“And that’s a problem?” I asked.
“It’s a great problem,” he said softly. For some wild reason outside my realm of understanding, I suddenly wanted to be back in the piano room. With him. I found my eyes moving down his face, resting on his chin. The scar. I wondered where it came from. Why did he keep it?
Why did I care?
I closed my eyes. “I…I don’t understand.”
“No, I guess you wouldn’t, would you?”
I cringed. He thought I was simple-minded. And yet, he almost seemed relieved, calmed by my lack of understanding. The chosen one was staring at me. I didn’t like it one bit, yet didn’t dare tear my eyes from his. How did we possibly have so many moments like this in our short time together?
Together.
His eyes moved once to my shirt. I inhaled sharply and quickly re-clasped the buttons. He looked away, turning his back to me, and I thought for a moment I saw embarrassment on his face. But he owned the world. He didn’t have to make any explanations for his actions.
“We’ll have to go somewhere.” He seemed to be talking more to himself than to me. I stood up, preparing to receive my orders.
“Follow me.”
Had I done something wrong?
The slash mark on my neck tingled.
Chapter 5
How was this happening? My goal, ever-constant and more important to me than the luxury of having friends or relying on loved ones, had always been to keep my feelings in check. This chosen one had already witnessed an incident where I failed, and I couldn’t help but fear the more time I spent around him, the more likely it was that I would commit another transgression. Was I a total failure?
He didn’t say another word. The chosen ones were known for being agile, completely at ease with their bodies, their movements, but he seemed tense. I could see, almost feel, the anxiety he was holding within him. This worried me more than anything. What would a chosen one have to be nervous about?
I followed as quickly as I could behind him as we entered the building, keeping my head down when I noticed several of the other girls slyly looking us over. One of them snickered. I avoided the eyes of Jacobson, my father’s old friend, who stood on a ladder changing a light fixture. Somehow I felt closer to danger as I moved past him than I had ever felt before, like I was doing something terribly wrong by walking with this chosen one. I had to remind myself that I had no choice. Perhaps it was only guilt I felt, because it was Jacobson’s involvement with my father that had led him to being placed at Templeton. The only natural men here were serving out punishments, prison sentences. Funny that we should both be left here while the true culprits were dead and gone.
Everywhere we walked there seemed to be people, both naturals and chosen ones. Surely, wherever we were going there was a less populated route available. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought this boy wanted us to be seen together.
He stopped abruptly when we reached a room on the third floor that appeared unmarked. The chosen one stood facing the door, his back toward me, not saying a word. I took a moment to try and catch my breath. It was only when another chosen one walked by that his hand reached for the door and pushed it open.
Nothing could have prepared me for what was within. Obviously, it was his living area, but what was surprising was how different it looked to what I’d expected. The chosen ones were the makers of the rules, the enforcers of decorum and order. Yet, in this room, order didn’t exist.
The space was cluttered and so oddly personal. It contained sheets of paper with various writing samples crossed out here and there, a record player on the desk. It felt warm, and the natural light that slithered in through the window was almost blinding in its purity. I wondered if he liked the light, desired something so natural when he was so…artificial. But what surprised me most were the rows of books stacked haphazardly around his room.
After my father had been taken by the council, my mother held my mouth open and forced burning vodka down my throat until I told her where he kept his books. She called my father a traitor, said she wouldn’t be one like him. I remembered Louisa clutching onto my leg the whole time. Emma couldn’t bear to watch, or to stop my mother. She was helpless.
I told my mother.
And then the books were gone.
“How?” I whispered. I had no right to, but I couldn’t help myself. He seemed perplexed by my question.
“All of this…it’s outlawed. I haven’t seen books in so long.”
How I craved to reach out and cradle one in my hands.
“It’s easy enough to get them. The council doesn’t mind so much. It’s a small bribe for the work we are to do. The minute we step out of this place, poof, there go our lives.”
I stared longingly at the books. I could feel something working its way through me that I couldn’t identify. Whatever I was feeling, it was seductive, willing me to surrender.
I licked my dry lips and glanced away from the books to see the chosen one was staring at me. His eyes roamed everywhere. I could feel them pause over certain places, spaces of imperfection: my slightly too long neck; my much too thin arms; my general lack of torso; my long, disproportioned legs; my thick reddish hair.
Yet somehow I could tell he wasn’t judging me or reeling in distaste over the physicality that exists as a result of random genetics. Instead he looked at me in what felt like approval.
Was this the first time he had been alone with a girl?
Emma used to joke that the chosen ones had to sit through a seminar on female anatomy—countless hours on reproduction and menstruation. The council did such a good job expounding on the female’s natural wantonness, weakness, and our general pits of disgustingness, they actually thanked the council for not creating any female chosen ones.
But this chosen one didn’t seem disgusted.
