by Laura Mae
She gave up on the food, looked down the long crowded table, and from the corner of her eye, caught pieces of paper being passed back and forth across the table. She glanced to the other side of her and witnessed the same thing further down the line. Was this how people were communicating?
“Alright everyone. Breakfast is over. Let’s go!” one of the guards shouted and rang an obnoxiously loud bell over the already silent tent. Everyone picked up their trays, dumped leftovers in bins, set the trays on top, and kept walking just like the sheep they had been turned into. As the three gathered in the massive crowd, they grabbed each other’s shirts to stay together and took the opportunity to talk as quickly as they could.
“Which tent are you?” Giovonna asked.
“43. You?” Sydona asked.
“We’re both in 56,” Giovonna said and gestured at Silas.
Sydona looked at her, puzzled, “You’re together?”
They both nodded. Sydona wondered how they got put together while she ended up with some random person. As the crowd dispersed into their own tents, Sydona motioned for them to sneak into hers. They finally reached tent 43, and the blanket the doctor told her he would bring was folded nicely on her cot. Dr. Malik actually did something nice, and his action was beginning to sway her opinion of him, just slightly. Sydona moved the blanket and sat on the cot with Giovonna next to her. Silas found a place on the grass and sat with his legs crossed.
“Who’s in here with you?” Giovonna asked only above a whisper.
“How should I know?” Sydona answered bluntly.
Silas changed the subject. “Where’s Willow?”
“Raoul said she was screaming and yelling on her way out of the cabin. He thinks she left.”
“Raoul? You spoke with him?” Giovonna turned toward her.
Sydona flashed a quick grin. “Yeah, he snuck in and was under the table in the hospital.”
“Hospital?” Silas asked.
“Yeah, the big cabin was turned into a hospital. You didn’t see it when you woke up?”
Silas and Giovonna looked at each other, and Silas answered. “No, Syd. We woke up in our tent with a guard standing over us. Why were you in the cabin?”
“Maybe they know what we’re trying to do...” Giovonna said with an even softer voice.
“No. I think it’s because I had a knife on me like Willow had brilliantly suggested and then tied my knot too tight.” She rolled her eyes thinking of that stressful moment.
“What happened?” Giovonna asked.
Sydona forgot that they were already passed out. “I was trying to untie my knot, and I couldn’t, and she faked a heart attack. It was so embarrassing...”
Giovonna smothered her laugh since she knew it wasn’t very funny to Sydona.
They sat silent for a moment and listened to the noise of shuffling people quiet down, but then Giovonna spoke up in a whisper. “What do you suppose these bracelets do?” She held out her left arm.
“Dr. Malik said it’s a tracking device,” Sydona said.
Silas’s eyes widened. “Dr. Malik?”
“You met him?” Giovonna asked louder.
“Yeah… I don’t think it’s true, though. It shocked me when Raoul tried taking it off.”
Silas observed his more closely, curious about the shocking aspect.
“What was he like?” Giovonna scooted closer to her.
“Uh--nice…” Sydona said.
“Really?” Giovonna asked.
“Yeah... It was strange. He apologized a lot. For the chloroform at the gate and for restraining me. He was angry when he saw me tied down to the table.”
“You were tied down?” Silas said in disbelief.
“Yeah. He called this place a temporary vacation,” she said with an eye roll.
“This guy sounds delusional,” he mumbled.
“I don’t know...” Sydona faded. “He seems… passionate. But obviously doesn’t want to harm us. And I think the guns they carry around are for the resistance. Not us.”
“Wha--they know about the Sparrows already?” Giovonna said.
“He said that there are groups out there who don’t understand what they do. Maybe they don’t...”
Suddenly a man in his mid-sixties with gray, balding hair and glasses walked through the flap entrance. “What are you all doing in my tent?!”
The three looked up at him, surprised as he stood in the entrance. They were at a loss of what to say to him. “They better not catch you in here,” he grumbled as he went to the cot on the other side. He opened up a tattered book stored under his bed and began to read while still mumbling.
Sydona looked at both Silas and Giovonna, trying to determine if they should just leave. They didn’t think about what would happen if they were caught inside another tent. Sitting silently on the one side of the tent, they stared at the man who seemed very disgruntled.
“How long have you been here, sir?” Silas spoke up at a whisper.
“Sonny, I lost count the first week I was here,” the man answered while keeping his eyes glued to his book.
“How long ago was that?” Silas pried.
“Years.”
Giovonna and Silas exchanged a worried look.
“This has been here for years? Why are we just now hearing about it?” Silas asked.
“Don’t be naive, boy. They moved us here.” He coughed deeply.
“Moved? Moved from where?”
He turned a page in his book. “Somewhere else, where do you think?”
“Are there a lot of people here like you? I mean, who have been here for years?” Giovonna jumped in.
“Oh yeah. Tons of us. That’s what most of us are. Been getting a lot of newbies lately, though. Guessing you are one of them.” He looked over at her, peeking over his bifocals.
“What have they done to you?” Giovonna asked sympathetically.
