-It's too late for her. She'll remember too much.
-But her potential...
-We'll separate them.
-Is it worth it?
-Yes.
-It is...
I pushed myself towards wakefulness, forcing my eyes open only to see white. I turned my head, attempting to cast my eyes on anything that would break the stark whiteness. Where was I? Where was Kristy? They couldn't separate us!
Confused from the dream that was still pervading my mind, I tried to sit up, but found that I was strapped to the bed on which I was laying.
In my peripheral vision, I saw a movement to my right. Someone was peering through the small window in the door. Suddenly a faint buzzing sound began and my eyes flicked to the bag of clear liquid which was slowly draining down a tube which fed into my arm. I wrestled the constraints which shackled me to the stark white bed, trying to prevent the unknown substance from entering my system.
As consciousness slowly ebbed away, I thought, "Was this the consequence for not telling anyone about my power?" The room darkened as my eyes flickered shut and once more, I was drawn into a deep sleep.
The air whizzed past me as I weaved through the white capped mountains I had always seen from the windows. I dived, enthralled by the speed of my decent, knowing that I could pull up at the last minute, trusting in my powers. As the speckled ground grew larger, asking to be my friend, I focused on defying the gravity that pulled on me. It didn't listen. The ground grew larger and larger just as the whiteness grew brighter and brighter and I began to panic. I couldn't fall! The ground was no friend of mine.
I sat up quickly, gasping in air. I was still in the room but I was no longer alone. I looked down at my hands which were still grasping onto the edges of the bed, pinning me down from the heights of my dream. I was sitting – the bindings that had been constraining me had been removed.
"How are you feeling?" The voice of the woman interrupted my train of thought.
"Ummm… okay?" I replied.
Her hair was dark, pinned up into a small neat bun atop her head. Her rectangular-framed glasses slid down her nose as she made notes on a piece of paper attached to her clipboard.
"No dizziness? Nausea? Headache?"
I shook my head, confused by these questions. The last thing I remembered was Kristy collapsing and then I made everything levitate in our dorm, by no will of my own. A quick glance around confirmed that nothing was levitating in this room.
"Where am I?" I asked. I knew what the sick room in the junior section looked like and this was not it. "Where's Kristy?" I had so many questions pervading my mind that I desperately wanted to ask. I needed answers.
The woman's eyes flicked up to mine briefly, piercing mine through those rectangular frames, before returning to her clipboard. They were a wonderful green. "You're in transition," she responded before promptly closing her clipboard and attaching her black pen to her breast pocket. "All will be explained to you shortly. Wait here," she said before getting up and leaving out the only door. It closed with a sharp click.
I wasn't quite sure where she expected me to go as the only exit was now locked. I slid off the bed, stretching my limbs and trying to get some blood flowing through my body. I had no idea how long I'd been here and what on earth did in transition mean? Was Transition a place?
I walked around the small room, running my hands along the smooth white walls. I was still wearing a simple white robe and the coolness of the tiles on my bare feet and hands gave me chills so I sat back on the meagre bed, waiting for someone to tell me what was going on. Those green eyes were still haunting me when the door clicked open again.
"Rochelle."
It was a statement of my name but I nodded my head all the same.
"Please change into these and meet me outside." This lady was wearing thick boots and a fur coat. Her strawberry blonde hair was cut short and I noticed a scar on her hand as she handed me a large pile of similarly fluffy clothing. Were we actually going outside?
I quickly changed as soon as the door was closed, not asking any questions. Once I'd managed to sort out what I was meant to wear in which order, I cautiously approached the door and opened it, not sure what to expect.
I was presented by a wide hallway. To my right were many other shut doors, I assumed containing similar rooms to the one I'd just left.
"You took your time." I turned my gaze to the left where the lady had just stood up from a simple white bench. "You're going to be late. We need to get going."
I opened my mouth to ask where we were going; what I was going to be late for; even just her name, when the memory of those green eyes – like emeralds – drifted into my vision again.
I found my feet moving in time with the lady's as she led me out a pair of sliding doors down the corridor to the left.
"Brittany really did a number on you, didn't she?" The lady chuckled as she glanced back at me, following mutely.
I didn't reply, but kept following, confused by her rhetorical question.
We were now standing at another pair of sliding doors. However there was no warm dry corridor on the other side of these – rather a howling blizzard. We were actually going outside. I remembered venturing out there briefly when we moved to the junior section, but that was almost ten years ago, and we'd been bundled up in a warm van.
I couldn't see any van outside here, but the blizzard was so thick that I doubted I'd be able to see much past the reach of my hand.
"Yes, we're going out there," the lady answered my unasked question. She reached over to pull my fur-lined hood up and over my head. "I'd put this on if I were you. It can get quite cold outside."
"Helen!" I swivelled my head to the left to see the first lady I'd met here running down the corridor towards us. Her neat bun was coming loose and she quickly tucked back a wandering strand of dark hair – which contrasted so nicely with those bright green eyes – behind her ear.
