fin // nine // anthrax vindicta

"It hurts, maman," the child says, without any real idea whether the woman she's speaking to is really her mother or not. Every woman here is her mother, just like they are each other's mothers, and every man here is her father, just like that are each other's fathers. Mr Blue Sky says that it doesn't matter whether they choose to call each other mother, or father, or brother, or comrade. What matters is the loyalty. Every person can arrange their family tree any way they like as long as their bond with every other person in it is as strong as the concrete that keeps their underground bunker of a home from collapsing into the ground.

What hurts is her arm, where that foundation word, loyalty, sits swollen and red and engraved into her skin forever. Of course it hurts, maman thinks, it hurts as all new tattoos do, as her own mark of loyalty did when she had it carved into her shoulder when she was this girls age. But maman doesn't say this; although one day this child will grow into a machine that can handle pain and will not be soothed by empathy, for now the latter is exactly what she needs. Instead, she rests her own pale hand on her daughter/sister/comrade's dark, shaven scalp and breathes reassurance to her. "You've just been awarded your stripes, my love," she speaks softly, using the archaic metaphor for a badge of honour. They try their best to keep the ancient language alive here, to remind themselves of how the world has been destroyed. "A little pain will soon be forgotten compared to the pride you should feel."

The child looks up from her puckered forearm to her caregiver. The wide gap between her two front teeth will never be repaired, as the people of this forgotten State have no resources to spare for personal appearance, as the citizens of the Capitol do. Her teeth will sit awkwardly in her thick-lipped mouth forever, the most memorable feature about her angry face. The mother knows as well as Mr Blue Sky does that this won't be a problem as long as they keep her, like every family member with a distinctive characteristic like that, off the suspicious person records of the Capitol.

They call him Mr Blue Sky because he helps them to look up and see a brighter day. The girl views him as the father of fathers - the überfather - the one who hands out guidance, and discipline, to all the rest. He's the ultimate provider. He's the one who causes them to hope and he's the one who will bring the passing of the storm. The girl once overheard two of her brothers saying that he wasn't the first man to call himself Mr Blue Sky and he certainly wouldn't be the last. The girl told a sister this. The next boy, those same two brothers were hanged in the atrium of the bunker for treason. Whether he's the first, the last, or simply a reincarnation of every Mr Blue Sky who will one day return as another, one thing is for certain. When he says loyalty is the only human bond that ever matters, he is far from joking.

_________

What she likes best about blood is the fact that you can taste every emotion of its source inside a single drop. After she learns how to skin her first rabbit (she will later make a pair of gloves out of its fur, and keep one dried foot in the pocket of her backpack to give her good luck) she licks the blade with deliberate slowness. The blood is still warm on her tongue, a hot red streak across that moist pink blanket. In it she tastes the fear of the creature, but below that there's the suggestion, as weak as a sparingly-used spice, of relief for finally being killed to stop the pain of the barbed trap which dug into its belly. To the girl, that relief is a sour undertone to the sweet flavour of a vulnerable creature's fear. She has learnt many, many times to never be afraid of pain. Pain is a threshold to pride, as a woman told her years before, and she has since added victory, success, realisation and dominance to that list. The girl relishes pain the same way other children relish sweet foods, or affection. Greedily.

She pierced her own ears the year before, and now regards the small gold rings she scavenged for them as another testimony to the power she holds over her own flesh. They add a certain balance to her bulbous skull, hanging from her brown earlobes at the same height as her low-set cheekbones, and the wide nostrils of her nose. People, especially the toddlers she now considers her sons and daughters despite how close their ages are, find her face particularly threatening. The illusion of her gleaming bald head and naturally furrowed brow, combined with her large glaring eyes and those distinctive teeth, makes her look almost like some ancient idea of what extra-terrestrials might look like - perhaps after several generations on Earth. If only the humans of the far past could have seen that the aliens they thought would come and destroy their planet would actually be their own distant descendants, first splitting populations into impermeable sections and then setting their children against each other in bloodthirsty sport, the girl's own hidden tribe might not be the last humans left in this country with any reason or rebellion in their minds.

