The visions are coming less and less frequently. Now when I look at Gordon I don’t see his eyes turn red, and I don’t see a scorpion. I don’t see anything on people anymore, but I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing. Now that they just look like normal people, I don’t find the means to hate them or fear them anymore. Maybe it was better to see things because then I would remember how much I hate them when I’m forgetting.
The doctor still doesn’t provide me with pills, and I assume he’s right not to. Clearly he’s not a bad person seeing that he’s blind to Avanna and Gordon’s intentions. Avanna is here all the time, and I want to scream at everyone else for letting a person like Avanna in their midst. Surely they know that something is amiss with her. I hate myself for not being able to find the right words to speak every time I have the chance. I just let it slip out of my grasp like water.
My wrist feels slightly better, the day slipping by. Avanna tells me that this is because they have strong medicine here. I always wonder: if they have strong medicine, why don’t they just give me my pills and be done with it?
I don’t know how long I’ve been in this hospital, but it must have been over three days by now. All I know is that when I wake up, Avanna serves me food, and I go to the lavatory when I need to which I limit often. I hate walking through the hallway knowing that I can just point Avanna out and have her arrested. Something inside of me keeps holding back.
One morning the door to the room bursts open, and Tabitha walks in, her dark hair frizzy, her eyes looking straight at me. She smiles, but it looks like a forced smile.
“Hello,” she says. “How are you?”
I don’t answer her.
“We’re leaving now,” Tabitha continues. “Avanna’s going to get you signed out, and then you can leave with us. We’re going to the outskirts.”
“No,” I find myself saying. Anger begins to bubble up within me, and I want to kill her. I want to take Bryler’s gun and shoot her until she’s a bloody mess. “I won’t go with you.”
She ignores my protest and stands over me. “You can walk or do you want a wheel-chair?”
“I’m not going,” I tell her, my voice still quiet. I wish that I can raise my volume level so then maybe she’ll stop treating me like I’m a fragile little girl who can’t do anything except whine about her pills. I’m not like that. “I’m going home,” I proclaim. “To the hospital,” I clarify.
“You’re not,” Tabitha tells me. “Look, if you don’t leave now, Bryler’s going to get upset and shoot you himself.”
Let him shoot him. I don’t care anymore. I would rather die than support and help these people. I’m sure Tabitha understands because she sighs and shakes her head sadly.
“They really have brainwashed you,” she says so quietly that I can barely hear it. Then she says louder, “You have to come if you want to go back ‘home’, Seven,” she tells me, careful to use my name.
The name has always sounded foreign to me, but now it’s like a calling to my soul. My name is Seven Young and nothing else.
“And…,” Tabitha begins, trailing off. “Well, I’ll tell you when you see it. You don’t know who your family is, right?”
I jerk away from her at the mention of the word ‘family’. How does she know about them? “What… family?” I ask cautiously, wondering if she’s lying to try to capture my attention and bring me away from here.
“You’ll see,” Tabitha says, smiling softly. “Avanna was really concerned about it so she looked into it and found some poorly protected files. Well, Thorpe helped look into it too. He’s a technological genius though he always denies it. But can you walk?”
“Yes,” I answer quietly. Even though I don’t want to co-operate with these people, there’s no way around my curiosity.
Curiosity killed the cat. That phrase whispers around in my mind, and I’m not even sure where I got it from. I keep on hearing it over and over again in my head, and I shut my eyes, trying to block it out. The voice is sibilant and then becomes a hiss until it screams in my head, and I nearly scream back at it.
Don’t fight fire with fire because you’ll only be burnt, a softer voice tells me. Don’t ever fight fire with fire.
“Stand up please, Seven,” Tabitha tells me kindly. “We’ll have you in on your own family matters in no time.”
What can I tell her? That I have no family that I can remember? That the pills they gave me at the hospital erased my memories? What do I say? The thought of not being able to recall my family members bring more shame than I had when I was with my friend. I never knew I could feel this way over something like this.
I stand up and keep the thought shut in my head to flutter around and bounce off the surfaces of my skull. I don’t intend on saying those things, and I’m good at self-control most of the time.
