Budding Hope

Chapter One

"It looks and tastes like natures very own skittles!" she whispers with a seriousness I cannot help to laugh at.

She sits back and laughs with me. We continue like that for several minutes, before we both run out of breath.

We aren't who everyone thinks we are. We are not expats. And I am not truly here to pursue a dream of becoming a professional florist. We have never even been to Montana, USA. Even though we tell everyone that it was María and my birth place. We are from a very different place far from here. At the beginning there were sixteen of us, five girls and five boys under the age of seven as well as six adults we call minders. Minders are meant to act as guardians to the children. Helping them learn our ways of life and be mentors to them during their times of adolescence. The children on board the ship that brought us here were divided up between us. Not every child has their own mentor though. Unfortunately, there were not enough of us minders at the time for the children to be split evenly. We escaped as our planet 'Synthous' was being destroyed about five years ago. María was four years old at the time. It was near the end our fourth civil war when the Eilnardians attacked. Our planet's defence forces were at its weakest, with nearly all our weaponry supplies having already been spent on each other. We were a lot like Earth during those days. Although we had started using sustainable energy, we were still fighting for resources. Our race had developed space travel technology a lot earlier in our evolution than earth though and by the time of the invasion we had already travelled to numerous planets in our galaxy. The Eilnardians were also hungry for resources, having turned their own planet into a cesspool of decay, disease and filth. They did not seem want to learn how to save their planet like we did. That is why they invaded. They needed our resources, and once they had drained every ounce of life our planet had, they left, leaving our planet as a barren wasteland. Not long before the invasion ended, the government was forced to evacuate a selected amount of our people, or those of us that were left. This was in a meagre hope to save our race and that we could one day return and restore the planet. Regrettably, this meant leaving the rest of our people behind to die as the ship did not hold enough space for us all. It was a horrible time. Our planet held our own and we could have normally won the war but we were weakened by our own doing and were defeated. The sixteen of us travelled to earth once we knew for sure that we couldn't go back. It was hard, having such young children to deal with on the journey here, especially after such a great loss.

Once we had come to Earth we thought we would be safe; that they would forget about us, or simply wouldn't care. We intermingled with the humans, adopted their names and ways of life and taught ourselves several of their languages, but a year later we were again attacked by the Eilnardians. We were still somewhat unprepared and despite our abilities we had not been brought up to be soldiers and were once again forced to retreat. Three of us were killed during the unexpected fight; Jessie Connors and her two children, Andrea and Charles. We believed that they had come to Earth for the same reason they invaded Synthous. But after the attack we were sure that it was also to kill off the remaining Synthiens as well, us. During the attack, the Eilnardians also discovered our ship and took it away, leaving us stranded on Earth. We spilt up to make it harder for them to find us. We were not to contact each other until we knew it was time to fight for our new home or return to our old, and so we left. We adopted new names and created new identities and have been running since.

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After dinner at the restaurant we head straight back towards home. María has fallen asleep already by the time we reach the end of the street. As a child it is hard to stay awake at night when your every instinct tells you to sleep the moment it becomes dark.

I see lights up ahead and hear sirens and I am forced to slow as a police officer waves me to the side of the road.

"SENORA!" he starts when I finally stop