Ch. 7

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[ CHAPTER 7: SISTER ]

"Mortal?"

Venna's voice was delicate.
It ventured out, softly peeking from a space somewhere behind me, somewhere that wasn't the wall I couldn't tear my gaze away from.
It looks could kill, the wall would be burning.
But I couldn't look away. It was a physical impossibility for me; as if, if I looked away, I would have a mental meltdown. Quite frankly, I was convinced of it.

Because all I could see when I closed my eyes was that boy's face.
His features softening as he turned to me, a gentle look of surprise replacing his burning hatred that portrayed itself on his beautiful face only a mere few seconds before. So real, so alive, so fresh and new and innocent.
And then, he was gone. Just like that; in that split second of his awareness, of his sweet bliss.
It only took a single second for it to be gone. For him to be gone, snatched, ripped away from the world without as much as a final breath.

Even whence I would blink, I could see him.
And it hurt.
I did not think that witnessing such a tragedy would have affected me in such a strong way. Hell, I didn't even know the kid, let alone have a personal relationship with him.
But his eyes.
Those ice blue eyes, so full of life, so full of the future and the possibilities to come. So many paths he could have taken; so many things he would have done, could have done.
But he was gone. He was gone forever, and he was never coming back.

And every single time that realization flitted so innocently across my mind, it felt like my chest was being ripped open once more.
Why do I care so much?
It was so fast. It was so fast.
Just like that. A snap of fingers. A blink of an eye, lashes a soft fringe against your cheek. A beat of your heart, one beat more, one beat more into the passing seconds of your life that you had and he didn't.
Because he was gone.
And he could have been me.

I pressed my palms harshly against my face, the skin of my hands pushing against the skin of my eyelids. I could feel my fingernails digging into the delicate material of my face; I wouldn't be surprised if the warm feeling of blood would have beaded on the tips of my fingers.
I opened myself to the physical pain that bloomed from my skin. I welcomed it; anything, anything to make the clawing storm somewhere within me cease it's howling.
Why do I care?

It could have been me. It could have so easily been me standing there, calling out to a crowd in need of a leader. I could have felt my chest swell in pride as their faces turned to me, as I spoke words so in desperate need to be heard. I could have felt like the king of a dynasty, before all I could feel was the silence of nothing.
It could have been me. It could have so easily been me.
I felt the familiar feeling of pained panic bloom somewhere beneath my ribcage, threatening to spread its wild wings and consume me.

I released my hands' cold grip against my face, my eyes still pressed shut as I lifted my head to face the ceiling. I struggled to calm my fleeting emotions, inhaling through my mouth, exhaling through my nose.
Inhale, exhale.
One more breath of life that he didn't have.
Inhale, exhale.
One more beat of heart that he didn't have.
Oh, my god.
How easily it could have been me.

"Mortal?"
Venna's voice, again. It ventured out to me, a subtle question in need of an answer.
Finally, finally, I turned my head slightly away from the wall my eyes had burned into for quite a while. It took my gaze a minute to adjust to the smaller room, it's familiar looming walls and pearly white boxes of coffins no longer a fright to me.
Venna was quietly sitting on the capsule in the center between the two others, hands folded delicately on her lap as her dark eyes met my own.
"Are you okay?" She asked quietly, wearing an unreadable expression on her fragile features.

Without knowing what else to do, I simply nodded.
But it wasn't real. It was as plastic as death was in the new world; stiff and fake and a lie.
Almost immediately I realized what a ridiculous and useless action it was to fake my answer to nearly anything with Venna, for at once she responded, "No, you're not, Mortal. Is it the boy?"

I was nearly sent reeling at how flawlessly and quickly she had peeked inside of my emotions to discover how I truly felt, except for the fact that I had reminded myself that I was speaking to Venna.
I felt my jaw tighten as I clamped my teeth together, pressing my mouth so harshly closed I could feel the nerves in my gums aching with complaint.
I didn't respond. A part of me denied it, but the half of me that knew the truth told me that if I would have responded, I would have a physical breakdown.

