Obeying his wishes, my shaking hands closed around the shaft, and I yanked it from his chest. Two more gasps, and his muscles relaxed as he bled out into his chest cavity. His eyes went glassy, and he was gone.
I sat back, staring at his slack face. Handsome. Young.
What did it say about me as a human that it had grown easier to watch them die?
A hand squeezed my shoulder in passing. I didn’t bother to check who it belonged to. The compassionate touch was familiar. Dr. Grayson had been our lead physician since the beginning. He always offered comfort when one of us lost a patient, even when he was rushing to save one himself. His partner—and my friend—Zara Akbari did the same.
Hours flew by in minutes, and when I finally looked up from my last patient, now stabilized, Dr. Grayson and Dr. Akbari sat beside each other, heads in their hands. A pang pierced my chest as I made my way to them. It had become a common sight, the two of them mourning those we couldn’t save. My mentors, losing hope.
“What’s the final count?” I asked Zara.
“Twenty-seven soldiers,” she whispered, exhaustion and grief spilling from her hunched posture. She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen, but the sorrow had broken her face into fragments—splotched cheeks, creased brow, sad little diamonds that dripped from her eyes and sparkled in the light.
“What happened?” I asked her.
Before she could answer, a survivor with burns across her face and arms spoke up from her bed. “We were sent to attack what we thought was a Hunter center of operations, but it was a decoy. We were the only ones who escaped. Left fifty behind.”
Zara and I exchanged pained glances.
“This world is like the devil’s playground,” she whispered. “Death lives in every shadow.”
I’d joined the war effort with the belief that I was doing the right thing, that good would always triumph. But that was sheer naivety. Good and evil didn’t exist. There was only strength and weakness, and the NAO retained the might of what used to be the United States. We were just a rebel band of do-gooders fighting the most powerful empire of all time.
We needed intel.Goodintel. Not the stuff that would send soldiers uselessly into the line of fire, but information that would save thousands.
A small sacrifice on my part could turn the tides of this war. People died today to fight the NAO. To consider backing out of my deal with the Blood Colonel was unforgivably selfish.
So I wouldn’t.
3
War Whore
A female’s rights to personal autonomy, movement, education, and reproduction are suspended unless expressly granted by a Male Guardian or State Officer.
—FEMALE CITIZENSHIP RECLASSIFICATION ACT, N.A.O.C. 42 § 3308
Isit hand-in-hand with my mother in the backseat of a car while Theo drives across the Appalachians to the river valley on the other side. The lights are strange—foggy and twinkling like starlight—but I stare at my mother’s face. Parts are blurry, almost as if I can’t quite see them, can’t remember what they look like even as I stare and stare and stare.
Eventually, Theo leaves the highway and takes a long, dusty road that leads to a church. I stagger into the cool spring air to stare at the unassuming building, trying to ignore the prickling sensation along my skin.
My relationship with religion is complicated. Raised Catholic, I should cross myself like Mom, but I haven’t put muchfaith in higher powers of late. As I stare at the large cross erected before the Protestant establishment, I wonder what sort of god would allow the current circumstances.
Other cars have crammed into the spaces around us. From within the building, shouts and rumbles bleed through the open doors, leaking between the nascent grass blades and delicate spring blossoms that surround me.
It’s so pretty.
Stay here, part of me whispers.
It already knows what’s about to happen.
It’s better out here, it says.
But Theo leads us to the entrance, and the three of us follow, trusting and docile.
In the sanctuary, hundreds of people yell and snipe.
Theo scans the crowd and meets the eyes of a Black woman standing near the pulpit. “There she is.”
