by Farah Cook
“What difference does it make?” I reply flatly.
“What do you mean?” asks Lars, perplexed. “It makes all the difference.”
“It wasn’t my turn to win,” I say. “Besides, the chasing game is not about winning – that’s what we’re told.”
His eyes grow big, then small. He stands up, turning his back to me, and lights a cigarette. He inhales the smoke in one deep breath and exhales with a cough, clearing his throat, and takes a seat next to me crossing his legs.
“Oh yes they are.” says Lars. “Everything is about winning.”
I look down at his black, pointy shoes and colorful striped socks. Lars mashes the cigarette underneath the tip of his shiny shoe, and he folds his hands together, interlacing his long, thin fingers. He leans toward me with still eyes for a while.
“It’s not,” I insist. Lars gazes stiffly at me and says,
“Dan, let’s load all the tests.”
“All of them? Are you sure?” says Dan, hesitating. Lars turns to look at Dan and nods. I get up, but Lars tells me to be seated.
Dan takes out a pair of sleek round virtual shades and places them on my eyes. He hands me two metal poles with buttons.
“All you need to do is move the poles and press the buttons to answer the questions in the beginning,” says Dan. His voice is soft and velvety. “You have five seconds to answer each question, multiple choice.”
Dan plugs something into my ears and a calming sound fills them and eases my throbbing nerves. The world around me vanishes and suddenly I find myself in a simulated place where everything is blank as an unmarked canvas, and a visual image appears in front of my eyes. In big black letters I read the first question.
What is your favorite color? I’m given several choices and select green. Next question. What is your favorite game? I press the button to select the chasing game, which is the only choice I’m given next to “I don’t like games.” After a while a string of questions appear before me, relating to my emotions – how I feel on rainy days and around people and crowds. I continue to press the buttons on the poles I’m clutching.
Soon my fingers are sore. I must have gone through over a hundred questions by now, covering how I see myself and how others see me. At this stage all the questions relating to my curiosity, surroundings and abilities begin to spin around my head. I try to take off the glasses, but I hear Dan’s sedating voice in my ears.
“Let’s skip to the virtual tests,” he says. “You need to move the poles with your arms and click the button when you want to perform an action.”
The blank canvas transforms into a jungle, a place I’m comfortable in. I’m confronted by an animated image of myself, which freaks me out. But then Dan puts his soft hand on my shoulder. His voice is as velvety as ever.
“This is a practical test. Try to relax, Nora.”
The sound of a baby’s cry echoes from inside the jungle. It’s dark and I’m surrounded by a pack of wolves. I hold my trusty bowie knife in my hand. The wolves begin to snarl, snap and lunge toward me. Spontaneously I assert myself and show the beasts that I am not an easy target.
I’ve seen wolves before in our area – and even outran a pack of them once when I was thirteen, but it was a near-death experience, which I’ll never forget. My heart elevates, as I feel like I have been sent back in time to confront the exact moment I escaped from the wolves. I am not sure, now, how I can flee these predators. Their eyes are hungry and their jaws thirsty for my flesh.
I draw myself up to my full height and shout loudly and aggressively, waving my knife at the wolves. I’m hoping they will back off so I can run away and get to the crying child, as the sound is distressing me.
Wolves are likely to attack if I’m alone. It empowers them – something we learned in class before we went on wilderness trips. Wolves, bears, and deadly snakes are common predators in the East division. I’ve also encountered crocodiles at a distance, in some of the deeper fresh and brackish waters. If I was on my own I’d know exactly what to do, but the crying baby changes everything.
I stare at the wolf pack, their instinct telling them to hunt me down. I take slow, easy steps back toward the woods, and then run as fast as I can. I get close to the sound of the crying baby and smoke is coming from a campfire. Wolves hate fire. Most animals are afraid of it.
But these wild beasts don’t seem discouraged and move closer to me as I reach the otherwise deserted campsite. The baby is wrapped in a blanket in a basket next to the fire. In front of me there’s a tree I can easily climb. I will be safe up there. Wolves can’t climb trees. But I can’t climb up if I’m holding the baby, so I quickly rule out that option.
