5. We've Heard It All Before

Strength is forced upon us, those of us who are different.

It's not that we want to be strong. That we chose to be strong. Both of those might be true, but it isn't the reason. It's because we must. Must be strong. Must be ourselves. Must stand up for those whose struggle we know too well.

We must survive. That's why storms that can destroy one foundation never touch ours.

Hours have crawled by, tricking my mind into feeling as though days, maybe even weeks, separate me from the jog I took at the camp.

The stench of urine hangs in the air. I struggle to pry my tongue from the roof of my mouth. We sit close to each other and, though we cannot hold one another with our bound arms, we don't let a moment go by without touch. Shoulders brushing. Cheeks resting together. Anything that reminds us we're not alone.

Every breath stings. I wish I could lift my shirt to see the black bruises I know must be swelling over my sides and abdomen. I meet the eyes of the girl who'd peed herself. Cypress. She whispered her name to me twenty minutes after the men had left us. Her body trembles. Ethan, the boy I hadn't recognized, nudges her with his knee, as if to remind her that he's there.

"Someone will come to help us," I say. "They're looking. I know they are."

She lowers her forehead to my shoulder, her tears dampening my shirt.

The aching in my body draws me back the night I curled up beside the dumpster three blocks from our apartment building. This isn't the first time I've had to be strong. Hell, this might not even be the worst.

For a moment, with Cypress lying her head against my shoulder, I close my eyes and imagine I'm back in that alley with her once more.

"Would you do it again?" She asked, her eyes vacant, as if she'd already died.

I swallowed down the knot lodged in my throat. "What?" Sniffling, I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand.

"Let the world see that you're a woman." Tears streamed down my face but hers had been dry all night. "Knowing what it would cost you."

Staring at the place where the police had stood minutes ago, where gravel had bit into my knees, and their calloused hands scratched along my face, into my hair, I opened my mouth to speak only to close it before a sob could escape.

"That's the problem with sacrificing even one person so that your people can have more..." Her voice sounded as dead as her eyes looked. "More money... More safety... More freedom." She began to button her opened shirt. "We start to eat ourselves alive from the inside out, thinking people who are different, or weaker, or poorer won't notice there's no good reason for them to suffer while you prosper. One day you're complacent and the next you're complicit."

I could hardly think beyond my storming heart. "What are you talking about, Erin?"

She took my face in her hands and looked deeply into my eyes. "Never let someone take away your freedom because they said you're too poor to matter. People who hurt others are weak." She wiped my tears with her thumbs. "You have the upper hand, even when it doesn't look like it. You're stronger than they'll ever be. Go show the world that, little sis."

The door slams against the wall so loud that we all jump. Cypress falls back and begins to scoot away from the three men who walk into the room one by one.

"You're stronger than they'll ever be."

I don't feel that way now. Erin was always the unmovable one. It's been three years now but remembering voice makes me feel as though someone's ripping my chest open and prying out my heart. Erin would never have cried in front of the recruits. She'd never have to be called into the Commander's office. I bet she wouldn't have gotten captured in the first place. And if she did... If she did, she would never, not for an instant, let these bastards think they had the upper hand, even being tied up and having no reason to believe someone might come find them before these people killed her.

It's hard to find your own path when the sister whose footsteps you've always walked isn't here to pave the way anymore. I want to believe her. I want to believe I'm stronger than these men will ever be, but fear paralyzes me. I don't want them to hurt me.

Do I really want to be a recruit?

"It seems reasonable to me that ya'll have had enough time to come to your senses." The older captor sighs and hooks his thumbs through his belt loops again. "Don't all speak at once." His stare finds me. "Not so talkative anymore, Princess?" He sneers. "What a shame."

Cypress stands up and speaks with a voice that shakes so badly I can hardly understand her. "I'll tell you whatever you want. There's no point in pretending we won't talk."

I lower my head at her words.

"We--we can talk. You don't have to hurt us."

"If they don't kill you, our people will if you talk, Cypress. Think about what you're doing." Ethan nods at me. "Isn't that right?"

My nod is cut short by a hand grabbing my hair. The third man storms by me and hooks the Ethan in the jaw. I struggle to my feet as pain cuts through my scalp like knives.

"You take care of us and we'll take care of you Cypress." He strides closer and pulls his keys from his pocket, giving them a twirl. "We'll take this talk to to another room where you can take a seat and have a nice meal." Glancing at me, he jingles his keys. "Anyone else care to join me?"

When I don't speak the man holding my hair gives it a jerk and I cry out.

"Too bad." He regards Ethan now where sits on the ground, holding his face. "I'll make your choice simple. You can die for sure or you can start a new life with us. We have the resources to protect you."

"Go to hell," Ethan says, his voice garbled by blood that spills out with each word.

I look back to Cypress, wondering if she's changed her mind yet.

