5 AMY
I AM AS SILENT AS DEATH.
Do this: Go to your bedroom. Your nice, safe, warm bedroom that is not a glass coffin behind a morgue door. Lie down on your bed not made of ice. Stick your fingers in your ears. Do you hear that? The pulse of life from your heart, the slow in-and-out from your lungs? Even when you are silent, even when you block out all noise, your body is still a cacophony of life. Mine is not. It is the silence that drives me mad. The silence that drives the nightmares to me.
Because what if I am dead? How can someone without a beating heart, without breathing lungs live like I do? I must be dead. And this is my greatest fear: After 301 years, when they pull my glass coffin from this morgue, and they let my body thaw like chicken meat on the kitchen counter, I will be just like I am now. I will spend all of eternity trapped in my dead body. There is nothing beyond this. I will be locked within myself forever.
And I want to scream. I want to throw open my eyes and wake up and not be alone with myself anymore, but I can’t.
I can’t.
6 ELDER
“SO, WHAT’S THE THIRD CAUSE OF DISCORD?” I ASK ELDEST AS silence creeps around us in the Learning Center.
He contemplates me. For a moment, anger flashes in his faded eyes, and I wonder if he’ll strike me.