utopia (n) an imaginary and indefinitely remote place

The first time Kai hears the word is in fourth grade. It had appeared in one of the many old books whose titles he’d already forgotten.

“What does it mean?” He had asked Mother, swinging his legs atop the wooden stool at the kitchen counter.

She clucked her tongue disapprovingly, and he stopped, sitting up straight and pushing the book towards her again. She glanced at it.

“It’s what we live in, Kai,” she said with a smile, ruffling his hair.

“What does it mean?” He had asked Father, plopping down on the couch next to him, leaning into his father slightly.

Father looked up from the Evening Post—it was talking about the stock market rising and the successful capture of a drug ring with a generic name like every other drug ring—and pushed his reading glasses up (everyone his age had them). He was silent for a long time, frowning at the word and then at the window, lost in thought.

Kai was confident Father was ignoring him when suddenly—

“It’s what we live in, Kai,” he said finally.

Kai couldn’t help but think that his eyes say otherwise.

⚜⚜⚜

Atop the bell tower, at the outskirts of the city, resides an Archangel. He holds with him a gold watch as ancient as time itself. It is said that when the minute hand strikes twelve, the world will have reached its end. But, those who have seen it claim that it stays eternally at eleven, never moving back or forward. It’s a wonder they remember at all.

⚜⚜⚜

There are health examinations at the end of each week. Every Fifthday, Kai is sent to a large room, along with his other twenty-nine classmates, and is inspected by a large machine. There are rows and rows of them, but Kai always uses one. Number 14. He sits in it, and the Man in the long white coat straps him in. It’s always the same Man. He’s told to go to sleep and to dream. Kai often wonders why the Man tells him to do something so absurd, for he can’t control his dreams, but he never questions it. He figures they must have their reasons.

Uniformity. That is the number one law of Cadeau. There is one number system, one measurement, and one language. It’s for efficiency, the mayor said with her signature toothy grin. Kai wonders if it’s wearisome smiling all twenty hours a day.

⚜⚜⚜

The bell tower tolls once every twelve hours. People say it is the Archangel’s warning to humankind, reminding them that there’s forever an impending danger hanging over them like a musky fog. Miasma that kills with every inhale. Other’s say it’s the Archangel’s cry of mourning, grieving the loss of his one and only friend.

⚜⚜⚜

Kai is called out of class one Seconday by the Principal. He does not look happy, but Kai doesn’t ask why. He knows he wouldn’t answer anyways. The Principal leads him silently to the Conference Room. He’s passed by it many times, but never went in. The stories about it weren’t pretty.

Father and Mother are waiting solemnly for him, eyes tracking him as he moves wordlessly across the room. He takes a seat across from the Man.

“Your son,” the Man says, leaning forward with his hands clasped on the table in front of him, addressing Father and Mother but looking at Kai. “He reads.”

Father and Mother exchange a look before, “Yes, he does.”

“He shall no more.”

There is an air of finality in his words.

Father swallows. “Yes, sir.”

Kai has his books taken away and locked inside the basement. He picks the lock at night and sneaks them out anyways.

It’s a different language.

Kai leans against the wall for a closer listen. Indeed, it is a different tongue, one he doesn’t recognize.

It’s odd, he thinks. He shouldn’t feel such warmth spreading through him as the words roll over him like the tiny, tickling waves of a warm lake.

It’s odd, he thinks. He shouldn’t feel such comfort caressing him as the speaker steps around the corner and reaches for him.

His name is Tao.

Tao is different, Kai thinks as he sits down hesitantly next to him.

His hands are cold as his fingers close smoothly around Kai’s wrist.

“You’re Kai,” he says, this time in Kai’s mother tongue. “You’re waiting for something.”

Kai blinks before slowly tugging his hand away from Tao’s grasp. His grip tightens.

“I—” Kai’s mouth grows dry, and his voice cracks.