The wolves have surrounded me and there’s no easy opportunity to escape. I have to strike these dangerous predators, and have learned that, should they ever attack me, I need to aim for sensitive areas like the face and the nose in particular, which can stun them. I hiss at the growling beasts as they come closer. There are four of them. One of the wolves is silver-colored, and pounces on me aggressively. I fall to the ground with the wolf’s heavy weight on my chest.
I take out my knife and drive it into its gut. The blood comes out slowly, covering me, and I kick the howling beast to one side. It’s not dead, just suffering, and I want to put it out of its misery so I bury the knife deeper into the creature’s abdomen and twist till it falls silent. I pull out the knife and wipe it clean on my jeans, and then raise my face toward the three remaining wolves. But they instantly run off howling.
In one quick motion I turn around and take the baby in my arms. He’s safe now, and stops crying. The animal blood from my hand brushes the baby’s rosy cheek. He smiles, and my heart feels warm – a feeling I’ve never encountered before.
The blank canvas reappears. The jungle and baby are gone and I’m standing on a mountainside. I look down over the edge of a steep cliff and see dark water everywhere. It’s a long way down. Though it’s not real, my mind makes it real.
As a child I used to jump into lakes from rocky hills all the time, without thinking. The water was usually very deep, and the cliffs between twenty and fifty feet high. Where I’m standing now is at least ninety feet up. The wind is strong, and although I’m in some sort of virtual reality I don’t have time to think or visualize my jump. It seems more like a suicide attempt. I’m scared of what happens if I don’t jump. But I don’t seem to have a choice. Behind me a wild leopard is growling. It’s strong and beautiful, with distinctive dark spots against its light fur.
I stem my panicked thoughts and place my feet together, raise my arms straight above my head and bend my knees. Just before I jump, the leopard shoots into the air and scratches my back. I get thrown off center and my ribs slam hard into the deep cold water.
I sink lower and lower, and a force stronger than gravity pulls me down. I resist the urge to get sucked in and manage to swim up, gasping for air. I see land and swim toward the sandy shoreline of a gray, dark beach. I pull myself up and cough out water from my lungs in the shallows. I flip around and hike into a cave on deserted land. I will survive. I can feel it to the core of my cracked bones, as the sound of the waves gets stronger. Yes, I survived.
When Dan takes off my glasses and grabs the two poles from my sweaty palms, he looks pale as if he’s seen a ghost. There’s no one else in the tent except the two of us. It looks like Lars left.
It’s late at night and I’ve lost all sense of time. The tests drained me and it’s like I’m coming out of a war zone. What I’ve just been through was so real that I struggle to come back to reality. I gather my slightly shaken body from the chair, but Dan holds me down.
“Take your time Nora.”
I collect my thoughts and zoom back to my current existence. The adrenaline is leaving my body, but the marks of stress are still there. For a split second I’m lost and want to crawl deep under my blanket and hide. The assessment was hard, and I’m eager to know how I did. But Dan doesn’t give away anything when I ask h
im what allocation I belong in, and that frightens me.
I ask him multiple times, but he doesn’t seem to be paying attention to me. Why isn’t he listening to me?
“Are you listening to me?” My voice is loud and filled with anger, but he doesn’t speak a single word. And then he spits something out.
“Nora, you’ll know in due course where you’ll be allocated. For now all you can do is to go home, okay?”
What does he mean?
“You’re not going to take me away are you?” I ask. If by any chance they decide to take me away, I still have my mom to think about – broken and fragile and living in a world of her own. I’ve never thought about what would happen to her if I were to leave. Who would look after her with her frail heart condition? She’d eventually fade away completely, and then what would I be left with?
“Nora, you may have to leave the East and allocate to the West,” he reveals. I stand on my wobbly feet and feel like a child, learning how to walk for the very first time.
“Leave the East?” I say in cue.
