Freebirds

SKY
The purple tint at the horizon announced dusk. As the birds flew towards the mangrove forests south of Delhi, a warm and moist gust swept the city. The view from the roof of the concrete giant was breathtaking, one could almost see the curve at the horizon. Soiree dragged a puff from the wrinkly joint.
The year is 2095. It has been twenty years since she was born. She grew up with her parents in a posh locality in Karol Bagh. She received her Elite tag from APCL (Aryan Population Control Limited) at age 3, certified by them as a healthy child fit for serving the higher orders of society. Her parents were decorated scientists from the world war 3 era, which made the tests easier to pass. She still remembers the green blue lights they used for the scan. It reminded her of Yamuna every single time. It was the only source of water for this supercity. Ever since the Evangeline Corporation obliterated Mumbai, all the historical monuments worth saving were shifted within a radius of fifty kilometres from Delhi and kept under heavy protection. Soiree often spent her time looking at the faint shape of the Taj Mahal in the east and imagining a missile launch from the silos surrounding it.
The last drag is the sweetest. She filled her lungs and held it in. The smoke came out, mild like a wisp, drawing gibberish shapes galore. She could hear her mother crying loud, her father, drunk and raw, beating her with his belt. The Evangeline plague took her mother when she was visiting Bhopal, eight years ago. The devastation was unimaginable as millions of lives writhed in pain, begging for death in an infected city. At first, these visions only came in dreams, nowadays they come only when she is high. Soiree sleeps a very deep sleep, like a stone, cold, motionless. APCL was merciful to napalm the city to cinders. APCL, the saviour against Evangelists.
The history lessons that Soiree hated so badly goes something like this. In the first half of the twenty first century the global population spun out of control. With limited resources to sustain, all the countries of the world formed a coalition to bring a twenty five year plan into effect, whereby the population increase would be stemmed and production would be boosted. The Evangeline corporation and APCL were the biggest players assigned with this task of tagging individuals and controlling reproduction surgically. As time progressed, the two superpowers concentrated a sizeable amount of effort and funds towards amassing weapons for security of tagged individuals. Underground skirmishes led to escalations and eventually war. The global population suffered a massive blow in world war 3. As the Aryans took the Northern hemisphere, the Evangelists claimed the South. A no mans land was established along the Equator, twenty one kilometres wide on both sides, running parallel to the latitudes. Violence however did not stop and use of WMDs on random cities became a common ordeal.
It was at the borders of the no man's land that her father died from an RPG attack on his convoy, a year after her mother passed away. They did not find anything to bury, Soiree gave them his belt from the wardrobe for the gun salute. The Aryans said that the information about these incidents were now embedded in her tag. Her neck itches whenever she thinks of it.
Soiree ran her hands over the tiny lump on the back of her neck. Then she pushed a few strands of hair behind her ear. She wished for someone to hug her tight. Someone's shoulder to rest her head on. Ever since she joined the university to study aeronautical engineering, she has moved further away from the real world. At times she felt a little tingle at the end of her fingers, goosebumps all over and it made her feel like she was flying. She wanted someone to fly with. Aryan protocol however did not permit her to be with her special someone before she completed her studies and served the corporation for two years. Soiree was tired.
An old familiar feeling? She suddenly felt certain that she could fly!

FALL
Another sleepless night ahead. The forty plus unread mails in her inbox was enough to make her feel nauseous. So Ruth picked up her favourite red mug and went to the coffee maker for a double espresso. The apparatus hissed and steamed at the touch of a button and Ruth added the powdered beans and a coffee pot with practiced ease.
Spectacles, check. Sandwiches, check. Communicator switched off, check. Boxers and gym shirt, check. With a warm cup of coffee in hand and a precariously dangling cigarette at the corner of her lips, Ruth walked towards her bean bag on the open verandah. On her way out, she picked the zip drive from the table and put it in her pocket. She can not afford to lose the APCL designs.
Ruth works for an engineering and robotics contractor. She was picked up by APCL as one of the brightest students of her batch. She was a natural when it came to robotics and automation. Her dream however did not involve applications in warfare. So instead of a star spangled career, she started working as a contracted designer for a small firm specialising in drone surveillance. Their latest project involved sound reduction of a drone designed by APCL. The details were still a bit hazy. The designs in the pen drive had made her head spin back in office. That was when she decided to come back home and think.
Home is warm. Home is sweet. Home is the twenty first floor of a super tower with a breathtaking view. When the smog clears, Ruth could see the silhouette of the Taj Mahal to the east. The missile silos there were white unlike the other ones with camouflage, scattered across the city. As Ruth lay there, sprawled like a pretzel on her beanbag, her thought wandered off in every possible direction. Nothing had ever disturbed her caffeine trips ever, that is nothing until this very day. 
A mild gaze at the sky and Ruth thought she imagined a speck rushing towards her verandah from the roof. In the blink of an eye she was sure. Someone had jumped. As a free falling body zoomed past the twenty first floor, head first, Ruth choked, jumped up and ran towards the railing. Shattered pieces of a red coffee mug lay on the floor. A trickle of coffee crawled across.

