chapter twenty six : hide and seek

                                    

                                          

[XXVI]
THE APOCALYPSE had trashed me, yes. The sheer volume of fear and near death experiences I had lived through was enough to have me set for life in terms of inner turmoil, but...the grief had eased tremendously. Now that my mum was alive, alive and loving, I couldn't be more grateful.
There were times where I remembered the infected, or Violet, or being chained to that fence; Abby. But the persistent urge to get my revenge was mellowing into a mere simmering, perhaps in the background but only noticeable when I remembered it, which was less and less nowadays.
I kept on thinking about it. Maybe...maybe Ellie and I could stay here. Live with Lev, and Finn, and my mum...like a family.
'Family' wasn't a word I or many of the people around me were accustomed to appropriating into conversations, the word usually synonymous with death and loss. But for the first time, I didn't feel fear thinking of it. 
The Purple Emperor Facility was a pretty unfathomable area to live in. I refused to live in my mum's lavish quarters for the time being, feeling it was unfair that while Ellie was coming to find me, I was sat comfortably, waiting to be 'rescued'...when I didn't particularly want to be. My mum had been guiding me around with excitement and gusto, just as she had always done everything, her loose sleeves billowing in the soft warm breeze like wings as she gushed about the home she had built for so many children. I smiled to see them; little children like me. I would sometimes catch myself looking for their bite marks, to see if there were any like mine, and would immediately tell myself off for being so nosy. But there were many; as young as four or five and as old as fifteen, but not many my age, suffice to say. Perhaps the gene became more prominent as the virus did? I wasn't a scientist, so I didn't delve much into my theories on this subject, but I didn't mind not fully comprehending. The Purple Emperor housed a notion I had believed in ever since I found out Ellie's story; the immune are blueprints for the future world, and cannot be sacrificed in the name of a phantom theory that hangs on a copiously thinning thread day by day.
The children all seemed happier than I had ever seen any before, whether in a QZ or out in the open. They all seemed to have personalities, interests past surviving. A pair were painting; a boy who was exceptionally talented, painting an almost lifelike replica of the Rhododendron tree as we walked past the communal garden, and the other next to him, a girl who simply painted what she wanted. A pink cat. It wasn't necessarily an objectively good cat, but it was endearing to see them express themselves so honestly, in a way that I had never seen in this world.
"They remind me of you," my mum said, "you still like to draw?"
I smiled at her. It touched my heart that she remembered. Pulling the notebook from the back of my pocket, I showed her various drawings from over the years. Her eyes welled looking at the shadows of my past, charcoaled onto the faded pages that she seemed to leaf through like she was turning through my mind. She stopped at the recent ones; ones of a forest, a lake, fires and ashes and a guitar with a broad arm and long, slender fingers that wrapped around it. She took one look at me, and raised a smug eyebrow.
I spluttered, snatching the book back in embarrassment. "I'm uh, not that good..."
She smirked, but said nothing as we continued walking.
Toy stethoscopes, magnifying glasses, pots and pans and little wooden trains and fire engines, paper and pens and instruments that filled the gardens and adjacent houses with laughter and noise and life. 
"You've given them a gift..." I half-whispered, in-awed by the utopia so drastically different from what I'd been used to. 
"There's a fence around the province," she observed. "But its not FEDRA. You can go if you like. Thing is...no one really wants to."