I was laying on a bed, a bed I couldn’t escape. Straps held me down as I struggled to lift my arms, but something felt different… And it wasn’t good. I turned my head to see my left hand covered in blood. Bandaging was all around it, though it didn’t do a very good job of stopping the redness that continued to pour out. Desperate to see what had happened, I shook my hand as I tried to move.
Rattle, rattle.
I froze. Staring at the giant artificial light over me, I didn’t know what to do next. It felt like every memory I had ever had compressed inside my brain, my eyesight felt equally warped. Without thinking, I started to speak, praying someone would hear me.
“M….Mama…”
“Mama!!”
“MAMA!!!”
Three times I cried, and nothing happened. I thought I was going to lie on that bed of pain forever until slow footsteps started to be heard.
“Mama…?” I whispered.
Someone laughed. “Awww, what’s the matter little one? Your mother isn’t here to save you? I’m sorry… I had to make sure she was out of here while you had your little surgery.”
Surgery? What surgery?! I kept on struggling with the straps that held me down, trying to make any sense of where I was.
“Who are you?? What did you do to me?!” I screamed.
The ‘someone’, turned out to be a woman. She purred as she came closer into the light beside my bed.
“It doesn’t matter what my name is, you’ll forget it by tomorrow,” She said, taking a syringe out of her pocket. Slowly, she eased it into my other arm, a familiar wicked grin on her face. “But as for you, my little experiment… Have fun living the rest of your life with a bomb implant in your hand. I’ll be waiting for my chance to blow you up.”
Wren Nilsen took the syringe out, gave one last menacing smile, and flipped the room’s light switch off.
. . .
“Haru, get up!” I heard someone say. I sat up like a bullet, my heart was racing so fast I thought it would run right out of my body. I looked at my hand, no blood, no bandages, and no ties that kept me stuck to a bed. Had that only been a dream?
“Get uppppp!” Millie said again, struggling to lift me off the couch. We were still here, inside Jude’s small yet cozy apartment. Mango mewed as if she too wanted me to get off her spot on the couch.
“I’m up, I’m up, goodness…” I muttered.
My sister wrapped her arms around me and smiled. “Good morning! I hope you had a nice rest last night… You wouldn’t stop whining in your sleep!”
“I dreamt of Wren…” I told her as best I could, despite being muffled with her jacket.
She pulled away from her hug and looked me straight in the eyes, her short hair was messy from sleeping. “Are you okay? Do you wanna talk about it?”
I loved my sister for her kindness, whenever I needed something she was there for me. I could trust her with anything I think, absolutely anything.
“Well, um... I dreamt about Wren and the day she put the bomb in my h-” I started to say before Tora walked into the kitchen connected to Jude’s living room. Her hair was no longer flowing freely down to her hips like the night before, instead it was back up in a bun and under her sunhat. She went to the fridge and filled a cup full of water, her eyes half closed and sleepy.
“Good morning Aunt Tora!” Millie said as she walked over to the kitchen. Our aunt didn’t say a word, she just sipped her cup in drowsiness.
“Not a morning person, huh?” My sister giggled as she hugged the woman’s waist.
Tora closed her eyes and made a frustrated face. “I slept in Jude’s room last night… I forgot how much he snores when he’s asleep, my goodness…”
“I DO NOT!” Her son yelled from his bedroom. He rushed out, his fluffy hair stuck straight into the sky like it could defy gravity.
My aunt took another sip from her mug, not looking any more awake. “Baby, fix your hair.” She muttered.
“I see my mother for the first time in seven years and all she has to say is ‘fix your hair’?! GOSH!” Jude said sarcastically as he stormed back to his room to get ready. Millie and I giggled as Tora finally smirked for the first time that day.
We hurriedly got ready to leave the apartment, grabbing anything we could eat in the refrigerator. I took an orange and unpeeled it as we went back outside onto the streets. The raining and harsh thunder from last night had stopped, now the fresh morning sky was filled with light grey clouds.
“Where are we going now?” Millie asked as she bit into a cheese stick.
“The Kaneiji temple,” Tora replied. “That’s are best guess as to where Wren is.”
I flung my backpack over my shoulders and proceeded to eat, trying to talk through a mouthful of fruit. “How would you know that?” I asked her.
“I overheard her muttering about it when she was leaving Shibuya… Something about how she had some business to do there.” Jude cut in, throwing his apartment keys inside his pant’s pocket. He looked nervous and fidgety like he didn’t want to see the sinful engineer again, but he kept it to himself as we walked along the road. We talked about a lot of things, mostly about what Jude had done since the time he’d been sent to Tengoku at the age of eleven. Since most of the people here weren’t real, he had no real job. He spent most of his doing hobbies at his apartment while taking care of Mango.
“It’s a fun life, I won’t lie,” He had said. “But when you stop talking to real people after awhile it drives you mad.”
My sister and I nodded in agreement. Imagine being stuck in a world with barely any interaction for the past seven years of your life!
Next I thought of my dream. The memories that I had thought of while sleeping returned, filling my head with pain. Had that all just been my imagination, or had it really happened? And where had Mama and Papa and Millie been? Could they not manage to save me before Wren had taken me away that day?
I sighed and quickly threw those terrible thoughts out of my head. I wondered what would happen if I Wren ever made me detonate. Would I turn into a human fireplace, or would the bomb be small enough to just make my hand go up in smoke? It made me shudder just to think about it. “Looks like you’re a human bomb-boy.” I muttered under my breath.
Whatever the case, we had arrived at Kaneiji temple. It’s gorgeous courtyard had more trees and flowers than I had ever seen in my life, and the plain grey sky made it stand out from the other houses nearby. The building itself looked old, it’s shining bronze doors looked like it needed a good shine. None of us could even care however as we marveled at how picture-perfect everything else looked.
