Revised Chapter of TRAP :)

Freedom is a word said through cupped hands and whispered voices.

The society has already decided my destiny. Our lives are written in the sky. No, our lives are stored in a small datapod, like recorded files- can be edited at times- but if not needed, obliterated forever. When the officials say that we are supposed to die right now, it will happen. When they don’t want us to remember, they erase our memories. And when they want us to live, we live but with their full control. I am one of the people who are desperately holding on to the frail line. I’ve seen worse in this world. My heart is tired from running away. But what’s the sense of running if it won’t take us to the right path?

I can’t think. My chest is pounding from running thousand miles. I am not certain if I am at the right place. There’s no right place in the world anyway. But I have to get off to the streets. Or I need a shadowy place to hide. I am leaving smears of blood in the snowy road. My body can’t take anymore torture. But I must run. That’s all I have to do. I pass towering trees in the forest, smelling fresh air as my blood stains the tranquility of nature. I hear sticks and twigs crunch and crack under my feet. I veer to another direction every time I hear something moves. I hit my head on a sinewy branch of a tree and I drop to the ground along comes the gunshot, not so far away in this place.

Hovercrafts flood the vast sky above, emitting skimming lights kissing the grounds. I duck myself under the thick snow and put dead leaves all over me. I taste dust and snow and mud. My heart is hammering and my head is cleaving in half. When the crafts change direction, failing of finding me, I don’t waste a minute. I run again. Still, I keep to the shadows.

How long should I run? At least until someone finds me in the woods.

Or until the marshals get here.

I choke back the thought, swallowing every word inside me. My world is spinning; I can’t be unconscious at this moment. I get tired of running. I walk and I feel my muscles pulling and stretching painfully. I lean against one of the trees, feeling so sick and exhausted. Breathing heavily, I extend my legs to the grassless floor and feel how the wintry air goes down my stomach. I peel back my sleeve, hissing as the cloth pulls away from dried blood. The wound is worse than what I imagined. I can still feel the sharp edge of the blade that I used to take out the tracker in my arm. They have this kind of tracker that can penetrate the body through injecting it straight to our veins. But it was a failure to me. They decided to implant a small tracker in my arm.  

My flesh is screaming of pain and blood ceaselessly flowing out of me. Food. I need food, and sleep, and a plan. I also need medical attention but I don’t even have access to that from now on. Probably, clothes…

I tear my other sleeve and press it gently on my arm. I grit my teeth. My face crumples as the pain from the fleshy cut transcends to my brain. I catch my breath. My vision becomes foggy. I hobble my way through the center of the forest, with no exact place in my mind. The detention center is million miles away from civilization. I keep walking and running and running and walking. But it seems that I m not advancing. The snow, the mountains, the trees and the stagnant air are all the same, not changing even if I already moved to the higher planes.

Visions and pictures of what had brought me in this situation flash through my eyes. I couldn’t slow the images spinning in my mind enough to make sense of them. I escaped from prison. I ran away from the marshals. I was loitering around the detention center, trying to make use of myself for the officials. I was sorting out the unnaturally blooming flowers in the garden, pretending to be innocent and helpless. Then, the marshal in blue accidentally dropped his card while making his round. I didn’t waste such opportunity. I sneaked out and got out of the gate before they could find out about me. Then, they came running for me.  

And I run. I run as if I already crossed half the city. I can’t remember how many days I’ve been running from them. I’ve been running even before they dragged me in the center. I am a lost little girl who ran away from home. No, I didn’t run away. I needed to run away.  I have no place to live in. Home is a word that circumstances took away in my life a hundred times. I wandered around without an exact place in my mind. I am an orphan for days that I cannot count. I traveled from place to place without certainty that somebody would find me.

After Sofia’s death, my mother, I entirely detached myself from the planet, thinking that there is no future for me. Liberation and death are two likely things to me. But I know I was wrong.

