SONDER (IV): tmr thomas

020: I should leap

Ella 20

"Did you hear that?" One voice whispers to another.

I don't pay them any mind. Instead, I sit and sulk on the ground. This is not where I wanted to be. The betrayer is not here, even though I had expected her to be. With the GPS destroyed, my hopes of finding her are shattered.

Maybe her death wouldn't bring Eli back to life, but it might help me feel better. At this point, that is all I can really care about.

The girl next to me stiffens. I have to remind myself that she is in fact Sonya. Sometimes I recognize her less than I did the violet haze which kissed the earth in the Glade. She is years older than the girl that I knew; years older than she seems. Maybe its because WICKED experimented on me and electrocuted me so frequently that my growth is delayed. In reality, I am probably a few years older than her. Honestly, I might even be the same age as her brother.

Among all the things WICKED stole from me, they stole her as well. They wore her skin down.

"Emily," Sonya whispers in my delicate ear. "What's wrong?"

She has been asking me that question practically since I met this version of her. I don't have the time, nor the words in this language to explain that I love a different person than her, one who used to be her but was violently ripped from my grasp.

It is an impossible thing to tell someone who inhabits the body and the memories of my lover. How could I explain to Sonya that I want to make her someone she is not?

A voice shushes Sonya from across the room. It is dark in here, nearly as dark as the boxhole which brought me up from ashes, a rising phoenix. They have drawn the curtains on the windows and closed the door to the rest of the dilapidated building.

"Someone is coming," a girl's panicked voice is louder than she intends it to be. It is impossible to whisper when you are trying to shout.

One of the few boys in the group stands up. He recognizes me, stopping and cocking his head to the side. I know him to be Teresa's experiment-twin, just as Eli was mine. On the other side of the door, there is a crash.

"Run," the boy insists.

He charges out of the hallway, leading with a few others. Bodies are rushing around the room. Sonya is boosting me up to the window behind us. She pushes me through the curtains, where I unlock the window and tumble outside on to the dirt lawn.

She is quick to follow after me. Her nails dig into my arms as she pulls me off the ground. It is so bright outside that I can't see anything.

"Come on," Harriet calls up ahead. She too moves on me, helping pick me up from the ground and drag me out of the space we are in.

There are other girls running all around us. Some are screaming, but others are silent. There is a voice on an intercom shouting at us to stop moving, stop running, stop resisting, but we keep moving anyway. This isn't WICKED. WICKED would not send us into Denver, these people are somebody else, some people I don't recognize.

I feel an explosion hit my leg and I collapse what little support I had from beneath me. My body slips from Sonya and Harriet and I hit the ground.