By Evelyn Lupton
To all the readers, and young writers that someday wish to become authors and bless the world with their words.
Chapter 5
I wait for a while. It feels like forever. Surely it’s just because Dad is taking a while to process Mum. After all, we’re not exactly human. But I don’t think it should be taking them this long.
I sit down, tired from flying all the way here. Today’s been a hard day. I can’t even begin to think about my massive plan. It’s something I’ll have to do later. This means so much to me and I’m sure, if other hybrids knew about it, they would care a lot too.
I feel a breath down my neck. Warm, but cold. I turn around to a boy, probably the same age as me, holding a gun.
“If you follow my orders, I won’t shoot,” he says, looking directly into my eyes. His black hair flows in the wind and falls onto his face. I feel my heart thumping in my head and chest.
“What do you want from me?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
I know I shouldn’t. I can’t. I will die. I want to fight him.
I launch at him and latch onto his arms, holding them to the sky. He fires a few times. I kick him in the chest and he is pushed away from me. The boy is stunned on the ground.
“I’ll ask you again,” I yell at him. “What–” He fires, misses. “Do–” Miss. “You want–” Miss. “From me?!” Miss.
He begins to laugh. “I’ve heard,” he says with an evil smirk on his face. “That you have been planning to break into the headquarters.”
“How do you know this?”
“Not telling. Just wanted to let you know that…” He looks at me intensely for a moment, then fires the gun. “Your wing is bleeding. I’m sorry, oh my goodness!”
“What are you doing here? Get away!”
“No! I just wanted to help you, that’s why I’m here. I want to help you break in. I was just… intimidating you, I thought that would make you want me to help you. I don’t normally–”
“Stop. Just stop.” I’m mad. I’m so mad. “Go away.”
“Please. I work there, I can get you in,” he says with a sincere look on his face.
“Why? Why did you shoot me? Why do you want to help me? Who are you?”
“Number 1, I wanted to intimidate you. Number 2, I hate the government. Like, really hate. They killed both my parents when I was just 10. I’ve been living on my own ever since.”
“But you haven’t answered the last question,” I say, inquisitively.
“Alex. I am 15 years old, half hybrid.” I could tell, not because he didn’t have any wings, but still had horns. I thought it was strange at first but then I remembered what Mum told me about half hybrids. “So, what do you say? By the way, you never told me your name.”
I don’t know what to say. I’ve never worked with anyone before, but he might be useful. I can’t take long to think about this. He’s looking right at me, expecting an answer. “Fine. My name is Agnes. Where can I find you?”
Alex smiles wider, then tells me to meet back here tomorrow. I smile too.
“I need to go now. See you tomorrow, Alex,” I say. Now, I need to go into the hospital and find Mum.
<><><>
Room 108. That’s it. I know that Mum would’ve insisted on having her lucky number as her room. I knock on the door and see Dad’s unhappy smile through the small window. He opens the door with a sigh.
My heart collapses when I see Mum on the bed. Lifeless. I run to her and kneel beside her. “Is she okay? Is she going to survive?” I say.
“They can’t say just yet, so, yeah.” He can tell I’m not happy with his response. “But… I think she can get through this.”
“I hope so…,” I say, but my voice is unhopeful.
I sleep on the visitor’s chair for the rest of the night, but I can’t seem to doze off. I think back to today.
“Mum! Dad!” I yell. “I heard them coming, I heard your scream! I knew I could save–” A loud squelch echoes throughout the room.
“No!” I shoot up, sitting up straight. I look over to Mum. She looks the same. “Dad?” I say. He looks up. “I have something to tell you…”
“Go on.”
I explain to him how I’m going to break into the headquarters. I tell him about Alex, the person who came up to me. I feel a bit relieved at the end, but not as much as I thought I would.
“Listen. I understand, and this is an amazing plan, but this is something that you must do without me. I believe in you, I always have, even if sometimes it doesn’t seem like it. I love you, Agnes.”
“Thank you. I love you too, Dad.”
I sleep most of the night after that with few interruptions. Sometimes I wake up from fear, but other than that, I sleep pretty well.
I wake up early in the morning, before Dad is awake, before the sun is awake. I look over at Mum. “Mum,” I whisper. I don’t know why. She won’t wake up, it’s impossible. Suddenly, her eyes open. “Mum!” I try not to be too loud. “I’m going away for a while, but I’ll be back, so don’t worry about me.”
Of course, I don’t really know if I’ll be back, but I’ve always seemed to avoid death. I slowly tip-toe to the door and wave goodbye to Mum. She smiles. I try not to cry, and smile back. I open the door and head out, my head hung low.
Once I reach the exit, I am greeted by Alex.
“You good?” he asks, with a sad smile.
“I might never see my parents again,” I realise slowly. My eyes begin to water, and Alex can tell. He puts his arms around me and tries to comfort me. I wish I could say it was working, but it isn’t. I’m still crying.
