The Classix

(2ND DRAFT) chapter NINE

Note: I love you so much and I hate how stressful life has been. I'm here and I don't take for granted how lucky I am to have you reading this book. Thank you, and know I'm always trying to make you something exciting with lots of plot twists.

PREVIOUSLY ON THE CLASSIX: Carstan's here. He's the new member? That's a change!!

EMERAY

For lack of extensive history, most classes in my school became studies on the customs and cultures of our two neighboring nations, Notness and Betnedoor. One of my least favorite lessons of all was the one on prisons––on the huge, gaping penitentiaries the other countries had. The punishments lurking behind their cement walls used to make my skin crawl.

In Notness, the undisputed intelligence-capital of the world, torture is turned into a science. A criminal, upon sentence, is to become the newest case-study, and is thus made into a point of reference, a grasp at understanding the darker shades of a human being. And to really capture those shades, well, the tests aren't always the most humane. I've heard horror stories of burning, faulty surgeries, and purposeful drowning over lectures my fellow students blinked through with lackadaisical focus. The way they could become so desensitized to the terrors in their notebooks never ceased to astonish me.

But despite the eeriness Notness supplied, conditions were by far the cruelest in Betnedoor: Crammed living accommodations, infrequent meals, and a time stamp for execution on everyone, regardless of their crime. It could be murder. It could be theft. Either way, a date was always made, and the sentenced would have to live out their few moments left in those quarters knowing exactly what was going to come next. That was how they kept the peace in a nation so massive––through indescribable fear.

Eldae, unlike the others, is a place with very few structured systems at all, much less a real jail. But that was no matter. Perhaps it wasn't on a scale quite as grand as theirs, but for a long time I dreaded those lessons for the way they made me feel like I was trapped in my own sort of prison. Like those in Notness, I knew of burns, and cuts, and drowning. Like those in Betnedoor, I knew of unfair punishment. And like any convict, I knew of the endless dream of unreachable things––the dream of a second chance, a new life, a fairy godmother from an old nursery rhyme swooping in to save me from everything. And while I was busy dreading these classes whenever they came up, I knew more than a few people who relished in them––who treated the teacher's lengthy presentations like they were hearing a coach give pointers before a big game.

Those people, of course, were who they always were:

Carstan, Felix, and their gang of friends.

And the big game, of course, was what it always was:

Torturing me.

And so, after years and years and years of my life being detained by Carstan van Horne, I would be lying if I didn't say that when I first joined the Famoux it felt, in some ways, like escaping one of those high lock-down prisons. For the first time in my life, the dream was real, and it was happening.

I had a second chance.

I had a new life.

Norax Geddes had come around, and she'd saved me from her son.

But how was I supposed to know that sometimes inmates aren't freed––that sometimes they just get moved somewhere else? And how was I supposed to know that the one person who imprisoned me my whole life––the one person I'd been saved from––would someday willingly join my sentence?