Serengeti

This is NOT the same story... don't be confused from the earlier post.

The names need changing - Mona and Miguel do not sound African.

However, read and leave comments. =) thanks.

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The wind blew that day with forcefulness beyond what the small house had ever seen. That is why it fell over, for it was unprepared.
It fell to the mercy of the wind, leaving Mona and her brother Miguel homeless.
Mona was sixteen, Miguel seventeen, and neither of them had much of a chance to survive on their own in the Serengeti.
They had built their house without even considering that the wind might blow it over. Why it had happened, why the wind had come that strong just once, and then disappeared altogether, was a mystery to Mona.
Mona really didn’t have time to contemplate it. Her brother insisted that they pick up the few, shabby remains of their belongings and start to migrate.
“Obviously,” Miguel had said matter-of-factly, “This spot is cursed. We must move.”
That didn’t make sense to Mona. They had thrived on that plot of land for as long as she could remember. And yet…
Miguel had a point.
So they picked up what they had (which wasn’t much anyway) and started across the plains, until they found a spot, like a cave or big tree, to stop.
On the way, Mona got tired and hot, and to keep her mind off the heat, she thought of her mother.
Her mother, and her father, who she really never got to know.
Her mother, who’d been taken by strange soldiers when she was but eight years old, just eight years ago.
Her father, who’d been taken in the same manner.
Right off their own little plot of land.
So maybe Miguel was right. Maybe it was cursed.
That was more painful to think of than the heat and the fatigue. So she focused her mind on the prowling lion in the distance…
There was a prowling lion in the distance.
That wasn’t making the heat easier, either.

Miguel trekked across the endless plain, scoping out a break in the horizon that would indicate a tree or cave.
Miguel spotted a break in the surrounding grass, but not so far as the horizon.
It was close enough to indicate what it was.
And it was no means of shelter.
He turned around slowly to face his sister, knowing she probably saw the predator in the distance, too.

Mona shuddered, but only for a second. She’d been raised by her brother. And she knew what to do.
She wasn’t really afraid of the lion, she’d been taught not to.
She’d been taught to kill it. Fearlessly.
And so, raising her bow and arrow, she deftly did as much, saying simply, “We will feast well tonight.”

Miguel knew the instincts of his sister, and he knew she’d kill it.
But he wondered whether or not she saw the cackling hyenas not too far away, shorter, and less visible in the grass.
When she let the arrow slice through the air, he figured not.

Mona was quite confused when her brother started to yell.
“Writi hatu? What have you done?” he screamed, taking the bow from her hands. “Hatu motep shri lata mesza! You’ll bring the hyenas here!”
"Wri-haut," Mona cursed in her native tongue. She didn’t see them low in the grass (she did now, but now it was too late).
Now, instead of having one giant lion, she had six hungry scavengers.
And she was out of arrows.

Miguel knew that arrow was a waste, and now they couldn’t go through there without being chased. So he headed west, having no better clue where that would take him.

Mona saw a tree far in the distance and suggested to her brother that they stop. The sun was setting, and there wouldn’t be time to go any farther.
Miguel agreed with her, and they reached the tree, having nothing to eat. So they surrounded themselves with the small bundle of belongings they possessed and collapsed onto the earth below them, tired from a long day’s hike in the African sun.
They’d been asleep no more than five minutes when the lions came home for a day’s hunt, to take their rest in the giant tree.

***

Chapter One, Part One

She walked slowly and carefully down the road, cautiously glancing around every few feet. She got to the corner, and stood still as a statue, listening hard. When she decided that she’d heard enough, she sprinted as fast as humanly possible across the street. She continued on her way like this all the way to school.

She reached the school building. She swiped a card through a slot in the door handle, stood still with her eyes wide for the retinal scan, put her thumb in the gel pad for the thumbprint identification, and, when the signals turned green, walked through the door.

She glanced down the halls for a room marked “129-B”, for that was her learning division. She found it eventually, conveniently located on the first floor, and went through the same procedure that she had at the main door. The signals turned green, and she walked through the door.

She glanced around the room – it held all of eleven people. She made twelve.

She took a seat (one of three left) and began to pull up the opening screen on the desktop surface.

Finding the signature box screen, she picked up a stylus on the side of the desk and signed her name carefully. The signature appeared in a window at the front of her desk, so it would be visible to the teacher.

She sat, lapping up every second of beautiful silence in the still room. She pulled up lessons that would be taught in the higher learning division classes (a skill that only she herself knew) and kept herself occupied with those until the teacher arrived, which would probably be in about five minutes.
She was always there before the teacher.
She was probably the only one who cared about the teacher, or paid any attention to him.
She was disgusted, thinking of the feeble minds that would take part in the “learning” that she would when the teacher arrived. The administration diagnosed her learning ability without even testing her. She was destined to be a B-129 forever, even if she proved she could be at least an A-190 a million times over.
She hated her country and the flag with the thirteen stripes and the 58 stars that represented it. She learned in the A-240’s lesson plans that the country’s education system had once been leveled differently. You were placed with children at your only level of learning, and your teacher gave you material that was challenging.
She longed for that.
Instead, she would have to sit and be bored. Again, just like yesterday, and the day before that.
She started to daydream. She dreams that she was an A-500, who study to be time-travelers. She dreamed that she went back in time five hundred years, and that she was in a classroom with brilliant minds like her own, learning things beyond the imaginations of the simple-minded.
And that’s as far as she could do, for now. Just sit, and dream…