United Regnum

Eva 1

I turn my head from side to side and the ends of my short black hair whip my face.

"Eva, honey. Go outside and play nice." I look up at my mother. She has blond hair and blue eyes, she's beautiful. I lift my small three-year-old hand to her cheek.

"Why mommy cry?" My big grey eyes follow the tears down her face.

"Go outside and play nice, Eva. Hurry, please, go." She lifts my hand away and leads me to the back door of our house.

"I no wanna leave mommy!" I stomp my little feet and began crying.

"For heaven's sake, Eva! Quiet!" I sniffle the tears away. "Mommy has to go." She takes me outside and sits in the grass.

"Mommy leaving me." She bursts into tears and hugs me.

"Mommy loves you. Mommy is going to see daddy, okay?" I nod my head.

"Tell daddy I love him."

The dream ends. I wake up. I'm 16 today, and the beautiful blonde who was my mother no longer exist. She was murdered that day. Now, I'm upset.

I hear my adoptive family downstairs chatting. They're talking about today, my coming of age ceremony, with out a doubt. The coming of age ceremony happened every year on the first Sunday in May. Today, everyone in my class is officially 16. Sixteen marked the end of school, the beginning of the final exam, and the time for the graduating class to stop taking the serum. The serum dulls emotion, so that you are focused on your studies, not your peers. They only dulled our emotions to 1/5 because they thought any less than that would register us inhuman.

I reflect on my dream. "Go outside and play nice." As a member of the sapentia sector, I should be focused on analyzing what she said and finalizing out what it means, but I only focus on the love in her voice. I want so badly to feel that true love again. I touch the locket around my neck. It's silver and holds a small picture of my mother and father. On the back of my mother's picture is a U and on my fathers is a badly drawn heart. They loved me. The government took them away.

I roll out of bed and drag myself to the shower, then the closet. I pull on my simple grey dress and flat grey shoes. The sapentia are philosophical. They, er, we believed that in order to have a clear, unjudgmental mind we must all look the same. So, apart from our hair and eyes, all the girls wear the same dress and the boys wear the same slacks and shirt. Usually women wear our hair up in slicked back ponytails, but on special occasions we're allowed to style it. I leave mine straight down. It licks at my waist now.

I walk to my kitchen downstairs where my entire family is. The house is plain and all houses is the Sapentia sector are the same. Three bedrooms, three baths, kitchen, sitting room- all grey. No television, a few books. We send our laundry off. No paintings or decorations- they're all distractions to clutter the mind.

I sit at the stainless steel table and begin eating.

"Are you excited, Eva? You have your final examination tomorrow." My father, Charles Taylor, asks me.

"I'm more excited to know that I no longer have to submit to the serum." The conversation stops and my brother is ushered into the kitchen by my mother. He tilts his head to the side and a white liquid is injected into his vein. The serum. My father says goodbye and goes to city hall to meet with his fellow council members.

My father is a member of the Ultimate Council of the Regnum. It's made of fifteen members, five people from each sector- Fortitudo, Sapentia, and Perspicia. They have the final say in all matters. Thirteen out of fifteen must always agree.

I finish my breakfast, brush my teeth again and we go down to city hall. Most families do not own cars, but we do. My father says its because we saved, but it's really because he's an official.