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Chapter Three

Chapter Three
As soon as my senses kick back in, I start doing the one, actually useful thing Markus taught me: fight. I scream and kick, startling the guards and causing them to let go of me momentarily. In that one, short moment, I start running down the hall, towards the doors that lead to the lobby. I see Markus and mom sitting at our table through the window, and push the doors open. I sprint to them, and when Markus sees me, he stands up quickly. I run to him, hugging him, terrified.

"Madi, what's wrong?" he questions me, holding me out at arm's length.

"I qualified, Markus. I qualified." I manage to get out through my tears before I feel arms go around me, picking me up and taking me away from him.

"Put her down!" Markus screams at the man as he carries me away. "The test was wrong! She can't qualify! There's absolutely no chance that she qualified! It's not in her blood!"

The doors close behind me as the man carries me, kicking and screaming, outside and to a waiting car. He closes the door, and I hear it lock. I bang on the window as I watch the man retreat back into the building, and the car pulls away, into the empty street.

"Stop! They got the wrong person! It's not me!" I yell, scrambling to the divider that protects me from the driver. Or maybe it protects the driver from me. I get no response, so I sit back into the seat, curling into a ball.

The test has to be wrong. They'll figure that out. There is absolutely, positively, no way that my blood qualified. They got the samples mixed up. That's it, they were mixed up. I mean, how could I, someone who has NEVER had a family member qualify, have my blood be positive?

My thoughts are interrupted by the car slowing, and eventually coming to a stop. My door opens, revealing a man, dressed in completely black, with a wire curling from his ear, standing outside. I slowly exit, searching for an escape route. I am currently in an airplane hangar, and a small jet, probably private, sits in the center. My eyes find an open door, about fifty feet from my location, and my legs twitch at the temptation to make a break for it.

"I wouldn't try that, if I were you." I hear a voice whisper in my ear, and I slightly turn my head to see the man that opened my door behind me. "This way, Miss Benson."

He ushers me towards the plane, and opens the door, stairs coming out. I look back, and he smiles reassuringly at me. I tentatively step up and into the plane. There are seats on either side of the plane, most of them filled by nervous looking teenagers, just like myself. All of them qualified, and we are all going to the same place. I walk by each slowly, studying them. A scrawny boy, talking nervously to a girl wearing mostly dark colors sitting across from him. I see no pure bloods on the plane with me. I know every pure blood in the area, because we are separated from the other, non-pure bloods, to discourage us from marrying one of them. When the time comes, if we do have to marry them, we are matched up to make the best child possible, and also to make them almost certainly qualified. At the very back of the plane, a boy sits alone. He is wearing a pair of jeans and a regular t-shirt, his hair long and messy. Since it is the only seat not already taken, I sit across from him.

"Hey there." he says to me. I look up, slightly surprised that he spoke to me.

"Uhhh, hey." I respond, looking ahead of me, at the back of the seat in front of me.

"You're a pure blood, right?"

"Yeah, I'm a pure blood."

"Well, what are you doing here?" he asks me. "How did you qualify? Isn't there, like, a one in a million chance that a pure blood will be chosen?"

"Actually, one in nine hundred seventy four thousand, two hundred fifty eight. But yeah, one in a million." I tell him.

"Ah, a smart pure blood. Impressive."