by Sara Preucil
In the bright, artificial light, Tara realized how ridiculous this gathering of cloak-wearing adults looked. She stood up, straightening her own cloak, as order was obtained once more.
“Chancellor, my apologies!” Minister Perkins babbled as the guards closed in on the girl, who had collapsed, unconscious, to the floor.
“Indeed, it appears that this demonstration was a complete waste of time,” Councilor King snarled, looking at Minister Perkins, as if to lay the blame on him. As if, moments before, she hadn’t just been calling this a breakthrough. She then turned to look at Chancellor Tavish with imploring eyes. “We promise, chancellor, that our efforts will continue. We will scour your research and try again; we must have missed something.” She shot the minister another accusatory look.
“Not necessarily,” a familiar voice piped up. Tara’s mom moved forward. Dina and John Olsen were two of the lead scientists at Modern Alchemy. Tara hadn’t thought much about what her parents did at work before, but was it possible that they were involved in these experiments?
“Chancellor Tavish, if I may,” Dina said carefully, “I’ve witnessed the unnatural doing this very same act. The difference is, before our experiments, she was able to blow a locked steel door off its hinges. Without showing any sign of fatigue.” She pointed to the depleted, unconscious girl. “I have reason to believe that the experiments have weakened her considerably and may only need more time to work completely.”
The chancellor seemed to consider this for a moment.
“All right, but move her off sight. We can’t have the offices drawing too much attention. Especially after what just happened.” He cast a sideways glance to Councilor King before walking off. He was, of course, referring to the escape of two resident unnaturals only two nights prior. Councilor King looked away quickly and immersed herself with commands directed at the simpering minister.
Dina looked around the room, then catching her daughter’s eye, made her way toward Tara.
“You ready to go home sweetie?” She asked Tara, like they were finishing up a day of shopping at the mall. Maybe one day Tara would feel as indifferent as everyone else appeared to be after a scene like this. After all, she realized, it came with the territory. Still, she doubted she would forget the sound of the girl’s screams any time soon.
“Sure,” Tara replied, trying to appear unaffected.
Chapter 32
A couple of hours later, Tara stood outside her dad’s office. She was still feeling a little shaken after the events at the meeting, and was looking for some form of reaffirmation. Gently, she rapped her knuckles against the dark wood door.
“Come in,” her father replied.
Tara turned the knob and poked her head into the office. Her dad was at his desk, which was in its usual state of chaos. He was leaning over a thick text, his glasses sliding down his nose as he read. His golden-brown hair, once the same shade as Tara’s, was graying now and was sticking up away from his head; he had a habit of gripping his hair while he concentrated.
John looked up from the pages of tiny text. “Hi pumpkin, everything okay?”
“Actually, I—”
“Oh! Just a second,” her father jumped in his chair suddenly, like a little spark of electricity had just shocked him. He then started rustling the many loose papers on his desk. Tara was used to this behavior, recognizing the sudden birth of an idea. Sure enough, he quickly unearthed a stack of yellow sticky notes and began scribbling frantically. Tara glanced around his messy office. In addition to the many papers littering his desk, they stuck out of books on his shelf, and out of half-closed drawers of filing cabinets. Her father wrote down everything, but how he found these notes once they were written, Tara had no idea.
“Okay.” Finally, he set his pen down and gave Tara his attention once more. “What’s up?”
Tara hesitated. She had originally thought to talk to him about what had happened at the meeting, but he seemed busy, and now that she thought about it, she wasn’t sure she wanted to appear to be having misgivings.
“Can I borrow a book?” She ended up asking.
“Sure, pumpkin.” Her father smiled at her and then returned to his work.
Tara crossed the room to the bookshelf, already knowing which text she was looking for. It was a collection of ancient writings and poems gathered by the Order and bound into a doctrine of sorts. Finally, she found it, the little black, leather-bound book with the symbol of the Order embossed on its spine.
She ran her thumb over the indention of the triangles as she walked down the hall to her room. In style with the rest of the Victorian house, her room was small, but charming. The off-white ceiling slanted into a peak overhead. A built-in seat adorned with cushions sat below the single-pane window. To the left of the window was her old-fashioned roll-top desk where her laptop and school books lay. Along the wall to the right of the window was her bed on its white, curvy metal frame.
Tara crossed her room to go sit on her bed, the sky-blue comforter fluffing up around her as the down feathers were displaced by her weight. She opened the small book, searching for the passage that she knew by heart. Still, she wanted to see the written words; somehow they made it more real. Quickly, she found the passage, and then the particular paragraph.
But hear my words; to learn augments the mind.
For as I said when I set forth my story's aims,
a double tale I'll tell.
At one time one thing grew to be just one from many,
at another many grew from one to be apart,
fire, water, earth and the unreached height of air,
and cursèd Strife apart from them,
their match in every way,
and Love among them, equal in her size and in her breadth.
