Fifteen-year old Henrietta Bishop looked outside the bedroom window of her room at a broken world that she knew that she would never understand. She thought, with sheer regret, about how she hadn't seen a blue sky since she was four years old, since she had seen them, her biological parents, her daddy and her mama. There were days when she could see them in her mind's eye just as clearly as if she were watching a recorded video of them, but there were also days when she could barely remember them at all, when she could maybe smell her dad's aftershave or smell her mom's flaxen hair while most everything else was fuzzy. She hated such days; her fists clenched into spheres of fury that had built up over years of pain.
Today was a day when she could remember her parents with utter clarity, and she was thinking about the fateful day that would forever change her life. She remembered waking her parents up at around 6:00 that morning, excitedly ushering her parents into the beautiful day outside, the cerulean sky set as the backdrop of the warm, sunflower yellow sun. Her parents had promised her a day at the park and then Joey's Pizza for dinner, and she didn't want to wait any longer. At four years old, she had seen so much hope in just one ray of sunlight, had had so much fun when she spent the night with her aunt Rachel and uncle Greg and her cousins Ella and Eddy.
To this day, she had clearly remembered the day when Grandpa Walter had introduced her to SpongeBob SquarePants, a ridiculous show about a kitchen sponge that lives under the sea and annoys just about everyone other than his best friend, a rather unintelligent starfish named Patrick. She had laughed at it so hard along with Grandpa Walter, and she now thought about how SpongeBob had always seen a light at the end of every tunnel, had always seen a solution to every problem. What would SpongeBob do today, in 2027? Would he see hope?
It didn't matter; the Baldies had silenced SpongeBob so many years ago, and now, nothing was broadcasted or published unless it was sanctioned by the Baldies. They had burned so many record companies, so many recording studios, bookstores, libraries, and so forth, all because they didn't want unapproved media to be available to consumers. Most people didn't even own televisions or radios or iPods, and most of the ones who did were Loyalists, people who stayed loyal to the Baldies and were rewarded for it, kept comfortable. For the most part, she and her foster parents were comfortable, but they kept to themselves and didn't rebel; they followed the Baldies' rules, followed their protocols, and so far, the Baldies had stayed out of their way.
Henrietta worried at the bullet that she wore on a chain around her neck. She had never known why, but that bullet had been important to her mother, and years after she had been separated from them, she had found it among her mother's possessions; it made her feel close to her mother, made her feel like maybe, just maybe, her mother wasn't dead, that she and her dad and Grandpa Walter were still looking for her. She considered that, despite what she had come to believe about her aunt and her uncle and her cousins, that they had been killed as a result of the Baldies trying to find her parents, they might still be out there, too, and that she would find them all someday so that they could rejoice. She thought about this and realized that this was hope, as foolish as it might have been, and just as she had this foolish fantasy of a happy ending, a knock on her open door interrupted her reverie, and dropping her right hand from the bullet around her neck, she turned around.
"Roger," she said, smiling.
"Hey, there, Etta," her foster dad said with a grin, but she could tell that Roger was very nervous.
"What's up?"
"Marsha and I have to go away for a bit," Roger said, his grin fading as she sat on her bed. Etta scooted away from her windowsill and joined him at his side.
"What do you mean?" she asked him, heated panic clearly audible in her voice.
"We've been called away on business," he replied sullenly.
"But Roger," she argued, "you and Marsha are engineers. You work at the CO station in the City. Why would you need to leave?"
"I wish that I could go into details," he replied, his dark eyes revealing regret and sadness, "but I can't."
"No," she fought, her head shaking more violently with every turn. "Where's Marsha?"
"Marsha wanted to leave for work early," he said grimly. "I tried to talk her out of it, but we may be gone for a while, and she couldn't bear saying goodbye to you."
She has already had to say goodbye to so many little babies, Etta knew he had wanted to add but didn't. Marsha had miscarried three babies for reasons that doctors couldn't understand, and Etta had been a miracle for Roger and Marsha, a spirited little blonde girl who had given them hope.
