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Glory and Gore / CHAPTER ONE the culling.
DENALI WASN'T SURE HOW MUCH TIME HAD PASSED.
The days had all seemed to blend together like an oil painting. It could've been weeks, or months, or years even that she'd been cooped up in that same room, with nothing of interest encased within the dull, stormy gray walls that only seemed to get smaller as the time ticked away. The state of unknowing left her on edge.
All she knew was that the band around her heart got tighter every time she woke up for the day, silently wondering if it was time, and it got even tighter when footsteps would be heard outside of their door, getting closer and closer until she wasn't sure she could take the rapid beating of her heart anymore. But then the footsteps would pass by and get quieter and quieter, just like her heart as she'd let out a breath and the band got looser; but only by a little bit. And she knew that the others in the cells around them felt the same.
Sometimes she wished she had been born a butterfly instead of a human. They were made to grow. Each one was different, but each one was beautiful in its own way, with unique patterns displayed upon its iridescent, velvety wings. And that had got to be the best thing about them. They could just get up and fly away any time they damn well pleased. She assumed.
Nobody on The Ark had ever seen a real butterfly except the last people from Earth, and they were long gone. The only ones she and anyone else had seen were those displayed in the children's picture books and the ones cut from paper like they used to make in school. They were like the flowers of the sky, the life amid the monochrome blues and greys.
She wished that she had wings. So that she could fly the coop and never return; inhabit Saturn and make it her bitch. ( Or maybe Mars, since science best supported that it was the most inhabitable planet; besides Earth, but of course that wouldn't do her any good. )
The council couldn't even grant the delinquents the courtesy of windows in their cells, so that at least they'd be able to gaze out of it while they were trying to fall asleep, daydream that they were out there among the stars instead of trapped inside the four steel walls, or observe the planet's placements to determine just how much time had slipped through their hands. They felt that the prolonged amount of time spent in there for some young teenagers would eventually cause them to go insane and they'd end up shattering the window, thus ending their life before they could even sit down at their trial. ( But everybody knew that the trial was utter bullshit.)Apparently, it had actually happened once. To a teen girl many years before when the skybox was first being developed and the glass wasn't nearly strong enough.Or at least that was the story they had all heard when they were younger. Aponi knew that story was probably bullshit as well.
