The Alternatives

6 | Divided Numbers

Pyro sat bolt upright, woken by the screaming alarms that shook the floor. Looking around his room, he saw that they awoke everyone.

He couldn't hear anything, not even his own thoughts, with the blaring alarms and the throbbing in his forehead. The alarms lasted around thirty seconds. Afterwards, there was a voice over the intercom. The voice of the plastic looking lady from yesterday. The boys around him were panicking and getting dressed hurriedly.

Good morning everyone, it is currently 5:00 a.m. here in the Hexagon. Breakfast will be served in 10 minutes and you will have 20 minutes to eat, before going immediately to your shift. Security will be accompanying you to make sure that you meet your appropriate time slots. Anyone who attempts to resist, will be sent to the head security office for punishment.

The boys around Pyro were hurriedly getting dressed into their orange jumpsuits, the only clothes that the Hexagon had provided. The only other clothes they had were the ones that they arrived in, that were torn and dirty andwere the clothes they slept in. Pyro doubted that they had any decent laundry service for the employees. Not that they were employees. Employees get paid.

The room was horrible and cramped.

The room itself was about five feet wide and ten feet long, and there were eight other teenage boys living in the same room as Pyro. The steel walls provided zero comfort, and there were pipes running across the ceiling, with concrete floor and no furniture except for the sleeping bags that the boys slept on and the wardrobe where the jumpsuits were kept.

Pyro didn't know anyone there. He wished that at least Connor would be (by some miracle) in the same dorm as him.

They had met that day in Prime Minister Shade's office. Pyro's toxic girlfriend was texting him, and Pyro was ignoring her. He had just told her that he was breaking up with her, and she was frantically trying to reconcile him back into her spider web. Not this time. It's not worth it.

He saw the boy reading a book when Pyro came into the room. He looked distressed, like he was trying to focus on the book but was then very distracted by something that was obviously bothering him. Pyro walked up to the chair beside his.

Pyro's heart stopped when he saw the book that Connor was reading. It was called "The Starved Assassins" and was one of the few books that Pyro read when he was alone, and couldn't be judged by his peers.

"Do you like the narrator?'

Connor looked up, startled. "What?"

"Oh, sorry, I-uh, I didn't mean to disturb you." Pyro looked around for another seat.

"Do I like the narrator?'

"Well-uh, yeah. But, uh, I didn't mean to interrupt you, so I'll just sit somewhere-"

"No- dude, it's cool. Sit." Connor smiled. Pyro obliged.

The Starved Assassins was Pyro's favourite murder mystery. It ends narrowing down the killer to two characters, but arubtly ends with the death of the narrator before the characters find out who the murderer is.

"And to answer your question," Connor continued, with a smile. God, that smile. "I didn't like the narrator that much, I thought he was a bit dodgy."

Pyro laughed. "Thank you! I thought I was going to lose it if one other person liked that rat. Good riddance in my opinion." The two boys laughed, ignoring the weird looks from every other teenager in the room. They even got some weird looks from the Prime Minister.

"I'm Pyro, by the way. Well, everyone calls me Pyro. But," he lowered his voice to a whisper. "If we're not in public, you can call me by my real name. Patrick."