Seneca Rebel

MY PILLOW WAS soaked from balling my eyes out all night long. I hugged it tight. My face was swollen and warm, lips salty from the canal of tears that had streamed down my cheeks for hours. I blew my nose and breathed a deep long sigh that comes at the finale of one seriously marathon cry.

My life as a normal teenager was over. I didn’t have parents around to protect me. Of the only friends I had here, one had been banished to the Aboves, and the other had some weirdo psychic thing going on that I hadn’t figured out yet. I didn’t know who he really was. I didn’t really know who anyone was. I felt ill with worry about Ellen Malone. Did she know what I had just been through? Did she see what happened with Gregory? I had no idea how much she knew. How could I trust her, and would she ever trust me again after I had manipulated her interest in me to pull this last stunt?

It was around 4 a.m. on Monday. I contemplated how I was going to go to session and not look like I’d spent the night flipping out. Even looking like I’d been crying would be so embarrassing. I had to remain cool, calm and collected– Ellen Malone style. That would be easier said than done.

Lockdown was over. I understood that much of it was about Dom and me, and what we had been doing in the lab. Now that S.O.I.L. had removed Dom and had me conforming to the system, they’d determined it was safe to lift my lockdown. S.O.I.L. wanted to control the situation before anyone else in Seneca got wind of it. They knew that we’d been meddling in their top-secret procedures, but they mustn’t have realized the scope, or they wouldn’t have let me go. They most likely hadn’t measured my computing distance and were unaware that I had placed a block on the quantum entanglement in my own blood, thus creating a virtual immunity to mind monitoring within myself. If they had known, they would have forced me to unblock it. But nobody could detect what I did. They would need me to do it because, as far as I knew, there was nobody else on Earth that could... at least not yet.

With four hours until session, and most people in the residences still asleep, I got up and took an acoustic carrier ride to a twenty-four hour market in the restaurant district to pick up a cucumber for my eyes. I had to make an effort to appear normal. My goal from now on was to fly under the radar with my eyes wide open.