REDEMPTION

CHAPTER 8

“You're a what?!”, I whisper-screamed.

He looked at me sideways and grinned like a Cheshire Cat,I thought, making a reference to a line I had read in one of the books from Before. He looked almost devilish.

“What?”, I asked, seeing his expression.

“Nothing, you've just gone really pale”.

“Well, it’s a lot to take in”, I protested weakly.

I had never seen a Rebel up close before, much less made an acquaintance with them. I thought about all the things I had been taught about Rebels since I was a child. When we were small, Azure once told me that she had heard from someone that Rebels could shoot lasers out of their eyes and could read other people’s minds and control them. Of course this wasn’t true, and was told to scare people and children to ensure that they stayed in their tracks. I knew that now because Zac was human like me, and obviously he couldn’t control minds, else we wouldn’t have been nearly shot to death just now. It was a lie, just like we had been told that there were flesh eating plants outside of Detrix. I wondered what other lies had been fed to us since the day we were born.

“Which rumor are you thinking about Rebels now?”, Zac asked me wryly, reading my mind.

Hmm, maybe mind reading wasn’t a rumor after all.

“Nothing”, I mumbled incoherently, my cheeks coloring up a little.

“It’s the controlling other people’s minds rumour isn’t it?”, he asked. “You know, I never understood why people made up that rumour, if we could control people’s minds, then the Rangers wouldn’t be hunting us and the Protector would have been long dead, chopped into pieces, lying in a ditch somewhere”.

Derek should have been awake. He would have roared with laughter at Zac’s words. These two would make good friends, I thought.

“But if you aren’t a Ranger, then how did that Ranger know your name?”, I asked.

“I’m a Rebel undercover as a Ranger”

“What?”, I asked, his words not fully sinking in.

He sighed and started explaining as he drove.

“There are many faults and cracks in the system of our government. The Protector is ruthless and is hiding a massive and cruel secret, which you will come to know soon enough. There are Rebels everywhere, dressed as Rangers, as normal people. Heck, your neighbor might have been a Rebel and you wouldn’t have known”.

I snorted at that statement. Mrs. Shirley? A rebel? Impossible.

He ignored my snort and continued.

“What I’m trying to say is, do not believe everything you see, for we only see that which is shown to us. We only see what we want to see, we only hear what we want to hear, and hence we only believe what we want to believe. Why do you think that you, and so many other citizens of Detrix, are opposed to Rebels, are opposed to the idea that something is wrong with the way we are being governed. This is because we have been taught since the day we were born that violence and shooting people on sight if they are outside after curfew are normal, that they are there to finish of the evil and rebellious. But have you ever thought why some people rebel in the first place? People won’t rebel unless there is a wrong that has to be righted. And only those who are brave and ready to risk everything become Rebels, for the Protector has installed fear among people that if you question his ways, you will be dead. That is why most people ignore the real evils that they see everyday, because their brains have been wired to ignore it, for fear of dying. Everyone wants to live and protect themselves and their loved ones, and hence most people aren’t willing to take that risk. But the Protector, as powerful as he is, does not have the right to take innocent lives, and the fact that he is doing precisely that, is the greatest evil of all”, he finished.