THE GAMES OF POWER

THE GAMES OF POWER: Chapter 9

CHAPTER 9:

The girl stared at me for a few more seconds before lowering her head. Her face and body was bruised, large dark purple spots covering her body. A cut ran across her cheek and another on her forearm. She was wearing a jumpsuit similar to mine, but instead of blue, it was yellow.

They wanted me to fight…this…this girl?...

She only looked to be about twelve, maybe thirteen. But the scars and bruises on her body made me think that she’d grown up a lot faster than nature had intended her to.

What kind of messed up people were these guys? Little girls? They want me to fight little girls?

“Begin attack,” demanded the man on the intercom.

I tensed, not sure what was going to happen, but the girl did nothing. She didn’t attack. Didn’t even speak. She just slowly slid down to her knees and hung her head, her matted blonde hair falling in front of her face. I could see tears splattering onto the hard floor.

“Renounced Pollemist. Proceed,” the man grumbled, obviously irritated.

But still the girl stood there. She looked up at me, tears falling from her face, but she didn’t look like she was afraid. No, definitely not afraid.

When my family first started learning another language so we could communicate with Em, it was hard at first, but eventually we got it. We learned to read the facial expressions on others, never realizing beforehand how much information resides in a stare or a grin. And here, looking at this girl, I definitely didn’t pick up on any fear. There was something though.

Determination.

I knew that look. In what you could only say in a few words, that look told me everything she’d been through. Countless days of being used and tortured and beaten. She might have been afraid at first. Who wouldn’t at that age? Heck, I was practically crapping my pants right now. But there was no fear in this little girl’s eyes. In those eyes she told me she was exhausted…tired of these people doing horrible things to her, and she wasn’t letting it happen again. They couldn’t make her, and she wasn’t going to let them.

“Pollemist! PROCEED,” the man shouted over the intercom. He was angry now, hitting the two-way window above us with his fist.

The girl stayed their motionless, staring back at me and still refusing to fight.

I whipped around to face the window I assumed the man was behind. “I’m not going to fight her! Let her go you sick morons! She’s just a little girl for God’s sake!”

“You will comply or the test will be reset and you will repeat it. I suggest you do what you are told,” hissed the intercom.

“She’s not going to fight!” I yelled. “And neither am I! You can shoot fireballs and launch boulders at me all you want, even send your little geek army of killer robots to take a shot at me, but I’m not fighting a little girl! You can’t do this!”

It seemed like I was giving this rant a million times, but no one was listening. When the man on the intercom didn’t reply, I turned to the little girl. She stared at me with bruised, grey eyes. A smile formed across her lips.

It said: Thank you.

The dull beep of the intercom came on, and there was a sound of papers being ruffled, then the man said in a gruff, angry voice: “Fine.”

A second later a door opened on the far side of the room behind the little girl revealing a dark room. Two men in grey uniforms and big, white rubber gloves emerged from the gloom and grabbed the girl’s arms, yanking her to her feet. She didn’t protest as they dragged her body towards the dark room.