Tuesday, 24 November 2015
9:13 P.M.
She knew it was her turn.
She could feel their eyes on her, and still she didn’t move.
A fleeting glance behind her confirmed what she had already known: that the only way out might as well have been on the other side of the world.
She couldn’t make it.
“Sasha?” a voice said softly in her ear.
Alexei was standing beside her. She needed to remind herself to address him formally in front of the others. He didn’t let just anybody call him by his first name, but he had told her that she was special.
“Why don’t you come with me?” he said kindly, holding his hand out to her. “Come on.”
They walked between the others. For those on Sasha’s left, the ordeal was already over, but the anxious wait for those on her right had been drawn out a little longer by her cowardice.
Green led her to the front of the room, to where a red smear had been dragged across the polished floor, one of her “brothers” having lost consciousness halfway through. A man she didn’t recognize regarded her emotionlessly, a bloody blade waiting in his hands. He wouldn’t clean it, not before disfiguring her—that was the point. They were one now, equal, connected.
“Ready?” asked Green.
Sasha nodded, taking short, rapid breaths.
He moved behind her to unbutton her blouse and slide it off her shoulders.
But as the stranger brought the blade toward her, she flinched, stumbling backward into Green.
“I’m sorry . . . I’m sorry,” she apologized. “I’m OK.” She stepped back up to the dead-eyed man, closed her eyes, and nodded.
He raised the knife once more . . . She felt the cold metal push against her skin.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she said, beginning to cry as she moved away. “I can’t.”
While she sobbed in front of her audience, Green embraced her tightly: “Shhhh . . . Shhhh,” he soothed her.
“I’ll do whatever you want me to, I swear,” Sasha told him. “This means everything to me. I just . . . can’t.”
“But, Sasha, you do understand why I’m asking you to do this for me?” asked Green.
A violent branding couldn’t have been as painful as the look of betrayal he shot her.
“Yes.”
“Tell me . . . In fact, even better, tell us all,” said Green, releasing her.
She cleared her throat:
“It shows you that we would do anything for you, that we are yours, and that we will follow you anywhere, do what you say without question.” She looked again at the curved blade and started to weep.
“Good. But you know you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to,” Green assured her. “Are you positive you can’t do this?”
She shook her head.
“Very well . . . Eduardo!” Green called. A man stepped out into the gauntlet of his peers. He pulled at his fresh bandages uncomfortably. “You and Sasha are friends?”
“Yes, Ale— Sorry. I mean Dr. Green.”
“I think she could use you right now.”
“Thank you,” Sasha whispered as Eduardo approached them, putting his arm around her.
Green squeezed her hand affectionately, then let go.
They had made it halfway back down the room before he addressed them again:
“Eduardo,” Green called, stopping them where the entire audience could see. “I’m afraid Sasha has decided that she isn’t one of us . . . Kill her.”
Stunned, Eduardo turned back to say something, but Green was already walking away, disinterested, his sentence passed. He turned to face Sasha, unsure what to do.
“Eddie?” she gasped, watching the look on her friend’s face change. She couldn’t even see the exit now through the wall of onlookers. “Ed!”
His eyes filled with tears, and then he struck her with a disorientating fist to the face.
Grasping out as she fell, his bandages tore away in her hands.
All she could focus on, as he kneeled down over her, was the word etched into his chest. And in her final moments, that brought her some solace, because it wasn’t her friend driving her skull into the room’s hard floor . . . He was already gone.