Inherently Innocent

Of Lonely Children

The day had started badly.
Firstly, he had exploration duty, his least favourite class. That wouldn't be until the early afternoon, but still Thyme dreaded the moment.
He had attended history class in the morning, walking all the way to the inner circle of the settlement with his dad. After class had ended, Thyme stayed behind and talked with his classmate Xia. The two were complaining about having to learn the dates of all failed Apollo missions when glass shattered across the street.
An ishine with grass-like hair had thrown something to break a window. They must have been sent to hurt the school, or hospital nearby, but got confused and broke a residential window.
Thyme pushed Xia inside the school, afraid more glass would rain down, and afraid both her and the ishine would get hurt.
From the damaged house, a middle aged woman shouted at the guards to hurry and kill the weed.
The guards by the school door were quick to shoot. A single bullet and the nymph would fall. Thyme closed his eyes, unable to look at the dead ishine bleeding white from their wounds. It was a pity how frail ishine skin was.
The middle aged woman from the window turned to shout inside the house. It was almost an insult to the lost life how fast she had dismissed her execution order.
The ishine's body hurried to shrivel. It became an uniform mound, from which a small plant hurried to grow. A stem and leaves, already growing from the corpse.
Thyme's throat closed up, he was already thinking where in his house he could plant a new flower.
But the guards stomped on the sprout.

Then a video was broadcasted on a screen by RM Plaza. Thyme sat with his class in the perfect spot to joke about the girl's statue holding the screen.
It was a propaganda movie of Program Imaginaria, showing fancy dressed nymphs showing off their abilities. They smiled for the camera but their eyebags couldn't lie. Thyme laid back so the statue's hands covered the video.