He makes the mistake of looking into Tao’s eyes, and he sees a ghost of himself wandering in this world, lost and hopeless. He notices that Tao’s eyes are a shade of unfamiliar obsidian.

“You’re waiting for something,” Tao repeats. “But it won’t come if you just wait. Look for it, Kai.”

He releases Kai and steps away, turning and disappearing into the shadows of the alleyway before Kai recovers.

“Wai—”

The alarms go off, and Kai curses as he realizes that he’s broken curfew and that the Authorities are probably looking for him. He runs home and jumps into bed, pulling the covers over him, just as he hears knocking on the front door.

Everyday, Kai takes two pills, a yellow one and a red one. Everyone has to. He takes the yellow one when he wakes up, and the red one when he goes to sleep. It’s to speed up his brain, they had said when they delivered it to his house when he turned six. He’ll work more efficiently then. Everyone receives them when they turn six. Kai sometimes wonders what would happen if he doesn’t take them, and his hand hesitates above the pill dish a second too long. He takes it anyways. Something inside him tells him to.

Kai is called into the Conference Room a second time. It’s rare—not many people have the luck, or perhaps lack thereof, to enter the Conference Room more than once. Father and Mother are not waiting for him this time, but the Man is.

He takes a seat across from him. It’s hard not to when Guards force you into the chair and handcuff your wrists behind your chair. The sensation feels oddly familiar now, and Kai lets out a sardonic chuckle.

“Kai,” the Man says, and pauses, surveying Kai with mild, polite interest.

Kai his head and gestures for him to go on.

“You… read.” His lips curl at the last word as if it was physically disgusting to say it.

Kai shrugs.

“It’s part of the Manual. To go to school and to learn to read and write.”

“Ah,” the Man says, tapping his pen against the edge of the table and leaning back, expression patronizingly sympathetic. “But you read more than you should. Even after we tell you not to.”

Kai doesn’t say anything.

“I’m afraid we have to take you away,” he continues, signaling one of the younger Guards to un-cuff Kai.

Kai massages his wrists and glances up. His eyes grow wide and his movements still.

Tao’s eyes stare back at him, and Kai says nothing.

“Take him away.”

Tao grabs his arm and leads him off school grounds and into the backseat of a solid-black car. He takes out a handkerchief and brings it to Kai’s face, lingering inches away from his mouth—almost apologetically—before pressing it towards his face.

Kai drops unconscious onto the seats.

He wakes up to blinding whiteness and a cinch in his back. He groggily rubs his eyes and looks around blearily, taking in the starkness of the box shaped room he was in. A huge metal door is in front of him, and a cot is placed to the side of the room. A single desk and chair sits next to the cot. Kai notices that he’s sitting on the cold floor.

He groans and twists around, starting when he sees Tao sitting barely a foot away from him, eyes regarding him steadily. Kai scoots away slowly and clears his throat.

“Hi.”

Tao nods in greeting.

“I—uh—didn’t know you worked for the Government.” Kai laughs nervously.

Tao nods again before stretching his arm and gripping Kai’s forearm.

“Did you find it?” Tao asks, voice deadly quiet.

“W-what?” Kai chokes out, eyes searching Tao’s timeless orbs.

“What you were waiting for.”

Kai is silent, mind reeling and bemused, but he shakes his head.

“No.”

Tao releases him and sits back.

“I need to help you.”

Kai is about to ask what he means when the large metal door slides open like the ominous jaw of a feline beast.

The Man walks in.

“How are you faring, Kai?” He asks with an air of apathy.

“Fine. I feel fine.”

“The room is comfortable, yes?”

Kai nods.

The Man smiles, and Kai thinks that it’s more like a sneer.

“Good. You’ll be in here for a long time.”

He says no more, merely observing Kai with unhidden distaste and moves to walk back out.

“My parents,” Kai says suddenly, and the Man stops. He wets his dry lips. “You’ve told them?”

