Beautiful Things

Four

* PAUSE *

"Who's the boy?" Danzel asked.

I sighed, rubbing my temples.

"Just watch, will you? His name will come up eventually."

Danzel gave me a wary look before playing.

* PLAY *

I woke up. I was still on the floor. The bee was still hovering near me, metallic eyes fixed on me.

But the doors were closed, and a section of the wall had slid back to reveal a wardrobe.

Clothes!

I jumped to my feet.

I could do with some clothes.

As I searched through the wardrobe, I noticed all the clothes were the same.

Plain army green shirts and green khaki pants.

Hot . . .

But I wasn't about to start complaining about clothes when my situation was so much worse.

As I got changed, I focused my attention on the weirdness of the time, trying not to think about how all the clothes perfectly fit. Time didn't seem to exist here. It was still day outside when I exited my room, my door sliding back as I came near it. It was like the air was frozen around me. My ears popped.

This time, as I came into the hallway, it was bustling with life. The garden bellow the hall was alive and teeming with kids.

They all looked around my age, and they all wore the same. Some of them cast me wary glances, but most walked with straight backs, heads down. And each one had some sort of huge bug following them around.

One girl that passed had a locust flying behind her. That thing must've been the size of my forearm. As it passed, the buzzing it emitted a lot louder than my bee, I was grateful that I had been given a less disgusting creature.

"You're awake," I looked to my right to see the boy who had the same bee as me leaning against the wall. "Took you long enough."

"What?" I frowned.

"Everybody you see here has been awake for at least three weeks."

"Three weeks?" I gasped. "How long have I been gone?"

"Three weeks."

"That can't be possible."

"Whatever they were pumping us full of, it took a little while longer to register than with these kids."

"Us?" I frowned as the boy started walking. I followed determinedly, noticing that my door slid shut when I stepped further away from it. "Did you just wake up?"

The boy nodded.  "A day before you ," he said. "And I was a lot quieter about it."

I blushed. I looked over my shoulder to see our bees flying strangely close to each other. As I looked around, I didn't see any other insects flying close to each other.

"What are they?" I asked.

I didn't have to explain what I meant. The boy knew.

"Bots."

"Like, robots?" I asked, trying to inspect mine closer.

"Yeah. But not. BOT actually stands for Biographical Observation Team. They shape them like bugs because that's how they define us."

"Define?"

The boy stopped and turned to me quickly, pulling me close.

"Everybody else got out three weeks before us. I think that us with bee bots are different."

"How do you know?" I whispered back. He looked around, as if somebody would be listening. The traffic of people continued to flow around us, the constant sound of buzzing filling the hall. A door opened to the left and another child stepped out, a ladybug following after her.

She reminded me of the boy that I had seen before. 

The boy pulled me into her room quickly without her noticing. The door slid shut behind us.

"How are we going to get out?" I hissed.

There's a tapping on the door and we looked to the door, startled. Outside, the silhouette of two bulbous bodies hover at the top of the door. Our bees.

"Look, we only have a few moments before they figure out how to open those doors. There are a few others, with bee bots," the boy said. "I was the second-last awake, before you. Nobody talks to us. I know all of this because the others with bee bots have been awake for at least a week." His voice was hushed and his grip on my arms was urgent.

"Why are we here?" I asked. 

"I don't know. Apparently there are classes. Yesterday, when I saw you, everybody was in class, that's why nobody was around."

"What are the classes for?"

The boy swallowed.

"I don't know. The other kids with bee bots say that they aren't allowed to tell me. The bee bots watch and hear everything we do. If we disobey rules, we'll get in trouble. And that isn't something we want to experience."

"How did you meet the others?"

"After I left you . . . in your room . . . I wandered around for while. I passed him-"

"The boy in the room?"

"Yes. He was screaming like there was no tomorrow and there was blood all over the other side of the door. Anyway," we both swallowed nervously, the tapping at the door becoming more persistent, "I found a cafeteria. I hung around until lunch, and they found me. It's lunch now, so if you want to meet them, we're going to have to move quickly. They don't like to stay put for too long."

"Why not?" I asked as we faced the door.

"The other kids bully them."

"Three weeks and they're already acting like nothing happened?"

"That's the thing," the boy swallowed again as red light shone through the semi-transparent door. Our bees were scanning the door like the dragonfly did. It slid backwards. "Nobody remembers anything before here."

"But we do."

The boy only nodded as the bots flew in.

"This is not your room," the bots' voices were mechanical and male. "Trespassing is forbidden."

"Shit," the boy cursed. "I didn't think about that."

"Punishment must be inflicted," the bees said.

"Punishment?" I swallowed. "You said that this is something we don't want."

"Guess we're about to find out why."

I still remember the way he clutched my hand.