The Hunt

Chapter 38: Hanna

Sometimes when a clock stops working, it stops ticking all at once, and there's just silence. It doesn't make sounds or shake and then slowly come to a halt. It just shuts down.

Something inside me shuts down.

I can see my team reacting, I can see their mouths moving. I can see Stephan crying and the guards completing their emergency routine. But I can't hear anything. I can't move. I can't think.

Someone picks me up, and I don't know who it is, but they drag me inside. I'm put onto a cart and people are standing over me, but names and faces don't come to me. The lights flash overhead, the ceiling tiles blurring by. Suddenly I'm stopped, and doctors are coming in. They're moving around my bed. They're plugging me into things.

A mask is put over my mouth and nose, and everythings starts blurring white.

There's no sound, no thoughts or feelings that come to me, nothing. Just white.

Stephan is sitting over me when I wake up. He's shaking uncontrollably. It looks like he's about to cry, but he doesn't. He's saying a lot of things but I can't hear them.

The next time I wake up, Viktoria and Minea are standing by the door to the room, talking. They must see my eyes open, because Viktoria rushes over, and even Minea looks concerned for me. Viktoria starts talking, but I still can't hear it. Why can't I hear anything? Why is it so silent?

One day I wake up and I can hear again. But nobody is there talking. I just hear the beeping on my machine until I lose consciousness again.

"Jonas is dead," Garik says again.

I don't flinch. My gaze is focused on the white corner of the wall right where it meets the window. There's a small crack in it, and it interrupts the white. It's very out of place, in the florescent white room with no flaws. But it's there and it seems to get wider the longer I stare.

"Hanna," Garik leans in closer, "Jonas. Is. Dead."

Something beeps on one of the machines.

"Damnit," Garik mumbles, and gets up from his chair, "I was relying on you Hanna. The city needs you, your team can't just disband. What the hell are we supposed to do now? I know I gave you an impossible mission, but exiles are getting out of control, you saw how they shot at you. I need your team to do something before the capital takes things in their own hands." He paces the room, back and forth.

And suddenly something clicks.

An image of Jonas pacing, back and forth in the dorm room, comes into my mind.

I remember Jonas and I were thirteen years old, and it was right when we got back from our trip into the city that Jonas began pacing like this. "I was thinking about it, and I realized, we don't need to go to public schools, right?"

"Sure," I remember saying.

"I mean, sure they have tons of friends their age and sports and a normal education, but we can shoot guns and learn strategy and we have this whole huge place to ourselves!" even then, six years ago, he would get that excited gleam in his eyes.

"Sure, Jonas," I replied.

"Besides, we're gonna be heroes some day Hanna. We're gonna be heroes and save the city from the exiles, right? Do normal kids get to do that?"

"No," I laughed, and then Jonas would tell me the story of how he would become a soldier and then a captain and then a lieutenant and then the Commander in Chief, and hunt exiles and arrest them and go on daring missions out into the scary forest.