That Rapturous Feeling

Walking around deserted Hoboken, Laren took in little of the desolate landscape. Windows and doorways were only half-covered - plunderers had been through here many times over in the past months. Whole chunks of asphalt covered the road, and rats scurried by in hordes. They ignored Laren totally, and she did likewise. There were worse things to consider than rats.

This didn't mean people. No, people in deserted Hoboken didn't even cross Laren's mind. There were reasons for this, now the norm in a vastly changed society.

Beauty held society in a steel vice. Of course, like any society there were workers and outcasts and the ones no-one accounted for. But beauty made the city keep running, somehow; beauty was the currency of the new world.

And in the new world, everyone wanted to be rich.

Surgeries and cosmetics were like taking a breath, needing no thought but basically necessary. With everyone beautifying themselves, those who elected to go without surgery doomed themselves to a life of ignorance. There was so much pressure…you either gave in, broke down, or ran away.

Laren hadn't run away. She had been taken.

She'd been taken before she was even born. In fact, the plans for Laren had stretched from before her own mother's birth, which wasn't all that long ago anyway. The plan hadn't been specific on who was chosen, though. Only the subject and the specialists involved.

The Subject. A horrid name, a bad metallic taste on the tongue that couldn't ever be erased. But it was gone now, except for a few flecks here and there, and she was going to forget about it and start over. Clean. Figuratively so.

The only sounds that were really audible around her were her lonely sneakers hitting the rough ground, but Laren could hear the rats around her, gorged bellies and scraping tails against jagged concrete, teeth clashing, nails scritch-scratching along old pavement. Fights and food-hunting and even rat love-making which made her wrinkle her nose in disgust, that her senses could detect it all. Senses that took more than a lifetime to hone, senses that needed the added pressure of fear and adrenaline.

And genetic modification.

Shaking her head violently to dislodge the thoughts, Laren scrunched her eyes closed then opened them, pupils dilating to wide black orbs and taking in all the detail of the street. The only light was coming from the waning moon and the city lights far, far behind her. The glimmer from the water had stopped long before. At the end of the street, she spied a subway station, and from it came faint sounds and smells…food and fires and conversation. Laren started striding purposefully towards it, until something made her steps falter, her wide eyes swinging around to take in something she'd inexplicably missed from the landscape.

There were footsteps behind her. Laren sighed, hands curling into fists and body tightening. "I guess it won't help to tell you that I left my wallet in my other pants?" she spoke out clearly, half-turning so her peripheral vision covered what had been behind her. Her wings that had drooped to just lightly scrape the ground lifted perhaps two inches, ready to make use of her fight-or-flight response, to be pulled back tight under her shirt or shoot out to hit someone who might want to get too close.

There was no responding comment, just the sound of feet getting louder, closer, faster. And…out of time.

There was more than one.

And a terrifying sound: the almost silent pop and hiss of a cap being pulled off a needle. It dragged needles through her nervous system, turned her insides to ice and body to stone. But she could still hear and see and taste. There was the rustle of netting, the sound of air whistling over knives, shadowy figures criss-crossing through streets behind her, and the overall taste of anger and brutish excitement. Fear tore at her now, and she took a few shaky, stumbling steps away from them.

The figures were speeding up; if she didn't move soon, she might not move again.

Forgetting what she was capable of, Laren…ran.