"I shouldn't care!"
The words snapped out of my mouth, nearly beyond my control. In an instant, I was up, pacing that damned wall of the room.
My breathing rate increased, my heart drumming against my ribcage in sync with my rapid steps.
The same thought tore away at my inner conscious; each quickened step beating back the devouring pain in my chest every time I blinked and saw that poor, poor boy's face. "I shouldn't care. Why do I care? I shouldn't care!"

"Mortal," Venna breathed my name for the third time. She peered up at me through her dark eyelashes, soft eyebrows slightly upturned in concern for my wellbeing. "There's nothing you could have done."
I was shocked at the words that fell from her gentle lips. One part of me was surprised simply because of how formal she sounded; how ahead of her age, how much of an adult-before-her-time she represented.
The other part of me swelled so severely in rage, in nearly drowned out any voice of sense or reason anywhere present within the walls of my mind.

"Nothing I could have done?" I snarled. "Nothing I could have done?"
My voice was rising now, a pressure on my throat as my vocal cords increased their volume profusely. "Don't you dare tell me there was nothing I could have done! I could have done everything! I could have done anything!"
I found myself rebelliously enjoying my harsh voice as it bounced swiftly off the walls. Out of the corner of my unfocused vision, I caught sight of a slightly frightened looking Toby looking as if he was trying to envelope himself in the corner of the room and never return.

I found myself continuing to speak in my harshly loud tone, words spilling faster and faster from my mouth. "Do you realize what could have happened? That could have been you! That could have been you, living, existing one moment, and gone the next! It could have been me! I could have died!"
The breath suddenly seemed to rush out of my body, as if a large weight had just been pressed upon my ribs, my lungs crushing beneath its pressure as I uttered one last sentence. "I could have died, and nobody could have stopped it."

A great energy that had seemed to rush through my veins escaped as quick as it had come, leaving me broken and battered in my desperately lonely state of mind.
"I shouldn't care," I whispered, the words brushing through my lips weakly as I felt the cool surface of the wall make soft contact with my back. "I shouldn't care."
At first, I was met with radiating silence.
And then, I was met with Venna's voice once more. "Who can't care, Mortal? We all have to care at some point or another. It's not like we have a choice."

I found my chin bowing so my eyes could meet Venna's once more, my face coming to level with the room. "Not like we have a choice," I repeated, finding it strangely amusing as a laugh bubbled from somewhere deep within my chest. "We never have a choice, do we?"
The moment the words slipped off of my tongue, I regretted speaking immensely, as I had just told two near-strangers the thought that never seemed to leave my head.
Instead, I only lifted my face to the ceiling again; a subconscious will to no longer face anyone within the small, white enclosure.
"I shouldn't care," I repeated, a gear clicking within my mind. "I don't care."

My words were met with a satisfying silence that thrummed through my senses.
I once again lowered my eyes to take my gaze across the quieted room; Venna's eyes had fully closed, as she sat upon her capsule with a tranquil, emotionless face. Her hands rested lightly upon her lap, giving her the impression of a meditating nomad. She hadn't bothered to respond to my words; I wondered why a tiny piece of my conscious was so childishly disappointed.
Toby, still curled in the whitened corner of the room, wore an expression as if he was mentally debating whether to speak something or not.

Eventually, Toby did open his mouth.
"I would care," he said quietly, his silvery eyes searching for my own as he spoke. "There are just some things you have to care about, right?"
He paused, as if hesitating.
"Like our home," he continued, his voice weaker than before as it drifted to my ears. "Like our earth. We are told not to care, but we have to care, don't we?"
This brought my gaze around to spear into his own, edging him on.
"I mean," he said, slightly louder from my eyes settled on his, "they say that we're the future of humanity. That we should leave those behind us to perish. But —"

A sudden, fearful look flirted across his face, as if he was terrified that The Council would overhear his tainted words. But, to my personal surprise, fear was quickly replaced with stubborn determination on Toby's features as he drove on. "But — there are things that are important to me. Like — like my sister. My sister is important to me. I love her." His voice broke at his last sentence, his tone trembling dangerously.
For a moment, we all seemed to hold our breath. A soft inhale suppressed with us as we waited silently for whatever consequence was to come with Toby's words.

