WARNING: This chapter in my story, Silhouette, is particularly violent (at least in my perspective), so if you dislike violence/fighting or anything of that matter, do not proceed to read this chapter.
hOI!
Life hasn’t been kind to me for the past while, partially due to some reasons that I won’t explain, and also due to the fact that my mindset lately has been awful and anything I write would be depressing.
So, because it was the least I could do, I edited Chapter Three of Silhouette, titled Verboten, which means “forbidden, especially by an authority”.
So, here you go, the next chapter!
—
“Silhouette”
“Chapter Three: Verboten”
Crown learned quickly that the burly man’s name had been Wood Fallen.
She had also learned she wasn’t supposed to know that.
It was so brief, at the desk of the Town Hall. A woman dressed in all white gave a somewhat flirtatious smirk to the man. “Wood Fallen?” She had asked. He looked her way, but then shouldered past her, trying to ignore the pitiful look on her face. But judging by the way he had stopped abruptly when he saw her but kept walking almost immediately, Crown sensed that the man had badly wanted to respond to that woman.
‘I wonder what he would have said to her…’
Around the next corner of the sprawling maze of the Town Hall, Wood Fallen as he was called looked Crown square in the eyes. Crown could tell he was wearing dark eye contact to conceal his true eyes, but still a glimmer of amber and green glistened through the contact when light caressed it just right.
“Oh, Crown Hayze, you little brat…”
He spat her name with vile and bitterness, pinning her against the wall. She could do nothing against Wood’s impeccable strength that made her stiff as a corpse against the white cold bricks of the wall.
“I know your little secret, and you aren’t going to get away with it. I know Earthen committed suicide. I know you have inherited your stupid mother’s genetic material that allows you to be immune to our procedures. It’s all in a microchip in your head. So, I’ll have to do this the hard way so the doctor doesn’t have to deal with this horrible sin that you have….then your mother is next, to be executed, of course. Consider yourself lucky.”
Wood grabbed her shoulders with such force that Crown had to bite her lip to keep from crying out in pain. He then gripped her wrists tightly so even Crown could feel her blood pulsing through her veins there, and led her to a vacant room in the Town Hall within the sickly medical sector.
There, he slammed her down into a hard wooden chair, that being close to the only furniture in the room besides a seemingly old wooden desk in the right corner.
Fear raced through Crown like thick honey, only it was nowhere near sweet. It felt like it filled every part of her, gluing her down, her limbs motionless. It felt like it was in every cell of her, holding her captive. It was like sleep paralysis. She could see, but not speak or move.
But she knew that Wood was going to try and kill her, even though that’s not what he tried to make it sound like. A knife would not be used to cut a microchip out of her head-different medical equipment was needed to perform an action of such.
Being a sin in Alquerbridge was like a speck of dust on impossibly clean floors, or a smiling face in a crowd of faceless people. She needed to be washed away, and even taking whatever chip she may have had in her brain out would not fix the fact that she had been born this way. Born a sin to the government. Born a sin to Alquerbridge.
But not born a sin to her mother and not born a sin to her sister.
Wood, while still gripping Crown’s wrists, reached for a drawer of the old desk and pulled out a knife, straining her arm.
“You are a sin to all of us, you sick, sick young girl.” His voice resonated scarily, and the space around her seemed to close. His voice even drowned out the sound of her heartbeat. It seemed to soak into every crevice, that sick numbness that her own mind cast upon itself.
But as he drew the knife and set it close to the back of her head, Crown could feel again.
She felt the chair beneath her. Wood’s death grip on both of her wrists with one hand. The silence in the room. The sounds of voices down the hall. The sounds of footsteps. Wood breathing close to her ear. Her nerves itching where the knife was about to touch.
“Not a sin to Earthen.”
Unfortunately, this was not like a scene from an action movie when Crown suddenly kicked backwards, her voice resounding not as strong but as young and weak.
The knife that had been waiting to cut into her skin then sliced a clean chunk of her hair off, and Wood dropped it in a hurry to hold Crown down again. She threw a punch at him, but only missed. She saw the door, and her only chance to at least try to escape. She lurched away from his flailing hands and set her hands on the doorknob that was still warm from Wood’s hand a few moments earlier.
Then time felt like it stopped, pausing around her, almost like a spectator or a watcher pausing a video to take in what was happening. The moment she tried to open the door, there was a searing pain.
It traveled around her lower neck to the small of her back, like a trail of fire down her spine.
She felt blood, it’s thickness gushing out out of the line that was just drawn by Wood’s knife. Then, just like that, she was weak again, and helpless.
“I was going to kill you anyway,” Wood tried to say in between heavy breaths, “and you just gave me more reasons to.”
Her vision was blackening, stars dancing in her eyes, the singular flickering light multiplying into several all around her vision like a kaleidoscope.The plain white walls and white floors were splashing with buckets of color-blues, reds, greens, pinks. Everything went blurry around her.
But she saw the knife that he had dropped and gripped it with her last amount of energy, hurling it at him.
Then, everything went black, and everything went cold.
——–
“Haha, mistress, you are so hilarious! Would you like some more tea with your French Toast? My special, of course.”
Earthen and Crown had been so young then. Crown was around 7 and Earthen was around 5, still relishing the light of their childhoods. The girls were dressed in two bouncy pink dresses adorned with sequins, followed by princess hats, the kind with the ribbons on top. There were 4 chairs, Earthen and Crown sitting in two of them, and two large and fluffy teddy bears took up the other two. It was tea time.
