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and reached in to retrieve something. I tried not to look too closely at the room while he was busy, but in another world, another time, this could have been my room. The council told us we were lucky to have a home at all, blessed to have a safe one. So much of our sector had been destroyed in the Civil War with the Easterners. The council used what we had left. They could only protect us if we lived in a central location. Soon each sector built a compound. They all looked the same and held the same story. Individuality was a trend of the past.
    Of course, Templeton didn’t look quite so shabby.
    This boy’s room could pass for a home, or what I imagined a home would look like.
    The boy returned from his closet holding a bottle of tan-ish liquid and a shot glass. My stomach tightened at the sight of these objects, and I could detect the beating of my heart quicken. The boy poured himself a glass and threw it back without a second thought to me. As the contents of the bottle slid down his throat, he closed his eyes. I knew the routine well. My mom was the one who’d first taught it to me. Maybe if he had been a natural I would have told him drinking doesn’t let you forget anything; it just prolongs the pain. But everything I had seen today reminded me he wasn’t a natural.
    He looked to me again and stilled as if suddenly remembering this was something I wasn’t supposed to see. He shook his head slightly and moved to return the bottle back to the closet. It was almost as if he were embarrassed. Nervous. Around me.
    When the chosen ones were first presented to us, flashed across our television screens in a haze of stylized infomercials, there was a lot of rumbling and joking around—we were going to let these pretty boys fight our wars? Some of our more artistically inclined naturals protested that it would be a sin to mess up such stunning faces, proof of the ability of science to create art. That was until we saw what they could do.
    It only took a single chosen one to destroy, demolish, annihilate five POWs from the Eastern sector. They had been caught attempting to thrust a suicide bomber into the midst of Supplies Day in an improvised tent town called Disputania. The Western sector was horrified and disgusted that these men had been willing to kill people as they attempted to receive food and medical supplies from our council. These people weren’t soldiers; they were mothers and children who were starving and sick. Their husbands and fathers were away fighting to keep the Eastern sector at bay.
    We all wanted revenge for the mere thought that they could terrorize these innocents.
    The council made a point of playing video of the POWs as they awaited their confrontation with the chosen one, to ensure us they’d been well-fed and taken care of. The council wanted to show us that these pieces of scum were in their best physical condition when they faced off with the chosen one.
    It took him less than ten minutes to kill them all. As my people watched the creature snap bones in a dizzy dance of brutality, we didn’t feel horror. We felt hope.
    The boy in front of me didn’t seem frightening. It was as if he didn’t know what to do with me.
    “What would you like from me, sir?” I asked, staring at the scar on his chin. It was easier to focus there while I spoke; it helped to calm the feeling that this endearingly nervous chosen one could snap my neck if he so chose—and that no one would care. He could say I committed some crime and the world would believe it. I had already been marked.
    Of course, he had taken me away from the other chosen ones, whose grabs and laughs made me feel beyond uncomfortable. I was intrigued.
    “Some rules they overlook,” he spoke, answering a question I had not asked. He cleared his throat again; I was beginning to think this was a nervous habit. This was a boy who felt uncertainty. What else did he feel? I thought they would have made him stronger, without these