The Fifth World

Bo: "Cynric," I hiss his name when I appear back into the present, into my bedroom where he is standing. "How long was I gone for?"

He smiles when I appear but then looks at me up and down. There is dirt across my clothing, smothered across my white skin, there are twigs and leaves through my hair. I then feel an aching pain in my wrist. "Not even ten seconds. What in the world happened?"

He comes towards me, quickly, and I instinctively lift up my wrist and hold it with my other hand. Ow.

"Let me see," he insists as he gently touches me. I shiver from his touch as he inspects my arm as if I am some frog he is dissecting. I look up at him, watch his eyes, how they look hard but somewhere, deep inside, they are warm and loving. I sigh.

"You've fractured it."

I was in danger, so close to being hurt... or dead or captured. I don't understand, if a Thorne wanted to kill me, why bother going through so much trouble to shape shift themselves into someone I know and love? Why not just kill me? Thornes have perfect athletic bodies, they're fast and they're strong. Sometimes I wonder if there are Thornes in the Average Human world, in my world. I used to wonder if Michael Phelps was a Thorne. He's the perfect swimmer, the ideal swimmer (since his arm span is like 201cm in length compared to his height which is 193cm). I think mainly why I thought he was a Thorne was because of his apparent infidelities with Miss Universe's best friend or something. He was dating one of them at least and then cheated or something. Now I don't think he's a Thorne at all, I just
think he's a dickhead.

I cringed, great, this is all I need, "should I see a doctor and have it x-rayed?"

Cynric rolls his pretty eyes, leads me out of the bedroom and into the bathroom after checking that Adam or Mum weren't around. With an irritated sigh I sat down at the bathtub as Cynric raided the cupboards.

"Do you want to tell me what happened?" he asks me as he pulls out some bandages and anything else he can find. I look down at my wrist and notice that it is swelling... and aching. I grit my teeth and try to think of something else.

I suddenly remembered some stories Cynric had told me and just some information that I had just come up with through general knowledge - if you talk about the future it may never happen. But I don't want a war to happen. I thought about it for a moment. The war could be a good thing, well, it never is. But what if something has happened and we're fighting to protect ourselves? Or possibly something worse?

I bite my tongue and put on a fake smile, I shrug, "nothing." He looks at me with a strange expression. He knows there is something wrong but refrains himself from pressing. I sigh and rest my wrist in my lap. I'm worried, I'm stressed. "Is there something you need?"

"No, I think I have everything." He quickly puts everything together. Within a few minutes my arm has a splint around it and numerous bandages. Cynric gives me a mix of Paracetamol and Codeine to deal with the pain.

"Get cleaned up," he instructs me, "we have to go out."

I wasn't sure how Cynric afforded it but he did. We booked two return flights from here to Melbourne, Australia. Mum and Adam will be on those flights tomorrow. We'll put the tickets in an envelope, accompany them with a fake letter and then they'll be on their way to bliss. And safety.

"We have to go to the post office," I say to Cyrnic as we walk down the street, passing many Average Humans going about their simple lives. We're walking through a mall. It's just a street of shops. This is a good place for young kids to congregate. People my age. Families to spend time together. Mum and Callahan used to bring Adam and I here all the time. We don't come here anymore.

"Why's that?" Cynric asks me. There are many young girls surrounding us, some I can recognize from school. They each look at Cynric, up and down and then they smile at him until they catch his eye. He simply looks away.

"Well, my mother isn't going to believe that she won a competition - that she actually never entered - if there's no postage stamp on the envelope her prize came in."

He smiles and shrugs, "I'm sure she'd still take the prize, you Average Humans can be quite greedy, selfish and unintelligent at times."

I roll my eyes, "and you Angelicans can be rude and arrogant at times. I thought that wasn't your nature."

"Shut up," he hisses, "you're one of us anyway."

I stop before we begin to cross the road and then turn to him nervously. Right. I'm Half Angelican. I know that I have this gift and that I can time travel and jump and whatever... but I should be kind and bring love and peace, right? I should have all of the characteristics an Angelican should have.

"Cynric, you're immortal, right?"

He raises an eyebrow, studies my expression carefully and then nods his head.

"What about me? Am I? I don't know if I could handle being immortal. I'd outlive Adam and Mum and everyone I love and care about... I don't know if I could do that. I don't know if I
could live to see that."

Cynric sighs and looks away from me, "I don't know if you're immortal, Bo."

I can read him like a book. There is doubt in his eyes. Curiosity. Fear and disappointment. I sigh.

Cynric: I honestly don't. It's strange to think about that. I've considered it many times. I do believe, that even though Bo is half a Time Jumper and half an Agelican, that maybe she could be immortal. Maybe she can give love and peace and all of that junk that Angelicans can do.

"How does it work anyway?" she asks me after crossing the street.

"How does what work? Immortality?"

She shakes her head, her black hair swishes from side to side, she tied it up, mainly because it's gritty from whenever she went today, "No, the way all of you can get to the Average Human World and go back to the Fifth World whenever you please, how you can supposedly change somebodies life by just bringing love and peace and goodness to it.
And must you always wear white?"

I look down at my clothing, a white buttoned up shirt and thick white pants. I smile, "don't you like my clothes?"

"A little color would be nice."

I began to speak and I explain to Bo how Angelicans work. At eighteen we graduate from the Fifth World Academy and at the ceremony we are assigned, by the government, a Fifth World Human that is living in the Average Human World (for whatever reason) and we must bring them back to the Fifth World so they can know who they are and so they can belong. We don't stop watching over these Fifth World Humans till they agree to return with us. After that the government assigns us to watch over Average Humans. I guess you can say we police them, watch over them and if needed, protect them. I remember being told, by a professor at the Academy, that she used to watch over a small child that lived in Kabul in Afghanistan during the nineties. She was eleven years old. The country was at war with the Taliban. The child, named Lila, dressed herself to resemble a boy just so she could find money, food and water for her family to survive. One day the Taliban were breaking into homes to find anybody suspected of breaking the law. The Taliban created many laws - no schools for girls, no females allowed in public unless they are covered in head to toe with a burqa and accompanied by a male, the list goes on. When the Taliban broke into Lila's home, they found that her mother was holding a school for some of the children in the neighborhood.
The Taliban shot and killed almost Lila's whole family that day. Her mother. Her father. Her grandmother. They took her brother who was fifteen. He would join the Taliban. Lila was protecting her three year old sister from them. They were hiding in the corner of their little room for an apartment.
Then my professor, Proffessor Stackhouse, intervened.

"How?" Bo asks me. "How does one simply intervene?"

I smile and mock her, "we wave our little wands."

"Don't be silly, tell me the truth."

"Every Angelican has a dagger and it's not like we can fly down from the sky and appear in shining light. We climb through windows. We sneak around. Stackhouse came through the door, spoke in Angelican and shielded the girls and herself from the men. To make a charm, or a spell or whatever you might call it, you have to speak Angelican."

"Angelicans have a language?"

"They do. In the end, Lila and her sister lost their whole family. But Stackhouse made it that the girls ended up traveling across the country, going through many hardships. They sailed on a boat and ended up in France."

"Then what happened?" Bo asks. She is eager and somewhat excited.

"They were adopted. Stackhouse checks in on Lila from time to time. She's fluent in French now."

Bo smiles softly, "that's a nice story."

"It's not a story," I shake my head, "it's the truth."