07-04-2014, 02:14 AM
“Thanks,” Melanie replied angrily, irked at his sudden tone. She pushed herself off the couch and made her way to the location of her bag. She looked through it, making sure all of her documents were there and there had been no damage done to her camera and memory cards. Eltiask may not have had a life, but she certainly did. She found her journal, skipping to the very end.
Matthew had been right about her trip to China causing many problems. Originally she was supposed to be in Indonesia to do research and take picture of the leopards that inhabited the rain forests there. Her brother was in Thailand, so she made a visit to him there. Towards the end of the trip, Melanie had grown curious over her birth parents, and did her own research to find more information on them, Her brother, a genius with computers helped her to hack several information databases before dragging up a very hidden birth certificate stating the name of her birth mother and the village in China she had been born in.
She decided to visit the village, meeting many of the villagers and living with them for a good month. She picked tea with them and built up a great rapport with many of them. Then she started to pry, looking for details about the circumstance of her birth and adoption. It was relatively easy because she could easily search their minds and memory. That’s when the sketchy details came to light.
Her journal chronicled her trips around the world to different wildlife habitats. It was well worn with sketches of the animals she did research on, along with her observations and musings. In the Yunnan village that she stayed in, she kept a log of all the information she learned about her situation. She flipped to the last page. She pieced together sketches of the strange men that came into the village and stayed there during her birth mother’s pregnancy. She wrote down the names that the villagers remembered and the stories they told them.
Eltiask may have had memories about his own experience with the experiments, but Melanie didn’t. From what she saw in Matthew’s mind, she knew that she was specially bred for the experiments—her birth mother was selected for her enhanced natural talents. Her birth father…she had many theories about the true identity of him. She endured the experiments as a child, but that was all she knew. When she was adopted, she couldn’t remember anything about the first five years of her life. She was haunted by nightmares throughout her whole childhood, but her memories were repressed.
Her trip had alerted whoever was watching her over the years. And so they sent Matthew. She didn’t want to face the people who sent him either, but she needed to know about why she was this way. She realized that this entire ordeal had been her fault. Once again, she had caused many deaths. Oh god, she thought sadly.
“I’m sorry,” she finally said, following Eltiask to his makeshift yard. “It was my fault that they came looking for me. And now they found you too.”
But she didn’t want to disappear. She loved the life she managed to carve out for herself. She loved her job and the animals she worked with. She loved her brothers, who supported her through her parents’ deaths. She had worked so hard to obtain a life of relative normalcy; she couldn’t just give it up.
“Look, I just need help getting away from here and back to the U.S. After that, we can go our separate ways. I’ll pay for your trip to anywhere you want to go. I won’t bother you again. I’ll keep quiet about you and everything that happened here.”
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