Her

Chapter fourteen: Where (Edited)

Chapter fourteen: Where

"There's nothing in here either!" Abigail yells as she slams close yet another book on the table we are sitting at. I jump at the volume of the noise. Abigail and I are sitting at one of the tables in the library with books towering around us like tall buildings in a city; each with similar titles, but each unable to tell us the answers to the questions we wanted answers to. "There's not a single book in here which tells you anything about deformed babies or where they go or even anything about babies who don't go to The Institution at all," she says and slumps back in her seat. I understood her frustration; we had been at this for hours, looking through all these different books, which we had found in all different sections of the library. At first we thought it would be easy that the first book we picked up about Breeders would have to have something in them about deformed babies, but unfortunately that wasn't the case.

"Then we find another one," I say to her and Abigail groans. "I know its hard Abigail, but we will find the answer."

"But I don't know where else to look!" she exclaims. "We've looked at every book on Breeders, careers, babies, The Institution, I don't know where else it would –"

"Shh!" a fellow Breeder scolded from only a short distance away from her and Abigail offers her a glare before turning back to me.

"I don't know where else it would be," she whispers.

I didn't know where else it would be either because she was right, we had been through every book that it would be in, but in every one it said nothing. It must be some book somewhere, I thought to myself. Maybe we were just missing something. I thought about it and I thought some more. Where would information about deformed babies be? It seemed to be a topic that most people didn't talk about. Actually since being here, the only time I had heard about was when Abigail had said it, but before that I had never heard it talked about by anyone and I didn't even know it was a thing. It was like it was just something that was not talked about and more something that people just knew. But if people didn't talk about it, how would other people know? Well they wouldn't because that is what happened with me. So perhaps the idea could be forgotten, or not be written about or simply put away on a shelf somewhere gathering dust... then an idea struck me.

"I have an idea," I tell Abigail and hop up from the table and I hear Abigail follow behind me. I walk down the corridors of shelves of books looking for the section which would hold what I was looking for. My eyes skim all the titles of the sections; Careers, Babies, Breeders, Our City... but I keep going. I walk up and down the rows, going around corners and more corners, walking up and down row after row, until I finally came to the far back corner of the library where books were in fact catching dust and looked like they hadn't been touched and yet were the most important books out of all the books in this library put together.

The History of Our City

"Leah," Abigail says, pulling my arm, trying to pull me away. "We can't be here, this is the restricted area of the library  with things we're not allowed to read -" 

"But there about the history of our City?" I said to her as I showed her the title of the book.

"Yeah," Abigail says looking around. "But if anyone sees us we're going to be in serious trouble and I'm already on thin ice at is."

"It's going to be okay, it won't take that long," I said and I don't know what suddenly made me so confident, or made me so into the idea of breaking the rules. Maybe because I just really wanted to know, or I just really needed to know.

I flick to the front of the book to the contents page and my eyes move down the list of titles before my eyes go to one title in particular... The Beginning of our City. I instantly turn to that page in the book and begin reading;