Moon

Jazmine Moon woke up above the clouds.

Her eyes opened. Disorientated, she looked around. Sat up straight, rubbed her eyes. The clouds concealed the valley, offering up only peaks of the surrounding mountain tops, including the one she was on. A light wind pushed the clouds and cut around her like water.

How did she get here? She can’t remember.

Instincts took over. Whenever she wanted to find a memory or a piece of information stored in her mind, she closed her eyes, envisioning a vast warehouse with filing cabinets up to the ceiling. She knew every file, she just had to start looking.

Who was she?

The file said: Jazmine Moon.

What did she do?

File: Executive Consult.

How did she get here?

She found the card, but it was blank.

How did she get here?

Nothing.

She opened her eyes. Stood up, a little weak at the knees still. She looked at herself - almost all navy blue: shirt, sweater, jacket past her knees with a hood, and black pants. She felt the inside of her pockets - empty. She paused at her right hip. Concealed along the seam of her pants was a slot with a handle. She lifted the handled and a staff about 30 cm slid out of a holster. Again, through instinct, she snapped the staff with her wrist the way a whip cracked. It extended out about three times the original length. There was a small button on the side, which she pushed, and the staff extended even further in both directions, making it almost as tall as her.

Jazmine looked around, listened for any reason that she might have needed this staff at that moment in time. There was nothing around her, only silence. She reversed her actions - pushed the button to retract the staff, snapped it the opposite direction, and placed it back into the holster.

Taking a few steps to through the clouds, she sat down on the edge of the cliff. She understood that there were times for stillness and times for action, you just needed to tell the difference and act appropriately. This was a time for stillness, so she waited.

***

And waited.

***

The morning had taken the clouds away. Jazmine stood up and walked down along the side of the mountain to the tree-line. It instantly got darker amongst the trees. There was no dawdling, Jazmine was being pulled towards a specific tree, one that looked like all the other ones. It looked like all the other ones, seemed to at the same time disappear into the surroundings and separate itself from the rest. Jazmine approached the tree, walked around it. On one area of the trunk, the bark was in a slightly different pattern than the rest of the tree. If you weren’t looking for it, you’d never see it. The area was about the size of a hand, so she slowly placed her open palm against the tree. She instantly felt a warmth emanating through her palm. A bright light outlined her hand, oval in shape, and growing exponentially until it was almost the size of her. As though someone grabbed her by the wrist, she was pulled into the oval area into a tunnel of light. She fell and fell until-

***

-Jazmine woke in a fright, and forgetting where she was, slid off the side of the cliff. With a quickness that surprised her, she was able to grab onto a jutting rock before she fell to the bottom. She climbed up, sat on the edge, out of breath. In her mind, she wrote up a file and stored it in a cabinet. The file read: Do not fall asleep on the edge of a cliff.

After the clouds had dissipated, a cold set in. Jazmine collected some wood and built a fire. As she stared into the flames, she spotted another oval shape deep in the fire. Again, it grew. And again, as though she was grabbed by the wrist, she was pulled into the fire.

The tunnel was painful and bright. She sensed movement, like she was travelling a far distance at a fast speed. It could have been seconds or days. All of a sudden she was standing in an area that was the opposite of a mountaintop in every sense. Flat as far as she could see. The other difference were the fires. About every two meters, fires shot straight up from the ground at the height of a person. The fires were all in a grid-like pattern, and so easy to navigate. That didn’t stop the intense heat coming off them.

Jazmine was here before. She stopped walking, closed her eyes. She had a file on this. Although there were some letters in the file, it was still incomplete. The only thing in any direction was a building off in the distance. As she got closer, she remembered bits of memories of being transported here. But from where? She reached the building, which was the size of a hangar and could easily fit an airplane. That’s exactly what happened - an airplane shot out of the hangar - and it was so loud that she covered her ears and closed her eyes-

***

-and she fell forward into the fire, opening her eyes, and shielding her face with her hand. Her navy coat caught fire and she took it off and slammed it against the ground until it went out. She sat back down in front of the fire and made another file: Don’t fall asleep sitting up in front of a fire.

Enough stillness, Jazmine thought. It was morning, the fire was reduced to smoke. She walked to the forest area and found the tree. She put her palm on the part of the tree where the bark was different. The oval of light opened up and she was pulled inside.

This time, instead of almost falling off a cliff, she almost fell off a roof. She had landed on top of a five story building. Surrounded by a dark, dingy city. It was raining. After being on the mountaintop, it was almost sensory overload. The lights, the sounds, the intense presence of other humans.

The file in her warehouse knew this place: she was back in Schrödinger City.

Jazmine put her hood over her head and climbed down the fire escape. At the third floor, she pried open a window. The windows were all spray painted black.

Inside, the small room was empty. A thin humming noise came from the next room. When she reached the next room, she instantly remembered everything. Well, almost everything. Beds lined the walls, each one filled with two people who were hooked up to machines that ran tubes into the ceiling.

They were being Harvested. And which happens sometimes, a file is delivered without her prompting it. This file was incomplete, but said enough.

At that moment, a fire alarm went off in her brain, and she knew she had to get out immediately. As she climbed down the fire escape in the rain. The words from the incomplete file were branded upon her brain: You have been Harvested.