Chap 119: The Burns Are Coming

Young Tee turned to Jack, furrowing her brows in confusion.

“I thought we were going to walk home and maybe head to the swings, since we live nearby and all.” Jack shrugged and looked at the ground. “Anyways, we can always walk home tomorrow. Bye.” He rushed off.

After that day, Jack never showed up at the swings at her clinic, claiming he had homework. Instead, he suggested they walk home together with his friends to make up for the time. Tee, ever gullible, fell right into his trap.

While riding in the back seat of the air-conditioned vehicle, Tee asked Tetra if she could walk home from then on. Tetra’s brows knit, like she’d just spotted a naked hobo on the street flaunting their assets. She moved her arm behind Tee’s back to pull her closer and said,

“No. That’s too dangerous. I wouldn’t be able to live if anything happened to you.”

An unwelcome thought crept into Tee’s mind. It was even more upsetting than how she could see inside a moving vehicle she couldn’t touch. It was that Tetra couldn’t risk anything happening to her precious test subject. Tetra’s life’s work would stall while she sought the illegal adoption of another Xeno-victim. It was common knowledge among scientists that too many dreamed of being the lucky one to discover the cure to the Xenogene.

Young Tee swore her large, beady eyes worked magic, because Tetra’s answer changed—but under one condition: Tee had to keep the GPS on her holo-phone active while walking home. That way, Tetra would know where to start hunting if anything went wrong. But Tee couldn’t understand—why would anyone want to hurt a ghost?

The next day, walking home was filled with non-stop chatter. Tee and her four friends had fun changing the lyrics of a song to insult their math teacher. Tee was surprised she remembered the lyrics and wished she didn’t. Why she’d wasted time doing something so dumb was beyond comprehension. Soon, the group split up, leaving only her and Jack.

“You have nice eyes.”

“Huh?”

Jack turned to her, holding both straps of his backpack. “I said you have nice eyes.” He stepped closer. “But your bangs are so low I can hardly see them sometimes.”

Young Tee’s cheeks bulged with a wide smile. After a week of hearing similar words from Jack, she parted her bangs to reveal more of her face. It was the first thing Jack noticed, and his deep stare into her eyes reached her soul. From that day, she began growing her bangs out.

He became her open door to being a kid. He showed her cards of digital characters, told her which rom-coms to binge, and soon she was up to date with all the trends. She understood the slang, the double meanings, and even the social structure of her First-level Academy.

Tee grimaced when the scene switched to the large room with one side open to the outdoors. It was filled with exercise gear and signs, both inside and outside, displaying acceptable scores for each type of exercise. Young Tee was always below them.

Young Tee stayed well behind the line of jogging students. In another blink, she crashed into one of the cut-out signs used to rank Xenosapians. That memory was from her first Stamina class. The students’ laughter was absent since everything had gone black, but Tee knew they were laughing their heads off. The next day, Armstrong gave her a name. Crash.

It was a stupid name, but she thought it was better than Sheep. Jack, however, would not stand for it. One day, as Armstrong headed for lunch and shoved Jack aside, he usually would have let it slide—but not after Armstrong called her Crash.

Jack grabbed the bully by the arm to stop him from walking off. “You idiot, her name’s Tee.”

Armstrong turned and looked down at the shrimp who dared touch him. “Well, well… looks like the Albino shrimp grew a spine today.”

“I’m not Albi—” was all Jack got to say before getting shoved into a stack of lockers.

“Jack!” Young Tee screamed, stooping to help him up.

Tee wanted to laugh at that moment, but her stone face remained. All the crap she endured at her Academy was bearable only because of Jack. Her small smiles appeared only when he was around.

Since they always arrived early at the Academy, they would walk around campus together. That was their special time to listen to music. Earbuds were banned in most places since they could block alerts, but those rules didn’t matter as they shared a single pair to listen to his favorite songs.

Jack always saved muffins he made with his mom for her, but only during their solo walks home so their friends couldn’t get any. He told her he wanted to become a cooking specialist, because food was the way to a person’s heart.

During global curfew, locked in their rooms, they would see each other’s faces online. Together, they watched romantic comedies and talked, aside from doing homework. Tee excelled at math, and Jack kept telling her how smart she was. Even though her Stamina grades were embarrassingly low at the time, her academic grades were high.

He gave her her first taste of being an immature brat—sometimes crazier than chasing someone while pretending she wanted to eat them. The scene shifted to a field trip.

While the teachers were away, most of the students started spraying juice on a statue. They claimed it was to clean off bird droppings, and Jack convinced Tee to join in. Brenda’s rare smile appeared in moments like those. Warren, finishing his juice on the statue, began searching for a stone to chip off a piece.