Our captor chuckles and shrugs. "At least I gave it a try." Still smiling, he reaches his hand to his side and whips his revolver from its holster. "What a shame."

A scream starts to well in my chest. He aims at ethan's chest.

A pop so loud I feel it beat in my eardrums explodes from the gun.

"That's really all it is." Our captor doesn't even pause. "Just a shame."

Ethan collapses to his knees and falls flat onto his back.

"He reminded me a bit of my kid when he was young."

My scream releases and a meaty hand locks over my mouth. Ethan gasps on the ground in front of me and his body tremors as he tries to sit up. This isn't real. This can't be real. There must be a way to fix this.

Ethan's eyes mirror the disbelief that begins to numb my body. He's looking at me as black spurts from his chest and oozes from a wound too small to see through the mess, flowing down to the ground. He's stopped moving now. Stopped breathing. His body falls listless but he hangs onto his life. I can see it in his eyes.

"There's a reason we send the young to fight our wars." Erin broke a twig in half, wearing her melancholy frown. "And it's not just that we're at our prime."

The flow of blood begins to slow. He lifts his eyes to Cypress. I start to look too when the revolver swings to me.

"I want you to think on whether it's worth it." He doesn't look like a man who just shot someone who reminded him of his own kid. His grin is too easy. "You want to join Cypress or the little shit on the ground?"

He motions toward Ethan who has ceased moving. Half-opened eyes, blood that no longer flows. I didn't see him die. He slipped away silently.

Pain grips my chest. "I must," I whisper.

"What's that, Princess?"

Chewing the inside of my cheek, I imagine that I can scoop the blood up and push it into his body to bring him back to life. It doesn't even work in my imagination.

"This story is getting old." My nostrils twitch. Fury winds its way into my chest. I'm tangled it.

Erin's voice fills my mind. She knew. She always knew.

"How many more ways to do we have to say the same old tale?" I ask. "Ordinary people triumph in impossible circumstances. The awful men of the world like you kill the good ones. We somehow go on." My voice raises to a yell. "It doesn't matter if I die here with you or in some alley with the police or naked on the ground of the recruitment office. Do whatever you're going to do, because I've had enough of the nonsense in this world. We don't need to kill each other. It's pointless to sell out more innocent people to go live a life with you that wouldn't be worth living."

I'm yelling and the words are drudging up from my depths but I don't really know what I'm doing. Not until I realize the man has released me and I'm standing there alone before the revolver. Not until I realize I'm a runaway train seconds from careening over the edge of a cliff. I can't stop the words. I've already said them and it's too late.

"Get it over with!"

I don't even have a full second to feel the terror. To question myself. To regret.

A bullet bites into my chest.

My eyes widen as I look down to the blood already spilling out of me and struggle with my bound arms, trying to bring a finger to touch the small hole peeking at me from my body. I don't believe it. The pain is so distant that I hardly feel. At first.

As soon as the first wave hits me, I stumble forward two steps and then sink to my ass. The world is spinning. I slowly settle onto my side. It hurts too badly to scream or cry. Agony freezes me.

"I've made my position clear." The man who shot me unfastens the cuffs from Cypress's wrists and drops them by my head. "You didn't go changin' your mind on me, did you?"

Pain begins to drown out everything I hear. I might be screaming. Or crying. I'm not sure. The world as I know it snaps black and I'm left all alone. It feels like I'm floating on water.

Somehow I've managed to feel surprised, even though I just watched him kill our friend and level a gun at me. What did I think he would do?

Truth is, I didn't think. The most critical moment of my life comes and I don't think at all. I never imagined I could die. Life is all I know.

Fear. Its vines weave into the anger until it's all I feel.

Erin is with me again. We're warming our hands by a fire in the woods. Everything's so shadowy I can't make out all our surroundings. A fuzzy world opens before me. I've been here before, and no matter what I try to do, I can't change anything. I watch, feeling as disconnected from this world as the last.

"We're impulsive and idealistic enough to be sent to die." Erin snaps another twig. "The world hasn't had time to cure us of hope or harden our hearts into jaded stone or exhaust us into apathy. We're not yet so entrenched in our obsession with consequences that we'll let them hold us back."

"Can you give a rest for once?" I yank the broken remnants of twigs from her hands and throw them in the fire that crackles before us. "I don't feel like stewing in your existential depression tonight."

"You better watch out or you'll end up like them." Erin reclines onto her back, laces her fingers beneath her head, and stares up at the starlit sky. The red glow of the flames paint her neck and face with soft light. "You should never learn to get too comfortable living in the middle of a wildfire. It'll make you dangerous or dead, and I don't care to pick which is worse."

The voices begin to fade. I reach out for Erin, desperate to grab hold of her and beg her not leave me again. The heartbreak reignites in my chest and sweeps throughout my body, so acute that I can't keep myself from screaming.

Bright light bathes my world in light.

I gasp.