I didn’t want to die in here like the rest of them. Like Seven.
I didn’t belong here.
I wanted to feel the sun on my face.
I wanted to die in the light.
Every day, this awful, crushing feeling bled deeper into bones that felt like dust. Oozed into a soul that hung like shredded ribbons of rotten flesh. Every day, it became just a little heavier. Squeezed just a little tighter, an invisible hand around my neck. It was impossible to ignore, but to acknowledge it meant surrender.
It meant becoming nothing.
I didn’t want to be nothing. The thought of nothingness terrified me, and as much as I wanted to leave this world, this life, this cell, I didn’t want to becomenothingin pursuit ofsomething.
I didn’t know what I was good for. I didn’t know why I was clinging so hard to a life that was never mine to begin with.
I could hardly remember where I was before this. All that had stuck in my memories were vague flashes of being strapped down, being kept in a dark, tiny room, being injected with things I had no knowledge of. Confusion and fear and anger were what I remembered.
It was my blood they’d wanted. Being a carrier of the virus meant I was less than human, just something to be tested and used, studied and dissected.
I didn’t care about the virus or what it had done to the world. I didn’t care that my blood might be the path to a cure.
When the brothers found me and brought me here, I thought maybe things would be better.
That was when I realized things could never get better, only worse.
At first, I wished I could return to the place I was before. At least they’d fed me there. But I slowly became accustomed to the brothers and their ways. I got used to hunting the very monster I was doomed to become.
They called us all bloodhounds, kept us locked in these cages, chained to the walls. They only took us out when they needed us. All we were good for was helping them find the Corrupted. Helping them hunt those flesh-crazed monsters that haunted the earth.
I got used to doing their bidding. Got used to being too cold or too hot or too hungry.
Too tired.
Whenever I sank into all that exhaustion and despair, when I let those tendrils of surrender curl around me, all the stories I’d ever heard of the world crashed through my mind in a stampede of hope.
You can’t go yet. There’s still so much to see. To learn. You know there is.
You can’t go yet.
I didn’t know whose voice it was that whispered in my mind. It was low, calm, reassuring. Soft.
I didn’t know what love was or what it felt like—had only heard stories—but I imagined that it would sound like that voice. How it slipped beneath my skin and wrapped me in its warm embrace.
Maybe it was a memory. Maybe I’d known love once. Before…
Before.
So I needed to escape.
It didn’t matter that the world outside these walls was a crumbling, putrid wasteland. It didn’t matter that I couldpossibly end up in an even worse situation. All that mattered was that one day, one hour, one minute, one second of freedom.
But the brothers were strangely absent these past few days. Even before they left, they’d been acting different. They’d even forgotten to attach our chains to the wall.
Mine, at least. I’d seen some of the others who hadn’t been chained to the wall either.
Maybe the brothers had finally gotten themselves killed. Maybe they’d gotten bored with us and gone somewhere else, leaving us to rot in here alone.
Maybe Seven had the right idea then.
