Where we are now

CHAPTER ONE

chapter one

gail

I press my fingers against my cracked lips, wondering why they get chapped so easily. Looking up at the old ceiling, I laugh to myself and sit up, looking around the room I've grown up in. Four grey, dirty walls with one small hole on the left side. The door below me is locked from the outside and they often let us out of the dark. One small skylight opens up the room, but barely. The small mattress in the corner is old, but it works. Aurelia and I share a bathroom but she doesn't like it. I think the fake bright lights bother her. The place is a mess. They only clean up once a year, when the reporters come. With the outside world thinking us Genes are treated well, they have to live up to it.

Tap. Tap-tap. I crawl to the hole in the wall and look into the room next to mine. Aurelia's blue eyes stare at me in fear. "Hey, Aurelia." The corners of her mouth turn up slightly, but it's a fake smile. I hear her trapdoor shut and I know she just returned . "Did they stick you in the pool again?" Nodding, she reaches her hand through the wall and makes a fist, the reopens her hand. I take it in mine and pull it to where the light is. She sighs and closes her eyes. I can feel her relax against the warmth.

Aurelia came a year after me. I was only seven, so I don't remember too much. All I know is they taught her never to speak a word. I remember when we first met and she whispered only one word to me. It still lingers in my dreams.

"Hey. Come here. What are they doing to you?" I asked, reaching through the hole. A young girl with brown and blonde hair peered at me through space. Her blue eyes shone and her freckles almost sparkled. She couldn't have been more than a year younger than me. Her small face held pain and sorrow and I wondered what they could have done to make her look that way.I motioned her towards me. Shaking her head, she wrapped her arms around her chest, gasping heavily. "My name's Gail. You're gonna be okay, I promise. Can you tell me your name?" Shaking her head she walked towards me. "Why can't you talk." I kept asking. She began to breathe heavily as she motioned for me to look through the hole. I pressed my ear against the wall and she whispered, in the quietest voice. "Pain." Her voice was so enchanting, I fell back onto the ground and gasped. Her voice echoed in my head, but it was other words. Not just pain. "Help me."

"They hurt me."

"Let me out."

"I'm dying."

It was like she could tell me everything I needed to know with one word. All the pain and the horror she had gone through in the last hours were rippling through my body. I don't normally feel pain, but I did that day and I did my best to completely incinerate it from my memory.

It didn't work.

I never asked her to talk again. Her voice remained in my head for weeks. Almost drove me mad. I am mad, but her voice wasn't the reason. I think they taught her to associate speaking with pain.

Again, I don't feel pain. I never have. They torture us here but with me? Oh, they have a hay day. The older you get the worse it gets. The torture, anyway. When I was first brought here, they strapped me to a table and took hundreds of different tests on me. I felt nothing. After the first few years, they gave up trying to discipline me. A few years back they hired an attendant who beat me bruised and bloody trying to get me to scream. I never did. I may not have felt the pain but her voice still haunts me. I shiver and glance into the mirror across the room. My dark red hair falls in many knotted braids with one band over the front.

I love my hair.

Beads, braided strips of old clothes all hang from it. Red, deep red and full of life. It's the one thing I can control. I make bandanas out of old t-shirts to wrap in front. I braid it so it is wavy the next day. It falls all the way down to my waist. When the reporters come the first year to write a story on us, they tried to cut my hair to make me look better. It took three security guards holding me down to a table, until I snapped one of their necks.