Anchored Down

25. Teach Me

Valours POV:

"Time is of the essence Thomas. Shoot her. Show no mercy." His voice rang with growing impatience. I could almost feel the frozen glare behind the cell window, so dark I couldn't see him.

She stood in shackles, her clothing torn and burnt. I didn't want to know what they had done to her, or why. I couldn't pull the trigger. I did my best not to cry out as the spikes in my collar and shackles tightened, cutting through flesh and tendons, blood warming the metal thorns.

"Be done with it boy. You're only hurting yourself." Colonel Walker yelled through the speaker.

My gun raised, her tears fell. The spikes dug deeper,

deeper,

the room got colder,

the air got thinner,

Bang.

I dropped the weapon, rushing over to her. I felt her blood within my hands, the life draining out of her eyes. I felt the black stain appear on my soul like the red dripping down my arms. Her life was gone, and I had taken it. As the spikes released and the torture devices fell to the floor with red tips, so did her body.

"First mission accomplished. Private Valour." Callaghan stated, the seal door opening to let me out.

"Oh, by the way. Happy eighteenth birthday."

I ran to it.

And slammed it shut, breaking the mechanisms inside.

Pain held my throat as I grabbed a rope hanging on the tool rack, beside other junk in the room. I tied it into a noose, spitting out blood from the wounds in my neck through choked sobs. Their commotion rose from behind the door as I staggered up and flung the rope around the ceiling fan above, tieing it tightly onto the weapon rack and shifting a chair below it. I threw my lab coat far away, the once valid ID badge now soaked in red.

I wrapped it around my still bleeding neck. I could hear them trying to barge the door, unable to open it automatically. If it was wood they'd be in here before I could even tie the rope. Classic Outsiders. I looked down at the innocent captives corpse, her eyes still wide and mouth agape. Glancing at her blood that flowed that like a river and dripped from my hands, looking one last time at the panic behind the tinted window.

And then I was hanging.

Everything went blur and dark. I could hear the screams of those people who fled that hangar just a month ago, now mixing with my cousins and fathers screams as I stared silently at my mothers body in the dirt, the blood still dripping from Callaghan's knife. I could feel the bullet that lodged itself into my eye, the heat of the explosion and the concrete scrapping against my back as Blaze dragged me away from the flames.

Air became scarce.

The world became dark.

And then the door came down.

Darkness. Crushing darkness. I couldn't breathe.

I jumped up and grasped my surroundings. It took me a good minute to stop panicking, to find there was no blood on my hands, to realize that the red surroundings were sheets and I wasn't not laying in that blood river, to realize there was no rope.

"Out. You're out." I told myself.

I walked. I just walked. I didn't know where I was going, I didn't care.