FLIGHT
At first there is a moment of calm. Everything stands still, no breeze to fondle your hair, no bright lights to blind you, no gravity to pull you down and nobody to move you. Soiree felt like a theoretical observer of the universe, nothing affected her and she changed none for those few seconds.
Then gravity yanked her by the head like a torturer tricked into giving comfort to his prisoners. The calm air turned breeze and soon into a steady gust strong enough to push her arms and legs behind her. A fourth through, she thought she would die long before hitting the ground. The anticipation of the very next moment in this accelerated descent formed tiny drops of sweat on her cheekbones and temple. She felt a chill and a rush she had never experienced in her life. Soiree was not afraid. She was just dying to know if she could fly.
The heaviest part of a human body is the head. Soiree did not fight the torque. She imagined the arc she would form to glide out. The radius, the speed, arm span and the other details. Either that, or she could be a Rorschach blot on the sidewalk. Soiree felt the air at her fingertips, the raw feel in her nostrils, eyes watering up in a fight against a wall of air. She turned her arms and spread them, joined her legs to cut through drag. She moved faster towards the ground.
She was now accustomed to the weightless feeling inside her body. The fall seemed like an infinite climb down a concrete laden hole of a concrete clad earth. The blur had just stopped making any sense. Twisted shapes grew taller and taller around her. Roads beneath her gaped with wide jaws. The artificial dust of the artificial city was stripped from Soiree's face. Her eyes caught a dumbstruck observer on one of the verandahs who's silhouette was lost before she could blink. She heard a thin sound from behind.
It started as a weak call to her. Eventually unseen voices joined in. The whisper became a crowd and slowly a chant. They were calling her name. Not shouting, not screaming, calling with a calm control over the pitch and throw of the word. She tried to crane her neck and see who they were, but there was no one. As if the entire universe had concentrated all it's cosmic forces to connect with her. She felt warmth flowing from the tips of her hands inwards. She moved her arms. What was tumultuous moments back, happened at ease. The cosmic hymn chant had stopped. There was no other sound to fill the void, except the wind against her curves. Soiree rolled, spread out with her head pointing up and stretched her toes.

ENVY
Ruth was not breathing. When she realised this, she started taking short frantic gasps all the while trying to understand what she had just seen. Her fingers were aching from holding the railing so tight. Her whole body was arched in tension. She had forgotten to blink.
Hold up. So the body heading down to the street should have hit the pavement like a meteor. Instead, it pelted towards the sky like a rocket. This made no sense. Ruth was grasping around for a proof of reality. A broken piece of cup cut her. She barely noticed it.
She screamed aloud. She felt frustrated, angered at the prospect of flight. Human being were not supposed to fly. It was the machines which were supposed to do that, not a random crazy neighbour. She tore up the lamp wiring and threw the set across the room into the TV. She spewed and sputtered like a rabid dog. She ran to the bathroom and opened the shower. Standing beneath it should calm her.
No peace. The running water reminded her of rushing wind. The cool stream made her feel like she was flying. She was ecstatic and manic at the same time. Her eyes told the tale of madness, green flames rose around her, she gasped, laughed and stripped herself naked.
The kitchen counter would have to do. Knife in her right hand, she dug deep into her left shoulder, no wings there. She could barely lift her left arm then. She tried getting up and slipped in a pool of blood. Her head hit the vase with a terrible crunch. She got up still laughing. There must be an explanation. She was groggy. The world was out of joints. She ran towards the balcony. If someone can fly, Ruth thought, it ought to be her.
She dragged herself on top of the wall. She could not jump. A searing pain impaled her from her left shoulder to her right. Her body crumpled like a pack of cards and went limp as it sped towards the earth.

VERTIGO
Her hair had turned grey white. Her skin had wrinkled, dotted with dark spots. The cost of flight was too much to bear. She had aged more than two decades in a couple of minutes. Soiree had not felt so weak in her life, yet she could not stop. Her body ached at each joint. Her spine felt like it was giving way. She felt numbness on her left arm and drifted left. Her ears resounded with the thumping of her heart. Her throat was perched.
She could see her home from here with whatever vision was left. Home is where you hang up your wings. She balanced herself as well as she could and stretched her toes again.
The peaceful land below never looked so daunting. Soiree remembered that she was afraid of heights when she was a child. The cold creeping into her chest could only mean one thing. Soiree pushed for reaching her home, she was almost there. She wished she could live longer. When she fell asleep, her right hand was still making circles in thin air.

DARKNESS
Mother moon sang a silent lullaby as the Sun slept off that evening. The city was torn apart by sirens from all across. The entire area was cordoned off with men in uniforms shoving away curious folks.
By standers were gathered for debriefing and evidence was being collected from the entire building. The body had been moved into the forensics van when the APCL agents finally rushed in a few minutes later. They started screaming jurisdiction and codes and finally coerced the coroners and the local cops to give up the body.
Night was reclaiming the city by bits. As a lonely body bag travelled in the back of an APCL van, a thin wisp in the sky vanished towards the Equator.