Judgment - Chapter One (Rough Draft)

Chapter One

Monday schedules are my favourite of the week: they keep me busy from dawn till dusk. Aside from the usual morning announcements in the Courtyard, I spend my Monday's working on Roots farm. Last year I'd only been able to help out sporadically as I'd had school and commitments, not any more. I loved the farm, I loved the animals, the earth, the crops, and I loved the sense of serenity I only seemed to find amongst Roots fields.

As the lazy sun drifts slowly behind the far off mountains, I run against the wind hoping to beat Clay to the Lake. Today I was on spread duty and I still have bits of the Imperium supplied crop fertiliser stuck in-between my fingers; It feels rough like the grain at the edge of the lake. The air is still warm from the high sun we'd had all day, warming me even as the wind cools me. The sensation alights my senses.

I hitch my full-length peach skirt up a little more, exposing my ankles to the wind. Blades of grass stick in-between my toes as I move, my sandals leaving me exposed to the elements and the earth. The texture of the grass reminds me of where I am racing too, and I run a little faster. I have to beat Clay, I have to.

Ducking under a few low-hanging branches that belong to the tree's separating the farm and the lake, I smell the fresh water before I see it. The familiar break in the browns and greens of the small woods becomes clear so I slow to a jog before settling at a hurried walk. I don't want Clay to know I ran in an attempt to beat him. He'd tease me to no end.

“What took you so long?” Clay asks, sitting on a rock beside the edge of the biggest lake in our Division. “I've been waiting forever.”

“How...I...How?” I asked, stopping still in my tracks. There was no way he could have beat me. I'd seen him talking to Roots near the animal pen before I'd taken off running and the pen was on the other side of the house, a good five minute walk away from where I had started.

“I could beat you running backwards, Reed. You're fast, but I'm faster.” He smiled triumphantly.

The setting sun is behind him silhouetting his frame, giving his brown hair an amber glow. The grey hand-knitted jumper he wears matches mine except Clay's is a few sizes larger and has snags in different places to mine. Roots had traded for the jumpers only a few months prior - once we had turned sixteen and finished schooling. He'd said at the time that we needed new clothes to work the farm, but we'd soon figured out that our old clothes would have sufficed; he'd done it out of kindness; a gift to each of us. Roots is the kindest man I know, he proves it time and time again.

“You gonna stand there all day, or ya gonna come join me?” Clay asks, bringing me back out of my revelry.

“I'm coming, hold your haystack. I just wanna wipe this fertiliser off my hands.” I rub my hands backwards and forwards over my ankle length yellow skirt – made from a pair of Roots old curtains – until the residue is gone. Flexing my fingers, I join Clay sitting on the rocks. We'd learned whilst we were schooling about all the life that exists in the lake: some dangerous, some not. My favourite is Water Skitters, tiny little bugs that skim over the surface of the water. Sometimes, during our personal time, Clay and I would lie still by the edge of the lake for hours looking at the surface of the water, hoping to see a Water Skitter. We'd seen a fly seemingly skim the surface once but the Water Skitter has so far eluded our hunts.

“Is it a new batch of fertiliser? My granddad mentioned something about the Imperium changing the chemicals, I think.”

“Yeah, Roots said it arrived this morning.”

“Are your hands sore?” he asks, concern lacing his voice. Sometimes the Imperium send batches of fertiliser that leave your hands raw, even bleeding. Roots, Clay's granddad has the worn hands to prove it. From the little we learned in schooling I knew that the Imperium had to change fertilisers and things as developments came about. Apparently yesterday's batch is no longer sufficient in helping our farming and so tomorrow Clay and I would spend the morning filling the back of Roots cart with the remaining old sacks of fertiliser, ready for Roots to take into the courtyard's shipment building.

I turn my hands over in-between mine and Clay's faces. “No, not sore, just tired.”

With careful, precise movements, Clay places his hands over mine, skimming his skin softly against my fingers. Barely touching me, the sensation relaxes my tired muscles. “You should have let me do it,” he says, his voice low.

“You had pen duty, right?”

Awareness lights up his eyes as he realises just why I much prefer spread duty. He moves his hand massage lower onto the backs of my palms, almost apologetically. “It wasn't so bad today,” he lies. I know it was bad; it's always bad.

Pen duty consists of working inside the animal pen and its the one job me and Clay would argue about doing when I first came to live on the farm. Eventually he had taken over the role completely, after I was found huddled in the pen corner, screaming and white with terror. I just couldn't handle it. Thankfully Clay had volunteered once he saw just how badly it effected me: he and Roots had been scared half to death. I'd never been more embarrassed in my life, but I just couldn't help it. The pen, as Roots explained to me after my screaming episode, is a completely necessary part of our Divisions survival. There has to be someone to watch the animals; There has to be someone to feed the animals; There has to be someone to take the animals to the shipping building, ready to be transferred to the butchers. I know this, I understand this, however after living beside the Courtyard for most of my life and only moving to the farm aged twelve after my mother passed away, I wasn't used to the.. the...carnage of what lay inside the pen. It is the animals, they weren't like they were in the diagrams in school, they were...different.

