"I am fine, Michael." Nova sighed, crossing her legs on the hospital bed, glancing in disgust at the white washed interior of the clinic.

"Getting a message about my daughter shot at by the wilds hardly left me unbothered."

Nova glanced at her father's unwrinkled suit, pressed tie and a polished, shiny pair of wooden sole shoes. Firm and inflexible, quite like the man staring at Nova with his back at the little square window.

"They didn't shoot me for no reason; I trespassed in their city boundaries to obtain the passcodes." Nova explained, meeting Michael's distasteful stare.

"Then the facility should've sent in trained men as spies instead. I'll talk to the Mayor about this correction."

"You will not do anything of the sort." She bit angrily.

"Why not?" Michael quirked his eyebrow. "Why do you, of all people, need entrance into this facility? You should be a pharmacist like me, and here you are, risking yourself." He gestured towards the tightly wrapped bandage around her right shoulder and arm.

"Because maybe this is the only thing that makes me feel alive, and not like one of the wilds' corpses I have seen in your laboratory, father!"

He straightened his framed spectacles, and with a smirk of amusement, he pushed his brown strands away from his eyes. "In that case your new opinion would enjoy the sight of some more wilds' corpses."

"More?" Nova asked, a frown replacing her fatigue. "You're going to bleed them dry too?"

"Nova, as your father and a person with genuine concern for you, you ought to refrain from conversing with Floyd."

"You are going to concoct a cure by slaughtering them?" Nova asked, forcing him to meet her eyes, a copy of his own green and shrewd ones. "Is there really even a cure?"

Michael closed the middle button of his black-fit coat, while the deafening siren of the alarm began to blare. He opened the door of the clinic room, ignoring her question as she hurled another. "Are they in your laboratory?"

He stopped, holding the door open, deliberating. He sighed at last. "They are imprisoned here in this facility…for now." Michael shot her a concealed glance, and hastened out.

The sickeningly loud volume of the alarms made her head pound along with the wound on her arm. While her heart hammered rhythmically with a dizzying and heavy beat of urgency she feared to name.

For the sake of lost humanity Nova could not let the wilds be subjected to either death or injected with the serum; which, to her, sounded far worse than quick death.

She scrambled off the bed, a hurry staining her movement as she zipped her boots and ran into a bustling corridor passing afront the clinic.

Floyd jostled through the crowd of shielders preparing to protect the city's borders against the attack by wilds. His greying hair stood out in contrast amid the colourful rushing heads. Nova's own violet hair swayed as a proof of the citizens' desperation to hold onto youthful vibrancy.

She grabbed Floyd's arm in the crowd, and asked, yelling. "What's happening?"

He hurriedly stepped with her to the side by the wall, arranging the guns on his belt. "Wilds have attacked to retrieve their comrades."

"Where are those captured?"

"Why do you want to know?"

Nova stared at him, no reply ready in her mind or on her witty tongue. She could not reply to a query, she did not know the answer to herself.

Floyd studied her with a twitch of his lips, hiding the realisation of her actions which Nova herself failed to comprehend as well. "They are on the floor minus-four."

Nova snapped towards him, and cracked a grateful smile. Grateful for knowledge, she didn't know what to do with, but decided to discern later. For now, she would act on her instincts and humanity.

With a single nod, Floyd joined the tide of the crowd rushing with evident panic but decreasing. Nova ran in the opposite direction of the crowd, bumping shoulders and elbows with everyone as she speared her way through the passage, and descended the staircase.

She clutched her shoulder, the dull ache waking from its slumber upon the impact of slamming into many. Quietly, she continued down the dimly lit stairs, as her feet struck the marble faster than her shallow breaths, reaching the Minus Four floor.

An explosion reverberated the facility building, tremors travelling up to her shaking knees, as she glued her back to the wall and shut her ears. Another boom resounded in distance, as tremors ceased.

She sprinted to the only door at the end of the passage, and swung it open; striding inside the underground clinic, Nova discovered those she sought.

A web of entangled wires slithered as snakes on the floor, in the corridor's dim lights. She stepped carefully to not pull on any. The door swung shut, engulfing her in momentary darkness before automatic bright lights blinded her.

Her breath expelled in a gasp as her sight cleared. Clothed distinctly in the wilds' rough style, thirteen men and a boy lay deathly still, with needles pricking in their bluish arms, while their unmoving hands seemed a socket of countless beeping machines.

Their faces tanned earthly from the sun looked sickly in the harsh whiteness. Nova traced the receding laughing lines from their countenance. Her heart skipped a beat with a pang as she recalled the joy and laughter buried with her mother, forever lost to her.

She caught sight of a glint on the wrist of one, and stepped to him, turning his wrist and baring the strapped drowser. They were not in a medically induced coma yet; there was still a chance to wake them.

She strode to the line of steel cabinets, rummaging messily through them; at last finding the device she searched for.

Nova pushed the green start button on the large screen in her hand, inputting values and scanning the inventions latched around the wrists of the wilds. The blue display of the drowsers alerted her with quiet buzz, and she removed it, ending its sleep-inducing imprisonment of the victims.

They all awakened one after the other, jolting upright as they recalled their deceitful capture by the citizens. They pulled the needles from their arms, and quickly unplugged the beeping machines.

She stepped back, colliding into a machine, and calling their attention upon herself. She simply stared back at them, as the one nearest to her grabbed a surgical knife and brandished it at her. She raised her palms in the air. "I am here to aid your escape."

"Lies!" He spat. "I recognise you, trespasser. We were all captured because of you."

"I am sorry." Nova said, apologising for believing in lies like all citizens; for her habitual loyalty to her city.

Another crash shook the facility, as the ceiling cracked into spindly webs. "You must get out of here." Nova voiced urgently. "The stairs up are ahead."

With a final glance, the one holding the knife threw it aside, gesturing to the others to follow him. They escaped the facility, running into the fields set alight with hatred.

» 1200 Words «