Chosen Ones (3 page)

“Tess, you are not to do anything like this again.”

I shivered at the sound of my name.

“Not under any circumstances,” he continued.

I found my voice. “Yes, sir.”

“And Tess? You play beautifully.” And then he actually smiled.

Chapter 4

After dinner, I spent the hours that supposedly belonged to me shifting through paperwork in order to claim my sister���s remains. Idiotic. As if everyone in the compound didn’t know she belonged to me. Or at least she used to. While Robert was Emma’s husband in the eyes of the naturals in the compound, the council didn’t recognize the marriage. As a result, all legal and family matters now fell to me.

As I signed my name to the document that gave me ownership of her body, I felt more repugnance for the compound, for the formality and audacious ceremony of it all, than anything I had seen at Templeton. The chosen ones had the right idea. They didn’t put on costumes and acts of sorrow. A dead body was a dead body.

That night I dreamed of everything I was afraid of. I was alone with the boy from the piano room. But we weren’t playing the piano. He reached for my hand, and I let him. I just allowed myself to feel his skin against mine.

It was a nightmare.

The next day’s assignment was less colorful than the previous one. My task was to clean up around the grounds after the Introduction Ceremony. During the ceremony, the young chosen ones were required to perform an array of tasks before the higher-ranked members of the council. These activities, rumored to be focused on the chosen ones’ physical abilities, combined with a series of interviews, were the official start of the bidding. Each subcommittee within the council would review their notes and lobby for their desired candidate. Then chosen ones would report at the end of their training at Templeton to the council member who paid the highest price. They had no choice but to comply. From what the naturals were told, though, they had no other desire than to fight for our country. They wanted nothing more.

That was part of what made them so different from us naturals: at some point we had stopped fighting the enemy. We grew tired of a war that seemed eternal, and we became more content with destroying ourselves. At least then we wouldn’t have to wait around for the Easterners to do it. We could control our own end.

The Miles Incident.

We began to terrorize our own people.

Miles was a small town, one ravaged by the effects of the fall of our country. Most of the town’s males had joined the army because it was a way to provide for their families, not because they believed in the cause. Out of the seventy-five fathers and sons who went to war, only four came back. Those four came up with a plan. A message.

They strapped explosives onto their children, their blood. They turned on a video camera. They placed the triggers into the hands of their wives and let the world see their demise.

They would rather destroy what was left of the world than live in it.

The naturals gave up our power then. We gave it all away. We wanted to save our world.

The council convinced us to embrace the creation of artificial life. Let the soulless die in our foreign war. Let those without souls bring our country back to greatness. And when we the naturals died, our women no longer able to give birth, the chosen ones would inherit the earth they fought so hard to save.

I would spend the next couple hours at Templeton cleaning up after a party celebrating the chosen ones’ eagerness to defend the naturals. The Introduction Ceremony was the first step in their lives of service. There was a variety of subcommittees a chosen one could be selected for during his time at Templeton. Since most of them were particularly good fighters, they would join the militia’s subcommittee to fight hand and foot against the Easterners. Guns and other weapons of mass destruction had been outlawed during the Treaty of Modernization a couple years back—no Eastern or Western army could use them in battle any longer. It was rumored the Easterners created a chosen-one army of their own, but none of us naturals had ever seen it. Some even whispered the reason behind the treaty was that these artificially created humans had been, for lack of a better word, upgraded. Like superpowers or something. Moving crap with their minds.

Not all of us were gullible enough to believe those rumors.

But there were other subcommittees, too. I didn’t know all of them, and our council didn’t seem too keen anymore to keep us informed. I knew we had a committee of explorers who went out into the Middlelands and searched for survivors or usable resources in the places where the bombs first fell. There were also chosen ones selected to be bodyguards for members of the council.

A natural had never been allowed to witness an Introduction Ceremony; I was only allowed to clean up after one. My supervisor had given my orders without so much as a whisper of the previous day’s incident. Apparently I had passed my first day’s test. The chosen one from the piano room had kept his promise.