With a heavy sigh, he walked to his closet and reached in to retrieve something. I tried not to look too closely at the room while he was busy, but in another world, another time, this could have been my room. The council told us we were lucky to have a home at all, blessed to have a safe one. So much of our sector had been destroyed in the Civil War with the Easterners. The council used what we had left. They could only protect us if we lived in a central location. Soon each sector built a compound. They all looked the same and held the same story. Individuality was a trend of the past.
Of course, Templeton didn’t look quite so shabby.
This boy’s room could pass for a home, or what I imagined a home would look like.
The boy returned from his closet holding a bottle of tan-ish liquid and a shot glass. My stomach tightened at the sight of these objects, and I could detect the beating of my heart quicken. The boy poured himself a glass and threw it back without a second thought to me. As the contents of the bottle slid down his throat, he closed his eyes. I knew the routine well. My mom was the one who’d first taught it to me. Maybe if he had been a natural I would have told him drinking doesn’t let you forget anything; it just prolongs the pain. But everything I had seen today reminded me he wasn’t a natural.
He looked to me again and stilled as if suddenly remembering this was something I wasn’t supposed to see. He shook his head slightly and moved to return the bottle back to the closet. It was almost as if he were embarrassed. Nervous. Around me.
When the chosen ones were first presented to us, flashed across our television screens in a haze of stylized infomercials, there was a lot of rumbling and joking around—we were going to let these pretty boys fight our wars? Some of our more artistically inclined naturals protested that it would be a sin to mess up such stunning faces, proof of the ability of science to create art. That was until we saw what they could do.
It only took a single chosen one to destroy, demolish, annihilate five POWs from the Eastern sector. They had been caught attempting to thrust a suicide bomber into the midst of Supplies Day in an improvised tent town called Disputania. The Western sector was horrified and
disgusted that these men had been willing to kill people as they attempted to receive food and medical supplies from our council. These people weren’t soldiers; they were mothers and children who were starving and sick. Their husbands and fathers were away fighting to keep the Eastern sector at bay.
We all wanted revenge for the mere thought that they could terrorize these innocents.
The council made a point of playing video of the POWs as they awaited their confrontation with the chosen one, to ensure us they’d been well-fed and taken care of. The council wanted to show us that these pieces of scum were in their best physical condition when they faced off with the chosen one.
It took him less than ten minutes to kill them all. As my people watched the creature snap bones in a dizzy dance of brutality, we didn’t feel horror. We felt hope.
The boy in front of me didn’t seem frightening. It was as if he didn’t know what to do with me.
“What would you like from me, sir?” I asked, staring at the scar on his chin. It was easier to focus there while I spoke; it helped to calm the feeling that this endearingly nervous chosen one could snap my neck if he so chose—and that no one would care. He could say I committed some crime and the world would believe it. I had already been marked.
Of course, he had taken me away from the other chosen ones, whose grabs and laughs made me feel beyond uncomfortable. I was intrigued.
“Some rules they overlook,” he spoke, answering a question I had not asked. He cleared his throat again; I was beginning to think this was a nervous habit. This was a boy who felt uncertainty. What else did he feel? I thought they would have made him stronger, without these impediments.
It was one of the promises made to the naturals during the “informational” phases of the initial creation of the chosen ones. The naturals were sick and tired of seeing their husbands, brothers, and sons returning from war forever damaged by the things they had seen and done. Women weren’t trusted in battle—it was believed our emotions would get in the way. But maybe that’s just part of being human, a natural. Many of the men who fought were left crippled not by some battle wound they received while fighting the Easterners, but rather were left immobilized by the truths they learned about humanity that seeped between the blood and dirt of the battlefields.
And when they returned from combat, they were no longer of any worth to their towns. Many were unable to work or help their families. These men simply became another mouth to feed during a time when the naturals already felt so helpless.
The absence of hope was the worst plague that ever ravaged my people.
As a result, the council swore the chosen ones would feel no sympathy for their enemies. They would be hardened by their training, prepared for what had to be done in order to keep the infidels of the Eastern Sector where they belonged. It was in our makeup as naturals to shy away from the gruesome things that had to be done to survive in this world. Something in us humans shied away from the idea of “kill or be killed.” The council called it selfishness. It was a dirty word.
The chosen ones would devote their lives to the cause. They would live in the estate houses built in every sector—mansions that were immersed in the grandeur and luxuries of the Victorian style. They would live like gods before fighting like gladiators.
Would this boy kill? Was that the only thing he would ever be good for? Could those hands I so admired cause death without contemplating the ideology behind the action?
“Why did you bring me here?” I asked, again unwilling to admit that I felt a need to construct meaning from the person who stood before me. I felt jittery the more time I spent inside his room. It was the same way I’d started to feel around Henry before he no longer could be around me. Yet I didn’t understand how Henry and the boy in front of me could ever possibly be connected.
He didn’t reply. He just looked at me. What the hell did he find so damn interesting? He knew the story of my people. What kept those eyes searching? He sat down slowly, gracefully, on the chair in front of his desk. Everywhere I felt his eyes travel across me, I couldn’t stop my eyes from following along his body. Before I could convince myself to stop looking, he was standing behind me.
