The Gathering

Chapter One - The Girl With the Bright Blue Eyes

It's happening again.

The girl tugged on my shirt helplessly, looking up at me with her bright blue eyes. Technically it was only one eye. The other eye was hidden behind a black eye patch. I see, that's where her Indent is.

"Please, help-" Her words were cut short by a tranquilizer shot that pierced her back. Her left eye widened, and she fell to the ground.

I moved aside so the Field Capturers who shot the dart could do their job. The people around me walked by, not wincing at the sight of the 5-year old on the ground. This was a regular scene for them now, and to be honest with you, it was to me too. The almost self-knowing routine of not saying a word to people of the girl's kind was something you'd get used to if you lived in a remote town like this. After all, all the hot spots for these types were in areas far from the city.

One of the FCs held the girl up so that her face was facing me while another ripped her eye patch off, revealing her indent. I'd admit, her Indent was quite pretty. It was a silver one that started from the end of her right eyebrow, creeping down and branching out like a spider web till they reached her right eye. It must have looked quite nice paired up with her blue eyes.

Remembering that I had to prepare for the town feast tonight, I embarked on my way home. My part in the feast was to make the town's signature soup dish, a secret recipe passed down in my family for generations, probably since this town's founding 400 or so years ago. I hung my coat on the hanger and looked to tie my hair in the mirror. It was always the same face that stared back at me; the same girl with hazel green eyes and jet black hair. I looked at her for a moment before tying my hair up and heading towards the kitchen.

As the soup was boiling, I turned on the T.V to watch my regular news channel hosted by my favorite journalist, Lawrence Gilbert and plopped on the couch.

"This evening we bring you the roundup of Day 7 of the Annual 300 Day Roundup.

In the West and North of the country, no captures were made.

In the East of the country in the city of Holds, Field Capturers secured captures with 4 Dreamers. One is identified as Edward Grounds to be the only adult male of the captured, with the rest being teenage females. 2 other Dreamers were captured throughout various towns in the region,

And finally, in the South of the country, 2 captures were made by Field Capturers today. One is a boy found a military base in Area 30, suspected to have been attempting to steal weaponry. Another is a young female in the town of Benign."

Benign? I guess the little girl made the news today, huh? And sure enough, after they finished flashing images of the captured on screen, the little girl was included in the shots, without her eye patch; her piercing blue eyes seemed to almost burst with an evil aura. For some reason, her eyes seemed to reach me even through the T.V screen. It was as if she was condemning me for ignoring her this morning.

'Well, no matter' is what I thought to myself after the news switched to the weather broadcast. It's not as if she was the first of them that I ignored.

The Dreamers came into this world 74 years ago, long before I was born. Their appearance was a shock to the world back then-they were people who had the ability to see into the future. Their coming was followed by a world catastrophe that wiped out half the world's total population. After that there came the series of small-scale wars that occurred between the Dreamers and us that shaped our society into what it is today. To be blunt, we don't see them as humans. There's no need for us to, after all, they're just a genetic screw up that happened along our evolutionary line. And so, to fix this screw up, the government allowed for the commencement of the "Annual 300 Day Roundup," a program whose only goal is to get rid of every last Dreamer in the world. Since the program started 4 years ago though, the numbers of Dreamers in the world is reported to have increased. The problem with the plan isn't that it's hard to spot the Dreamers, since their Indents give them away pretty quickly, it's that more and more people are born with this genetic mutation by the year-up to 1,000 a Dreamer births annually in Bellum alone now. Nonetheless, this has only caused support for the government program to rise.

The timer rang and snapped me out of my trance. I got up to turn the fire off and made the final preparations of the soup for the town festival. The town festival used to be about honoring the founders of this town. Its purpose was changed during my mother's generation, and now the town celebrates once a year to honor the Reaping of the Dreamers.