“Liar,” I say, pulling my hands from his and thanking him with a smile. Clay returns the smile, but he hesitates first and I know why.

“Are you okay?” I ask him. I understand our predicament just as well as he does.

“I'm fine, Reed.” His tone has changed, and I know he is not fine. He pulls at the sleeve of his left arm, thawing more of the threads around the cuff.

“Clay, I -”

“- Don't, alright. I'm fine,” he interrupts, climbing from the rock and walking down towards the waters edge. He's ten yards from the lake before I'm even off the rock.

I follow him down the small slope, the gravel I'd longed to feel gathering between the soles of my feet and my sandals, mixing with grass. This is why I had wanted to beat Clay to the lake, I'd wanted us to go for a swim as an early celebration of Clay's birthday tomorrow. That is impossible now of course, I couldn't strip off with Clay already here. I had planned to beat him here and be in the water before he arrived; problem solved. I'm sure if he'd known Clay would have let me arrive first, but it is too late for that. There is no way I am even suggesting the idea now. I know where this conversation is leading. We've been here before, more and more of late.

I watch him as he stares out across the still, dark waters. The surface is smooth: a black mirror. I take him in from head to toe, relishing in the opportunity which is so rarely given. Clay likes to keep eye-contact so I never get a chance to look at him without restraint. He is barefoot, his slip-on shoes most likely left back up the slope. He's wearing the same loose fitting sky blue pants - made from another of Roots old cloths – that he wears everyday. His jumper has a new hole at the centre of his back, and I see his skin through the gap. From the position I know it is around the spot that Clay's birthmark is, but I can't see it in the dying light. His dark hair no longer appears amber, it's darker now and in a disarray, sticking up at odd angles due to his long day of labour.

He's a man of seventeen now, as I'm a woman of sixteen. That's the problem.

“Do something for me, Reed,” he asks as I reach his side.

“Anything,” I reply, hoping to cheer him up, hoping to let him know that it pains me too.

“Bubbles.”

Bubbles? It's been so long since he requested bubbles that I'm taken aback at first. Only for a moment though, before the idea overtakes my mind. It's always been the same way. Ever since I started doing... it. Any time the idea came into my mind it was near impossible to ignore.

Closing my eyes, I focus on my breathing. In. Out. In. Out. In. out. In. The smell of the water overtakes my senses, and I feel my fingers twitch by my side. A familiar feeling courses through my veins - as though replacing my blood – and then I know that it's time. I want it, I will it.

Opening my eyes, I smile when I see the bubbles floating above the surface of the lake. Small, delicate and different sizes, they slowly rise higher, floating around Clay and I. Small, perfect spheres of water, no longer black as it appeared under the blanket of the lake's surface; the water of the bubbles is translucent.

“You're amazing,” Clay says, sounding happier. At one of our Lake side Water Skitter hunts, years before I'd moved onto the farm, Clay and I had been laughing about something neither of us remembers. What we do remember is that the more I laughed the more these tiny bubbles crept up from the lake. At the time there had only been a couple, but it had amazed us both. I wasn't ever really sure how I could do it, Clay couldn't. That first time we'd agreed to never tell anyone, fearing the Imperium would not be happy with my... ability. However, occasionally whist at the lake I'd manipulate the water. I never dared attempt it on the farm, or back at my old house, both were far too close to other people.

The snapping of twigs and rustling leaves breaks my concentration, and the bubbles pop simultaneously.

“Who was that?” I ask, spinning to face the tree line, panic overtaking me.

“My granddad?”

“He never comes by the lake, Clay.”

“Maybe he's looking for us,” Clay says. “Who else could it have been? Relax, Reed, whoever it was they were too far away to see anything anyway. Besides, it could have just been an animal.” He pauses. “In fact I'm sure that's what it was, an animal.”

Unsure, I stare at the trees expecting at any moment for a Guardian to jump out and arrest me.

“Come on,” Clay says, offering me his hand. “It's getting late and we have announcements in the morning. We should head back.”

Silently I grab his hand, allowing him to lead me home to the farm. My heart races as we walk but it's not caused by the heat radiating from Clay as he stands close as it sometimes is. This time it races through fear. If a Guardian saw what I just did, or if someone else saw and reported me to a Guardian then I'm in trouble. I broke one of the top rules of all the Divisions: keeping a secret from the Imperium. An unstable secret. A secret that marks me as different. A secret that marks me as a threat.

I swallow back a heavy lump that forms in my throat as the word threat echoes around my head.

There's only one thing that would happen to me if the Imperium discovered my ability: I'd be judged.