The sentence comes out a question, and the Man laughs as he turns back around.

“Yes, I have.”

“What did they say?”

The Man raises his eyebrows. “Why, they said they wish you the best. After all, you’re with the Government now.”

The metal door clangs shut with an echo of trepidation.

Kai leans back against the wall and lets out a breath he didn’t know he was holding. There’s a feeling in his chest he can’t describe, something almost like fear. No one ever feels fear in Cadeau.

Tao walks towards him and reaches out to him.

“Let me help you.”

Kai looks at the outstretched hand, and then Tao's eyes—he thinks for a moment that he sees himself with black wings—and without knowing what Tao means, takes it.

⚜⚜⚜

Long ago, people say in hushed whispers around the family fire. Long ago, the bell tower never chimed. Long ago, the minute hand and hour hand were one, and the time was forever twelve o’clock.

But long ago, there was no time. After all, time was inefficient.

⚜⚜⚜

Tao teaches Kai things he never knew existed. It takes him a while to understand at first, and he’s often confused, but he loves listening to Tao’s tales of the Past and of a time Before.

“Do you know what friendship is?” Tao asks one day, walking through the metal doors and tossing Kai a new book.

Kai catches it deftly from his spot on the floor and turns it over in his hands, the gold embossed title. They let him read now, and he’s asked Tao why.

“There’s no harm in it,” Tao had said. “You’re in here.”

“The state of being friends, which is a person attached to another by feelings of affection or personal regard,” Kai recites fluidly, eyes not leaving the book as he thumbs through the first few pages.

Tao is silent, and Kai finally looks up after a half minute.

Tao is looking at him with a sort of appalled and amused expression.

“What?” Kai asks defensively. “It is!”

Tao chokes back a laugh and nods quickly.

“Right,” he says, still trembling from suppressed laughter. “But what does it mean to you?”

Kai opens his mouth to reply, not wanting to ridicule himself further, but he realizes that he has nothing to say.

He his lips.

“I don’t understand,” he says hoarsely.

He hates the way Tao’s eyes burn.

“Friendship. What do you think of when you hear it?” Tao begins pacing around the room. “What do you feel when you hear it?” He stops and looks at Kai almost pleadingly, like Kai’s understanding of this foreign and abstract concept is of utmost importance.

Kai’s looking at the book again, but the words swim in front of his eyes.

Friendship.

“Nothing.”

Tao drops the subject and tells Kai stories of the Past instead.

“Well, there was more than one language,” he says, sitting next to Kai on the floor with his legs stretched out in front of him. “There were hundreds. Every country spoke a different one, almost. And people from other countries would go live in a different one, and they’d speak their own language.”

“Really?” Kai looks awed. “But, that’s so... inefficient. How did they communicate?”

Tao shrugs. “They have their ways.”

“And besides,” Tao says after a while. “It’s not like we have only one language.”

⚜⚜⚜

Few have seen the Archangel. Even fewer have returned to tell their tale to their children, but they all say the same thing.

The Archangel is beautiful, ink black hair cascading past his shoulders. His eyes are a poignant black, shimmering with nonexistent tears as he stares hollowly through your soul. And his wings, God, his wings. They’re magnificent, spanning sixteen feet across, each dark feather reflecting light like a million obsidians.

What’d he say? Everyone would ask as they gather ‘round to hear the story.

The speaker would pause and think for a minute.

I don’t know. He spoke in a language I’ve never heard before.

⚜⚜⚜

“How do you know all these things?” Kai asks.

“What do you mean?”

“Like, stuff from the Past and everything.”

“I listen.”

Kai scoffs. “So do I, but I’ve never heard anything about it.”

Tao hesitates for a moment before saying, “I grew up in the Lower Wing. In the Lower Wing, people talk. More than you Upper Wingers anyway.”

“We talk a lot,” Kai protests. “We talk every day.”

Tao stares at him for a moment before bursting out laughing.

