The Secret

One

The now non-existent whirr that once radiated from the white walls tells me that the interconnected tracking system (ICTS) is disabled. I am in luck. Usually the hundreds of tracking units sprinkled around the vast complex are highly monitored by the Guardians. Finally, tonight someone has outsmarted them.

A lone Guardian stands across the room, his hi-tech rifle-sized sedater in hand in case some rabid animal comes to attack him. In this case, the young female human they have mistaken for a rabid animal is me. I slip off the pod (the oval shaped beds in the complex) and walk towards him. His cold grey eyes meet mine, full of putrid and disdain. They emanate the words get out of my face. A prisoner is akin to a slimy piece of gum stuck to the bottom of my black boot.

"I want to see the head Guardian. I need to ask him something about my imprisonment sentence," I say calmly.

"Well you're not," he says indifferently. The hope my heart once clinged to now dangles precariously off the edge of a cliff.

"Please, sir, it is very important," I reply, a little fragment of desperation in my voice.

"Of what importance?" the Guardian raises a jet-black eyebrow, creating a ripple of small lines on his skin.

"When I will be released."

He chuckles defiantly and walks towards the wall opposite of my pod. He faces the wall and begins to stroke a pattern into it: it is the key to unlocking the door; the key I have memorised after seeing him leave the cube so many times; the key to my freedom, my escape. The Guardian lowers his sedater in one hand. I watch carefully, and just as he punches in the security code I firmly place my hand on the nape of his neck.A small shriek leaks from his lips as I shove him into the wall with a loud thump. He drops to the floor, blood running from his temple.

"Thank you, sir," I whisper, uncoiling his dead fingers from the sedater. The illuminated screen on the wall now requests the final pass: the Guardian's finger print. I lift up his limp arm and place a bloody finger onto the screen and it flashes green, then blue, and then the wall slides open.

Clad in a loose white cotton shirt and trousers and armed with a sedater, I venture out into the corridor. The head Guardian of my sector of the complex yells out "Hey! What's she doing here?!" up in his tower. He scrambles for the ICTS but finds it is not working, and then screams out "Stan! Stan! She's armed!" Stan, another low-rank Guardian, runs over, his eyes searching. They land on me, and he leaps into action. The medicated stapler of his sedater comes flying in my direction and I duck and somersault just in time out of the way. I steady myself behind a pole as he warily walks to towards me. I let out a high pitched scream to startle him and hurl around, the stapler from my sedater puncturing his cheek. He falls to the floor, unconscious. The head Guardian emerges from his tower and is armed with his own sedater, but I shoot him before he even completely comes out. He lies on the steps, as still as a statue.

A loud alarm is radiating the essence of adrenaline through the entire complex now, and I sprint down the long corridor. I see the last Guardian guarding the final exit, and I thrust him against the wall, hard. His big rough hands reach out to break my iron grip but I hold the sedater against his temple like a gun.

"Unlock the door!" I screech into his startled brown eyes. "I said unlock the door!"

He fumbles on the wall, stroking a pattern, then a security code, then a finger print before it slides open. I shoot him anyway, and sprint out into the wild night, the stars and the Milky Way arching above my head like a crown of velvet. Two other guards chase after me but I tear into the rainforest, the sound of my bare feet slapping against the slippery moss and ferns soothing. I am running for my life, for my freedom, but I have no fear as yet again another army, this time of rainforest parrots, flutter away, petrified, into the treetops.

I run, and I don't stop, my body leaping wildly for freedom, for excitement, for danger. Eventually I trip over a small clump of bromeliads, a rainforest shrub with thick, pink waxy leaves. Finally, I'm free, I think as I grin at my grazed palms. I'm not a criminal any more.