Counterfeit

-fiftyone--

--fiftyone- 

CHARLESTON WAS RIGHT in the fact that I would never be ready enough to understand the ways in which The Surge might be affecting me, or how it might kill some of my friends if we didn't do something; nothing in the world could even begin to prepare me for news like that. But he was wrong about him knowing me better than I knew myself. 

I didn't know what led me to making the choices I had, but I knew who those choices made me. I knew who I was when he hadn't been here. That mattered. 

I couldn't say a lot for certainty, but my 11 months in The Dormir hadn't left me unchanged. I felt so far from any previous idea I had of myself; stronger, as if I had learned to grow again without the familiarity or presence of Charleston. I could feel him so resolutely in all of my recognition, in a way that told me how fiercely I had needed him before. 

I still needed him now, of course, and I wanted him too. But it was different somehow... There was MiKinley and Ava, Thea and Patrick; more people that mattered, people that I couldn't lose. 

If Charleston just understood this, realized that these people inside of here meant the entire world to me, then he could figure out why I was so afraid and hesitant all of the time. Why I couldn't always be brave. 

But as I sat down in the Mess Hall with my friends, studying them all individually, I couldn't fathom the thought that even one of them wouldn't be here. And I didn't yet know that it would be the last time I would look at one of them and not know that they were already half-way through the process of dying. 

Ava had the same tattoo as me, along with Patrick and Billie. I knew that they were also Research Developments, but whilst the tag suggested a lot, there was so much to it that I wasn't aware of. Things as important as what was being done to us, why they needed us in The Dormir, and if we had a good enough chance of survival. Still, maybe not knowing was better. Maybe it was easier to bare the load this way. 

Then there was Thea and MiKinley, neither of whom were the same, both contrasting from one another. Finally a certainty: at least one of them I would lose. 

But I needed to save them both.

This was the kind of thing I needed to talk to Charleston about. I couldn't even begin to understand a way in which I could save them because I didn't know what The Surge was, or anything else about the world I had left behind, or been thrown into for that matter. 

I glanced around the Mess Hall in search of him, equally trying to distract my thoughts from my dying friends, but he was no where in sight. Another glance back at my own table told me that Patrick also wasn't around. It was no mystery that they must have been together somewhere, but what could be so important that Patrick risked the consequence of not showing up to breakfast? 

If a higher custodian discovered that Charleston had been sneaking campmates out of routine practices, then that could jeopardize everything. 

I turned to MiKinley, wondering if he new anything about where his friend was. 

"What's happened to Patrick?" I asked him, aimlessly moving my food around my plate. I was too nervous to do anything but worry. 

"Patrick?" MiKinley asked. "He wasn't feeling great this morning so he didn't leave the cabin." 

Panic. Perhaps it was nothing, a mere coincidence at the most, something they hadn't told me, but the idea of one of us being sick was surely a confirmation of who was running out of time. It had to be, right?

I breathed out, tried to disguise the horror slowly burning its way through my veins, but the soot it left behind weighed down heavily in my heart. MiKinley noticed. 

"You okay?" 

I nodded, to my anxiousness, drawing along the attention of someone else. 

"Pip?" Avaline faced me. 

"She's fine." Immediately, MiKinley tried to dismiss her. 

I wasn't. But they didn't need to know that. 

Ava rolled her eyes at him, looking me once up at down before returning back to Thea. MiKinley still had his eyes on me, and despite what he had said to Ava, his questioning look told me that he didn't believe my answer. 

"I'm fine." I lied to him. It felt so wrong, but I had to get him to stop focusing on me. I needed to go find Charleston and Patrick as soon as breakfast was over, and I knew that MiKinley wouldn't let me be around Charleston if something was wrong. 

Whether I did a convincing job lying, or if MiKinley just knew that he couldn't help me this time, I managed to slip away from the group without interference. I headed over to the creek; whilst I knew it was unlikely that I would find them there, I think a part of me just wanted a minute alone to breathe before the entire universe would change. Everything would be different. Unkind, I knew that for sure. 

I felt the running water on my toes, stared at The Fog - stared straight through it, and relished in the last moment where life would be bearable. To my knowledge, the last time when everything would be okay. Afterwards, I began my walk up to the Grey Range, every step taking a toll on me. 

The door was already open and Alistair wasn't in sight, but I heard voices muffled by the long, treacherous hallway. I stepped inside, following the noise until I was right outside the door, right about to walk in and find Charleston and Patrick. 

I don't know why, but I waited. Maybe it was fear of crossing from the hall knowing that only the thin panel separating the two rooms was all that stood in between me, and my world's end. 

I could see Patrick through the gap, leaning against a table; he couldn't see me yet. And then Charleston appeared, pacing back and forth relentlessly. The heartache on his face drew me to enter, but what he said froze me in place. 

"How am I supposed to tell her that her best friend is about to die? That she won't ever see him again?" 

Him. My best friend. 

MiKinley. 

-fiftyone--

24/12/17

I'm sorry.