Later that day, the dreaded moment came. He walked to the exploration barracks, leaving his father working at the school. They would meet again in the afternoon. Except they wouldn't.
He could have been thankful, after all he was going to miss exploration duty outside the settlement. But he wasn't thankful when the guards handcuffed him.
Thyme wasn't afraid for himself, rather for his father. If they came back to handcuff him at his school too, Thyme didn't want to think about it.
Then he was taken to Program Imaginaria as it was bound to happen.
Bound to happen.
Of course they'd find out one day. It was all his parents had told him since he was a child. It was all he had talked about with his mother. It was all he had planned on. From the moment he started thinking, from the moment he knew his mother was an ishine, his incarceration was bound to happen. It shouldn't have been, his mother argued, but they had to prepare because one day, it would.
The plan was simple, escape at all costs. But he had done it again.
He had spoken to the girl and wandered into that bright side of his head, how her life had been. How each life in the line had been.
Thyme didn't feel like that was a hole to fall and follow a rabbit in. Rather it was a mountain. The ground beneath his feet raising him up into the sky as life stories he imagined piled underneath.
So the plan wasn't simple. It could never be if there was a risk of endangering one of those lives. Or even end one.
No, he couldn't think of that. He just had to change the plan.
The handcuffs had been removed. Liliac laid next to him in that uncomfortable-looking feathery dress, asleep with a concerned frown.
The sun came in through a small window with the hues of the sunrise, but there was no way to discard the option of sunset. Even so, he could have slept through the light hours. As far as Thyme knew, it could have been days.
He smelled under his arm.
It couldn’t have been days.
His arm ached from raising it, so he rolled his sleeves to see a bruise on the inner side. A broken vein, possibly cut with the edge of a needle. Blood analisis, Liliac had said. He pressed the bridge of his nose to relieve the headache that crawled up his neck. He looked around to avoid thinking of his insides.
The cell was small, but decorated. There were bunk beds to a side, a toilet to the other. Then the concrete walls were empty, except for the carved drawings of years back. Some were eyes, some were flowers. Some were even simply spots. Thyme wondered if they were an attempt at recreating the constellations.
“Liliac, can I call you Lee?” Thyme whispered to the sleeping body on the lower bunk bed. For a moment he felt envy, since he had woken up on the floor. But of course she wouldn’t answer, still he felt like asking. “Lee, wake up.”
He repeated the words and found no answer. He tried to move her hair away from her face. The weird hairstyle had come undone and was now a loose cover for the right side of her face, and a perfect rag for the floor dust.
It seemed too perfect to be dyed, but colourful hair, skin, and eyes were common traits among ishine and nymphs. Thyme wished he had inherited some of his mother's traits. She had done everything in her reach to look like a human, and managed to pass as such for years. But her son wondered how she could have looked before that life, when she walked and shaped the mountains of the distajce. Thyme wanted something like that. Something to mark him as a nymph. That would have brought him trouble earlier, but he could have also displayed it with pride. There was pride in his human traits though. His father was the best he knew.
“Lee, wake up,” He insisted, shaking the girl a bit, but she wouldn’t answer.
He stood and knocked on the metal door, but there was no more answer than the echoes through the outside hallways.
When remembering the time that had passed, Thyme thought it would be better to take off his binder for a while. Facing the wall, he changed before taking it out and putting his shirt back on. He took a deep breath and relaxed his shoulders.
“Lee, wake up,” He repeated. He lifted the purple hair, silk-like to the touch, away from her eye.
And that time she did. She lifted her head and sat up, still with her eyes closed and the hair undone over her eye.
“Lee?” She asked, possibly surprised to be addressed by her surname. To Thyme, it was just the ongoing tune of her name, “What time is it?”
“About to be noon I believe,” Thyme looked in diagonal out the thin window, trying to see the hue of the sky, and then back to the purple and rainbow hues of Liliac, “I don’t know what time we were put here though. But we’re getting out.”
“You’re not thinking of doing that again, are you?” Liliac whispered, looking over her shoulder at least twice.
“Yes, I’m exactly talking about it. I just have to get my hands on some ground. This doesn’t really count, I can't do much more than shake this concrete around. I need the earth to bring this place down” Thyme put his hand against the cell floor as if trying for a second could have tested it. Indeed, it didn’t count.
Liliac looked down at the piece of ground he had touched.
“You're going to kill us all. How did you do that?”
“Do what?”
“The earthquake thing, idiot,” Lee moved the edge of her hair behind her ear, but the flow of it still covered her eye.
“Why so hostile? I’m just trying to be nice, we’re two nymphs locked in a room and you call me an idiot?” Thyme moved back but refused to lay against the wall.
“They’ll kill us if you do that again. That Host, he tasered us when we didn’t do anything. And if you tried what you say on actual grass? Imagine that a hundred times worse.”
A hundred handcuffs didn't sound like such a bad nightmare.
“Cove Marull,” Thyme mumbled.
Liliac nodded.
“The host," She whispered. She was visibly surprised that Thyme knew his name.
“He’s the governor of the settlement, Lee. What rock do you live under?”
“The rock is called Program Imaginaria and you’re in it right now."
Glenn Heseltine, Thyme's father, often worked with the Marulls. They were close in age, and both children of first settlers, but they couldn't be more different in opinions. The Marull twins were vocally against the ishine ever since the first attack, while Glenn had often defended them, and had had Thyme. He also remembered when Cove had visited his home, with his unique motorized vehicle and fancy white suits contrasting his dark skin. He recalled how Cove had talked about the school Glenn worked in. The man had even messed up young Thyme's hair, long and straight back then, when his head was at the height of his dad's hip. There was a Marull family member in Glenn's new class, so Cove wanted to make sure they excelled. That was how the Marulls were, always trying to get their kids to stand out. Legacy, heritage.
Liliac grinned and stood, walking to the door to knock.
She didn’t want to talk. Alright. Didn’t have to be so rude about it.
A small buzz was heard in the distance, the very same one that announced a door being opened.
The guards weren’t going to take them out peacefully, not if Thyme’s handcuffs had been removed.
He hurried to the slim window, slowly starting to hit it in a crescendo. The glass didn’t even shake when Thyme was already hitting it hard enough to turn the side of his hand red.
“We have to avoid them. I’ll try to hit them and you’ll run away, ok?” Thyme ordered Liliac.
“What? No. I’m following the guards. I have to work if you want to have dinner. If you want to get yourself killed, it’s up to you. I won’t be part.”
“What- the- hell!” Thyme clapped between each word, “You’d rather have dinner one night than be free the rest of your life?”
Liliac turned to exhale. Her breath shook.
“You’re forgetting your shirt,” Liliac pointed behind her with her thumb, refusing to look at Thyme.
He didn’t answer. Unlike her, he’d rather leave his binder behind and survive.
The door opened, an armed guard behind.
Liliac walked out, her feet light on the concrete ground. She even dared spin to look at Thyme on her way out. The feathers on her dress puffed out like a threatening pigeon. The purple haired nymph walked away through the corridor, away from Thyme's gaze. The guard didn't follow her. He looked at the guard, the opaque helmet hiding their stare. Thyme frowned and walked out in search of Lee. The guard's heavy steps echoed behind him.
Other nymphs walked past, whispering at each other and peaking inside Thyme's open cell.
He looked sideways. Opened doors, more cells. There might have been five to the left and three to the right. All nymphs had left to the dining hall, which Thyme assumed worked as a common space too.

How could you not think about escaping? By being surrounded by bars and armed guards.
A metal door closed behind Thyme as soon as he walked into the room. A line to get afternoon rations had already formed, with about two dozen nymphs waiting for their small bags and water. Right by their side, a guard walked back and forth with a gun on display by their side. The other guards were by the doors and walls, talking to each other. There wasn't tension. Just agreed submission.
Thyme approached the nymph in front of him at the line and asked.
"What is going on?"
The nymph turned. Her arms were bruised red, with purple stains under his skin. Plenty more broken veins than Thyme had.
"You're new," She smiled. Her teeth were faintly tainted yellow. "We're just getting food. Then we can go back to the field, or studies. What were you assigned?"
The nymph held Thyme's hand. He could feel the bones underneath.
"I don't know yet," He pulled back, discreetly cleaning his hand against his pants.
He instantly felt remorse. He was the rude one now. He held the nymph's hand again.
"Tell me about the field. What's your name?"
The nymph brushed her short brown hair, dull and greasy. The only feature Thyme could take away were her dark green eyes, and how they smiled.
"Ocarina," She leaned in to whisper, "I really liked what you did before."
Thyme smiled. They were on the same page.
They would escape. It was bound to happen.