Burned 2.2

The hallway is rather large, able to hold all of the regular traffic comfortably. Despite the high number of students who attend the school, it never feels crowded. Vido must’ve spent hoards of money to build this place and upkeep it. It’s been around since his ancestors first established it in 1908, over a hundred years ago.

Merith and I walk in silence. Despite there only being a few lamps along the way, it’s easy to see. Windows line the walls, letting in the soft light of the moon. I glance at my watch. 01:53. It isn’t as late as it feels. The professors schedule these exercises at night in hopes that they’ll get us at our weakest, or close to it. They want to see us push through and overcome obstacles. Apparently lack of sleep is a rather large one in their eyes.

It doesn’t take us long to reach the Wheel seeing as the dining room is at the beginning of the hallway. The Wheel is a large open area which connects all of the hallways in the building. There are seven of them in all, each one as dark as the next. For reasons unexplained, and probably irrelevant, there are barely any lights in the hallways. All classes are taken during the day anyway so there’s no need for them, really. How kind of Vido to think of the environment.

“I can’t believe how upset everyone is,” Merith says as we head to the right towards the agents dorm hallway. “I mean, people do well in exercises all the time. No one else gets riled like we did.”

I can only nod. Merith has known me since our first day at Vido’s. Supposedly, anyway. I don’t remember that day. There are things that she knows about me that I don’t even know about myself. To admit to her that the only reason people are being mean to her is because of me would only break her heart. If she figures it out by herself so be it. I’m not going to be the one to knock my friend down.

So I try a different approach. “What can you do about it? The fifth levels gets crazy come graduation time. There’s only one job out there and we all want it.”

She pales. “Only one position? I don’t know if I’m ready for that.”

“No, only one job. As in become an agent or live as a nobody.”

“Oh,” she responds, sounding relieved. We part ways to walk around the elevator that leads to the basement. That’s where our combat classes are held. I’ll be there in five hours. It’ll be a brutal class on such little sleep. Professor Stevens is probably the toughest professor out of them all. He won’t care that we had an exercise that kept us out way into the morning. He’ll work us just as hard. And I know now that most of us are going to fail.

I wonder when he’ll let us start using weapons. It’s been four years and all we’ve learned is close, hand-to-hand combat. Sure I can now take on a group of ten people by myself, but what if I don’t want to get close to them? Being a long range threat is just as important as being one in close quarters. If I can take out my target without revealing my existence, I’m taking it.

Merith doesn’t speak up the rest of our walk to the dorm. We stop at the third orange door on the left. Each door is painted a different color, although some of them repeat. I’ve spent years trying to figure out the pattern, because there has to be one, but I haven’t yet. I bet it’s a big joke among the professors. They think they’re so smart because they can confuse their students.

We walk into the room and I flick the light switch. Nothing happens. I groan and flick it back off. “What happened to lights out in an hour?” I take careful steps and plop onto the couch when I find it. Merith stumbles across the room and opens the bedroom door, bathing the room in moonlight. There are two windows against the far wall in that room, the only ones in our dorm.

Our main room here is a mess. The shelves that hold up the television are stuffed full of probably pointless papers and books we were too lazy to put back on the shelves in the bedroom. The single trashcan in the corner is overflowing with wrappers and crumbled up paper. It reminds me of that terrible paper I had to write for History a few weeks ago. It was an opinionated assignment, forcing us to tell our view of Dryysdale and Vido. I had trouble coming up with anything to say that didn’t make me sound unpatriotic. It’s not that I hate our country, I just see many of the faults about it that everyone else misses.

Merith disappears into the bathroom behind me. I reach to the left and feel around the side table. My hand finally lands on the tablet I leave there every night. The brightness of the screen makes me pause for a moment. Once I adjust my eyes I sign in and pull up the journal app the doctors told me to get. I start a new entry and label it for today.

All I can do is stare at the screen. The keyboard is up, but I can’t bring myself to actually write anything. I could say the same thing I said yesterday, but that wouldn’t actually help me.

“Remember anything?” Merith asks.

I shake my head, not taking my eyes off of the blinding screen. “There has to be something, right? How can all of my memories just disappear like that?” The last memory I have is of my sixth birthday party. It’s still a bit grainy; I only remember pink balloons and a chocolate cake. Everything after that is a blur up until the end of first level.

The “doctors” here tell me that I have a medical condition where my brain rewrites my memories, sometimes making them disappear completely. If they had given me actual proof I might actually believe them. The fact that they don’t even have medical records for me really doesn’t help their cause.

Merith sits next to me, wrapping her arms around me and resting her chin on my shoulder. “It’ll come back to you soon. These things take time.”

I laugh, a dark, cynical one. “Time? It’s been four years, Mer! I don't want to wait another minute. Don’t tell me it takes time.” She flinches, and I’m sure I've hurt her feelings by snapping at her, but I don’t care. I’m frustrated beyond belief. Everything in my life is going to change once I graduate. How can I expect to live the rest of my life if I can’t even remember what got me here?

Merith eventually falls asleep as the hours pass, her head resting heavily on my shoulder. It’s a bit uncomfortable, but I don’t want to move and disturb her. It’s the least I can do.

This damned screen is still glaring at me. Nothing has come to mind, leaving it just as blank as before. The more I try to dig out memories, the less I achieve. I close my eyes as if that’ll help. I see a man, a book, the sun. Then I’m running. My eyes fly open as I groan. None of this is clear; every image fuzzy. I’m not even sure if the man is a man or if I am me. These could be different people that my mind has manipulated to appease my curiosity.

Once I start yawning, I decide to type out what I saw. These are the same images I’ve written out days and weeks before. Looking back in my journal, a majority of the days are occupied by these same four images. One day it’ll all make sense. The problem is waiting.

I wiggle myself off of the couch, somehow without waking Merith, and head into the bedroom. It’s a very simple room, just two beds, a floor to ceiling -- a very low ceiling -- bookshelf that separates them and a those two windows. The first moment I stepped into this room, I had claimed the bed by the windows. Merith told me that. I believe her. Some nights I stay up just watching the world outside; the flocks of birds, bunnies racing by. From here I can see the back of the dining room, which was still illuminated, and the empty grounds that we just completed the exercise on. It’s a beautiful area and I can’t get enough of it.

I’m shaken awake before I even register that I had fallen asleep. Rubbing my eyes, I look out of the window to see the dark still clinging onto the night. Confused, I roll over to yell at Merith. Instead, I see Colton standing over me.