Chapter 249: Angel and Angel
"This girl is going to get into trouble one day."
Angie first heard herself described that way when she was six years old. Her nanny was the one who said it.
She had been pedaling her little tricycle that day, trying to ride out of her Eden Lake District town and make it to the outside world, reaching all the way to the heavily guarded border. The guards intercepted her and called her nanny to come pick her up.
That was her first attempt to see the street world, and it ended in failure.
The children in Eden Lake played a game called "bankers and street dogs." A group of kids would split into two sides and fight. The bankers always won, and the street dogs always lost, because the bankers had all sorts of gear and weapons while the street dogs had nothing.
A street dog wasn't even allowed to pick up a tree branch. Those were the rules. Whoever played the street dogs had to lose, and sometimes they got beaten badly.
Some latent special-impairment persons showed their true colors from a young age.
Elizabeth Sterling, her older cousin, refused to play either role. She just wanted to be a Hero. Elizabeth would wander around, and whenever she saw bankers bullying street dogs, she would jump in and stop them. Whoever used their strength to pick on the weak got a beating from her.
Sometimes it was just her; sometimes Sophia Amick was with her.