Over thirty seconds, we waited.
A sudden impatience on my part curled my slackened hands into hardened fists.
"I don't have to care about our earth," I nearly snapped, the same feeling of adrenalized energy beginning to rush through the nerves within my body once more. "I don't care, really."
Toby's face morphed into one of confused irritation. "What?" He rasped, his tone set in disbelief. "How can you not care? It's your home! It's where you were raised! It's practically who you are!"

I didn't know why his words sent thorns through my heart.
I forced my eyes away from Toby's silvery gaze, instead letting my glare blaze into the wall beyond his shoulder, just as I had when we had met.
"It means nothing to me," I found myself having to force the words out of my throat, even if I knew they were the truth. It felt like barbed wire scraping up the inside of my neck as I exhaled air; I could practically taste the blood. "Nothing."
Toby was off the wall now. "That's impossible!" His voice began to gradually rise with every sentence he uttered. "It has to mean something to you! You can't just throw it away without hesitation! There has to be something!"

I found my eyes involuntarily flickering to Venna to see her reaction. She hadn't moved from her position in before, but a part of me could have sworn I saw her fists clench.
"There doesn't have to be anything, and there isn't," I snarled, not caring about how heartless I sounded. "I don't have a problem with The Council's doing, truly. I really don't care."
I emphasized the last two words on my tongue as my gaze raked right back to Toby's own, marking my will.

Toby looked at me as if I wasn't human.
For a small eternity, he stared at me in such a way, before he finally spoke again.
"No," his voice was flimsy, but unaltered. "I don't believe you. You can't — what about your sister? Don't you care about her, Mortal?"

It was like a firecracker exploded in my chest.
My emotions tore open the thinned line of control somewhere deep within me, running wild without my control. My mind seemed to shut off in my head, leaving me in a spiraling black hole of rage.
"You don't know ANYTHING about me! ANYTHING!" I roared, ripping my voice by sheer force.
Toby's disbelieving expression twisted into one of sheer terror, as my suddenly shockingly loud voice clapped against him. His back made unexpected impact with the wall behind him as he took a rapid, instinctive step back.

Silence followed my vicious outburst.
It was the same kind of silence as we had heard in the large, domed room — the kind where the softest tap could have been heard.
I was discovering many, many different types of silence.
A sudden heaviness overtook me, making my limbs feel like dead weight and my head a rock resting upon my neck. I found it increasingly difficult to remain upright; I felt as if I could collapse any moment from sheer exhaustion.

Venna was staring at me now, too, her gaze glitteringly hard and her face scarily monotone.
I suddenly came to terms of how fatigued I was, both mentally and physically.
"Mortal," Venna's quiet voice surprised me, as I had not expected her to speak. "What happened to your sister?"
It felt like small, hot needles pricking the inside of my chest, my heart. For a moment, I found my eyelids squeezing shut on my eyes, closing my vision.

I didn't have the faintest clue as to why I was reacting so strongly at the mention of a sister I never had.
I remembered seeing children with their determined sibling, almost always categorized together. Most of them were closer than the strongest wound wire, and yet no sibling bond or relationship would ever bother me in the slightest; a part of me would always be glad that I was alone, finding my own way in my single-player game.
"Never had one," I said, quite bluntly.

For a moment, both Venna and Toby simply stared at me, as if they expected me to look up with a large goofy grin and shout out that I was kidding, that I wasn't an only birth, that I didn't hate life or the world and wasn't so angry all the time and was actually an intergalactic alien.
But all that stretched out between us was a heavy, tired silence, identical to my switched mood.
"Oh," Toby practically squeaked, his voice a wrangled wheeze. "Oh. Oh. I — oh."
For a moment, he looked like he was painfully holding something beneath him.
"I didn't know," he finally rasped. "I'm — I'm sorry."

