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The Siren was haunting Eli.
Every night, Eli woke in a cold sweat. She could not sleep without seeing her face, in blood. The nightmares weren't always the same. Some nights, she would scream and fight and plead for Eli's interference. On other nights, she merely hung there. So still and quiet that one would think she was part of the tree she was tied to.
It was not the worst thing Eli had ever done, but she hadn't been able to rest since. She would wake with a lingering weight pressed upon her chest. Laying there, she'd remember the weight of the Siren in her arms and the way she shook after spilling blood on her behalf.
It wasn't her fault - the Siren wasn't supposed to be there to begin with. How was Eli supposed to know she'd be followed? How was she supposed to expect the chaos that came after? Why would she choose someone she barely knew over the three of them? It wasn't like she never asked for her help.
When the sun was up, Eli pushed the woman out of her mind. There were other things to worry about. Maybe her exhaustion was starting to show. Director Knox didn't say anything about it, but he told her to deal with the recruits for a few days. It seemed like a tacit acknowledgment of her need for rest.
The recruits dreaded the days that Eli ended up overseeing training. It didn't happen often. Eli observed the training grounds with a chilling detachment. So what if they were struggling? It would prepare them. Alex thought she was too hard on them, but it was a necessary evil to weed out the weak and forge the strong.
The brutal exercises were all tools, in her eyes, to separate the resilient from the fragile. She didn't flinch when a recruit was struck down or when a plea for mercy fell on deaf ears. They'd recover. They'd learn. If not, they'd die out there.
Her voice, when she spoke, was icy, devoid of empathy. "Training is not for the faint-hearted," she would say, her tone cutting through the air like a blade. "If you can't deal with this, you're useless against the Republic."
But, admittedly, there were occasions when she had to step in and stop the trainers from going too far. It wasn't out of compassion but to maintain order, to ensure that the Elites remained a force to be reckoned with.
To Eli, the abuses in the training grounds were a necessary evil, a means to an end.
"One of our recruits disappeared," Alex said tiredly one morning. "I thought they meant he was dead. But he just ran off. It's the third one this year."
"Why?"
He shrugged. "It's not like they say bye. Who knows."
They were too low on manpower to ignore something like this.
Suspicion crept up on her when she was overlooking training that day. She was quiet about her arrival, slipped in a little later than usual, and didn't think there was any need to interrupt.
She scanned the training grounds, her eyes narrowing as she witnessed the Elites in charge of training abusing their authority. One of the newest recruits was being pushed around physically, despite the blood streaming out his nose.
