Blue

Cannot Be Washed

Tracking down the frenzy was surprisingly labor intensive. Not for Adam as much, since he hadn't been part of that 'math' or science group or whatever it was (he realized all too quickly how little attention he had paid it when Anton had first shown it to him), but he felt like he had barely seen Curtis since the battle. He was constantly inside the room with a few of the others and newbies, tracking and calculating. Adam had poked his head inside the room once and had been greeted with a room of scribbling pencils and heads bent intently over maps. It had given him a rather bittersweet feeling; he found that he missed the scratching, soothing noise of several pens far more than he thought he would. It was interesting what noises he missed. He hadn't bothered to enter the room fully and had turned and made his way back to the training grounds and to the welcoming, familiar feeling of Fabayo trying to draw forth every dark bloom of broken blood vessels from the flower bed of his body as she could possibly manage. He was nothing more than a blood-letter. Now, in the training rooms, in the blood room designed to find the frenzy on full moons, and, worst of all, when he had sullenly joined the others and beat the new Ensigns to the brink of death. The frenzy had been too far away to justify chasing them across the ocean to kill them, though Adam had protested to Fabayo that he was more than willing to walk 500 miles to get to them if he needed to. Instead, Fabayo and a few others had insisted that it was time for another Culling, and there was no option to sit out of it this time.

Being on the inflicting end of the ritual felt... indescribable. His emotions drained out of him in steady drops, like his blood on the strange machine that could locate the frenzy. The night before the Culling, he hadn't slept at all, not even the poor, fitful sleep that had been his only constant since the battle. He had walked alone to the room with the frenzy finding mechanism and he had placed his fingers one by one on the little fingerpad and needle, drawing up the image of the frenzy's location over and over and over again. He stared at it. The little dot on the map, too far away for the others, but far, far too close for him. It didn't matter. The following day was the Culling, and he had participated in it just as he was expected to. The moon waxed, blowing out like blown glass into a perfect sphere of white, watching over them all. As usual, his bloodlust increased. His foot connected. His shame grew.

The worst Culling had been an unexpected trainee. He knew a decent number of the new Ensign, if only by a passing glance to their faces, but when they had walked in the trainee he had passed over, the one that resembled Chase so much, his heart stuttered nervously and then started to thrum a bit faster. The Chase-like trainee's presence meant two things. One, that one of the Ensigns who had survived the ritual after Adam and Curtis had selected him, though he was so new, and two, that that brand new Ensign hadn't made it out of their first battle. It was a serrated blade, one that tore an enormous hole in his gut and left him with ragged and painful edges. He couldn't decide what was worse: going into battle or inflicting the Culling. The way the Chase-like trainee's face was so open. His eyes had been wide, brown, trusting. All of their eyes had been trusting. But these eyes, these eyes were too familiar and it scared Adam.

He had walked into the room and Fabayo had been the one to apologize to him, as Anton had apologized to Adam, and someone before Anton had probably apologized to him. Another Ensign had flipped the switch, the one that would send that horrible noise out to dominate the air, and he had fallen to his knees. His face screwed up. His hands were on his ears and then he was doubling over. Adam's very bones vibrated with the force of the noise. But maybe it wasn't the noise. Maybe it was that horrible shame. Filling up his body with bubbles like carbonation. Or a pot boiling over, steaming water bubbling and frothing as this little skinny kid shook and cried. But there was no time to feel bad. The Ensigns surged forwards, their boots aimed for his little head. They crushed him and broke him, kicking him until the trauma and noise was so bad that his head was a mass of lumpy red. Adam's fingers shook with the force of the bubbling water inside him. But this is what they had to do. This is what the trainee had asked for. What he himself had asked for. He had to remember that. He was just doing what he was supposed to. This boiling feeling rising up inside of him was doing so for no reason. He didn't know why it was making him shake and why it was poking angrily at the backs of his eyes until they stung with the pain of the carbonation.