“May I see your mark?” he asked, his breath tickling the back of my skin.
I shuddered—I couldn’t refuse if I wanted to. I slowly moved my ponytail over the front of my shoulder. I could somehow feel his eyes take in the new, raw mark on my skin, and my face flushed at the mere thought that he was looking at it. I never before cared who saw it, but something about a person who could produce such music, someone I could maybe respect in another world, examining the mark caused my throat to dry. When I could stand it no longer I turned to face him, my hand sliding up my neck to cover the branding.
He cleared his throat.
The silence trapped us together; the only noise I could detect was our breathing. The more I listened to the pattern our breaths created, the more I realized they had become in sync. In. Out. In. Out. I caught a glimpse of us in a lone mirror leaning against the corner of his room. His cheeks reflected the warmth of mine. When his chest rose, so did mine. His eyes followed me to the mirror.
I shook my head. “We don’t have glass at the compound, sir,” I blurted out, embarrassed.
Not since my mother had smashed her fist against the mirror in the communal bathroom and was found slicing her hands, screaming that if someone didn’t get her a drink she would kill herself. But now both her and glass were only memories.
He swallowed. “Are you the eldest girl in your family or do you suffer for someone else?” he asked, choosing to ignore my random comment about the glass.
“Suffer, sir?”
“Don’t call me sir. Let’s not pretend there is anything civil about all of this,” he replied, running a hand over his eyes.
“Whatever you say, sir…I mean, well, thank you.”
“For what?”
“For…the boys…taking me from them,” I mumbled, looking away from him.
“Don’t be so fast to thank me. Out of the frying pan and into the fire. That is how the saying goes, right? I missed the signup for idioms 101.”
I didn’t know how to respond. He failed to fit into my definition of what a chosen one should be. He played the piano and read. He wrote. He even attempted humor. Though it was becoming more and more obvious humor wasn’t something they taught in his classes.
And he felt things. He didn’t know how to deal with what he was feeling, obviously. But he felt all the same. I didn’t understand why, but it was sort of beautiful to watch.
“Why did I bring you here?” He sounded dejected, lost, and exhausted by his earlier performance. I certainly had no answers for him.
“What shall be shall be,” he said to himself. He moved and picked up several novels that were scattered around the floor near his bed. He placed them in my arms.
“When you check in with your supervisor, bring her a note detailing my schedule and that you are to come here. You work for me now.”
I nodded. More rules I didn’t understand. Did I want to come back here?
“I am sorry, Tess.”
“For what?”
“Mostly I feel sorry for myself,” he admitted with a small, empty laugh as he ran his hand over his face, which still burned bright.
I shifted as I waited for him to continue, clutching the books against my chest. But he didn’t answer, merely sat back at his desk and placed his face into his hands. The silence was uncomfortable. There was a small part of me that felt responsible for this boy’s state. He had lost something the moment he took me by the wrist and led me away from the others.
On the whole, this knowledge didn’t bother me. I shouldn’t care what he felt—it was wrong he felt anything at all. But deep inside, waiting in the place where weakness still struggled to live, I did feel bad. It was the same part of me that longed to see my sister again. The part of me I worked so hard to destroy.
I began to pick up the other boo
ks around the room, placing them nicely and neatly onto the bookshelf. I tried to make as little noise as possible. I’m not sure if I did this for his sake or for mine. As I reached for a novel that lay on his bed, the boy snatched it from my hands with a quickness that left me startled.
“Don’t touch this. Do you hear?” he whispered.
I nodded.
I glimpsed the title as he shoved it in a drawer inside his desk: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
He cleared his throat, offering a small smile.
“Music? I mean, if we’re going to do this, we might as well do it right. So how about it?” he asked suddenly. It was an obvious attempt at concealing the man he had briefly flashed before me—a chosen one, a boy, someone who felt fear.
I should have told him no. The council may not have cared that he listened to music; I knew they would care that I did. But I didn’t say a word. He quickly moved around his room bringing out what I recognized as records. Of course I had never owned any, but growing up my father had described them to me so vividly. He was a lover of music.
The council had been convinced these things, treasures of knowledge and expression, aided in our natural need to weaken ourselves. We were slaves to our emotions, our sensitivity. The council and its chosen ones would only protect us if we gave them something in return. We gave them everything. Music, books, our personal sense of style, our houses—these were only the material things. Most of what we gave them could not be quantified.
As I watched the chosen one flip through his collection of records, I felt the tiniest bit of guilt. There was a part of me that had always agreed with every word the council had told us.
But there was another part of me, the quieter side of myself, that experienced a sense of sublime ecstasy at the sight of them. I felt my legs go weak and didn’t wait for permission to sit down, instead taking the chair across the room. I felt safer the farther away I was from him. But if a chosen one allowed me to listen to music, could it be so bad?
“What shall we listen to?” he asked, more to himself than to me. It was odd. While his hands held onto the records, he seemed calmer. At ease. Normal.
Chosen Ones (The Lost Souls, #1) Page 4
