Page 18 of Shards Of Hope

Dan, I miss you.

Dan,you left me.

Dan, please.

I can’t do this on my own.

Why did you.

It should have been.

Please.

Brother.

CHAPTER THREE

JACK

I spent the hours between Warner dropping me off in my containment room to when he came back to collect me furiously trying toremember. I gave myself a migraine attempting to dig out anything from the void of darkness inside my head. But no matter how hard I pushed myself, the gap in my memory remained stubbornly blank. Eventually, I had to accept what my brain was telling me. There’s nothing there to find. The blue drug took control of my body, used it, then burned the evidence.

It would be a lie to say I’m not terrified of what OI seems to have created. They’ve figured out how to steal time. Their blue drug has the power to take everything. Thought, speech, movement, sight, sound. All of it, gone. Taken and given away.

Where did they get this drug? Was that the first batch? Are they making more?

None of those things matter to me as much as this: can it be resisted?

Can I fight it?

Dan could. If he were here. He would find a way to fight it. Dan would rather die than not fight it.

But Dan isn’t here. Dan isn’t. He isn’t anywhere.

All I have is me. All I have to fight with is me.

I’m distracted from my thoughts when Warner clears his throat and produces a file packet. The packet is black and plastic and the exact same as a thousand others I’ve been handed during my OI career. Warner holds it out to me. I take it from him, careful not to make too much eye contact as I do.

OI handlers rarely tolerate eye contact for very long. Or at all.

We have one handler, Brady, who really hates it when we look at her. She had me sent to the dark box for three weeks after I met her eyes one too many times during a mission.

Since then, I’ve been more wary of my handlers’ limits. It’s not worth pissing them off just to make a point. I’m not even sure what point I’d be making if I did purposefully challenge my handlers.

Dan used to say the point of defying our handlers is todefythem.

“Don’t overcomplicate it, Jack,”he told me.“Sometimes it’s just about telling them no. It’s about showing them that we stillcan.”

I don’t get what’s so complicated about needing areasonto fight back. But. That’s not an argument I’ll ever have with anyone again. Unless I’m having it with myself. And that’s just. No. I have enough walls to batter my head against as it is.

I know what points Brady was trying to make when she had me put in the dark box.You are lessandyou matter to no oneand, more than anything else,you don’t scare me.

That last, of course, was a lie. She was very scared of me. I was a ten-year-old boy who had killed people right in front of her. I was a ten-year-old boy who shot five people in the head and snapped another child’s neck without a hint of hesitation or remorse. She was terrified of me.

A lot of the OI agents have that problem. They all think they’re harder than they actually are.

I don’t really understand why, but. There’s something extra horrifying to most people about seeing a child commit acts of violence. It’s like they think children shouldn’t be capable of brutality. Like children aren’t, in the end, just as human and mad and terrible as everyone else.

“Target is in the pack,” Warner says, like I somehow wouldn’t know that.