“Now, are you ready to see Miss Nilsen again?” Tora asked me. What kind of question was that!? Did it really look like me, a tiny eleven-year-old boy was ready to face his mother’s adversary? I simply nodded at my aunt and clung to the straps of backpack, the way I always did when I was nervous. We opened the creaking doors of the mystic building, ready as we could possibly ever be.
Two people stood in the hall of Kaneiji temple, but neither of them looked like Wren.
“Ah, so they really did show up.” One of them smirked.
“I would’ve never guessed the little boy and his repulsive family would actually be brave enough to face us.” The other sneered.
Hidden by the shadows, I tried to make out what their appearances looked like. One was a girl, tall and thin but with a malevolent attitude. She wore a black dress with a belt, clicking her boots as I watched her. Her hair was pulled into two shaggy ponytails and her eyelids glittered with makeup, I could tell she was Japanese like us. The other was a man, he looked young and strong with dark brown hair and eyes that pierced the darkness. His skin was tan, maybe from Southeast Asian decent. His jacket was black just like his friend’s, and both of them had pistols on their belts.
Tora paced ahead of us, questioning the two mysterious people with caution. “Do you work for Miss Nilsen? We need to speak to her!”
“Oh, of course we do, she’s paying us lots for this job. We’re looking for that boy she wants.” The girl giggled as she stared directly at me.
Even after everything I’d heard of Wren, I didn’t know she was this evil. Evil enough to hire people just to hunt me down, all because of my parents? The girl seemed to read my mind, she slowly walked closer as she reached her hands out to grab me.
She tied my arms behind my back just like Wren had done, putting a hand over my mouth as she purred. “Wren says we’ll get lots of money from kidnapping you. You must mean a lot to her then, hmm?”
Millie screamed as she started to panic, her eyes darting frantically. “PLEASE DON’T TAKE HARU!” She cried.
The woman who had pinned me laughed and winked at her friend. Next the man came, taking his gun out and pointing it at my other family members. “Saying 'please' isn’t going to cut it, kid.” He said while motioning for them to follow us as the woman started to drag me down a hall.
The dark temple didn’t look so beautiful on the inside anymore. Everything was dark and cold as we walked into a bigger room of marble, a seat in the very front. There Wren sat, guarded by yet another woman in a hood. Her hair looked to be dyed lavender and she also had a gun on her hip like the other two helpers. Her face immediately landed on mine, and I heard her make a small gasp.
“Can this day get any weirder?” I thought.
Miss Nilsen smiled the exact same way she had at Motoyo Inc. She looked so innocent and kind as she gave a hand signal to her assistants to drop me on the floor.
“Good seeing you again, Little Experiment.” She greeted.
I gritted my teeth and stared her dead in the face. “Don’t call me that.”
Before Wren could reply, Tora stood before her as she tried to muster up courage. “Miss Nilsen, I don’t know why you’ve captured Haru, but I just need you to listen to me. I’m here to make things right, it’s no use fighting-”
“Andddd, you’ve lost my interest.” Wren said as she rolled her eyes and waved her hand in disgust. “Look, I know you want to be a ‘mature adult’ and be nice to me just so I don’t hurt your nephew, but that’s not going to work. These three helpers are from the real world, they joined my side so they could share some profit once Motoyo Inc is mine. First, I’m taking my experiment child, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me... Haru is mine now.”
The Norwegian woman took out a clicker from her pocket, and pointed it at me like a remote control.
“Now,” She said. “You see Tora? All i want is Jín's son, once I have him I'll let you get out of this stupid temple and live… For the second time.”
“And what happens if I don’t let you have him?!” Tora’s fear turned into burning anger in seconds. Her eyes were filled with flames, hatred for what Wren had done to our family.
Miss Nilsen smiled sweetly and pretended to hit the button on the small clicker. “Well, if you don’t… Haru goes boom.”
It made sense now, that button was going to detonate me! I felt like a dog on a leash, never being able to escape the grasp of it's owner. I had a feeling Wren would use the detonator clicker as leverage from now on, forcing Tora and the rest of my relatives to do what ever she wanted.
Jude spoke for the first time we’d been there, his voice was strong and firm like his mother’s. “I think you forgot about Life Cards, Miss! You can’t blow up Haru if we have those!”
Aunt Tora hushed him immediately, putting her arms around him. “Sweetie, we have to save those, they’re a last resort. Wren can’t know about them or she’ll take them away from us, we only have two left...”
“So what do we do?” Millie asked quietly.
I held my breathe as I watched my family decide my fate. Would they put up a fight and probably get themselves killed? Or would they surrender me to Wren?
The three henchmen sat at attention as they eagerly awaited to take me away. For some reason, the woman with soft purple hair reminded me of home. Her porcelain skin shown in the dark like an angel as her brown eyes stared into mine. Something about her tiny figure told me she wasn’t evil like her friends, and it was hard to look at her without feeling comforted.
Wren struck me out of my thoughts, smiling in satisfaction. “Your time of deciding has run out, Tora. I’m taking Haru wether you like it or not.”
My family starting panicking again, stuttering their thoughts.
“W-wait, we weren’t ready to answer!”
“You can’t take him like that! THAT’S ILLEGAL!”
“Take me instead!!”
Miss Nilsen clapped her hands to her henchman. The woman with pigtails grabbed my arms again, though I tried to scramble away from her. The man took the duty of keeping my relatives away as they all tried to come rescue me, scratching and kicking and screaming. The second woman with purple hair got up to escort Wren as she held her pistol at the ready, never uttering a word. They took me to a new smaller room where the shouts and cries of my family got farther and farther away, I didn’t know if that would be the last time I would ever hear them again. I was shaking from head to toe, why on earth had I deserved to be the one Wren hated so much?
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