Chapter One

There are rocks pressing into my back. It is dark, but I can hear murmurs and cracklings in the undergrowth on the bank above me. I'm huddled in a tiny niche in an old train cutting. It? been abandoned for a long time, trains don't run any more. The last one shut down 2 years before I was born.

But the tracks are still here, and the gravel. The sharp nodules of flint, and other hard gray stones, some are worn smooth but most are roughly pyramid-like in shape. I squeeze my eyes shut, huddling back as a torch beam sweeps across the ground in front of me, trying to stop my breath from hissing sharply in the night air.

They're searching now, they don't know I'm here, but they're always searching, looking for any body that still had life so they can rip it from them in a spurt of blood and a cut off scream. When it gets light, they'll go away. I'm sure they will. They always do.

I wish I had my watch still. Actually, I do. I can feel it digging into my skin. But the battery is dead, it doesn't work. There are probably only a few more hours till dawn. Just a few more hours, then they'll go away, and I can breath again.

I wish they would go away. My calf muscle is sore and stiff. I reach a finger down and touch it gently, feeling the knotted flesh of the scar. I got hit by a stray bullet. But I'm not bitter, I was lucky. It could have killed me. Would have, if they had known I was there. They almost never miss. Nobody knows I'm here. My name is off the record. I disappeared when I was a child. Thankyou mum.

My mum was a psychic. You know, side show tarot readers, palm readings for three dollars. One day, she had a real vision, of the war. So she staged my kidnapping and possible death, and my name was wiped off the government lists. They keep a track of everyone. They're trying to wipe us all out. But I'm still here.

They don't know I'm here. I wish they would go away. I need to sneeze. I cant sneeze, if I do, it's worth my life. Hold my breath until it goes away. Come on, dawn. I'm not scared, not any more. It's just a challenge now. There's a game out there, and I will win. Just you wait... when I work it out, some plan, I don't know what, I'll stop it.

But I will not be merciful. They never have been. They can die deaths as horrible as the ones they caused. Worse. I've had plenty of time to think of terrible ways to die. Maybe I'll make a mosaic out of their flesh. I'll cut the squares out of them until they pass out from the pain. Then they'll know what they did.

I don't care about them. I care about the world. I am the world. And they destroyed it. It's getting light now, they'll go away soon. Now I can see the train track. It's dead. The posts are tilted, the wires slack and broken in some places. There's just the empty track, as far as I can see, over the hill and further. But it's dead, the whole area screams it. There's no sounds. No birds, no squirrels in the park. Just gray rock, twisted metal tracks, and empty.

They'll be going away any moment, only... there was a sudden noise, and one that I recognised. A foot landing on the gravel, then the weight of the person. A crunch, then silence. Another step. They are being quiet on purpose. They must have seen something. I slide my eyes to the right, and there, on the other side of cutting, I see what they saw.

A child of maybe five or six. A scared child, and a child about to die. She doesn't know they're seen her yet. Why haven't they shot her yet? She turns my way and I see for myself. On her forehead there a small tattoo. Only a small geometric shape, but it's everything. Oh god, I wish I could do something. This child is a research specimen, she won't be killed, not until her life has wasted away inside a laboratory under bright lights and electric pulses.

And then something far more awful happens. She sees them, and her eyes widen in fear. They start running towards her from further down the cutting. It's dawn now, oh why couldn't things have worked out properly? But then she, turning to look for somewhere to run, but some chance, some cruel twist of fate, sees me. And starts to run towards me.

And they are following her, right to my hiding spot. Oh mother, your work 11 years ago will all be for nothing, I'm going to die. The girl is a few metres away now, and one soldier begins to turn. He's going to see me. I think my hand must have jerked then, and moved the gravel. I don't know, it happened too quickly. Suddenly a light blinked next to my left eye, somewhere on the wall behind me. And then I fell and landed hard, in darkness. Above me, I could hear the child screaming, and she must have kicked one of the soldiers because there was a groan of pain and then the hiss-snap of a tranquilliser gun and the shouting stopped.

