UNWANTED

CHAPTER 3 - J20.1.18 - LIZAVETA

I stayed in the hall for a few seconds, wondering which level the crypts were on, when padded feet came trotting towards me. Jazzy.

Being in that hall again was disorienting.

I've run away multiple times as a child; once with my brother for three days before they found us in the deserts of our ancestors, the Sauds. Then they found me a few months after my brother died staying somewhere below the border where I met Ly. Once when I tried to smuggle Ly out of the country to avoid conscription, but we were eventually caught in one of my safe houses in España. And then now, right after the attempt that almost succeeded.

It was unreal. I was still here when I thought I could go. There was no hope of escaping now.

I sighed and Jazzy rubbed her head on my shoulder. She looked cleaner, her maw no longer covered in blood and meaty bits. She had a violet collar on which I immediately hated. When she laid down on the wood-paneled floor I installed myself, I found the latch and took it off of her. "You look better without it, Jazzy. Tigers aren't pets, they're buddies."

She didn't care.

The hall that led to my quarters were lined with high-level Guard, all of which were wearing the regal, now mournful, violet. I needed to get over my disgust of the color... was it even disgust?

More likely it was fear that kept me away from it, remembering the sting of a hand across my face when I was caught wearing my mother's old coat. I just wanted her scent, but Upapa told me I didn't even deserve to wear the color.

A wave of nostalgia came over me as I scanned the bedroom of the suite. It was ten times the size of the cabin at the Peak, painted in a softer white compared to the marble exterior. The floor was of gray-tone wood, covered here and there by blue and cream rugs. Vases full of wilted green carnations... My bed was still white sheets and cream pillows without a comforter, my windows were still screens showing me what was outside without actually making me vulnerable with glass.

On my shelves were the books with real paper which I've collected over years of diving into antique shops... and right next to my window were my art supplies, still not arranged from the day I hastily left. And on my walls were pictures of me and Ly on vacations next to printed flight maps.

How could everything here still be the same after everything else has changed? It felt like I was creeping into the life I left in a time capsule.

I found myself straying to the faux window with the easel- on my palette there were still two colors wet from my last painting- blood red and cyan.

One was the only color I was allowed to wear in public. Most people just thought I liked red. But to the people who actually knew what it meant, I was that girl; always separate, always an outsider.

Then cyan... the color of the sea I loved to bathe in, the sky I learned to fly in. It was different now. Once it was the color of the freedom, I always wanted for myself, once it was the color of new friendship and comrades at arms. Now it was the color of the sky my grandfather died in.

They melted together down the finger hole of the palette and mixed on my floor. Violet. Regal, imposing... my new identity, I guess.

Jazzy looked at me lazily licking her paws on my bed. She filled up the entire thing, so I just dived on her. She put one heavy leg on me as if to hug me and I hugged her back. "We should have stayed on the peak."

She squinted her agreement. Jazzy was the largest of her kind. She was only about five years old, a gift from the Russians to my grandfather, who, after seeing her resemblance to me, gifted her probably hoping she would grow big enough to swallow me whole.