CHAPTER 3

THE MERCY OF BLIND SPOTS

I used to think forgetting was the cruel part. 

I was wrong. 

Sometimes the blind spots are the mercy.

I don’t remember most of my childhood.  Not in any useful order.  Lucky me.

What I do remember tends to show up when it feels like it. A punishment here. A missing day there. Something my mother said that I didn’t realize was insane until years later.

You’ll get the point.

As far as Coen and the four years we spent inside Central City?  I don’t think I will need to rehash them for you to understand just how much he meant to me. 

Just know this.  Bickering was definitely part of our love language.

Anyways, tunnels.

Central City had plenty of places hidden inside the walls. Service corridors, maintenance passages, little arteries meant to move people around without anyone important having to look at them.

But tunnels that actually went somewhere? Those were different.  There was only one I knew of.

The one that led to the tube.

The tube that carried the bullet train from the base of the Four Harred towers to the world outside Central City’s walls.  Or what passed for outside.  A closed system built to shuttle the pod-born between the five domed cities without anyone ever having to breathe outworlder air.

And because so few truly understood what that tunnel really led to, my mother let fear control it for her.

Fear planted by someone telling a story no one had proof for.  A tale that grew into something bigger than, well, death, I guess.

I had heard it once, a story of the woman who had died on the tracks.  A woman who had gone against the Tenets and against the Doctrine.  A non-com who had died at the hands of a train laced with karma and Harred grace.

They never said why she did it, just that she did and was punished for it.

So, no one ever dared challenge the idea of walking near or on the tracks of a tunnel that clearly had a walking path right beside it.

Moral of that story:  fear makes people stupid.  Blind, too.

Which was lucky for us because Coen, in a split-second decision, decided, it was the next best place to go.

Almost like he remembered its other purpose.  And yes, it had one. 

Not that that purpose allowed for a staircase or access to the tunnel.  No, we had jump off the platform onto an old, rusted pathway and hope no one would notice. 

No one did. 

For a city hell-bent on demanding accountability and hypervigilance, it had no shits to give when people actually did something wrong.  Or it was that fear thing again, blinding them. 

Made me wonder if P.A.N. was blind too.  Or stupid.  Two biometrics vanishing that fast, and no alarms went off?  None?  Come to think of it, neither did shutting off our Imprints. 

I had to ask myself who this ‘help’ was that Coen had was.  No one had access to P.A.N. like that.  Not in Central City, at least.  Surveillance, yes.  But to manipulate, control or otherwise intervene.  That had to come from someone with insane knowledge of the system.

Or P.A.N. was just another propaganda lie. 

But if someone was helping us, were they watching while we quietly scurried to the far end of the Jarsdell Station–the festering wound he called a monument?  While I tripped over my dead feet and jellied legs?  While we navigated the maze of performative loyalists who came and went as if life in Central City fulfilled them? 

Could they see the disgust I had for the self-aggrandizing throat held open by two enormous statues of my grandfather?  The disturbed awe of his stone hands raised as if one flick of his wrist could close the whole thing down around us? 

I know my observations and judgment were clouded by my own filters. I mean, after all, the baggage that came with lugging around the Harred name could have filled the ginormous space we were escaping from.

And then some.

Yet it didn’t minimize the guilt I still felt in leaving it all behind.  I had been raised to think it was all normal, despite the fact that I could see all its flaws.

“Let’s stop here,” Coen said, sitting me down about fifty feet into the tunnel.  “No one can see us here.”

Probably because the darkness had just begun to engulf us.  As if we had crossed over to another side.  Still, the light, although dim, shined enough that I could see his face.  That’s when I noticed he had at some point shed his ethereal image.

We were truly off the grid.

But it didn’t help how I was feeling. While I was no longer hyperventilating, I was still fighting a strong tingly feeling in the bottom of my ass cheeks and the sensation of a giant ball of acid in my throat.

As if I’d tried to swallow my guilt whole.

Not that I had any desire at that point to go back.  She wasn’t the forgiving type. 

Imagine being a five-year-old child, barely more than a toddler.  Still needing help to tie their shoes and button your dress, and yet, apparently old enough to know that everything done wrong is considered disloyal.

Like telling a woman in the park that you watch your mother crawl into a machine at night.  One you assume everyone slept in. A machine that would strip the top layer of skin off her body and make her beautiful again, because Mommy was the most beautiful in the world.

So, you lost supper.

Or inviting a boy over after lessons, only to find out that in doing so, when not prompted or arranged by your mother, was considered trashy and perfidious.

Her words.

Which required you to scrub your body for one hour with a hard bristled brush, until your soul and body were clean.

Your punishment obviously never fitting the crime, because spare the rod, yada yada…

You could literally stub your toe and cry too loudly and find yourself balancing books, stacks of them in each hand while reciting the twelve tenets and the prelude to the Doctrine till your vocal cords bled.

Or watch as your favorite possessions, which you had so few of, get dipped into acid and slowly melt away, because you walked too hard.

Yes.  She was a bitch.

But for some reason, I loved her.

I was terrified of her, but I was loyal and that was all that mattered.

So maybe, that had something to do with my spiral.  I mean, I was guessing at that point.