“Where are we going?” I ask her. Tabitha’s quiet for the moment that she leads me out of the hospital room. Nurses give us glances when they see us walking down the hallway, but they don’t look surprised and they don’t try to stop us. Tabitha is walking so fast that I have to try and keep up with her long legs.
Tabitha suddenly answers my question. “The outskirts, I told you.”
Except that I don’t know what the outskirts are. I barely even know civilization outside of my hospital. I’ve heard of it, I yearned for it, but I never really knew of it. Now that I’m finally away from the hospital, I wonder if I really want to be here anymore. All I know is that I want pills to stuff down my throat. All I know is that I want Ana to lead me to Learning classes and for Dr. Salazar to run tests on me and tell me that I may be leaving soon.
I used to get excited over that, but now I just wish I’m back.
Avanna comes down from one of the hallways, and they exchange smiles. “Goodbye Tabitha,” she says, her voice soft and almost mysterious. “Good luck.”
Tabitha nods and lowers her voice because there’s a doctor bustling down the hallway beside us. He’s not listening to the conversation, but Tabitha takes the precaution anyway. “Don’t worry about me. You have to stay safe too. Don’t contact us in the following month. It must be an uproar at the capital with the report of a missing girl.” Her head jerks towards me, and I perk up, thinking about Dr. Salazar using my tracking device to find me. I’ll be back where I belong in no time.
Then I remember that my tracking device is longer in my skin and hope plummets quicker than it had risen.
“Don’t come back,” Avanna tells Tabitha. “They’ll notice something about you. Don’t come back to this city ever. Not even within the sector. They’ll track you.”
Tabitha snorts, but I can see fear in her eyes. “I removed that tracker ages ago. For all they know, I died along with Fiametta.” Her voice catches the mention of the name and then hardens again. “I’m dead to them.”
Avanna nods. “That’s exactly why you can’t be caught here. Surely someone remembers what you look like. And once they find out, they will report to the authorities and this time, your group will be absolutely crushed. It won’t be a setback this time. It’ll be for real.”
Tabitha swallows and nods, keeping her eyes on the ground. We’re walking again, and Avanna is following us. I realize that she’s holding a clipboard, and she’s scribbling incoherent words upon the sheet of paper. I realize what she’s doing; faking a report to cover up her conversation with Tabitha.
Anger starts to stir within me, but I find the means to quash it down. When I get back to the hospital, this information can bring them all down. It will be useful. I will be useful. The thought of that brings a smile to my lips because even though I don’t remember much of my childhood, I can still remember the feeling of being nothing more than useless trash. I’ve never been anyone important and now’s my chance to challenge that. I won’t be forgettable any longer.
“We’ve gone further now,” Tabitha says, feigning the bravery that I’m sure she doesn’t feel. “We can do this. We’ll find the thing he’s hiding the most and bring it out to the world. Seraphin will never forgive him.”
“If you believe so,” Avanna says softly, her voice so light that it can blow away with the wind. “I believe you can bring it down, but he has got Seraphin in perfect harmony. You’ll bring chaos.”
Tabitha says something else but I don’t hear her because there’s one word ringing in my head. Harmony, harmony, harmony. It’s a lovely sound and like I do with the book I carry around, I say the word out loud, testing the sound of it on my lips.
“Harmony,” I whisper. Tabitha hears me, and she turns around while frowning at me. I shrink back from her look, hoping that she won’t lash out at me. But then again, that is more of Bryler’s thing to do.
We have reached the same doors that I had come through. “Get going,” Avanna tells Tabitha, holding the door open for her. “Get going and don’t come back, ever. If you come back, you don’t know what will face you, and I’ll have to stay in the background and pretend that I’m agreeing. Promise me that you won’t come back.”
“I won’t,” she promises. Then she turns and steps through the doorway and into the sunlight. When she turns back, I see a sunny gleam in her eyes from the light, and she smiles at me. I lose all the hated feeling that I’ve always felt from her, and she grasps onto my hand with hers, and we walk hand in hand away from the hospital.
