Chapter 2

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I looked in the mirror, after applying my good makeup in my cabin bathroom. Looked good enough. I didn't even know why I was worrying about how I look. I never acted like this with Kevin when we were little. In fact, I always wanted to look my worst when I was around him because when we were six, his older brother told me that Kevin had a crush on me. This made me really freaked, so I tried to make myself as repulsive as I could by putting whipped cream in my hair, and eating garlic bread all the time. That's actually how I became kind of pudgy when I was about eight, because garlic bread became part of my daily diet just to prove that him wrong. Maybe I didn't like Kevin. I mean, yeah he left a little kid with a skin condition, and came back the surprisingly attractive man he is now, minus the skin condition. I guess in Orac they have the best skin medication in the country. Anyway, it didn't matter. Yeah, he was good looking, but that didn't mean anything. I was there to have fun, not worry about Kevin.

I guess it was a good thing that the war hadn't made it's way to the water yet. The war had only started a few weeks before. Which was why my parents dying was so shocking. I didn't think anything like that would begin happening for a while. I'd never lived during a war though, so I was completely clueless. The military was probably still getting recruits for the army. Because of this, I felt a bit sorry for Kevin. With the wars, the law was that all men and women age seventeen and over up to age fourty-five are elligable to sign up for the army. Thankfully for me, when women didn't sign up, it wasn't frowned upon. The army was mostly made up of men anyways. But when men didn't sign up, everyone kind of gave them the evil eye. I guess they thought of the men who didn't sign up as cowards. Kevin didn't sign up though. I don't know why, but if he didn't want to sign up for suicide, I wasn't gonna hold it against him. I wouldn't have signed up if I were him. To have your life in danger every day? I couldn't handle it. And I'm betting that's why Kevin didn't sign up. Although, sometimes, I thought about signing up just so I'd have the chance to rip the life away from the people who'd killed my parents. To avenge them. But then I remembered that this was real life, and that I could barely even lift my own suitcase.

I walked out into the hallway, and navigated my way to the restaurant where I was supposed to meet Grandpa. The weather was pretty nice and warm. I saw the sign for the restaurant and walked towards it. I looked off the side of the ship and thought I saw another ship way, way far into the distance. I blinked hard to clear my eyes, and looked back. It was still there. I wondered what it was. It didn't look like a cruise ship. It actually kind of looked like a military ship. But there had been no notices that the war had moved to the water. That was why the cruise had been allowed to go out. I decided to just forget about it. They wouldn't have let us go on the cruise if they knew there was even a little possibility that we were in danger. Right?

"Hey Grandpa!" I said as I walked into the restaurant, but stopped abruptly when I saw who was sitting at the same table by the window. "Oh, hey Kevin!"

"Hey" Kevin said as I sat down.

"Um, Ok, let me just say that I have nothing against you being here, and because you are here, we get the window table, which we wouldn't have had if it was just Grandpa and I, but" I stopped as Kevin gave me a questioning look. "What are you doing here?" I finished.

"I invited him!" Grandpa said cheerily.

"Oh." I said.

"Yeah, I thought that because you two haven't seen each other in a long time, you might want to catch up." Grandpa explained. "In fact, I was just thinking, what if I went to get another table just for me to sit at so you guys can talk by yourselves? Would you like that?"

"Oh," I said again, looking at Kevin. He looked back at me and shrugged his shoulders. "I guess, I mean as long as Kevin's ok with it," I said as I tried subtly shaking my head at him. He didn't get the message.

"Yeah, sure!" He replied cheerily.

"Ok, I'll get out of your way." Grandpa said, getting up from his seat. He winked at me as he passed by. Was I so bad at getting dates that my own Grandfather had to set me up? What had the world come to?

I sat down facing Kevin, who had a sympathetic face.

"Sorry about that." I said to him, desperately shoving the blush I felt creeping up to my face back down. What was wrong with me?

"Honestly, don't worry about it." He said. "It's nice to talk to you."

"Well, good." I said awkwardly. God, why was this so awkward? I looked out the window and saw the same ship I had seen earlier. But it had gotten a lot closer. Why was it getting so close? Were we having some kind of weird ship captain meeting or something? It didn't look like a cruise ship.

"Hey Kev." I said.

"Yeah?"

"Do you see that ship?"

He looked out the window and his brow furrowed, as though he was thinking really hard.

"Yeah I do."

"You know a lot about ships." I said. "Do you recognize it?"

He paused for a moment, thinking again.

"Um, It looks like some kind of war ship I think." He said carefully. This freaked me out more than I was expecting, because I was still scared about anything that had to do with the war. And the ship kept getting closer, and closer.

"I bet it's not, though" Kevin said quickly, trying to calm me down.

"Yeah, you're probably right" I said, staring at the ship. If there were anything wrong, the captain of our ship would probably have already alerted us.

I looked at Kevin, as he took a sip of his water. Ok, seriously, what was up with his hands? They were just the perfect size. Bigger than mine, but that wasn't really hard to be. I had grown a lot in the last few years, but my hands hadn't caught up to the rest of my body. I still had the hands of an eleven-year-old.

"So, shall we order?" I asked, getting the menu out. But before I could read the first dish listed, there was a huge bang, and the whole ship bumped, as though we had hit a big rock. Panic spread around the restaurant, and I knew that it was spreading around to the whole ship. I looked out the window to look for the war ship, and it had latched itself onto our cruise ship.

"What the hell is going on?!" I shouted, my heart speeding up by the second.

"I don't know!" Kevin yelled back, eyes wide.

"We need to find my Grandpa!" I shrieked. I looked desperately around the room, scanning the crowd looking for him.

"Ok, get up!" Kevin yelled, grabbing my arm, pulling me up out of my seat, and guiding me through the room looking for Grandpa. It was a dizzying blur of loud sounds, and people running, shoving, and bumping into each other. Alarms began going off, adding to the chaos. Finally, I spotted my Grandpa trying to manoeuvre his way through the zoo of chaos. As I pushed my way through, I realized that Kevin had disappeared from my side. I looked all around, and saw no sign of him. I looked back for Grandpa, but he had disappeared too. I stood on the tips of my toes, looking around for the two of them. But I couldn't see them. I spotted men in black clothing storming through the entrances. I couldn't tell who they were from their uniforms. They just wore black - nothing special about it. I found myself in a sort of trance, staring at one of the men in the doorway. There was something about him. He looked familiar somehow. Not in a way that I had seen him before though. Just something about the way he looked at me. I recognized his gaze.

Someone trying to pass me shoved me to the ground, where my head landed with a loud smack. The strong ache from the hit spread quickly all throughout my brain, causing me to feel dizzy. I pulled myself to my feet, and managed to stagger through the crowd towards the only doorway that hadn't been taken over by one of the men. As I walked through the doorway, an arm grabbed me, and covered my nose and mouth with a cloth that had a sweet, alcoholic smell. Chloroform. I stumbled backwards into the person who drugged me, my vision beginning to fade.  

"Beth Riley?" the man asked me. His voice sounded far away. As if we were at opposite ends of a long tunnel.

I tried to speak but my voice wouldn't work. It took all the energy I had left to slowly nod my head in response. My muscles weakened and I fell back, my body going limp. I looked up to the ceiling, and everything went black.

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⏰ Last updated: Apr 18, 2015 ⏰

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