The next few days after the field trip were a blur for Soji. He stared numbly into the distance, perhaps blinded by the horizon of an adventure that would never happen. Or maybe reliving the awful events of that horrible day. It was hard to tell as the world happened around him; doctor visits, police interviews, worried coddling, a check featuring many zeroes. It was only the sharp ping of a doorbell that woke him up to present day reality.
~
June 17, 2022 - 7.30pm
Maitama, Abuja, Nigeria
Soji ambled his way downstairs, feeling a strange pull towards the door. His parents commented on him finally coming out of his room but their words were muffled background noise against the echoing doorbell in his head. His vision darkened as he approached the door, letting out an inexplicably nervous breath before unlocking it. The boy, exhausted from days of mental anguish opened the door to be surprised by a bubbly young woman greeting him.
She wore a lavender colored dress, one that looked like she might’ve arrived in a pumpkin carriage. Truly committed to the look, she’d adorned her brown butterfly locs with deep purple daisies. She wore a wide grin, and yet, the smile didn’t reach her big, brown eyes. Almost instantly, Soji’s stomach somersaulted to catch his plummeting heart. He instinctively stepped back from the fancifully dressed, dark-skinned woman.
The memory of the sickly sweet scent of blood and flowers from a few days earlier elicited a quiet gasp from him.
“Relax,” the mystery woman shushed him, “I just need you to bloom for me.” She brought her white-gloved hand up to her face and blew a purplish-blue glitter at the boy.
The world slowed down as Soji fell backwards. His parents shot up, yelling something inaudible as he hit the ground. Or rather, what should have been the ground. Soji’s senses fed him deceitful whispers about being submerged in a hot tub of concrete as he was consumed by a crushing darkness.
“What is this…where am I?” His question was soon answered, albeit incoherently as an angry red glow lit up below him. He could barely turn his body to see the giant red iris below him, staring back at him. Before he could react however, Soji was pulled out of this watery blackness and found himself in his newly renovated living room. Two charred bodies with arms outstretched laid just a few feet away from him. The furniture and walls had all been incinerated and a warm, orange glow illuminated the now exposed night sky.
“Wow…” The woman at the door poked her head through a gap in the burning home.
“It’s even more magnificent than I had imagined. I finally found you,” she gushed with her hand outstretched, waltzing towards him, “come.”
Fresh memories of his mutated body thrashing and emanating waves of heat while unconscious bombarded his now conscious mind.
“No way…” he thought, “I…” Soji looked up at his assailant with malice.
“You burned my house to the ground! My family’s dead! What did you do?!” The boy yelled, scrambling to stand up. The fairytale arsonist opened her mouth to speak but froze for a moment as her eyes narrowed.
“I should have had more time,” she muttered to herself, “I’ll be back for you, okay? Omen.” At the utterance of a single word, she was erased in a puff of black mist, leaving behind no trace of her presence.
~
June 18, 2022 - 9.42am
Unknown, Abuja, Nigeria
Soji shot up, ejecting himself from what he hoped was a nightmare, but was soon disappointed when he found himself wearing only a pair of oversized sweatpants and trapped in a glass cage in a dark, concrete room.
“Where am I?” He thought, “What’s going on?” As he pondered on his whereabouts, his mind betrayed him once more. The memories of his night came crashing into the present. The boy held his head and wailed in terror. “Why is this happening to me!?”
“I see you’re finally awake.” Coach soundlessly appeared in front of Soji, outside the glass box. The fluorescent lighting reflected off her bluish-silver hair, further obscuring her features, but highlighting her perpetually present visor. She wore what looked like a modern rendition of a white medieval cloak, with padded shoulders and a golden embroidered halo of thorns on the back. Soji rushed at the glass, slamming against the barrier with both fists.
“You! Please! What’s happening to me!? What’s going on!? Do you still have Kuro!?” The boy sobbed.
“Your friend is fine. You though…not so much. I’m not sure how it’s possible, but you're a bloom, er, a half-bloom, more like. And last night, you murdered both of your parents.”
“No point in sugar-coating it.”
Soji retched at the thought while the woman continued. Acrid smoke in the back of his throat formed images of his parents’ blackened corpses.
“This is all my fault. I was hoping to avoid a situation like this when I saw you at the lab.”
“W-w-what?”
“I mean, I knew you were a bloom from the moment I saw you. And in accordance with M.I.I. laws, you should have been eliminated on sight.”
“You knew!? Wait! Eliminated?! Wait! What about that woman?” Coach tilted her head in curiosity as Soji explained what he remembered from the incident.
It was through his own explanation that he realized the absurdity of his begging. His pain from losing his friends. His mourning of the death of his parents. Those feelings, and the idea that he was truly responsible, were notions that he vehemently rejected. He should have been angry.
“This was done to me!” The boy punched the glass with a loud THOOM. His fist glowed faintly with heat while Coach looked on with intrigue. She was quiet for a moment before chuckling.
“I was never going to kill you, Soji.” She paused to approach the glass. “I think we can help each other. You see, the M.I.I. has been looking for an individual like you for decades now, eliminating regular people they deemed potential blight users.”
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“Blight user?”
“Yes. The process by which blooms infect other organisms is commonly referred to as blighting. I think that somehow, you can control this process. You don't turn into a bloom. You are one, just at varying stages. I’m willing to help you through all of this. Including finding the person that did this to you.”
“But you want something…”
“Am I not a human being?”
“Yes, I want something. I hate to ask in such trying times,” the woman said with actual sincerity, “I’ll help you, but in return, you’ll help me destroy the M.I.I.”
