Well here's the first chapter of Dysfunctional Feathers, hope you love it as much as I do! I'm only uploading as long as people want me to… I LUV readers! Enjoy!
1
Have you ever been in a situation where you know that you're doing something completely wrong, but do it anyway because you think it's fun and worthwhile? Yeah, well I have. Things aren't always rewarding these days.
Not that I would ever pass on something including explosions and close calls, but as I crouched there chained to the inside of a cage so that I couldn't try to bend the metal, I began to wonder about this speculation.
I heard my sister whisper something to me from the cage next to mine. "How are we supposed to get out of this one, Heather?"
While turning my head towards her, I frowned. "I don't know, Stella," I shrugged as a whitecoat stepped into the room. While the automatic door closed with a light shhhhhh, I went over everything that had happened before that very moment.
3 Months Earlier
The sun peeked over the hills to begin a brand new day. I, on the other hand, was in my dark room in bed, dreaming away. Suddenly, the light flicked on.
"Get up!" I heard Gwen—my other sister—yell. She left the room to go make breakfast while I groaned and fell off the bed in an attempt to wake up.
"Ow!" I rubbed my head where it had hit the ground, and my mind cleared up a bit. I stood up and turned off the lights once again. But instead of going back to bed, I opened the blinds a little bit, giving my room a different light. My walls were bathed in pastel blue, and the wooden floors became light brown. I shuffled to my dresser and put on jeans, a tank top and a jacket, both of which with two large cuts on the back for my wings. Yes, I have wings. Trudging down the hallway, I smelled bacon and eggs and I perked up a bit.
When I stepped into the kitchen, I came face to face with two of my sisters: Gwen and Aurora. Gwen, who has short, choppy brown hair, was flipping slices of bacon, while Aurora was scrambling at least twenty eggs on a giant pan. She has long, wavy strawberry blond hair that glows in the sunlight. Both of their wings were hanging out lazily. Gwen's are a dark, chocolate color, while Aurora's are white with a few golden speckles.
When Aurora caught sight of me, she turned to me quickly before I could sit down. "Go make sure Stella's getting up, will you?" I sighed, rolled my eyes, and turned right back around into the hallway.
I knocked on Stella's bedroom door, and heard a strangely muffled shuffling noise. "Are you awake?" I yelled into her room.
A muted, "Yeah," came out, and the door opened. Stella stood there with her dark eyes staring at me in annoyance. "I hate mornings." She mumbled as she walked past me towards the kitchen. I followed her to the table and we sat down together just as Aurora put the eggs on the table.
Just before we could begin attacking the platter, she sharply said, "Wait until everyone sits down." I sighed in frustration while Stella stared down the eggs as if they were her prey.
Aurora brought four cups to the table and filled them with orange juice. She sat down, eyeing Stella with her stern-looking bright blue eyes. Gwen set the plates on the table and—finally—served the bacon. Before she could even sit down and push her chair in, Stella grabbed as many pieces of bacon and eggs that she could with her hands, while the other three of us stared at her.
After a short silence, the rest of us attacked the food, gulping down all the orange juice as well. After breakfast was finished, I washed the dishes (it was my turn) and put them away, while my other three sisters were brushing their teeth. After I was finished, I brushed my teeth too, and put on some shoes.
Then the four of us, together, went out into the world. We live in a condo, with three bedrooms (Aurora and Gwen share one) and two bathrooms, with a kitchen. We don't like to call attention to ourselves, because we're a kind of "escapees" from the School.
We're four of those screw-up experiments, so we each have some flaw. Luckily, all of us have wings and can fly. But, as I said before, there's something wrong with each of us. For example, my body is very, very sensitive to pain, so I always try to stay away from fights and violence. Aurora isn't very coordinated, and though she's a pretty good cook, that doesn't mean she never knocks over a glass of water or bumps tables when she's walking around. Gwen's skin is sensitive to intense heat or intense cold, and to top it off we all think she's partially bipolar. Finally, Stella has the running strength of a normal human—well a strong-ish normal human.
We live in Santa Cruz in California, but in a quiet area where no one will suspect four refugees to be hiding out. The school doesn't look for us, as long as we stay hidden.
"What were we going to do today again?" Stella complained before yawning and rubbing her eyes.
"To the ship docks. It's sushi day, remember?" Gwen said with an edge to her voice. "I can't wait. I just love sushi."
"…Anyway, let's hurry or we won't make it to the bus." I said, and then we were on our way, rushing through the walkways and pushing past people rudely.
It was a good run between the different bus stops, but we had to stop two or three times for Stella to get some rest. I don't blame her, actually. It's a long way from our condo to the docks. We all sat at a table outside of a Starbuck's, ordering cold frappuccinos by the dozens. After a few of these stops, we finally arrived at the dock.
"Okay guys, you know the drill. We just have to go into storage building number seventeen, Aurora stands guard at the entrance while the other three of us go in and grab all the sushi we can. We all run when we're in the blind spot. Got it?" I laid out the plans quietly, and we all ran as fast as we could, right into one of the many identical warehouses.
As soon as we were in, I couldn't help but marvel at the endlessly immense size of the place. The bright lights, the mazes of crates stacked up more than twice as tall as me, and the smell of frozen foods made me think of all the times we'd stolen from these warehouses full of the gourmet we eat every day.
Of course, it wasn't always at the ship docks; the smell was the same yet different from the salt water. We've taken foods and more goods from trucks delivering to supermarkets, malls, even bookstores.
Stella shut the door almost completely, leaving a small crack where Aurora could tell us someone was coming. Meanwhile, Gwen was already opening the closest wooden box, revealing packaged sushi filled to the brim.
"Just one crate, right?" Gwen confirmed while stuffing boxes and boxes of sushi into a cheap-looking sack. Stella and I opened another crate, farther away, which contained packets upon packets of plain rice, grabbing all that we could with both hands and putting it in the same bag.
At that moment, I thought my life couldn't get much better. We had a nice house, no one searching for us from what we could see, and no one would ever catch us in the act of stealing all this food. That is, that's what I thought at the moment.
Because right then and there, I heard a startled cry—which I immediately registered as Aurora's voice—a heart-stopping metallic clang, and a thud.
I knew at that exact moment that my sister was hit on the head with a metal pole, that she was dead, and that whoever did it was coming for us next. The three of us froze in our tracks, all waiting for the door to open and our doom to come.
It felt like hours before I remembered to start breathing again, and we all shot each other glances of terror. After another minute, the door opened, and I knew we were all going to die today.
Well there's the first chapter, review please! Tell me what you think, and I'll upload more! Have a sweet one!
~Lexxie
