The child, a runaway, an escaped experiment, an enigma. Taken by a man prepared to do the unforgivable. With hidden memories and a complicated past, she stands alone. Injured, abandon and on the run; no one to trust and nowhere to go. A stolen child...
In the quiet of the night, stars shone their brilliant light down from the heavens, illuminating vacant streets. A gentle breeze that smelled of spring and an oncoming storm whirled past. Through a sole window, beams of moonlight cast a silvery glow over a young girl. Her face was pale and shrouded in shadows, sea-green eyes scanned the horizon.
The pair of eyes belonged to a child; full of wanderlust she sat on her windowsill, legs swinging and hair blowing in the gentle wind. Wide awake and trembling with fear, the child named every star she could see, as if that would ever be enough to rid herself of the terrible fear she woke up to every night. Memories of hell fresh in her mind, there would be no more sleep for her tonight. The darkness; the fear; the pain. It was all too much. Perhaps no memories were better than this.
'Why me?' The one question that constantly flew around her mind. Why was she taken; tortured? Why did the Australian Secret Intelligence Service rescue her – why had they been looking for her? How did they know where she was? Where were her people – where did she belong?
Nat remembered that night so clearly – it was one of the only things that she could remember – men shouting, guns blazing, there was so much noise. The details were lost but the feeling remained. She had been so scared. Yet so filled with relief and hope when the red lights came.
Once Nat was safely back with ASIS, a woman explained to her how she had been abducted by a terrorist organisation. She was told that her name was Natasha Turner, (as she had only remembered the name Natasha, and nothing else) that her parents worked for the government, which was why she was taken, they guessed, for information. And when she was taken, her family fell off the grid, not even a whisper of who they were or where they went. But strangely, Nat had no recollection of her former family; she couldn't even begin to picture what they looked like. Being an amnesiac sucked. It made for some awkward conversations. 'Where are you from? I don't know. Didn't you ask your parents? I don't remember my parents.' Yeah – no. No, thank you.
ASIS was not allowed to tell Nat about her captors, because it was all top-secret information. Meaning that the only way Nat was ever going to find out what happened to her, is if she went digging herself. Apparently, hacking into ASIS was supposed to be almost impossible. But, the computer ASIS provided Nat with for Homeschool was connected with the mainframe, meaning that she could just trace their signal and hack into their mainframe from there, simple really. The terrorist organisation that took her, HYDRA, had a long record of abducting boys and girls between the ages of eight and fifteen, with only a small percentage of survival. Unfortunately, the information on what HYDRA does to their victims is kept on paper record only.
Just because Nat had almost no memories of what happened to her, didn't mean she couldn't speculate. Nat had a pretty vivid imagination. The added brands, tattoos and scars littering her body didn't help either. The disturbing nightmares could only allude to so much, especially when Nat couldn't hold on to the dreams. Every time she woke it was the same feeling of hopelessness and desperation. Every moment she lay there motionlessly, she could feel the memories slipping away, like smoke through her fingers.
Nat only managed to hold onto one thing from her past; a light blue anklet with a small silver dolphin dangling a few millimetres down. She had been wearing it since she first woke up. No memories. Not photos. Just a single piece of jewellery. Even then, she was ignorant of its significance to her past. Her mind was like a blank canvas: mouldable and vulnerable.
The silhouette of a colony of bats glided across the ground. An audible sigh of deep longing could be heard. If only she could fly. Then she'd be free to fly far away from here. But longing for the impossible was useless. It brought nothing but disappointment and false hope. Clearing her head of useless fantasies, Nat breathed in the cool, damp air – rain was coming.
Nothing in Natasha's life was constant. Always moving, always changing. Nat had no stability in her life, she was moved from foster home to foster home every few months. Nothing was permanent. Well, almost nothing. There was one thing. A Shadow.
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