Two thoughts flick through my mind. Firstly, if I’m allocated in the West I’d be able to search for my dad, and a sudden hope of finding him emerges. Secondly will I still be able to hide my extraordinary abilities? Or will I eventually reveal what I’m really capable of?
3
IN NATURAL HISTORY we learned that rattlesnakes are venomous. They have a triangular head, a heavy body, and live in the woods, sharing territory with the coyotes and hogs down by the river in the forest. Tonight I don’t walk the usual mud-spattered route that takes me back to Blossom Heights. Instead I deliberately walk through the dark forest, hoping to catch a rattlesnake. In one second, the snake can move its rattle back and forth sixty times or more, which makes it easy for me to catch one in the dead of night just by following its sound.
One thing is on my mind as I stride through the black woods. Lisa. A snake once bit her younger brother while she was running him a bath in the communal areas. No one knew the snake lived inside the well, and Lisa didn’t see it when she hauled the bucket of water up with the snake inside. She poured the water from the container over her brother’s head and the snake landed in the bath, biting him twice on the shoulder.
Although her brother survived and recovered, she never did. Her fat face blew up all flushed and she was hyperventilating for hours, like the incident had happened to her. When we used to speak about different types of snakes in Natural History class, Lisa would instantly leave the classroom. She doesn’t know much about snakes now.
I sit in a squatting position close to the river and carry a pair of wooden tongs. After a while I hear the rattle of the snake. I take out the small flashlight I always carry with me along with my bowie knife. The snake is about four or five feet long. That will do. I grasp it mid-body with my tongs and place the snake into my cotton carrier bag while it still vigorously rattles, and tie a firm knot around the bag.
When I arrive at Blossom Heights it’s almost dawn. I take a seat at the long wooden bench outside the central hub and scrub the dirt off my shoes with my bowie knife. The knife belonged to my dad, and was custom-made and handcrafted from high-carbon steel, and is a unique emblem for some Elite Raiders. My mom revealed to me that weapons forged for Elite Raiders possess special magical powers, but so far I’ve not seen anything unusual about the knife.
When I have finished rubbing the dirt out of my shoes I glide my fingers over the blade of the knife. It cuts the tip of my finger and a few drops of blood splatter out. I quickly put the knife into the black leather scabbard and focus my eyes on the large, colorful hippie bus called Peace Point, where Lisa lives with her family. They’re one of the few families in Blossom Heights that live in a bus. Some of the other families live in caravans and others have small, shakily built outhouses at the edge of the village.
Before I go to sleep, I make a trip to Peace Point and sneak soundlessly onto the roof of the bus. I open the hatch from the top – not too wide – and take out the snake from my cotton carrier bag. I cut off the snake’s head with my knife while holding it with the tongs at the back of its neck. The snake starts wriggling dramatically and I drop it down so it lands, blood-spattered, on Lisa’s bed, between her legs. I glide down from the top of the bus and quietly walk back to the communal tent. Just before I reach my mat, I hear a loud, hysterical scream. I don’t feel any chills or shivers, but I know someone who does. It makes me smile as I flop to my mat and sink into a deep sleep.
“Nora!” My mom shouts. She shakes me forcefully, her grubby hands on my sensitive skin. It hurts and I wake up dramatically. She never wakes me up.
“Mom, stop, stop!” I say. But she keeps shaking me nervously. Terrified, she looks toward the tent curtain. Lars barges in with Dan and walks briskly in my direction. I rub my eyes to make sure I’m not dreaming.
Dan stops in front of my feet, Lars just behind him. My mom slides to the side and drops to the floor. Like a broken fragment, she breaks down and cries – her rough hands hold her desperate little face. She then addressed the men viciously.
“Leave her alone.”
A cigarette is pressed between Lars’s firm lips. He doesn’t respond to my mom’s hysteria. Instead he tells me to get to my feet. I glare at him and get up slowly. My heart is pounding fast.
A smile creeps across his face and he says, “Get dressed, you’re leaving with us now.” He walks out with Dan, who shoots me a sympathetic look. What is going on and where am I going? I suddenly can’t think straight, and a multitude of emotions explodes inside my head.
