Chapter 3

Memories consumed my dreams that night. My parents’ blurry faces whispering under their breath, a next-door parentless kid moving into the wielders’ floor, the uniform education schedule I was forced to strictly follow for thirteen years. I dreamt of my early childhood where I would play games of tag and hide-and-seek with the other kids in my hallway, then when they tired, they would make paperclip and glue people to create little families. When it was time to go to bed for the night, the kids would set their families on the floor next to their beds and fall asleep praying that their happy little family dream would come true. In the morning, the little families would be gone, swept away by the cleaner in the middle of the night. I held my ratty teddy bear close to my chest. I squeezed myself, wishing for all the hurt and loneliness to go away. I prayed to whoever was out there, fiercely wishing for myself to never have been born with myasset. That way I would have a normal family, a normal childhood, and a normal life. I wouldn’t have been almost kidnapped. I wouldn’t have had to have Booker tell me most of my life was a lie. I would have been safe with all the other kids in the family branch during the raid. Safe. Safe. Please, if someone is listening, keep me safe. Almost immediately after I wished it, My thoughts faded away into mist, and my mind slipped into darkness, allowing me to sleep peacefully the rest of the night.

When Booker told me that I was being moved to the thirty-sixth floor, I almost cried, my horrible nightmare was real. He told me that he was sorry, but he thought that I might be excited to know that I’ll get my own room. The thought of privacy made the move a lot easier, but it didn’t take away any of the fear I had for the wielders. Although Booker told me that they were usually harmless, it didn’t make me apt to believe him. The fight I had witnessed the day before between the Burke wielders and the Others was enough to prove the stories I heard right. While I was putting my few belongings in a cardboard box, I felt a tremble. It was normal for me to feel a tremor every once in a while, but now that I was aware of my asset, I couldn’t help but wonder if I was the only one who could feel it.

“Did you feel that?” I asked Booker, careful to not use his first name so no one would accidentally overhear.

“Feel what?”

“Oh, I guess it's nothing.” So I was the only one who could feel the tremors. That information was wildly humbling.

Booker directed me toward one of the elevators, and when we stepped inside, the dormitory sized room was completely empty. The elevators were so big in Burke because it was the most common transportation system. It is how people get from the residential floors to the occupational floors.

The farms and water plants are on the bottom two floors, and above those are the food and good markets. Above that are the residential and government districts, taking up the fourth to fifteenth floors. I lived on the fourth with all the other parentless. There was an education complex on each floor to accommodate the thousands of children in Burke. The majority of the floors are all occupational floors, consisting of doctor and dentist offices, real estate, residential planning firms, banking, and any other job you could think of. The occupational floors are the sixteenth to thirtieth. The police took the next floor, followed by the fire team, although each had emergency stations on each floor. Services like electricity, gas, and storage are on the thirty-third to thirty-fifth floor. The very top floor was were the wielders lived and trained, as well as where the city’s lockup was. Burke’s original city planners laid the city out with the most essential things on the bottom, knowing that the bottom of the building is more sturdy and in the event of an emergency, the top floors would be replaceable. When they were designing the city, wielders weren’t discovered yet. Booker explained he had to put their residential and training areas on the top floor because it was the only place with extra room.

As we went up, and up and up in the elevator I felt more and more aware of my surroundings. The top floor is the most dangerous floor in the whole city. Any accident that damages the city’s structure would a hundred percent of the time cause the thirty-sixth floor to fall thirty-five stories to the ground, evidently killing everyone inside. Wary of my surroundings, all noises screamed louder in my head, I could hear the cries of a baby getting an injection, a whirring drill, and even one of the news reporters covering the attacks of the previous day. “If the brave mercenaries did not step in to stop the terrorists yesterday, more than three people would have died,” he said.

“Booker, did people die yesterday?” I was shocked. I had no idea that people got hurt. I felt especially guilty now that I know it was because of my residence in Burke.

Booker was taken aback, “How did you know that?”

“I heard the news reporter saying that if the wielders didn’t step in, more than three people would have died,” I repeated.

“Remarkable,” Booker marveled, then, recognizing the situation, he lamented, “Yes, three people died as a result of the raid yesterday. One was a mechanic responding to a malfunctioning door when the terrorists broke through it. The second, a janitor cleaning one of the classrooms on the thirteenth floor, and the last one tried to take a shortcut to his residence when he ran into some of the attackers.”

“Oh. I had no idea.”

“Nobody did until this morning. I woke up to the broadcast myself. I blame my arrogance. I was so sure that I did everything to protect the people, but I guess even I can overlook things.”

We sat in silence, mourning the loss of the three innocent strangers, but my ears were listening intently to the sounds around me, curious as to what I could hear that I wasn’t supposed to. The ding of an elevator retrieval button two floors below, people walking in a hallway next to the elevator shaft three floors above, a muffled conversation in the electricity center. Then I heard something I never would have expected. There was rock music coming from floor thirty-six.

