“Killing my sister was the right choice?” I mumbled against the sand.
“Yes,” she said crisply. “Obviously.”
A voice came toward me, floating out of the line of trees circling our compound. “Yeah. And I plan to hold it against you for the rest of your life,” Becca said.
I blinked and turned my head slightly to see her. Her white snowsuit was splotched with bright-red blood. More of our fellow soldiers of the Resistance came behind her, a bunch of underfed, overtrained kids in white camo, their arms and faces marred by scars old and new. Many held heavy weapons with ease, showing it was second nature.
I let out a breath, flattening more onto the hard sand. If I’d failed this time, I would’ve never seen them again. Slowly my brain thawed out and started generating coherent thoughts. I was a soldier, just like them. A year ago I’d been a senior in high school in a tidy farming cell that produced feed corn, beef, and smaller amounts of vegetables for the Co-op.
Then Becca had disappeared and I’d set off to find her. We’d ended up at the Crazy House. Months there had broken down everything we had known or believed about our cell, our lives, ourselves. All truths had been dismantled and remade. Among the lessons in survival, killing, surveillance, and endurance, I’d been conditioned not to cry—never to cry.
When we’d gotten out, we were soldiers.
Inhaling deeply, I brushed sand off my face and sat up, feeling about a hundred years old. Now that feeling was coming back, every muscle burned, and I felt sick. Becca knelt by me, her bloody snowsuit inches from my face. Our eyes met and it was both like looking into a mirror and looking past a mirror, through it to another me, another universe.
I started crying silently.
7
WIPING MY NOSE ON MY wet sleeve, I stood up, ignoring Becca’s helping hand. She gave a wry smile of understanding and passed me a flask of something warm and laced with alcohol: moonshine. It acted like antifreeze, making veins open and blood flow again.
“Finally,” said Sasha, a soldier maybe a year older than me. I handed her the flask and she drank and then said, “Jeez, I was getting so sick of watching you screw up.”
I shivered, my sodden hair dripping down my back, starting to freeze into a hard lump.
“I know it was superhard.” That was Mouse. She was so small and young that she shouldn’t be training as a soldier, but we needed every able body, even skinny twelve-year-olds. Anyone able to hold a weapon was being conscripted into the Resistance Army.
A guy came over and took a drink from the flask. “I was sure you were going to bail on killing Becca,” he said.
I almost had. “Me? No. No way,” I said, trying to inject some strength into my voice. “I knew I had to kill Becca.”
“If you had forsaken your duty, it would have been the wrong choice,” Ms. Strepp said coldly. “And it would have cost you—cost us—everything. These training scenarios are to prepare you for the realities of war.”
Someone moved toward me through the circle of soldiers—Nate. Nate Allen, my… boyfriend is such a stupid word. I don’t know what to call him. Anyway, he got to me and hugged me long enough that the heat from his dry body penetrated through my cold, wet clothes. I almost sighed with relief. When I finally looked up I saw Ms. Strepp’s eyes on me.
“Everyone head back to camp,” she ordered. “The show is over. You have time to run sprints before eating.”
We all groaned and headed back through the woods, automatically taking different paths so as to leave a more confusing trail for outsiders.
“I can’t believe it took you this many tries. There was a time back home on the farm you would’ve gladly killed me for borrowing your truck,” Becca said, walking beside me.
I knocked her shoulder with mine. “Smothering you in your sleep and ordering your bloody death by sniper are two very different things.”
Just then a couple of kids ran out of the compound, screaming, their hands clamped over their mouths and noses.
It hit all of us at the same time, stopping us in our tracks and making us scowl at the couple of rough outhouses that served the camp. Instinctively I quit breathing and pinched my nose shut.
Our pal Diego from the Crazy House came out of one, saw us, and waved, adjusting his pants.
“What’d I miss?” he asked. “Did you kill Becca this time?”
8
HERE’S WHAT YOU HAVE A lot of in training camp: Pain. Injury. Grit. Adrenaline. Anger.
Here’s what you don’t have a lot of: Softness. Gentleness. Patience. Lightheartedness. Cute clothes.
So when Ms. Strepp announced that we would have a celebration that evening, it took me a few moments to process that concept.