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.
But it was the guilt of leaving my brother behind that stopped me in my tracks.
I was a boy, dressed in stark white pajamas, standing barefoot in the center of a moonlight-shrouded street in Portugal, a calm breeze blowing the thin material of my pants against my bony legs; I was hunched over slightly with my arms crossed over my midsection. I was an out-of-place smudge on a painting, the one thing in the picture that did not belong—I didn’t belong anywhere, really. But as I stood there, seeing Victor’s face in my mind, that guilt he’d planted there before when he was so hurt by the things I’d said to him, it grew so much that I suddenly felt suffocated by it. I couldn’t leave my brother in that place.
I couldn’t leave him anywhere.
I turned around and went back the way I came.
The guard pretending to be asleep before, stood in the doorway of the building, waiting for me, dressed in a black T-shirt and black military pants tucked into black military boots; a police baton hung from his fist.
“You could have kept on going,” the guard said. “Why did you come back?”
A loud clunk and click and then a constant mechanical hum sounded from high above me and bright lights spilled out over the rooftop, pooling around me in two brilliant circles that made the grass beneath my feet look white. The spotlights, as if shackling me to the ground by chains, held me still in that spot in front of the building. Two more guards came toward me from somewhere that I didn’t care to look, and stopped in arm’s reach. I kept my eyes trained on the guard in the doorway with the police baton. He had asked me a question and I didn’t know how to answer it, so I didn’t at first.
A white-hot pain stung me in the back and my knees buckled beneath me, sending me to the ground. I wanted to cry out in pain, but I knew it would only make them hit me harder, longer. I bit down on in the inside of my cheek so hard that the metallic taste of blood pooled inside my mouth.
“I will ask you again, Fleischer,” the guard with the police baton said—though according to my back, the ones standing beside me also had batons. “What made you return?”
I could hear his voice, but my eyes were clenched so tightly because of the pain, that I couldn’t tell where he was standing anymore. He was closer though, that much I knew.
Slowly, my eyes crept open, my vision was blurred for many long seconds.
He was standing directly over me.
I raised my head and looked at him and finally answered, “I belong here, sir. I pledged my life to The Order and I will die in its service.”
“Stand up.” His voice was calm, but stern.
I did what I was told, pushing through the pain and forcing myself to my feet. I raised my chin to appear strong and obedient; my legs were shaking only because of the pain, but I maintained my firm posture.
“Take him for punishment,” the guard demanded the others, “and then begin his transfer.”
They thought I would cry when I was stripped of my clothes and flogged with a whip. They thought I would beg them to stop, choke on my own vomit.