——————Chapter Nine——————

————Friday April 4 2313 ————

———A Luxurious Event Hall———

The hall is crowded with people - mostly free people - dressed in colourful, shimmery, overwhelmingly luxurious clothing. They claim they need it. They have expensive jewlery of changing and shifting metals and colour-changing gems. There are chandeliers made of the most expensive materials, spinning and twirling and gliding and dancing above everyone's heads. Statues of strange creatures and fantastical humanoids writhe and dance along the walls. Glitter falls from the ceiling. And fake snow. Streamers pop up from the ground. And it is all subsumed into the ground and then resprinkled. There are expensive hoverboards with gold and platinum and rose gold trim, encrusted with jewels. They are carpeted on the top with plush and soft carpeting, made of darkened spectrum colours with a metallic hue. They are self-warming and self-cooling at the same time, keeping partygoers' feet the perfect temperature. The floor is a holographic ocean with robotic fish jumping and gliding around. All around holograms dance to life. Holographic birds and butterflies and all manner of fantasy creatures fly and glide and dive along with the chandeliers. Robotic butterflies land on peoples' arms and shoulders and faces. Holograms whir with to life all around. Recreating intricate scenes from epic tales as the partygoers mingle around them. The paintings on the walls are made of rich, fine paint. Music sifts and drifts all around, as if it is part of the air itself. Strange-sounding synthetic instruments and almost-human vocaloid words. The ventilating is a carefully-modulated cool breeze. Trays of food, rich and decorated, float this way and that as people pick from them. This is exhuberance Ika has only seen once before. On the worst day of her life. 

Ika is eighteen years old today. The last day. The last day of her life. 

The world blurs around her. She'd not really able to see any of it. Her mind is silenced numb and screaming bloody both at the same time. She feels like a lamb being lead to the slaughter. Because she is. She has to face her destiny now. She can't turn away for even the faintest moment any longer. And oh how she crumbles completely underneath it. Ashes, ashes, ashes with barely any embers. 

She is wearing a dress made of swirling bright blue and pure white. It looks a bit like the sky but not really. Not really at all. It hugs her slender, fit, well-toned frame. Her face is devoid of make-up but her skin is perfectly flawless, well-moisturizered, softly shining in the light of the chandeliers and the candles that line the wall. 

Her eyes are glazed over. Her expression is completely blank, carefully and painstakingly trained into giving nothing away. But if you really look then you can see the cracks in her mask. Behind those cracks her expression is haunted. She has been broken her whole life. But now she is something beyond broken. She is shattered. 

She is young. So incredibly young. Her limbs are still just a bit too long for her. Her frame is still shorter than it would be. Her eyes still have a sense of largeness to them. Her cheeks still have traces of roundness. She is a child at the end of the day. She looks like a child. She thinks like a child. A deeply traumatized child but a child nonetheless. She is being paraded around like a new dress in the hours before she is set to be murdered. 

She doesn't notice anything about the party around her. People - free people, original people, oppressors - walk up to her and put their warm, nauseating hands all over her. And she stands there and she takes it, a faraway look in her eyes. They touch her like she is fabric. They talk around her like she is a doll. They look at her like she is a piece of furniture. They look through and over her like she isn't even real. 

Every once in a while she is grabbed by the wrist and led somewhere. She walks silently, passively. Like a ghost. 

No words. No expressions. Just obedience. Submissiveness. 

She thinks of all the children she will be leaving behind. She thinks of how they will grieve for her. How she will grieve for them. And for some reason this hurts her so so so much more than the prospect of death in and of itself does. 

People talk and chatter around her and she remains perfectly silent. Nobody notices. Nobody cares. Nobody ever cared what she had to say. She grew up in a house where she was regarded as property and she is in a hall where she's regarded as property and soon she'll be strapped down to an operating table because she's property. Except, she's not property. 