“May I ask what happened?”
“Mum got stabbed. By government people. I… I don’t know why!” I break out into more sobs. “If I die on this mission, can you tell them what happened to me?”
“Of course, but you aren’t going to die. You’re strong, I could tell that from the moment I met you. The way you didn’t move when I fired my gun, you’re so brave.”
“Thank you, for this. Let’s go.” I wipe tears from my eyes and begin to flap my wings. I look over at Alex and realise that he can’t fly. I can’t hold someone while flying. We’re going to have to take this journey on foot.
Chapter 6
I take him through the forest, trying not to think back to the memories I have here. Suddenly, I see a tree that looks familiar.
“You are weak. You are weak.” I turn around and see a crowd of people. “Who would love you?” I don’t know. No one. No, stop! I love myself. My family loves me, I don’t care if you don’t. I shake my head and try to get rid of this dream. It isn’t working. This is a dream, this is a dream. It must be.
“Arghh!” I yell, holding my head.
“Are you okay?” Alex says, obviously startled by my sudden shouting.
“Yeah, yeah, just… memories.”
“Okay… Anyway, where are we right now and how much longer?”
“You’re like a child. We’re in the Darklands right now, and we should be about halfway there.”
“Great.”
<><><>
Don’t freak out. Don’t freak out. I see another point that I remember. We’re almost there, it doesn’t matter. I can see the end of the Darklands.
She mouths something, then says it louder. “You are not my daughter. I don’t know you.” She turns around again, and continues walking away.
“Mum!” I shout again.
“Agnes, are you sure you’re okay? You keep on freaking out, and it’s starting to scare me.” He looks at me, confused.
“I don’t know. I keep on having these flashbacks. It seems like they’re real life. I’m sorry.”
“Just try to chill out, okay?” He doesn’t understand. I bet he hasn’t had the virus. I bet he doesn’t even care. He probably just wants some massive revenge thing. I’m not looking for revenge, I’m trying to save the hybrids.
Why did I think this could work? We are nothing alike. Maybe he did want to shoot me. Maybe he still does.
“Agnes, I am on your side, but we need to be able to work together to make this work, okay? We know, like, nothing about each other. This is going to be hard, but we have to try.”
Finally, we reach the end of the Darklands, and the headquarters is in sight. “Okay, we have to sneak in the back entrance,” I say in a hushed voice.
“There’s less security there.”
“Exactly!”
We walk just out of sight to the back entrance and try to open the door. It’s locked.
“Wait, I have just the thing,” Alex says. He reaches into his pocket and I back away. I don’t fully trust him yet. He pulls out a card with a photo of him in the top right corner. It must be his ID card.
He places it on the lock and it makes a click sound. I try to open it again and it lets us in. “Yes!” I whisper. “Good job, Alex.” He grins shyly.
I take a piece of paper out of my pocket and inspect it. It’s the sheet with the plan on it:
Sneak in through the back entrance, low security.
Break the wiring, opening the doors.
Follow the left passage, low security there.
Go up the stairs and knock out one of the guards, steal the uniform.
Blend in until you see a split in the path.
Follow the right path until you find the lab.
Find out what is happening and take it down.
We’ve done the first step and don’t need to do the second. We can skip right to the third. I show it to Alex and point at the third step. He nods and we both go inside.
After following the grey corridor for a while, we find concrete stairs. I go up to them, but Alex pulls on my shirt. “What the heck?” I ask, clueless of the guard at the top.
“I go up, you stay down here,” Alex says.
“Fine.” I roll my eyes. He goes up the stairs and the guard sees him. I can hear them talking for a bit. He pulls out the same card he used on the door and points over to me. Please don’t do something dumb, please don’t.
After a bit of talking and unhappy faces from the guards, Alex comes down the stairs and puts his face near my ear.
“I’ve just told them that I’m an agent and I am taking you inside. After I say this I’m going to yell something so I don’t look so suspicious.” He backs away a little bit. “So don’t you dare try to escape, you… dirty hybrid!”
The guard doesn’t look impressed, but I doubt he ever does. I hope that worked. I pretend to act scared as Alex takes me by the hands and yanks me further into the headquarters. For a second, when he holds my hand, I feel sparks. Electricity flying between him and I. What am I thinking? I shake off the feeling and focus back on the mission. We try to blend in as much as possible through the endless, dark hallways. When we reach about halfway in, I stop.
“Alex, why are we doing this?”
“What do you mean? You’ve been planning this since… weeks ago!” He looks at me in disgust. “Are you saying that we back out now?”
“No, I never said that, you need to calm down. This just feels… wrong all of a sudden.” I look to the floor. “And, I don’t know why.”
“Well, I’m not listening to your random feelings. We are not leaving now. It’s too suspicious anyway.”
“Fine!”
