Page 4 of Us Dark Few

“Roll call begins first thing tomorrow. You’ll hear the morning bell and stand outside your cell to wait for the Captain to complete cell count.Do notsleep in during roll call, or you will be punished. Any other questions, you will ask the Captain, not me,” he said just as she was about to open her mouth and ask if there was any toilet paper.

The guard pulled a thin, metallic device from his pocket. She heard light beeping, and the frightening, razor-sharp tip glowed neon red.

“Hold out your left arm,” he commanded.

“What is that?” she whispered. The next moment, her head whipped to the side as the guard backhanded her. Her mouth opened in shock as he got right in her face.

“You do as you’re toldwhenyou’re told, prisoner. Now, hold out your arm before I break it.”

Her chest heaved up and down in rapid breaths. His ring caught the corner of her eye with the hit, and a warm trickle of blood dripped down her cheek. Her hands trembled as she slowly lifted her arm. The burly guard gripped her elbow and lowered the device to her wrist.

Her skin prickled at the immense heat as the tip neared, and she panicked. In a last bid of desperation, she tried to pull away, but the guard held firm.

Pain.

That was all she could feel as the guard touched the tip to her wrist.

No force was able to stop her screams. Her wails bounced around the walls, constricting the air around her, begging futilely for the agony tostop. But no one responded to her cries for help.

Her voice grew hoarse by the time the guard backed away, and Khalani’s eyes slid down to the bright-red number 317 branded into her skin.

“You are no longer Khalani Kanes. Khalani Kanes disappeared the moment you stepped foot in our walls. She doesn’t exist anymore. You are Prisoner 317. Fall in line, or you’ll be punished.”

Merely a number. No better than genetically bred cattle. The brutal guard left, slamming the bars shut with a resounding bang that echoed, leaving only the sound of her breath in the frigid cell. Tears streamed down her cheeks so profusely that her face would soon forget what it was like not to cry.

Was that possible?

Her back bowed as calamity and misfortune greeted and caressed her body like old friends. They kissed her face and drew the wet passage of tears further down her feeble skin.

They took away everything. Even her name.

She slid to the ground. It was cold. Hard. The only thing that was…real. Everything else was merely a dream. A nightmare from which she couldn’t escape. Slowly moving, she reached inside her pant pocket and grabbed the one personal item they let her bring. A picture of her parents.

She had long, dark hair like her mother and the green eyes of her father. She was on her dad’s shoulders, and the camera snapped when they were all laughing. The picture was taken the day before Genesis became habitable, a week before their death.

When the immense dome shielding the last surface city from lethal radiation was completed, many rejoiced at the remarkable feat of human engineering. That was, until the bodies returned. Apollo’s council had forced Braderhelm prisoners to construct the dome surrounding Genesis, and every last one of them died from radiation poisoning. Their lifeless bodies were transported through the streets to the medical ward.

She still remembered the smell.

The odor of charred skin—like it’d been melted in a pot—forced grown men to their knees in shock.

Protesters gathered in Apollo Square, crying out their dissent against the council, but they were swiftly defeated by the armed force. Bodies lay discarded in the streets, her parents among them, brutally murdered by the Apollo regime.

Khalani was only eight years old.

She didn’t eat for a week. She sat in her doorway, assuming her parents would walk through any moment and wrap her in their warm embrace. A concerned neighbor came to check on her and found a tiny, emaciated girl collapsed on the floor, still staring at the entrance.

Waiting. Hoping.

Because she didn’t understand the concept of waking up and them not being there—no kisses, no reminders to clean her room, no wiping away tears when she was afraid, no caring for her when she was sick, and no goodbye.

Her parents never returned for her, and they never would. Sometimes, she hated them for that.

But maybe it’s impossible to hate someone without loving them.

Out of the corner of her eye, a giant cockroach emerged from a minuscule hole in the stone wall. The creature wiggled its antennae and traveled along the floor. Her forehead puckered as the cockroach skirted by a piece of black chalk on the ground, half the size of her pinky.

Hours passed before she moved. Slowly, like her body weighed a thousand pounds, Khalani reached over and grabbed the chalk. Her eyes lifted to the rocky walls of her cell, marked with black dashes all over.

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