Page 70 of The Order

“What-”

“Forest, chop-chop,'' Rae says, tapping her watch with a pink nail. She looks annoyed, clearly off-put by yet another exchange between me and an Unfortunate.

“You're being summoned,” Mark says, looking back toward the road with a lowered head. I step back, wondering how the conversation could shift that quickly. My head snaps back toward Rae, giving Mark one last look before pulling myself away from the tram.

I step off with a heave, moving past the blonde who has only managed to push my buttons today.

“How many of them do you plan on talking to?” Rae questions, trailing behind me, nagging me like a fly buzzing by my ear. My brother is talking to Max, standing close while whispering something in the boy's ear.

“As many as I fucking want,” I spit, pausing to finally become eye level with the girl. “Because right now, the last thing I want is to be around our people,” I continue, watching her expression contort into unease. The boys watch the exchange with curiosity, standing still, waiting for one of us to look at them.

“What the hell is going on with you?” Rae questions, giving my front a shove that leads to nothing. I hold my ground, keeping a leg back, unsure of when I had braced myself for the impact I didn’t know was coming. She moves to shove again, stopping once both of her wrists are in my hand.

“I don't know. So stop trying to figure it out for me,” I whisper, narrowing my eyes at her with a firm squeeze to her wrist.

A loud crash breaks my concentration on her, forcing us back several feet as we narrowly avoid tree branches falling on top of us. The tree scrapes the sidewall of someone's front yard before landing on the sidewalk between the boys and us. It’s one of the many aspens planted on the sidewalk, and there’s now a gaping hole where it should’ve been. I stare at the exposed roots, each jagged and ripped clean from the ground. I trail my gaze up towards the trunk, where I notice it’s been sliced clean through with precision. We pause our angry banter, looking over the suddenly displaced eyesore in front of us.

“What the hell?” Kai questions, moving closer to get a better look at the tree.

“You both okay?” Max questions, resting his hand at my side. It makes my skin crawl.

“Yeah, we're fine,” I quickly say, keeping my eyes on Kai.

“You two stood there, and it just started leaning over,” Kai says, rubbing his fingers along the perfectly sliced trunk. “How the hell does a tree even break like that?” he questions, motioning the twins to come over and get a closer look.

The trio is studying botany in science this year, spending a great deal of time trying to figure out new ways to incorporate plant life, once thought extinct, back into our society. As far as I know, our people’s resources, though seemingly plentiful, still tend to dwindle in some areas. The ability to create other fresh produce items that our society thought long gone grows more plausible each day.

With minds like Kai and Rae thrown into the research process, what once seemed impossible is now a light at the end of the tunnel. You’d be surprised how quickly people have gotten bored with what fresh produce we do have, given they have no real idea what food was like before New Haven began to get a grasp on how to mass produce once more. There are horror stories about New Haven's beginning and food scarcity before civility and agriculture returned to the human race.

Something wet falls from my ear, pulling me away from my thoughts once it meets the pavement and I see a red splotch. I touch my ear, pulling my fingers in front of me, and find bright, red blood coating my fingertips. Slapping my hand over the side of my head, I walk away, letting my slow steps become enormous strides, all while leaving my friends in the unsettling space behind me.

I shove open my front door, quickly scanning my ID card before the house triggers an alarm at the sudden presence within it. Running to the kitchen, I grab the nearest towel, clamping the material over my ear. I tilt my head back to try and stop the bleeding. After many minutes of vigorously washing my hands and patience, the bleeding stops, leaving me no other option than to shove the rag in my bag until I can clean it on my own. If anything, it would be just one more thing for my mother to question.

The only person active in the house is my father, although, given how dark it is inside the home, he must be sleeping off one of his longer shifts.

Quietly, I tip-toe closer to my bedroom door, doing my best not to look into his study through the open door. He rarely leaves it open this time of day so it’s hard not to steal a glance inside.

Curiosity gets the better of me, forcing my head to look into his large workspace. His body is slumped forward onto his desk, his chest breathing deeply, and he’s snoring onto the countless files sprawled across his desk. I step closer to the door, hearing a noise once my foot moves past the doorway. Looking down, I notice papers strung all over the floor of his study, each covered in handwriting of all different fonts and sizes, all sporting the same word.

“Apparatus?'' I whisper, pushing myself to move further into the study.

His hands are coated in color pastels. Pages are ripped from his notebook. Some of his files are even covered in the word. Slowly creeping closer to my father, I see the nearly empty bottle of scotch resting next to his head.

I continue to find even more papers surrounding me everywhere I turn.

“What the hell?” I whisper, unable to focus on just one document.

Sketches of New Haven's territory are on my father’s wall. Pins of varying colors poke up from the map. Green, blue, red, purple, and gray.

Of the five colors, there is one gray.

It marks our house's central location in New Haven’s territory.

I poke my father’s body, ready for him to scream at me for being in here. I don’t know if he’d even bother trying to explain whatever it is I’ve stumbled upon.

He doesn’t move a muscle.

Letting my curiosity guide me, I quietly move folders away from his desk, knocking his computer mouse in the process. His screen lights up, requiring no password, seeing as he passed out while doing work. I look over the multiple files on the computer, biting my nails once the cursor lands on the file labeled “Unfortunate Sector.”

---