When she died, the marshals came crashing our door, hauling mom’s body, like what they always do when someone dies.  I was crying over her death but they took her away from me the moment her soul departed. It was time to burn her. I didn’t want to see her body turns to ash like anybody else who died.  But it never ended there. I was locked away in the detention center along with boys and girls of my age to help the officials. They said detention center, a center for troubled youth, homeless neglected children, a home for psychologically disturbed persons. I am not crazy. But I am homeless. They told me that I should be serving the government instead of brooding over her death. Service is the work of every citizen of Dicentra but not mine. I knew what service means there. And it’s a filthy word said under whispered voices.

The marshals are hunting me. There’s no guarantee if they would ever give up. But the only way to survive is to run away. I am not sure until when. I will run whenever I have to. I am running away all of my life and the chains are still clung to me.

My head starts to turn and my bloody arm is taking all my strength away. My bruised knees are trembling, as if I’m about to fall down anytime. I push myself a little more, just to make sure that nobody can catch the gap that I made. I see a break in the clearing. I try to look what waits below, dark and frosted river. I look sideways to find a cavern where I can hide. There is none, instead just an old oak tree. I duck under the sad living tree, which seemed dying at the same moment and curl myself into a ball. The realization of something worse to happen slaps me on both cheeks. The marshals might not find me here. They could even forget about a fugitive after some time. But the chilling frost and the wild animals can sentence me to death.

I strip off fabric from the hem of my shirt and twist it around my arm like a bandage. I grit my teeth. I bite my inner cheek until it bleeds. I am trained to survive. I can adapt to the cold. But I am getting weaker and weaker as days go by. I am ready to face my grim. No one’s looking for me anyway, not my dead mother or my twin brother, just the pack of Courthouse pets. We all come to a point in life that we think we want to disappear. But all we really need is to be found.

As I am about to close my eyes, I hear footsteps coming.  My system begins to panic and I fight back the nausea. All the way here, I’ve heard pounding footsteps following me. I didn’t dare to turn and look back. Maybe, some of them were secretly tracking me to find the right time and attack me. Perhaps, they could be the marshals who hit my head on the floor and whipped me, leaving long red marks all over my body.

I curl myself into smaller ball and wait for them to come. I see frames of two people in the sinister, one smaller than the other. My heart wants to explode from panic and pressure and pain. I swallow hard, and my eyes shut every time I try to clear my vision. My lips are stiffened. My hands are freezing. I am like as dead.

“There!” I hear a voice and the shadow points to my direction.

You must get up! You must get up!

My own voice shoots through my mind. I can’t even open my mouth. My eyes are swelling badly.

Then, I can feel them moving closer. I can see them through their shadows. With all my driving force to survive, I get up and release a blow. I don’t care who I hit from them. I swear I hit someone. But as I throw my punch, I am the one hitting the ground, dizzy and freezing up. I cock my eyes and I see the figures clearer. A man and a boy, probably of my age are standing before me. I am sure they are not one of the marshals.

“Child, are you alright?” asks the man, pressing his warm hand on my frozen forehead. I want to say no, I am not okay but words couldn’t form in my mouth. There is no difference between me and the air I breathe, that I’m mostly dead. Instead of answering, I just look at them.

“You’re feverish! Let’s get you home,” he says. In my mind, I have no home. I am wrecked. The marshals are searching for my head, possibly.  All I need is to be alone, or so I thought. Then, the young boy draws himself closer to me. His icy blue eyes that are as cold as the snow seemed like a glimmer of hope in the dead wintry night. I think I know him. His one eye looks awkwardly smaller than the other and discoloration starts to form around it. I feel guilty. I feel like hurting myself too. But I already am dead. Like as not, the marshals might declare me criminal or dead even at my young age.

“Let’s go,” he says in an urgent tone. Then, I find myself on his back, stealing glances on his face. The boy carries me and I can feel the warmth of his body. It feels comfortable lying on his shoulders. “She’s cold, dad. I don’t want to carry a corpse on my back.”

