They're Watching You

Prologue

"Shh, be quiet!" Ear-splitting cries still pierced the tense atmosphere.

"It's a newborn baby," she said incredulously at her antics. "Give her to me." The kind-eyed nurse plucked the minutes old baby from the arms of the midwife.

The shock and horror seemed to have dissipated in the time it took for the nurse to console the baby and the mother had now chosen to recover the newborn's role of screaming where she left off by crying hysterically. The father had an arm around the woman's shoulders, attempting to hold in her wracking sobs as he failed to mask his own mortification.

"How could this have happened, there's nothing like this in my family history!"

The nurse glared at the mother, trying and failing to be professional. The delicate, innocent pink eyes peering up at her were nothing to be feared. They were to be cherished.

When the king had come into power only a few years ago, everything had been turned backwards, flipped on its side, inverted.

Now, people with coloured eyes were to be feared. 'Their eye-colour determined powers will drive us out of our homes,' the king had announced one day. The endowed, as they were now called, were dangerous and volatile in the eyes of the mass public, eyes which were grey.

The endowed, was their new name, as if they were the anomalies. No, grey eyes and no powers were the mutation. Granted, it is a mutation that is very common, but a specific name to describe those with coloured eyes was never needed in the past- when the Queen was in rule.

Side by side they lived, now they couldn't get further apart. The endowed had either fled or been taken by the king's army to... Well, no one knows where. There are rumours they were killed, there are rumours they were sent to some sort of institute, there were rumours they were shipped off to the realm of the faeries, they were rumours and rumours and more rumours; none of them verified and none of them disproved.

The father was now mumbling something about an aunt with blue eyes, endowed with the power of manipulating air, to the mother's outrage.

But this baby had pink eyes. The colour was even more unusual, even more peculiar than being borne to two parents with eyes of grey.

"We will take her into the special unit designed for this kind of situation," the midwife said it so gently, it was as if she thought that if she even mentioned what had happened in particular, the mother would start screaming again. "We have a team of people who transports babies of this," a slight pause, "nature to the King who will then take care of the situation as he sees fit."

King Brice was displayed on the television screen in the room. He was making an announcement but his wife was missing from beside him. He was holding a baby, it lay in his arms but was held slightly distanced from himself. It was publicly known that the king was expecting a child and just when the thought that his wife must be recovering from the birth entered her head, he stated that his wife had passed away during labour and that before any rumours were spread about the child, the baby girl was endowed with purple eyes. The nurse's immediate reaction was to think that it was karma for treating the endowed as nothing better than weeds in a garden but then she felt pity. She felt pity for the child that would have to grow up in such a hateful household. "Her name is Adelaide," the television blasted.

The midwife made an impatient noise.

The nurse took that as her cue to leave with the newborn in her arms. The unit for 'natural' babies was directly next to the unit for endowed babies. The only reason they were allowed so close was that it takes a couple of years for them to develop their powers and they are therefore not deemed dangerous, yet.

There wasn't anyone else in the corridor. The receptionist had a direct view of both the units but there was no way that she would be able to see the baby girl's eyes from that distance.

Walking past the room full of endowed babies, blissfully sleeping in their cots, the nurse felt a pang of guilt. Rationally, she knew that she couldn't save every child from that same fate, she wasn't always in the delivery room when they came along and it would be too suspicious if they all disappeared, but she was determined to save this one.

Every once in a while, she placed an endowed newborn in the wrong unit and made sure they were asleep before she left, eyes closed and indiscernible from the rest. She would then keep a close eye on them and immediately go to them if they woke up. When it came to the end of her shift she would then get the baby out of the hospital without anyone knowing. Most of the time, she picked the baby back up and pretended to take them to the new mother in the room nearest to the fire escape and then slip out quietly, the baby in her arms.

The baby cooed as she left the nurse's arms and was laid in the cot. Comforting sounds left the woman's mouth in an attempt to lull her to sleep, all while rocking her slowly.

She stared into those bright pink eyes and watched as they were obscured by drooping eyelids.

Pink eyes were rare, even for their kind. There wasn't a specific power it was destined to morph into, it had the ability to be anything, she had the ability to be anything.

The baby's eyes fell closed and could no longer see the nurse's grey eyes. Well, eyes that appeared grey.