Page 72 of Slashed Bonds

I’d like to call us the rejects.

Slashed. Every one of us. Taken off the chopping block because we were too fucked up to exist in the realm of normal, and stacked here, in a rink in the woods, where nobody would have to look at us.

And that’s what I’m thriving on.

The uniqueness. The strange, dangerous, unfamiliar sensation of having found…

A tribe? Is it too early for that bullshit?

Probably.

But fuck. I like it here.

Greenie is funny.

He records everything, which is a problem when the everything includes me, and he’s been told so, twice, once by me and once by a goaltender with blood on his chin. He’s also good. Sneaky good. A shot that only lands one in six, but the one is always from somewhere nobody expected.

And he’s right about the content.

They need it. The committee wants villains, and the villains need a highlight reel, and there’s a deadline rolling in that Roz mentioned twice tonight in the voice of a woman who’s watched three social media hires quit in a month.

I could get Maddie on board.

The thought arrives, and I turn it over with the caution it deserves.

Because Maddie is lethal bubblegum.

Pink hair, pink phone, pink everything, and a mind under all that sugar that can put a rumor into circulation and have it back to you with interest inside an hour. If I bring her in, this stops being a program playing nice with the government’s Omega rule and starts being a program with a weapon.

And that’s before anyone finds out she can skate.

Nobody needs to know that yet. Maddie on the ice is a concoction few people should be trusted to handle.

Then there’s Viper.

I should explain Viper, and I can’t, not properly, because Viper doesn’t need much explanation when it comes to her existence. She arrived at Bellwether in my fourth month, two weeks before I left, and in that time she said perhaps forty words to me, and every one of them was a nail going into exactly the right board.

She isn’t loud like Maddie. She isn’t quiet like me.

She’s still, in the way a thing is still when it’s waiting.

Nobody knows what was done to her. I’ve never asked. Maddie asked once and got a look that ended the conversation for a year.

What I know is this: she has a list.

It’s longer than mine. And every name on it is going to find out, eventually, that being patient isn’t the same as forgetting.

If I’m the one who got slashed and Maddie’s the one who starts fires, Viper is the one who makes sure nothing ever gets to happen twice.

Ugh. I have to update her too.

Though if I tell Maddie first, Viper will have the whole story before I’ve finished typing, because that’s how the two of them work.

I’m not the social one.

That’s not my role.

The three of us have a name, apparently. Maddie came up with it in the day room at Bellwether with a marker and the back of a meal menu, and I’ve never been able to shake it.