As The Knight Falls Series BOOK 1(COMPLETED✨)

4: Friends and Foes

Claire Huskin lay straight on her bed, motionless.

It's fine. It's gonna be fine.

She kept chanting to herself as she looked around. She was currently in the most luxurious room she'd ever been to in her whole life but this was the last room she ever thought of being in. The room was minimal yet elegant. It was furnished with a king-size alabaster bed complimenting the smooth grey wall adorned with an elegant picture of a lifeless tree.   A herculean window was bringing in the fresh morning breeze gently stirring the grey linen curtains on the way. A beautiful combination of sombre contour filled up the room with an aura of sophisticacy and it was choking her. Because she knew it was a hoax.

These. All. Were. Hoax.

None of these was real. Not only were they not real but they were all in grave danger. A very grave danger.

She pulled her legs to her chin and looked outside through the window.

It's still there.

It was a beautiful scene outside. A tapestry of green enshrined by a cloudless sky beckoning the beginning of a new day. The forest was visible for miles and more down the window. And so was visible a brilliant turquoise water reservoir, reflecting the virgin sky in all of its tranquility. And it was precisely from this point her thoughts began to jumble.

Annexa has no such reservoir!

She knew for sure there wasn't any. She herself explored every inch of Annexa to find one.

After the Great War thrashed and smashed humanity and left it to wither away, people stood up again. They staggered on the way, stumbled a few times more but turned around nevertheless. And in this long journey of restoration, the earth got divided into three main human colonies, each with traits of its own.

Harlin's consider the heart of the renaissance, the one with all the upsides. Foods there were abundant and technologies were splendid. But it's most looked up to for possessing the Phoenix headquarter, the sole defender of humankind for the last 14 years against another major outburst. It literally stood for "the Land of the Warriors"

Descending down the ladder of nourishment, next was Kallier. It was a colony of the improvisers, having a modicum amount of everything, but excelling in nothing. Hence, the living standard there was somewhat mediocre. Lastly came Annexa which was the worst of all in the bunch.

Annexa was the farthest of them all and the most unpolished one. It took the greatest hit during the war. Out of the 39,600 surviving the apocalypse, more than 5,000 occupants died in the first three years afterward due to famine and lack of medical care. The rest of 34K consisted mostly of children, teenagers and only a few thousand of adults. There were more orphanages down there than families. And they came from one such orphanage.

Though they turned their situation later on from ground zero, mother nature had very few roles in that. And of the things they never had was a natural reservoir of water in any inch of Annexa. And surprisingly none was found in Kallier either.

It had been a year since they moved to Kallier on student visa. As part of her architecture assignment, she had to study the land types and details of the whole  Kallier and submit papers on it. When she shared this information with the boys, Xen jokingly said these lands were too weak to cum.

A smile climbed its way on her lips as her ears turned red from embarrassment.

Xen and his nasty jokes.

Her heart twitched remembering them and she got mad looking at herself. They were stuck at Harlin thousands of miles away from their homeland and here she was, frantically fixing the curtains for being too skewed. She didn't even realize when she got off the bed and started dwindling with the floating curtains. Her OCD was getting worse now that Derek wasn't here to keep her mind off.

She sat down beside the window and pulled her legs closer.

It was always them.

Life was never easy for a three-year-old growing up alone in a rat-infested, third-grade orphanage but Derek and Xen were always there for her. They never made it look difficult. But now at this moment, she didn't know even how they were doing and here she was, getting the treatment of a queen, being completely useless. Then again, this wasn't free treatment. She knew what this room was.

It was one of the vilest rooms in the history of humankind- the "Chamber of Dawn". The chamber was in reality a large, sophisticated MRI machine infused into carefully crafted teflon walls developed by the late J. J. Dawn. It was developed during the war to click MRI images, X-rays, check the vitals of its guest but most importantly,  it was used to torture them mentally by messing with their brains' impulses.
It was developed for targets who were politically protected too well to be forcibly tested and tortured. Since it left no trace on the body of the target, it was a lethal gizmo during the war, especially against bureaucratic elites who didn't see eye to eye with the ruler of the then Harlin, Sho Kawasaki and were too dangerous to be killed in broad daylight. If one carefully listened, he could sense a mild hammering sound of the machine once the  MRI process started.

Claire knew all about it. It was grandly publicized with high-resolution pictures by the Phoenix to bash around their superiority in the tech world.

Another reason why I hate them!

Claire breathed in and out. In. And out. One thing was certain. Like they didn't know what the hell was going on, neither did their captors. Had they known they were some nobodies just living their lives far far away from here, they wouldn't have bothered about discretion. They could easily have killed them and disposed them off somewhere and no one would even care. And if she's still alive and well, so should be the boys. They were safe as long as none of the sides knew what was really going on.

What was really going on though! Why were they held as prisoners!

Claire sighed. What could they possibly have done to catch the attention of the  Phoenix, important enough to send two of their elites down to interrogate them?

No one's ever come back from their claws, alive!

How did they even come here in the first place! Even twenty-four hours ago, they were on their campus really excited about the game night. Xen was selected to play in power forward for their college basketball team. It was a big deal for Xen to be selected to represent a foreign team. They were so looking forward to it.

Claire fixed the curtain once again unknowingly. The sun was completely up now, marking the complete transition from a vicious night to a brand new day. She got up and plummeted on the bed. She didn't know what lay ahead of them but Annexars were proudly horrible in one thing. They didn't know when to quit. If Phoenix wanted a piece of them, so be it. She's going to use every opportunity thrown at them and thrive as long as she could.

For now, she decided to sleep. Sleep and prepare for a whole new battle.