The last time I saw my father, he was a dead man walking. Nothing more than bare skeleton masquerading in human skin.
It had been little more than a year since the Augments rose up out of obscurity. A year since the wars began. We had been living in a hovel in the middle of a deserted hamlet somewhere deep in France. The memory is still so potent, so firmly etched into my brain, because it had been the first time I realized my father was dying.
It's not a soft, pleasant memory, but nonetheless the last I have of my family whole. I remember he'd been talking, animatedly, the uniform of a soldier hanging from him like a torn sack. It had once been a proud spectacle, seeing father in his uniform, but as disillusionment and the pangs of hunger set in – they became nothing more than rags.
He had been hard, cold, as if fashioned from glass. The bones of his hands as he held his rifle rose sharply from beneath the painfully stretched skin. He spoke of rebellion, of fighting back against the tyrants who sought to eliminate us. I remember thinking – as I diced wild turnips for mother's soup – that perhaps my father was finally going crazy.
Mother tried to inject reason into his strange, endless ramblings. Here and there, she'd lay down her needles, her knives, and trace circles into the rigid tendons bulging across the backs of his hands. Her own fingers were white and gnarled, like the roots of an old willow tree.
There's no use fighting anymore, dear.
She said it so simply, without ceremony. For her, it was reciting a truth that had become old before its time.
Before his disappearance, and the agony she suffered as she slowly withered away in his absence, I remember with perfect clarity that she repeated those words at least once a day. Like a mantra. Over and over. I don't remember her telling me she loved me, that everything would be okay. Only those final words of surrender.
There's no use fighting.
But it never sank in.
. . .
I don't know how long we've been traveling. There are no windows, no portholes, and the only way out is a trap door locked tight above us. We are alone down here. Huddled together for the meager comfort of human closeness as we listen to the heavy steel groan and shift all around us. But even that is not enough – we know our fate.
Sometimes, I can hear them whisper amongst themselves. I'll close my eyes, trying to escape the claustrophobic darkness of the hold, and hear their hushed voices echoing off the walls. They wonder where we're going. What they will do with us once we get there. And most terrifying of all – if we are being shipped across miles of restless ocean only to be lead to our deaths like cattle. The Augments are not known for their compassion.
Especially toward women and children.
After so many nights spent in agitation and dread over the uncertain purposes of our captors, the brig has fallen oddly silent. Some have resigned themselves to what may come. The rest sit quietly but boil on the inside and slowly rip at their fragile seams. I have my own fears, but voice them to no one. I suppose I am one of the latter, entertaining in secret my own dark notions of what awaits us once we reach land.
Like clockwork, the footsteps come. Locks turn, the metal hinges creak, and within moments a harsh white light floods the shallow brig. We never see them, this faceless crew. They bring clipboards and electrolyte tablets, but never allowing us to catch even a glimpse of them. It makes them seem even more frightening, these creatures without name or faces. Unseen enemies are the most dangerous of all adversaries - until they are unmasked, no longer the twisted giants of our imaginations we were allowed to create in ignorance.
I have never truly seen an Augment before. Only in the descriptions and hints of others. The most I had ever seen of our overlords were the basic drawings my father often showed to me in the past. But never with my own eyes. I'm more afraid of seeing them than any cruel, unjust fate they may have planned for me.
The tablet dissolves quickly on my tongue. I spread the tang of salt around in my mouth and wish, for the first time in my life, that it was mother's runny turnip soup instead.
. . .
I wake up to the hiss of their whispers being passed around. They are all frantic. Their quick voices glide over the sleek metal of our quarters, changeable like a gust of wind.
One woman's bleak prediction rises up above the rest. "We're not moving…we've stopped," she says, the rest falling silent in order to hear her theory. "They're going to herd us out and slaughter us like pigs, I know it. Just because they can. For fun."
"You don't know that," says another. "They could be putting us to work. They have factories, you know. They don't work them themselves….that's what us humans are for."
Hope bleeds into their voices. "Factory workers get food. And beds."
"Don't get too excited," says the first woman. "I've seen them cut down children without batting an eye. What do you think they'll do to us?"
They're quiet again for a long time before the footsteps come. I look up at the black ceiling, swallowing hard against a knot in my throat as the ice floods my veins. It's such a haunting sound, the rhythm of their long, deadly stride synced together in one thunderous boom. Like a prelude to a death march. Our death march.
At the trap door, they pause, and we all strain our ears against the muffled gloom to hear what they're saying. Though barely discernible through the thick sheet of metal separating us from their exchange, I catch but a few words of reassurance which put my heart immediately at ease.
"The General asked only for one of them," comes the order. "The rest will go to the factories as planned."