Immortals

Chapter Two // Mia

April 7th.

The day we all thought was safe.

It was supposed to be safe, it was supposed to be special, it was supposed to be everything it wasn't.

It was supposed to be a celebration, not a death march.

"Happy birthday Emery!"

Emery was sitting in the commons of our hideout, immersed in a book when I walked in. He was a creative mind, Emery, always reading or writing or working on some sort of art project with what he could get his hands on at a given moment. Creating was like therapy to him, recreation that didn't come from the substances he had been so reliant on in the early days of our flight from corruption.

By the time of his seventeenth birthday, the time of the true start of the end, he had been just over two years sober, and all the more beautiful because of it. The Emery I had known before the downfall of old society was a sickly, lanky, worn out high school freshman, lifeless eyes and a hopeless dependency on drugs I could only speculate on the names of.

But now he was seventeen and as golden as one on the run could be. Faint freckles, curly golden hair, blue eyes that now sparkled like an ocean under sunlight, he had blossomed like a flower sprouting between the cracks of a ruined city.

"Thanks Mia."

I didn't know how birthdays were viewed by anyone that wasn't me or my friends. I didn't know what Favorables did, if they even held on to those types of sentimental ties, or what the other escaped Unfavorables did. Did they shed customs out of a sadness for the world they couldn't get back or did they celebrate to keep a lost world alive?

Even if celebration was difficult in a ragtag society, we tried to keep the custom alive.

"Anything you want to do today?"

I didn't even hear Ashe enter the room until her voice rang out. She could be all but silent when she wanted to, delicate like a fairy flying in the fluffiest of clouds.

And she was delicate and soft. Pale, slim, caramel eyed, and a bleached blonde when she could get her hands on the stray boxes of hair dye that sometimes floated our way. Otherwise her hair was a deep chocolate brown that made her eyes look like melted amber.

If I didn't know them before our circumstances, I would've assumed her and Emery were twins. They looked and acted like it, a close knit pair ever since I had known them.

"I don't know. Maybe a lunch out in the woods? It seems like decent weather outside."

Early April in a hidden wood just outside of Albany could be a bit frigid, but it was a clear day, a rare one that week in the middle of a wave of pouring rain.

We could accommodate.

"Parker! Shane! We're going out, get up!"

Ashe could be a mother sometimes, especially when it came to Shane and Parker, the youngest in our gang. Only fourteen and freshly fifteen, they were essentially the children of the found family we had created.

Granted, I had no room to speak as so was I, but I was still granted more leniency in a way.

"Ashe, it's barely nine. I'm tired," Shane grumbled, coming out of their room, dragging a half comatose Parker behind him.

If I hadn't been as close to Shane as I was before the end of the world, I would've assumed he and Parker to be siblings. The pair looked like twins, the smallest differences present but the same height, same build, almost the same of everything else.

"We're going out."

"Where?"

"Out."

"But why?"