Heads or Tails

Prologue

My grandmother used to tell me stories of before the war, stories only the elders knew of. Stories that were never to be told, never to be repeated. Stories of a different world, a world with countries that lay upon the earth and lived in harmony; for the most part.

She told me of a place called Chicago, a huge city, where people lived freely. My grandmother was one of the only few survivors left of the destruction that had ended life as she knew it.

100 years ago, in 2037, a war began that continued for the next 20 years. They called it the xterm. Every country that had once lived together had been reduced to ashes, with advanced nuclear bombs that had torn the world apart.

Today, I live in A3, the upper middle class district of the Reliq. We live inside what they call the bubble. After the war, walls were made, walls that could never be destroyed, and no one was allowed to leave. Ever. That's how they promised us safety. And after 80 years of peace, we all followed the rules. Because in the Reliq, all crimes, no matter how petty, were punishable by exile, on the other side of the bubble, and you never came back. You were either in or you were out, and as far as I knew, being out was worse than being dead.

The Goverment told us that choices are what ruined the world we used to know. That people making their own choices were the most dangerous thing. So I never knew what a choice was, what making a decision felt like, or the feeling of making up my mind. Because since the day I was born every choice I would ever have to make was made for me. My arbitrium, the coin I was assigned at birth, told me what to do, and who to be. As long as we followed what our arbitrium dictated, life was good. The arbitrium was controlled by Deuse, our God, who watched over us, and knew who was doing as they were told and who was not. Ignoring, or opposing it's instructions however was a crime, and like I said before, crimes were not tolerated in the Reliq.

At least this is what I had been told, my entire life, and I had always been obedient. My eldest brother, Ollie, was exiled no more than 2 years ago. The arbitrium had told him to go home after school and study for his exams, instead he went to spy on the overseers, the men and women who stood at the reliqs boarders and protected us. My brother's dream had always been to become an overseer, but then again that wasn't his decision. Instead on his 17th birthday during the choosing ceremony, where we were given the job we would have from the moment we turned 18 for the rest of our lives, he was publicly chosen to be a Valet in A1, the richest sector. So that day, instead of coming home after school he went out to walls, and he never came back home. From that day forth, I had learned that making choices was never worth it, ever.

This was the world I thought I knew. My name is Valentina Woods, and this is my story.