"There are things that you need to know, Henrietta," Roger continued, putting one arm around her. "Marsha and I love you very much, just as if you were our own. We had always thought that maybe someday you would call us mom and dad, but we never pushed that on you because we respected what you had gone through, what you had endured, and we wanted to give you space. We came to feel guilty for thinking that we could be parents to a beautiful girl who had lost her own, and I don't want you to ever give up hope that they might still be alive. You understand me? We love you, Etta, and that's why I can't tell you where we're going, where we're going to be. It's better for you if you don't know."
Etta considered herself to be a very strong person, one who didn't cry all that often, but right now, she couldn't help it. Tears began to pool in her eyes before they fell down her cheeks, and she hugged Roger.
"Please," she said, "don't go. Roger, I've loved you and Marsha like parents, too. You're the closest that I've had since the Baldies took me away from my mom and dad and gave me to you after they got what they want. They took me away from them. I don't want to lose you, too."
As she said these words, flashes of what had happened that day at the park filled her mind. She had made a wish that her mama and daddy would never die, that she would be with them forever, before she blew the seeds off a dandelion, or a wishing flower, as she had called it. The sky had then lit up with a bright blue light, and they showed up, approaching Etta in their black suits and fedoras as her daddy had screamed her name, beckoning her to come back to him, but he was too late. They had had her before she knew it, and they had held her for weeks in a small, dingy room where they had probed her mind for information about her parents. They had eventually let her go, and Roger and Marsha had taken her into their household. It wasn't until years later that she had realized that her parents might be dead because of her, because of something that the Baldies had pulled from her mind.
"You are the strongest person that I have ever known," Roger said, holding Etta close to his chest. "You're brave, headstrong, strong-willed, and if anyone has a chance of surviving this crazy new world, it's you."
She tried so hard to convince him not to go wherever it was that he was going, but he eventually left the house, ignoring her pleas to stay. After he left the house, got into his car and drove away and was well out of earshot, she had quietly begged, her face tear-streaked, "No, dad; please, don't go."
The following evening, Etta was sitting at her windowsill yet again, and she heard a noise in the house. It had sounded like the front door had opened, and for a few seconds, Etta panicked, figuring that a Loyalist had broken in, but her fears were then subsided as she considered the exciting possibility that her foster parents had returned. She shot up and left her bedroom and quickly moved her way down the hallway toward the foyer.
She was completely taken aback by who stood in the doorway. It wasn't a Loyalist, and it wasn't either of her foster parents. Her heart sank.
"Linda?" she said, her voice quivering.
Linda was Marsha's younger sister, and Etta had only met her a handful of times.
"Hey, kid," Linda said, "we got to talk."
They did. She and Linda sat down across from each other in the kitchen, and Linda began by sighing very deeply.
"I imagine that Marsh and Roger didn't tell you why they were leaving," she said.
Etta shook her head.
"I didn't think so," she said. "Listen, Etta, your parents were members of the Resistance."
Etta shook her head. "No," she said, "no, they weren't. They weren't those kinds of people. They always tried to stay out of harm's way. They always said that they didn't like what the Baldies were doing but that they never wanted to put me in harm's way like that."
"Well," Linda continued, shrugging, "that would be why they didn't tell you the truth."
"What exactly are you telling me, Linda?" Etta asked, a bit impatient.
"There is no easy way to tell you this," Linda said, "but Marsh and Roger were killed late last night."
Etta swallowed so hard that she hurt her throat. "How?" she asked sternly.
"They were trying to sabotage a carbon monoxide station. That was what the Resistance cell that they were a part of was trying to accomplish, to take out the carbon monoxide stations, but they were discovered and taken out. It was a bomb planted by an undercover Loyalist. They died quickly and painlessly."
"How do you know this?" she asked through gritted teeth.
"I received a call earlier today from a friend," Linda said. "No doubt it will be in the newspaper by tomorrow."
Etta didn't cry; she couldn't. She felt numb, but as the days passed by, the weeks, she swelled with hot-red anger and hatred for Loyalists and for Baldies, and she swore, right up until the day that she had shot Linda dead in her living room after having discovered that Linda, herself, was a Loyalist and had been the one to report her parents, right up until the day that Phillip Broyles discovered her and recruited her as a Fringe Division agent, that she would wipe every last one of them, Loyalist and Baldie alike, out. They had taken everything from her, and she wouldn't allow them to take any more.