Under a Broken Sky

Chapter Four

The world isn't always as it seems; sometimes it's much worse.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Everything around me was gray-scale and suspended in time. My friends stood frozen in their poses. A glance out a window portrayed a similar scene. Someone had just tripped and their dropped apples hung in the air, never falling and defying all possible laws of gravity. Just beyond that, water hovered after a child jumped in a puddle.

Yet I could move freely. I wasn't the only one. The unassuming old woman was moving, too. She came around to the front of the desk and smiled. It was an uneasy smile, one given with the intent of unnerving the receiver. I would never admit it, but it worked. I quivered, looking from side to side for something I could use to defend myself if I absolutely had to.

"You won't be needing that, Aisling." The woman spoke, using my name even though there was no way I had given it yet. "You are safe here, for now. Don't do anything stupid and you'll remain that way."

Her tone was not that of an old woman who worked at an inn. As I stared at her, the wrinkles melted away, revealing rosy peach skin, smooth and clear. Her hair was no longer mostly gray. In the vast gray space around us, the flaming red color stood out even more so than it would normally. Even her eyes that seemed ancient were now brighter, a radiant green. Her voice, I realized, was snide and callous, almost taunting me with her words.

"I never told you my name," I said, unable to think of anything wittier. My tongue was numb and had difficulty forming any complex words. My mastery of English was fading each passing second. Or was time passing at all? I couldn't tell.

"I know your name, just as I know the names of your companions. Garth and Rhett. The three of you are from the nearest city south from here. You and your backwards idea of – what do you call them? – choosing ceremonies? Deprived of any chance to make real choices or be your own people, instead choosing to live cookie cutter lives. Boring and bland."

The hair on the back of my neck bristled and I frowned. "What do you know of my home? You don't live there. You don't know the difference the Choosings have made on our society. There are fewer wars, fewer crimes. Less hate and less uncertainty."

"Or so they tell you," the woman chided. "Do you have any idea how long it's been since that system has been in place?"

My brows furrowed. Of course I did. We were all taught about the wars and wide spread violence from a century ago. It was the majority of what we knew of that before time; there was never much room for talks of what was good. That's what we were living, the good of our world. It couldn't be any different. It's how things were, and that was all there was to it. I didn't have a chance to reply before the woman challenged me again.

"It was 30 years ago when the timelines split between the one your parents were born into and the one we now reside in. Some might lead you to believe it was some significant event that caused the shift, but what our scientists knew then and have learned in the years since is that any small decision could cause a split. Something as simple as whether or not to pick up a penny off the ground leads to two different outcomes, potentially, and each of those outcomes continue on independently and branch out into many, many more outcomes. Before anyone realizes, that one decision has spawned an infinite amount of realities, all very similar but different in one way or another."

I reached my hand back to grope for the chair I knew was there. I slumped into it, floored by the information she was telling me. Parts of it made sense, yet I didn't understand why this was relevant. I didn't grasp the finer details that would have opened my mind and filled the empty space with all the things I didn't know.