hollow promises

03

SHILOH JONES

I held my breath for many beats too long, my ears buzzed and my head felt as if it were made of cotton. I could hear nothing but footsteps crunching on bits of crumbled ceiling. My arms migrated to Marcy's neck instead of her back and I clutched her so close that our cheeks smashed against one another's.

"Who wants to come play?" A voice taunted in a sing-song tone from outside of the pantry.

    For many minutes the room was silent, save for the footsteps. Marcy broke the silence by whispering to me, "Kale didn't cut the net on your tennis racquet when we were nine, I did."

    I almost laughed. "Why? It took two weeks for mom to let me get another."

    "You did better than me at the tournament a few days before. I was jealous. I'm sorry." She replied. We were so close that our noses lightly touched when we smiled.

    "Now is not the time to make me mad at you, you know?" I resisted the urge to laugh when a nervous shudder reverberated through my spine.

    "I don't want to die with a guilty conscious." She responded. Tears built up on the top of her lower eyelid, I watched as they spilled out one by one.

"Shut up. You're not gonna die." I kissed her forehead and tried to believe my own words.

Our little bubble of serenity did not last long, the chaos outside of the pantry interrupted it with ease.

A shriek cried out and I was easily able to infer that they had found a mole. "Let me go!"

There was a small enough amount of us for me to able to recognize the voice, Bishop Dixon. His parents were in Science and his only sibling, Skyler Dixon, was just sorted into Commune. Cross-sorted families weren't incredibly uncommon, however the rumors that spread about Skyler being Commune because of her affair with the Board Representative caused a scandal. People, myself included when I was especially into gossip, liked to say that the Representative, Mr. Kyer, had rigged her test to sort her into his faction so that he would have easier access to her.

    "Shut up, kid." A new voice gruffly told him.

    "Please, get off of me!" Bishop hollered. I felt it when Marcy winced in my arms.

I tuned it out. It wasn't hard considering the buzzing in my ears was beginning to intensify. I held strongly onto my consciousness and refused to release it. I would not let myself fall vulnerable in this situation. I reminded myself of the ridiculous and pretentious creed,

I am a mole.
I am a survivor.
I am a thriver.
I am intelligent.
I am strong.
I am the future.

I breathed deeply, faintly heading through the pantry doors and the thick buzz as objects began to move around and young screams began to erupt. Against my will, I recognized each and every voice and yell that called out for help. Braxton, Lucy, Raye, Perry, Hadley, Silva, the list went on and on. I'd known each of them since they were born and yet I was paralyzed with fear. They were moving too fast to comprehend.

One scream in particular cut through the sounds of crying children. "Let me go!" Pippa.

My Pippa. My baby sister. A little girl who had just learned how to write capital letters and who couldn't pronounce her R's. Pippa, who was in pre-education before she would age up to year 1 when she was five. Who teased other kids for wearing one braid in their hair instead of two. Who couldn't read a clock. Pippa, who was utterly defenseless.

"No, no, no, please," Marcy began to beg me not to do what I haven't even began.

And then I did begin. I didn't stop to think of the detrimental effects that my actions would have. I didn't think about how my recklessness would expose Marcella. I didn't think at all, I acted on instinct as I hurled myself out of the pantry.

I didn't take in the intense state of disarray that was the White Room. The floor was coated in layers of rubble that had fallen from the walls and sealing and one massive crack stretched across the floor, how the hell did they get in?

I ran as fast as my body could carry me. It took no time at all for my eyes to pin down Pippa, her ginger hair stood out brightly against the crowd of darkly clothed bodies and pasty white wreckage. I remembered the moment she was born and the utter shock my parents had gotten when they'd birthed a ginger. They didn't tell me until I was fifteen that they'd been in such disbelief that my papa had asked for a paternity test.

I opened my mouth to call out for her when the wind was knocked directly out of me. My organs crunched inside of my stomach as thick trunks wrapped around my waist. It took me a moment to register that it had been human arms who had grabbed me. I knew immediately it was not a mole. Not only had they touched me so violently, they also stank terribly.

I was lifted aggressively off of the floor and pinned against a brute's chest. My limbs thrashed wildly out of my control. I felt as if I was watching my body from an outside perspective, as if it wasn't my own.

   "Deus, Damien. Iste prope te obtinuit, dorsum tuum observa!" Oh god, I couldn't understand them. I felt my panic increasing beyond levels I knew it could reach. Was I hallucinating or were they speaking another language? The founders had tried to keep old languages alive in the underground and managed to fail horribly, the most I knew was the names of a few old languages besides English.

"Pedicabo te, Javi. Hie occupatus sum generis." He wrapped her long orange braid around his hand and gripped it close to the base of the braid. Pippa's pained cry interrupted my state of disbelief.

"Let her go!" I cried.

A hand reached around and grilled my throat from behind, everything about the man holding me was big. I couldn't catch sight of him and it petrified me. The hand squeezed my throat so tightly that I could feel as my veins pressed out of my forehead and the air fled out of my esophagus.

"Shut up, okay? You'll be fine. We don't kill the pretty ones."