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things you think you should do, always ask yourself: Am I following protocol? At the end of the day it is the only thing that will save your life.”
    I could not tell whether she meant the drawing or the tree I’d climbed. And then she leaned in close so I could smell the cigarettes on her breath, could see the hairs and wrinkles on her upper lip. “And if you ever disobey me again,” she whispered against my ear, “I will kill you myself.”
    That threat must have been issued to every single one of us at some point because over time other backs became as straight as mine, other faces less enamored with the idea of mothers and love. I stopped climbing trees. I stopped talking to Alex with anything other than contempt, stopped talking to the boys in general. We girls became allies. Allies, but never friends. Like a person you can share a toothbrush with if necessary but whose eye color you might never know.
    I cannot erase the image of Alex. Alex, in our tree. Alex, dead.
    I have always followed protocol. Until tonight, when I cannot breathe. When the boy leaning over me is killing me. Protocol means always finding a way to win, but I’m not looking. I’m not even trying to save myself.
    â€œCome on,” Ezra says, but he doesn’t budge an inch.
    His fists press harder against my windpipe. He smiles.
    He is drunk with the power of it. Power to make me want to beg. Power to determine my fate.
    No one else in the training room asks him to stop. Everyone is engaged in some kind of violent sparring of their own, with their hands and their training knives and sticks. There is another room full of treadmills, another for target practice, another where you have to assemble your gun with your eyes blindfolded while knives dart out at you. Every room is full tonight.
    Perhaps we feel like we need to be punished.
    None of us are really speaking to one another right now. Some mutter about how selfish it was of them, Alex and Margot. To kill themselves on the day before testing, as if they had wanted to take us down with them. Others see it as part of the test: to fall apart now would be to fail, and so they fight harder.
    Margot and Alex were sparring partners. From what I could see they did not even get along. That is what I am thinking, lying there, when someone says, “Get off her,” and Ezra is suddenly ripped off me by Gray.
    The two of them fight until they bleed.
    Training sessions started light when we were younger, but there is no mercy in these rooms now. If you are worrying about how best not to break someone else’s leg, you might just find yourself paralyzed before you can do anything aboutit. We are feral, almost heartless, when we fight. I wrap my arms around my chest. My breath comes in huge, painful gulps, and still, not nearly enough enters my lungs. Finally I scramble out of the way and lean against the wall.
    Ezra has always been my sparring partner. Short and stocky but with arms of steel, a brick wall when he wants to be. Gray is taller, and one and a half years older than us, with his tie loose around his neck, the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up his arms as they’ve been since I first knew him. I can tell that he is looking for a fight tonight. He is the one who discovered Alex and Margot, the one who saw the worst of it. For that, it is probably smart to stay out of his way, and Ezra knows that. He scuttles away with a bleeding nose. Gray has plenty of vulnerabilities, from my vantage point, but tonight even the other boys cannot look at him.
    When I am strong enough to stand, I glare at him. “Why did you do that?”
    For a moment I regret it because he flinches. I am afraid he will say he didn’t want to see me hurt, but he doesn’t. He blinks at me as if he has no idea who I am, where we are, and then finally he shrugs, swipes at his brow with a severely cut-up hand. “Why not? I need someone who will not make this easy for