Tee looked away from the brats and focused on the statue of one of the few honored Xeno-victims in history. Young Tee knew she was a Xeno-victim, but she kept it a secret out of fear of ridicule. She didn’t want her things stolen, have garbage thrown at her after mutation evacuations, or have to wipe liquid off her chair every time she got up. The life of a Xeno-victim was hard.

After accepting Jack’s friends, she became aware of the Xenogenemisia they gave off. The almost-empty cafeteria—with her, Jack, Brenda, Warren, and Tyler—began to form in her memory. It was from a prep quiz they usually did together in that spot.

Tyler wiped the surface of his tablet to reveal more questions. “Recall that there are two Apocalypses. The first is Apocalypse Prime, and the Reign of Severin. Which name is most alternated with ‘Hell’?”

Young Tee slammed her hand onto the table. “The second Apocalypse Reign of Severin!”

“One more point for Team B,” Tyler said, turning to Brenda and Warren. “Team A, true or false: The Mid-Guard is to equip humanity for killing Xeno-victims.”

“True, Brenda,” said.

Tyler lowered the tab to see Brenda and sighed. They all knew she knew the correct answer—she was the top student.

“Incorrect. It is to equip humanity to live in a world with Xenosapians. Team B, what is the one thing that distinguishes a host of the Xenogene?”

“The curse-mark,” Jack blurted.

Tyler nodded. “True or false: Human rights apply to all humans, whether crippled or Xeno-victim?”

“True… for now,” said Warren.

Brenda leaned over and slouched on the table. “Can we skip the questions with the xen-freaks? We all know the answers are the reverse of what they should be. The illogicity is hurting my brain.”

Tee walked over to Brenda and swung her hand toward her head. Brenda’s body distorted into smoke before Tee’s hand reached her, and so did everyone else in the cafeteria. In an instant, Tee found herself in darkness. Another memory began to form as lights from the corridor ceiling beamed down.

The stampede of students rushing for the exit shoved young Tee from all sides. The alarm screaming through the air was the mutation alert. Her wide-open eyes were glued to the exit until it passed over her head. Soon, she was running across the concrete pavement, all the blood rushing from her face.

Tee remembered her heavy pants echoing in her empty head until a shock of pain stabbed her heart. The pull on her backpack from behind had to be from a Xenosapian. Her screams for help blocked out any logic trying to reach her mind.

“Tee, it’s me, Jack!”

She felt a hand grasp hers, and Jack’s voice settled in her ears. It made her stop screaming and turn toward him, holding his hand. She overlooked the rushing bodies behind his large blue eyes.

“Finally, I found you.” He pulled her along to start running again. “I’ll get you home.”

Tee remembered the tight grip that never left her trembling hand until they were behind the gate. After that day, he started walking her home instead of parting ways at the usual intersection.

On rainy days, they walked together under separate umbrellas. He made a habit of stooping to wipe the mud off her shoes.

Seeing their faces close when he stood up made Tee’s lips twitch. If she could touch him, she would have given him a playful slap on the back of the head.

Time flew by with more sweet memories of young Tee and Jack. Soon, they were inches taller and attending the Second-level Academy in their district. Everything at District Ninety-nine Academy was larger—it had to accommodate being the only second-level institution in the area.

Tyler relocated to another district with his family, leaving Tee’s friend group smaller as they entered this new stage of life. The stares and unwanted attention from looking different made her and Jack even closer. It reminded them that fate had brought them together, and they didn’t mind the staring since they had each other.

They no longer spent lunchtimes in a noisy cafeteria. Their new Academy had benches outside beneath trees, bathed in bright sunlight. The MG offs appointed as guards stood out in their blue uniforms against the school’s red theme.

With the location of their new Academy, young Tee and her friends couldn’t walk all the way home. They took the public underground trains to reach walking distance to their sectors. The seats on the train were always in pairs, but Jack didn’t allow her to be more than an inch away from him. When no empty pairs were available, he made her sit while he stood beside her in the aisle.

When they did sit together, he took the window seat and often leaned on her to nap. Most of the time, she caught his eyes open, staring at her in the reflection of the glass. He would smile to brush it off, and Tee would bite her lips to keep from smiling.

While walking the remaining distance home, they had to be careful not to get too carried away in talking. They needed to remember to nod to the MG officials. That gesture, however, never crossed their minds for the MG troopers zipping by on hoverboards. They were like human-sized pests. Since she and Jack stood out with their uncommon features, they became targets for idlers.

Tee hated that she couldn’t touch anything in that dream. Lifting a rock and tossing it at one of those troopers would have felt good. So she was left walking behind her younger self and Jack, like a ghost Xenosapian with nothing to do but follow her prey. If she could eat something, Jack would be first on her list.

However, the hard stares she gave Jack weren’t a sign of hunger. She knew the burns were coming but looked forward to them, because it meant she was closer to catching up to the present. Maybe then she would finally wake up.