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I think I’ve been shot
It happens that fast; the pain slices clean through le There are snipers on the roof of the Control Tower They are alatching, always adjusting their aim It’s intolerable The hurt takes awayI touch a hand to my chest, just to be sure
Saht so hard to keep the sound of his voice fro, maybe Because I think I just--I think I just saw--
Vanessa is the one that ulti her knee into the back of ined it My fingers curl and uncurl into and out of fists and I feel like I’ inside ofto screa is to press a fist against my mouth
By the ti out froain is like a rubber band snapping and snapping and snapping against my skin I wish I had resisted, not looked up at the boy posted at the door, his hands clasped in front of hi Our eyes loves creak as his fingers tighten around each other The Mess is heated, yes, but it feels only lukeware of dread-stained recognition creeps down s will dissolve under nize hi too long in the shade
My et faces So Others, a curse, some kind of punishment for all those tihborhood Good kids go to heaven; bad kids need to be rehabilitated Now I know that must be true; I know that someone, whether they’re up in paradise or down here in this little slice of hell, is trying to breaktested
The years between us have thinned out his round face,his father’s chiseled features Dark eyes sit below dark brows, thick dark hair The rest of us are so drained of life after a sunless winter, we may as well blend into the snow, but he is lit fro I have ever seen in
I can’t--I s the bile, try to shove away the last i up the singsong password to get into our idom he invented in the thick cluster of trees behind our houses His hair shines like a raven’s wing as he climbs up the rope to the tree platform his father had helped us build, takes his seat on the pilloe stole from one of their couches, and starts to read the story of the lost prince of Greenwood and a young knight-- out to find hi it; it ht to picture it, one ar it fro around us
If I could, I’d spend my days locked inside the fantasy of our stolen time there, but I’d never been able to disappear so coination the way he could It was stupid to be so hung up on it now Even then, we should have been too old for play like that, or at least old and clever enough to nahborhood street But it hadn’t mattered then, and it didn’t , was how badly it hurt to realize by our own rules I would be denied access to Greenwood, anyway--the requireoodness in your heart, and I barely knohat those words mean anymore I think of them and I see hiled not to cry e found the overturned nest of eggs in Greenwood? They didn’t even have a chance, he’d said
I want to cry, I want to cry so badly, but the helpless fury that’s been threatening to choke h the last soft part of ive up
Even in another life--another world--where everything was good and sweetly noret the face that belonged to Lucas Orfeo
We won’t be fed again until dinner, but I couldn’t bring etable stew We’ve been eating the saright back up as soon as I ed to s it down
Fear followed us into the Mess Hall, coating the silence, expanding until I thought it would eventually push the walls out of alignment It multiplied faster than the weeds in the Garden This is what s that puts this place at the corner of bleak and misery There’s never an explanation Not for the e’re supposed to behave, not for why they do the things they do When they first began work on the Factory, Ruby said--
No That wasn’t right Ruby wasn’t here when they began turning the dark dirt over, burrowing down into earth She hadn’t been the one to wager the guess that the ca to take care of the problem of us--permanently Put us where no one would ever be able to find us
I bracedto rub away the throb of pain behind e of a little dark-haired girl was gone, replaced by a panicked kind of anger It grated onfor no reason at all