I tried not to compare the size of my thigh gap with hers. “Do you ever feel like that?”
    “No,” she said, and I felt illogically betrayed. I pulled away from her a little, loneliness burying itself deep within me. She shifted closer, refusing to allow me to sulk. “Don’t worry about the future,” she said. “Things are only going to get better. I promise.”
    She promised me.
    The dorms are hazy with steam tonight. It’s crawling into my mouth, gathering in the back of my throat.
    I need to breathe.
    I pause by isabel’s room on my way out of the dorms, see her platinum hair spilling over the pillows. It’s been a long time since she has come into my room at night.
    I follow the floor tiles, black to white, black to white, until I reach the cloisters, walking the long nave with its curved window frames on either wall, each one sealed up to block out the dead outside. The windows are covered with giant paintings, seven on each side, all depicting images from life before us. The Empire State Building, the Grand Canyon, the Great Wall of China, the pyramids, the Coliseum, the Taj Mahal. I imagine them now, baking like clay in the blistering heat. Or maybe they’re swimming underneath the Great Ocean, only fish bones left to keep them company.
    The others think it’s weird that I love watching the Nature Channel to see what the world was like before us. They don’t understand why I would want to know about the life cycle of frogs or watch the sea roaring, throwing its spittle onto thousands of grains of sand. Fields of corn waving in the breeze, mountains capped in glittering ice, millions and millions of people living in the big cities, all performing their part in an intricate dance, weaving in and around each other unthinkingly.
    The only nature they show us in class is in the authorized Destruction series. The ice melting, the seas reconciling theirdifferences and drowning the doomed low-lying countries, never to be seen again. There was relief at first, the hope that they had found an organic solution to the population crisis, but that soon turned to fear. The remaining people moving inward and inward and inward, until the Zones were formed to protect the remaining few from the scalding sun and the rising waters. The Noah Project. Two by two the humans entered, all marching forward to create a new world. They got rid of anything we would not need, like animals, and organized religion. They got rid of anything that would weigh us down.
    I reach the giant wooden doors guarding the entrance, each one engraved with the white, red, and black triangles of the triquetra. I twist the brass handle to release them, my sweating hands slipping, leaving a mucus-like residue behind. The gates stand sentinel next, rusty metal arches reaching into spikes, waiting for intruders that will never come.
    In the garden I walk along the circular concrete path looping our living quarters, stepping off the path into the grass, the synthetic blades scratching my bare feet as I weave my way around the army of trees. Each one is positioned at an equal distance from the next, their plastic limbs extending into painted leaves embellished with crystals, stuffed birds glued on like feathered tumors. I think of the videos on the Nature Channel of the vast orchards in Old England, the gnarled branches heavy with natural food. They