Value the dead, we’re all they have left. That’s what they whisper in my ear each night as I see the silhouettes of bodies, fragmented by the bars of my cell. The only legacy they leave behind are scarlet streaks of blood that glimmer black in the moonlight. Some are lucky enough to have kept their faces, their mouths open in fear and pain as they were stripped to the bone. Some still have the last gasps of life lingering in their bodies.

Those ones are the worst, you can hear their rattling breath, their desperate pleas for life as they are dragged past. Some will live for mere hours before their last breath escapes them, some will live for a few days with their own hopelessness pooling around them, staining the remnants of their soul. These are the ones who have caused trouble at some point. The nurses strip them of their muscle and then cauterize the would, wrapping their wounds in padded bandages, preventing them from rubbing away the remnants of charred flesh.
This is the only hope that we’re allowed, that death will come quickly as we bleed to death rather than slowly starve. It’s the only motivation that we have to be good, the idea that we won’t be condemned for days of endless suffering. It’s what allows the routine to become ingrained in our very being. We get up, ignore the scent of blood, eat a large breakfast of unseasoned meat, stale bread, hard cheese, and vegetables. Our captors come and let us out of our cages, clipping chains to the thick iron bands encircling our wrists and necks. We are dragged to a large open courtyard laced with exercise equipment. The crackle of electricity pushes us onward, sweat pouring down our backs and dripping down our faces, drenching our hair and clothes. The sun beating down on us as we continue to lift and pull, our muscles rippling under our skin. A small break for lunch and then we continue on until the sky turns pink and we collectively stand. Men and women in white lab coats circle around us, measuring biceps, waists, thighs any muscle we have. Two groups are formed, one sentenced to die and one sentenced to live. I cannot tell which is more tragic, the idea of living, knowing that it is only your destiny to die or to know that in a few hours time you will die a heartbreakingly painful death.
I had remained undecided between the two until I was sentenced to death by the woman in the white lab coat. Her long black hair was pulled back tightly into a bun with a few stray strands framing her angular face. She was beautiful, a beautiful angel of death with ice cold eyes that bored their way into mine. I stared at her profile as she guided me to the desolate gathering. Her grip was delicate, a way of giving me a choice I suppose. Or the illusion of one, what choice was there really? When we were surrounded by guards with crackling electric prods.
I tried to remember every detail of her face, thinking it would be the last one that I would ever see. I etched her features into my memory: the sharp line of her jaw, her prominent high cheekbones. Her perfectly straight nose, the curve of her lips, the way her hair cradled her face. The way the sun shone through her eyes making them look almost transparent. The blue in them trying to infiltrate that space between her iris and cornea.
Yes, she was a beautiful angel of death, nothing like the others who stood around the group with their harsh features and unrelenting stares. Her long fingers let go of my arm and my eyes found the base of her throat where a small gold medallion lay, suspended upon a thin red thread. I closed my eyes, letting the sun beat down upon my face as we were slowly herded like cattle inside.

The atmosphere was white, clinical, cold, harsh. There were no windows in my final resting place. Only a cold veneer so different from the warmth of the sun. It was then I decided that living with the destiny of dying was better than death itself. At least you had sunlight there.
Slowly, people began to trickle out of the room and the screaming began. It split through the silence as easily and as harshly as a knife splits flesh. It demanded to be heard, recognized their last seconds alive etched upon our memories. Value the dead, we’re all they have left. That statement never seemed truer than it had in those moments.
I had wondered what my last moments would be like, on the long dark nights I would sit in my cell, listening to the music of rattling breaths and melancholy. I stopped when I realized there were only two options, to die screaming or to die slowly.
These were the options I weighed out in my mind. How ironic it was; my last moments spent thinking about how I was going to die. I was the last left in the room when the woman in the white lab coat approached me, dark circles and lines of tiredness spread across her face.
“Number 49,” she sighed, looking down at a clipboard in her hands and checking off boxes. “Please follow me,” she said as she began a brisk walk out the door she came in. It was passive, weak even- I realized as I followed her- to follow without resistance. But what choice did I have? Death was an inescapable fate.
We turned down a dark hallway with an exit sign illuminated in red at the end of it. “Where are we-“ I began before she quieted me with a gentle touch on my arm.
“Quiet please,” she whispered as she withdrew a key from the pocket of her lab coat and opened the door.
The hallway was illuminated only by fluorescent lights with glass doors at the end, letting a spread of stars decorate it. Two guards stood at the end of the hall, electric prods clipped at their waist.
“Excuse me, miss?” one of them called out as we entered the hall. He was young with a few freckles dotting his face.
“Yes officer?” she said turning to face him, a look of innocent astonishment spreading across her face.
“You can’t bring him here, sorry, subjects aren’t allowed outside of the medical center.” The guard looked at me  for a moment before returning his gaze back to her. “I’m sure you can understand why.”
She blinked at him for a moment before laughing slightly. “I’m so sorry, it’s just my first day here and I got lost. It all seemed pretty straightforward when they explained it to me, I just…” she laughed again, “I don’t know, I suppose you could call me directionally challenged.” She smiled at him, her white teeth glimmering in the lights.
The guard quickly cleared his throat and held out a hand. “Here perhaps I can get you back on the right track.” He smiled as she handed the clipboard to him. His fingers were just about to close around it when it fell, hitting the floor with a loud clatter.
“I’m so sorry, I’m apparently incredibly clumsy too,” she laughed, beginning to bend down to pick it up.
“No, allow me,” the guard held out a hand and kneeled down. Before I knew what had happened her knee had connected with the guard’s chin and his feet were swept out from underneath him. The woman grabbed the electric prod and pressed it into his sternum, his eyes going wide with shock.
“Hey!” the guard at the end of the hall yelled as she told me to run. My legs took off without my consent. She ran at him, her arm outstretched as he extended his. Just as the prod was about to connect with her body she slammed hers into his with the crackle of unharnessed electricity. The expression on the guard’s face was one of shock as she pressed the weapon into him. You could smell his flesh burning, taste it on the tip of your tongue as he descended to the floor almost in slow-motion.
I realized I had stopped, the world in a frozen tableau around me as the epiphany came to me. I wasn’t going to die. Not here in the very least, everything I had fantasized about, how I would die, my last thoughts, my last moments, my last sounds, my last breath… it was all meaningless. The vitality of that possibility filled me in the short seconds it took that angel to reach the doors. Not my angel of death, but my angel of life. My beautiful angel of vigor with her backdrop, the cosmos, spreading out in front of me.
She beckoned me forward and I obeyed, my footsteps echoing through the hall.

