Thriving in The Dark [(TDM) ENG]

XI

It's been three years now since Cate found me in the streets and brought me into the League. And safe to say, I'm no longer the girl I used to be -- all shy and sensitive --, I'm tougher now. Stronger, even. I've trained and trained and trained for three long years. I've been sent to all kinds of missions: kidnapping people of interest, rescuing fugitive kids, killing enemies... I've seen it all. I still find it unfair that I have to do shit like this, all just to survive.

During my first months, when I was still a little girl, I would be horrified to hear what my other peers would do in the missions. I told myself I would never do such things, but that decision wasn't mine to make. I grew stronger every day, training after training. "You're ready to go on your first Mission," they said. But when you hand a gun to a fourteen-year-old kid, do you really think they're ready?

Now, it doesn't even faze me. I can't even remember how many people I've had to eliminate, -- that's the word they use -- how many times I held my gun towards someone, how many people I've had to electrocute to death. They say it makes you stronger, but I just feel myself getting colder and colder. The other girls avoid me like rabies. Cate moved me into a room where I slept alone for years. "It's just so you can sleep and rest better, nothing else," she said, but I know it was the girls who asked her to move me away from their room. They were scared of me, I always knew it.

Now I eat alone in the cafeteria and sleep alone in my room. 'Cold-blooded killer' that's what they call me, like I wasn't forced to do everything I did. The Blues and Greens don't get assigned to certain missions, they just kidnap and rescue. Me, the other Yellows, and the only Red kid at the League are sent to do everything the others can't, and they feel superior for it. They never shot anyone, they never used their powers to kill anyone, and they treat us like we enjoy doing what we do. But they don't know how much we burn inside, how much we hate the monsters we've become. We were just kids who had to grow up too fast and learn how to use guns at a young age.

Sometimes I wish I could just disappear. In my dreams, none of this has ever happened. I'm seventeen and I'm doing my last year of high school. I have a boyfriend and lots of friends who love me. I've never been to Thurmond and I don't have psychic abilities. But then I wake up and I find myself here, with my muscles tired from all the training and the terrible flashbacks of my past.

There is one kid that I actually talk to, though. His name is Hunter and he's the only Red at the League. He isn't scared of me, not like the other kids. And I'm not afraid of him either. Sometimes he comes and sits next to me at lunch or dinner. We talk about everything. He told me about his past, about how he was taken from his home during the night when he was twelve, and how the League got him out of his camp. I never wanted to tell him my story, but he was okay with it.

The other Yellows once saw him burn a whole building to the ground during a Mission and were scared of him to death, but I didn't care. There was a lot of good in him, and that's what mattered to me. I'm also pretty sure he saw me electrocute four people to death at the same time with just a touch, but he didn't care either.

Something special grew among us through the years. I would always catch him glancing at me in the halls when he would shyly look away in embarrassment. He would always speak gently and softly to me, unlike he did to everybody else. "Don't talk to him, he's dangerous" they said. And they weren't wrong, I knew it damn well. But he acted differently around me. I loved the attention, I'd never received it from anybody else. Except for Claire, my sweet caring Claire. I felt a rock in my chest every time I thought about her and my girls, who were all probably buried next to the railway, where the PSFs would put the bodies of every kid who died in the camp, by accident or not.

Hunter knew about them, I always talked about them non-stop, still haunted by their death even after all the years that had passed. He would look at me softly and put his hand on mine. "It's not your fault they died, Lia" he would always say "I left my boys behind too, and God knows what happened to them, probably all dead too". He was the only one who called me Lia, and I liked it. It was my special nickname, only for him to use.

When they got him at twelve years old, they didn't take him to Thurmond, luckily. He spent two years in Caledonia, and the League took him away before they removed all the Reds to take them God knows where. Cate always talked about something called 'Jamboree Project', but she never said what it was. Only she and John Alban -- the 'Boss' of the League' knew about it in detail, and it was probably so shocking that she never wanted to discuss it with us kids. Hunter always asked her, he strived to know what happened to his boys, but the only thing he got from her was that they were all alive but that wasn't good news, because we knew what the government was capable of doing with Dangerous kids was far worse than killing them.