Don't be.
I surprised myself at the first thought that drifted into my mind whence I heard Toby speak, but I remained as silent as the aura that surrounded the room.
Instead, I found myself looking up, my gaze searching for Toby's silvery eyes. My stare met his own for a fraction of a second before my eyes dropped away from his, but the moment our two gazes became one, it was long enough for a silent exchange of condolences.

"There are other children."
Venna spoke once more like a ghost; a wisp that had entered our small atmosphere, a mystery to come and go.
"There are other children on our earth, Mortal, just like you."
I was stunned to silence. Venna drove on.
"Children born alone. Children who look at their side, wishing there was someone to share the story of life with."
I was about to protest, claim that I had never felt such a thing, but Venna spoke over my will before I had a chance.
"Mortal, there are others who look at the sky and wonder what you do."
Her dark eyes burned my own.
"What happened? Why? How did we end up like this?"
It wasn't the first time Venna had seemed to pluck thoughts right out of the center of my mind.

She quietened for a few seconds, letting her words sink into Toby and I's inner conscious.
She continued. "What about them, Mortal? What will they do?"
At this, my complete mindset was thrown off kilter.
I had always assumed, even after I was introduced to Venna and Toby, that I had always been alone on the vast space that was the earth. That I was the only being with such a mind that revealed how our future had veered horrendously off of our track.
It was then when I realized how small my world was.

"You say you don't care about our earth. Our home. But I think, somewhere so far down, somewhere so dark and old you can't even see it anymore, you still do. Because, I think that in that small, forgotten compartment in your memories, you already know everything I've told you."
I found Venna's words wholly shocking, yet mesmerizing, as well.
Venna gazed at me for quite a while, her eyes grim pools of sadness. Toby had turned his stare away from Venna and towards me as well, though his head was bowed towards the floor.

I didn't have the faintest clue what to say.
Venna inhaled to speak one more time. "Just remember that, Mortal. Remember."
A small, humming hush followed her stony words, one too small to be accepted before another voice cut through the soft purring of the walls.

"Greetings, Chosen Subjects. Daylight hours have now come to a close, and lights will be switched to Night Mode, as well as your chamber capsules. If you are resting yourself on a capsule, please rise immediately, as they will begin their transaction."
At once, Venna stood, her stature one of wary caution. Toby's misted gaze had also snapped into focus, as he looked to the capsules, alert.
The slightest bit of my subconscious expected that the boxes as white as the walls would sink into the ground to be replaced with full beds.

But the capsules simply opened.
Their lids hissed into the walls, just as the silent doors had done before. Beneath lay what appeared to be perfectly identical, small beds, complete with a single pillow and a pale blue blanket to cover.
For a moment, all I could do was blink at the newly made bed, head in a daze.
I found that they weren't coffins, after all. Not generally.
But even then, I was almost absolutely positive that whence the one who inhabited it was eliminated, they weren't a bed at all.

The metallic voice continued. "You will be awakened whence Daylight Hours return. Until then, it is recommended to sleep through Nightly Hours, as you would on a regular basis. Sleep well."
And with that, the voice vanished back into its humming white walls.
For a moment, I could sense all three of us remaining still in our positions, as if silently inspecting our strange capsules for any cause of harm.
It was Toby who stepped forward first, leaning down in just the slightest to run his soft fingers over the rim. For a few, long moments, he hesitated at the bedside.

He turned to glance at both me and Venna, before murmuring a quiet, "might as well."
And with that, he cautiously rested himself within the newly formed bed, still looking quite untrusted himself.
Venna followed his actions after a few seconds of looking as if she was debating to, approaching the center capsule with tremendous vigilance before settling herself within it.
Her dark eyes made contact with mine one more time, and her words rang through my head; a gentle chime.
Just remember

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