The class is quiet. We’re all supposed to be reading our books, but I haven’t heard a single page flip in the past five minutes. I suppose we’re all too distracted by what the next twelve hours may bring..  

“Alright class, it’s five minutes until the cleanse begins. I want to remind all of you about the rules.” Ms. Joanne says, her voice quivering. “If an agent is about to, uh, cleanse you, you must not resist. Assault of an agent will result in imprisonment if you survive, and…” she continues, but I’m not listening. I’ve heard about all these rules before, over and over again. But it never really clicked that I’d have to care about them one day.

An alarm blares. A loud, ear-shattering sound that sends shivers down everyone’s spines as it roars on for a full twenty seconds. It’s the alarm that marks the beginning of the cleanse, the alarm that marks “the annual steps toward the rebirth of our nation and our world” as President Stiltus likes to say. 

“Attention students,” the principal says over the loudspeaker, “it a- seems that our school has the, uh, honor, of being visited by a few agents. Please remain calm, and do not panic, they will most likely pass by your room if you are quiet, so please, remain cal-”  A screech emits from the speaker as the principal is cut off, which can only mean one thing.

“Did those things just kill Mr. Alberto?” Someone cries from across the room. Well, if they wanted us calm, killing the principal as he spoke to us was the wrong idea, because the room unfolds into chaos.

“WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!” Someone else yells. Books flying everywhere, and Ms. Joanne is struggling to keep everyone inside the room. 

“Kit, c’mon, we can jump out the window,” Ari whispers, gesturing for me to follow them. 

“We’re two stories up, we wouldn’t survive that jump!” I hiss back, walking over to them. 

“Well at least we have a better chance running than just waiting for those things to kill us,” they respond, talking louder now.

“Okay fine, we’ll jump.”

“On three. One.”

“Two.”

“THREE,” they say in unison as they jump.

I hear a crack as we land, but don’t feel anything, until I look over to Raven, who is lying on the ground holding their knee.

“Ari! Are you okay?” I say quickly, running over to them. 

“I think I broke it,” they say between gasps for air. 

“Can you walk?” I ask.

“I don’t think so.”

Before I can respond, a black, foot-long blade flies past my head and into the ground next to Ari, spraying dirt all over. I turn around to see three agents standing about ten meters away, only one turned towards us, its arm extended, seeming to have launched the blade from its usual spot on top of its forearm. I hear a low hum as the blade starts to shift, and the next second it flies back to the agent, sliding right into a metal slot on its wrist. It makes a loud rattling sound, almost like a rattlesnake, signaling its companions of our presence.

“C’mon, we have to go now,” I say quickly, lifting Ari onto my back, piggyback style. I take off as fast as I can, not looking back once. The entire time I run, I can only think about one thing. We disobeyed the law. We ran. We weren’t supposed to run, we were supposed to die. And now, even if we do survive this, we’ll be locked away forever, or worse. 

“Look, over there!” Ari says, pointing to our right. I turn to see what they’re pointing at, a warehouse. It’s only now that I start to feel tiredness in my muscles, and am glad that Ari pointed it out. I turn and start sprinting towards the giant building, but am stopped abruptly when I feel the weight on my back lighten, and the hands that clasped my shoulder vanish behind me. I look behind me to see an agent holding Ari by the back of their hoodie while they try and break free from its grasp.

I turn back and run towards the two, and tackle the agent, telling Ari to take off the hoodie and run. They do, while I’m grappling with the agent, Ari slips free and limps towards the warehouse, disappearing behind some trees to where the door must be. I turn once again and sprint toward the building leaving the agent on the ground. 

I hear a scream and sprint faster. I have to run through a bunch of bushes and tall grass to get there and am appalled by what I see. Ari, standing there, holding an agent’s blade. And an agent, lying on the ground, dead, a wide hole in its chest.

“HOLY SH*T ARI YOU KILLED IT!” I exclaim, a little too loudly.

“I, what?” They say, seeming to be dazed. I grab them and pull them towards the door, and we run inside.

“We’ve been hiding in here for hours, can’t we at least go out to check if there’s any out there?” Ari complains. We’ve been lying on these metal crates, in which one of them we found an old tv. We eventually found an outlet and now we’re watching the news, seeing if anything has been said about agent bodies or running children.

“No. At least one of those things knows that we’re here. And the fact that you killed one of them means we may have to hide out here for the rest of our damn lives.” I respond sternly, although I have also started to grow bored. “We need to wait out the cleanse.”

Just as I finish the sentence, we hear a bang. Sunlight starts to pour through the now-open doors, and we hear a rattle-snake noise from the other side of the crates. They found us. 

