But the three compounds—mine, Damia’s, and Conall’s—existed as proof that other perspectives had to be taken into account to weigh the scales to one or the other side, to see whether the degradation of our humanity was worth the cost of survival.
Whether burdening half the population with a saddle of childbearing, and the other half with constant humiliation for their reproductive organs refusing to cooperate with the cities and their needs, was how we were supposed to live.
Whether having the opposition, the three smaller cities we called the compounds, raising their youths in preparation for war, honing their minds into ruthless killers and strategists who viewed people as means to an end, could be considered the right way of life.
Whether battle training from a small age was what we wanted for our children.
Leaning against a maple tree, I rested my forearm on my bent knee. Blades of grass poked the ankle of my stretched-out leg. The green blanket hadn’t yet fully awakened after its winter hibernation, the vegetation lacking the courage to reach for the sky.
The treeline hid my shape from the training rings on the other side of the field, but the sounds of metal clanging against metal, fists connecting with stomachs, the shouts to pause, applause, and further instructions on how to fix stances and moves rolled all the way over to me.
The square buzzed from the crowd of half-dressed people going through their daily drills. Adults, teenagers, seniors, all together were rehearsing the war to come.
Yet it was the head full of golden-brown hair that caught my attention. Zion slunk along the chalk-ring while his opposition—the woman who had killed me—secured the grip on her two knives.
The two of them might have taken the helm of leadership in my absence, but it was about to be challenged.
They didn’t know it yet, but Ilasall had sown treachery in their paths.
25 YEARS OLD
“You should get some rest.” The doc swiveled on the stool in our infirmary’s examination room. “It’s called sleep, Gedeon. You need it more than we need you distracting everyone here.” He gestured to his team as they checked their med supplies for the tenth time at their stations.
Pacing alongside the too-bright wall, I grunted out, “They should have returned by now.” Zion and Eli had never taken this long to meet with our contacts in Ilasall, including the drive to the city and back. “Something is wrong.”
“Gedeon,” the doc pleaded. “Sit down. Your migraine is approaching.”
My boots continued to work dents into the white-tiled floor. “It’s not.”
“Your symptoms are obvious. You’re squinting at the lights and twitch when you step under a ceiling lamp,” he said, rummaging in his desk drawers to pass me a bottle of pain relief pills. “Here. You should be running out by now anyway.”
“Thanks.” I stuffed the purplish bottle into my jeans pocket and resumed my journey from the med supply closet, past the open infirmary door, to the trembling apprentice pretending not to see me as he secured his blond locks in a hairnet.
Turning on my heel, I began the trek back to the doc taking inventory of his desk.
“You won’t stop pacing, will you?” He straightened a pile of papers. “You can’t change the outcome by?—”
Yells swarmed the hallway all at once, and the doc rushed to the infirmary’s entrance right as Eli plodded inside, dragging Zion with him.
Together, the three of us heaved Zion onto the table, his white t-shirt soaked in crimson and sliced across the chest, his left eye swelled shut.
My mouth dried out. My pulse picked up. Voices mixed into a cacophony of indistinguishable commands as our med team elbowed me out of their way.
Wheezing, Eli collapsed against a wall. “A crew of soldiers ambushed us at the gates,” he strained to say, despite the gash spanning from the right corner of his lips to his jaw and underneath. As he spoke, his teeth peeked through the laceration, scarlet coating his neck and soaking into his pale-blue shirt. “Zion lost consciousness about half-halfway b-b-back,” he stammered before passing out.
More blood trickled down his chin.
So much red.
Enough to drown someone.
“Gedeon, you have to leave,” the doc called out to me. When I didn’t move, he roared, “OUT,” and shoved me out of the infirmary.
The door slammed in my face, the solid surface painted in a milky shade, the swirls in the wood resembling the minutes stretching, and stretching, and stretching, one after another, longer and longer. Endless.
I staggered back, and my back crashed into a wall. But my screaming shoulder blades couldn’t distract me from the sight of unconscious Zion forever etched into my memory.
He had been as still as the dead.
