18 Walls

  “Yeah,” he frowns, “the Association for Fair Treatment of People. They were the most vocal group in the last thirty years, campaigning for equal treatment of everyone. They even managed to enter into negotiations with the government on your side. But something went wrong and the leaders went missing on the night of the negotiations. We haven’t heard of them since. It’s truly a pity. Not just the fact the negotiations probably fell through, but also the two leaders’ subsequent absence. They were a close couple, the glue which held the entire organisation together. They…”

  “They’re dead,” I whisper, a sinking feeling in my heart. “My parents. I…I could only watch…the letters tattooed on their bodies…”

  It’s Ben’s turn to look stunned. Mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water, he gapes at me.

  “Your parents? You…what? How…”

  I don’t know which of us is more confused at this point. All thoughts of busting out have been extinguished from my mind, replaced by an empty, hollow void.

  “Did you know them?”

  He remains silent for a moment, calculating whether to trust me. He does.

  “Rei and Mari Hikari. I can’t say I knew them well, but I did work with them on occasion, especially when we were arranging for the negotiations to take place. They were one of the strongest people I ever knew. No matter what others said or did to them, they always held true to their beliefs and maintained their stance that everyone should be treated as human, with or without the presence of an Extension. Their dream for such a society led them to start the AFFTP and have those letters tattooed onto their bodies. People thought they…” his voice trails off.

  My shoulders slump. I never thought that I would be learning about my parents from a complete stranger, an enemy, no less. My back hits the backrest with a solid thump, startling the guards sitting beside me. Suddenly, I don’t want to be a part of this any longer. Ben notices the change in mood and offers me a bottle of water. I’m not surprised. He’s probably seen enough to know when a captured enemy has given up and isn’t going to attempt escape any more.

  “All right,” he clears his throat awkwardly. “I think it’s time you meet the rest of your friends. But one at a time. And if you make any false moves, that’s it. I’ll be seeing you in hell.”

  “As if this place isn’t bad enough,” I nod in agreement. “Would you bring me to Raine? The girl who freaked out just now.”

  Ben issues orders through his radio and I’m whisked away, through a convoluted labyrinth of corridors until I reach a barred iron door. The number of guards has doubled, filling up the entire corridor. All of them are armed to the teeth and are, no doubt, implanted with Extensions. When they’re all set, Ben gives them the signal. The door opens, creaking loudly on its hinges. Raine. She’s the only thing my mind registers. Her eyes widen when she sees me, a look of relief flooding her face. She stands up so quickly that the chair falls over with a crash, causing the guards nearest to us to bring out their Extensions defensively. We ignore them.

  “I thought you were dead when they took you out of the room,” she says softly, staring intently at me.

  Her eyes have misted over, a droplet pooling at their corners. Immediately, I feel bad. It hadn’t struck me that the others were as worried about me as I was about them. I guess, in that respect, I was only selfishly thinking about my own worries.

  “Sorry,” I mutter. “Want a consolation hug?”

  “Screw off,” she laughs.

  There’s a pause. She looks like she’s thinking pretty hard.

  “Actually, I do.”

  Before I can react, she wraps her arms around me and squeezes so tightly that I have to gasp for air. I’m surprised. I never thought she would. But it does feel nice, a certain warmth I’ve never felt before in my life.

  “So what’s the deal now?” she asks as she releases me. “You don’t seem ready to fight these guys.”

  Her face is flushed. On second thought, mine probably is, too. For a moment, I can’t speak. I’m not even sure what I plan to do from now on. I mean, I’m in the hands of our enemy, who supposedly isn’t actually our enemy and I’ve just found out that my parents were on the side of the enemy I’ve been fighting against. And above all, I can’t decide what to trust any more, not even my own memories. It’s strange how you think you remember something clearly, but after thinking it over countless of times, you start to doubt yourself.

  “Come on, spit it out,” Raine presses. “I’m dying to know.”