It was a passage from Empedocles’s On Nature I, a text she had been taught as a kid. It was one of the first basic ideas that the children of the Order learn. How Love, the personification of good, of balance, exists as a whole body made up of many elements in harmony. But Strife, the representation of evil, of an imbalance, manifested in bodies in which the elements were not in harmony as one, but set themselves apart. This individual dominance of a particular element caused illness and chaos. It was why, they were taught, the unnaturals were prone to violence.
As a child, Tara liked the idea that the Order represented Love, the hero in the battle for good and balance. It was easy, then, to imagine them as champions against hidden evils in the world.
But now, after what Tara witnessed earlier that night, that image of the white knight bearing the Order’s symbol didn’t come so easy to mind. Its white facade, once so shiny in its purity, was beginning to tarnish and gray.
Tara closed the book, feeling agitated that the familiar words hadn’t brought her their usual comfort. She laid back against the pillows that scattered the head of her bed and closed her eyes.
Immediately the girl’s face came to mind. Dirt-streaked and contorted in pain.
Tara’s eyes flew open. She scrambled out of bed and walked over to her desk. Turning on her laptop, she sat down to work on a paper for her English class.
She spent the rest of the night determinedly absorbed in homework, trying to get that image out of her mind, and eventually falling asleep at her desk.
Chapter 33
Tara was having difficulty concentrating. The text on her laptop screen blurred in and out of focus as her thoughts kept drifting to the events of last night. To her surprise, she had found little solace in her readings of the Order’s doctrine, and was having misgivings about her own indoctrination.
Thankfully, she didn’t have one of those oddly realistic dreams last night, and had now decided to chalk it up to the pressure of becoming an official member of the Order.
She tried once again to focus on her work. She was supposed to be looking though this year’s birth records and flagging any births along intersecting ley lines that had been previously overlooked. She would then add these suspected
infant unnaturals to the database for future surveillance. Mapping these mystically charged lines was an ancient practice, but still the most effective in early detection. Unnaturals were never born outside these intersections.
When she realized that she had read the same line for about the fifth time, she sighed, and leaned back in her chair. She was sitting in the small conference room at the back of the large office space which was dedicated solely to the research and tracking of unnaturals. She stretched her arms over head and looked up from her computer, through the windows into the larger room. The desks had all been abandoned. She was alone. Glancing at the clock on the wall, Tara realized it was nearly seven.
Normally, she didn’t have the work ethic to be the last one in the office, especially since she wasn’t a true employee and was not yet being paid for her work. But home was tense now. After the gathering of the Order, her parents had confirmed that they were indeed part of the scientific team that conducted experiments on the unnaturals. With what happened at the meeting, and the escape of 2307 and 2381, her parents were under a lot of scrutiny. Even though neither of them were present during the incident, Councilor King was convinced that someone had messed up the treatments.
Tara closed the browser showing the birth records around Mount Shasta and snapped her laptop shut. She scribbled down one last thing in her notebook and closed it as well, setting it on the laptop. Grabbing her coat and bag from off the back of her chair, she stood up. She left her laptop and notebook on the table; she’d be resuming her research tomorrow after school anyway.
She exited the conference room, walked past the deserted office space, and turned down the white hallway toward the lobby. The reception desk was empty as well; only a single guard stood in the darkened corner of the lobby near the elevators. Councilor King had decided that security was needed after the breakout. Tara waved to the guard as she walked toward the exit. She pushed open the glass door and stepped out on to the sidewalk.
It was already twilight; the streetlamps were just now coming on, illuminating the softly falling raindrops as they passed through their orange halos. Tara’s car was parked in the public garage three blocks away. She fished around in her bag for her umbrella, pulled it out, and opened it with a pop. She set off down the damp sidewalk to the percussion of rain hitting the black nylon. It was a nostalgic sound, reminding her of a simpler time before she had been included in on the family secret and her world was forever changed. When her family would do normal things, like camping. She’d wake up, snuggled in her sleeping bag, to the sound of rain landing softly on the tent and not have a care in the world.
She thought again of the girl last night, and the raven haired girl who had escaped. Her stomach twisted into a knot. Was it wrong of her to wish for ignorance again?
The rain started to fall harder, increasing in volume against her umbrella. Suddenly, the hair at the back of Tara’s neck stood on end, and she became distinctly aware that the splattering of rain wasn’t the only thing she was hearing.
Turning her head ever so slightly, she peered out of the corner of her eye over her right shoulder. Someone quite tall—a man by the look of his stature—was walking along the same sidewalk nearly half a block behind her. He was dressed in dark colors, a hood was drawn up, covering his face.
It wasn’t as though the streets were deserted and his presence was odd, or that wearing a hood in the rain was at all suspicious. Nevertheless, Tara’s pace quickened as she turned the next corner. She was close to the parking garage now, and as she crossed the street, she chanced another glance back. No one was there.
Feeling foolish by her unnecessarily skittish behavior, she closed her umbrella and headed into the stairwell. On the third landing, she was turning to head up the last flight when suddenly, she was yanked into the shadows underneath the cement stairs.
