Fate Project

Phase 2 | Blessing ‘n Curses

RHINE

On the way to the Farms, I'm half-dragged and half-chased by Alice. After hours of painful scuffles and brawls, we settle for a short truce and rest at the meadow. We watch as the sun rises, rays spilling across the Farms on the west, the Markets the east of Moor. This is where we'll always find ourselves, Alice and me, after a long day at the Bridge. This is where our thoughts goes and leaves, our frustration find its release. It's ours.

"Did you saw it?" brings up Alice, "the aerocraft this morning?"

"Just caught a glimpse," I say, fiddling with the strings, "why?"

"The aerocraft was headed to Veld," she answers, "Father thinks it's the provision aeroship, he's going to the next village to get some rations."

"It wasn't," I say, "did you stop him?"

"I did but you know how he is," she replies, rubbing her accursed eye. It must be hurting again. I stop her from further picking on it.

"If it's not, he'll be with some kids, then," she says.

I stop playing with the strings and look straight at her. Intently. When she avoids eye contact, I don't bother hiding my spite.

"Well, that's a decent thing to do," I say, sarcastically, "even for old Murray, that's a whole new level of stupidity."

"Our supplies can't hold out as it is," I claim, darkening, "and the kids are almost useless, unless you force them to work in the Farms—"

"He won't do it," she snaps harshly. "Why would he? They're three year old kids!"

"Yeah, who can walk and talk like our age!" I snap back

"But they don't have the understanding we have," she glares at me, "they are still children, still innocent in both mind and heart.

"And they just received their curses."

I turn my back to Alice. It's not a fair thing to do. To talk about curses, to me of all people. Curses is what makes us irregulars. It's what separates us from them—regulars. But that was an excuse, a lie, we use to deceive ourselves.

Regulars live at Mars, in the Capitol. Irregulars die here at the Bridge, worse killed in the Citadel. Regulars are the elites of the evolved human race. Irregulars are the blights of humanity. While they embody perfection, we define abnormality.

And they have blessings instead of curses. While we are cursed with disorders and disabilities—impairments, they are blessed with talents and abilities—powers. They are the unthinkable and the unimaginable. The impossibilities. We are the aberration and the distortion. The anomalies.

And the cor in our bodies will be the judge. Your entire fate decided on the day of your third birthdate, the Age of Fate Reconnection. With just single test scan, everything that you are will be changed. If your cor turns to be a blessed cor, you stay, allowed a residency at the Capitol as an official regular, but if it turns to be a cursed cor, the next thing you know, you are being taken into custody and to be deported at the Citadel as an irregular.

So you end up here, trying to survive or just simply wasting away, waiting for your death or a miracle that will never come. Cursing your life as if it isn't cursed as it is. Damning others because of your own bitterness and resentment. And then when you have enough, learning to inflict others what the world inflicted to you. I would know, I'm one of its victims.

It's hard to stick out in a place where the strange and unusual lives. If you do, then you're like me. A target. An easy prey amongst preys that likes to act like a predator. It's revolting.

They say it's because of my uncommon curse, the scar in my chest. Others, my un-irregular appearance. Some, my aloof behavior. Actually, they can choose one thing from another and blame it all on me. No one would bother, no one would care. So why would I?

So what if I am sent here at five, not three. If I can see, hear, touch—sense and perceive things others cannot. If I choose to be indifferent just because everyone will not. If I am strange and weird just because people are not.

It makes sense why we blame it all on our curses. After all, that's all you can do, blame and find fault because the alternative means you have to accept the truth and resign yourself to your fate. I don't. It's not a matter of curses or blessings. It's not a matter of fate. No, it's a matter of your resolve. You don't just choose your own fate, you create it.

I create mine.

"Well, if you're not going back to the Farms, do something productive," says Alice, standing up to brush the dirt off her makeshift, ragged, burgundy dress. No improvements, Alice does not have the sense to groom herself even back then. She'll be eighteen next month, me seventeen next year, and she still dresses like a heathen.

"You can go clean the barn," she suggests, "Do you want me to help graze and shepherd the cows and goats?"

I groan but I know I can't refuse since she's being lenient to me. Too lenient.

"Come on," she implores, "you lazy-head."

I earned that nickname for always slacking and ditching my work, at first it's really annoying but as the time goes it crept up to me until it finally stuck, so now it became Alice's official trademark of insult.

"Shut up one-eyed freak," I say, hiding a smile.

