First Love, First War, First Step |√|

Birthday Girl

Before all of that though, I spent a wonderful year with Luther, who seemed to take great delight in instructing me in my duties as an Archivist.

At times, I viewed him as the father that I should have had, the one I would have had if my mother had not died. Not that I blamed my mother for my father's inattention to me.

Luther took me everywhere that he dared, showing me how others lived, worked, and breathed. One day we would visit the scientists who were working on improving the vaccine, and the next we would join a fisherman in his tiny boat where I was allowed to assist him.

"It is important to learn everything about how our world is run if you are to keep accurate records for the next generations," he said after we had watched two government officials argue over a pending law, "that much is true. However, there are places I won't even take you until you have fully accepted the duties of an Archivist."

I mulled over those words later that night as I read All Quiet on the Western Front, a novel about a war that had been fought before the societies that the men had been fighting for destroyed each other in the Infernos.

What places were he speaking of? The jobs and hierarchy that we were taught about in school were basically everything that he had shown me. Was there more to our society, our Cineres, than any normal citizen realized?

Shutting the paper covers of the book, which had suddenly lost all appeal, I leaned back against my pillows. I was reminded of Orwell's 1984, one of the first books that I had taken out of the Archives.

Had not Winston found some of my own questions in his heart when he looked at his own world? We were not at war, so I didn't wonder about that, but there were so many other things I didn't understand.

Where were those extra children going? The government took them, but we were never told whether or not they were ever reintroduced back into the population.

How did citizens keep getting markings when there was clearly no equipment left in to create them excepting what was secured in the Archives?

I would have asked Luther the next day, but my questions were buried beneath a different realization.

It was my birthday that day, my fifteenth this time, and once again my father had forgotten.

"Ilania, you seem a bit out of sorts today," my mentor remarked as I slid into the seat across from him, staring dismally at the stack of papers in front of me.

"It's nothing," I said, pulling the first sheet towards me and finding that it was an inventory record. "I just had a gloomy thought."

He took the paper from me when I started to scribble on it. "Tell me what's wrong. Is it what I said yesterday?"

I sighed. "No, it's not that. Today's my birthday."

A slow smile spread across his face. "Well, we can't let the day go by without something happening."

Before I knew what was happening, Luther snatched my hand and tugged me into the main area of the Archives, seeming more like a child than the thirty-some man I knew he was.

"Everyone, today is one of our newest soon-to-be Archivist's birthday!" He called. "I'd appreciate if you wouldn't get me in trouble as I take her somewhere special to celebrate especially considering that we're not going to get any work done today!"

"That was embarrassing," I told him after I had managed to escape the crowd of well-wishers. "You couldn't have just told them that we were going to go see this 'wonderfully exciting' place."

My mentor merely chuckled and continued to lead me an unfamiliar way through the streets. Curiosity was the only reason I didn't wander in my own meandering way, spinning fantasies about the happy families that lived in those homes.

"Where are we going?" I asked, the portion of the city still unrecognizable to me. "We haven't ever been here, have we?"

"I suppose it's only fair that I tell you, birthday girl," Luther mused, halting in the middle of the street. "We haven't been here before because I've been saving this building for a special occasion."

Engineering. That's where Luther took me. The place where most of the artifacts were lent out from the Archives as they tried to recreate the best of the world before the Infernos.

It was where I met him.

He was lanky with a certain grace to him as he fiddled with some little machine on the table in front of him. His eyes weren't visible, but his dark curling hair just barely skimmed the top of his ears.

My fifteen-year-old self wouldn't have called it love at first sight, the thing that was only read about in books and forbidden books at that. She called it forbidden love, a love even more potent than my parents' had been.

The feeling that I had that day, looking at that young man intent on his work, was not the healthy kind of love that I was looking for.

It was the dangerous kind, the kind that sparked rebellion and swept empires off the face of the world. It was the kind that stopped my heart in my chest as he secured one last screw on his project and released it, revealing that it was a tiny mechanical bug.

It was the kind of love that made you realize that you would kill to keep that person near you forever.

My newly-turned fifteen-year-old self wouldn't have called it love at first sight, but she would have fainted if his callused hands had cradled her as gently as he did that little bug.

She nearly dropped to the floor when that young man, that engineer, took his eyes off the soaring creation and locked those cyan orbs firmly on hers.

His name was Luke, and he was five years older.

He was forbidden fruit that I shouldn't have looked at, much less touched.