*Watty's 2021 Shortlist*
Samantha Roberts and Ben Evans have one thing in common - they both attend Sir Robertson's School for the Gifted, an elite boarding school for the children of the world's wealthiest. Both scholarship students, they gravitate...
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There's something wrong with the moon. I'm awake, barely, blurry eyes squinting through nearly-closed eyes, but there is most definitely something wrong.
It's hanging off-kilter, and I'm pretty sure it didn't used to be that colour. I mean, I haven't looked at the moon in a while, but surely it wasn't always blue?
I push myself further up onto my elbow, staring out my window. I'm not sure what woke me up, but when I blinked open my eyes, my room was saturated with a strange shade of watery turquoise.
I haven't quite managed to gather up the will to get out of bed. Everything seems sort of... hazy, the air thick and sluggish. I feel as though time has slowed down around me, sand barely dripping through the hourglass of my life.
Pinching the skin on the inside of my elbow, hard, serves to do nothing except give me a painful bruise. Not a dream, then, not that I know for certain that that system actually works.
I manage to struggle out of bed, dropping to my knees on the soft carpet. Resisting the urge to puke, I try to ground myself. Hands wound through the fibres of my carpet, I open my eyes again and gasp.
My room is swathed in shadows that twist and turn, movement caught only in the corners of my eyes.
They disappear as I face them head on, not black like true shadows but a strange blue from the moon.
I breathe.
One.
Two. Trying not to panic – trying to figure out what to do.
I don't think it's a dream, but it has to be, right? The moon isn't actually blue. I'm not actually going insane.
It's a dream. I can't – I won't – accept anything else.
It's a dream. My heart is beating impossibly loud, filling the small room. It seems to echo, over and over again, until my head is full of the sound.
I try to call out, try to alert someone to the fact that the moon is broken, but there is no air in my lungs. It feels as though they are filled with water instead of oxygen, but instead of suffocating, I am floating: powerful, more awake then I've felt in years, with adrenaline running in my veins instead of blood.
The world suddenly feels like its mind to command – like I know everything that is, and everything henceforth – it's all swirling around in my head.
I'm drunk on it, drunk on this power that rushes through me. Every inch of me is humming. It's almost too much.
The sharp edge between power and pain is one easily tipped over, and I can feel my lungs struggle for air. Suddenly, the water cannot sustain me, and I recognise the floating for what it is: a trap. I thrash, my body assaulted with the pinpricks of a thousand tiny needles, my mind filled with shadows. They writhe, and everywhere they touch turns numb. But it's a bad numbness, a stealing numbness, and it's dragging me under.
