The Incita Virus

1

  A blonde curtain of hair stands between me and the girl, who keeps her head down and tucked into her knees as if ashamed to be near me. My eyes dart around the room, but all I see is black, black walls, black floors, and the black dress draped over the blonde girl's pale frame.

  She looks up and my sister's face is the one that greets me. "Emma," I want to say "Em, what's going on?" But my lips won't move. No sound is heard throughout the room until I hear her voice "Why Alice! Why did you try to save me! Maybe you could have saved yourself!" Tears roll down her face as she stands walking to where I lay in my wooden coffin . She walks over to me and closes the case.

  "You failed me."

Those words echo through my mind again and again as I wake, shooting up from my cot, my breath heavy and my entire body damp with sweat.

I try to shake off the memory of the dream, reminding myself it won't give me anything but guilt but it stays with me haunting my every thought.

I try and take care of my morning routine like always but the memory of the dream continues to consume my thoughts, I climb to the top of my bed frame and peer out the tiny window at the lawn, thinking that the small bit of sunlight I can get will help me clear my brain, but I'm just reminded of a time where we would be allowed out there. The privilege was revoked years ago after information about a planned insurgence in the yard was leaked. I sighed, my toes curling with the desire to sink themselves into the mud and grass

I saw my sister awake and starting up her normal routine and pulled out my journal, not wanting to seem suspicious. I flip to the next empty page and begin to write down what happened in my nightmare but I can't stay focused. I keep flipping to other pages and reading what I wrote as a young girl.

March 17th 2370

My birthday is in less than two weeks, I don't want to admit it, but I'm scared, I'm so scared. Eleven was the age that Mother got taken away and I don't want to leave her, I don't want to leave Emma, but it's inevitable, every girl here knows her fate, to be turned into a mindless baby factory. I hate this stupid virus! Just because our ancestors messed with radiation and other forces that they didn't understand we have to suffer! It's not fair!

May 4th 2374

They revoked our garden privileges yesterday, they said it was because of radiation in the yard, but I know it was the girls who tried to fight. They say we are here to do a great service to humanity, and maybe they're right but this is not the way to go about it. Why can't we have the same rights as everyone else?! These thoughts are probably why they took away so many of our books, to discourage other girls from getting the same idea, the idea that we can be more than this.

I close the journal with a sigh, the memory of the dream was slipping, leaving only an imprint of fear on my mind.

In the silence I'm left to contemplate the future and what it will hold. As much as I want everything to stay the same, I know it won't, life will change, Emma and I will be taken and separated. One of us could be sold to be a slave to a rich man, not only being forced to bear children, but having them separated from us at infancy, working the fields if boys, or the homes as girls. I sit in my silent torture room for what feels like ages (but what the clock above the locked steel door tells me is ten minutes) before I hear a sound coming from the bathroom. 

I cautiously creep around the bed frame and to the door and cautiously open it, expecting an attack, but what I do see is even more painful. Bright red blood stains the front of her dress, Emma sits hunched in the corner across from the mirror, head in between her knees in a fetal position. She looks up when I enter