“They treat us like second class citizens. Give us crap food, test us once a week; won’t tell us what for. Make us fly with a chain rigged to our feet, sometimes force us to carry heavy things. Hardly let us talk; gotta write things to people all the time. Don’t want us to start an uproar or communicate big escape plans, I guess. They put these goddamned bracelets on us to prevent us from flying away.” He sat up and put his book down. “But the worst part is the isolation. You start to go crazy here. If they notice you’re spending too much time with someone, they will separate you, keep changing tents. I’ve even seen them beat the living hell out of some guy because he wouldn’t stay away from his wife.” He paused and frowned as if recalling a terrible memory. “He died.”
Silas shook his head in disgust. “We have to get out of here!”
“Ha! Good luck with that! Tell me how that works out for you.” The man chuckled with a cough.
Maybe Dr. Malik wasn’t as welcoming as she had thought. This would be a real problem for the group. If they planned on overthrowing the place, they had to congregate at some point.
Sydona straightened up. “We will get out of here.”
The man laughed louder and shook his head.
“And we’ll get you out of here and everyone here. You watch.” Sydona’s eyes turned green.
They heard the faint voice of a guard in the distance ordering fliers to go back to their own tents and reminding them there was to be no talking.
“You better leave,” the man warned.
“They put me here,” Sydona said without skipping a beat.
Both Silas and Giovonna said their goodbyes and as soon as the guard had his back turned, they were gone.
Sydona lay flat on her metal and cloth bed and stared up at the ceiling of the tent. It was pure white with one part bleached a bit brighter because of the sun. There was no breeze, no trees, not even any birds she could hear in earshot. She longed for her backyard that was full of so much life: birds, fairies, and the occasional rabbit she would catch munching on her cabbage (that she didn’t stop). The squirrels always made it more fun be
cause they were very fond of Raoul’s family, and Sydona would catch them playing hide and seek in the trees and bushes. Sighing deeply, she wondered if she would ever see that yard, or house, again.
“Psstt!” came a quiet sound from behind her cot.
Turning onto her stomach, she remembered seeing a hole in the corner big enough for a fairy to fit through, and he did just that. Raoul stood with his hands on his hips.
“Raoul!? How did you find me?” Sydona said, elated.
“I saw them put your file away with a number on it. I had an idea of what the numbers meant. Did you find Gia and Silas?” Raoul jumped up onto her bed and out of site from the man on the cot.
“Yeah, I saw them. They woke up in their tent, though, didn’t even know there was a hospital here,” Sydona said as her stomach growled ferociously.
Raoul jumped back at the monster vocalizing its anger from inside her body. “Hungry?”
She grabbed her stomach. “Yeah. But this food is garbage. I miss my garden…”
“Me, too. And the mangoes we would get in the city. Oh man, what I would do to get my hands on a mango.” Raoul slobbered.
Sydona chuckled, but then had a flash of the fruit stand with Annie and Joseph standing behind it, and her smile quickly faded.
“Ah, mango.” The man’s voice from the other side made Raoul perk up.
“Who’s that?” Raoul peeked over her sideways arm.
“Name’s Maverick,” he answered.
Sydona pointed her thumb at him. “That’s Maverick.”
“Oh, Maverick Vandermeade. I saw your file, too.” Raoul whispered to Sydona, “He’s been in captivity for twenty-two years.”
Sydona’s stomach dropped, and her monster subsided. Twenty-two years? How long would she be trapped there? Willow mentioned that they moved these camps around all the time. She wondered where they had moved this one from. According to Maverick, they didn’t tell them much, or he had moved so many times that he couldn’t keep it straight. The story about the man that couldn’t stay away from his wife made its way through her head. Could it have been her father? Her parents were always very close, and she could see him fighting to be next to her mom.
She then thought about the guards and the rules. They said no talking, but Maverick didn’t seem scared of talking. Was it just a scare tactic? He had been there long enough to know what they could and could not do. The guards seemed dimwitted and more like monkeys with toys. While Dr. Malik wasn’t necessarily the ring leader, he was in charge of the organization. Her mind went over the looks on Giovonna’s and Silas’s faces when she told them she woke up inside the cabin. Why weren’t they brought there, too? What made her so different from other fliers there? The bracelets that Maverick mentioned, prevented them from flying. It made sense. But Dr. Malik said they were just tracking devices. His stories were starting to crack. Her nails took the punishment as she pondered over everything.
A speaker phone screeched through the park loud enough to make Sydona cover her ears. “Listen up. Tents one through sixty, report to the northwest quadrant for the weekly flying tests. One through sixty. Report immediately. I repeat…” The announcement repeated three more times.
Maverick closed his book and put it under his bed. “Come on newbie. Better leave your fairy here; they hate them more than us.”
Sydona ignored this and opened the big pocket in her oversized blue pants, and Raoul slipped right in without Maverick seeing. They walked out of the tent and into an assembly line of fliers, all walking the same direction in a much more uniform fashion than earlier. This time, they were going to be experimented on, which was the one thing she looked forward to the least. She tried to picture how it would go, but she had been wrong about everything so far, so she just walked in unison with everyone else.
“Name’s Sydona, by the way. Not ‘newbie’,” she whispered to Maverick.
