Chapter 1
Goodbye Kantila Island

The bodies rocked to and fro as the bus rumbled down the narrow mountain path. Destiny Stone swayed with the rhythm of the bus, as she stared vacantly out of the window. Her throat closed as the dusty road wove past ashy bush and dilapidated, charred buildings, the remnants of the village that she had come to call home.

A grey layer of soot covered the trees, and what wasn’t grey and dusty was black and charred. Huts and small houses had sprung up between the thick tropical bush as the population of the island had grown with each generation. But, in a matter of days it had all disappeared into a blur of smouldering debris.

She closed her eyes and wiped her cheeks, smudging the dust on her face. It was hard to watch it all go up in smoke, but harder still to let go of hopes, dreams, and memories.

Just eighteen bodies swayed in the bus from the chapel as it wound down the narrow road to the pier. The wheels rolled up a billowing cloud of dust and ash, and Destiny imagined more people scrambling behind the cloud, trying to catch the bus. She glanced over her shoulder but saw no one. She leaned her head against the window and closed her eyes for the rest of the trip.

When the bus eventually stopped, a rusty boat waited for them at the end of the mouldy pier. Destiny turned her wristband and the time appeared.

19:00. The light was disappearing from the sky.

As she stepped off the bus, Destiny turned to search the mountain road, hoping to see another bus or a dust cloud. She frowned when she saw neither.

Once they were all off the bus, the passengers were led towards the boat by the bus driver. As they filed onto the pier, a man was being forced out of the boat in front of them. A guard emerged from the boat, pointing a gun at him. The man held out his hands and pleaded with the guard.

‘Please,’ the man begged, but two shots fired, and the man fell down, dead.

Destiny looked at the man lying on the pier and then at the guard, her heart pounding in terror.

‘Does anyone else think they can get onboard without the proper payment?’ the guard asked, and in an instant, the passengers knew their place: they were toxic islanders from Kantila, good for nothing except the money they could pay to unscrupulous mainlanders.

‘Keep moving!’ the guard shouted, ‘And hold your wristbands up!’ He wore black from head to toe and his vest had a logo on it that Destiny didn’t recognise. It was three arcs that formed a broken, incomplete circle, with three arrows coming from one end of each arc towards the centre.

His wristband didn’t match the rest of the uniform. It had the letters BVS printed on it. Destiny didn’t recognise those letters either, but it was clear that the man wanted his wristband hidden.

The line moved slowly towards the boat. Destiny’s feet felt like lead as she walked, still shocked by what had happened to the man who lay motionless where he had fallen.

Suddenly, someone pushed Destiny from behind and she stumbled forward onto the pier beside the dead man, her hand landing on his. It felt warm though life was bleeding out of him. She gasped and pulled her hand away. Her head swam in memories of the horrors she had seen on the island in that last week.

‘Get up!’ the driver shouted. He pulled her to her feet and dragged her roughly towards the boat.

Destiny was still shaking as the guard demanded to see each wristband and test if it was working. She stole glances at the man lying on the pier until she climbed onto the boat.

Once onboard, they were led to a small cabin below the deck. It smelt damp and there was hardly space to move once all of them were inside.

Destiny held her backpack tightly in her arms and looked around. They sat huddled close together, each of them lost in their own thoughts, mourning their own losses. She leaned her head back against the wall and closed her eyes.

There was a loud rumbling sound as the engine roared to life. The boat slowly pulled away from the pier, and eighteen stowaways began their journey to a new life.

As the boat dipped and rose on the waves, two fearful thoughts whispered from the depths of the unknown and filled her mind. The first was that she would never see the man she loved again, that the future they had hoped for was completely lost, and that the love between them was shattered, broken not by death, but by fear itself.

The second thought was a deep foreboding about what awaited her on the mainland. She feared that too much time had passed, and that the bonds that tied her to the home she had left years before were severed beyond repair. She feared that as she arrived on the shores of the mainland there would be no one there to welcome her home.

Chapter 2
A Harsh Welcome

‘Get out!’ a guard shouted, jolting Destiny from her fitful sleep.

There was a flurry around her as all the stowaways jumped to their feet and clamoured up the stairs.

‘Out! Out! Out!’ another guard shouted as he pushed islanders onto the gangway. Both guards wore uniforms with BVS clearly displayed on them. Their caps read Bella Vista Security. Destiny frowned at the word security, not remembering her home as a place where it had been necessary before.

As the space below the deck emptied, she slid her backpack onto her back and followed the others up the stairs and then stumbled off the boat.

Guards stood along the pier in the darkness, shouting at them, making sure they walked in single file. Anyone who tried to break out of line would be shot without warning, so no one dared to stray. Islanders knew their place.

The line slowed down as they came to a menacing glass building that seemed to rise up out of the sand. Destiny looked around to try and determine where she was. She didn’t recognise the building, and the beach looked different to the way it had looked years before. She slowed as she crossed the threshold, reading the sign overhead. Purification Centre: Welcome to the Outer City. She frowned. Outer City?

