The Untouchables

Chapter Nine: Luke

 Something slammed into my back, sending me flying forwards, nearly into the pile of wood I'd just finished building.

I was startled, I reached for the worn dagger I kept on my belt and raised to my attacker.

Only, there wasn't one.

Instead, I found a girl, in an unconscious crumpled heap on the ground. She couldn't have been older than sixteen, if that. She was covered in scratches and scrapes from head to toe. Her hair was an odd color too. Her hair was long, and a shade of deep black, like a sheet of the night sky, but the bottom third of her hair was a dull gray. Almost the color of silver, just more muted. But this girl's hair wasn't the strangest part about her.

She had wings.

Beautiful. Bird's wings.

Black and white, like the moon and stars, contrasting beautifully against one another.

Questions whirled madly through my head.

Who is she? Where did she come from? How did she get here? Is she one of the Monarch's experiments?

The leaders and scientists of the Old World started experimenting on human and animal subjects over forty years ago. They started them in hopes that when a war was to break out, they could use the experiments in battle as an advantage, giving the experiments unnatural abilities and powers. Since they're was some 'unspoken agreement' that you weren't supposed to harm children. Even though that didn't matter now.

We thought that The Monarch had continued these experiments, but we haven't found proof that he had continued them beyond what Old World leaders had.

Most believed that it was a hoax from the beginning, and that it was just meant to scare us, but we've found evidence of the old experiments in an abandoned lab underneath the fields in the Harvest Sector.

More and more questions rattled in my head, then I looked back down at her.

Blood stained the area around her right ankle. Something tore through the leather of the boot and her skin, leaving a gash on her ankle. I could name many things that could've made that deep of a gash, but I couldn't assume anything. Especially because she was currently unconscious.

I couldn't just leave her lying there. If I did, the Wolves would surely smell her blood, and eat her alive, even though I wasn't in their territory. So, I gently picked her up, and brought her to the area I made to sleep in under the elevated tree roots. She had made no attempt to move during that.

I prayed she was still alive, so I checked her pulse.

It was faint, but she was still alive.

Since she still had a pulse, I assumed she had passed out from exhaustion and the blood loss from her ankle, so it wasn't like I was trying to take care of a corpse.

Once I set her down on the dirt, I got to work. I had to cut off her torn boot and sock instead of pulling them off, to prevent doing further damage to the area in case it was broken, and rolled her pant leg up to her knee so I could see the injured area.

Her entire foot and ankle area was covered in blood. The gash was deep, but it wasn't deep enough for me to risk my amature suturing abilities on some random girl.

Thankfully, nothing looked broken, so I didn't have to set any bones, or remove shattered bone pieces.

To get started, I got my water bottle, and poured some of the contents on the gash to clean it. Then, I grabbed the First aid kit from the backpack. I quietly thanked whoever decided to put that in there, because I wouldn't have been able to somehow craft a bandage out of the leaves from around camp, because as much as I believed in my survival skills, I didn't know how to make a usable bandage out of tree leaves.