Our Forgotten Souls

Chapter One

The streets overflowed with chatter.

As the sun beat down on the black pavement, the shouts of vendors, joyful screams of children, and the casual talk of acquaintances filled the air. Smells of roasting meat and fried dough wafted from small white tents lining the sidewalk. It would almost be nice if it weren't so brutally hot. My leather jacket and brown denim pants stuck to my skin, encapsulating me in the heat.

I didn't mind too much, though – I had much bigger things on my mind.

I pulled my black cotton hood over my head as I moved closer to the city's center. It was easy to tell. As I neared it, the shouting grew louder, the bubbling excitement of the city infesting my heart and soul. It wasn't that I had anything in particular against the happy people walking by me; it was just that I couldn't help but think of the horrors under the surface.

A young male vendor shoved a stick of fried chicken toward me. "Chicken! Chicken only a dollar! Going fast!" he shouted, and I kept walking. These people would get right in your face. The only way to stop them was to ignore them completely.

I brushed by a gaggle of teenagers shouting about who knew what. They giggled and glanced down at their cell panes. I wanted to roll my eyes. Since the cell pane was created – a thin sheet of translucent glass that acted as almost any technology you could want – regular cells had been going out of style. Sure, they looked cool, but I preferred something a little thicker and more physical.

Of course, it wasn't like I had a cell anymore. It'd been a long time since then.

Almost there.

I knew this route by heart. I took it every morning, bringing a pencil and notebook with me. It was the only thing still keeping me sane.

I turned the corner and was finally able to see it.

The board.

The only thing that mattered anymsore in this city.

Names upon names were listed. Hundreds upon hundreds, thousands upon thousands. Every couple of seconds, the screen would switch, and a name would be highlighted as people checked where they were on the list.

The most prominent names were the first five, labeled accordingly.

Roland Lenox, Penny Lenox, Dobrev Lenox, Taylor Lenox, Fitzgerald Lenox.

Everyone knew who they were. They didn't need a gigantic board in the center of the city to let people know.

But they had one. They had one for a very important reason.

I pushed through the crowd towards the line of people waiting to check where they rested on the list. I snuck around the line, keeping my head low. I wasn't normally a fan of cutting, but the work I was doing was a lot more important than them checking where they were.

The list wasn't just any list. In any society, people were aware that there were the rich and the poor. If you were rich, you knew it and so did the rest of the world. If you were poor...well, I guess it didn't matter who knew, you were screwed.

The city of Antheia just opted to make things a little clearer.

If you were number one, you were the richest. If you were lesser...well, you were ranked accordingly.

I was nowhere near the top. But I wasn't so far down that I had to fear for my life.

Somehow, I managed to find a spot near the front of the line. The people I snuck in front of had been too busy talking to bother noticing. They looked cheery. They were definitely higher up on the list – their nice clothes were an obvious giveaway, but so was the nonchalant way they were checking their ranking, like they truly didn't have anything to fear and were only curious. I wished I could be that carefree.

Finally, it was my turn. I stared at the machine in front of me. It was a little scanner, meant to read the chip placed in all of our arms at birth. The chip didn't track us or do any of that weird conspiracy crap that some people claimed or feared. It just was an identity chip. It let the government keep track of who was in the city and allowed everyone to remain safe without fear of outsiders. It let us into buildings and let us find where we remained on the list.

The screen flipped through a bunch of names before finally stopping nearly at the end. It highlighted my name, smack dab in the center of the second to last page.

Marion Courtenay.

I kept my face blank. I didn't even speak as I turned and walked away from the station. I knew that the richer ones behind me were probably staring after me in pity. But that wasn't why I'd come there.

It was pretty easy to play the part of an innocent poor girl desperate not to be on the bottom.

I smiled to myself as I pulled out my brown leather notebook. The pages were dirtied and worn, but it didn't matter. What mattered most was what was written inside.

Numbers. Numbers upon numbers. And I saw the numbers I needed in the corner of that screen. I saw how far the list went.

The screen wasn't just to boost the rich's egos. It wasn't so people could pity the poor. It wasn't even to encourage them to do better and reach the top.

The list was a solution. A salvation, according to the government. The list was a manner of controlling the population of the planet and keeping us all alive.

I scribbled the number. Twenty-nine. Twenty-nine births this month.

And unless someone did something about it, twenty-nine of the lowest ranking citizens would be gone four weeks from now.

And something was exactly what I hoped to do.