YOUR CLASS TEACHER

The smell hit first. Copper, burning fat, rotten flesh, and the sweetish stench of open bowels.

The blast had turned the cottage into a crater of splintered timber and red mud. You couldn’t tell where the kitchen ended and the yard began. Scraps of hand-knitted sweaters hung from shattered rafters alongside severed limbs. Near the doorway, a boy’s top half rested against a cracked water jar, his face unmarred and eyes wide, while his lower half lay several yards away, caught in the tangle of a collapsed stone hearth. Some lay fully intact, faces turned up toward a gray and bloody sky. Others were reduced to shattered shapes beneath the rubble. They were student refugees.

Beside a fallen wagon, a mother’s corpse sat propped against a wheel, her chest hollowed out, while an infant with blue lips clawed uselessly at her blood-matted bodice.

Further down the road, the artillery had left behind worse than corpses. Scraps of torn linen hung from charred tree branches alongside severed limbs. Flies swarmed over a pregnant woman crushed beneath a fallen stone arch, her lower half flattened, her swollen belly torn open by shrapnel. In the ditches, children who had lost their arms or legs groaned softly, their voices too weak to scream, their skin turning gray as their lives leaked into the dirt.

It was the Great War. It had begun as a localized feud, just Elnealin and Gaffrod trading blows over borders. Then the Eastern powers crossed the sea to claim their piece and eventually turned a petty regional war into the Great War. The slaughter that burned down half the world.

Then the sky cracked open, and the silence came back.

He woke up with a sharp, ragged gasp. His chest heaved against a suffocating weight, his heart hammering violently against his ribs. The copper taste was still on his tongue. The sound of tearing flesh still rang in his ears.

He stared up into pitch darkness and forced his muscles to untie themselves. He wasn’t on the battlefield. The ground beneath him was flat, cold, and smelled faintly of antiseptic.

As his eyes adjusted, the dark softened into a dull, blue-tinged shadow. He sat up. A deep, rough sound came out of his throat as he pushed air past closed lips.

Beyond the thick, seamless glass wall at the foot of his bed, dimly lit monitors hummed in the observation gallery. Shadowy figures in crisp white coats stood in the gloom, silhouettes leaning over clipboards and control panels. One of them tapped a key, and a soft click whispered through the speaker in the ceiling, followed by the quiet rustle of paper.

They didn’t speak to him. They just watched. Sometimes scribbling on the paper to record his movements. The tremor in his hands. His ragged gasps. The way he wiped the cold sweat from his forehead. And the way he was in distress.