“They’re going to take you away from me,” says my mom as her voice completely cracks. I’ve never seen her this terrified or hysterical before. My senses are blurry – everything is moving too fast. “I knew they’d come for you one day.”
“Mom, you’ve got to calm down,” I tell her. “Everything is going to be fine, and I’ll come back for you. Trust me.” She’s hysterical and shaking, and what does she mean she always knew they’d come for me? She’s not thinking clearly.
I get dressed swiftly, gather some of my belongings and leave the tent. Outside, all of Blossom Heights is gathered. Even Lisa. The look on her face is sympathetic. Something I never thought I’d live to see, especially after last night’s incident, which makes me feel guilty.
They’re allocating me elsewhere, and I’ve been chosen to leave the East division. The big black jeep is parked across the central hub. Dan and Lars are sitting inside waiting for me while the engine of the car runs loudly.
I have two options. I can either make a break for it, or go with them to wherever it is they’re taking me. I’m more familiar about the woods and wilderness than anyone else, but I’m afraid what might happen to my mom if I make a rash escape. Visions of what the West has done to rebels in the past flash through my mind
Plucking up courage I walk in the direction of the jeep. My mom swings her arms around my waist. She holds me tight without saying a word. The tears prick her sad eyes. I look at her. Her eyes are puffy and red. Just like the day I returned from the woods six years ago.
“It’s going to be okay,” I assure her in my tense voice. I try to stay strong for her, so she doesn’t fall weaker. She needs to know I’m going to be okay. She looks at me, broken like a river has gushed out of her heart, and continues to hug me tight for a while.
“I’m sorry,” she says, and kisses me on my cheek.
“Mom?” I stare at her. She wants to tell me something.
“You need to find your father Nora,” she says.
“What do you mean?” Dan’s sharp stare intensifies. He drops his shoulders and walks in my direction. I don’t want my mom to get hurt, and release myself from her strong grip. She hands me a picture of my father and scribbles a number on the back. Before I get to ask her what it means, the horn from the car goes off. I don’t even get to say goodbye to the people around me or gather all of my belongings.
I hold the tears back from runnin
g down my cheeks and let my face swell instead. Gustav stands among the rainbow people in Blossom Heights when I walk by. His eyes are watery – he runs out from the crowd and embraces me. I stop, stunned for a minute. Gustav’s firm grip is soothing and I don’t want him to let go of me.
“Will you come back, Nora?” He’s fighting back his tears.
“I will, I will be back, Gus, I promise,” although I may be taken away for good. Gustav takes off his bottle necklace, which contains the red soil from Blossom Heights, and ties it around my neck.
“You’ll always carry a piece of home with you wherever you are,” he says and gently presses his lips on my sallow cheek.
Dan marches toward us, yanking us apart.
“We have to go right now,” he says, unfriendly. I glance toward the jeep. The other man keeps signaling for us to move, but my feet are clamped against the beautiful red soil of Blossom Heights.
The pressure is increasing in my chest. It’s tight and blocks my breath. I find movement in my feet and drag them across the ground, following Dan. I duck my head to avoid eye contact with everyone around me. I can’t face anyone from the village. I’m afraid it will break me down. If I remain strong, they’ll be assured that I will be fine. I try to block out the sound of my mom’s crying, and quickly jump into the back seat of the jeep.
As we drive off, my mom and everyone else are gathered in an open circle. The fear of my departure is painted all over their faces. Soon they all become tiny dark dots, and then disappear from my vision completely. I’m not going to see any of them for a while, and for a moment my heart is gripped with panic. For the first time in my life I’m terrified of what lies ahead.
We’ve been driving for few hours and the change in air and climate is visible. We’re leaving the wetlands and Blossom Heights is already miles away. I’ve never been this far from home. My heart is aching, and is in agony. I can’t swallow, as a clump of pain is blocking my tight airways. Thousands of thoughts filter through my head, but nothing is taking the throbbing sting and pressure away from my chest. I’ve never felt this way before – the feeling of loss and tragedy at the same time.
