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The dump had always been a maze, but Dylan knew its corridors the way he knew his own pulse, which was thundering in his ears as he scrambled over the hood of a half-buried car, his sneakers slipping on the peeling paint. She was right behind him. He twisted, ducked under the open driver's door, but a hand still caught the scruff of his shirt.
"Tag!"
Dylan let himself drop against the front tire. "Not fair! You're bigger and faster than me."
Jesse flopped across the hood above him, her hair swinging down to brush his nose. "And you're a sore loser."
They both laughed, the sound bright.
A coolness slid across his arms, thin and dry and wrong. The dump had always smelled of hot tar and rust and sunbaked metal. This air smelled of nothing.
"I'm not with you, you know." Jesse's voice softened as she looked down at him.
Dylan let his head fall back, looking up at her. "…I know."
She was looking at him upside-down, her smile a frown from Dylan's perspective. "Do you miss me?"
He sniffed. "Yeah."
"I miss you too." Her smile faltered. "I wish we could be together."
"We are. Aren't we?"
"In a way." Jesse shrugged, before her expression turned somber. "But... you have to go back."
Dylan looked around at the lanes between the towering piles of junk. He didn't think running through any of them would lead him back to Ordinary. They would all end up with him back where the cold was coming from. "...Do I?"
"I'm sorry." Jesse slid off the hood and pulled him into a hug. "But I'm coming for you, okay? I haven't forgotten. I promise. I love you, Dylan."
"I..."
Something was beeping.
Dylan blinked and opened his eyes to the flat white of a ceiling light pressing down like the lid of a cage. He was no longer surrounded by the Ordinary dump, but by the bare walls of his room in the Oldest House, the camera in the corner blinking its patient little blink. A tray had already come through the slot in the door, holding his breakfast portioned to the gram. Paste again.
"Prime Candidate Training begins in ten minutes. Please be ready."
Dylan lay still on his bed, his face turned toward the wall, though he knew the camera could see him there too. His cheek was wet, and he didn't wipe the tears away. Let them see. Let the people behind the camera log it, the same way they logged everything - heart rate, intake, output, emotional response, compliance. He was data now. A running count of variables. A trapped little rat that still remembered the smell of the outside world, though they were doing their best to make him forget.
Somewhere under the hum of the air vent, he could still almost catch the ghost of an Ordinary summer - rust and sun and Jesse. Then the filtered air erased even that.
"...I love you too," he whispered.