We walk in silence the rest of the trip, until we reach a door with the words “THE LAB” written on it. Alex uses his card to unlock the door. I go into shock when I see the room.
Hundreds, if not thousands, of hybrids, all along the walls. They sit, lonely, in cells. The ceilings fly up hundreds of metres. Why? Why capture all these hybrids? It was useless.
They all look down on us as we enter. Their faces look sad, probably because they think I am captured, too. Boy, do they know.
A man in a lab suit comes up to us. “Where is your protective gear, young man?”
Alex looks at him in shock. “What do you mean?” I begin to freak out. He better think of something to say. “Umm… I mean, you know they let down the restrictions?” The gulp of air I was holding in is let out. Thank goodness for his quick thinking. I’m still mad at him though. He didn’t need to overreact like that before.
“Oh. Sorry for interrupting. You can go back to doing whatever you were.”
“Umm… sorry to ask, but, why are we doing this? It’s… my first day.”
“Don’t you know?” The man seems confused. “Wait, you’re not joking? Okay, so we are trying to maintain the population of hybrids. Or at least that’s what the government says. Really, they want them all gone. So do all humans.”
“I-I t-totally agree…” he looks at me sympathetically. At this moment, I realise how serious this is. This isn’t a game. We are going to die if someone doesn’t do something about it. The virus was to kill us. The doctor… he told me I had escaped from home. I ran away. But I didn’t.
They lied. They told me that, but I didn’t. They stole me from home! They took me. I can remember now… Why? They can’t do that. They must’ve taken everyone else. Mum. Dad. Every hybrid. I’ve been lied to. What else can I believe?
“Take her to the cells,” says the man in the suit. I look at Alex with a begging face. Please don’t trap me. I haven’t known him for long, and I don’t completely trust him yet. If he breaks my trust, I might never get out of here.
Alex grabs me again, pulling me by my clothes. He takes me to an elevator, and the doors open as soon as we come near. The silver, scratched doors close when we are inside. Alex presses a button, numbered '108'. My unlucky number. Mum’s lucky number. Alex shoves me into a random cell, close enough to the elevator.
“What the hell, Alex?” I say through my teeth.
“I am trying to avoid suspicion,” he says quietly.
“Yeah right.” I scoff. “You know, at first, I thought you were just like me. I thought that maybe I could trust you. Boy, I was so naive. You have done nothing to help me.”
“Urgh! You overreact so much! You’re always so… so annoying! Goodbye, Agnes.”
“Wait, no! Don’t leave… me.” It’s too late. He’s already gone, and I’m trapped, useless, in a cell. This plan was stupid. Why did I think that I could do this? I don’t know if I can get out of here.
I crawl to the front of my cell. I look into the curved window and see all the other cells. I know they didn’t come here the same way I did, but judging by their faces, I can tell they’re thinking the same thing. ‘This is stupid.’
The cells are only a little bit bigger than me, and can hardly fit my wings. I can’t imagine other, more mature, hybrids fitting in here.
“Let me out!” I scream at the very top of my lungs. I bang multiple times on the glass window. “Let me out of here!”
Chapter 7
I spend what seems like days on an escape plan, my body finding it harder and harder to function as I am deprived of food and water. But then, it finally hit me.
My sick soul, with all of the might that I have, eagerly punches and punches the door. At one point I almost give up, my fists bruised and bleeding, but I can’t. Not now, when I’ve come so close to saving my family, my hybrids, all counting on me.
So I continue. For several painful minutes. I begin to sob. From pain, emotion, and everything that has happened in the past month. Tears flow down my face as I punch the door. Until, finally, it opens. Now I really want to cry, but I need to be quiet. I don’t want to get found. That would make me cry.
I walk around, opening everyone’s cells and telling them to open more. Soon hundreds of hybrids are free and unlocking more and more cells. Another tear falls. Except, this time, it feels happy. I take a deep breath and step to the side as everyone rushes past, taking it all in. I need to go now. I need to lead.
“Follow me!” I yell, with a cheerful tone in my voice. They all turn to me and begin to smile. It’s working. My plan is working!
The hybrids follow me through the thousands of hallways until we reach the final one. More tears are falling from my eyes now. They have been since I heard the hybrids laughing and chatting happily.
Where is all the security? Where are the guards? It begins to get eerie. The silence is so unusual in a place like this.
Suddenly I hear yelling. Thousands of footsteps come charging into the room. I usher everyone to hide or exit quickly. By the time the humans come, they are all safe. But I’m not.
“Get her!” one of them screams. They begin to shoot, but I freeze. I smile. I saved so many hybrids. Knowing that, I’ll rest easy.
I hear a gun click, click again, then fire.
My eyes fade to black. I feel as if I am floating in emptiness, like space, only there are stars now. I love the stars. I feel light and airy. My chest feels wet from blood, but nothing can hurt me now. Nothing at all.
THE END
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