The room she took me to was small and cramped. There was another girl there, made of nothing but skin and bone. Her cheeks appeared to be hollowed in, the flesh scooped out of them. Her arms nothing but bone clothed in skin mimicking cloth. Her eyes were tired, just as hollow as her cheeks and her hair ran down her back in lanky stripes.
“Number 84 and 49, charmingly dehumanizing,” I turned and saw her, the angel who had taken me out of purgatory. She didn’t smile at me. Instead, she moved to the front of the room and sat down across from us.
“You may be under the presumption that I am your hero, but you are sadly mistaken. I’m nothing but a person as cruel as the ones who guarded you. The only benefit of having me here is that your lives have the potential to get marginally better. I can guarantee a longer life since if it weren’t for me you’d both have drawn your last breath hours ago. But it won’t be much longer. You see, I’m in the business of starting revolutions and you both will be the figureheads. Why, because you were chosen by people much more important for me. What for, because you are a part of a cancer that has been accumulating for centuries. Why has no one bothered to cleanse it and before they had begun they had failed. What’s different this time is they have me and I’m not as easy to fool as they are.
“Now, onto a more pertinent matter. What exactly is this revolution about? Well, it’s about power and the means of achieving power or ways those who are powerful can go about achieving more power. Or so they think. Strength, intelligence, and beauty are the most common illusions for power, but all are difficult to come by. Which is where you both come in. You were born to become one of these three attributes and then be harvested for them. Number 49 is obviously strength. What else could he be without those bulging muscles? Unfortunately, you aren’t very intelligent or else you would’ve discovered it would be extremely easy to overpower the guards and you're very submissive to their will. Number 89, intelligence but as weak as a twig, I could break you in half within a blink of an eye. This also makes you extremely easy to control.
“Put you both together and what do you have? An extremely powerful soldier who does not kneel to anyone, a formidable combination. Place beauty in there and it becomes seductive, like everything evil. They told you to value the dead, but what if I gave you life? An opportunity to wrap this world up into a cocoon and force it’s metamorphosis to give power to the weak. The power for you to be free? Would you want that? Would you want to fight for this world that has given you nothing? Nothing but the fear of death and interaction. Nothing but the way it painted all humans into the colour of monsters. Does the chance to change this make it worth fighting for?”
I stared at her, her eyes were different now. Something had changed within them, a fire had sparked and I could see the flames dancing. As she spoke I saw them spreading, flickering across her face, changing it into something that struck the fear of life itself into me. But I also felt a spark of something within me. A spark that could either be kindled and cared for or snuffed out before it had begun. It was a spark that motivated me to change the world.
“What if you’re one of the elite, someone who's been watching us die for your benefit? You already have what you want and you don’t want anyone else to have it. It would make it easy for you to come out on top with everyone opposing you were gone and a small group of weak people, like us, to deal with. How do we know you aren’t using us like they are?” Number 89 said, her voice quiet, barely more than a whisper. It seemed to rattle around in her chest before slipping out through her lips. It looked like every word she said would break her.
The woman smiled at her. “Well, you’re just going to have to believe me when I say I’m not. I can’t do anything to disprove it or to prove it. You’re just going to have to believe me when I say I’m only in this for the money. I could care less about this world, but that doesn’t mean that you have to.”
“Why do you have to be the one to start it?” 89’s eyes flickered up to the woman’s but as soon as they met hers, they flickered away. Perhaps the intensity of them was too strong, I knew it was for me.
The spark that had begun to grow was quickly retreating. Why would this woman help us, someone who clearly exhibited all three traits that we were being raised for? Why would she be paid to help us? Why would someone other than ourselves want to start a revolution?
“It doesn’t matter what my role in this is. It doesn’t matter what I want or what my goals are. What matters is that I’m giving you both a choice. A choice between condemning countless others to purgatory on the suspicion that I might be in this for myself and freeing them. You can be heroes or bystanders. I don’t care which ones because we’ll find someone else who's willing to become our hero. The choice is entirely yours, I would choose carefully.” The woman said as she stood. Our eyes trailed her as she made her way to the door and slammed it behind her, the sound reverberating through the room.
89 turned to me and we sat in silence, staring at each other before she said: “I think we should do it.”