The girl is quick to understand ideas when her elders assign them to her, and so she believes with all her heart that the reason that she's being deployed in one of the fenced areas still under the government's control is to find new comrades amongst them, and help them to see that there is still hope of a brighter future - a bluer sky, as the family says in honour of their leader. When she declares as much to the family around her, they simply grin at her, never replying. Always thinking herself on top, however, the girl understands this to be a sign of their submission and admiration. She never thinks to question them further, or to keep her own hubris in check.

The girl might never have the privileged position of being given the true reason first hand, but perhaps with time and maturity she can understand herself why the family had to send her away. Perhaps she'll remember the day Mr Blue Sky told all his comrades about the Capitol's latest surveillance developments, and how she was found that night pulling her eyelids up from her eyeballs, searching for microchips in the pink membranes surrounding them with frantic shaking fingers. Perhaps she'll remember the week when a brother got sick from their rations, and so she refused to eat until a father forced a tube up her nose and pumped the liquidised nutrients into her throat until her nostrils were bleeding and there were tears running from her eyes. Perhaps she'll remember ever night she kept herself awake and on lookout for nothing, every day she went without talking in case the microphones picked up some hint of vital information from her words, every vision she's ever had of the many ways of silencing a traitor, to protect the others around her who were oblivious to the need to protect themselves. Even as she thinks forwards to the day she will be sent away to District Nine where she is determined to find a new family, just like this one, who are as attuned to the need for loyalty as she is, she cannot get the memory of the two swinging bodies of the first brothers she reported to her elders out of her head. They act in her mind like a pair of pendulums, hypnotising her into a fugue that tells her what is right, what is wrong, but more importantly that just as she is always watching, she is always being watched.

Her desperation for justice is what has driven her out of the community that she has always served. Mr Blue Sky sees her as, in his words to a private cabinet which the girl would never be able to listen in on (as much as she would want to had she known), a loose cannon, a time bomb with a fuse that none of them can see or prepare for. One day her ingrained sense of justice and loyalty will take her too far. They cannot terminate her either through execution or even in secret, as questions will be asked that can never be answered. What they can do, however, is send her away, somewhere where if she is a danger it won't be to them, who are too fragile to be compromised. It's an undeniable fact, to her, or Mr Blue Sky, or anyone, that her paranoia will keep her safe.

_________

She wakes up in a room filled with other girls, all of whom sleep sprawlingly but as silent as corpses. Though not all of them are related by blood, there are certain quirks of their behaviour which are so unanimously identical they could be hereditary. The room is white and the ceiling is panelled with wooden planks. It is not a wealthy house, but every girl here has their way of finding the money to make ends meet. This room is adjacent to the first one the girl stood in when she was initiated here, where that first conversation with the Head of the House cemented a new chapter in the girl's already colourful life.

"What's your name?"

"I can't tell you."

"Well what can we call you?"

A pause.

"Anthrax."

"How old are you?"

"I don't know."

A pause, but not the girl's this time.

"We'll say sixteen. Do you remember what I told you to learn?"

"Yes," she begins to recite, "the Pride comes first, over anything and everything.

"To fraternise with the enemy is to betray the Pride.

"The needs of the many must come before the needs of the few.

"Power over honour. 

"The Pride is a Sisterhood - Never again will weak men hold power.

"Kill only in self defence or in the pursuit of revenge."

"And do you agree?"

"Yes."

"Welcome to the Pride, Anthrax Vindicta."

The girl smiles at the memory. She likes the word Pride and feels it now. Perhaps Mr Blue Sky and her original family would resent some of the rules of this new collective, but one thing was certain at least.

As long as she had someone to be loyal to, and someone who was loyal to her, Anthrax would continue to be unstoppable.