A large hand covered her mouth before she could let out a sound, and she was pushed roughly against the cold, cement wall. The umbrella fell to the ground at her feet.
“How many more of us do you have locked up in there?” The man’s deep voice snarled in her ear.
Tara pushed against him, her hands going for his face where she at least hoped she could poke an eye. He dodged her reach, and she only managed to push back his hood.
He was younger than she expected, given his height and deep voice; his dark hair was cut short and his dark eyes, black in the shadows, were blazing at her.
He grabbed her hands, pinning them against the cement wall. This left her mouth free. She sucked in a breath.
Her hands, wrapped within his, grew abruptly, painfully hot.
“Don’t you dare scream.” He hissed.
He’s an unnatural. Tara realized. She complied, shutting her mouth. The heat ceased, but her hands still stung like the aftermath of the contact burn.
“What do you want?” She whispered, fear causing her voice to tremble.
“Tell me how many of us you have locked up in that building.” He repeated.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Tara lied. Her heart was racing in her chest. What was he going to do to her?
For the briefest moment, his face softened and Tara could see the shadow of doubt flicker behind his dark eyes. He lowered them from her face.
Then an angry hiss escaped his lips. Tara followed his gaze. Peeking out from the top of her coat was her necklace. The Order’s symbol impossibly caught what little light streamed into the tiny space they were crammed into.
Quickly, he snatched it, the chain pulling taught against the back of her neck.
“No?” He pulled her face closer to his by the thin chain. “What’s this then?”
“It’s a star of David.” She gave him the same explanation that she gave anyone who asked. But at this proximity, there was no mistaking the difference.
“Don’t. Lie. To. Me.” He said through clenched teeth. He looked as though he was struggling to keep himself under control.
She began to squirm under his hold, but she had no idea what to do. She had only ever encountered unnaturals when they were in the Order’s custody, and then they were hardly a threat.
But the young man cornering her now was under no one’s control but his own, and Tara was not safely observing him from behind a shatterproof window.
Tara felt the hand that still held hers immobile begin to heat up. The small alcove became warmer; she could feel the heat radiating off him in angry waves. She could sense just how dangerous he was, and she knew she was in real trouble. She swallowed.
“I-I don’t know.” It was the truth. Since she wasn’t a full member of the Order, she wasn’t privy to most of their doings.
The unnatural’s dark eyes bore into hers for a moment; it appeared as though he was deciding what to do next.
From the landing above, voices entered the stairwell. The boy jumped, glancing up and then back at Tara. He looked panicked, like he didn’t want to be caught there.
“Shit,” he mumbled. He then looked at the silver pendant that he was still holding, and with a sudden yank, snapped the chain. He glared at Tara, pocketed her necklace, and quickly turning, took off down the stairs.
Tara stood, momentarily stunned, as a group of girls—dolled up for the club scene—came down the stairs overhead, turned the corner, and caught sight of her partially hidden in the stairwell.
Exchanging confused looks, the girls continued on their way, one of them muttering, “Weirdo,” to her friends to the sound of muffled laughter.
Catching her breath, Tara bent down to pick up her umbrella, her hands shaking as she clasped its plastic handle. Deciding that she needed to move before he had the chance to return, she took off running up the last flight of stairs toward her parked car.
She sped all the way home, glancing constantly in her rearview mirror for fear she was being followed. When she got home, before leaving her car, she checked again to see if anyone was around. The rain-smudged windows made it difficult to see much, so she decided t
o chance it and made a mad dash to the front door. Safely inside her house, she locked the front door behind her, and then yanked back the sheer white curtain that covered a thin window next to the door. No headlights pierced through the rain, and eventually Tara felt like she could breathe again.
“Tara, is that you?” Her mom called from the kitchen. “Dinner is almost ready.”
“Okay,” Tara called back, glancing out of the window once more before drawing the fabric closed. She hung up her coat, set her bag down, and slid off her shoes. In a daze, she walked into the dining room, where her dad was already sitting, and her mom was just bringing in the final dishes.
“Thanks.” Tara took a plate from her mom, and sat at her usual seat, to the left of her dad; her mom sat across from her.
“How was your internship?” Dina asked, scooping salad on to her plate.
“It was okay, I was going through the birth records.” Tara skewered a baked potato with her fork. “Nothing too exciting.”
“I bet you’re looking forward to finally doing some real work there, huh kiddo?” John said around a mouthful of bread roll.
Like the work you do?
The snide thought flashed through Tara’s mind before she could stop it. She hated this new feeling, like she was starting to disapprove of her parent’s work. But surely they didn’t abide by that kind of behavior that the chancellor exhibited. Then again, it wasn’t like anyone lifted a finger to stop him. Once more, Tara thought of that raven-haired unnatural, Emmy. Tara had been forced to take notes while Councilor King talked to the girl while she was tied up. And Tara hadn’t done anything either.