Finn lies immobilised on his bed. The cover fell off a while ago due to his frequent tossing and turning. But then the last nightmare had gripped him so tightly that his outer body could no longer move. But his mind still could. Not that that’s a good thing.
In his dream world, Finn s staring open mouthed at the grotesque figure in front of him. It’s Blaze… but not Blaze Blaze. Not his Blaze. Her mouth is bent into a cruel and twisted grin, yet her green eyes stay void of emotions. In one fluid movement, she tears the front of her shirt open, but instead of her chest, an open cylinder is all Finn sees. The front panel is swinging open on hinges, showing a beating heart, sparked with electricity instead of blood. Wires hang off around it.
And somehow Finn can tell that this isn’t the end to the nightmare. He’sright; in his hand is a sharp, short, silver knife. This hellish idea of his sub conscious is that he must kill, murder in cold blood the girl he loves.
Already, the knife is forcing itself up, into the knot of pulsing wires. His hand shakes furiously, his mind trying desperately to control it.as a last resort, he tries to drop the knife and turn his head away, but the dream will let him do neither. The blade plunges into her electric heart and black ichor explodes everywhere. And her scream… it haunts his mind and echoes in his ears.
It’s still there, still ringing when he wakes from his agonising prison of make-believe Rolling out of the bed, he dashes to the adjacent bathroom where he vigorously pukes. How could his mind even think up such a horror?
He’s afraid that the Borough changed Blaze, changed the characteristics of who she is. He already knows that they made her more robot, one step closer to being ‘perfect’ in their eyes. But surely they wouldn’t do anything like he saw in his dream? How did they modify her in the first place?
Perching on the edge of the bed, Fin places his throbbing heavy head in his hands. Think of something happy, Finn. A world where Blaze is just like she was before. One particular memory springs to the front of his traumatised mind, immediately soothing it. Five years had passed and he could still remember this moment in such detail:
It was late into the afternoon when Finn and Blaze finally managed to sneak away from their normal lives. Having met three months ago, the twelve-year-olds had become close friends, and they knew everything about each other. Well, almost everything.
Their meeting place was a deserted courtyard, a place where they had both come just to think, but found each other instead. The ruins provided excellent games of climbing and catching, and when you reached the top, you could see the whole Borough.
It was Blaze’s idea to start digging. Four weeks into the discovery of the quad, she had fallen while messing around on one of the walls and cut herself on something sharp. A piece of metal. Finn, of course was more concerned about the bruises on her head and the huge gash pumping out blood on her arm. Blaze just shrugged the injuries off – she didn’t care about appearance at all, not like other girls – but she let Finn tie his shirt around her arm as a bandage.
Roughly, Blaze began scuffing the ground with her foot. Soon she uncovered a piece of metal that Finn didn’t recognise, but she obviously did. “It’s a piece of a hovercraft!” she explained, her eyes shining with excitement. “We can try and rebuild it!” Finn could already imagine the weeks of fun they would have trying to make the rusty old thing work. He smiled, happily.
It was later, on the top of the broken walls, after several pieces of hovercraft shrapnel had been revealed, that they sat. Staring at the sunset, Finn gathered enough courage to ask a single question Blaze. The one that he’d been meaning to ask since he got to know her and her stubborn ways. “Will you be my girlfriend?”
Blaze looked him up and down, taking in his mussed up hair, bare chest (his shirt was still on her arm), her blood on his hands and the dust all over him. Her green eyes glittered and her mouth stretched into a wide grin. She too was a mess, but Finn meant that in the nicest way possible. She was still beautiful in the light of the setting sun.
“Yes.”