But trying to make sense of it while hanging out on a platform in a train tunnel wasn’t exactly ideal.  Especially when we had only two hours to get out of there before another train made its way home.

“I need to know if you are still with me,” he said, buttoning the top button of my jacket and looking toward the dark end of the tunnel. 

“Yeah, I am,” I said, completely unsure.  “I made it this far.”

He chuckled. 

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“This way,” he said, lifting me to my feet.  Once he knew I was steady, he started walking farther into the dark.

“And what is this way?” I asked, following behind.

He pulled a flashlight from his bag and turned it on.  Then he handed me one.  “We are going to try and find the mole people.”

“Where the hell did you get these?” I asked, accidentally shining the light in my face.  “How?”

He pointed the tip of my flashlight toward the ground.  “I brought them with me.”

“But from where?”

“Outside.”

He was outside?  The wall?  The Federation?  I didn’t know what that meant.  I mean, I knew he came from the Capitol, but I assumed he was from there. 

“Huh?”

But he kept walking and didn’t answer.  I don’t think it was intentional.  I just don’t think he heard me. 

Of course, you would have thought the fact that he had an Imprint like mine and looked different without it, just like me, would have clued me into the fact that he was, in fact, not a citizen.

Instead, it was the flashlight that threw me. 

“Who are you?”

He kept walking.  “What do you mean?”

“I mean, who are you?”

He stopped and looked back at me.  “I don’t know what you mean.  We’ve been over this.”

“And?”

"And what?” he asked.

“And I don’t remember what you said, obviously,” I said, trying to focus on his face.  “Or I wouldn’t have asked.”

“What part?”

I tipped my head back and just looked at him.  “All of the stuff you supposedly told me yesterday.”

I could see worry and confusion distort his face.  He genuinely didn’t know what I meant.

“I can’t remember why you look the way you do.”  I paused.  “I can’t remember why we keep doing this.”

He took a step toward me.  “Doing what?”

“This,” I cried.  My voice echoing in the tunnel.

He instinctively threw his finger to my mouth.  He had no idea how far my voice would carry.  “But I told you yesterday.”

I pulled my head back and licked my lips.  The metallic taste from the flashlight lingered on his finger, then on my tongue. 

“And I can’t remember.”

“Why?”

It was meant to be rhetorical, I think.  I know he knew I didn’t know.

“I don’t know.  Maybe because you made me set off some tripwire that turned off my brain.”

That made him a little defensive.  “I didn’t make you do anything. I asked you to choose.”

“And I did,” I said, “so why are you being so difficult?”

He shined the light in my face.  “I’m not.”

I pushed the light away. 

“So, how about you answer me then?”

He stepped even closer.  “Answer what?  What do you want to know?”

But I wasn’t sure, exactly.  I didn’t know what I needed to ask.  I just knew things were in there bouncing around as if they were trying to figure out where they belonged.

‘Who are you?’  suddenly felt like a loaded question I couldn’t handle the answer to.  Not then.

I pushed past him and started walking.  Frustrated with myself, with him, with the whole situation.

“Isa, wait!” Coen called out.  “Just hold up.”

I didn’t hear him.  Not at first.  I was too in my head.   It wasn’t until he called my name for the third time that it registered.  I turned, and when I did, my shoulders launched my body into a spin that nearly threw me to the ground.

“Huh?”

And he was there, like he always was, and caught me, one-handed, pulling me to safety.

“Look,” he said, holding on to me.  “I’m sorry.  What do you want to know?”

I just shook my head.  “Never mind.”

He looked at his watch, realizing how much time we had wasted, and he began to worry a little. 

“Look, whatever you want to know, I will tell you.  Just not here.”

“Why?”

“The train,” he said.  “We have to get out of here before the train comes.”

I gave him a look. You know, the one where you know you need to get over yourself for a minute, but you like the drama so you try to hold on to it a little longer?  Or maybe I just liked the fact that he was holding me a little too tight. Too close.

Yeah.  He knew that one too.  Normally, he would feed into it a little—I think he kind of liked it—but we didn’t have time for it.  Not when a giant metal bullet would be hurtling itself at us at a disgustingly absurd speed.

So, he smirked, rolled his eyes and began walking.  “Are you coming?”

It was a question he had asked me so many times before.  And yes, I had started to remember some things. 

Like when I was nine and I grabbed his hand and followed him to the front gate.  Or at twelve when I saw him again and ran into his arms.  At fifteen, after forgetting who he was, still trusting him enough to almost leave again.  Finally at eighteen, walking him as far as the east gate, looking him in the eyes and telling him, “Not yet.”

I had gotten close to yes every time, without following through.

Why would this time be different?  Would it be?  Would I actually mean it when I said ‘yes’?

I wasn’t sure.  I wanted to think so, but so far, we had just been caught in a loop neither one of us could seem to break.  A Groundhog Day of almost escapes that this time led us to a dark tunnel, with no certain way out.

Would that be all it ever was?  Or would I have to trust that this time, when the door opened, I would walk through it.

I guess it didn’t hurt to find out.

© 2026 E. S. Mercer. All rights reserved.
The Wrong Daughter and The Heresy of Isa Harred are works of fiction by E. S. Mercer. No portion of these excerpts may be reproduced or distributed without permission, except as permitted by law.