The Half-Blessed

A.L. Young

Description

Amethyst is a girl on the run with her adoptive mother in a middle of a legal battle between two territories. Murky loyalties and dangerous motives threaten to destroy all that she knows.
On April 4th, 2071 many students of Amethyst's age fell from the sky as if there was a sudden change in gravity. The event was called simply The Falling. No one knows what caused it. People only knew all that fell had died and all that died were Lost Children. The Lost Children were children that were relocated during the famine that ravaged the majority of the crops in the Crow Territory, leaving many starving. Amethyst learns about her past as time goes on and where she belongs. As tensions rise as to whether or not these children should be returned to their birth parents after all this time, Amethyst is on the run with her adoptive mom. Meanwhile her close friends Sasha, Muse, and Zora are using grassroots efforts to stay within the Bluebird Territory. We follow all four friends as they find themselves caught in the middle of these decisions to fight to stay.

Sujets

• Adoption
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Xlibris US
• Date de parution: 08 mai 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669876298
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE HALF-BLESSED
 
A Novel
 
 
 
 
 
A. L. YOUNG
 

 
 
Copyright © 2023 by A. L. Young.

Library of Congress Control Number:
          2023908430
ISBN:
Hardcover
978-1-6698-7631-1

Softcover
978-1-6698-7630-4

eBook
978-1-6698-7629-8
 
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
 
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
 
 
 
 
Rev. date: 05/08/2023
 
 
 
Xlibris
844-714-8691
www.Xlibris.com
851708
CONTENTS
Prologue
Run
Pain
Quiet
Corn Silk
Hell
Archery
Talented Friend
Muse
Muse II
Ivy Ladder
March 3, 2071
Bells
Dreaming of Arestromer
Press
Citizen’s Day
Checkpoint
Glass Hill
Flat
Cerplex
Salve
Trial
Turpeek
Fog
Rose Water
Diamond Sea
Guest
Cards
Jump Start
Turpeek II
Am I in Danger?
Mask
Zora and Muse
Judy
Catch Up
Mind Numb
Half Blessed
Flashing Lights
Epilogue
PROLOGUE
Amethyst: April 4, 2071
Amethyst found the monotony of scanning groceries a welcome change to memorizing formulas. Each soft beep was a disruption of any thought that was bothering her, including the long essay that was due in a week for sociology— beep —the leak that couldn’t yet be fixed at the back of the store— beep —the heart condition her father had that was getting worse— beep . It was easy for a moment to put away these thoughts.
The line was an aisle long and included some of her impatient classmates, buying their lunches at the supermarket instead of the café. These poor souls had Saturday classes. She was saved from that fate because she wasn’t too bad at English or math. She was nearly done with the line when she heard someone yell, “Help her!”
Outside, a large gathering of people was forming. They were talking to one another. They were asking questions too fast. They were taking out their cell phones. In the store, she heard a similar commotion next to the fridges. She couldn’t see what was happening, but she did see a tall man wearing gym shorts say, “She just fell out of nowhere.” And a group of people surrounded what looked like a student. The girl was wearing a uniform of saddled oxford shoes, green plaid skirt, and a white polo, so she wasn’t from Amethyst’s school but from one nearby.
Some of the people in line froze. Amethyst motioned them forward, and the woman in front let the man behind her go forward so she could walk over to the girl lying near the fridges. She said, “I’m a nurse.” And she began trying to see if the girl would wake.
Amethyst kept scanning to keep the line moving. She didn’t know what else to do. She was about to charge the man for his three items, but the two girls standing in line with their sandwiches fainted, falling hard onto the linoleum. Amethyst’s hands trembled. Her heart raced. The man stood there, stunned, and then crouched down beside them, trying to get them to wake.
“I . . . I have to call my manager. I’m sorry,” Amethyst mumbled as she walked over to the phone on the wall toward where the other girl fell.
“Rob, there’s a couple of sick girls in the supermarket. What do I do?” She heard the tears in her voice, and through the receiver, she could hear him breathe deeply and exhale.
“I called emergency services. They’re all tied up. It’s happening all over town. They just told us to keep them comfortable.”
“She’s dead!” someone shouted.
“I’ll be there in a minute,” her manager said . “There’s a guy here who seems to be half awake. Tell Rochelle to come to aisle 7.”
“Rochelle to aisle 7. Rochelle to aisle 7.”
Rochelle ran down to aisle 7 faster than Amethyst had ever seen her move. She worked at the back of the store, handling the shipments. There was a crowd now surrounding the girls who fell in front of her register. The man was waving his arms, she guessed in an attempt to keep people at a distance.
Amethyst walked back over and saw a clear view of what they looked like. She would never get the image out of her head. Their faces were blue, like they had suffocated, and the corners of their mouths had blood dripping from the sides as well as from their nostrils. The man shook his head. He put his hands to his mouth, cupping it. He began to cry.
“I’ll call them again. I’ll call them again.” Amethyst called emergency services, and when she got through, they told her they would arrive after twenty minutes and that a lot of episodes were being reported around the territory. By the time they did arrive, the girl who had fallen outside had her face covered with a black leather jacket. She wore the same uniform Amethyst was wearing—a navy blazer, blue and yellow plaid skirt, and cream blouse.
The store emptied. EMTs arrived. Amethyst stood by the bread aisle, looking at the top of the girls’ heads. The EMTs were looking them over side by side, and when they determined what had occurred, the three girls and one guy were put on stretchers and covered with white sheets.
One of the EMTs asked Amethyst to “please keep off the road” as she left. She walked to the back office, where she kept her things, grabbed it, and left. She didn’t know what to expect. What she encountered was much of the same of what she saw inside—people around her age lying in the street, surrounded by adults. Some of them had already been covered by sheets, and every few blocks or so, there were officers keeping crowds from forming around the bodies.
She walked down the city center the fastest she ever did, nearly running and trying her best not to see anything. She focused on the bright red turret of her apartment complex that stood on the boundary of the city center and the suburb. She couldn’t calm her nerves when she had to open the lobby door. The key card shook in her hand, and she kept dropping her keys for her apartment door. She thanked whatever controlled the universe for not showing her anything else horrible.
The news that night was scary. Arnett, her mom, saw a group of students collapse on the bus, and she immediately thought they fell from the turn and not because they were critically ill. They waited as the news channels seemed to catch up with what was happening. The news was just labeling it as asphyxia, but Amethyst could not understand why the girls she saw had nosebleeds. Every news channel said the same thing, that they didn’t know what caused it and that maybe it was an illness spreading through the schools. Most of the people affected were her age, and the thought of it happening to her was terrifying. Then she had another thought. Why hadn’t it happened to her?
Amethyst sat in front of the television, trying to absorb everything, watching each loop of the news story, holding on to the promise there would be more information. At 4:15 a.m., the event was given a name, “the Falling.”

