The Geneva Project - Truth

The Geneva Project

Truth

By Christina Benjamin

Copyright 2012 Christina Benjamin

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.

For information regarding permission, write to:

Attention: Crown Atlantic Publishing

8585 SE 155
th
PL, Summerfield, FL 34491

Copyright 2012 by Christina Benjamin

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Crown Atlantic Publishing

1.1

ISBN 978-0-9883375-0-3

Edited by Michelle Whitmer

My name is Geneva Sommers.  I didn’t know that until today.  Until today, I’ve lived the past thirteen years of my life as #65.  Jane 65 to be exact.  Janes, that’s what they call us female orphans at the Troian Center.  We live on Hullabee Island.  Our way of life here is very simple, either you’re one of the lucky ones, or you’re not.  I am not. Or at least that’s what I thought, until I found out the truth.

Hullabee Island is massive; it would take you two weeks to walk end to end if you never stopped.  It would take you just as long to hike to the top of its towering volcano as well.  For the colossal size of the island, the population is rather small.  It’s made up of one beautiful sparkling city on the southern shore, called Lux.  That’s where the citizens live.  They’re the lucky ones.  If you live on Hullabee, your biggest hope is to be a citizen.  Then you could live the good life in Lux, in one of the beautiful white-stone houses that stare out at the glittering blue sea.  The rest of us are called locals, we live on the outskirts of Lux in small villages.  Our life consists of trying to clean up the mess from the Flood and keep things running smoothly for the citizens in Lux.  The Flood
, as we call it, happened over ten years ago, and that’s how I became an orphan.  There’s a bunch of us orphans thanks to the Flood.  We all live at the Troian Center right outside of Lux, in the town of Aveile.  It’s not such a bad life being an orphan, we spend a few hours each day learning lessons and then the rest of the day we work with the locals in the cleanup effort. 

It may seem strange that after ten years we are still cleaning up from the Flood.  Well, it wasn’t just any flood that ravaged our island.  We were flooded by a force nature had never seen before.  There was wind, water, fire and lava, and there was nowhere to run.  I’ve heard so many stories about the Flood; it’s almost turned into a legend around here.  There’s little else we have to talk about with the locals while we work, so they tell us all they can remember.  They say it was like a monsoon, with a typhoon, mixed with an earthquake and a tsunami all rolled into one.  Not to mention the molten lava spewing out of our volcano amid the chaos.  As you can imagine, this event is responsible for wiping out most of the population on our island.  There used to be big, lush settlements all over the island.  Most of them were inland, sheltered from the harsh sun and weather by a canopy of thick, tropical trees and vegetation.  These towns are all gone now.  They were directly in the volcano’s path and it’s said that no one survived.  Only the citizens of Lux were spared, along with a few lucky nearby villages of locals and us orphans.

So, since the Flood I have lived here at the Troian Center.  I have worked my way up through the years cleaning, sewing, and cooking with the other young orphans at the center.  When I turned eight years old, I graduated to Flood clean up.  I have been helping sort through the rubble to find what is valuable enough to send to Lux.  I’ve become a master at finding little diamonds in the rough, as we call them; pieces of gold, small jewels or precious stones, and metals.  I find them and polish them until they look brand new.  I don’t mind the job much.  I get to be outdoors in the salty sea air with the sun warming my back.  It feels like a treasure hunt sorting through the piles of junk the locals bring in from the forest for us to comb through.  It beats doing laundry!  Working the rubble has made my legs strong from climbing the piles, and my feet sure and fast from scaling down the rolling, churning debris.  My fingers are nimble from sorting and my arms toned from polishing.  I cherish each beautiful sparkling thing I find.  Each is more stunning than the next, and they’re all more luxurious than anything I could ever hope to own.  It makes me feel powerful to have something so beautiful in my hands.  It almost feels like the gems speak to me sometimes, sharing with me their hidden secrets.  Sometimes, when no one is watching me, I pretend they are mine and that I’m a citizen worthy of owning them.   

Maybe if I were a citizen he would like me more … Nova.  I’ve had a crush on him since before I knew what a crush was.  I’ve seen him in the Troian Center since I could remember.  He was kind of hard to miss with that shock of blonde hair and his tall frame.  He was always a head above all the other kids.  At first I thought it was because he must be much older, but I guess he was just blessed with being freakishly tall.  Something I was in obvious envy of since I made a habit of walking around on my tippy toes to make up for my short stature, which eventually earned me the nickname “Tippy” from him.

Well, if I’m going to tell this story, let me start from the beginning. 

When I first had the pleasure of officially catching Nova’s eye, I was eleven and he was fourteen.  I was sorting rubble as usual and talking to a precious ruby I was polishing when he startled me.

“
So, is that your best friend or what?” 