“Is that Green Day?” I asked, amused.

Booker laughed, amazed at the range that I could hear the music, “You can hear it better than I can,” he joked.

The digital readout changed from 35 to 36 and I held my breath, anxious to see what lies beyond the elevator door. The door opened and both Booker and I were injected with drums and guitar. Whoever was in charge of the soundbooth was blasting the song.

“One second!” Booker yelled, but I couldn’t hear him.

“WHAT?” I yelled back.

Booker shook his head towards the ground, grinning ear to ear. He motioned at me to stay where I was and he took off through the maze of unplanned corridors and hallways. Even though he told me to stay, I followed him, not wanting to be left alone in this completely new world. Booker professionally navigated through the twists and turns of the hallways, and I had to run to keep up. As I carried my box of belongings down the twisting turns of the thirty-sixth floor, I gawked at how Booker had mastered the directions of this unorganized mess of a district.

Eventually Booker entered and glanced through a windowed room in what could only be the common area. For the span of about fifteen of my classrooms wide, and forty long, there were no walls, only an occasional pillar keeping the ceiling up. What surprised me was that there were windows in the back corner. I had never seen through a window before, I didn’t even know that Burke had any windows. The only time I ever saw the outside was when I studied old photos from an equally ancient book during education. The windows stretched from the floor to the ceiling and even from a distance I could see the beauty of the world for miles. The floor was paneled with rich, brown wooden planks and about fifty lunch tables were strewn carelessly throughout the room. Groups of wielders sat either yelling in each other's ears to try and hear each other over the music, or just plain rocking out to it. At the halfway line in the room, the floor stepped down, merging the wooden floor into the uniform gray, cracked cement. On the cement were numerous different kinds of exercise equipment, dumbbells, and blue workout mats. Adolescents and young adults, both female and male, were working out on the equipment. On one mat, a female was doing pushups with a smaller kid on her back. There was a ripped male lifting a heavily-weighted bar up and down over his chest. One guy was helping a younger kid do a pull up. The whole picture of the room was chaos, but I didn’t see a single wielder exhibiting ruthless or heartless behavior, they were just untamed and wild.

I turned back to Booker and saw that he went inside the windowed area he was looking through. I followed him through the door. There were three wielder boys inside shouting the lyrics of the song in ear-splitting pitches.

“I walk this empty street on the Boulevard of Broken Dreams. Where my city sleeps, and I’m the only one, I walk alone.”

Booker waved at them to turn down the music, and when they saw him they quickly lowered the volume to a whisper compared to before. There were shouts of ‘C’mon at the good part’ and ‘Seriously?’ from the wielders inside the big room, but when they saw Booker standing in the booth, the protests silently died.

“Sorry man,” the first one chortled.

“I appreciate it boys,” Booker said graciously, “I have a new trainee to get settled in.”

“Is that her right there?” the second boy asked, pointing directly at me. I gulped.

Booker whirled around and smiled when he saw I followed him in. “Yeah, this is Shae.”

The three wielder boys greeted me, and I waved back shyly. The five of us stood for a few moments in silence before Booker broke it.

“Alright, I should get Shae settled in now,” Booker said to the boys.

“See ya later Leader!” the third called out to Booker.

Booker waved and then led me back the way they came.

“You just let them call you Leader?” I asked, confused.

“Yeah,” Booker responded, “I don’t want the entire population knowing my name.”

“Then why did you tell me?” I asked. He just handed it to me almost without a thought.

“I have my reasons dear,” he changed the subject, “So, down the hall this way is where your new room is going to be. I’m sorry that all your neighbors are just babies, but that is where all the open rooms are.” Booker tried a comical smile, but my nerves didn’t let me find his description of twelve-year-olds very amusing.

“That’s fine.” It wasn’t the ‘babies’, as Booker called them, that made me wary of the thirty-sixth floor, it was everything about the place. Nevertheless I tried to remember the lefts and rights that we took so that I would be able to navigate the maze myself. After all, I was to live here now.

Booker took out a key on a separate keyring from the massive one he used last night, unlocked the door, and dropped the key into my sadly empty box of things. “Here you are,” he said.

I walked into my new room. It was smaller than any other dormitory I had ever been to, but as I took in the surroundings, I realized that this room was just a sleeping area. I had a bed, a nightstand and a digital readout that would tell the time, but there was nothing else in the room. The room was so tiny, in fact, that with two people inside, the room seemed overcrowded. Even with the tightness of the closet-sized room, there were four walls between me and anyone nearby for the first time I could remember.

“The bathrooms and clothes washers are just down the hall that way,” Booker explained, pointing in the direction that would take us further down the hall, “and meals are served in the common area three times a day.” He gave me a handwritten note of a general schedule, and most helpfully a map of the thirty-sixth floor. “You are here,” he pointed at a hallway on the map, “There are training rooms on the west side of the floor, that’s where you can experiment with your asset, but they are only open eight to twenty. I wrote that on that sheet as well.”