I realized some part of me secretly hoped that he had told. I didn’t want to owe him anything. Just thinking about the scarred chosen one made my skin explode in red blotches like a flare in the dark of night, warning of some attacking army.

I glanced at the girls walking ahead of me toward the lawn of Templeton. They looked rather silly. I noticed how their hair hung low down their backs, hiding their slash marks. I never bothered, always choosing to wear my hair up. I wouldn’t be ashamed. It wasn’t a part of me. It was my duty.

The girls linked arms and giggled as they separated from me. I never shared these types of moments with girls from the compound. I wasn’t sure if this was because they kept their distance from me, or because I pushed them away.

It didn’t matter. Not really.

They wasted their free time flirting with boys from the compound. While they knew, as we all did, that nothing could come from it, they seemed just the sort of pretty girls who lavished in the attention of others. I was above such acts of stupidity. My sister’s body was proof enough where that sort of feeling, that attachment, could lead you.

I slung a bag over my shoulder and headed out on my own. I wandered the grounds for hours, picking up trash, stuffing my bag till it was full. My plan of throwing myself into work was such a success that I still had two hours left of my shift when I had completed the task. No clues remained to shed any light on what had actually occurred at the ceremony.

Instead, I was reduced to a glorified maid. I picked up barely stained silk tablecloths that would no doubt never be used again. The amount of food wasted by members of the council was astounding; piles of plates half covered with leftovers littered the lawn. Some of the food I didn’t even recognize. I watched as a few of the other girls snuck bites, but I wasn’t so brave.

Gwen thought me too slow to fill my bag in such a short amount of time, and she wouldn’t expect me back so soon. If I had been like the other girls, I would have attempted to work in pairs, spending more time talking than working. But that just wasn’t me.

I debated for a short while the idea of going back for more work. But I feared my next assignment would be in Templeton, and I didn’t desire running into any of the Templeton boys. Especially mine.

Mine?

I remembered how the chosen one’s hands had caressed the keys, and my stomach tightened at the image. There was so much passion to the way he played. Could someone, something, like that really only desire war?

Whatever he was, I didn’t want to see him again.

I decided to wander instead of returning to the mansion for more work. I knew what awaited me when I got back to the compound—more pointless arrangements for Emma’s burial. I sought solace in the open air. It took a while, but eventually I came across a bit of woods toward the end of the property. I thought briefly back to the days when I would have found comfort in such a place. But even nature had been tainted. Nothing was sacred. Nothing was above corruption.

The heat was unbearable for the peak of fall. It was as if nature didn’t know how to behave, either. I decided to rest under the shade of a large tree. I undid the top two buttons of my shirt, the loose strands of my hair stuck to my sweating face. My breathing slowed. If I didn’t move an inch, maybe it would cool down. I would become stone.

Something jarred me from my moment of peace. It was quiet and low at first, but suddenly it got louder and very close to me. I felt an insurmountable sense of disorientation; the sounds were so alien to me. It was only as the moments crept on that I realized I was hearing a mixture of laughing and yelling. Why did it take me so long to recognize it as noise coming from humans?

They were the sounds of people, and I was quite sure they were not my people. Maybe if I kept still enough they would not see me, would not hear me.

Templeton boys. Chosen ones—five of them. I had never seen this many in one location at one time outside of a wrangling or deportation.

Most of the chosen ones would soon be shipped off to command posts throughout the Western sector, working alongside the council to devise and implement ways to fortify the boundaries against attack. Only those who had been found wanting, lacking, receiving no bids after the Introduction Ceremony, were left to monitor one of the thirty compounds in the Western district. They would be stuck babysitting the naturals. Even my people understood it to be a mark of shame.

But these men—boys—appeared to have no concerns that such a fate awaited them. They looked as if they had been playing a game of some sort. Their faces were flushed from running around and they held their shirts in their hands. I noticed how their bare chests and backs were covered in a variety of bruises. Was this a result of the Introduction Ceremony?

