Escaping Eleven
Escaping Eleven
I am not quite to the main corridor when I hear it. Footsteps, heavy with speed.
I move to the side of the dimly lit hallway and wait. The concrete wall is cold, enough to make my palms ache, but I don’t have to wait long. A young boy flashes in and out of my vision: short with orange hair, something tucked under his arm. A heartbeat later, there is another flash, this time all black. A guard. He is holding something long and metal.
A baton.
I step into the corridor when they have passed and gaze after them. Just in time to see the guard raise the baton over his head and smash the boy to the ground. The boy crumples and then rolls. The guard smashes him, again and again. The thing under the boy’s arm was a loaf of bread, and now it lies still and forgotten.
Soon the boy will, too. I can’t see the tattoos on his hands from here, but he’s probably a Denominator from the first floor; they are always hungry.
Maggie and Hunter think I should try to be a guard, think that I would be able to secure such a position even though it is an Upper Mean fourth-floor job, even though Lower Means like me are never granted such authority. My fighting background helps my chances, they say, and my volunteer work feeding Denominators—Noms for short—does too.
I think I would rather die, I tell them.
In fact, I would rather die than hold any position down here, because every Mean job ultimately does one thing. It serves the Preme leaders, the people responsible for what happened to Jack. I refuse to serve them, not for a day not for an hour, not even for a minute. I refuse to kneel before them and pledge my service. I refuse to have a painful past branded forever along my skin. So I will have to escape Compound Eleven before that time comes.
Four generations ago, climate change and rising global temperatures made Earth uninhabitable. The rich created underground compounds for themselves and sold off spots in the compounds to those who would work in them. Eve lives in Compound Eleven where there is a strict hierarchy. At the top are the Premes, the descendants of the wealthy who funded the compound. The Premes live in luxury on the top floor of the compound. On the next three floors down are the Upper Means and the Lower Means. These are the people who keep the compound running. At the very bottom, living in squalor and poverty on the first floor are the Denominators. Eve is a Lower Mean, living on the second floor. This means that she is destined for only the least desirable jobs in Compound Eleven. Eve is 16, the age at which she finishes school and needs to choose the job she will do for the rest of her life. Except Eve has decided she is not going to choose a job; instead, she is going to escape from Compound Eleven. Eve has a few weeks that she is supposed to use to take job tours and choose a job. Instead, she explores the compound, including parts of the top floor that are forbidden to her, and she fantasizes about her escape.
Escaping Eleven is the first of the “ Eleven Trilogy”, and it is very much a part of a recent trend in post-apocalyptic young adult fiction. Like many of these novels, the main character is not always likable but has excellent fighting skills, and the world the characters inhabit is brutal and violent. Escaping Eleven is extremely violent. Eve competes in no-rules fighting tournaments that comprise the only entertainment in Compound Eleven, and characters in the novel experience shocking acts of violence, including domestic violence and attempted sexual assault. This level of violence may turn off some readers. Escaping Eleven is an uneven read. Parts of the book are slow and bogged down in unnecessary details while others are exciting and fast paced. The first half of the novel drags with endless chapters of Eve’s detailing how she hates the compound and plans to escape. Eve, herself, is not a very likable character. She is rude and dismissive to her friends and spends most of the book lying to them and keeping secrets. The reader is never shown what she has done to deserve the loyalty and affection her friends give her.
Escaping Eleven does not stand out from other post-apocalyptic teen novels. Nothing about the characters or story feel original. However, fans of the genre will no doubt still enjoy it, and its ending will certainly leave readers impatient to find out what happens next.
Tara Stieglitz is a librarian at MacEwan University in Edmonton, Alberta.