Pangea: Pangea, #1

For Zachary & Savannah

I love you always!

Chapter One

My heart was beating so fast, I was sure it would burst from my chest any minute.

So this was what it was like to experience pure terror?

This kind of fear was an emotion completely unfamiliar to me. I had experienced a little fright here and there, but never the complete terror I was feeling now.

I made my way through the dark by reaching one hand behind me, and feeling my way along the wall.

I wasn’t about to turn my back on the creature.

My heart was near rupture.

I had to get out of here!

But there was no way out and nowhere to run.

The huge snake swayed back and forth, its glowing red eyes as lethal as its fangs.

Suddenly the snake was changing, mutating into something else. Right before my eyes, I saw the serpent shift into the form of a man.

The man was old, maybe even as old as the ruins of the ancient cities.

His hair and beard were silver, not so much the color of metal, but more like the color of moonlight.

Fear turned to fascination, but it wasn’t so much his appearance that caught my attention, it was what he held in his hand.

The ball of light was so bright, it should have blinded me, but strangely enough, it didn’t bother my eyes at all.

This is the light within your soul. You must find it. Without that light, Pangea will wither and die. The old man’s scratchy voice faded with his last words, as did the image of him standing in front of me.

Now there was only darkness, a thick all consuming darkness that wrapped itself around me until nothing existed outside that black abyss.

I couldn’t breathe!

Gasping to pull air into my lungs, my eyes flew open.

It wasn’t dark at all.

I was in my sleeping room and it wasn’t dark. The paint on the walls emitted a soft glow of light.

There was no old man, just my bed and the glowing walls.

I came out of it slowly. With each second that went by, more of my mind entered the waking world.

It was nothing but a dream. A Knowing dream, but still not physically real.

There was nothing unusual about the Knowing dreams. I had them sometimes. Mostly they were warnings or little insights sent to me from that part of my brain where the Knowing lived. The Knowing came from that part of me that wasn’t normal.

But this dream was different. Even now I could feel remnants of that sinister darkness.

The darkness wanted to eat me!

There it was again. The Knowing!

I was different in many ways, but the Knowing was the most significant difference. Like my other peculiarities, I kept the Knowing to myself. If people found out about it, I would be sent to Purge.

Not even my parents knew about that part of me. They had no idea I had Knowing dreams, or that I could even make objects move sometimes, if I concentrated hard enough. Justice knew about the Knowing, but he would never talk about it, to my parents or anyone else.

But there were some differences that my parents did know about.

Washington and Satra Beck did their best to hide their daughter’s oddities. Being different could be dangerous, so my parents hid my differences as best as they could. Like my hair; it was the wrong color, so it had to be bleached white.

Sighing, I shifted positions, hoping to find a comfort zone in my narrow bed. My tiny sleeping room wasn’t much larger than the bed. There was barely room enough to stand between the bed and the chest where my clothes were stored. Fortunately, the bed folded into the wall when it wasn’t in use.

Everything in my room was gray or white. Color wasn’t considered necessary in personal living quarters.

But that was my life, and my life was the life of the REM.

The history books tell us there was a time when the world was fragmented into many lands. That was long ago.

The lands of Pangea are now connected, and where the water separates the land, there are corridors that bring it together. Pangea is one land with one government, the REM Republic.

Our world is much better now that we are all one. That’s what they tell us anyway. No one alive really knows for sure. Earth as it was before, no longer exists, the end result of the Reformation disaster.

Officially, the story is that a large meteor hit the planet. The disaster that followed shifted entire continents and changed the fauna and flora, until Earth was almost unrecognizable to those who survived, which were few. New forms of life were born or unearthed.

That was the official version, but some believed that Reformation was the result of a conspiracy.

My name is Tian and I am a REM, short for Remnant, those who are descended from the original humans - the superior humans.

But I am different, which means I am not really REM. I live in one of the domed cities with my parents and brother, who are REM.

I know my parents love me, but they fear my differences. To keep my differences secret, my mother bleaches my hair at each new moon, sometimes sooner if my roots begin to show.

Different isn’t good if you are REM.

If your hair or eyes are not the right color, it is believed that you have Borderland blood in you somewhere. The Borderland people are those who rebelled after Reformation, or people who are genetically inferior. They are known as DEV, short for Deviants. DEVS have tainted blood. It is because of this they were cast out and banished from the domed cities.

I’d met real DEVS a couple of times. I thought I resembled them more than the REM, but my parents wouldn’t admit it.

My eyes are blue, like other REMS, but such a pale blue that I barely pass as a REM at all. If my eyes had been any other color, there is no way my parents could have hidden the truth.

My thoughts drifted back to my dream. It meant something, but I had no idea what. Maybe it was really one of the Knowing dreams. Maybe it was just anxiety.

Our living quarters consisted of three, ten foot by ten foot, sleeping rooms, a living space that was barely large enough to do anything, along with a kitchen with just enough room to turn in place while preparing a meal. The living room doubled as a dining area. Oh, and there is a water closet for showering and other necessities.

Most of the time life as a REM was routine and mundane. My day would start with a small breakfast consisting of a wheat bar and powdered milk. At 0700 hours, I would board the public transit system and be on my way to Life Training.

The public transit system, also called Metro, was an oblong pod with several seats. It moved in a glass tube around the parameter of the domed city. There were many domed cities in Pangea, but they were hundreds of miles apart, connected by a sleek train known as Zone Transport. Our city was located in Zone 4.

I’d never been beyond Z4C9. The dangers of the Borderlands were drilled into our heads from the moment we were old enough to listen.

This was the backdrop of my life up until my sixteenth birthday, which would also be the day my carefully constructed glass world would begin to shatter.

It was a special day, but I wouldn’t dress any different than any other day. I wore a gray Life Training uniform. The uniform was really no more than a tight jumpsuit. Girls and boys wore the same colors. The only difference between the Life Training uniforms and the clothing of adults was that juveniles wore a lighter shade of gray.

After the morning meal, I stepped into the water closet so that I could see my reflection in the tiny, ten-inch mirror that hung on the wall.

Pulling my hair back, I secured it with a tie. We weren’t permitted to spend too much time in front of the mirror, just long enough to make ourselves presentable. The REM frowned on vanity. One could be punished for paying too much attention to their appearance.

Mother and Father were already gone. They had to be at their jobs by