I jumped at the voice behind me and dropped my stone back into the rubble pile.  I whirled around ready to be scolded and beaten for slacking off on my job, but instead I was met with his blazing green eyes and the big grin on his sun-kissed face.  His breathtaking beauty up close took me by surprise.  I was at a loss for words, so at first I just started scrambling around searching frantically for the ruby I had dropped.  But then I heard his laughter, and my ears grew hot and I could feel my cheeks flush with anger.  “Who did this John think he was anyway?” I thought.

“
Why did you do that?” I screamed! “Now I have to find it and start all over.”

“
Jeez, sorry kid, I wasn’t trying to scare you. I’ve just never heard anyone talk to a rock before.”

“
It’s not a rock!” I huffed. “It’s a ruby! And don’t call me kid!” 

“
Okay, okay, I’ll help you find it if you stop shouting about it.  You’re gonna get us sent to the locker!”

This shut me up momentarily because he was right, and that was the last place I wanted to go.  The locker was where they sent us orphans if we misbehave.  If we slacked off on our job or lessons, or if we were being difficult, we were sent to the locker.  Difficult is a funny word, it seems to mean a lot of different things around here.  If you outgrew your clothes too quickly, you were being difficult. If your shoe came untied, you were being difficult. If you cried after a beating, you were being difficult.  It seemed Nova was very difficult because he was in the locker a lot.  I had only been there a handful of times and made it a goal of mine not to go back.  It was cold and dark and damp in the locker, and there are no windows, no sounds—just you and the damp, cold, darkness for what seemed like an eternity.

“
So what’s your name kid?” he whispered as we searched for the ruby.

“
65,” I replied curtly.

“
I’m Nova.”

“
What?!” I squealed.  “That can’t be your name, it
has
to be John and your number,” I said matter-of-factly. 

“
Well, Miss Know-It-All, my real name
is
Nova. But if that bothers you so much, you can call me 18.”

“
But, how do you know your real name?” I challenged.

“
Well that’s a long story, maybe I’ll tell you someday.” Then he handed me the ruby and ran back towards the woods, leaving me flabbergasted.

He must have heard Greeley coming, because a second later she was upon me.  Our head mistress Greeley is not known for her kindness, so it was a good thing Nova scurried away when he did or we’d both be headed to the locker.  She is from Lux and seems to despise the fact that she has to spend her days here with us orphans.  She couldn’t even be bothered to learn our numbers even though they are sewn onto our tan, shapeless uniforms, as well as tattooed on our shoulder for good measure.  To her, we were all just Jane or John.  Not even worth a number.

“
What have you got there little Jane?” Greeley croaked.

I slipped the ruby into her gloved hand and she gave a sly smile, exposing her vicious teeth and slipped the ruby into her pocket.  Then she said with a wink,

“
I should give this one a closer look, don’t you think?” 

At first I was confused, thinking she wanted me to reply, but she motioned to the pile I had in my basket and I quickly offered it to her.  She did a quick survey, pawing through the valuable trinkets I had collected today, and then dumped them into her sack and sauntered away to the next orphan without another word to me.  This is when I first realized she was stealing stones meant for Lux.  I shook my head at her greediness, but also gave a little sigh of relief, knowing I had narrowly escaped Greeley’s wrath and a sure sentence in the locker.  Whatever she did with the stones wasn’t my business and I was happy to keep my head down and survive another day.  When she was far enough away from me, I gave up my sorting for a moment so I could turn towards the woods to try and catch another glimpse of Nova.  I shaded my eyes with my hand against the hot afternoon sun and squinted, but he was gone, disappearing as quickly as he had appeared. 

After that day, all I could do was think about Nova and wonder how it was that he knew his real name.  I had always wondered what mine was.  In school, each time I would read a new name in a lesson book, I would pause to wonder if it could be mine.  I’d roll it around on my tongue and imagine my parents saying it to me.  Maybe they would sing it each morning as they woke me up with kisses or each night as they gently rocked me to sleep? 

I spent almost every waking hour thinking about my parents, imagining what they looked like, where we had lived, what they sounded like. I would usually get jolted back into reality pretty hard by the back of my teacher’s hand.  This always brought on a little snicker from the other kids.  To everyone else in class it probably looked like I was just sitting there stuttering over the name.  This added to my outcast status—since I did this often—as did the fact that I am the youngest orphan in the center.  My parents died in the Flood like most of the other orphans here, but I was barely a year old when they found me washed up neatly on the shore in Aveile. I was apparently happy as a shore bird, all swaddled in a basket, without a scratch on me. What a mystery, right?  How does a helpless little baby survive the Flood when her parents and so many others weren’t spared?  I wonder about this question day and night.   