So there they were, happy as 5 and 7 year olds sitting at a childish picnic table with white picket chairs drinking imaginary tea in the light of the summer sun. But all of the sudden, a colossal cloud passed into the view, and then everything was black again.
There was just black….and then there was Earthen, taking off her princess hat.
She looked so much older, her eyes glimmering, her hair shorter, raising just above her shoulders.
“I wish I could tell you that this is what I planned. I wish I could tell you that there was a way I could help you.”
“Then again, I’m the one pushing your conscience back to reality, preventing your death. I don’t know how I’m doing it, but I think it’s through that chip. I thought I was never going to talk to you again, but what I realized was that I can only reach you in times of weakness. After all, you’re dying right now, so that’s why I can talk to you. After I died, you were weak from your emotions surrounding my death. But, here I am.”
“That man’s a government official, known for his astounding amber green eyes, which you noticed through his contacts while he goes along with when he has to leave the upper floor of the Town Hall. He has killer morals, as you undoubtedly just experienced.”
“I can’t tell you what’s happening right now, all I’m doing is holding your soul in your body for you. You can still die. Just like that, your life would be done just like mine.”
“I know you want answers about that chip. It’s real. Grandmother was the leader of an Alquerbridge rebel group that formed the chip that prevented mental control by the government. Those without the chip could be pulled up on a file and controlled. But you can only control a certain amount of people at once….the government officials aren’t all there by free will, you see….”
“This is forbidden in terms of the government, but I can’t help you, and i’m….”
“You’re alive, Crown, I can feel your soul beginning to fill your body again.”
“My time’s running out.”
“Good luck, you need it…”
—–
“Sorry dear that he got a hold of you. He is a bit unpredictable sometimes, that man.”
Crown woke up coughing blood into a sink, clearly in a different room, but still in the medical sector. The white walls were like chalk, with that same pale color and crumbly look. But as she reached her hand out to touch it, it was strong and sturdy under her touch. But her depth perception had been lost, she noticed, for it felt like those walls were standing in the middle of the air, spinning.
‘Why can’t this whole thing be just an awful nightmare that I will just wake up from back at home? I would go give Earthen a big hug good morning and check on Mother….’
“Do you remember why you are here?”
Crown coughed up a little more blood, and went to touch her neck lightly, covered in fingerprint bruises.
“No,” she said, but she very well remembered.
‘I wonder if Earthen’s watching me right now…’
Crown turned to properly focus on the source of the voice that appeared to her side when she woke up. It seemingly was a mixed middle aged woman with sleek black hair tied into a neat ponytail and large sparkling brown eyes. She smiled, her teeth twinkling in the white light.
“I’m Cloud, a doctor here. Unfortunately, you’re not here for a great reason. You were just attacked by a man who is getting disciplined at the moment, and now I am required to perform the memory loss procedure to make you forget every memory of your dear sister Earthen, lost to suicide.”
Earthen’s words rung through her ears. The time was now.
“DON’T JUST SAY IT! WHISPER. THERE ARE CAMERAS, MICROPHONES……” a voice screamed in her skull, making Crown have to force herself not to jump in surprise.
“U-Um….” Crown tried to stand, and ended up falling on Cloud’s shoulder. Perfect.
“Can you still speak to Youth Lost?” She harshly whispered before coughing up more scarlet blood into the sink.
Her dark eyes stopped shining for a moment, her smile falling from her face like a raindrop from the sky, and she looked at Crown with understanding and sadness.
“That means she has spoken to you, hasn’t she…” She whispered softly, gripping a inflatable to measure blood pressure.
‘Cameras….they can watch her….they can hear her…..so she’s trying to look like she’s doing something’ Crown thought.
“Yes….she has, Cloud Daiy. I’m immune. I-“
“You have a chip, don’t you, dearest Hayze child…”
They exchanged a gaze, and stopped whispering for many moments.
“Now, to perform the procedure, I need you to come here to the back room. You’re going to be a tricky one, to get in your brain. I’m sorry, but this must be done.”
Normally, one would think that Cloud betrayed her, but she hadn’t. Crown detected a slight change in her tone, the slightest touch of a lie that was able to be detected.
Cloud took Crown’s small and weak hand and lead her to a room in the back of the medicine room.
Looking at her straight on, there was a mischievous sparkle in Cloud’s eyes.
“You have to go. Leave the Town Hall. Leave Alquerbridge. The remains of your people are just outside the border. I’ll help you, but there isn’t much time. Not many have been in your shoes, kid.”
Placing a very thin plastic bracelet on Crown’s hand, she whispered,
“They’ll scan you with that. Child, if you stay here, you will surely die. Your mother has the same job as me-to find survivors of our group and bring them to our camp. It’s going to be tough. I must stage your death within the room as a procedure malfunction, which is sadly common.”
She let go of her hand, and glared at her with so much hate that there may have been fire coming out of her eyes, even though the intense look was staged, then pushed her supposedly carelessly into a secluded and small room in the back, like a closet. She pulled out a medical bed, hooking her up to a heart monitor.
She stood up to leave, but then gave Crown her fiery gaze again, and hooked her up to a drug, which had the word “FAKE” written across it lightly in marker, which Cloud rubbed off as she hooked Crown up to it.
“Stay here.”
—
PLLOOOTTT TTWWIISSTTTT
Didn’t think that was where it was going, did you?
Tell me what you think of this twist in the story in the comments if you like. Or just any feedback in general.
That’s all I have for you biscuits! I don’t know when i’ll post next, but yeah!
Have wonderful lives.
-No theatrical piece, my head hurts, you have to deal-
Riley's Backpack 