The Gate Keeper: updates on hold until further notice

1. New beginnings

Luce was a dab hand at trusting no one and appearing invisible, valuable skills for survival on the inside. But nothing could have prepared her for life on the other side, on the outside. Surving in the real world, well she had always sucked at that.

Luce hopped off the rust bucket of a bus with a long forgotten sense of excitement. She felt like the Easter Bunny as Spring rolled around, or the Grinch when he finally got a heart. It pounded in her chest just like that, foreign, uncomfortable. It made her head spin like that time she'd been on the Gravity Wheel after too much Slushy, during day release. The only difference being she didn't have a brain freeze and she hoped like hell she wouldn't vomit blue smurf gunk all over her shoes.

This was good, she was finally clearing the dust riddled shelf where she'd stored most of her feelings, like a set of faulty Christmas lights she kept meaning to repair year after year. Now she was finally turned on, electricity practically radiated from her skin, causing the follicles along her arms to stand on end.

She was almost there, about to start her new beginnings.

Her beaten tennis shoes hit the cracked soil with a soft thud, as she bounced from the cabin of the bus. Black veins of thin crevices in the dried up dirt emanated clouds of dust fleeting up from beneath her feet. Luce turned to thank the driver. The bus was already leaving its station, she ended up waving to beaten tail lights, with a mouth full of dust and dirt. It tasted like freedom, kind of.

Technically she had made the choice of her own free will to come all this way, and for the first time in a really, really, long time, she was truly alone. Luce had spent a lot of time by herself, she learnt very early on it was the easiest way to stay out of trouble. She spent a lot of time by herself, but she was never truly alone. Even during lock up when the guards weren't watching her, waiting for her to step out of line, she was never alone. She could hear the girls in the cells besides her breathing, or hurling abuse at each other through the bars. Those bars that felt so permanent, so eternal, so impenetrable, that even on the other side she felt them holding her back like she was chained to the cold steel, forced to drag it behind her where ever she went. A visible weight which would shackle her, always.

Luce breathed in the hot, humid air, pulling her rucksack up over her shoulders. She turned to face her destination.

She didn't have many expectations for Westpoint Academy for Girls, a habit she had picked up over the years. Luce never set her hopes too high, or even anywhere near mediocre, in fact she avoided setting hopes at all. She had a sure fire way to avoid a life time of disappointment. She was just happy to have some direction, a step closer to the answers she desperately sought, and that was enough to be excited about. She had noticed that Westfield Point Academy coined the acronym WAG, which she hoped was an unfortunate coincidence.

She took in the sights; the cracks of canyons in the baking soil stretched up to a Savannah, disappearing beneath the corse golden undergrowth, the type that scratched at the calfs if you were to walk through bare legged, as Luce was.
Barren land stretched for miles across the horizon and beyond. Far in the distance Luce could make out the rectangular silhouette of three buildings - if she squinted. According to Google Maps, and the printing she had kept neat within the confines of its plastic wallet, those three buildings made up the Academy. Those three buildings that looked so far away, it felt like she was looking down at them as she would look from a plane, watching the people on the ground scatter around like ants as the buildings got smaller. She had never been on a plane of course, the most exotic transport she had taken was the bus here which was enough to put her off for life. She imagined how it felt to fly, to approach a destination as the buildings grew from minuscule miscalaneous objects, to post stamp sized outlines, eventually soaring low over roof tops that she could almost touch. The Academy looked so far way, it would take her hours to walk.