  I tell her. Everything, from start to end. The things I’ve seen, the things Ben told me.

  “And so, here I am,” I finish. “Not knowing who to trust, who to fight against, who to hate.”

  “I don’t care. Whichever side you take, I’m with you.”

  “What happened to loyalty to your country?”

  “I have nothing left behind,” she shrugs nonchalantly. “You and the rest of our squad are all I’ve got.”

  She seems indifferent, but her eyes are confused and sad. I can empathise. When murder is your job and you’ve just found out that the targets you’ve been hunting are just like you, their lives having been eviscerated by your own hands, it hits you like a sledgehammer to the ribs.

  “I think we can trust these…Sav…people,” she begins slowly. “That guy’s mentioning of the AFFTP proves it. He couldn’t have known your past, right? Besides, look at the screen. They took care of Rick’s injury.”

  “So that’s it?” I ask softly. “We’re jumping ship? Giving up on everything we’ve believed in for the past eighteen years of our lives?”

  “If we’re in the wrong, we’re gonna have to admit it sometime anyway. And you know it. From what you just told me, the version of history here is way more concrete than what we’ve been fed back home. We came out here, blind to the facts, simply believing that we had an enemy to kill. And now, as you’ve observed, that enemy is not what we believed them to be. We are the enemy here,” she says vehemently. “Of course, it isn’t easy for me to say this either. But I don’t want to be kept in the dark any more. I don’t want to fight and risk my life for the sake of a cause I don’t believe in. I don’t want to kill and die for a country which didn’t even give a damn about my life.”

  Her words strike home. I’m hesitant only because there’s no guarantee that this side is any better than the one we’ve come from. For all I know, there could be no right or wrong in this bloody conflict. How are we, as soldiers, mere pawns in the greater game of chess where all the pieces are the same colour, supposed to know the purpose of our actions? How are we to know that we’re not killing simply because some cranky old bastard said so?

  “Okay,” I sigh. “Okay. I’ll speak to the rest about it.”

  “I’ll go too,” she offers.

  “As if they’ll allow it.”

  “I’ll make them,” she says, a dangerous glint in her eyes.

  “You’ll do nothing of that sort. Unless you want to sign our death warrant.”

  She pouts and slumps back onto the chair. I turn to go. I know she’s just as unsure about this as I am and probably has a mountain of things to think about, but I can’t help asking one last question, a question which has been on my mind since we were captured.

  “Right before I passed out, you grabbed me and…”

  “Forget it, okay?” she interrupts sweetly. “Or I’ll make you forget it.”

  Right.

  15

  It’s been days since I visited Raine. Thrice a day, my friends are provided with food and water, but otherwise, they’re denied contact amongst themselves. I’m the only one who’s allowed to leave my cell. Maybe they’re trying to bore us into submission. Aside from the usual tension in the room with the guards, there’s an unfamiliar aching in my heart that I can no longer ignore. Seeing Raine on my screen as she paces restlessly in her cell just makes it worse. Furthermore, she can’t sleep. Every single night, she’s plagued by an endless stream of nightmares which wou
ld wake her, drenched in cold sweat and breathing hard. A couple of times she even attacks the guards, sending everyone into panic, myself included. I don’t know how long I have before they lose their patience and decide to cut their losses. This is it, I guess. The price she’s paying. The price we’re all paying in some way or another. It’s an expensive one. And now that I’m out of the battlefield, I find myself hoping against hope that I’ll never return to it.

  Over the course of the next few days, I put my best coercion skills into practice. When I’m not distracted by Raine, I’m visiting cells. Sean, Rick, April, Hyung and Ivy. It’s beginning to feel like an interrogation, except for the fact that I’m the one moving among rooms. I tell them what I know, then give them the chance to decide for themselves. Not that there’s much of a choice.

