Awake

Chapter Thirty-Eight - Preparations for Battle

To Miriam's profound relief, Jonathan didn't make a speech. At least, not a dramatic, rehearsed speech designed to get the blood boiling and inspire people to lay down their lives for the cause. He simply stood in front of the youth corps and talked.

  What's more, he told them everything. He told them all about their distrust, about the break-in at the archives, about the risks they had put things under. He didn't hold anything back, not their rule-breaking or the information they'd found or even the doubts they had. Jonathan laid it all out in front of them, bald and truthful and unadorned.

  Miriam was glad. She wasn't sure she could have coped with him painting a picture of a perfect revolution. It would have been a lie too far. While the others might be raring to go, itching to get into the fight, Miriam felt sick to the stomach at the thought and the idea of making it some kind of glorious martyrdom only made things worse.

  It wasn't that Miriam disapproved of the cause they were fighting for. The treatment of people in this place was all wrong, from start to finish. It was as if all the humanity had been taken out of them. They were being treated like things, data, numbers in system, and that is where real evil starts.

But Miriam wasn't a warrior. She wasn't like Carmen, who could look you in the eye and smile while she slit your throat, or like Jonathan, who seemed to think anything was worth it for victory, or Natalia, whose detachment had been trained into her all her life. Miriam couldn't help but empathise with the people she might otherwise be killing.

She wasn't proud of it. She looked around her at the people she was tied to by this strange, unexplained project and she wished she could be more like them: more confident, stronger, more daring, less afraid, less emotional. She wished she could trot out snappy lines like Carmen and threaten death as if it meant nothing. But if she had ever been able to, she couldn't now.

Miriam had seen death, lots of it. It had haunted her every day, a ghoul watching over her shoulder while she fought against it with everything she had but every time she calculated the perfect attack, it appeared behind her again, laughing. She couldn't remember the things she had seen and still be a killer. Miriam put people back together again. She didn't take them apart.

   The youth corps watched Jonathan silently, standing to attention in their perfect rows, dressed in white, distinguished only by their varying heights and the colour of their identical haircuts. Miriam scanned over the crowd, trying to figure out what they were thinking. She didn't know.

"Miriam?"

She looked down at Puck as he sat, face still turned forward. He had spoken very quietly, out of the corner of his mouth.

"Yeah?" she replied. "I'm here."

"Do they look convinced?" he asked.

"I don't know," Miriam admitted. "It's hard to tell. They're just listening. They're not doing anything at all."

"I don't like this," Puck told her, quietly. "I don't think this is a good idea at all. It's too rushed. It's too raw. We don't have all the facts."

"I wouldn't like it anyway," Miriam whispered. "I don't like killing things."

Puck smiled faintly. "You never used to be like that."

"I've seen more death now than I saw before. I'm not going to be a part of it. I don't even want to authorise it. People shouldn't have to get hurt for things to improve."

"You still think that life was real, huh?" Puck murmured.

"You're never going to convince me otherwise," Miriam replied. "I know what life feels like and that, that felt like life. Almost more than this does."