I don’t really have many friends at the Troian Center, not that that kind of thing is encouraged anyway.  My closest friend, well my only friend, really, is John #26.  He’s in my year, and we are in all the same classes and usually end up working the same jobs.  You see, there’s a strict system that we follow at the Center.  All the kids are broken up by year. So all the thirteen-year-olds are together, all the fourteen-year-olds are together and so on.  You spend all your life at the Center with the kids in your year, so if you’re in a bad year, you’re in for a rough ride.  I should be in with the twelve-year-olds, but the problem is, there aren’t any twelve-year-olds in the Center.  I guess I was the youngest survivor of the Flood.  So, they just threw me in with the next youngest group and I’ve been with them ever since.  Right now we’re all thirteen-year-olds, or I should say, they’re thirteen-year-olds and I’m technically twelve.  But I’ve been with them for so long—I consider myself one of them, even if they don’t.  In my head I’m thirteen-years-old.  I think over time I’ve made up the gap of a year and am right there with them.  I take all the same lessons, do all the same jobs; so, for all intents and purposes, I was a thirteen-year-old. 

It has always been sink or swim for me, and I’ve really tried to swim!  Being a year younger than all my peers may be a disadvantage, but I tried not to let it hold me back.  I may have been a head shorter than them all, and my clothes didn’t fit right—my scrawny shoulders always sticking out the neck hole of my work uniform and the rough, tan shirt being long enough to cover my shorts—but I made up for what I lacked in size with smarts and speed.  I was one of the smartest in my class when I wasn’t daydreaming, and I could outrun even the boys in my year.  This showboating in speed often resulted in me getting bullied and tossed into the sand, but it was worth it for the brief second that I knew I was better than them! 

I was trying so hard to be liked and to fit in that it seemed to have the opposite effect, so recently I’ve stopped trying.  But not with #26, he’s one of the good ones.  He never gave me trouble for being fast or smart, or small and short for that matter.  He never snickered when I stuttered in class. He never said much of anything really. He’s very timid and doesn’t talk much.  He kind of reminds me of a marmouse.  They’re these cute, cuddly, large rodents that you can find all over the island and they often try to take shelter in our center when it rains. 

Marmice are squeaky and brown and utterly defenseless, which makes them easy targets for the tarcats that patrol the halls.  These vile, black-and-white spotted jungle cats patrol our school like guard dogs.  They’re cruel and ruthless and play with their prey in a tortuous way before they eat it.  Head Mistress Greeley just loves them.  She even has a few favorites that she takes home with her each night, leading them by their big, sparkling collars.  I think they’re the only things that make her happy, besides sending us to the locker.  She sent #26 to the locker once for a whole week when he was very young, and I think that’s why he doesn’t talk too much anymore.  I think he must be scared he’ll say something that will land him in the locker again.  He’s a great listener though, so I told him about my conversation with Nova while we ate in the dining hall today.  This seemed to upset him.  His big brown eyes got wider than usual and even welled up with tears at one point.  I thought he was going to say something but he just sniffled and stared at me, so I kept going.

“
Do you think he’s lying?  I mean, we’re not allowed to have names anyway, so why does he go around with this stupid story about his name being Nova!?  I think he thinks he’s better than us because he has a real name!  Everyone knows orphans don’t have names.  We’re John or Jane with a number unless a citizen adopts us.  But that will never happen, we’re much too old for that, they only adopt the ...” 

“
-emi,” whispered #26.

“
What?”

My words stopped short as I caught the barely audible word slip from #26’s lips. 

“
What did you just say?”

“
Remi,” he glanced nervously around, “My name was Remi.” 

“
I don’t understand,” I stammered.

He grabbed me by the hand and pulled me behind him as we exited the dining hall at an alarming speed and scampered down the hall to the Jane’s room.  He slowed down every time we passed a Grift.  Grifts are locals who work at the Troian Center because they’re too weak to work with the other locals on Flood damage.  Some were injured in the Flood and have missing limbs, some just seem like they’re a little crazy in the head.  Most of them are alright enough, but some would rat you out to Greeley in a heartbeat.  Luckily, no one really paid any attention to us as we blended in with the other orphans in the halls while they changed classes.  I was out of breath by the time we were behind the stall door in the Jane’s room.  #26 crammed us both into one of the tiny, dank stalls on the far end.  It was so small inside I had to climb onto the toilet bowl so we could both fit.

“
What are we doing in here?” I whispered. “Are you crazy? We’re both gonna get sent to the locker!”

For what felt like forever he just stared at me.

“
You
are
aware that you’re in the Jane’s room right?  And
you
dragged
me
here, after saying your name is Remi!  You should be the one doing the talking now.”

“
Fine, will you please keep your voice down though?”

“
Fine,” I whispered.

“
You should know that some of us know our real names.  Like me, my name was Remi, that’s what my parents called me before they were killed in the Flood.  I used to have a little brother named Dhani, too.”

“
What?!  Why don’t I know this?  Why have you never told me?” I howled.

