Deceived

Chapter Two

"Don't forget your pill." Mother smiles as she collects the plates and piles them into a stack. All neat and tidy, like everything else in this apartment.

My sister hops from her seat at the table—which is barely small enough to fit in the room and still give us space for chairs—and she grins. "I won't." She bounds across the dining room and through the white doorframe of her bedroom faster than a dolphin spotting fish.

Probably to go chat with Jen on EYEnet.

"Especially you," Mother chides me. She settles the plates into the crook of her arm and waggles her finger. "We don't need you getting sick." She disappears into our apartment's tiny kitchen. All our needs are provided for, but that doesn't mean we have much spare room.

Part of the reason I spend so much time at the pool. Less crowded.

"Don't worry." I pluck the remaining napkins from the table and toss them in the trash. "I remember the pills now." Mother peeks around the kitchen wall and gives me a concerned smile, and I force a matching smile before heading to the privacy of my room.

I flop on the bed. The orange adominogen pill bottle sits on the corner of my desk. I reach over and grab it, rolling it around in my hand so the pills rattle. If Mother is listening, maybe she'll think I took one.

I toss it back on the desk with a clink. There isn't a point in taking medication against a dead plague. Especially when we stop taking them after the Health Scan once we graduate.

I stare at the light in the ceiling, urging my aching muscles to move. A warm breeze lifts the curtains of my window, sending in the smell of freshly mowed grass. I take a deep breath, wishing I could smell the sea from where we live. The pool always has a familiar sting to the nose. But the sea... there's a damp storminess to the surrounding air and a wonderful salty tang. It's so open.

Endless.

Someday, I'm going to live right next to the sea. I'm going to have a job where I can sit outside or take a swim, and not be cramped by pastel buildings every way I turn. No walls keeping me locked up in a tiny little apartment...

I sigh. Who am I kidding?

I'll probably get a job in sanitation or warehouse stocking.

I roll over and stare at the orange bottle. I should probably place today's pill in my backpack in case Mother decides to count them again. A couple months ago she realized I wasn't taking them and took pains to carefully count the pills every couple of days while I was at school. I managed to convince her I'd forgotten them between swim practice and coursework—that sort of thing—but since then, she's been cautious about me missing them.

Problem is, I don't really care.

Theophrenia—the hallucinogenic plague the pills are for—has been contained for decades. No one in the Community is going to catch it. The territories? Maybe. They only loosely follow Community rules on security and safety, so maybe it's a problem there. But the Community of E-Leadership isn't going to let someone who's infected travel inside Community borders, so where's the plague going to come from? It's not like we're at war with anyone who would use biological warfare.

That's a thing of the past.

Still, less work for me if my mother doesn't catch me skipping them, so I roll off the bed, land on the white tile of my bedroom floor with a graceless thump, and grab the bottle from my desk. I shake out a couple pills, scrunch my nose as I try to recall the last time I actually removed pills from it, and then finally decide on three.