The atrium was enormous. There were three glass cubicles to the right for residents of Bella Vista, but there weren’t any people lined up there. The rest of the space was taken up by a long, winding queue of people waiting to go into one of thirteen chambers on the left. They looked like thirteen cylinders from the outside. The people near the front of the lines wore beige tunics and held their clothes in their hands.

After the devastation on the island, desperate islanders had used whatever debris they could scrape together to build rafts to carry them the eighty kilometres across the Kantila Strait to the mainland port. Some had tried to come onto the mainland illegally by avoiding the port, but they hadn’t survived. Those who hadn’t been smashed against the rocks in the tumultuous sea had been shot by guards. For islanders, it seemed the long lines and the chambers were the only way to enter the city.

While the other stowaways from the boat fell in line, Destiny waded through the crowd towards the glass cubicles marked Residents that stood between her and her home.

She approached one of the cubicles slowly, forcing a smile. The guard inside looked her up and down as she approached. He made no effort to acknowledge her.

‘Hi, I’m Destiny Stone. I used to live at the end of this street actually.’ As her eyes followed her pointed finger through the glass, she was surprised to see a wall in the distance, blocking the street she spoke of. A darkened dome appeared over the top of it. She frowned slightly and then smiled again to try and win the guard over.

The guard didn’t smile back. He tapped away at his keyboard and then a red light ran along the contours of Destiny’s face.

Three loud beeps came from the machine. ‘Please follow the line to Purification.’ He looked stern and unkind.

Destiny looked over her shoulder at the crowd of people and was met with a few judgemental stares. She turned back to the guard. ‘My father, Joseph Stone, still lives in this city, on this road, I think. Braeside Road. My mother, Eleanor Stone, was a doctor. Maybe you’ve heard of them.’ The foreboding thought returned to her mind. Would her father want to speak to her after they hadn’t spoken for eight years? She shook the thought from her mind and focused on the guard.

He scoffed. ‘It’s not the first time I’ve heard that.’ He laughed and shook his head. ‘Look, I don’t have a facial recognition file for you. Your profile says Absent from Registration, which means you might as well be a Toxic!’ His face darkened as he added, ‘You can’t be here! Get away from my window and get back in line!’

Can’t be here? Destiny frowned. This is my home. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked, her eyes stinging.

‘Go away!’ the guard shouted again, banging on the glass.

Another guard approached. ‘She just needs water,’ he said, guiding Destiny away from the cubicle. He looked at her as he handed her the bottle. He blushed slightly, and then looked away. ‘You can have this,’ he whispered awkwardly.

Destiny looked down at the bottle in her hand. The bold number eight on the bottle started to blur through her tears. ‘I need to get home,’ she said softly. ‘I’m not an islander,’ she added, fighting emotion.

‘That’s all well and good, but you don’t look like you belong on that side of the Wall.’

Don’t belong? She looked down the street at the wall in the distance, and then over her shoulder at the door she had walked in through. She couldn’t go back to the island, and she couldn’t get home. There was nowhere she belonged, and the fear inside her began to grow.

She looked down at her clothes. She wore a jacket over an oversized floral shirt and faded blue jeans. There were marks on her jacket from the dust she had brushed against on her trip, and her hands were still grimy from where she had touched an oily spot on the railing of the boat. She wiped them on her jeans. She pulled a few loose strands of her thick, curly hair back and looked at the guard beside her again.

It was only then that she noticed how tall he was. He seemed to tower over her, but something in his eyes and the tone of his voice told her not to be afraid.

He glanced over his shoulder and reached into his pocket. He leaned in very close to her. ‘The Chamber will only make you sick. Go out the window at the back of the storage room directly behind me,’ he whispered, sliding a small, square card into her hand.

She glanced down at it and then looked up at the guard who took a step away from her. ‘You’ll be safe there,’ he whispered. ‘There won’t be guards out there for a few minutes.’

He frowned suddenly, and pushed her violently, sending her stumbling into a crowd of people. ‘Get back in line!’ he shouted.

Destiny felt every eye on her as she pushed herself up from the floor. She looked at the guard as he turned towards his partner. He wore a BVS uniform like the rest of them, but he didn’t act like any of the other guards.

She slid the card into her pocket and looked at the crowd of people around her. They had already begun to turn their attention away from the strange girl who refused to get in line.

She slowly stood to her feet, keeping her eyes on the people. She glanced at the door with the words Storage Room on it. It wasn’t too far away. She took a breath and walked backwards towards it. She remained unseen. As she reached the door, she gripped the handle and turned it as quietly as she could. No one noticed or turned around.

She backed into the room slowly and held the door handle ready to turn it silently when the door closed. The kind guard turned and their eyes met for just a moment. He nodded slightly, and then faced his colleague again. Perhaps her trust was not misplaced there.

Destiny let out a sigh of relief as she turned the handle of the closed door.

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