“That’s not what I meant,” he says in between guffaws. “I meant—well—we talk about certain subjects more freely. Controversies, rumors—we discuss them all the time. Not like the fickle topics you speak of.”

“But—”

Tao waves a hand around. “You’ll understand someday.”

“How did you end up working for the Government? I thought people from the Lower Wing couldn’t apply for a Government Job,” Kai asks.

“Right. But, they found out I could read, so I got drafted. Apparently, the Lower Wingers are not allowed to read. That’s too dangerous. But, one of the exiled Upper Wingers taught me, and when the Government found out, they forced me into being a Guard to keep an eye on me. Chestnut?”

Tao holds out the bag towards Kai. Kai shakes his head, and Tao shrugs before popping another one into his mouth. Kai watches him as he chews and wonders what it would be like if he’d grown up in the Lower Wing with Tao. Maybe he would understand what friendship is, and know what the Past and the time Before was like. Maybe he wouldn’t have to suffer ten hours of school each day and two hours of mandatory exercise right after.

The metal doors slide open, and someone walks in with a dish in his hands.

Kai sighs resignedly and takes the solitary yellow pill.

“Thank you,” he says after swallowing it, and the man nods stiffly.

“Next time,” Tao whispers after the man leaves. “Don’t take the pill.”

Kai stares at him.

“What?”

“Don’t take it.”

“But—okay.”

Kai isn’t sure why he agrees, but he thinks it’s probably because of Tao's eyes.

They still burn, but the pain seems to be dying away.

Kai doesn’t take the red pill.

He puts it in his mouth and takes a gulp of water, but he makes sure to keep the pill to the side of his cheek. When he climbs into the cot he uses as a bed, he spits the pill into his palm and wraps it discreetly in a tissue, shoving it under his pillow.

The collection of pill grows larger, and on some days, he feels just a little bit different.

He doesn’t really think about it though—the way his visions seem to dim at the edges, yet the world seems to appear more tangible, more real—until one day, Tao presses a cool hand to his cheek.

“Wha—” Kai leans away, alarmed.

“It’s working,” Tao murmurs.

“W-what is?” Kai asks cautiously.

Tao replies by whipping out a mirror. He holds it up, and Kai frowns at his reflection with confusion. Suddenly, he sees his eyes flash white, and then black, and a gasp escapes his throat.

“What was that?” He breathes, leaning closer to the mirror when it happens again.

It fades back into Kai’s signature ocean green eyes mere milliseconds after, but he can’t deny that it never happened.

“The effects of the pills are wearing off,” Tao says simply.

He sweeps Kai’s bangs farther away from his forehead and pushes them up as he peers into Kai’s eyes.

“Hmm…” He muses after a while. “I need to get you out of here.”

“Wait, what? Out of here? What do yo—”

“Shh…,” Tao says warningly. “Just... act natural, okay? I’ll think of a way to get you out. You can’t stay here with those eyes.”

Kai opens his mouth to ask why in the world he shouldn’t take the pills, because really, everyone did, but Tao holds up a hand and smiles apologetically.

“I’ll see you later, okay?” He promises. “Remember, don’t look the Guards in the eye, especially the one who brings you the pill.”

He pats Kai on the shoulder and glances at his eyes one last time before he leaves.

In Cadeau, seconds, minutes, and hours are measured with the grains of sand in a colossal hourglass, standing twenty feet tall underground the country’s center. There is no such thing as time though—no, the Government refuses to let a supreme force control the human life. They call it Zones. That, they can control. Or so they say.

There are ten Zones—Zone One, Zone Two, Zone Three, and so on. Ten Zones make up a Halfday. Once an entire Halfday passes, the Zones reset themselves to Zone One, and the cycle begins again.

The first Halfday is what people know as Daytime, and the second Halfday is what people know as Nighttime.

