The Divergent Games[In Editing]

The Divergent Games X: The Awakening

If heaven ever existed, it's not where I went.

     All I saw were my mistakes in life. I saw me being framed for stealing a bushel of corn, and being whipped for it. I saw when I accidentally missed a baseball session with Kelli and she sat outside in the rain waiting for me for over an hour. I saw when I had accidentally dropped Tyson while he was an infant because his head was too heavy.

     But out of all the things and mistakes I'd made, killing myself wasn't one of the visions I had. Sure, I thought about it, but it didn't come to me like a gruesome nightmare, amplified to make the scene ten times worse than it actually was. In the first one, I actually stole the corn and my mother was killed for it. In the second, a man had found Kelli on the baseball diamond and raped her before painfully murdering her. In the third, I'd given a mental disorder to Tyson and my mother had disowned me.

     This must be hell. I'm being punished for everything I did wrong by seeing it differently and more severely each time. When all of it had finally passed, I was left to float in a large, black space.

     I remembered stabbing myself, and it felt as if my soul had left my body and I had been watching everything from a third person point of view with zero emotion.

     After I'd drove the dagger into my abdomen, blood spilled from my mouth and my eyes rolled back into my head. I fell to the ground, my head hitting the floor fairly roughly. The knife had clattered to the area beside me, and all the Gamemakers seemed to stand up and gape at the occurrence at once. Medics and Officials had immediately rushed in, but that's where it stopped. My soul must have been taken to the underworld before I could see anything else.

     Now I simply laid there in the black space, my stomach facing what I thought was downwards, my arms dangling in front of me, my legs limp. My whole body felt numb. I could move, but I couldn't feel myself moving. I never knew if I was flexing or stretching. But I think, for the most part, I was motionless as a million thoughts ran through my head.

     "Renee, why did you do it?" Blake's voice seemed to ring through the space like an echo, bouncing off invisible walls. He repeated the question. He sounded like he was crying.

     "I'm not their petty little mouse. I'm not their test subject. I'm not their toy. They don't have the right to play with my mind and my body like they own me. I... I took my life into my own hands." But I only thought the words. Nothing came out of my mouth. I reached up to touch it, and of course I couldn't actually feel why it wouldn't open, but my mind calculated what was going on. My fingers seemed to move at a bump, and based on assumption, I guessed that someone had stitched my lips closed. Maybe it was me. Maybe I didn't feel the need to speak anymore.

     "Oh, Renee..." he said, and it was as if I could feel him- almost. It was like a type of pressure spread all over my body, as if he were using his whole being to wrap me up and consume me. I didn't cringe. Maybe it was the fact that I could barely move. Maybe it was the fact that I didn't want to let this feeling go away in this cold and dark place.

     Lights. White lights all around. My eyes hurt and I was forced to keep them squinted shut for a few moments. I ached- my head pounded and my stomach felt sore as if it had been stretched out and tied in a knot. The first thing I became aware of was the smell. It smelled like rubbing alcohol and soap. Rubber and latex. The next thing was sound. All I heard were rolling wheels outside of this place, or maybe just behind another invisible wall, and someone whispering “no”. When I was finally able to slowly open my eyes, I glanced around to find myself in a bright white room. Or at least I thought it was a room. I couldn't quite make out where the walls or the door or the floor or the ceiling was. When I looked down, I saw the lower half of my body covered in a light blue, thin blanket. The rest of me was clothed in white.