Night

Cassandra

Niju's flat has always been eerily quiet during the dead of the night. Perhaps it was the sleepy, low-lit neighbourhood. Whatever it was, Cassandra would not have a wink of sleep tonight. 

She sat in the soothing inkiness of her temporary bedroom, blinds drawn and bedsheets upturned. Niju got the ceiling repainted, she thought, after staring at it dutifully for the past two hours. This nagging feeling at the back of her mind had kept her company. But it's efforts for her to sleep were wasted.

Rika's dead. Cassandra slammed her fist on the mattress for the twenty-fifth time.Her hand bounced off for the twenty-fifth time, leaving a red mark on the side of her palm. She most likely wasn't the only sleepless one tonight. Damien. Rika was his sister. 

Maybe she should check up on him and see if he's fast asleep but she dejected that plan. If he was sleeping, she didn't want to disturb him. She hated seeing those lifeless, blank eyes of his, as if a fog came over them. It all began with that phone call. 

She should've been able to comfort him but she wasn't Alison Gates. Cassandra didn't have the qualifications of a therapist, only qualified to offer some words of what she hoped was solace. 

 This brought back recent events to her. She met a girl with an eyepatch this afternoon. "I'm not a compulsive liar," she had told the girl. "I lie when I have to." Which in her mind, translated into 'I lie only when the people I love or an innocent is in danger.' And that thought brought her to wondering whether learning taekwondo and wielding her powers actually protected anyone but herself. 

After a good five minutes she concluded she had only saved someone else, stranger or not, fourteen times in the last ten years of her life. And that was pretty depressing. All the rest were saving herself. 

So what was the point in saving other people if they can't live their lives well? They waste it, play with it and under-rate it anyway, so just end it? Cassandra immediately banished that thought from her head. Maybe some of Alexander's cynicism was starting to get to her. Alison might have agreed too. 

 "Gah!" she whisper-shouted, raking her straight hair with her fingers. I should stop thinking so much and prepare for night school, she mentally told herself and did just that. Heck she even put on some decent clothes-a shirt with a Hunger Games mockingjay and black shorts. A part of her wished she was Katniss Everdeen and helped lead a rebellion against the Capitol, but here she is: being the last free one of her kind and running away from a mighty organisation called The Crow that wanted to experiment on her. 

That thought made her immediately throw off the t-shirt and replace it with a dull grey one. I'm on the Final Tribulation now, she consoled herself. I'll beat this and be free like a mockingjay forever.