Perfectly Scarred

The Unfortunate Case

"How do you know about Lisa?" I ask, suddenly suspicious.

I begin to question my instincts again. Is this a setup to try to find Lisa? Dahee has mananged to somehow make Ms. Bennett and the guards diasappear, and now she's searching for Lisa? Are they using Alpha to find out the information from me? I cant trust her. This all could be a trick to catch Lisa, to catch me. I'm not as gullible as I once was. If anything, that attribute was my main flaw. My eyes are open now, wide open to everyone around me, but I also know I need to be smart and try to learn as much about Lisa from her as I can.

"You're right to be suspicious." She says. "That'a good. You're wondering how I know all this. Lisa didnt receive much, if any, coverage in the wake of you and Shey Lee and its safe to say the Society doesnt like stories of Failures At Birth children searching for their Failure parents."

I try not to react to this news, even though Lisa mentioned it to me, I cant help but still feel like my mind is whirling, my stomach churning.

"Im sure you know the children are not allowed to search for their biological parents. First, they're taken away from their Failure parents and locked up in an institution for eighteen years to teach the Failures out of them. As soon as they reach 18, they are released. If they searched for their parents, even so much as think about it, they're branded as Failures. Loyalty to their own flesh and blood is seen as disloyalty to society. "She shakes her head, the anger causing the veins in her neck to pulsate. Despite my fear that this is a setup to locate Lisa, Alpha's anger on this subject is certainly not fabricated.

I think of Lisa's words and her file, the file said that Lisa received a brand to her chest which she actually did. This would add up if what she's saying is true. I decide to believe her, but Im still not true if I can trust her.

"Lisa should have waited a few months," she says angrily, almost as if she's directing it at me and it was my fault she did this. "They always keep a close eye on their students for the first few months to make sure they dont search for their biological parents, but she searched for them too soon, almost like she wanted to be caught.." she trails off, eyes studying me for my reaction. I don't respond to her. I'm too stunned by what I hear, too moved, feel sad for Lisa. I want to hug her tight right now. I wish I'd known this earlier not now that I don't know where she is. I thought she was an empress for being too strong, somebody who had done the worst possible act but really all she had done was the gentlest. The caged animal who paced and fought and looked like she wanted to fight the world has merely tried to find her parents, who were forced to give her up as a child because they were failures. Lisa mentioned it before, that she is the daughter of Failure parents, but it still struck me in ways that I can't explain. Does knowing this fact change my opinion of her?

Yes, it does.

She's spent years being endlessly brainwashed, being told that her parents were worthless, that she was better than them, only to search for them too soon after hes release. Her love couldnt be broken; she won. She is braver than I's thought. She is the empress I believed she was.

The comments Jessica made about her in the cells now make sense to me, she was a "bad egg" coming from a "bad parents" the society painted them; Judge Kim's flippant comment about her being "Failure to the very core of her being". It's true. She never even had a chance, het trial must have been a joke. She was branded as soon as she was born, she was never going to lose that. Maybe Alpha's suspicions are right, maybe she did deliebrately want to become Failure. Maybe she wanted to become who she really was for better or for worse, and not somebody the Society had reared her to be. The more I think about her, the more she goes up in my estimation.