“He have to go, NOW,” I whisper aggressively to Ari, who’s jumped down from the crates. We sneak around to the other side of the room as quietly as we can, always looking back to make sure we aren’t being followed. We soon arrive at the opposite wall and find an open window sitting about ten feet up. 

“Ari, help me up,” I say, gesturing to the open window.

“I can’t,” they respond, looking at the ground.

“Fine, you’ll go up first, lemme give you a boost.”

“I said, I can’t. I can’t help you, and you can’t help me.”

“What do you mean? Just get on my hands and I’ll lift you up.”

“You don’t get it Kit, you can’t lift me up, you can’t even touch me.”

“What do you mean, of course, I can touch you,” I say, reaching out to touch them on the shoulder, but I don’t, my hand passes right through the air in front of me, the air that no longer contains my friend. 

“In recent news, a body has been found outside of an abandoned warehouse,” I hear a voice from the tv say. “It seems that after murdering an agent, a 14-year-old girl was overwhelmed, and ended up killing herself. The identity of this child is “Arianna Stanzi”, she seems to have attended Lakeside High, a school which was earlier visited by a squad of agents.” 

Well, then that’s it. It was all in my head. They’re gone. There's nothing left to do now. Ari, the one person that I trusted in the whole world. Ari, the one person that was always there when I needed them. Ari, the one who always brought happiness into my life, is gone. My whole life flashes before my eyes. School, my friends, Ari, the days where I would come home from school smiling because I passed a test, and the ones that I would come home crying because some bully pushed me over. I think about my family, my dad, the one who would take me out to hike in the woods behind our house. My mom, the one who would take me shopping, and make me my favorite meal of spaghetti and meatballs with her famous homemade sauce. My little brother, who would annoy the crap out of me, but I still would beat anyone up who dare make fun of him. My dog, Henry, that energetic little husky that would lie with me in bed at night as I cried into my pillow. 

I can’t help but to laugh. “Arianna”, Ari always hated that name, and they would hate that it’s that name they’ll be known as from now on. So no peaceful rest for them, and I doubt I’ll have one either. But who knows, maybe there is some magical place out there that people go when they die, and maybe if I die now I’ll meet them there. I start crying, crying and laughing, as I sit against a wall with my arms around my legs, I must look insane, although insane wouldn’t be far off. 

I lay my face onto my now soaked hands, but quickly look up as I feel something around my neck. It’s the crystal, the one that Ari gave me at school, it somehow didn’t fall off during all of our running. I roll it around in my hands. It’s half as long as my finger, but just as thick. It’s surrounded by a sort of thin metal cage, of which has a tree design to it. 

Suddenly, I hear a voice shout from across the room, “We’re all good in here, you can stop searching.” It’s a man’s voice, it sounds sharp, like an army general. I hear the rattling sounds of the agents communicating with each other, and then hear them leave. I let out the breath I didn’t realize I was holding, and wipe my eyes dry. 

It worked, it protected me, I think to myself whilst looking down at the crystal in my hands, thank you Ari. And I sit there, just like that, for hours. I’m sitting there so long that I don’t even notice the sun go down until I hear the blare of the final siren. It’s the one sound produced by those helicopters that anyone enjoys, it marks the end of the cleanse, if you’re hearing it that means that you survived another year, and you’re safe until next time.

No one likes the cleanse, except for maybe funeral home owners, who probably make millions from all those funerals in the weeks after each cleanse. And now, for the first time, I’m attending one. It’s pretty much what you’d imagine, a large room, families walking around, talking about how the person was during life. The one requirement after each cleanse is that the fallen must be cremated, otherwise there wouldn’t be any room to bury them. But Ari’s grandparents are very well off, so they were able to pay extra for a space to bury thei rentire body without cremation. There are photos of them everywhere, and a slideshow playing on a tv in the corner. 

Soon the speeches begin, one from their mom, their dad, their cousins, and a couple family members that I don’t recognise. And then it’s my turn. I slowly walk up to the front of the room where a microphone stands, and I finally let out what I’ve been holding in for the past week. I talk about what they were like at school, the sleepovers, the birthday parties, the pranks we pulled on our parents, I let it all out. By the time I’m done I’m sobbing, but I pull myself together to do one last thing for my friends. I take crystal from my pocket, and I walk over to Ari’s lifeless body, and I place the crystal in their hand, and close their cold, lifeless fingers around it. To protect you, I speak internally, and I let go, and walk back to my seat, still sobbing. And I make a promise to myself, and to Ari, that one day, I’ll fix this broken world, and make sure the sacrifices of all of these fallen people would not be in vain.