They were going to shoot me next, they knew she was running to something. But nothing happened. And nothing, and nothing and nothing. After awhile I realised it was dark because my eyes were shut. Silly of me I know, because it was day now.

I opened my eyes, and it wasn't. I mean, it probably was day, but I couldn't tell because I was underground, and there was artificial light. I was lying in a small square room, above me was a sort of... paddle wheel type machinery, long and narrow and covered in gravel. I assumed that this had turned, dropping me through the ground under the embankment, and I was now somewhere below the train cutting.

I stood up, slowly. Lighting was not a good sign. Lighting meant electricity, and that meant them. Because we aren't allowed any. After all, we were on the hit list to be killed, checked off one by one... I mean, I wasn't of course, legally I was already dead. But you know what I mean.

There was a little door to my right, that was open. It was so small it was more like an air vent really. By the look of it (it was folded down against the ground) I could tell that when it was shut it would be practically invisible. Camouflage at its greatest. I would have to go through there, I couldn't get back the way I came, the roof was beyond my reach. And staying in the room would be pointless.

So I got down on my belly and crawled through the opening. It snapped shut behind me. Even though I knew it was there I couldn't tell where it was, it was that well hidden. So I stood up and looked around me, and for the first time in my life I was shocked. Death didn't shock me, pain didn't shock me. But this did.

The room was circular. Or cylindrical maybe, as the roof and floor were flat. And it was very, very big. I was near the roof, on a small platform, and in front of me was a long metal pole, apparently the only way down. The ceiling was painted with an immense clover. Not the naturally growing three leaf, nor the fabled four leaf, but a five leaf clover. I looked down. It was a long way. Clearly I had to descend via the pole, which I did, sliding cautiously and trying not to get friction burns.

This place was so strange. So far there had been only one way to go, absolutely no way to get back. My decisions on where to go were easy. Now they weren't. I was standing on rich red carpet, thick and soft on my bare feet, in a huge library. There were couches, and desks, and bookshelves all the way up to the ceiling. A balcony ran around the room halfway to help provide access to the top half, and there were sliding ladders with which to get to the highest books on each level.

Only, most of the library was empty. There were about 30 shelves that had books on them, and some of them weren't even filled. I walked closer, feeling dirty and out of place, and discovered that each shelf bore a name. Not a book name, a person name. There was a notice on the wall next to me.

"Journals" it read "are to be filled by all patrons, periodically and accurately. This fulfils the purpose of providing knowledge for the future generations. Cease journal upon death"

That seemed stupid. Obviously you would stop writing when you died. There was a little button next to it labelled "Patrons/visitors" and a sign that said "Press this button for help" I'm a naturally cautious person, but right now, I had everything to gain and nothing to lose. So I pressed it.

The fright nearly killed me. A huge claw came out of the wall and grabbed me before I knew what was happening. I was deposited in a chair at a desk, and a large book thumped down in front of me, as well as a non-fade pen. Apparently I was now to write a journal. Some help. Whoever made this library must have had a sense of humour. So that is where I am now. Writing. And I have finally finished writing what is foremost in my mind today.

Now I have some time to write more of myself, but I am very tempted to continue exploring. Only, I don't know if I'll ever come here again, and it will be pretty useless to have written all this down, if no one will ever know who I was or what on earth I was talking about.

My name is Elf Clover and I'll try to write things down as I felt them at the time. I'm five foot nine inches tall, I have greeny blue eyes and black hair. My skin is the colour that has become known as gold marble. It's the result of the mixing of races, and how far the genes have become blended. It's pale, but coppery. I suppose I'm pretty skinny, but I'm strong, I've got muscles that work. Have to have, or I would be dead.