Of course the bruises were nothing a good creator couldn’t fix in a matter of moments. Their whole physical being was a testament to the power of science and illusion. I reached up and trailed my fingers across my slash mark.

It was as if this movement somehow alerted the group to my presence. Their eyes bore into me like I was a science experiment, and I felt a growing sense of mortification as they continued to stare down at me. Why did they linger?

He was there, too, the boy from the piano room, and I felt my heart beat a little faster at the sight of him. His face didn’t show any sign of recognizing me, though I noticed how his fingers tapped furiously against his side. So much emotion seemed trapped within those fingers. I remembered how his hands had moved across the keys of the piano and I shivered.

From disgust or something else?

“What is this thing?” a boy asked, sizing me up.

“It is what it is,” another one of them said. His words snapped me from my dizzy recollections. His eyes lingered on my shirt, focusing on the undone buttons. This seemed to be rather amusing to the others, as they all laughed.

“Are you lost?” one of them asked with a sloppy grin. It was weird to see them so…so unrefined. My knowledge of the chosen ones was very little, scripted in the sense that we only saw them as they wanted to be seen, but in the time I had spent around them, they seemed to be so emotionless, so controlled. The two chosen ones assigned to our compound barely raised their voices when a fight broke out over missing laundry or the volume of someone’s snores. They would coldly look over the culprits, demand they stop, and the incident was soon forgotten.

My mind wandered to the sight of the mangled reject bleeding onto the floor. What sort of training changed these boys into the humans I was taught to revere above all things?

“It’s lost, all right,” another laughed.

I hated myself for my inability to speak at that moment. I wish I could claim it was out of defiance, but I knew it was from fear—not fear of these monsters, but fear of something more instinctual, fear of revealing how unnatural I was. I stood up weakly and made a move to leave.

Why did it have to be so hot? I felt dizzy.

“Look, it’s embarrassed!”

Their laughing was becoming unbearable. One of the boys stepped in front of me. I tried to move around him but he was faster.

“She must be new.”

Another one took a step toward me, and I instinctively took a step back. The action caused the boy to grin, like this was another game for him and his friends to play. He was just as stunningly perfect as the others, but there was something in his eyes that left me feeling naked, like he could see right through me if he chose to and I would be unable to stop him. He wore his power proudly. “Are we sure she’s a she? I know she’s a natural, but damn, she’s ugly.”

It wasn’t like I’d never heard the word, but it had been a while since anyone had bothered to describe me at all. I had worked so hard at disappearing that to be acknowledged at all still felt wrong. Besides, I hadn’t invited this boy to judge me. Before I could make sense of why my appearance mattered to a chosen one, the boy yanked me to him by the wrist. The suddenness of the movement and the closeness of another person, chosen one or not, caused my breath to burn inside my throat.

“I guess we should check and make sure?” he asked his friends as he winked at me. Before I could protest, the boy leaned down and grabbed the hem of my skirt.

This wasn’t right. This wasn’t right.

The chosen ones were supposed to protect.

“George, stop this. You’re scaring her,” the boy from the piano room called out. He didn’t sound angry. More like bored.

George dropped my skirt and sighed. “Who does she belong to? Any of you?” he asked.

“She’s not new,” the boy from the piano room spoke up. Then, in a sudden succession of movements, he pulled his shirt back on and grabbed my wrist, pulling me away from the group. His hand gently held onto mine, and I wondered if it took all of his concentration to hold back the strength I knew coursed through him. The chosen ones weren’t created to play nice.

“I guess we can count you out of the game?” yelled George, his voice no longer holding the amusement he’d showcased only moments before. I heard it between the notes—suspicion.

The boy holding onto me shrugged as he continued to move us away from the crowd. “I guess so.”

“Slow down,” I begged as I stumbled.

“No.”

I could still hear the boys behind us laughing—that damn laughing. They were calling out words I didn’t understand.