“Nice to meet you.” Maverick turned and smiled.
Sydona walked closely behind Maverick, not by choice but because everyone seemed to be crowding each other. The massive group of over one-hundred fliers gathered in a field surrounded by a dozen guards with guns. Everyone made a makeshift line, and a guard tied a small silver chain to the first person’s ankle. The chain connected to a circular device that seemed to have extra chain inside of it. A woman in a white lab coat typed things into a laptop with tons of wires coming from it. She took the flier’s metal bracelet off after she finished inputting information. She then put a strange headband on his head with the same look and sheen as the bracelet.
The woman said something to the man, and he started running as fast as he could while the chain jerked all over the place. Kicking off the ground to soar into the air, the expression on the flier’s face made it seem like it wasn’t so bad, like it was a moment of freedom. Do they all look forward to this? The woman in the white coat watched the screen intently and occasionally glanced at the flier up in the air. After several minutes, she blew a whistle that hung around her neck, and like a trained dog, he returned to her and waited for her to take off his metal leash. His face returned back to it’s normal mundane look with sunken brown eyes and frown lines.
It felt like hours being out in the hot afternoon sun with no shade and clothes that had no breathing room. She couldn’t remember the last time she had sweated that much in her life, and she felt as if she would pass out. If she was this hot, she couldn’t imagine how hot Raoul was inside her restrictive cotton pocket. She opened it every five minutes or so, and he popped his soaking wet head up for air. Everyone around her fanned themselves with their hands or used their shirts as a fan, and kids stood behind taller people for more shade. Water was the only thing she could think about, and they weren’t offering any at all. It was almost more than she could stand, the inhumanity of treating someone like this, even if they were second class people according to the NFA. As soon as she felt herself get dizzy, she saw that she was next in line. A wave of relief pulsed through her since she would be able to fly and refresh her hot face with some cooler air.
She walked slowly over to the woman in the white coat and noticed her drinking a cold bottle of water with condensation dripping down it. Watching each drip fall off the bottle, her mouth filled with saliva.
“Hot out here, huh?” The woman smiled and laughed.
Sydona glared at her through the sweat in her eyes.
The woman routinely began to put the chain around Sydona’s ankle, typed things into the computer, took her bracelet off, and strapped the headband on.
“When you’re ready,” she said and smiled sincerely, giving Sydona the feeling that maybe not all of the people working for the NFA were bad.
She spun around to see nothing but open, gorgeous grass and flowers. A breeze gently kissed her face, wiping away some of the sweat. She took a deep, long breath and closed her eyes, listening to the birds in the near distance.
“Come on. We don’t have all day!” the woman yelled.
She jumped in surprise at how loud she yelled, and her thought of ‘some nice guards’ went right out the window. She took a step forward and then ran as best she could with the chain whipping around behind her. When she finally took to the skies, the air cooled her off, and she felt at peace. She then understood the look the first flier had. It was nice to feel free for a moment, even in a place filled with guns. Tall trees lined the forest behind the hospital cabin, and colorful flowers grew in front that she wasn’t able to see before. This was the perfect opportunity to take a mental image of the entire park. It was bigger than the map she saw, and she could clearly see all of the tents. Turning her head, she caught a nice glimpse of the lake on the other side of the main entrance filled with ducks and swans. She then tried looking for Silas and Giovonna, since they were within the group the announcer called, but was unable to find them. She assumed they were shading themselves behind bigger people.
Looking down farther in the giant line, she noticed an older woman who looked extremely familiar
just by the way she stood. She stood very close to an older man who also looked familiar. The woman had blonde hair with streaks of gray, and the gentleman had all grey hair. As she studied them, the woman happened to look up directly at Sydona, and her heart sank. It almost made her fall out of the sky when she realized who the woman was.
“Mom!”
Chapter Fifteen
Sydona screamed at the top of her lungs so loudly that she felt as if her vocal cords would crack. Her mother covered her mouth with shock and jabbed the man next to her. Sydona’s hands shook as he looked up at her, too. It was her father.
“Dad!” Sydona’s heart trampled her insides.
She changed positions to fly to them as quickly as possible. Her parents were just as excited to see their daughter and ran out of the line to her. Sydona didn’t care what the consequences would be; she needed to be with her parents and didn’t care how she did it. Then, she heard a booming, deep voice yelling at her parents and whipped her head toward a guard pointing a rifle at them.
“No! Stop!” Sydona flattened her body as much as she could to reach them quicker and then saw another guard adamantly making a circular motion with his arm.
“Oomph!” she cried as the chain yanked her back.
The woman in the lab coat reeled the chain back in so forcefully that Sydona swore they were trying to tear her leg off. But Sydona fought it hard with adrenaline pumping through her veins just as quickly. Grabbing the chain with one arm, she tried taking it off, but it was being held together with some kind of strong magnet. The more she focused on trying to get it off, the lower she sunk to the ground. She was fighting a losing battle, but she would be damned if she gave up so easily. Raoul would be able to help her get back into the air, but she couldn’t risk anyone seeing him. Not after Maverick’s snide comment in the tent.
