Imbalanced

Chapter One

I was awakened each morning by screams; screams of terror for what the day held, which evidentially dulled to crying from children who would never see their family again, many who would never step foot off this property again.

I knew it wasn’t right, but that was how I’d grown up, it’s all I’d ever known. I couldn’t get away from any of it, no matter what I did. The more I ran, the worse everything would get, so by the age of twelve I learned to stop running.

Recently I’d been thinking about running off more and more often, but I couldn’t, not just because it was impossible for me to ever escape without getting caught but because I couldn’t bring myself to leave all the other children here.

I was the oldest of all the children here and the kids looked up to me like a big sister, I couldn’t live with myself if I were to leave them abandoned here –God only knows what would happen to them if I left.

At just the young age of six, I was ripped from my family and all I had ever known. It’d been twelve years since that happened. Twelve years since I’d last seen my parents and older brother. I was slowly forgetting about them, a memory lost every day that I was in this horrid place. All I could remember was my parents love for me. Every time one of us would leave the house they’d make sure that we knew they loved us more than anything. “I love you,” was said in our house more than anything else.

We didn’t get to say, “I love you,” one last time before I was taken. And I regretted that, hated that, more than anything. I wondered if they looked for me a lot. Sometimes I doubted that they ever had because here I am, still stuck in this God forsaken place; seemingly trapped here until the end of time, or the end of me, whichever came first.

I was the only child ever taken from a family here. If there was anything I could be thankful for over the years, it was that. The others here were all taken from orphanages. Most were used to being placed in different places, being tossed around like they didn’t matter. This prison we were trapped in was like another temporary house to them, at first that is, until they realized what exactly they did to the kids placed here.

It wasn’t temporary at all though. I, of all people, should know that. They’d keep you here, working you like a dog, putting chemicals in your body that did who-knows-what to you, breaking every bone in your body until there was nothing left of you but a hollow shell.

I was not sure what to call this place I was in except for hell. It matched the definition perfectly, except it wasn’t boiling hot like you’d expect hell to be. This place held a chill only it could possess.

The floor boards creaked as small feet shuffled across them. “Shay?” A small voice said. Little hands grabbed at my arms, trying to wake me, but I was already awake.

“Yes?” I asked, though I already knew what she wanted. It was Kylie, the youngest girl here right now, only five years old. She always crawled into bed with me in the mornings, whenever she wasn’t in the basement that is. She was just one of the many children here who woke up screaming every morning.

“I couldn’t sleep.” Her voice shook with every word. No doubt she’d had another nightmare.

“Come on up here.” I said, helping her up the bed to cuddle against my chest.

The thing about Kylie’s nightmares was that they weren’t just nightmares. They were much more than that. Her nightmares always came true in some way or another.

“What did you dream about this time?” I asked, bracing myself for the worst. Her last dream had been about Denver, a young red-headed boy who hadn’t been here more than a month at the time. In Kylie’s dream Denver had wandered outback, where we weren’t supposed to go without supervision, and he had fallen into the pool where he drowned to death. The weird thing is, apparently, he hadn’t tried to swim to the surface, he’d let himself drown, sinking deeper and deeper into the darkness. A week later that nightmare became reality as one of the doctors here found him floating, lifeless, in the pool.