Hide-and-seek

The muffled screams of being burned alive echoed not only on the streets but within Mia’s bones. At the age of eight, she learned a lesson that she would never forget for the rest of her life.

When fully engulfed in the flames of a Pyrokinetist, the victim cannot scream. The only sound that escaped was the crackling of meat being charred. Even with her pursuers yelling as they chased her, this white noise of flesh being roasted could not quite disappear. It was the background track that played in each of Mia’s nightmares, even after six years had passed since that horrific night.

Only this time, the nightmare was happening when she was fully awake.

“This way! Hurry!” Neither shout nor whisper, her voice guided the other children to safety. Loud enough to be heard, but quiet enough to blend in with the sound of fire in the distance.

These children, some as young as four, followed her instructions as the eldest. They ran as quickly as they could, their white patient gowns billowing in the shadows, desperate to escape the bad guys searching for them. Mia couldn’t look away from the burn marks some of the children had. Hairless, skinless, pink tissue exposed to the wind. Yet, they didn’t cry. They couldn’t. And neither could she.

She kept a close eye on their surroundings. There were no sirens. No searchlights. Darkness engulfed the city, willfully sleeping, ignoring their plight. They knocked on doors. They begged for help. But those who opened turned them away. No family on The Surface would take in stray orphans. She would only learn much later that it was due to the Procreation Allocation Act. But at that time, she cursed these selfish adults. The same rotten animals as her parents.

The fresh scent of savory pork yanked her attention away from her thoughts. She, like all the others, was famished. It has been hours since the orphanage burned down. Even longer since their last meal. The only reason why she did not look like sticks and bones was due to her Shapeshifting. Even though she could hide her physical appearance to an extent, she could not deny her body’s clawing desire for food.

But that glorious smell was a trap.

“Go! We’re almost there!” She hurried them along, into the forked alleyway and away from the scent. She had no idea where they were going. Or where was “almost there.” Be it lie or false hope, she had to get them as far away as possible from that sinful smell. That was the only thing she knew. Don't get caught.

So when one of the children started crying, Mia's entire world shattered.

A young girl half her age fell and scraped her knee. Unable to fight back her tears, her elder brother smothered her face, essentially suffocating the poor child. He had little choice. Either silence his sister or be silenced forever.

“Hurry!” She helped the sister onto the shoulders of the brother, urging them along as she stayed behind.

As much as the fear in her feet demanded that she run, Mia remained firm. She was the only one who could slow the bad guys down. There was no doubt that one of them heard the girl’s shrill cry, even if it only lasted a second. The smell was getting stronger. Standing alone by the split in the cramped passage, she waited as death approached.

Every cell in her body protested, pleading for her to run. But she forced them to transform.

“I’ll head this way, you go down there!”

She gave the command to the bad guy who appeared, directing him to take the path that none of the children took. He gave her a nod, and when he vanished from her sight, so did the scent of charred flesh that stuck to him.

Mia shivered from the cold sweat sliding down her neck. She had no idea whose body she was in. Twice her original size and dressed impeccably in the bad guys’ suit and tie, he was just one out of the many men chasing them. And when his skin unravelled and vanished, returning her to her previous form, the air in her lungs flowed once more.

She heaved and panted like never before. It was the first time she had ever tricked someone with her Gift. Sweat streamed down her face like rain, the droplets thick enough for her to see her reflection on the small puddle forming near her feet. Tone of voice. Microexpressions. Body movements. She had to assume everything, gambling on the bad guy not recognizing his colleague as a fake.

As she caught her breath, it finally struck her—what was the point of all this?

For so long, all she ever dreamed of was escaping the orphanage. And now that she was outside, she felt so tiny. Cold. Hopeless. She had nothing in this city. Nowhere to go. Not even an inkling of where she was. Adrenaline made her run, but now what?

With her Gift, she could try to disguise herself. Blend in with the adults. Live someone else’s life. Maybe even leave The Surface altogether. A scary thought for an eight-year-old, but compared to being hunted down and killed by the bad guys? It could work.

But she banished the thought. This was not what “Mia” would have done.

The other children were still running for their lives. Confused and lost. All younger than her. She might be afraid, but the little ones? Someone had to lead them. She was the eldest. She could not abandon them. Because “Mia” did not abandon her.

Wiping away the sweat and hesitation from her forehead, she ran in the direction where the others went. Her heart hammered against its cavity, each knock a prayer for their survival. The winding alleyway seemed to grow ever tighter, closing down on her as her lungs constricted by the second.

Hide-and-seek. She repeated the mantra in her mind. This was all just a game of hide-and-seek. The same words she used to comfort the little ones had little effect on her, but what else did she have?

Seconds turned to minutes. Minutes to hours. Hours back to seconds again. The maze-like pathways of the city’s backstreets made her lose not just her bearings, but also her sense of time. Was she going around in a loop, just like her internal chants of “hide-and-seek?” Shadows hid behind every corner, concealing the answer.

Everywhere felt equally as cold. Ice wrapped around her lungs like a python. The mere subconscious act of breathing was agonizing. But her mind focused on the children. Every second she spent breathing could be spent helping them live.

But as she turned into a dead end, she found her strength evaporating like smoke. Gone, just like the little girl further down at the end of the wall. The sight of the orphan combusting into a ball of flame was seared into her very soul.

With just a wave of his hand, the bad guy in front of her turned into a human flamethrower. Fire spewed out of his arm, devouring the girl where she stood. Mia froze as the child burned alive, calling for help but unable to make a sound. Body crumbling into ash. Arms waving frantically, trying to put out the flame, only to feed it further. In her dying moments, her gaze met Mia’s. The last thing she saw before her eyeballs boiled into pus, dripping down to the pile of black residue.

