The Descendants Series Vol. 2

Part One - Chapter 1

Part One

Stranger

I'm confident
but I can't pretend I wasn't terrified to meet you
I knew you could see right through me
I saw my life flash right before my very eyes
and I knew just what we'd turn into
I was hoping that you could see
take a look at me so you can see

- Secondhand Serenade

 

Chapter 1

Fear.

It can make people do crazy things, to themselves and to others around them.  People place fear in others so that they can have…

Control.

It’s what the Directrix had over all of us now.  Well, the ones of us that are left.  But the one thing that the Directrix didn’t know was that there would be…

Resistance.

Those of us that are left are tired of the Directrix still trying to put fear in us.  Few of us have even actually tried to bring them down.  But with limited resources, nothing was able to even put a scratch in the Directrix’s defenses.

No one had tried to do any damage to the Directrix for a while.  Probably because everyone knew that they would give us harsher consequences.

Chicago hadn’t seen any major consequences in a couple of months.  The Directrix would try and cause trouble just so they could come and ‘straighten out’ the problem.  That’s how they worked if there hadn’t been any commotion in a few months.

But the one thing that they couldn’t really get to physically was my dreams, yet somehow my dreams couldn’t stray away from certain images that the Directrix had planted in my head.

 I shot up in bed, covered in sweat, the image of gold, green, and blue swirling in my head.   I’d had the dream again, the one that had haunted my memory for so long now.  No matter what, it always seemed to come at me when I least expected it to, making me feel awful.

I turned over slowly, careful not to wake Lyric.  She was six now, and still as tiny as ever.  She looked a lot like me, with the bright blue eyes and dark, curly brown hair.  We’d inherited that from our father, who’d inherited it from his mother, Grandma Cora.

She and Lyric were the only people I had left now, thanks to the Directrix.  It was the power that took over seven years ago after the national government was destroyed.  No one knew how it came to be, but they all knew one thing:  The Directrix was capable of doing anything they wanted.

Over six hundred million people died when they took over, so there weren’t many of us left.  And those who did survive were scattered out now.  We had tried to build everything from the ground up, but then the Directrix would just tear it down again.

I’d lost some of the most important people to me during the rise of the Directrix.  My father was lost in one of the bombings in downtown Chicago where he worked.  They had the place completely leveled in fifteen seconds.  No one was found alive.  My mother had died a couple months after he did, giving birth to Lyric.  After that, I was nine with a baby to take care of.  I didn’t know what I would have been able to do if my grandma wasn’t there to take care of us.

She’d lived in Atlanta, before it was destroyed.  That’s where we used to live, but we’d moved to Chicago when I was four for my dad’s job. 

Then there was…

No, I couldn’t think about him.  Not if I wanted it to come back and haunt me later.