The Deathless Trilogy

1.3. The Deathless

I wake up with tears in my eyes. Our home was destroyed, and Mom... I'm not even sure anymore. The last thing I remember is hitting my head against the cavity wall, and seeing those strangers. I start to panic, and I can see it reflected on the heart monitor. Who were they? They said they were Deathless, but what does that mean? I wonder if they are looking for me too. Whoever they were, they pulled me out of the Prowler, but what if they couldn't get to Mom in time? What if her Prowler got away?

Everything I've ever known, all my memories and all the things I've collected over the years, are gone. If Mom's gone too, I won't have anything left in the entire world. And I don't want to live in that world.

I turn my head from side to side, but it still aches from when I crashed against the Prowler's inner hatch. I can still move it, which is a good sign, but now I see that I'm in an unfamiliar, sterile room. My head rests on a pillow, so I must be on some sort of bed. The windowless walls around me are gray concrete and silver metal pipes stretch across the ceiling. Long wires drape from the ceiling, dangling glass lights. Directly in front of my bed is the only door, a large metal sheet with a pad of numbers above the handle. I am covered in a white blanket, but I can feel that my clothes have been replaced with some sort of stiff fabric night shirt. Everything here is so different from home. There's no character, no love, no color. Just grey and white nothing.

Beside me are two flat screens, one of which is connected to my chest by long, thin wires, monitoring my heart rate with lines and peaks, while the other screen just seems to be an unfinished profile of who I am. It reads: "Unidentified woman. Approximate age: 15."

Seventeen, actually.

"Condition: Stable. Ailment: Head trauma."

I try to get up, but the pain from my head is too overwhelming. From this position, I can't really see past the screens, only that the room continues on with other beds in it. It reminds me of a photograph I saw in a book about World War II of a long hospital room with lots of beds and wounded soldiers in it. Daniel and I looked through that book a lot when we were younger—I was ten and he was eleven—which was why we started playing soldiers. We would run off past the fields, into the woods, and toward the train tracks, where we'd shoot at each other from opposite sides of the track. I never knew who I was supposed to be—the Nazis or the Allied forces—so I'm pretty sure we both imagined we were the good guys. That's how it always is in reality too, though, isn't it?

Daniel and I would bring our slingshots and load them with tiny pebbles we found along the tracks. Dad made them for us and warned us that they were serious weapons, and that they were not to be played with, which of course put the thought into our heads to shoot at each other. That's why we would always run so far away to play: We never wanted our parents to catch us. Of course, ultimately, one of us would shoot the other in the face or the neck with one of the pebbles, and we would have to stop playing. After a while, Daniel thought up a new game: Army hospital. Whoever got hurt in any given game of soldiers would lie down, automatically transitioning the game from soldiers to hospital, as the other person would then have to take care of the wounded soldier.

One day I accidentally shot Daniel right in the center of his forehead. He squealed in pain and dropped his slingshot, falling back into the weeds. When I found him, he was rolling back and forth, trying to hold back his tears, and cupping his hands, darkened from the summer sun, over his forehead. I ran to the edge of the woods and tore a fistful of cool leaves from the shady trees, feeling guilty for having actually hurt him. Whenever either of us would get shot, we would use the leaves as makeshift ice packs. I pressed the leaves to his already darkening bruise, and even though he was the one in pain, he smiled and told me not to worry.