She gives me a light smack on the head and goes first; I give up and stand to follow her.

I trudge towards the barn, lazily, while dragging bundles of soilage grasses with my hand. It's then George comes and flies at me, grinning widely. His sprightly spirits tends to rub me off the wrong way. It's urging me to swat him like a fly. But there's not much of difference, he's annoying, stubborn and small, though larger than a fly, but a little smaller than a songbird. An orb, that's what they call theirselves.

I tell him not to nag me and start my work. Alice have already escorted the animals in the meadow and told me to make a quick work in cleaning and stocking the animal feeds, then sorting out the supplies in the storage once I finish. That duty used to be Orca's, the eldest irregular that ever lived here in the Moor. One of my old man's closest friend until he finally passed away because of his curse, scoliosis. And then few years later, my old man followed. Except it wasn't his curse, that weak enlarging heart of his, that caused his death. It was another one of us. An irregular. A rebel.

You would think nearly all the irregulars are dying to fight and overthrow the Capitol but it's entirely the opposite. But then again, the rebellion would not reach the Bridge if the irregulars are not foolish enough to join the fight for equality yet had already sacrificed so many.

Indeed, it was for justice. It was fair and righteous. Moral, even.

They are fighting for the right cause.

They are doing the right thing.

Stupid. Because that's what they also thought when they divide regulars and irregulars.

During the time when Allcor Alliance was founded by the leaders of every remaining nation back in Earth, instead of managing the evacuation to Earth and assisting their people, their first action had caused a great distortion to us. They had declared the division of all regulars and irregulars, that's why. They had decided that all classified regulars, the blessed ones, would be staying in the Capitol, while the classified irregulars, the cursed ones, would be sent in the Citadel. The reason is, or so they said, that these two different people would never coexist, would never find peace, until they were left off of themselves. Instead of uniting for the purpose of coexistence, they chose dividing for the sake of so-called independence.

We have it coming all along. The rebellion, the one to cause another destruction and damn us to extinction. Because it's but a vain attempt. Irregulars rebelling against the regulars is the same as defying the Gods.

They might've been fighting a revolution for equality. They might've conquered the Citadel, marked the dying planet as theirs. They might've defied the Alliance's orders, destroyed properties of the Capitol. They might've drove regulars managing and facilitating the promised advocate for irregulars, convinced that it was nothing but a way to manipulate us. They might've ruled, the Citadel, our wasted Earth, becoming just as its name uphold. They might've achieved such feat, felt this small victory and hope.

But hope, hope is a fragile yet dangerous thing. Because that same hope, will soon come crashing like tenfold despair when the truth settles in.

Because they are regulars, we are irregulars. They are Gods. We are trash. We will never be equals. And that's an irrefutable truth.

So as the rebellion's inevitable defeat.

It has been set in stone, set just like our fate.

It just makes matters worse because the resistance had reached the Bridge—and once it reaches us—I don't want to even consider it happening. It's inconceivable.

George has seen the worst in the Arid region, he would make a joke out of it when he would tell me about it, but the face his lot made, the ones who really witnessed the whole thing and brought the news, it was bad enough to describe what's happening in the deserts. The rebel's bases and the uprisings. They've already planted a base here in the Mountain region—two, one at Veld, the other at the borders of Pampas and Torrid (a village in Arid region). It could be Moor next.

Just thinking about it sends a horrible, wretched feeling to my gut. My chest tightens, my throat burns. It's here that my scar chose the time to attack, sending stabs of pain in my chest. It's a pain I'm already familiar, a torment that we have to bear all our life, and somehow along the way you get used to it. Or that's what we tell ourselves.

I find myself stopping from my work, trying to ignore the pulsing pain in my chest, so fleeting yet an agony so excruciating, I can't help but to wince against the pain and stop the cries of torture begging to spill from my throat.

Seconds pass and just as easily, it disappears, the pain diminishing. I huff a steady breath and calm myself. Tugging at one of the golden strands, I tie the fallen soilages into a bundle. Just when I plan to leave, George suddenly darts across me into the storage, hitting the storage's doors, probably trying to chase the occasional rats.

And that's when I hear it, a sudden clunk inside the storage itself where all the hays and flours are kept. I would let it pass, thinking that some filthy rats or birds might be feasting on the goods. Except that I won't, because what comes next is a sudden sound I cannot miss. A gun, its hammer drawing back, set for firing, and its trigger sliding into place.

I have one thing in mind. Rebels.