Simple Talents

Chapter Fourteen

Matt never came that night. Neither did any of the boys. Hoping that they just weren't listening, the girls packed up as planned and headed for the woods. Each carried their packs, each took a tarp or tent, and each went on-foot. A giant-flying bird would raise too much suspicion, and Ami floating wouldn't exactly be an easier sight to see, so they walked on through the dark, hoping that everything with the boys was okay.

As they walked down the silent halls, every tear was held back, and every need to go back to the safety of the world they would be leaving behind was squished. This couldn't be their home anymore. Yet still, it would remain home to many who would sleep with the only fear on their minds being a far-away disease, a seemingly more distant torture, and the most prevalent of all in their minds, their final grades.

Everyone in the group wished for that innocence and ignorance back, but understood that what they knew could never fade. They simply had to focus on the fact that they were the lucky ones out of the whole situation. They would live freely. But leaving their sort of family behind with nothing was simply too cold. As they left, they taped up posters, slid notes under doors, and letters in mail-boxes, hoping that they wouldn't be the only ones to survive the horrors they knew would come. They felt selfish saving themselves, but were comforted by the fact that when a plane's oxygen masks would deploy, that you were supposed to put yours on first, then help others. You can't save others if you can't save yourself. They only hoped that their feeble attempts could save those they left behind.

As they left their dorm tentatively and circled behind it, Alexis pulled off her map and looked onto it. They wanted to meet up at a clearing they all knew, just to the left of the boy's dorm. The girls had a distance of open ground to cover, and none were happy to try it. They had settled earlier on that they would circle to the back of their dorm, and then follow the tree line around the rectangle of a boarding school, under the safety and hiding places it would offer.

After reaching the wood behind their dorm, Ria and Theonda begun to cry quietly, and continue the whole way around to the clearing; they were losing the most through the excursion. Unlike Ami and Alexis, Ria and Theonda had talent families, a clan of those like themselves that they could turn to in times of need. They couldn't do that anymore. Leaving their families to be taken in to the labs or even just to be studied in the school system was like a colossal betrayal. But they pushed on, and only looked back once before finally going deeper into the forest, kissing their hands and waving goodbye, like a child t a funeral, saying goodbye for the last time as their friend was lowered away; unsure of what it truly meant and what was happening, but that it was a certain goodbye coming far too soon, wrong and horrible in far too many ways.

By tomorrow morning, Carper and everyone else they left behind would know everything they had learned about the labs and their involvement with the schools, and they could manage the information any way they deemed fit. Just thinking about the impersonal lettesr they left for them, specifically Carper, made Ria want to scream, but she was too scared to even breathe too loudly. Sobbing was her one indulgence. But that was gone now. It couldn't stay. And much like Ria, the girls swallowed back their emotions and focused on their path ahead.

It was midnight when the girls reached the edge of the clearing at the agreed-upon time. But they could not see the boys or the stick in the mud (their signal that they had moved on to the church, their secondary point in case the clearing had been compromised). They waited for almost twenty minutes, watching around themselves nervously in the shadows cast by the moon, before grabbing a stick and shoving it into the mud themselves. They had to move on. Matt hadn't shown up earlier, and the boys still hadn't arrived. So they began their trek to the town nearby, hoping that they wouldn't have to leave without them at one in the morning...