I don’t look back.
“I’m surprised that the girl is still here!” Bryler says and then guffaws out loud. “My, is that funny!” He has been saying this for the last hour.
Tabitha grimaces and curls her hands into fist but doesn’t say anything to him. Gordon sees her look and wraps his arm around her shoulder while they walk, and he whispers something in her ears. She nods and continues walking, her attention no longer fixed on Bryler.
I fall behind because my legs are getting tired of the constant steps I am forcing it to go through.
We’ve left the city long ago. One of the others whose name I don’t know strolled up to a man in black uniform at the large gates and showed him a card. He nodded and opened the gates for us, letting us right through. As I walked past him, I noticed that he must not have been older than me by very much. That thought sent a shiver through me. He looked just a little older than Thorpe. Though I’m sure the others took note of this, they’ve never said anything about the oddity of this, and I did not find the means to speak up. We left the city behind us by foot, and we were all together at first. Some people headed in different directions until only ten of us remained.
“Where are we going?” I ask Thorpe. Not to my surprise, he doesn’t answer me. Instead, Gordon answers.
“We’re going to a different sector. Or further away from the outskirts of the eleventh sector.”
I have no idea what a sector is and Gordon still hasn’t explained it to me. “What is Seraphin?” I ask him, remembering that he was about to tell me when we were leaving the boat until I had been rudely interrupted by the man rushing us down the boat.
“What?” Bryler asks, scowling and jerking his head towards me. I see the yellowing of his teeth, and I stop on my tracks before Thorpe pushes me forward again. “You don’t know what Seraphin is?” He looks surprised and almost a little amused and that makes me grit my teeth.
“No,” I say with all the calmness that I am able to muster. “I don’t.”
He guffaws out loud, and once again I’m reminded of how much I hate him and this group that has taken me away from my only home. If only I can turn back and run now, but they will definitely stop me, and I don’t know the way back to the hospital. I would leave only if I knew all that I needed to know to get back.
We’re walking across the barren landscape, filled with sand and yellowing grass made orange by the descending sun. There are few trees, and most of them are dead. Looking over this desolate landscape gives me a feeling of hopelessness.
“She doesn’t know what Seraphin is!” Bryler says, laughing so loudly that Tabitha winces and glances around quickly to see if anyone has heard him. “By Seraphin’s sake! She doesn’t know!”
“No,” I agree. “I don’t.”
He continues laughing and slapping his hand against his thigh like it’s the funniest joke that he’s ever heard. I don’t try to stop him from laughing at me. I just stare at him. He’s the only one that’s laughing because everyone else is either ignoring him or staring at him with a mixture of pity and disgust.
“You’d expect it,” Tabitha tells him quietly. “She isn’t supposed to know anything at all. That’s the point. She won’t rebel against them.”
Bryler keeps laughing and pretending that he can’t hear her, and Tabitha face turns red. She forces herself to look away from him and keeps quiet which I suppose takes a great deal of energy for her.
“Why don’t you let me explain it to her before you start laughing like a madman?” Gordon says, grinning in his usual way, but it never reaches the eyes. “You can’t possibly expect her to agree to what we’re doing without knowledge of those… things.”
“Right, right,” Bryler says, still guffawing in that way of his and the anger begins to stir again, only quashed down by my control over it.
“Seven,” Gordon says, turning to me. His arm slides from Tabitha’s waist when he turns to face me. There’s a note of hesitation when he says my name, and I know he doesn’t believe that it’s my real name. I don’t comment on it because what can I say to convince him? I’m not sure how much that I do to help convince him that Seven Young is my name.
“Gordon,” I say, keeping my eyes trained on the ground. In Learning, when the Teacher addresses people, we are not to look them in the eye unless we hold the same amount of authority. We only look them in the eye if they tell us to, which they don’t do often. More often than not, I am punished for looking at them in the eye, and I don’t want to make the same mistake with these people. My Teachers are good people so who knows what these people, what these bad people will do to me if I disobey them?
“Seraphin is the name of this land, understand?” he asks me, grinning. “It’s not a very difficult concept. It’s the name of our world.”
