Prologue
I could feel the cool breeze whipping through my hair, the fabric of my dress snapping in the wind. The metal bars creaked under my weight as I climbed up the railing of the abandoned watch tower of my sector. Everything was a bit blurry and I couldn’t tell if it was from the hot tears flooding my cheeks or the three quarters of the bottle of whiskey I had drank in the past 15 minutes. It was probably both.
“God fucking damn you, God,” I whispered. Quite a sentiment. But also quite called for. At least, I tended to think so.
There’s a frantic meowing from Mocha. When I turned around, I saw that she was watching me closely through the small bars of her cage that was facing the glass door that led to the balcony. She knows something is wrong.
“It’s okay,” I call to her through the door. “It’s alright. I’m okay. Go back to sleep baby girl.”
Mocha won’t go back to sleep, she won’t calm down. She won’t look away from me either. She’s a good loyal friend who has always there when I felt like the days would never end.
As I stare into the small kitten’s caramel brown eyes, the thought crosses my mind that maybe I really should go inside and call someone...my sister perhaps. She would be there before the third ring.
Only, I’m pretty sure that even if I did call her, I’d be right back in this very spot tomorrow night, or the next one after. There just didn’t seem to be a way out of this mess. I’d thought it all through a hundred times in the past several hours. I came from the sector of calmness and always helping others. I was good at the whole ‘helping everyone’ thing. I was very good at it actually. And while that was indeed my strength when I was an initiate, it was also very much my weakness because while I was good at helping everyone else and suiting their needs, I wasn’t ever able to help myself. I remember my husband always believed it was why I was more successful than any of the other initiates that came from any of the other sectors. But, then again, none of them were up here drunk as hell and hanging onto their sanity by a singular thread of hope.
It’s been only a day since the war ended...since my friends and one true love were taken from me by the cruel hand of Death in the form of the people in the city who were against us and I couldn’t even bear the possible idea of moving on. But…how does one move on when they lose something they can’t replace? Answer: They don’t. So how can everyone expect me to possibly move on when they can’t do it themselves?
I could feel the gaze of his eyes on my back. No, he’s not here anymore. But the one thing I have left of him is a picture of us. We’re sitting on the grass outside by the old lake, I’m in his lap with my arms wrapped around his neck and his lips on mine. His hands are on my waist and my fingers in his beautiful messy blond hair. I looked into his eyes and for just a moment. For one singular goddamn second...everything felt normal again. Like he was just in his room waiting for me to come down so we could spend the night in each other’s arms and watch the sunset together like we did every night. Then just as quickly as the feeling came, it disappeared into the storm that had become my mind.
This is so hard, so bad, so wrong. It was so unlike everything I’d ever done in my life.
I kept unwillingly picturing Caspian and my husband, the last people who were taken by the corrupt sector members of Honor. Caspian, my best friend who was killed in a moment of drunken rage by his own parents, and my husband...my everything. The first and only guy I’d ever loved that was born with an entire galaxy in his bright blue eyes. Every time I closed my eyes, I kept seeing those horrifying moments where they sacrificed everything because they were doing the stupidest thing anyone’s ever tried to do; They saved my nothingness of a life.
That was the end of my life. The true end of what I once called home. The end of the thread I was holding onto.
