Code Name X

1-If anyone says I'm vertically challenged I will kill you slowly.

'Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end' - Seneca

05/11/2500

Esme

For about the billionth time, I wondered how on earth I had got myself into this mess.

Well, not so much wondering how, because I had been told all of the miserable details, but why. Because really, did I deserve this? All I had been trying to do was improve the lives of the people who were struggling to survive.

Okay, that may have involved stealing from the rich and happy, but it was helping people who actually deserved it.

Take Marta for example. She was ten years old and her father had been killed years ago in a death camp. Sorry, work camp, but really they're the same thing. Her mother was ill with a plague, and she had to look after her two little brothers. So how was it a crime to borrow (fine, with no intention of returning) some money and food from a house nearby, to help her, and give the poor girl one less thing to worry about?

But then, as that ancient saying goes, no good deed goes unpunished. It was just sad that my punishment was to spend six months in jail, completely alone, apart from the guards.

Then, for some unfathomable reason, the government decided that I was going to need help re-adjusting to my life, so I would have to stay in a centre of learning.

Which was a load of crap.

Part of the reason was that I would need to go to school. I hadn't been to school in forever, so it was pretty darn useless. Unfortunately, school would never be useful to me. The government have always claimed that they don't discriminate about backgrounds and wealth when giving jobs, but if that was true, then wasn't it a strange coincidence that all the best jobs were given to the richest people?

So, the poor never had good jobs. Therefore, school was completely useless to someone like me, a poor orphan who camped on the floor of a kind neighbour. My parents were rounded up a long time ago, but the camps don't take children, so I was left behind, aged eight. Another reason why the government was comprised of absolute morons. What kind of people leave an eight year old kid alone in the world? People who have power and no hearts.

Funnily enough, it was the thought of my mum and dad that stopped me from running as soon I was let out of the car that had transported me from the prison in the middle of nowhere, to the enormous, ugly building that was a mess of glass and steel. It was supposed to look modern and friendly, and to make us peasants show respect. All it did was make us hate them more, because the money they had spent on that could have fed the people in my sector (about six hundred people) properly for a month. It showed us that they didn't give a damn about whether we lived or died.

It made me angry that they didn't care about my parents, but as soon as I thought of them, I knew they wouldn't want me to run away. Mum had always said that running was the coward's way out.

So I took a deep breath of fresh air, took a look at the city that I had missed so much and climbed the steps to the steel framed door. I emerged into a large hall, with a few people bustling around. I immediately spotted a door over to the left, that I assumed was the one I was supposed to go through. I looked behind me, at the two guards escorting me, looking for a sign of affirmation, but all I got were two stony looks. Well, weren't they just rays of sunshine.

I turned left, but there was a dead end a short distance away. I came back, but I couldn't remember which flight of stairs I had come up, because there were so many leading off, and the shining metal was disorientating.

I heard an argument going on, inside a door that was to the right of a flight of stairs.

"If you're so much better, why have you been in prison for the last year?" A girl's voice yelled angrily in English.