Being an anxious over-thinker is hard. You usually scare yourself. -- Anon Guest
Why, oh why, did clinging to the very bottom rung of the social ladder feel like hanging desperately from a trapeze... roughly a hundred Sidu's up[1] and with no safety net? CL-3 tried not to hyperventilate and faint -again- as things continued to deviate from her expected norm. Not that she had been much better within her expected norm, but at least there was a routine. Everything changed into certain uncertainty when the soldiers came.
They had come during free play, a time in which CL-3 attempted to hide in one of the cubbies from the bigger, meaner girls and play quietly with a stuffed poppet. She had screamed as the big suits came crashing through the ceiling and huddled up over her toy baby as they made loud noises. She'd wet herself when the big, armoured hands scooped her out of the cubby and carried her to a pod. The mean girls had laughed.
This wasn't like the other times, when she was told to walk along a path in her underthings, turn around, and go back. She wasn't going to be Selected. This was different. She was Taken. Admittedly, she was taken to a place with much warmer rooms, softer beds, and nice colours, but it was too different. There were no pictures on the walls with helpful signs of what was right and what was wrong. Green ticks with arrows showing the picture of the reward. Red crosses with arrows showing the punishment. There was no right way. There was no wrong way, and CL-3 now lived in a permanent haze of fear.
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