No one knows how Nighttime is like. It is imperative that they go to sleep when the first Halfday ends and that they wake up only when the second Halfday ends. Nighttime is defined by silence, and the unknown, and the shadows that lurk behind dreams made up with questions that could not be asked.

Kai woke up once, during Nighttime. The silence had been deafening, and tiny pinpricks of pain crawled over the expanse of his skin. He couldn’t get rid of the feeling that someone was watching him.

“There are no monitors in this area of the Capitol,” Tao had said.

“Why?”

“Because there’s no need for one. There are Guards everywhere in the building; nothing can go wrong.”

“Yet you’re telling me all this stuff I’m not supposed to know.”

“Well, they think you won’t be able to leave. I don’t think they mind.”

The person who brought Kai’s pills appears earlier than usual one day, and Kai sits up hastily, startled.

“You’re early,” he says warily, and the man says nothing.

Kai takes the pill and the glass of water, and places it on his tongue. He pretends to swallow and hands the water back to the man. He doesn’t take it, and instead, reaches swiftly towards Kai, roughly pulling Kai’s chin towards him.

“You didn’t swallow it,” he says in a low voice.

Kai clenches his teeth. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He doesn’t know how his voice isn’t wavering, but he thanks God it doesn’t.

“You didn’t swallow it,” he repeats and tightens his hold on Kai’s jaw, forcing it open.

Not knowing what else to do, Kai kicks the man in the shin and tries to wrench his way free. He’s just about out of his grip when suddenly, two more Guards appear at his side and take holds of his arms.

“Let me go,” Kai grits out.

“You’ve disobeyed the rules,” the man says.

He takes a step forwards, hand raised as if he was about to strike Kai. Kai readies himself for the blow but refuses to look away, staring dead-on into the man’s eyes, looking past the vibrant blue and into the hollow shell with a lost soul. He tries to find something, tries to assure the tiny denying part of himself that tells him his parents hadn’t lied to him, his teachers hadn’t lied to him, and that his very existence and what he calls life is not just a fabricated concept that never really existed.

The blow never comes.

Instead, the man’s eyes grow wide and his body, rigid. He slumps to the floor, cold, and Kai’s eyes meet Tao’s. The muzzle of his gun is still smoking.

Two more shots ring out, and the other two Guards fall.

Kai is standing stunned, staring at the bodies of the three men, but Tao doesn’t have time for this. He strides quickly towards to Kai and drags him out of the room, telling him that the alarms will go off soon and that they’ll be after them soon.

“I’ll explain on the way,” he tells him, firing shot after shot as the two of them run down the long corridors.

The number of turns they take makes Kai dizzy, but he trusts that Tao knows where he’s going and follows him mindlessly, feeling oddly safe and comforted

It’s weird, really, Kai thinks as he grips Tao’s hand a little tighter. After meeting Tao, the only thing that has been thrown his way was danger. Yet, he’s not afraid to rely on Tao, not afraid to smile in reassurance when Tao throws him a worried glance.

“Hey Tao,” Kai says when they finally make it out the building and down another two blocks, finally stopping and leaning against a brick wall. “I think I know what friendship is now.”

“What is it?” Tao pants, bending forward with his hands on his waist.

“It’s me and you.”

Kai doesn’t know how many days he and Tao spends wandering in the City, but soon, they make their way to the Lower Wing and find what Tao calls his family.

“We’re not blood related,” Tao explains. “But we’re family all the same.”

Kai nods, and an older woman immediately makes her way towards him, fussing over his attire and how skinny he looks. Everyone has the same dark eyes like Tao—Kai’s eyes are probably darkening steadily now, too—and they all spoke the beautiful tongue Tao was fluent in. They tried to teach him over the dinner table, laughing as he slips up and smiling when he laughs along.

It’s a totally different atmosphere from what he’s used to, but he finds that he likes it.

He doesn’t think he can find a word to describe it, but he settles for warm.

____________________________

A/N: Part II will be up tomorrow, along with a headcannon I wrote for this.