Victor shook his head. Then he reached out his hand to me, laying it on my shoulder. He peered in at me through the darkness of the small bare room equipped with only a bed, a metal desk and a three-drawer side-table where he kept his clothes and toiletries.
“If you run,” he warned, “they will catch you”—I felt his bony, boyish fingers gently dig into my shoulder—“and I can’t bear to see you suffer the punishment they will inflict on you.” Even at such a young age, Victor always spoke with sophistication and elegance, unlike normal children. Most of the boys in The Order did—even in that aspect I often fell short. My favorite word was fuck. Still fucking is.
I shrugged his hand away from my shoulder, biting back the pain that simple action caused my ribs.
“I don’t care what they do to me,” I snapped. “I’m not afraid of them!”
Victor pushed air through his teeth to hush me, his eyes widening in the blue-gray darkness. “They will hear you,” he whispered harshly, grabbing my shoulder again.
“Why are you so afraid, Victor?” I asked, feeling my heart sink into the soles of my feet. “Why won’t you come with me?”
Victor sighed.
He looked at me and I could see in his face something that I already knew, but never wanted to believe: he wasn’t afraid and never had been; he was willing, utterly accepting, and wanted nothing other than to succeed and excel in The Order, to make our father proud, no matter the cost.
“I want to be here,” he said. “Niklas…in time you will feel the same way; you will understand that everything we are put through is going to make us stronger, it will make us men. It will give our lives purpose.” He didn’t sound like my brother anymore, the boy I played roughly with in the field in Germany—the words coming out of his thirteen-year-old mouth were the words of our trainers and his mentor. And our father.
Victor paused, looking once more at the doorway. “You are my brother,” he said with devotion, but then with a sigh he added, “and that makes you my only weakness. It is why it is forbidden to have ties like ours, why we can never tell our secret—because ties make us weak, and weakness gets us killed.”
I shoved away from him and rose into a stand, straining under my own wounded weight.
“Then why don’t you just tell them that I’m your brother? Or turn me in as a traitor—tell them whatever you want!” I lashed out, though I kept my voice to a whisper. “They favor you…Brother”—I couldn’t hide the resentment, the pain, from my voice—“they would believe you, and I love you enough that I’d go along with whatever you told them, and they’d kill me, and then you wouldn’t have to worry about me anymore.”
Victor shot up from the bed, the sheet that had covered him stirred by the brisk movement, falling slowly against the mattress. He stood in front of me, glaring into my eyes. I had never seen him so angry, so controlled by emotion—I thought I was looking into the eyes of a stranger. It frightened me. But mostly it made my stomach swim with guilt.
“I would never, Niklas, in my short or long life, do anything that would cause you harm.” He stepped up closer, his toes touching mine, the warmth of his breath on my face coming from his nostrils. “If you think I could, then perhaps you are not my blood, after all.”
And I knew he meant what he said, I knew that my brother’s loyalty to me would be unwavering for years to come, that he would do everything in his power to protect me, even if it meant risking his position in The Order. And risking his life.
But at eleven-years-old I was stubborn and chose not to listen.
I left his room without anything but my white pajamas. I crept down the hallway, past the guard pretending to be asleep, and walked right out a side door and exited the building into the warm night air.
I got as far as the fence.
No one came.
I slipped through a section in the fence where it met the brick wall of the front gate of the property—I was skinny enough I could push my body through it.
No one came.
I walked as quickly as I could down the street made of broken asphalt.
Still no one came.
I thought I was free. Every step I took, the closer I got to the lights that reflected off the surface of the lake from the small town nearby, I felt like I was going to finally live the way I wanted. Images of when I was boy, playing in the field behind my house with Victor and our friends and our maybe-sister, Naeva, I began to feel like I was reclaiming the life that was taken from me.