Atrophy

Chapter 2

Eden's P.O.V

I threw my hood back, letting my thick blonde hair fall down my fragile body. I was unnaturally thin, like everyone in Lowhaven, and my petite height didn't help to make me look any healthier. I could've been taller, I supposed, if I'd had the nutrition my body had badly needed, but I hadn't got it. The good food stayed up north, in Highhaven, and down here in the south, you got watery, tasteless slop.

That was the best part of it, how you couldn't taste it. The lumps made you gag enough without help from the flavour.

I was seventeen years old but looked only 15, partially because I was underdeveloped, but mostly because I didn't have time to dress my age, hiding with my mother. Hell, I wasn't even supposed to know my family, as all kids were thrown into cruel institutes as soon as you were born where you were beaten until old enough to work.

But not me.

I was my mother's biggest secret, and nobody but her closest, dearest friends even knew that I, Eden Winford, existed.

Keeping a baby from the Regime was one of the worst crimes possible. Louise Winford, my mum, knew that and had given away countless amounts of children before, but when she gave birth to me, something in her snapped.

Twins, she had unexpectedly. One male, one female. The Regime only knew about one of us, and my mum had undergone so much heartbreak over the years, that she knew such an opportunity couldn't be wasted. Choosing between me and my brother, my mother would tell me, was one of the hardest decisions of her life. She picked me because I was the smallest and she knew I wouldn't survive in the institutes. I always thought her saying that was obscene, but she had a point. I probably was the weakest.

I opened a small hatch hidden behing a hanging blanket, and crawled through - not for the first time thankful of my scanty size and flexible body.

My secluded refuge was very tiny indeed, and held only a rickety wooden bed and some thin threadbare sheets that had too many holes in them to count. It was always dark and dingy, although sometimes during the day frail beams of sunlight danced through cracks in the slabs on the wall, illuminating the room a little, and even bringing some warmth.

This place in winter was deadly. The cold was one of the biggest causes of death in Lowhaven, and it wasn't for the good community spirit, over half of us would probably have perished. Yet even neighbors would turn on each other, which was why my mother was so reluctant to share anything with them, encase they took it to the Regime for a little reward money.

Things were so bad, that we couldn't even trust people who we were supposed to be close to.

Spring had arrived a few weeks back, but the days weren't getting any better. If anything, they were getting worse. The mayor of Arkhem, Elias Kronin, had ordered that the slaves double their workload and get everything done twice as fast. It was impossible - we knew that and he knew that. Not that he cared, as all he wanted was money and power, two things that we unwillingly helped provide him with.

If only there was a way we could stop, strike out and refuse his rules and order. Demand he leave and never come back. But that was an impossible dream we were too scared to share.

He was such an authoritative man, and had self elected himself to dominate over us, be the 'fatherly figure'. Except for the fact he wanted us all dead.

I had never met my dad, like most kids down here in the south. No, correction: all kids in Lowhaven, except for me.  I was the foreigner, you could say, the illigal immigrant who the Regime wanted to find and 'kick out.'

Just because a woman wasn't married, or in a relationship it didn't mean she wasn't still required to have children, quite the opposite.

Men from Highhaven would come, and well...one of those men was my other parent.