I nod, understand the basic concept of this but not truly understanding all of it, but I don’t want to waste his time. Whenever I ask my Teacher too many questions, they get frustrated with me and call me stupid. I don’t want that to happen because it makes me feel inferior and idiotic for not understanding basic concepts. And according to Bryler, only an idiot wouldn’t know this.
“World,” I say, nodding. My Teachers have said that this word refers to groups of civilization, which I assume ‘sector’ is a substitute for.
“There are twenty-two sectors in Seraphin. It was previously thought to have only twenty-one until we found your sector.”
“Twenty-two sectors,” I repeat, nodding my head so it gives off the pretense that I comprehend all the information being thrown at me like it is common knowledge.
“Each sector has their own piece of land and there’s usually a large city in the middle surrounded by smaller and more rural towns and then the gates rope it off. In the eleventh sector, the land beyond is not very livable so they close the gates right off, making the outskirts very nearby. We’re only allowed in the outskirts if we have official permission or…,” Gordon trails off and swallows but then gives me his grin again. “Well, official permission is enough.”
I nod again, processing the information in my brain and storing it all away for a time it can come into use. This place is called Seraphin. I lived in the twenty-second sector. We are in the outskirts. We need official permission to be in the outskirts.
My brain stumbles over the word ‘official’ and my mouth finds the means to ask a question about this. “What is ‘official’?” I ask, giddy to have a new word in my vocabulary like ‘prince’ and ‘kingdom’.
“Nothing you need to know about,” Gordon says so absentmindedly that I would have completely erased it from my mind because I’ve always been denied the answers to question in the hospital.
But this is different because I see a Gordon twitch and then scratch the back of his neck while he says this, grinning at me so widely that it looks fake.
And I know that he’s lying.
I don’t push it further and I just nod, keeping my eyes focused on the ground and making sure that I look like I won’t bother him again by asking more questions. It’s all silent around us if I count out Bryler’s laughing, which is mollifying now. He’s not finding it funny anymore but still wants to laugh like he’s trying to prove the point that I’m an idiot. And I’d be lying if I said that didn’t make me a bit furious to hear him like that.
I just wish that I’m back at the hospital. I wish that I never transferred rooms. These people would have taken another patient instead of me. Perhaps they wouldn’t have taken anyone at all. It is partially my fault, after all.
A girl a little older than me falls into pace beside me. Her hair is the same colour as mine, but it seems shinier and more vibrant in the dying sunlight whereas I’m sure mine still looks like a muddy mess. I stare at her while we walk, noticing how she has brown eyes and how her hair is parted neatly in the middle. I finger through my own hair and find that I have messy bangs that haven’t been cut for over a year now. The hospital never found use to cut it until it went below my eyes.
“Hello,” she says, greeting me in a voice that must be just a tad lower than Thorpe’s voice. “What’s your name?”
This is the only thing I’m really sure of, and I smile to myself because this is one thing I can answer. I no longer feel like the idiot that Bryler has thought me out to be. “Seven Young,” I tell her. Just to be polite, I add, “What’s your name?”
She’s not from the hospital so she’ll have some odd name that has no references to numbers. I always thought names with numbers were more common than the nurse’s name, but that may be wrong. All the patients that I’ve ever known have number names like I do. The nurses had their own names and we called our doctors by their last name. Now that I think about it, I wonder why we don’t have names like they do. Is it really that odd to have a number for a name? Before I can think any further on this, the girl speaks.
“Kasie Lawrence,” she tells me. I haven’t expected her name to be different, but her last name strikes a bell in my head.
Lawrence.
Mr. Lawrence.
Teacher.
I squint at her, noting her dark brown eyes and brown hair. She looks like him, and I suddenly feel giddy inside. I’ve found another family! To think that families were just a faraway dream seems impossible now. Not when I’ve found Tabitha, Bryler, and Thorpe. Not when I’ve found Kasie Lawrence and my Teacher.
“I met your…” I struggle for the word, wanting to open my storybook so I can find it. “Father,” I finish, smiling.