~
June 18, 2022 - 9.50am
Unknown, Abuja, Nigeria
Kuro sat on the white leather couch of Coach’s living room, bouncing his leg up and down anxiously. Monika looked on with disinterest from a barstool placed neatly in front of the kitchen’s island separating the two rooms.
“Don’t worry. If she wanted him dead, he’d be in bits already.” She said without looking up from her phone.
Kuro looked up at her with rage and worry. She caught his glare and quickly averted her gaze.
“Sheesh.”
In the hallway leading to the foyer, a door just outside the kitchen opened, and Soji stepped out, still bare chested. Kuro's worry dissipated as his eyebrows turned upwards in relief and mouth curved into a small smile.
“I came.” Soji grinned while Coach closed the door behind them. Kuro stepped forward for a handshake that turned into a one-handed hug — a long-lived greeting between the two of them.
“Pause,” Monika interrupted, breaking their embrace and prodding looks of irritation from the two of them.
“Aw come on, you made that too easy.” Soji flipped Monika off, who feigned offense and returned the gesture. Despite the sour looks, the obscene gestures, and the previously traded blows, neither harbored true animosity toward the other.
Kuro ignored the two and their silent bickering. Coach walked past Soji and centered herself between the three.
“Okay, everyone’s back together, hooray,” the woman said sarcastically “Now…we’re going straight into it. As you can very well deduce, someone like Soji, with his bloom situation, isn't the kind of person the Institute wants walking around freely. And it’s one thing for me to protect you, it’s another to be babysat for the rest of your lives.” She turned towards Kuro.
“So what are you saying?”
“Soji and Monika have already agreed to this. We’re going to dismantle the M.I.I. . And to do that, you’re going to need to be at least half as strong as me.” Kuro’s eyes widened. From what he understood, the M.I.I. was the benevolent force that kept the world protected from the very creatures that put them in this situation. Would he have to plunge the world into chaos to protect his friend? Monika read his expression.
“It’s not as dramatic and chaotic as it sounds,” she reassured him. “The Board in charge of the Institute is very…archaic. We only need to remove them. Big Sis will sort the rest.”
Even in his naïveté about this world of maestros, it was quite clear to Kuro that this was an oversimplification, meant to bring him on board. But what could he do besides agree? Between the implied murder of this mysterious Board, and his and Soji’s own possible demise, the choice was obvious.
“Alright.” He said shakily. He steeled himself, focusing on his innate desire to protect Soji. The last few days had frustratingly shown him how helpless he was in this new world.
“When do we start?”
~
June 18, 2022 - 7.31pm
Unknown, Unknown, Unknown
The woman with the lavender dress matched the cadence of her steps with the rain and her demeanor with the thunder; a rapid pitter-patter of heels against the concrete of a suburban sidewalk as she stormed about.
“How dare they change locations while I was out?!”
She held an umbrella with a canopy made of leaves, and a branch acting as the handle. Despite its ostensibly rickshaw assembly, it vibrated with life; thin, leafy snakes writhed around the brim, lapping up thick droplets of rain water and shielding their creator. Beautiful, vibrant violets adorned the handle, all dancing on a faintly glowing blue vine.
She approached a large white house, just dripping with the idea of the American dream. It had a white picket fence, and perfect green grass. A driveway big enough for two cars, and a garage, perhaps to house a third. The welcome mat was nothing special, and its accompanying red door was just as boring, but many times more obnoxious. The woman didn’t bother to knock, and instead twisted the door handle aggressively until it broke with a SNAP, granting her entrance into the lavish home.
“Jesus, Daisy, we just got here!” A fair-skinned woman commented from the couch in the living room. Daisy stormed towards her, not bothering to take in the house’s interior. The woman tilted her head in curiosity.
“No kid?”
“She took him. After years of planning and preparing, she just took him,” Daisy spat.
“But that’s a good thing, my dear Daisy” a voice called out from the TV, causing the disgruntled woman to turn around, as she discarded her umbrella. The poor thing withered into bits of plant matter.
“Iosef. What face are you wearing today?”
“Don’t be cruel. This technique that’s brought me back to the world of the living isn’t perfect. That’ll mean an unorthodox day-to-day life for now,” the man’s voice was deep and sultry.
“But like I said, the boy being taken is actually good for us. I know you wanted to go ahead with this plan your way, but my method and your method share the same results. For now, we just need to make sure nothing happens to him.”
“And how do you suppose we do that? Nobody will be able to spy on him with that woman hovering around him,” Daisy spat, as if the name of Soji’s savior was an unspeakable slur.
“We don’t need to worry about that. Besides, something tells me she’ll leave them to their own devices in the near future. Send Victor to make sure he stays safe during that time. I guarantee we won’t be the only ones looking to meet the half-bloom.” The video call ended, and the two women were left alone. Daisy shook her head as she walked to the fridge.
“It’s okay,” her colleague on the couch, Lucia, comforted her. “We’ve still got a long way to go before we can say we failed.” Daisy opened the fridge and frowned in displeasure upon discovering what seemed to be the bodies of the owners shoved into what was actually a freezer.
“What the fuck? This is a freezer?”
“I know, right?!” Lucia turned to face Daisy in the kitchen.
“Where is the fridge? Actually… where is everybody?”
“They went to get hot pot.”
“The place with those spring rolls?”
Lucia nodded in response.
“They’ll get you your spring rolls, don’t worry.”
“Great. Now…Victor.”