It's not as if she remembers this herself. Not when people are talking and laughing and clinking glasses and nibbling on pastries while she'll be dead at the age of barely eighteen by the time the night is over. It's not as if she can hold onto her sense of self after all that. 

She's not Miren. Wait. Miren. Miren. Miren. Miren. Miren. She thinks it over and over to herself like a mantra. And it breaks the spell. 

She starts screaming. Loud. Completely wild and raving mad. Otherworldly. She tears at her hair and claws at her dress. Soon grabbing, pulling hands are all over her. She tries to fight them but there are just too many. She is not strong enough. 

They tie her down with strange fabric that seems soft but she can't, she can't get out of it. She sits on the floor with tears streaming down her face and she thinks. She's as old as Miren was when she saw him last. Miren went out with a bang. She resolves to do so as well. But her bang will be a lot more secretive. It will have to be. 

She uses her silence and the way people look over her whenever they aren't looking at her. She uses it to inch closer to trays of food and plates of untouched snacks carelessly left around. She has a moment now. A moment where she isn't as restricted. She can fill her body with as much unhealthy, delicious sugar as she can get her hands on. So she does. 

It doesn't do anything to curb the unspeakable agony. But there is something about rebellion. Something light. Something Lifemaking. 

She still wears the haunted look in her eyes. Her lips still have the slightest tremor to them. Her expression is still one of horror painted over by blankness. Her cheeks are still a bit too round. Her arms are still a bit too long. Her legs are still a bit too lanky. People still poke and prod her like cattle. But underneath all the embers flickers just a little bit to life. 

She is destined to add to the fire of Life. Despite what the oppressors think. She is a flame of the Lifemaker's Life that lives and burns on under the harshest of storms. The fire will burn and grow and it will add to the burning blaze that makes up the Lifemaker and eventually they will burn away all the poison. Turn it into life-giving ash. 

Eventually the festivities draw to a close. The real star of the party, Ika's master, is taken in an expensive and brightly decorated limousine to the hospital to begin the procedure. Ika is grabbed on all sides, held down, and forcibly injected with a drug that makes her arms and legs heavier than lead. She's carried by security guards to a black car and delicately placed on a metal bed. She has no control over her body. But her mind is awake. And clear. And horrified. The drugs do nothing to calm down the terror and the dread that swirls inside of her. 

She has no grasp of time as she is pulled out and strapped down to a table. 

This is it. She tells herself. This is finally it. She prays to the Lifemaker in the silence of her mind. She prays for protection for all the loved ones she leaves behind. 

A doctor in shining white clothes walks over to her, looking her up and down like how a chef would look at a cut of meat. 

And then there is pain. Clawing, biting pain raging through her, starting from her skull and running all the way down. Her skull is neatly sliced open and then it feels like there is lava running through her head. Like someone is taking a blowtorch to her neurones. 

She desperately wishes she could scream. 

Then everything becomes black as the world fades, fades, fades. As her soul is pulled away by force, screaming and clawing and struggling and finally dead. 

——————Chapter Ten——————

Ika feels safe, for the first time in her existence. She feels calm. She feels sorrow. But she feels freedom. More freedom than she had ever known before. She feels loved and more importantly she feels protected. She opens her eyes to the strange sort of calmness she is entirely unfamiliar with.

All around her the world burns bright, beautiful. She is in a great field of grasses and plants of all sizes. Green and gold and golden-brown blaze around her as the sky burns bright blue. Wildflowers the likes of which she's never seen dot the landscape. The sun burns and it feels so natural, so spontaneous. She has never quite known how a place like this could exist. 

On the horizon there appears a shillouette of a young man, no older than her, dressed in leather. She feels such a sense of love and belonging from that person. He slowly walks closer. 

"Ika?" He calls out. 

"Miren?!" She can't believe it. 

They run towards each other and embrace under the bright blue sky. Miren hugs Ika and lifts her up and spins her around. 

"Miren. I missed you so much."

"Me too, sister. Come on, let's meet the others. We have a revolution to train for."