I want to scowl but he is right. I can be dead anytime. I feel dead anyway. But I am grateful, somehow. My whole body becomes numb. I am passing out but I try to memorize his footsteps. I don’t know how they will react when they find out that I was a prisoner of the Courthouse. I can’t let them know that. I must blend in. and maybe in time, the marshals will forget about me. And there is just one way to do it. I’m just not sure if I can do it. Perhaps, I’ll just wait for the odds to come my way. I’ll wait until my destiny transforms into something bigger than me and to somehow change my life.

-----

This house is different from the others, even from the one that I used to live in, neither from the one where the officials sent me. The sound of the whispering wind slides down my body. Everything about the house tells a story of the endless life that encircles the world. The walls… ceilings… the floors… they are all foreign to me but I feel somehow, at ease. The strangest thing about the house of hundred stories, there are no locks on every door. Yes, there is none; not even the front door. The owner trusts all the people around him. And I want to negate and contradict his belief but I know he is a man of his words. Besides, I just got here and I can’t even kiss the thousand ideas in my head and form them into words. It’s better to keep my silence than to speak of worthless words.

 It’s been thousand hours since the night Mr. Wilbur Ray and his son found me freezing on the ice cold winter. They dress me up and introduce me to things I’ve never seen before. I taste foods that aren’t familiar in my tongue. They let me use one of the rooms in this big house. If there’s one thing that I can complain about, that would be the boy’s earsplitting words and self-admiration. Someday, somehow, I can get used to him; his words, his stories, his poems and his voice. Any minute now, he might appear to that defenseless door and tease me. That’s what he always does.

“Hey Anika!”

The voice of the boy who rescued me breaks the stillness of the night.  I hear hundreds of footsteps approaching and he comes, almost breaking the door. I am right. He is standing with a pile of papers bound in unfinished oak and leather. It looks odd and strange and odd and strange.

I look away and peek through the window, avoiding to see the healing mark on his face.

 “Seriously, Marcus?” I ask, even if I already knew the answer. “If you came here to make fun of me again, just leave.”

I stay seated on the soft comfy bed, ashamed of what I just said. I want to be alone. I don’t want to be alone. I can’t look at him or say another word because my mouth is zipped and doesn’t want to open up. It’s hard to form words out of letters just as hard as to create a house in the middle of the wastelands.

He plants himself beside me and covers us both with the blanket, putting my injured arm on his lap. I think we’ve known each other as if no one else does. It feels good having someone to share yourself with even if there is nothing left to give.

“Dad said you don’t want to leave your room again,” says Marcus, opening the old thing. I don’t want to move. I don’t want to get out. I don’t want to eat anything. I just need to spoil myself inside this room.

Marcus starts to turn the pages of the filthy creature and out of curiosity I say words that I am not meant to ask.

“What’s that? It’s old,” I say, wrinkling my face. I hear the paper rustles and it tickles my nose.

“It’s called a book,” he answers.

“I’ve never seen one before. Not even in school,” I say. We use this device called datapod which stores everything that we need. This book might be one of those prehistoric relics that existed many years ago. I turn its pages and it is older than it appears.

“Of course! Books are kept in the history department. But we own the only bookstore in the city,” he says blithely. All the accounts, books and everything that the government recovered after the war are kept and preserved. No ordinary people can put their paws on these artifacts, not even the Grandees. I wonder how Marcus gets a hold of this book when we are not allowed to see one. Great, I almost forgot. After graduating from the Secondary school, Marcus works at the History Department. I just don’t know what he does there. Maybe, he is one of the minorities who have such authority to take these records.

He continues turning pages and says, “But only few of these are allowed to be sold and distributed. There are limited copies for each manuscript. ”

I nod and look over the book again. I can’t help but to ask questions. The word curiosity is written in my mind like it will never be erased at all. I cock my head and ask, “What if they found out about this?”

