Eden

1

CHAPTER ONE

"In the beginning God saved the heavens and the Earth. The Earth was in chaos and was ruled by evil. The heavens knew lies; they had taken the wrong path. But the spirit of the Lord was watching from above."

– Beginnings 1:1-3, The Bible of the New World

There's a clock in my school that never ticks.

It sits high on the white wall, its hands rusty and motionless, the numbers painted on its face faded and already half-gone. Sometimes I like to watch it, waiting for that eternal second – the frozen moment in time – to pass.

It never does.

But some things do. Like classes in room B13. The old, broken clock may say there's still seven hours until class finishes, but the bell will sting ring, it's high-pitched scream echoing eerily throughout the empty dark hallways.

"Avalon," a voice says.

"What?" My eyes trail from the clock and meet the cold, merciless gaze of my teacher.

"Would you please repeat what I just told the class?" she asks. The students around me go rigid, the boy sitting at the desk next to mine flinching. Slowly, every head turns to look at me, their eyes curious but afraid. Always afraid.

I sit back in my cold metal chair and put on a front of nonchalance, twirling my copper-coloured hair around my fingers with a sigh. But the fearful heart in my chest is pounding out a rhythm that's a thousand times faster than any song.

Shut up, my brain whispers to the stupid life-giving organ. The beating is so loud that I fear the teacher will hear it – that I fear he will hear it.

Calm down, calm down, calm down! I scream. But it doesn't, and there's no point in fighting the beating in my chest. The real fight lies outside of my skin, in the room awaiting my answer.

I know the answer to the teacher's questions, I tell myself. I have to know the answer.

"The world was made in five days," I say, my voice steady and confident. That's the answer she wants. I'm sure of it.

A second – or is it a minute? – passes in which her eyes bore into mine, as if digging tunnels that lead right to the secrets in my mind. I imagine her unpacking my soul, bit by bit, examining the contents for traces of Impurity.  If she really were to look, she wouldn't find any. But she wouldn't dare search my soul anyway – using your powers on school grounds is forbidden.

The teacher's eyes leave mine and she says, "As I was saying, the Lord created the world in five days, and on the sixth, he rested." The moment the words leave her mouth, the fear holding everyone prisoner evaporates, allowing us all to breathe. My answer was correct.

She continues on, and once again, I tune her out.

They teach us the same thing every year. We start with the Creation, move through the stories of the Changings and onto the formation of the Pure. Every year it's the same, and every year, twice a year, we are tested. When we're young, they're lenient. Get a few things on the Test wrong and you'll get away with only a call home. In the later years of primary, make a mistake and you're off to see the principal. But once you reach high school, things start getting extreme.

Make a mistake on the test in First or Second year and you'll receive a punishment - anything from after school detentions to food restrictions. Once you reach Third year, a mistake on the Test becomes serious, with it noted and added to your file for review upon the completion of your education.

But it's Forth year that things really start to hit home. Answer a question incorrectly in class and you'll receive a punishment. Get something wrong on the Test and you'll face the possibility of being Expelled.

I'm in Fifth year and things are getting dangerous. A single misstep could result in Expulsion. Or worse – Removal.

I swallow. No, don't think about it.

See, that's the way things work here in Eden. If you show even the slightest hint of being Impure, it'll be the end of life as you know it. The memory of the first test I took Second year comes to the forefront of my mind and a shiver runs down my spine. The question was: How many years did the Changing last? I recall the small forty I scrawled beneath the question.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

That simple mistake stripped me of a week's food supply. Even now, my stomach grumbles when I recall the days I spent drinking glass after glass of water, hoping that the liquid would fill the hollow in my stomach. It never did.

I look to the clock on the wall when suddenly, a scream tears through my mind and images flash by: a dark corridor and a black room; a dazzling silver weapon; a girl with dirty blonde hair and tears in her eyes; and a man in an ink-black suit, a splash of red on the sleeve. The memory comes back to me in pieces, as it always does, and it takes everything in me not to cry out. I squeeze my eyes shut and wait for my pulse to slow and the images to fade. They do eventually, but not entirely.

It's been like this for as long as I can remember. The memory comes at the strangest times – when I'm walking the school hallways, brushing my teeth, sitting in class. It's always the same and it's always fragmented, as if someone is controlling what I see, never giving away too much.

I look at the teacher, horrified when I see a patch of scarlet on the sleeve of her black suit. I blink once and it's gone.

"...for that reason," the teacher says, "we spend the sixth day of the sixth season in remembrance of what the Lord has done for us."

The bell goes and I collect my books, hurriedly leaving room B13 and its broken clock behind.