RUN

Amethyst
News had been spotty for most of yesterday, the radio towers losing their reach after fifteen-some odd miles. They had officially entered a dead zone. The last bit of news yesterday afternoon was an announcement that the Lost Children had staged a protest in the lobby of Hunter’s Point Mall in Ivy Ladder and what sounded like hundreds shouting, “Let us out! Let us out!” over a loudspeaker. This had happened on March 13, but news stations said nothing about it until the next day. This was just another tactic to keep students in line and not too “excited.” Or rather inspired by what was happening, they couldn’t rein all of them in.
The sound bite crackled and popped like it was an old newsreel. The sound of gates being drawn and guns discharging on the sound bite rattled inside Amethyst’s head for miles. The station went silent before they could find out what side the shots came from.
The pair wove through the mountains that hugged Moss Point; the heavy smell of sap baking in the hot air filled the SUV. Moss Point was a larger town in the Bluebird Territory just north of Bluebird Stream, the town Amethyst was from. Amethyst’s mom had gotten them this far, and at their current pace, they would reach Arestromer in three days. In that moment, she was measuring the time by how many breaths she could get past her lips without her mom realizing her stomach was in knots. This pain was nothing new and because of this whenever it hit her, she tried her best to keep quiet and not worry her mom. She had her methods for keeping it tame. She would breathe deeply, swallow about 1000 mg of extra strength pain killers and hope it would go away sooner rather than later. That was all she really could do.
She had this constant ache for close to two years now, and all a typical doctor could do was guess what it was as there was no physical indication that anything was wrong with her body. It was suggested by one of the last doctors she saw before they left that it was psychological. She can’t remember his name because she was in so much pain at that appointment. Most of the time, the pain she had was man