Chapter 1 Casualty Value #2
They lower Princeton to a cot, and Dr. Grayson lifts his bloody shirt to reveal a bullet hole through his abdomen.
“It might be okay if it didn’t hit anything,” Dr. Grayson says, prodding gently around the wound.
He checks for an exit wound, and there it is, straight through Princeton’s back, lower than his kidney should be.
A seed of hope sprouts in my heart, and I grasp for Princeton’s hand. He squeezes back, warm and strong.
“What can I do?” I ask, ignoring all his squad members hovering around us.
“See if Adam has any of his moonshine left.”
I force out a laugh.
Dr. Grayson cleans and dresses the wound, but we have no surgical capabilities. We operate on prayer alone. Russian roulette, military style.
Time passes.
His hand grows hot.
His teeth chatter.
“What do you think happens when we die?” he asks.
“We meet Jesus,” Tekqua says, certain. “And our Father in Heaven.”
I press my lips together. It’s a prettier answer than the one I could supply—we simply cease to exist.
“Even if we’ve killed people?” Princeton asks.
Tekqua’s voice gentles. “Have you prayed for forgiveness?”
“I don’t pray.”
“I’ll pray for you, then.”
And she does. Her palm presses over his heart, and she pleads to a god I’ve never trusted to watch over him, to take him peacefully when his time comes. Her words morph until she’s praying for all of us, begging God to end the war and help our enemies see the error of their ways.
I lay there, bitter, imagining the supporters of the NAO doing the same—wishing we would recognize our wrongness and fall into the fold. Tekqua thanks God for His mercy and grace while I recount all the things—all the people—that have been taken from me.
When she finishes, a single tear falls from Princeton’s closed eyes, trailing over his temple. The sight is a jagged shard of glass, cutting. Shoving down the burn in my throat, I grip his hand. The rapid tattoo of his pulse beats against my fingers like a drum.
His body relaxes into sleep. I exchange a worried glance with Tekqua, but no words exist to encompass the sheer degree of fear that overtakes me.
He isn’t getting better. We both know it.
Eventually, I drift off.
When I wake, Princeton’s hand in mine is finally cooler. His fever has broken! I rise to my elbow to smile down at him, but his eyes are shut.
His eyes are…shut. His chest isn’t moving.
“Princeton?” I shake his shoulder, ignoring the frigid temperature of his skin.
Tekqua wakes. She blinks at me, confused.
“No!” I shout, shaking him harder. “Princeton!”
“Sophia!” Theo’s voice broke through the memory, and suddenly, I was back in his office, curled over my lap, breathing into my knees.
His hand rubbed circles between my shoulder blades, familiar.
He’d walked me through these attacks before.
“Think of the forest,” he said as my breathing slowed. “Tall trees. Warm rain.”
I nodded, doing my best to imprint my forest over the memory of Princeton. He’d been shot on patrol just a few months ago. The last of my original squad to die.
Unless Tekqua…
No! She wasn’t dead.
“Sorry. I was just thinking about Princeton.”
Theo’s mouth set in a grim line. “At least with this Blood Colonel’s information, you could help us end this. You could stop losing people you love.”
My eyes narrowed, and I wanted to hurt him. “There are none left to lose.”
The stricken flash of sorrow on his face lent me a strange vindication.
He took a quick breath. “I didn’t want you to do this.
He’s a Hunter. He could hurt you. He could be a double agent and screw us over.
But Williams is right. We’re running out of time, and there’s no help in sight.
We can fight until we all kill each other, or we can take drastic steps to stop it. ”
Happy to be the drastic step you take, I wanted to say.
But I didn’t. What difference would it make?
Trapped in this war-torn portion of the Ohio River Valley, I had nowhere else to go.
The Defiance was all I knew, all that mattered.
The NAO had stolen everything from me, including my country, and most likely, my best friend.
If there was an opportunity to find out vital information about Tekqua, I had to take it.
I should have escaped to Canada when we still had fuel, but back then I was naive enough to believe the good guys would win.
I stayed because it was the right thing to do.
Nia Williams convinced me we could win the fight for equality.
I laid my name to rest on the Defiance registry willingly.
I gambled my life on an unwinnable game.
And now?
Leaving was suicide.
Hunters hid in the dark like predators, waiting to pounce. My only chance at safety was staying with the Defiance. Maybe I was in the lion’s den, but I was with Theo, and that had counted for something. Until now.
He returned to his chair, slumped. Grief had weathered him.
The stress of commanding this failing rebellion had etched lines into his face.
As my late father’s best friend, Theo had always been part of my life.
Before all this, he’d still had that soldier stiffness—he’d been a ranking officer in the Special Forces—but he used to smile as I’d run and clutch onto his legs.
“Throw me again, Uncle Theo!”
He’d toss me high in the air.
A different world. A lifetime ago.
Shoving down the pang of nostalgia, I straightened, exhaling a measured breath. My heartbeat slowed and my skin turned clammy. “When do I meet him?”
“Thursday night. Seven o’clock.” He made me memorize an address on Evanston Avenue.
Binding information. Irrevocable.
A permanent handcuff to my new jailer.
The Blood Colonel would have priceless information. He could warn us of devastating attacks. Navigate us through enemy territory. Help us steal their supplies. He could save lives instead of take them.
If he was telling the truth.
I glared at the floor, and two thoughts struck me.
First, the stark and surprising awareness that I didn’t want to die. There had been times, moments, when I’d thought death preferable. I’d longed for the comfort it could provide, the end of the suffering.
The second thought was a hot wire slicing through my mind.
You deserve this.
“Thursday at seven?” I asked, my voice lifeless.
Theo nodded. “This wasn’t an order.” His eyebrows drew together, pleading. “I thought you’d say no. I—”
“Well, I didn’t. It’s too late to go back now.” I left the room before he could say anything else, hurrying down the main stairs, cursing all the circumstances that had brought me to this point.
The NAO and its power-hungry Commander.
The declaration of war against our peaceful allies.
The civil war that destroyed us.
It had been three years since the NAO ratified the New Constitution.
We the People of the Unified States, in Order to restore our greatness, secure our borders, and uphold the rights given to us by God, establish this Constitution to ensure freedom, prosperity, and law and order for all true American citizens.
The worst part?
We did nothing. We willingly stepped into a cage and realized too late that a fire had been lit beneath it. Each small move on their part was a match added to the flame. We let a censored media calm our worries while we slowly burned alive.
Because autocracies do not happen overnight.
They start slow. Prettily. With words like unity and patriotism.
They grow with bribes and manipulation.
They bud in the death of free speech, where saying the wrong thing can earn you an execution.
They thrive when fear outweighs morality.
Then they disseminate, and nothing short of civil war will stop it.
Except we were losing that war, and I wasn’t sure that a damn thing I did could help. This was the end. My certain death at Lucas Scott’s hands would be in vain, and all I could think was…
It shouldn’t have ended like this.