Carsa's eyelids, thick with dark eyelashes, shot open to reveal bright, scared, amber eyes.
As she came out of her stupor, she realized it was just a dream. At least it wasn't real that night.
She slowed her panting, attempting to steady her already fast heart. She clutched the branch she was sleeping on until her neck, chest, arms, legs, and wings untensed.
Her amber feathers were ruffled, literally.
Nightmares unnerved her. Thankfully, Carsa was tough-programmed to be tough, even. She frowned, playing with one of her wing's fluffy down. She could use a bath. Her feathers were becoming matted.
Thus the life of a runaway.
You see, Carsa escaped this dreaded "School:" A biogenetic testing facility in the middle of the desert. She was "Generation 23," or so they told her. Carsa was a...clever bird. The scientists, which she remembered as Needlers (since they found great pleasure in injecting formulas into her, no matter how much she begged them not to) once had great hopes for her.
Carsa would be a weapon: genetically programmed o be smarter, stronger, faster, and wiser than any human. Of course, they programmed her with flaws, so they could control their "weapon."
Sadly, their flaws weren't very controllable, either.
Carsa broke out of the School after they had taught her an excess amount of the world she would never get to live in. She ran for miles, her white shirt-and-capris uniform snagging on everything as she tried to outrun these monsters the lab had created. They were called Erasers. They were new. And Carsa had memorized the English dictionary well enough to know Erasers get rid of things, especially mistakes.
And, Carsa sighed admittedly in her mind as she thought of all this, that she was, indeed, a huge mistake.
Carsa could remember always being skinny (she was genetically designed that way) and underfed, but the past few years had made her even more lithe and scrawny. Carsa had de-evolved, she told herself. She had gone from the most evolved humanoid to animalistic. Sometimes, she talked to the birds and animals in human languages. But more often than not, she didn't talk at all. Truth be told, Carsa realized, she was crazy.
After the torture, testing, whole "you-are-an-abomination-against-nature" thing, and not fitting in anywhere (heck, Carsa growled mentally. She wasn't even part of the Animal Kingdom. There was no homo-avian.) Carsa had lost it. And hard.
She retained all of the training and teachings and - Ack - painful memories from her life. So, really, all she had lost was her sanity.
She was very smart. Too smart. The dirt-ridden girl nestled into the branch again. Slivers of moonlight hit her between the leaves, causing her metallic wings, hair, and eyes to shimmer. Another great thing about being eight percent avian, she thought, was the night vision and genetic coloring.
She was a pretty birdy.
Pretty, tortured, crazy birdy...
Carsa was gone.
She knew it.
That didn't mean she accepted it.