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"This is who we are, a product of war."
𝐀𝐫𝐚𝐛𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐚
The sun bleeds out slowly over the compound, turning everything the color of dried blood. The sky doesn't glow here, it bruises. Shadows stretch long across the concrete, like they're trying to pull us under, and the silence isn't really silence at all. It breathes. Watches. Threatens. Life at this base doesn't feel like survival anymore. It feels like rot—slow, quiet, carefully orchestrated.
I try to picture something else. A world that isn't drowning in grief. One where people laugh without looking over their shoulders. But even my imagination feels like it's been put under lockdown. I can't conjure it. Maybe I never could.
It's not that I don't want to believe in better. It's that I've never seen it. I was born into this; into lines and orders and uniform silence. Into a world that forgot how to dream before I even opened my eyes. We've never tasted peace; we only inherit the memory of it in the way others speak, like it's a ghost story meant to soothe children.
Even the soldiers have changed. The soldiers—or rather what's left of them—don't talk unless they're spoken to. Don't think unless they're told to. Don't react or move unless they're told to. Don't feel unless they're told to. No one does. Emotions are liabilities here. Friendships, weakness. Love, useless.
The barracks are scrubbed clean of any humanity. No photos. No letters. No signs that someone once laughed in these walls or dared to care.
I walk through the halls and see it in every pair of eyes I meet—emptiness. Fear. The quiet resignation of someone who's already buried themselves just to survive. Many of the soldiers here are just trying to bring food home. To stay alive, even if it costs them their very own lives.
We're not people here. Just roles to fill.
Even the air feels infected. Heavy with death. It sticks to my skin, lingers in the folds of my clothes, coats my lungs with dread. I'm surrounded by death and blood and murderers. That's all I've ever known. And I fear that's all I'll ever know.
I glance around at the faces of the soldiers as I meet some of them in the hallways; their expressions are blank, their eyes empty as always. Despair had become our common language, spoken in every gaze, every sigh. It never changes, so it feels safe.
I turn a corner and nearly run into a soldier—barely older than me, but already hollowed out. His words stumble out, rushed, nervous. "He-he wants to see you. The Commander I mean, of course, who else I—" I stopped listening.
The Chief Commander and Regent of sector 505, Mr. Wilson, wanted to see me. The old man was notorious for his ruthlessness—a quality that had earned him his position in this terrifying new world. I have to give him that. Whatever he wanted, it couldn't be good. Breath, you're okay, they don't suspect a thing. Just breathe.
