How did I get here? Was there anyone before me? Did they survive? The questions danced rhythmically through my mind, each vying for first place. I stood helplessly on a pillar the width of a serving tray, lifted just above the famed lake of fire. My life seemed to flash like lightning, too quick and too bright, as I faced terrors no matter which direction I turned. Just weeks earlier, my life had been unbearably bearable—until Derrick appeared, standing out of place, lost, yet impossible to ignore.

He arrived the week of my sixteenth birthday, when childhood ended and adulthood arrived whether you were ready or not. Sixteen years of safety and sameness had slipped away, leaving me accountable to a future I had not chosen, one I was doomed to. In Provision, our borough of invisible walls, we came of age at sixteen, married at eighteen, and rarely lived past fifty. To exist here was to accept predictability, a shallow kind of safety that smothered hope.

But something about Derrick and his family was different. From the moment they moved in across the street, they carried themselves in a way that unsettled the rules of our world. They didn’t belong—and maybe I didn’t either. For the first time, I felt a fire ignite inside me, daring me to believe there might be more beyond Provision’s boundaries.