“Don’t worry about that… I have ways,” he answers. He’s not smiling but his eyes do. For the short period of time that I am here, I’ve never seen Marcus lose control of him. He is as calm as his voice and as freezing warm as his eyes. “I’m gonna read a beautiful verse for you tonight.”

I turn my head into the nothingness and stare blankly into the vast strange space. I am not used to this kind of treatment. Back then, there was no one who gave me attention and talk to me like Marcus does. I never talked to anyone this much. And I like how it feels. I like how my thoughts are turning into sound forming words. It is discovering his world as I learn mine.

“Can I?” he asks. I give my attention back to him and nod.

“Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white,” Marcus begins. I listen to him word for word. There is something in his voice that makes me want to hear him speak again. There are moments that I even close my eyes to brood over the words resonating in my head.  I keep listening and reading the old words in my mind. I listen. I read. I listen and read. I interrupt him when I encounter a word, capitalized in the text.

“Earth?” I ask, raising my brow. Even though almost half of the terms used in the verse are strange to me, the short text caught my interest. Words, languages, colloquium and jargons are sorted out by the Courthouse during the reestablishment of the world. There are only limited words in our lexicon. And this is the first time I encounter the word.

Hmmm. Marcus is thinking and smiling and thinking and smiling at me. “Earth. It is the old world. People called it Earth.”

“Ah…” I say not even sure if he’s telling the truth. How could they call Dicentra in such way? It’s very amusing. Finding satisfaction in his answer, he continues reading again. I won’t dare to ask him again. So, I listen. I listen until the very end of the verse.

“So fold thyself, my dearest, thou and slip into my bosom and be lost in me.”

Then, we find ourselves inhaling deeply as if we are pleased by the old poem. Suddenly, questions keep boggling my head and ask, “What does it mean?”

I simply don’t understand the aged verse. The words are too old and its creator seemed to be too smart. I wish for an answer because I want to understand. I wait. I am waiting. Marcus smiles at me but he doesn’t have a word for me. My brows find their way to crease. Maybe, he doesn’t understand either.

“Who wrote that?” I ask.

His head cranes over the old pieces of paper and say, “Alfred Lord Ten--”

He stops reading because the part of the paper where the name was written has been torn apart. It’s disappointing. My lips turn awkwardly into its sides and my eyes roll into the horizon of agitation.

“Look!” he crows. “It says that the Alfred, man, lived in 1809 to 1892.”

I read the part where he is pointing with and fascination creeps in my system.

“It’s older than I thought,” I say. It is true. The man lived hundreds of years ago before us.

“Do you want me to read another one?” asks Marcus. I shrug and slide my back to the bed. Honestly, I want to sleep and sleep for the rest of my life. But he is still here with me so I can’t do it.

“I want to sleep, Marcus,” I say, faking a yawn.

He shrugs, almost imperceptive. My eyes feel heavy and my ears are indulging his voice that I don’t want for him to stop.

“Be near me when my light is--”

“I don’t care!” I stop him before he can speak another word. “I hate books anyway.”

But he continues anyway. I cover my head with a pillow but I made sure that I can still hear him. Though, I am certain that I don’t like books. Yes, I hate books even if I only saw them once. They can be torn apart and can’t be fixed, just like humans. When a single page is missing, the story inside it can no longer be completed- much worse when the most important part of it has been torn apart, it loses its meaning. In human’s life, when someone slips away, they take something from us- much worse when they leave, they take everything with them, leaving us with nothing but sad memories.

I hear Marcus’ voice creating words into the evening. I close my eyes and let go of myself from a lifetime imprisonment. I run away. I never have to hide. I let go in my thoughts, where I am free to dream and free to speak.

 He reads the verse beautifully that I keep repeating them inside my head. Words that best explain the thoughts I keep in my heart. Be near me when I fade away…