Page 4 of Storm

Some of our features, like our jawlines, do not quite match. His is broad, while mine is thin and pointed. Mam says my face is shaped like a heart because she loves me so much. I used to tease Nix because that must have meant Mam loved me more than him. When I became a teenager, I realised the differences in our face shape and eye colour meant something more sinister.

My eyes are startlingly blue. Nix’s are a deep brown with gold. In our case, they speak of the differences in our parentage, mine more ill-begotten than his—mainly the merchant who took advantage of our mother around eighteen years ago. The man my mother has never seen since.

He wooed her with the possibility of a better future, an escape. However, with age and time, she soon understood no one was coming for her. And the only way Mam, Nix, and I are ever going to be set free is in the roots of the soil, long after our bodies are buried.

Mam likes to call my eyes her calm before the storm. She says I am building up to something great. My outbursts as a tiny child often alluded to the temper I managed to get under control with age. However, it didn’t stop the constant, unbridled burning of solence in my veins. The thrill of it pumps through my heart, often pushing my actions, even before I think.

I love them both endlessly for overlooking my one true flaw, the lie the man who sired me bred into our family: hope.

A hope that ‌kept me believing there is always something better around every corner. The problem is we don’t have many corners in our fields.

That hope has now turned sour.

“It’s not going to happen, Storm. If I hear you talk of it again, I will restrict your factory trips.”

Lie. He will restrict nothing. “Sure, and the ground isn’t brown, and the sky isn’t grey with mist.”

A small chuckle escapes his lips. I fall down next to him, laughing. “Why can’t we try, Nix?”

“Because here, I can keep you safe. I know the rules. Out there.” He gestures towards the walls of our tent. “Out there with the merchants, I can’t be sure of their motives. You’ve heard the stories. Merchants lie.” Lips splutter on the last part.

Beyond the man who tricked Mam, I’ve heard the stories. The ones where they take the prettiest of the children and use them as bargaining chips. The thought of being sold makes my whole body shake.

“Come here.” Nix opens his arms. I scooch to lie on his chest, listening to the boom, boom, boom of his heartbeat.

I used to take this same position on our mother’s chest, and it almost—almost—reminds me of happier times with her. Moments where she held me so tightly, her squeeze alone was my whole world.

A time when Mam and Nix were enough.

A time when anger didn’t live in the pits of my soul.

A time when I didn’t understand the reality of my existence.

“I’ll find a way,” Nix reassures me, patting my arm.

That’s what he says every night when I try to broach the subject of doing more. Or at least learning more. He tries to protect me. I’m no longer a child. I don’t know what Nix thinks he’s going to find. We both know Mam is on a one-way collision course with the earth.

We are lucky to make it to our fiftieth birthdays in the lightning fields. Gossiped whispers on market days say this is a common occurrence within the farming colonies.

All I see is red when I close my eyes, willing death on the hollows—a silent admission I’d never admit out loud. Because if I ever get the chance. I will make them pay.

“I love you,” my protector whispers against my hair, and I wait for the rest—the poem that calms the raging furnace within and lulls me into sleep. “Beyond the simple measures of time and space. Beyond bodily forms and tricks of the eye. I love you...”

CHAPTER 2

FLAYED OPEN FOR ALL TO SEE

Market Day. A day held once a month to keep us seronds feeling like we aren’t forever stuck between four barbed wire fences. They provide us with small treats to wet the senses, to make us think what we do is enough, that we will want for nothing.

It’s a trick.

There’s a crying out, a yearning for something more. Even if my fellow farmers don’t want to say it aloud. I see it in the hunger reflected in their eyes, the colourful irises, so different from the hollows’, screaming for a future where there’s more than this. It’s hard to imagine what it could be. What’s the pull, the knowing that makes you inexplicably understand there’s a possibility for contentment, peace?

This truth runs through my bones with the zapping electricity of a strike. It has to be within my fellow seronds, too.

It must be. I can’t be the only one out here dreaming of more.

The only one angry.