Chapter 1

I held my protest sign as high up as I could, but it obviously wasn’t high enough. My friend Marla would have been quick to point out that was because of my slight height, which she, being my best friend, has never allowed me to live down. I clutched the edges of the neon poster board with my hands and held it over my head, aware that the glitter and pink letters didn’t exactly look like they belonged to someone who was twenty-eight.

“You stand tall despite your proximity to the ground, Lily,” Marla would have said encouragingly.

Zoe, Marla’s six-year-old, had helped me make the sign the previous night. She had turned her nose up when I showed her my usual white poster board and black permanent markers. That was my idea for entertainment for a babysitting night. She had brought her own craft kit instead, and what Zoe wants, Zoe gets.

So, it was neon paper, pink letters, glitter glue, and some cartoon cutouts of birds. I had to concede though, it did stand out from the rest of the crowd. Well, the neon sign and the hand-made conch shell earrings. And not to forget, the bulging purple bag hanging across my body, which I had stuffed with extra art supplies and the tons of “emergency” things that I always carried with me. Yeah, I definitely stood out.

These wanderers are lost! was my slogan, with the cartoon birds lining the edges of the protest sign. If I could get noticed, at least I would get my point across.

Now I held the sign up over my head and screamed again, “These wanderers are lost. Don’t build the wind farm!”

I was yelling at the top of my lungs, my voice drowned out by other voices around me. Nothing was going to deter me from standing there; something needed to be done. Argent Energy Systems. It’s more like Argent Enemy Systems. I smirked to myself when I stopped for a moment to catch my breath. We were going to show them. We were going to make sure they heard our voices and knew that we weren’t going to forget about our feathered friends. These bastards were going to hear us and know that we weren’t going to just sit back and watch while the wind farm destroyed the habitat of the Green Gleneagles.

“Stop killing Mother Nature!” a woman beside me yelled, and then turned to me with a sour face and a crude look in her eyes. “I’ve been yelling my throat hoarse, and these fuckers have been cooped up in their offices all day.” She leaned in toward me to make herself heard.

I rolled my eyes in disgust and started yelling again, waving the sign over my head to stress my point.

The protesters had been barricaded by rope so we didn’t block the path between the front entrance of the Argent office building and the parking lot. There were a few cameras covering the protest on the other side, with their lenses turned toward us, just waiting and hoping for the moment when our peaceful protest erupted into violence. I could picture it as a headline in the newspapers the next day: Tree-hugging loonies kick a white-collar human in the balls.

I rolled my eyes again at the scavenging cameras and screamed my slogan aloud.

I had counted ten uniformed policemen already, standing with their arms crossed over their chests. They formed a human wall on the other side of the barricading rope and were glaring us down. I caught the gaze of one of them, who happened to turn his eyes on me.

“Don’t build the wind farm, sir,” I called out to him from my post, shoving some of my auburn curls behind my ears.

The policeman looked away, almost like he was embarrassed, although he knew as well as I did that my shouts weren’t necessarily meant for him. I was just trying to make myself heard.

“Sir. Sir. Sir! Don’t build the wind farm,” I yelled at him, pushing my way through some of the other protesters. I was aware of stepping on other people’s toes as I made my way to the front of the rope, but this wasn’t the time to apologize. The lives of endangered birds were at stake, and the clock was ticking.

“Do you know that only 160 Green Gleneagles are in existence today?” I screamed at him now that I was closer.

I’m still not sure why I decided to lecture a policeman. In that moment, this cross-faced policeman was the only person I could vent my rage at. He was still looking away from me, pretending that he couldn’t hear what I was saying.

“The species will die out if we build over their habitat,” I yelled at him, now very close to his face. I could feel the coarseness of the rope digging into the top of my belly, but I pressed myself against it to get as close to the cop’s face as I could. He was much taller than me, and he loomed over me with a look of disgust on his face. What a piece of unthinking meat.

I propped myself up on my toes, with the sign still held over my head, just so I could reach him better.

“Don’t you feel guilty about killing an entire species of birds? They will have nowhere to live,” I screamed.

“Back down, Miss.”

I had finally extracted a reaction, and that made me feel victorious. I held my position, still on my tiptoes.

He whipped his head around to look at me directly. He looked like one of those hardened cops who’d seen a couple of years as an undercover agent in the mafia. Severe scars marred his face, and his lips were set in a firm, thin line. He was at least fifty years old and had no time for some students protesting for the life of birds. I knew his type; I was well acquainted with them, and I detested him just as much as he detested me.

“Back down, Miss. I won’t tell you again,” he said, while I glared into his eyes. He must have seen my nostrils flaring and the way my cheeks reddened with rage.

Marla would have placed a hand on my shoulder and asked me to back off, but I was holding my ground.

“Spill blood now if you have to, Officer. You’re spilling the blood of those birds anyway,” I snarled at him.

To my absolute shock, the man turned to one of his colleagues and laughed like I’d made some kind of joke.

I gritted my teeth and felt my breath catch in my throat from the anger coursing through my veins.

I backed down. Not because he asked me to, but because my toes were giving way, and I couldn’t hold that position for much longer. I clenched my jaw at him and yelled out my slogan at the top of my lungs for good measure. I knew what these guys were doing. They were hoping for a violent reaction from us. Well, they weren’t going to get it from me. Not from me. I was going to take it out on my punching bag later, but I wasn’t going to be violent now.

A group of employees emerged from the office building right then, and all protest signs and voices turned to them immediately. The people behind the cameras anticipated some action and turned their lenses, swinging from us to the employees.

It was unclear whether these people were just walking to their cars, or if they were about to make some kind of official comment on behalf of their company. Either way, I was quick to notice their sharp suits, polished shoes and clean-shaven jaws. They looked at their watches and each other, like they had important things to do, like save the world. Oh, the irony!

They walked as an entourage, slowly and silently, entirely ignoring the raging voices and abuses being hurled at them for what their company was in the process of doing.

Of course, I was incensed. Just seeing their smug corporate faces was enough to make me lash out, and I screamed as loud as I could. At one point, I was even jumping, holding my sign up, just so that they might see it over the heads of the other protestors who engulfed me on all sides. Then the pushing began.

My small frame didn’t allow me to see clearly where the shoving was coming from. My heart raced, because I knew something was going on. Someone had been hit, maced, or was being arrested. All I knew was that people were pushing against me. Elbows were being thrust in my direction, until one caught my face with a crackling thunder that sent me rolling backward.

I was falling back, my sign was ripping in slow motion, and I no longer had control over my body.