ila /d10 cb

My mother told me that my name came to her in a dream while I was still asleep in her womb. Maybe then, the dream was a shared thing between us.

My mother told me that in her dream, she was standing alone on the vast tundra of our ancestors. Wind blew over the ice, Silla was angry in her dream, the night was bitter, it was cold. For a long time, she had been so bitter and cold and for a long time she had been alone. But then, over the horizon, came a figure, a companion for her lonliness.

She knew that it was me.

⟣ ⟢

We never lived in Ten, just around it. My people moved with the sun. We followed routes we'd been taking for thousands of years on land that had never occurred to us that wasn't shared. When the fences first came up, we simply learned to get around them. How could we know that they were built to contain us?

⟣ ⟢

The Peacekeepers came from the sky, in great white birds that brought the anger of Silla with them. I was five years old, witness to the destruction of my home and my community. Small hands scratching at the arms locked around my waist, lifting me, taking me into the belly of the birds. I saw my mother, watched her being dragged away by the ankle as her nails dug into the earth, as she tried to crawl to me. Her eyes, glinting like a wolves' in the dark, feral. Me, watching from above until the floor shut and she was out of sight.

⟣ ⟢

I became a tool, an unregistered ghost. They buried me in two, beneath miles of rock and raised me in the dark, away from the sky and the wind. They dressed me in white, branded a number onto my wrist – 01 – and drilled pain into me daily until one night my home was once again being destroyed. Two was in disgrace, their facilities were moving, assets were being dissolved, you could hear the screams as they went from cell to cell, making Avox in the dark. I lay there silent at three in the morning, watching the slow, bloody waltz past my door.

In the morning, they came for the rest of us, a handful of people in comparison to the near hundred that we had been.
"Where are you taking us?" asked 48.
"Home."
"And me?" I asked.
"Ten."