I stood in a daze as Brittany handed Helen an A4 size file, instructing her to give it to a Mike. She started saying something else when she glanced in my direction, stopping short.
"Don't worry," Helen said. "I think with the dosage you gave her, she won't be asking any questions until next week some time."
"But I didn't think…" Brittany took off her glasses, looking down at them in her hand. "Shoot," she cursed. "I forgot I was wearing these. They must've amplified it."
"Woops," Helen chuckled. "Those are new, right?"
"Ya, I got them last…"
There were so many greens in the world. Not that I saw much of it in Antarctica. Brittany's voice faded into the distance as I thought back to the greens I'd seen around the junior section and in Geography class. From that harsh almost yellow green of a highlighter to that soft green of...
"Rochelle!"
I snapped back to reality as Helen shook me gently by the shoulders.
"Come on. Let's get you out of here before this gets any worse. The further you get from Brittany right now, the better."
Gently but quickly, she led me through the last barrier to the outside world. I raised my hands to shield my face, expecting an onslaught of icy snow and wind. It was icy alright but no snow or wind reached me. There appeared to be a bubble of sorts surrounding both Helen and myself which kept us shielded from the elements. With the blizzard cleared slightly, I could see that there was a snow-mobile about 50m ahead of us.
"Come on," Helen said, nudging me to move a bit faster. "I didn't expect the weather to be so against us today."
She helped me get on the vehicle but as she was about to climb on behind me, she paused, clinging onto the cushioned seat. A gust of wind broke through the invisible barrier which was shielding us from the elements.
I wordlessly reached out a hand to Helen. I recognised that fatigued look on her face. Kristy had had it for a while and I realised that I must have looked similar for the last few days I was in the junior section.
"I'm fine," Helen said, taking a deep breath and getting on the mobile. "Let's get going. It's not far."
She swiftly turned on the vehicle and manoeuvred it to what looked like a road carved out of the snow. It led uphill, further into the heart of the storm. Flecks of snow brushed my cheeks and I felt us speed up, pushing the vehicle's engine to its limit up the steep incline.
As more wind and snow pushed its way through the barrier that surrounded us, I saw a small building approaching up ahead. Was this our destination? This couldn't be the senior section.
We stopped beside it and I quickly jumped off, following Helen through a small door into the building. She slammed the door shut behind us and slid down on to the floor breathing deeply.
"Are you okay?" I asked.
"She speaks!" Helen exclaimed, laughing a bit. "I'll be fine," she replied, pushing herself up from the concrete floor.
The room we were in was very small with no windows and two doors – the one we had come in through and another opposite it which was shut.
Still breathing heavily, Helen motioned to the shut door. "Go on. We're almost there."'
I approached the door and turned the metal handle, pushing it open. On the other side was another room with a large box of sorts and lots of thick cables leading up the mountain through an opening to the right.
"What's that?"
Helen looked at me quizzically. "More questions…" She looked back up at the box. "That is a cable car and it is going to take us up to the senior section."
She opened a door to the cable car and climbed in. "Come on. This is probably going to be quite a bumpy ride, so no more questions, okay?"
I looked right out the opening at the growing snow storm outside. The metal cables were swaying violently in the wind.
Helen grabbed my arm as I started backing away and pulled me inside after her. "Come on," she said. "The weather report is only forecasting worse weather for the rest of the week. We need to go now."
She buckled herself in and I hurried to do the same before she pressed a button to her left. The cable car lurched into motion and the cables whined as they began moving in the icy weather. It got even worse as we exited the building and got hit by the blizzard.
Helen shouted something over the wind but I couldn't hear. I just shut my eyes and waited for the nightmare to be over.
Finally, after about ten minutes of terrifying travel, the cable car stopped swaying and I opened my eyes to find that we'd reached a similar building to the one we had just left.
"That wasn't too bad. Welcome to the top of the mountain," Helen said we came to a halt. She quickly unbuckled herself and headed to the door.
"What do you mean, 'Not too bad'?" I asked, hands still shaking from the ordeal. "We almost died!"
Helen gave me a look. "Right. You are definitely outside Brittany's radius."
Before I could ask what exactly she meant, she continued. "Look, we've still got a short ways to go. This should have all been explained to you but we've been a bit short on time and I really need to get these documents to Mike."
She gestured at the open door in front of her. I held my tongue and stepped out of the cable car into a short hallway at the end of which was a set of double doors. Helen set a fast pace through those doors and then turned left into a lift. We seemed to be on Ground Floor. She pressed the button for floor five.
As we slowly ascended, I fidgeted with my gloves, itching to ask all the questions that were flying through my mind. The most important being what had happened to Kristy?
I took a breath, about to ask this question, when the lift doors slid open and my ears were attacked with the sound of voices. I stumbled back slightly as students sped past me.
A/N: I now know not to make any promises about when I'll be updating. Sorry to those who have been enjoying this story and have been waiting and waiting for an update and thank you SO MUCH to those of you who have reviewed. This is the entirety of chapter 2. Chapter 3 will be up when it's up :)