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“Jasper.” My mum’s icy voice snaps me back to reality. “This is important. I need you to know that what I am telling you is important.”
But I’m still not listening because an even more annoying thought has entered my mind.
RUN AWAY WITH HER.
Take her away from all of this horror and stress and run away to some place far from the city where it would just be her and I and we could live on a farm or something and have the chance to be happy.
Stop it, I scold myself. You know that’s not going to happen Jasper. Let it go.
“Jasper,” Mum’s hand squeezes my own, “she’s been lying to you. You do realise that.”
I’m not sure what she was talking about before, but I’m pretty sure that it wasn’t this. I don’t respond.
“You know her little gang of friends?” She says the word ‘gang’ as if it is a horrible taste in her mouth.
I nod.
“Well, they are only after one thing. Chaos. They stir up chaos wherever they can. They steal kids from their families and try to turn them against their own parents. That Aubrey girl, she used to be Civilised, her parents work for us, until Emerson stole her from her parents and brainwashed her with lies about the CSO. Emerson is nothing but a lying cheat.” She gets up and starts pacing around her office. “They think that they can tear down the peace that we have tried so hard to create in our world. That one day they will have the power to overthrow us and rule themselves.”
“What your mother is trying to say is that they don’t understand.” Albert intervenes, noticing how worked up Mum is getting. “They’re kids. They don’t understand that they wouldn’t survive without us. Emerson is the very initiator of that trouble. She is the leader of the pack; all the chaos stems from her.”
I don’t understand what they’re trying to tell me.
“You know how we already knew each other, Emerson and I,” my mum asks. I remember the time in the elevator where it was very clear they had met before. The hatred that my mother showed for her then was just as evident as it is now. “She’s been here before. Her and her family actually have a long past with ours.”
“You see, Jasper, when we were younger, probably about your age. Me, your mum, her mum, and her dad were inseparable. The Great War had ended, and everyone was excited at the prospect of building our own new world. There weren’t a lot of us, but we needed someone to lead, nonetheless. As I know you know, that’s when my mother, your grandmother, stepped in. She birthed the CSO with the very idea that we needed universal peace. We needed an impenetrable way to make sure that there was no more war. And what was the best way to do that?”
“The Mark,” I whisper.
“Exactly. The Mark was a foolproof way to make sure that war never occurred again. To have the ability to separate people who had specific destructive genetics from the people that could cause no harm.” This was nothing new to me. I’ve heard this every single day, the cutting-edge technology that had been invented by my father and grandmother that had saved ‘humanity from itself’.
“What does Emerson’s mum have to do with that?”
“Well along with formulating the idea for the mark, her mother and I created a ring. This ring was designed to be able to neutralise the violent brain waves which would mean that everyone would be able to actively participate in society. But Ophelia, she grew hungry with greed and stole the ring, meaning that we have never had the chance to unite the people of Beast Eye and the Civilised.”
Now this was new. I always assumed that my dad was focused on getting the Civilised people as far away from trouble as possible, but now there’s a chance that my dad actually wanted to help them. And Emerson’s mum had been the one to stop the people from being united? This was becoming too much. I have so many questions but none of them have the chance to escape my mouth before my mother continues in a gruff, jealous voice.
“Ophelia is a selfish, proud woman who cares only for herself, but she was smart enough to know that we would come looking for her. So, she found a way to hide the details of wherever she hid the ring deep into Emerson’s mind and erased them out of her own mind thinking we would never know.”
“But you do know,”
“Once we had Ophelia trapped in here for long enough, she began to open up,” my dad continued, “not enough to discover where it was hidden, but enough to know that the key was in her daughter. She has long forgotten where she hid it, but she somehow made sure that Emerson never forgot.”
“We took Emerson two years after Ophelia, when her father had run away. We assumed that she would be weak and defenceless, which would make it easier for her to tell us where the ring is. But it turns out she’s as stubborn and arrogant as her mother. She doesn’t understand what we’re trying to do, all that we are trying to accomplish to keep the peace between our people.” Mum says.
I don’t understand. I have never understood why my parents do the things they do, but now I am even more conflicted. Them telling me they were trying to create a united AND peaceful society is conflicting to everything that I have witnessed from them. But why would they bother to lie to me? I am their son. I will do what they say because of that reason alone. No matter what, I don’t need them to convince me of a cause that I have already been dragged into.
“Why are you telling me this now?” my voice is barely a hoarse whisper.
“We are just trying to make you understand. We want you to know why we are doing what we do. All we want is to unite people. Not get rid of the problem, rather fix it.” Dad tells me, his voice is strong and steady, as if he is giving a press conference, not talking to his son.
“And Emerson…is a problem?”
“I think we both know the answer to that, son.” Dad says, standing up and heading to the door, looking at his watch.
“Tell me, what should I do?” I don’t know what I am thinking, asking my father for advice. But something about this conversation has shifted me, helped me see something that I hadn’t seen before.
If what he’s saying is true, then Ophelia is the one to blame for all this. Emerson doesn’t even realise what her mum has done. She’s fighting for the wrong cause.
