When you're faced with resistance, a binding force guarantees you have to work twice as hard. You keep pulling the rubber band of fate, seemingly going to never snap, but when you try your hardest, it breaks, leaving a satisfying screech in its death.

Maria Cobb combed back a plait of her thick black hair which had somehow wound up in its own ponytail, then braided a crown. It was the hairstyle her mother had always put on her before special occasions, when the other neighboring Snow cobras came for reunions. She licked her lips, imagining the hot bread cracking against her tongue, and the ice cream following in thick vanilla drops. Whenever she had nightmares about the Strangers, the dinners always seemed to erase away those anxieties.

But a subsequent screech of death, and her mother with two fang-size holes in her body. That's when Maria's eyes turned purple.

She slashed at the metallic walls with her knife, though she knew it could be dulled and the menders couldn't fix the scratches. But she liked it, for it looked like a tiger had been set loose in her room and she was able to kill it before it could kill her. The idea of false trophies was taboo to the White Block, but she couldn't help but raise herself up when nobody else was around to do it.

"Knock, knock," a man's voice said overlaid with a knocking on wood.

Maria pushed the knife back under her drawer and turned around to meet the same man from the convenience store.

"How did the anti-venom treatment go?" He asked, stepping over the threshold as Maria lashed out her arm to halt him.

"Mind your own boundaries before you cross mine," she hissed, pushing the air in front of her, and the man walking backwards as though pushed with her invisible force.

"Right, I'm sorry. When I was in the other Legion, the leader considered anyone in the army her friend. A "come right in" y'know," he almost scoffed, raising both the sides of his lips into a smile.

"Yes, and that's precisely why she was killed," she said, hoping her words sliced into him. "And don't expect to be friends with anybody here, except yourself. Especially. Not. Me."