“
Shhhh!” Remi clapped his hand over my mouth. “We can’t talk about this!”

“
Why not?”

“
It’s forbidden 65, that’s why I haven’t told you.  I knew you would go on about it until it got you into trouble. I don’t want to end up in the locker again.”

“
You’re right,” I sighed.  Then something dawned on me. 

“
Is that why Greeley sent you to the locker for a whole week?”

“
Yes, so you see why I don’t want to talk about it?  When we got here they basically brainwashed us into forgetting our names if we were old enough to know them.  They told us that we were never to talk about our old names ever again, because it was disrespectful to the island gods because our family namesakes had been wiped out for a reason, and it would bring upon another horrible Flood if we went around speaking such names.  You were too young to know your name when you arrived here, so they didn’t bother with you.  Plus, you know that if we get adopted the citizens will name us, so it’s easier if we’re not hanging onto our old names.”

“
No citizen is going to adopt us Remi, you know that. We’re too old now.  They only take the babies that the locals bring us.”

“
It could still happen, 65.”

“
Whatever you say,” I fumed.  “So why did you tell me your name just now when I was telling you about Nova?”

“
I was jealous that he gets to go around boasting about his real name.  It’s the only thing I have left that reminds me of my family and my home. Sometimes I need to say it to myself just so I know it’s real, that I really did have a life and a family before the Flood,” he said.

“
Do you know
my
name, Remi?” I excitedly whispered.

Silence.

“
What?”

“
I thought I heard someone.  We need to go,” he whispered.

“
But, do you…”

“
No! I’m sorry, no one does. You were too young.  Now can we drop it and go?” he hissed.  “And you have to stop calling me Remi.”

I slunk down off the toilet I was perched on and sighed.

“
Okay, but let me go first so I can make sure the coast is clear,” I said.

I walked out to the hallway deflated.  I looked around and there was no one in sight.  The Grifts were elsewhere and all the students would be in the dining hall by now.  It was almost time to start our Flood work for the day.  I glanced to my left towards the buzzing coming from the dining hall and then made up my mind that I had lost my appetite and I turned right, and headed towards my room.  By the time I reached the door to room 13, my eyes had started watering. I knew our room would be empty so I barreled blindly through the doorway and tossed myself onto a bed.  I buried my face into the mattress and tried to quietly sob for the next thirty minutes. I thought to myself,

“
This is so unfair!  I bet everyone else in the Center is walking around feeling satisfied knowing they had a name once and a family that loved them.  I have nothing!  No one!  I will never have any answers and no one cares about me
.” 

I was in the middle of a pretty good pity party when the rest of my class started to stream into the room to change into their work clothes.  I gathered myself back together as best I could and tried to wipe the tears away, but stupid Jane #31 saw me before I could. She was always picking on me.  I hated the sight of her mean little black eyes and her silky raven-black hair.  She pointed at me and said,

“
Aw, is da wittle baby cwying? What’s da matta wittle baby?”

“
Shut up, 31,” I mumbled.

I slung on my tattered tan linen shirt and faded brown shorts, jammed my feet into my shoes and stormed out into the courtyard where all the years were gathering to be escorted by Grifts to their jobs.  I was busy scuffing the toe of my shoe into the sand when Nova appeared by my side. 

“
What’s wrong now #65?” he said

I didn’t even look up, but I knew it was him from his content voice and the way he smelled like plants and earth from working in the forest all the time. 

“
Come on,” he said and he grabbed me by the hand.

“
Wait, where are we going? It’s time for Flood work,” I protested.

“
We’ve got time, and besides this will make you feel better. It always makes me feel better.” 

I felt the stiff breeze of the salty air, and as I looked past him I saw he was leading me around to the Southern wall of the Center that faced the ocean.  It was the one way I could always tell what direction I was facing even though I couldn’t see over the tall coquina-shelled walls that surrounded the center.  I always wondered why it was so securely walled.  No one was going to try to break in and steal a bunch of orphans.  And it’s not like we were going to break out with nowhere to go.  We stopped at the far corner and Nova pointed to a big Banana Palm that had nestled its way into the corner of the yard. 

“
What? A stupid plant is supposed to make me feel better?”

“
Not the plant little Jane, look beyond it,” he said pushing me towards it.

I felt a warm breeze rustle through the palms just then and could see a shimmer of light coming from behind the leaves. 

“
What is that?” I asked.

I leaned closer and danced on my tippy toes trying to get a better look.  Nova smirked at me and slipped behind the tall broad leaves, disappearing from my sight.  After a second my curiosity got the best of me and I followed him.  Behind the palm there was a perfect eight-by-eight-inch hole missing from the wall, and you could see the white-sand beaches and crashing waves beyond.

“
Ohhh….” I said, finally realizing what made Nova feel happy. 

“
The sea always made me feel better too.  How did he know that?”
I wondered.