  Eventually, on the third day, they gather in my room. Hyung looks reluctant, Sean conflicted while the others seem indifferent. That figures. Hyung and Sean have people they love back there. The rest of them either have no one left or have had a troubled past with the people who were supposed to love them. Raine looks terrible. Her sleepless nights have caught up with her, her eyes weathered and exhausted. But deep within them, I still see that spark of resolve I’ve come to admire. Ivy is a lot calmer than I expected. For someone who was once thirsting for the blood of her enemies, I sure as hell didn’t expect her to listen to my reasoning. Raine seems to think the same, shooting Ivy a look of disbelief, to which the latter replies with a mischievous wink.

  “Hot nurse,” she quips. “I couldn’t help but want to stay here. Maybe hit her up.”

  “Get real.”

  “Come on, don’t be so uptight,” she laughs. “It’s not like I don’t understand war. People die in war, whether we like it or not. In fact, I’ve known all along. That I’ve been killing like the Savages. That I’ve become what I sought to destroy. That my drive for revenge would make a monster out of me. I thought it wouldn’t matter, but after seeing all of this, I can’t do it any more. I can’t do what was done to me to someone else. After all, I’m only human.”

  Her eyes are hollow, her lips creased into a smile which now seems dismally empty.

  “I see.” Raine bites her lip and takes a seat beside Ivy. “I’m sorry.”

  “Ahem,” the old guy, Ben, clears his throat, “sorry to interrupt your reunion, but we have work to do. You’ll be deployed as a part of our unit in the Reformation Movement, working with us to do for others what we did for you. I know that it sounds like some sort of crooked evangelism, but everyone in this camp is betting their lives on it. Some of them are even what you would call Neutrals.”

  “There are Neutrals here?” April asks, startled. “Don’t you produce offspring with Extensions?”

  “Genetics,” Ben explains patiently. “Since not all genetically modified people take similarly modified people as their partners, some combinations of chromosomes during fertilisation lead to the absence of gene products being produced and hence the failure to bring out Extensions.”

  Blank looks all around. Ben takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly.

  “Anyway,” he continues. “You’re now a part of our country. Please remember…”

  “Wait,” Sean frowns. “Our country? What country?”

  Ben gives him a strange look.

  “We still go by the old names of the countries. In fact, nothing has changed outside of Pangaea’s communities.”

  Yep. Pangaea. Our community, the one we came from, is named after the supercontinent which existed millions of years ago. Probably intended to be a majestic term for the last united frontier of humanity against the Savages or something. More blank looks turn in Ben’s direction.

  “I guess it can’t be helped,” he sighs. “Welcome to Singapore.”

  “Singapore?” April echoes. “That’s what the rest of the world is called?”

  “No. Singapore is a country. A very small one. There are hundreds of others, each with a different name.”

  “What? Wasn’t our world that diamond landmass they showed us during the lecture?” Rick whispers to me. “What is he going on about? You sure we can trust him?”

  Ben hears him and throws us an exasperated look. Striding over to the wall, he taps a device on his arm.

  “Project the map of the world,” he commands. “These idiots need a geography lesson.”

  “Hey!”

  “Roger that,” a monotonous voice acknowledges. “Done.”

  A map appears on the once plain white wall. But it’s not the map I recognise. There are many chunks of green land spread out across a blue background. The diamond-shaped landmass we saw at the lecture back in our camp is nowhere to be seen.

  “Zoom in to a hundred and three-point-eight degrees east and one-point-three degrees north,” Ben says.

  “Roger that.”

  The diamond-shaped landmass. Suddenly, everything becomes clear. What I thought was the world was nothing more than an infinitesimal crumb in the real world.

  “Shit,” Rick gasps. “What in the…”

  “Yes,” Ben nods austerely. “This is us, compared to the world. This is how small we are.”

  “If that’s the case, then Pangaea…Pangaea…” Hyung stammers, losing track of what he was about to say.

  “Pangaea is quite unlike the supercontinent it was named after. In fact, it’s not even a country on its own. It’s a collective group of walled communities set up in many countries across the world when the genetically modified people began their revolt. The largest lies in China while the smallest of these communities is in, well, Singapore.”