Five seconds. That was all it took to turn a child into cinders. By the time Mia’s eyes adjusted to the sudden flash of burning light, the girl was indistinguishable from the dirt on the cement.

The urge to scream was restrained by Mia biting down on her own hand, hard enough for blood to ooze out of the puncture marks as she forced herself to run. She did not let go. Because no matter how hard she hurt herself, the pain in her hand could not overwhelm the horror in her mind. It could not pull her away from the tantalizing scent of roasted pork that made her sick to her stomach.

Hide-and-seek.

Those three words were the only thing keeping her mind from falling apart. It was all just a game. None of it was real. Her eyes were tired. She was just hungry. Her mind needed sleep. And once she woke up, it would all go away.

But it wouldn’t. Because by the time she let go of her hand to breathe, all she could see was the white in her bones. Her vision blurred. Her hand trembled. She coughed, trying to get rid of the pieces of her own raw flesh stuck between her teeth. But the only thing she gave away was her position.

“Over there!” The sound of a grown man crushed her spirit.

Mia resisted the urge to vomit. She forced it down to the same pit where her heart sank as she broke into a sprint. The scent of cooked meat got stronger. Closer. She could not shake it off no matter where she turned or went.

She could sense him catching up, always lingering one corner behind her. But try as she might, she failed to transform. Her body morphed violently, trying to retain shape as she ran, but it couldn’t. Could it be her injury? She self-harmed and transformed many times before, so why now? Why couldn’t her body just listen to her?!

Hide-and-seek.

Hide-and-seek.

Hide-and-seek.

The broken record played in her broken mind, carried by a broken collage of limbs and body parts. She could no longer run; only limp. Still, she kept going. Even when all the muscles in her body shrieked in agony, she did not stop. It was only when she hit the wall of a dead end that she realized she had nowhere to go.

Turning around, she saw a bad guy enter the same alley she was in. She saw herself as the little girl from before who was burned alive. The game was over. She had been caught. Her eyes shut, not wanting to be turned to mush like earlier. But as she waited for the burning embrace of death, all she heard was screaming.

Not a child, but the bad guy’s.

He had a look of abject horror as he fell on his rear end. Unintelligible rambling left his jittery mouth. He stumbled. He crawled. He ran. He was no different from the children. What was he so afraid of?

But Mia did not have the time to answer. Being given this second chance, she immediately headed the opposite way from that bad guy after turning out of the dead end. It did not take long for her to realize this was the right choice; she found the children huddled together behind a dumpster. Finally, she was no longer alone. They could all escape together and—

“Aaaaaahhhhhh!!!”

The screams of the children in unison shook her core. She tried to shush them, but they scattered. They hid so well. Why were they doing this now?

Mia chased after them. But when she came across her reflection on a broken window, she paused.

She was no longer “Mia.”

She was everyone and no one at the same time. Clothes and flesh and faces and hair, blended into one grotesque abomination. But it was not her form that terrified her. It was the faces of her father and mother fused into her own.

The mass of writhing flesh tore at itself. Shattered the windows and thrashed the alley. She did everything she could to undo her transformation. Separate her parents from herself. By the time she got rid of them, she was bruised, bloody, and almost unrecognizable.

But she was herself again.

“Gu… ys?”

It hurt when she spoke. Everywhere hurt. She dragged herself out of the alley, smearing blood and pus across the cold cement wall. The metallic, rotten odor of her own fluids mixed with the pervasive aroma of sweet pork was dizzying. She could not think. It hurt to even think. Every second alive was an hour of torture. Consciousness ebbed and flowed like the blackening corners of her vision.

She made it out of that corridor, stumbling out into the open. Lights sparkled in front of her. Has she survived till dawn? Was it time for people to leave their houses? She rubbed her eyes, ignoring the sting of blood entering her vision. But by the time she finished blinking, the lights were gone, reduced to ash by the group of bad guys standing around in a circle.

She sat there, eyeballs trembling, realizing she had sent the children to their deaths.

“Is that the last one?”

“Which idiot beat her up? Just look at all that blood…”

“Call the janitors. Can’t leave any trace of ‘em.”

“Wait.”

The voice of a woman among the bad guys was the only one that Mia had a reaction to. A twitch of a finger.

“I want her.”

Mia felt a hand lift her chin up. It was the woman’s. She was in a labcoat. Spectacles made her eyes look bigger. This woman seemed to be inspecting her.

But the moment Mia felt the woman's thumb in the corner of her mouth, something snapped inside of her. For a brief moment, she saw the male researcher who did the exact same thing to her in the orphanage every weekend. What followed had been locked behind her old memories.

Blood splattered out of the thumb as she clamped her mouth shut. The same horrible things must not happen to “Mia.”

Everything became a blur. She could not differentiate between the man and the woman whose thumb she had just bitten. Memories spilled into reality. His yelp blended into her scream. His blood mixed with hers.

Mia forced her battered body to move one last time. Anywhere. Anywhere but here. Her cell in the orphanage. The ashes of the children. The bad guys. Her parents. She had to get away. She had to hide. Hide-and-seek.

The fire that suddenly engulfed her body and the burning sensation within her muscles were one and the same. All of the screaming was both hers and the children’s. Simultaneously silent and deafening. Her feet and mind ran in two different directions. But they both ended up in the same place.

A black hole. The Wishing Well.

Falling into the abyss, she plunged back to the present.