Broken

Prologue

I wish I had known what was coming. Maybe I would've been ready for the adventure that would change me forever, ripping me from the same old routine I called my life. Back then, four years ago, I was a little girl going through my preteen angst like everyone else, short dark brown hair, hazel eyes, and olive skin. I had glasses that I hated but needed so desparately, given the fact that I was as blind as a bat. And don't even make me talk about my braces.

So blah, blah, blah, I was like any other typical tween girl, worrying about my pimples and blemishes. I had known nothing of love and sacrifice then, President Chalice prevented that. When we were babies, we all had to get a vaccination that stopped us from loving anyone. Not even our parents. That wasn't so hard for me at the time, growing up with an abusive father who never gave a damn about me. His perfect facade kept anyone from thinking anything was wrong. But night after night he would get angry and hit my brother, Aaron, and I. My caring mother would occasionally stop him from hurting us badly, which usually ended up with her getting a beating too.

It didn't matter though, all the coaxing we tried to make him stop. My mother couldn't leave him, couldn't say a word about what went down inside the walls of our perfect little home. President Chalice would have us killed. It was against the law to leave your chosen soulmate here the West. The Division stopped love and divorce and remarriage years ago.

The Division was in the year 2068, when America fell into a national depression. People stopped getting married due to the fact that women and men alike would get cheated on, broken-hearted, and abused. That means people stopped having babies, and that means the population got low. What didn't help, was that at the same time all around the world, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes and more natural disasters struck the Earth, killing more than 1 billion people. Then electricity stopped working suddenly, killing off a couple million. Then sicknesses killed about a billion. So, in the year 2100, the world went from 7 billion people to 3 billion people.

To prevent any further population decreases, President Chalice created laws to make sure our existence was not in danger. But, it was not that simple. Oh no, the East wanted love to be freely chosen by the people, not by the government. So a war between the East and West ended with a bang—literally. The West got their hands on some modified nukes and blew up the entire East.

Now it is simple: from the day we are born, we get a shot to stop love, then we get a locket with a unique symbol. When you turn sixteen, you have to go on a journey to find the person that has the same locket. The farther away you go, the colder and more painful the locket becomes. The closer you go, the warmer and more pleasant the locket becomes. Then after months, years, even decades, you find your lover and everyone is perfectly happy.

I can't believe I ever thought that was okay, but how could I have known? I never knew what love felt like, how your insides twist and turn and how it's so amazing yet painfully sweet at the same time. How could I have known that real love felt like you could soar in the sky and escape all of existence? How could I have known that love was vital to a human's survival, for without it we become less and less human everyday? And isn't that the point of humanity, to be human?