  “So, we’re insignificant,” Raine looks relieved. “It won’t matter whether we…”

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” Ben interrupts gravely. “Singapore has the smallest of Pangaea’s walled communities, but also the most deadly. It’s the heart of Pangaea. Because of its size, it’s easy to govern and almost impenetrable. That is the reason the Captain made it his harbour.”

  “Wait.” April blinks. “Wait, slow down a little.”

  “It might be a bit too much to take in,” he concedes with a weary smile.

  “You mentioned the Captain. Just who is he?”

  “He is the one behind this entire war. The ruler of Pangaea, if you will. I don’t know his motives, but he has absolute control over Pangaea’s military might. Stories about him have spoken of blackmail, murder and all sorts of heinous crimes which he uses to keep his place. There is a lot I don’t know about him, but I do know one thing. He won’t stop until we’re all dead. He won’t stop until Pangaea’s communities no longer need their walls.”

  “That’s…”

  “Unbelievable? Maybe. But it’s the truth as we know it. Now, if you don’t have any more questions, we can, perhaps, move on?”

  “So, uh, what did we come here for?”

  “You’ll be assisting me in my work. If there’s nothing else, Resh will show you around.”

  A short, pale man in his twenties steps forward, giving us a critical glare with his slit-like eyes. Two leather sheaths hang by his sides. The one on his left contains a dagger with a lotus flower carved into its hilt while the sheath on his right is strangely empty. He beckons and we follow. There’s a tiny tattoo of a lotus on the back of his neck. Sean notices it too. We share a look and he signals subtly. I nod. Resh leads us to an air-conditioned room further down the corridor.

  “Office. Wait here,” he states astutely, disappearing behind shelves.

  After a bit of rummaging, he reappears holding seven bracelets, offering one to each of us.

  “To recognise our own,” he explains.

  He watches us like a hawk as we put them on. Upon closer inspection, I realise the bracelets are locked securely in place, a tiny keyhole peering out at us from the inside of the bracelet. My suspicions are confirmed when Resh pulls out what looks like a detonator from his pocket.

  “If you try anything,” he warns. “Bracelets go boom. Together with
your hands.”

  I’m starting to regret obeying his orders. Raine clenches her fists. She’s definitely about to start something. I grab hold of her hand and squeeze. Please don’t kill anyone, my expression says. Her eyes widen as she stares from my hand to my face, then quickly back again. Please don’t kill me, my expression probably says now. To my surprise, she doesn’t object. Instead, her fingers curl ever so slightly over the edge of my palm.

  “Let’s go,” Resh urges.

  I kind of get the feeling he hates us and wants to get this entire farce over and done with as soon as he possibly can. We’re shown to the canteen next, the only place which has a television screen plastered on the wall. Our temporary living quarters are two tents, which have been set up on a grassy field directly behind the canteen. All around us, people go about their daily lives as if they were never at war. The only difference between them and the city dwellers back in our country is probably their living conditions. While the city dwellers trudge like zombies in the monstrous metropolis, these people flit actively from place to place, doing whatever they can to bolster the Reformation Movement. Some of them are directly involved whereas others either lend their strength indirectly, or are simply uninvolved family members.

  “Lunch. Now,” Resh points to the canteen. “Work briefing after lunch.”

  Definitely a man of few words, that one. We make our way to join a snaking queue of people. When it comes to our turn, a boy behind the counter ladles a lump of mush onto our plates, smiling brightly. I wonder if he knows how many of his people we’ve killed.

  “Uh, could I have more of whatever that is?” Rick asks.

  The boy moves on to the people queuing behind.

  “He’s deaf,” Resh steps in, engaging him in a series of gestures.

  Still smiling brightly, the boy nods, acceding to the request. We carry our plates over to an empty table and sit. Just as I’m about to shovel a scoop of mush into my mouth, the television blares to life.