This story takes place where #54: The Begining left off. The Prologue has been revised from the original. I apologize for the shortness of this chapter, but the other chapters are longer.
Disclaimer: I do not own anything that KA Applegate wrote about or created.
Prologue
My name is Tobias. You have heard our stories a hundred times before. We fought a war, and against all odds won. But not without countless casualties on both sides. Our story should have ended there, broken as many of us were, unable to heal – but it didn't. There was still a cosmic game being played and our time as its pawns were not over.
The One, that thing that had taken Ax's body, stared back at us through the view screen. "Ram the Bladeship" Jake said. I understood his motives, but it didn't help the feelings of betrayal I felt towards him. After all, I'd lost Rachel because of him; I'd lost everyone and everything I had cared about because of his decisions. And while I knew deep down that he made the only decisions he could, than any of us could and have survived, that everyone had lost something in the war, I felt like I was still constantly given the short end of the stick. And now, without any consultation he was throwing away our lives; Marco's, Menderdashe's, Ax's, all of ours. Of course we would have gone along with him given the chance, I had no illusions about our chances of survival, but damn it, I wanted the choice! (Jake, you can't order this! It's wrong and screwed up! There's go-) I didn't get much farther than that before I felt the Rachel give a horrible shudder and I was thrown into the bulkhead, the world vanishing.
You know the light at the end of the tunnel? Well this wasn't it. This was a blinding light, like my retinas were being burned out. I tried to close my eyes only to realize that I didn't have eyelids, eyes, or a body for that matter. I was floating in this painful bright light, I was the painful bright light, and then there was only darkness.
When I opened my eyes, I was staring at a ceiling. It was blue and dusty. I looked to my right and saw my alarm clock, blinking twelve. Right, gotta set it some day. I looked to my left and saw a poster of Matchbox Twenty. I didn't remember buying a poster, and I didn't remember ever really being into Matchbox Twenty. Come to think of it, I couldn't remember much at all, not even who I was. I got up off the rumpled bed I was on and went over to a mirror on one of the walls of my room, yes I remember that now, it was my room. The person in the mirror was me. A young kid, probably 14 or so, scrawny with messy dirty blonde hair. That was me.