Fireblood

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CHAPTER 1

I wake up in a dark cell. I feel groggy and my vision takes more than a moment to collect and join as one. I’m used to this feeling. The feeling of being drugged not more than five hours ago.

I look around my cell. Four grey painted walls, a narrow iron cast bed with a lumpy mattress and bedsheets the colour of rotting mold. A window, tiny and completely covered in dust and some disgusting gunk the that looked like sticky, moist remains of something that had died a long time ago, was built up high on the wall opposite the cell door, which was made of solid steel bars.

Actually, I can use one word to total everything up: dull.

No games, no entertainment, nothing. Also no other people around that I could talk to.

There is no wall clock and I don’t have a wrist watch. There never has been either of these time telling devices around. I never knew when it was day time, when it was night. I think I go through activities at usual times. There are alarms set for particular times of the day, all stating that it’s time for one of my daily tasks, one for waking me not included for I have a very strong biological clock. Now, I think it’s early in the afternoon.

Slowly, I sit up on the bed. I groan and hold my face in my hands, wanting the pain that is blooming in my head to go away. As much as I’ve become more familiar with this sensation than I’d ever want to be, I hated that it made me feel so sick. When the throbbing becomes tolerable, I look down at myself. I’m wearing a black tank top, a pair of black skinny jeans and combat boots.

I try to stand up, fighting the urge to throw up although my stomach was definitely empty. The simple act of standing on my own two feet proves to be more than hard. I steady myself with the sturdy iron bedpost.

The moment I take my hand off the bedpost, my knees buckle and I fall backward onto my bed. When I land on the mattress, sharp, painful pricks, like needles being stab into my skin ( I do know what it feels like), erupt along my back at the shoulder blades. I sit up and use my hands to feel for what is poking me. Instead of finding splinters (or maybe needles), which are what I expect, smooth feathers brush under my fingertips.

Then, I remember that my wings had begun to sprout yesterday.

I turn my head around to take a look at my new wings. They have black feathers and shaped like angel’s wings. And they are rather big. I struggle to stand up again but this time I succeed in doing so. I notice that my wings reach about an inch above my knees.

I wonder how I can use them… I think. Unfold. Please.

For a second, nothing happens. Then, slowly, feathers rustle and my wings spread out.

I grin at my success. So I need to tell you what to do, don’t I? I think.

Flap twice…

My wings flap once. Twice. The gusts of wind that they conjure lifts clouds of dust from the floor.

Lift me up…

My wings have barely begun to flap when I hear the familiar beeping of the security code being punched into the high-tech code pad attached to the door of my cell. I hurriedly stop my wings and end up crashing on the floor. Klutz.

A woman in a stiff white lab coat enters my cell. She has in her hands a black piece of clothing. She is wearing a navy blue button-up shirt and black trousers underneath the coat. Her blond hair is fixed up in a perfect ponytail, not a single hair is out of place. A hockey mask covers her face.

“Artemis 846?” she asks, using my code name to address me.

I nod. My hair falls in front of my face, the long bistre strands covering my right eye.

She comes over and sticks a small white rubbery plastic square with a pulsing red light in its middle on my left temple. I hear the object make a whirring sound and then a series of clicks. Then, it sounds off a beep and the light turns green.

This little device-the white rubbery square-is encoded to me. Sticking it on my temple will activate a series of micro-sized needles-hate the little sharp buggers- which sink themselves into my head to detect if I’m really me and not some clone they think I would’ve left behind to trick them if I escaped.

Dummies. Like I really have nothing better to do than to leave behind such an amateur deception if I really did escape, which I have tried and failed terribly at doing.

Immediately afterwards, the woman stands up and gestures for me to follow her out of the cell. “Come with me,” she says, her voice coming through her hockey mask. “Fall behind or make a sound and I’ll have to shoot you.” She pushes her lab coat to the side far enough for me to catch a glimpse of a shiny silver pistol strapped to her belt.

I scramble up quickly and step out of the cell. The woman hands me the black cloth, which is actually a black pea coat, and slams the cell door back in place and walks away, down the corridor with me at her heels.

She leads me along corridor after corridor, past other cells, all unoccupied. Occasionally, she glances back through the little holes in her mask to make sure I’m still with her and that I’ve put on the coat. Then, she takes me down a flight of stairs. Every wall is made of old crumbling grey bricks and the floor is solid cement.

The last few steps end in utter darkness. The woman lights a match and grabs a rust covered torch from the brick walls, lighting it as she descends down the remaining steps. I stare at the torch as I continue to follow her, thinking if the access to electricity was limited down here. Torches. How primitive.

Finally, we come to the end of the corridor. A steel door was built into the wall. The woman digs a key out of her coat pocket and unlocks the door. The door swings open without a touch and the woman points at the darkness that lies beyond the door, meaning for me to enter.

The door looks like the mouth of a monster, gaping wide open. I imagine that razor teeth, sharp enough to split a strand of hair, might come sticking out in a second, all ready to tear me to shreds. A one way detour down a gullet. Shiver. I wonder if this monster likes winged teenage girls. I wonder if it’s hungry.

I don’t know about you, but I think sixteen is too young an age to get digested.

 I shake my head, terrified of what I might find behind if I were to listen to her. There was no way I was going go inside.

The woman sighs. “You must,” she says “you have no choice, and neither do I.” I refuse to move again. “You must do as I say. The Earth is dead and if you proceed to resists my orders, we all are too.” she growls at me.

She moves to take hold of me, to toss me into the room behind the menacing door. In my panic, I start to fight her. I feel rough hands grasp my shoulders and I scream out in fear. I punch something. I’m not sure what it is, but it’s enough for the woman to activate a switch on the wall which gives out a blaring siren, calling for reinforcement.

Soon, there are at least three  other people are trying to restrain me. I scream again and again, but nobody comes to my aid. Then, I feel the prick of a needle piercing the skin of my neck and the excruciating pain of chemicals being pumped into my bloodstream.

Like, I said: Hate those little buggers, needles.

My veins feel like they’re burning, fiery demonic fire coursing through them and smouldering everything slightly human and awake about me in its path. I can tell the dosage has been increased for it never hurt so much.

The drug works in a few short seconds. My limbs go numb, like they’ve been stuck in a tub of freezing water, cold enough to turn a cup of hot cocoa into ice within a few seconds (I’m exaggerating here so don’t judge me!). My fingers feel like they’re going to fall of, just like that.

I feel my head loll to a side as I’m being shoved into the little dark room behind the metal door. The space is small and it’s like there isn’t enough oxygen inside for me. I gasp, trying to draw breath. My mind fuzzes up. I can think straight and I think hear gears whirring in the background.

There is nothing but a faint buzzing in my ears as I blank out.