Displaced

Chapter 105

Rain pelted down, the torrent of water pouring over Sofie even with the cover of the trees. She welcomed it. The water left her feeling cleansed in more ways than just physically. The softened dirt didn't hurt either; between the rocks, the roots, and the fact she hadn't been able to find anything better to use in the bandits' storage room than a single-hand wooden spade the size of a gardening trowel, she found digging to be hard enough without the ground also being as hard as a brick. Letting the mindless monotony take her away from the events of the past few days, she plunged her trowel into the earth, over and over.

She'd woken up to daylight and a cave hideout covered with blood and corpses. Apparently, her body's weakness, brought on by malnutrition, insomnia, and torture, had combined with the intense emotional stresses of that night to cause her to faint at the end of the slaughter. The sleep helped. Higo's knife, dropped by her side when Snake first attacked him, had helped even more. Freeing herself had taken some time, but the celebratory Liberation Crackers had made everything better.

Not really.

Her scabbed fingers and toes throbbed constantly, pain flaring up with every step she took. Her body still felt weak and lethargic, even after gorging herself on crackers and other assorted food in the storage room. Granted, she hadn't felt anything close to "good" since Pari's death, but even compared to just two weeks ago, she felt like utter shit.

Still, she did it anyway because it needed to be done.

She thought as she dug. The Sofie of the past, the one sitting in a library, would never have been able to do this, she knew. That version of herself would have crumpled into a weeping heap and accomplished nothing. And yet, she found herself wishing that she could be that person again. She couldn't help but feel that she'd lost just as much as she'd gained—if not more—since coming here.

She could feel Scyria pushing her every day to become somebody she didn't want to be. She didn't know what was worse: that it was working, or that everybody else seemed to view her resistance to it as some sort of obstinate, selfish, naive folly. Who you were as a person was perhaps the last true choice a person could have, the one thing anyone had near-total power over, but this goddamned hellhole of a world seemed intent on twisting everyone she knew into some cruel mockery of the person they had been.

Blake had probably been a jerk back on Earth, but surely not a murderous one. It was Scyria that had broken him so, both mentally and physically, and set him on his spite-fueled quest. The quest had no end; Blake was chasing the ghosts of acknowledgment and vengeance, but no matter what he did, they would always be a step out of reach. Sofie believed that even Blake understood this by now, but he was far too stubborn to stop. Or perhaps, he feared what would happen to him without his drive to prove an entire country incorrect.

Sofie wanted to believe that Gabby had been a nice person before the transfer; she could see the motherly nature the older woman still held within her. Still, the Eterians had taken to calling her a monster for a reason. When faced with the choice between two lives integral to her existence and the lives of thousands upon thousands of others, she'd chosen the two. Blake, Arlette, and the rest probably thought that the Ubrans had tricked Gabby into her actions. Sofie had thought the same, once. Now, she wondered if Gabriela had equally used the Ubrans, letting them build her a permission structure for her actions, a justification to soften the guilt of her crimes.

And then there was Arlette. What would she be like if she had been allowed a normal, warm childhood? What would she be like if she'd just been allowed to be happy? What would a truly happy Arlette even look like? Sofie tried to imagine it and came up blank. She didn't think she'd ever once seen the Scyrian in a state that could qualify as true happiness.