Memories in the Dark

               “Get up! You have to get up!”

                Your voice is far away. As if you’re underwater.

                Pain. Red- hot pain. It’s everywhere.

                It’s cold.

                Wet.

                I hear yelling. Barking.

                It's... dark.

                My chest… hurts.

                “Please, Marigal! Open your eyes! You have to get up! They’re coming! You have to run!”

                Screaming.

                 Rain.

                Blood.

                …My blood?

                Cold.

                “Marigal!”

                Your voice is fading. It hurts to breathe. It hurts to try. It hurts… everything hurts.

                I try to speak. To tell you to go. But I can’t. I breathe once, and then the memories come.

                It was a beautiful warm day. I am five years old; a short, chubby girl with blond pigtails. I’m going to my grandmother’s lab. It is my first time traveling by Aerotrain. My mother holds my hand while we look down on our city, New Philadelphia, while flying through the air. I wore a blue bracelet that day. It had a charm on it; a flying bird. I held my wrist to the window. It looked like the bird was really flying. I laughed. My mother smiled at me, but there was certain sadness around her pale eyes. Her beautiful face was already pale and gaunt from the sickness. Everyone looked like that then.

                We got to the lab. It was white. White and cold. The scientists smiled and greeted us as they carried towering stacks of medical textbooks. My grandmother appeared and smiled at me. She was a slender, pale woman with steel-grey hair. I remember she had cold eyes. ‘Like stone’, I had thought. I was scared of her. I still am.

                My next memory was when I was eight years old. I was still chubby and short, with my blond hair grazing my ears. I lived in the lab with my grandmother now. My mother had died four years ago. I spent most of that day like any other one, locked up in the library, drowning in my favorite overstuffed arm chair, reading books upon books on the Sins Plague. The same plague that killed my mother, father, and 48% of the population. I wore a red jumpsuit that day. I asked my old maid, Talin, for lunch. I had five maids. After all, my grandma was the Empress of the New Americas. Her granddaughter could have anything she wanted.

That day, I felt bored. I took a walk around the lab. I found a door that I had never seen before. My young curiosity overcame me. I opened the door with the combination I had figured out that my grandma uses for every door. It was my birthday, 11, 13, 95. I stepped inside the bare, padded room.

And I found you.

You were a scrawny child, with long dark hair and serious black eyes that pierced right through me. You were sitting on a wooden chair, the only piece of furniture in the sterile, white room.

You're glare was unnerving, but not scary for some reason, not to me.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“My name is Aarek,” You said, not smiling.

I didn't even ask why you were there in that prison. We were both lonely eight year olds. We had a special bond.

                When I was thirteen, my white- blond hair went past my waist, and I lost my baby fat. I came to your room every day in secret. We told each other everything. Our secrets. Our dreams. The only thing we never talked about was why you were locked up. But one day you told me after I prodded relentlessly.

“I am in here because I know too much.”

And that’s when you changed my world forever.

You told me everything; how your parents once worked for the Empress; how they betrayed her; and how they told you the Secret before they died. You told me the truth.

There was no Sins Plague.

The Empress killed the people, with a special poison that she invented herself and put into the offenders' food. "The offenders," meaning the people who were part of the Rebels Society, an underground group of the people who wished to overthrow the Empress.

              Which meant...

             "Grandma killed her own daughter," I had whispered. "And my mom was part of the Rebels Society."

               At first I didn't believe you. I called you a liar, I punched you, I cried. But you were patient, whispering to me evidence, stories, and told me to think about all of the people who had ever publicly disagreed with the Empress. All of them were never seen or heard from again.

               I believed you. I had no choice. An ever since then, I have been part of the secret society, the Rebels. I helped you escape from your white prison, and we ran away together.

                “Marigal!” You scream. You’re crying. I can feel your hot tears on my face. “Don’t leave me! Please, don’t leave!”

               We went around at night, whispering stories, handing out pamphlets, to anyone who would listen. We would sleep in barns, in abandoned Aerotrain stations, anywhere we could find.

                "It's you and me against the world, Mari," you would tell me "Together, forever and always."

                 "Forever and always," I would agree, "Forever and always."

                  I try to break the surface, to come back to my Aarek. But it is too hard. Sleep is easier.

                  Forever and always.

                “I’m sorry,” I whisper hoarsely. I can hear the dogs barking, and the guards yelling. The precious documents, the ones that we stole tonight, the ones that will tell the world the truth, that are in Aarek’s arms, are soaked in my blood. “I’m so sorry Aarek.”

                Then I close my eyes and sleep.