Immortals

Chapter Four // Ashe

The dark was dangerous, but the dark was comforting tonight. It felt better than home, tense and suffocating. The air outside was crisp and free, just what I needed to clean the fog in my head.

We called this place The Land of Escapees. It would never be seen on any map, would never be recognized as a true town, but it was a civilization of its own making.

When you break down the youth and throw them into the mix of life or death games, they learn how to adapt. They rebuild what they have lost to the best of their abilities. They take the practicalities they learned in a society of the past and create their own form of society, for them and ran by them.

But at night, it was a dead zone, vendors closed and lights low. Silent, except for a generator hum of Parker's creation. He and Emery worked in shifts with a handful of other Unfavorables to provide The Land of Escapees with water, heating, and light. It was all Parker's mastermind that managed to keep it inconspicuous to outside eyes.

I had never known anyone with so much technological genius before he became my ally.

My talents lay elsewhere. Early on in out settlement in The Land of Escapees, Mia and I had discovered that there was a network of thieves among the Unfavorables, those who were branded for kleptomaniac tendencies that did not fade when they escaped.

I don't know where the valuables they got their hands on went before me, but I know where they went after me. They went towards providing for me and my friends, traded off for food and other necessities. The thieves smuggled, and Shane, Mia, and I sold. We all benefited in the long run, after all.

Was there even a long run now, though? Or had everything come crashing down forever?

Shane was gone. They took him after we had all fought so long and hard to keep our freedom in our hands.

And it was all my fault at the end of the day.

Maybe if I had kept my mouth shut, ran at the first warning sign, we would've all made it out. If I hadn't let my temper get the best of me, there wouldn't have been an unnecessary sacrifice of any sort.

I was the fire that caught in the woods and essentially killed Shane. I took him out when an old need to be oppositional got the best of me and turned a peaceful setting into a war ground.

It was me that sent him to the fate we had all been trying so hard to avoid.

And because of that, a life was stolen when it was supposed to be saved.
I knew in body he wasn't dead, but that said nothing about spirits and souls. Everyone knew what happened when you were caught, that's why they always ran. They all knew you lost yourself when they found you, lost everything that made you who you were. They took your identity away from you and turned you into a shell designed to do their bidding, like a robot programmed to destroy the world.

So for all intents and purposes, Shane was dead.

Mia and Emery had hope that maybe we'd be able to save him before the end, but I was hopeless. The only person who could break down the walls was against the idea, and I was right behind him in his defiance.

It was something we knew Mia and Emery didn't understand, with Mia being an only child and Emery being the brother of a young Favorable who did what was asked of her, but a part of me wished that they did understand the grief Parker and I still carried from our siblings. Parker, only twelve at the time, had to watch his brothers be led away to the same fate as Shane when all they wanted was freedom. Me, at fourteen, who had to hear about the historic death of my siblings through a pipeline of rumors, the Favorable who was sacrificed in the killing of an Unfavorable, they all said. That's what the news and rumors said, even though deep down there was more to the story than that. It was a sacrifice, but not in the way propaganda wrote it.