You Never Know Who to Trust

Green

It rained the day they brought us to Thurmond, and it went on to rain straight through the week, and the week after that. Freezing rain, the kind that would have been snow if it had been five degrees colder. I remember watching the drops trace frantic paths down the length of the school bus window. If I had been back at home, inside one of my parents' cars, I would have followed the drops' swerving routes across the cold glass with my fingertips. Now, my hands were tied together behind my back, and the men in the black uniforms had packed four of us to a seat. There was barely room to breathe. I could feel the fear and nervousness from every kid, with traces of betrayal. But I also felt hatred and disgust, from someone who radiated being powerful.

The heat from a hundred-odd bodies fogged the bus windows, and it acted like a screen to the outside world. Later, the windows of the bright yellow buses they used to bring kids in would be smeared with black paint. They just hadn't thought of it yet.

I was in the row in front of Ruby. I was closest to the window on the five-hour drive, so I could make out slivers of the passing landscape whenever the rain let up for a bit. It all looked exactly the same to me-green farms, thick expanses of trees. We could have still been in Virginia, for all I knew. The girl sitting next to me, the one that would later be classified Yellow, seemed to recognize a sign at one point because she leaned over me to get a better look. She looked a little familiar to me, like I had seen her face from around my town, or she was from the next one over. I think all of the kids with me were from Virginia, but there was no way to be sure, because there was only one big rule: and that was Silence. It wasn't difficult for me to be quiet, that's all I ever was. I didn't talk to people I didn't trust, and right now the only person I trust was sitting right behind me.

After they had picked us up from our house the day before, they'd kept us, along with the rest of the kids, in some kind of warehouse overnight. The room was washed in unnatural brightness; they sat us in a cluster on the dirty cement floor, and pointed three floodlights toward us. I was sat next to Ruby, it was the only comforting thing I had. I tried my best to make her feel better. We weren't allowed to sleep. My eyes were watering so badly from the dust that I couldn't see the clammy, pale faces around me, let alone the faces of the soldiers who stood just beyond the ring of lights, watching. In some weird way, they ceased to be whole men and women.

In the gray haze of fear, I processed them in small, terrifying pieces: the gasoline reek of shoe polish, the creak of stiff leather, the twist of disgust on their lips. The tip of a boot as it dug into my side, for no apparent reason.

The next morning, the drive was completely silent except for the soldiers' radios and the kids that were crying toward the back of the bus. The kid sitting at the other end of our seat wet his pants, but he wasn't about to tell that to the red-haired PSF standing beside him. She had slapped him when he complained he hadn't eaten anything all day.

I flexed my bare feet against the ground, trying to keep my legs still. Hunger was making my head feel funny, too, bubbling up every once in a while to overwhelm even the spikes of terror shooting through me. It was hard to focus, and harder to sit still; I felt like I was shrinking, trying to fade back into the seat and disappear completely. My hands were starting to lose feeling after being bound in the same position for so long. Trying to stretch the plastic band they'd tightened around them did nothing but force it to cut deeper into the soft skin there.

Psi Special Forces-that's what the driver of the bus had called himself and the others when they collected us from the warehouse.

You are to come with us on authority of the Psi Special Forces commander, Joseph Traylor. He held up a paper to prove it, so I guess it was true. I had been taught not to argue with adults, anyway.