I nodded, trying my best to follow along with what Booker was saying. My mind was too distracted with all the stimuli I had already intaken today, but I still processed most of his words.

“Curfew is at twenty-two, but the officers sometimes allow kids to stay in the common area later than that. If you miss a meal, they won’t make you another one, so be on time to those. Uh, I believe that’s it, do you have any questions?”

I originally shook my head, but then nodded, “Uh yeah, isn’t there like a training program thing for the wielders to do?”

“Not an official one, no. The training system here is self-motivated. There are tactical teams here for the older kids to join, if they can meet a certain physical requirement, that sometimes get sent out into the outer world, so there are perks to doing some training. Most kids team up with an older kid to help guide them around the place until they find a social group of their own. Okay then, I’ll let you unpack and settle in your new room.” Booker started to walk out of the room when he remembered something. “Shae, there’s one more thing I need to tell you,” his tone was serious.

“Alright.”

“There are some things that you can’t tell anyone here.”

“Wait, what things, and why?”

“Well first off, my name. Don’t tell anyone that.”

“I won’t, I promise.” I already figured that one out.

Booker smiled, “Second, don’t tell anyone who your parents are or what their plan is, okay? Wielders may seem tough and fearless, but telling them that secret won’t make you any friends.”

“Oh, right, makes sense.”

“Thank you Shae,” he soothed, “If you need to talk to me about anything, especially that topic, just alert one of the officers here and they’ll schedule a meeting with me alright?”

“Alright.”

“Oh! And Shae?” he had forgotten another thing apparently.

“Yeah?”

“Your last name is Vincent now, not Westow, as well as anybody here knows. Okay?”

I wondered why I couldn’t use my own last name, but I nodded in agreement, trusting that Booker was just looking out for me.

He left my room and I started unpacking my few things. It took only a few seconds.

“Shae Vincent, not Westow. Shae Vincent. Shae Vincent.” I practiced my new name under my breath. A new name for a new life. When I opened the top drawer of my nightstand to try and store my tattered clothes, I noticed a book page with a note on top of it.

The note read, I thought you’d be interested. -B.

Curious and excited from what looked to be mail, I removed the note and read the bolded top of the first page, Chapter 4, the Scarlet Devil. Intrigued, I set down my stack of clothes and leaned on the edge of my new bed to read the page.

The Scarlet Devil is a legend among the skyscraper cities that originated after the major world powers destroyed almost all life on Earth 400 years ago. According to the legend, the war started because an American archeologist unearthed a gigantic red stone causing China, Russia and South Korea to bomb the site, not wanting the Americans to have the power of the legendary Devil on their side. However, no one died in the blast, although decades of carefully extracted relics were destroyed. Even though the stone had been sent to the U.S. government hours before the bombing, all the archeologists had touched the stone within the last 12 hours which caused their skin to be impenetrable to the blast.

I gasped, this must be the stone that Booker said my parents were after. Why else would he give me these pages? I continued reading.

The United States declared war on China, Russia and South Korea, but they brought four allies of their own into the fight. Splitting the Scarlet Devil into five pieces, The United States, France, Britain, Canada and Denmark all used the Devil’s powers to make their troops invincible.

The China, Russia and South Korea alliance was losing men and land quickly so they sent more nuclear weapons around the Earth, recklessly trying to destroy the five pieces of the stone in any way they could. Responding with the same tactics, the United States, France, Great Britain, Canada, and Denmark alliance tried to defend their people by eliminating the threat. Eventually, Denmark was lost to the sea.

I had learned about the war that scarred the world, but I never knew that this stone was responsible. Did my teachers know about this? I was horrified that this is the weapon that my parents want me to unearth for them.

In 8 months, the Earth’s population of 7.5 billion was devastatingly reduced to less than 900,000. In shock and horror of what they caused, all countries ordered a ceasefire, desperate to protect the remaining life on Earth. The United States, France, Britain and Canada all disintegrated their stone pieces, turning them into dust, so they would never be used again. No country worried about Denmark’s piece because it was thought to have long been destroyed by one of the bombs, but rumors from Danish survivors, surfacing after nearly two generations after the end of the war, claimed that the Danish stone had not been destroyed, but buried in the North Sea under miles of blasted land, steel, and sea water. To this day no one has dared to try and locate and destroy the stone, but

The page ended. I was disgusted that anyone would want to use such a thing to gain power. This information sparked a fire in me, a rage that I’ve hidden for ten years. I would stop my parents from using this stone even if I had to die doing it. I will not let them kill innocent people like the three who died last night any longer. I will train as a wielder and once I understand and can control my asset, nothing will stop me from obliterating the goal my parents aim to fulfill.