WISHFUL THINKING

Yayy!Continuing the story...  Installment 4: Where a Race is Run STORY SO FAR:   Ani Raye has been asked to appear for an appointment at her principal's office. This  is a strange request and she finds herself wondering what could possibly await her behind his orange door. In the school cafe, she meets with her best friend Khyran (K) and her trainer Stratten. K and her mother substitute Willa is also introduced. Leaving the c afe, she meets a servant girl Jina, who tells her to give a note  to K. In the note is written the words If I talk to you, and they catch me, They won’t sack me or tell me to go home. They will kill me as a lesson to others like me. Spooked, Ani runs into two of her Trainers who ask her to run a race. My feet crunched against hot concrete. I was barefoot enough that I could feel the heat lick at my soles. Dusk was falling but the heat hadn’t broken yet. Pale sunlight still shone stubbornly through fragments in the multi-hued sky, gold s...

This is my world, encompassed in four walls that held me and two hundred other kids inside a sprawling fifty-acre plot. Here, bloody fights and bloodier gang brawls were as common as the rising sun.  I could navigate with ease the cobbled pathways worn to rubble by pounding feet even blindfolded.  I knew every stone of the walkway leading to the cliff just past the wall; the memories of hatred and love and fighting and passion etched into each one like a permanent tattoo. The tall and torturous climbing wall, the fake war zones, the bright classrooms, the arena with its adrenaline rushes….everything was as by-heart to me as the back of my own hand. Lots of random facts about the School was loaded into me, too- like the fact that the Trainers are hard-assed jerks; or that you could always predict the weather for the day if you knew the sea well enough to look from the cliff and make out the subtle changes in it; or that below the solitary cedar at the far end of the campus was...