I'm a girl, if you didn't know. I guess my name is pretty androgynous. And my name is one of the reasons this place is so strange to me, and yet I don't feel in danger. See, the clover on the roof is the same as a tattoo I have on the inside of my right wrist. I don't know why I have it. I never questioned it until now, but I've always had it, and I don't think children are born with tattoos.

I never had any siblings, but my dad didn't have one. Or I never noticed any before he died, or in any of the photos or holograms of him. Maybe my mother had one, but I don't recall ever seeing her wrists or hands. She always wore strange clothes, did my mother. Loose or short or no sleeves at all, she always had gloves on. I suppose she must have taken them off in the shower, but I never saw her without them.

I was born on the 24th of March, 2254. Even though I'm only 16 I'm pretty good at taking care of myself. My father died when I was 5 so after that my only family was my mother. Well, I had some distant cousins but I didn't know them too well. Soon after my fathers death my mother had a vision of this war. She feared for my safety, and decided to stage my disappearance and death. There was no one to object except me, but she said it was for the best and I trusted her so I went along with it.

There was a funeral, or memorial service since they couldn't find my body (since of course I wasn't dead) and after that time I lived in the forest behind our house, and my mother taught me survival skills. I was only a little kid, so she helped me, looked after me as well as any mother. Just... differently. She set traps with me to catch my food, skinned and gutted it for me, boiled poisons out of vegetables.

By the time I was eleven I knew as much about living in the wild as it was possible to. I don't think many people, at age eleven, have been living off the land for five and a half years. Oh sure, maybe a couple of hundred years ago, when there were still aboriginal cultures, but not now. Now there are no different races. All people are the same race, because intermarrying has been going on for so long, we're all just a mix of everything. Now there's just them and us.

But back to my childhood. By the time I was ten or eleven I could take care of myself. And that was good, because my mother disappeared. I didn't know why, didn't really understand anything of why I wasn't in the city like the other children. But there had been smoke on the horizon for a few days, and things were strangely still. I had developed enough of an animal instinct to know that as much as I loved my mother going back in there would be my death, and like an animal I felt a desperate urge to survive against all odds, so I ran.

Truthfully, I don't know where I am now. For five years I've just been running, hiding, killing, surviving. It doesn't make a different to me what the name of the city is. Most of them are mainly rubble now anyway. They don't bother with the old cities, they have their new ones, beautiful and glistening, and suspended on stilts hundreds of metres above the ground, domed and inaccessible to the unwanted. Hovercraft transport the rich and curious down to ground level.

Not that many want to come. The only ones down here are the soldiers. They watch during the day, and come down at night to kill us all off. I don't even know why. All I know is that there is a file up there with a list of names, people that aren't wanted. They train the soldiers specially to hunt those people down, one by one and when their found the list becomes one name shorter. On to the next victim.

Down here nobody knows why their hunting us. They just know that sooner or later it will be their turn. Except me, because I'm already dead. One day I will be the only one down here. What a horrible thought. I wonder if I might be up there in the new cities if I wasn't legally dead. Maybe I wouldn't have been on the list, maybe my mother destroyed my life. But now that I've seen this side of it, seen how cruel they are, I don't really want to be a part of them.

This library is beautiful, it smells so clean. The carpet is thick, the walls still shine as if they've been polished. There are lights somewhere...I mean, it's not dark in here, but I can't see lamps or fires anywhere. I'm still a little wary of the fact that everything seems to be powered electronically, because like I said, only they have that kind of power. All power points down here were cut off 6 years ago.

10 years ago they left for their new cities. No one knew they were going to kill all those down here off. Life kept going as normal for a while, while they trained the soldiers I guess. But still, our life wasn't as good as theirs, we had the destroyed world,their polution, but still lived pretty normally. Then they cut out the power, and started the killing.

I also wonder how this place can be so clean and new looking when there is nobody around. There must be somebody here, who let me in and looks after this place. I think I'll go and have a look at some of the other journals. It would be interesting to see who else has been here before me.