The Touch

Chapter 16 - Slade's story

I was born in London and brought up in Kensington. My upbringing had been normal in many ways, well normal to anyone born to a family classed as pure by the Government, pure being that the blood line had no children born with The Touch.

I attended Hill House School when I was younger which was for children who came from influential and wealthy families, basically it was full of very spoilt kids who thought they knew everything and that the teachers were lower class servants. I, on the other hand, was brought up with parents that saw money as only a means to live and get a good education, but did not believe that they were higher in society then the butcher down the road. I suppose the fact that they had both been brought up in families who had a lot of money that was inherited and not earned by themselves, made them into people who wanted to change that for their child. Both my parents defied their inheritance and worked as lawyers.

They had their own practise in town, Maxwell Law, where they specialised in criminal and family law, and they were also members of the underground network called the CWT. I had not discovered this until I was about seven years old when my mother and father had had an argument over her attending a meeting out of town. My mother had always been a strong believer that anyone had a right to live the life they were given, and no one had the right to tell you otherwise. She was well known for raising issues against the government's policy for taking away any children with the Touch and executing anyone else they could find that associated with those who had it.

Neither of my parents had been born with it and I was also not born with it. My mother explained that sometimes it could skip a generation or two but no one in our family had ever had it, so it was unlikely that I ever would.

Both of my parents explained to me the devastation of seeing Marlena Gael and her family killed and they vowed that they would never stand aside, instead they would fight against it. They had explained about children being taken straight from birth and tested to see if they showed any signs of having it. Parents would scream and try and take their children back but The Watchers were always there and if you resisted it was jail or you were shot where you stood.

They told me stories about children being born at home and being hidden away, but somehow most were always found. In the end people knew that having a child meant you had a high possibility of losing that child as soon as they were born. This had a huge impact on the population by the time that my parents were pregnant with me. In fact most people had decided at a certain age to undergo sterilisation to ensure that they could never have children. The risk to some seemed too much to bear.

My birth had been very hard on my mother and she was unable to have any more children after me. I knew deep down that she had always hoped that she could have had more children so that I could have had brothers or sisters so that if anything happened to her or my father then at least I would still have some family.

I often wondered if she knew something bad was actually going to happen to either of them as our conversations often revolved around what to do and who to see if something did happened.

She was right to tell me as it did happen.

My mother was murdered when I was fourteen years old.

On that day I was at home as it was the middle of the school term break. I wasn't planning to be home but my best friend Theon's parents had taken him out to visit family so we had to cancel the trip into town that we had planned. Looking back on it now I remembered that I didn't mind that it was cancelled as I had the most horrible gut feeling that something bad was about to happen.