D rip.

Dr op.

Dri p.

Bee-

eep

Beep. Beep. Beep.

This is the soundtrack to my awakening. I just had some tests run on me, and they needed me to be asleep. That’s been happening more often these days, as they try to figure out what exactly it is that they injected me with. I mean, they know its name – I helped them come up with it.

I was infected with this curse of an illness the day I turned sixteen; happy birthday to me! The government does not like Undesirables, and as an underaged orphan, I was a member of that category, so they figured nobody would care if they ran a few experiments on me, instead of sending me to war like most of the other ageing out orphans

All for the greater good, of course.

The official diagnosis of my illness is Sanguine Imperfecta – you can see the teenage angst in the name alone, but the idiots let me name the virus. SI, in short, causes my red blood cells to be too big but too few, which can only be cured by consuming blood although I refused to drink it when they first tried to make me. Back then Kurbey, my doctor, hadn’t created a protocol for SI patients because I was patient zero, so they decided to see what would happen if they pumped it into my stomach. For some reason, SI causes the body to not be able to absorb the proper nutrients of blood through traditional means, as I’m sure you’ve surmised. I can’t take iron pills or get regular blood transfusions, because my body rejects it eventually, by releasing it via every orifice of my body. I only feel better after they’ve pumped that blood into my stomach.

Being patient zero has its perks. For example, I’m privy to the fact that anybody who was infected after me shares a little bit of DNA with me. We were all infected with the same batch – I was the only one, for a while, because they had to perfect the next phase of the virus within me.

I grew up thinking that I was headed for a life in the military, but this had always been my future. Apparently, the “wild” version of this disease has ravaged the world for some time, and Undesirable babies born with rare blood types or medical marvels, are destined for Guinea pig greatness! My blood type is AB+ so I’m able to take whatever they give me with the added benefit of being a pretty rare blood type myself. Unfortunately, this means that I am one of their favourite lab rats – today I had three rounds of testing, I reckon.

Growing up, everybody is told to believe that the government knows what’s best for everybody. They’re who is in charge, after all. Just yesterday, I was reminded for the billionth time that just forty years ago our leaders pulled the broken nation of America up from its bootstraps and renamed it Affinity.

I grew up in Sector One, in the city of Eld for the first seven years of my life before being orphaned. My mother worked two jobs; one legal and the other, not-so-much. By day she was a construction worker, and by night she kept people company. Her hard work put me through school and helped assure that we’d always have a bit more food on the table than the average household.

My biological father, well, he could have been anybody, but the one I called “Dad” was a photograph tucked away in my mother’s closet of her dead husband, David. The stories my mother would tell of his kindness made me long for him to be my real father. Mom always told me that it didn’t matter who my father was, only that she loved me and that love was a powerful tool. Turns out, she was right about that last part because one of her night time clients killed her in a fit of jealous rage. My mom wasn’t just a sex worker – people paid her to act as if she was in love with them, that they were the only important person in her life. When your job is to pretend to love somebody, some of them may start to believe the lie after a while, even if deep down they know it isn’t true. I think it’s sort of like the holograms in certain store windows that you’d swear were real but logically know are fake.

When mom died, I was brought to the borough of Arch in Sector Two. Arch Orphanage to me, at first, looked rather imposing as far as buildings go. The place is a huge building that’s covered in vines and made entirely of stone. It was built to last in the late nineteenth century and boy has it ever lasted. It intimidated me, at first glance. I mean, I was a kid, right? A huge stone building looked like something out of a horror movie to me, back then. Little did I know how much I’d turn out to look like something from one in the future.

I quickly changed my mind once I was escorted inside by my caseworker. We were immediately greeted by Mrs. Linwood, the head coordinator of the orphanage. The warmth she exuded made me instantly comfortable, and when she showed me to my room, it didn’t matter that I had to share it with a few other children, or that my bed was smaller than I was used to. I felt at ease. I knew I’d be safe there, under her care. I thought maybe, a few days here wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe I could wait to start school for a bit, get to know my surroundings.

However, the next day, I was expected to start school as if everything was normal. I didn’t much like that, but what could I do? A few of the orphans in my age bracket had tried to get me interested in being friends with them, but I didn’t quite feel up to task yet…so it shocked them all during lunch at school when I didn’t tell Rhett to go away when he sat down next to me.

God, I miss Rhett.

I couldn’t have convinced him to go away if I’d tried, though. He was convinced we’d be the best of friends. He was a scrawny kid, a year older than me, with dirty blonde hair and slightly crooked teeth. His father was a farmer, carrots, corn and potatoes, as I recall. His eyes were green, like fresh grass, unlike mine which are a darker shade, closer to baby poop than anything resembling pretty.

The first words he said to me were something he probably heard in a movie his parents had watched. “What’s a pretty girl like you doin’ in a place like this?”

The way he said it, all serious but with laughter touching his eyes, caught me off guard. It was enough for me to give pause, and instead of ignoring him I blinked at him, quizzically. He took that as a sign to sit, setting his lunch of chopped carrots down on the table. I gathered that his parents were farmers.