I'm excited. For the first time in a while, I am excited. Elle and I wait by the door, ready to go.

It wasn't hard to get past the Matron guarding the dorms. All we did was make sure the kitchen cooked lamb stew for dinner. Matron always fell asleep after stew.

Sorrel said he'd meet us here at midnight. Where was he?

All of a sudden, hands clamp down on my shoulders and I open my mouth to scream in surprise but other hands shove a gag into it. In the darkness, I can't make out anything but slight silhouettes against the blackness.

"Don't make a sound." A gruff male voice commands and I do as told. The lead me out the door and out into the darkness. Fear starts to fill me. What was going on?

I hear another voice curse silently. Elle.

"Electra, stop fretting she'll be fine as long as she's telling the truth." Another voice says, this time female.

"I told you, she's telling the truth! She isn't a Complex spy for hells sake!" Elle replies. Wait, Electra knew these people?

I manage to spit out the gag. "Elle, what's going on?" I ask, and I'm surprised by how scared I sound.

"I said don't make a sound kid." The guy holding me says angrily and shoves the gag back in.

The push me along through the dark, me stumbling every two seconds. Questions whip through my head like a tornado, and suspicions rise about Electra. What was going on?

They lead me a fair way, and then I start to make out plaques in the ground, engraved with names and messages. The graveyard on the southern edge of the Complex. I had never even been to the graveyard.

The plaques are in neat lines, the white marble standing out in the moonlight. White flowers sit on graves, most getting trampled on as we walk on them. The thought occurs to me that we are walking over the dead, but I push it away.

I couldn't think about that now. Not with the churning in my stomach and the gag in my mouth.

We walk over the flowers and plaques, the darkness concealing our every step. As we get deeper into the graveyard, the plaques start to fade and the faint outline of the date the lying body below died gets fainter and fainter. I even see one dated back to 2059, only just over ten years after the war.

I notice the change in the writing, the sad quotes and RIP's changing to black letters. The first reads an A, and the next reads a C.

"The black part of the cemetery. We're almost there, don't worry Mae." Electra says, explanatory.

But I am worrying. What was going on?

I look up and see an approaching building, an old tomb, one that has a door and everything.

As we get there, one of the people leading the group stops and knocks on the door, once, then three times and then a pause and two more knocks.

I hear a lock click and the door is gently pulled inwards. The man behind me, holding my shoulders forces my neck down, so my head is facing the floor and all I can see of the person who opened the door is black shoes. I am led down a set of stone stairs that opens to an iron door with an old fancy lock.

"Dammit, who has the key." The person leading says, and a single old key, the kind you see in the history books is passed forward. The door is unlocked and the first thing I notice is the smell. Like damp soil, it fills my nostrils an I almost cough because I'm so overwhelmed by it. Then I feel rather than smell a heavy sour taste fills my lungs and nose. I cough, in the process the gag in my mouth coming out and see slightly green gas around me. But no one else is affected. I see Electra watch, a sad frown on her face. I feel myself drop to my knees, gasping for air. This wasn't right.

I manage to whisper something amazing like, "What's going on?" and then everything goes black.

-*-*-

The gun glints in the bright artificial light of the lights above. It's an automatic. Used in training many times before, but never has it made my heart flip like this.

All because it's pointed at the boy I kissed. He is strapped to a wall, his arms outstretched. His eyes are filled with fear. My heart pounds.

I could save him. It isn't the first time the thought has occurred to me, but now it's the most real. He was almost ready. Glore was wearing his smirk while talking to the other blacks, but it goes through one ear and out the other.

I knew the shots woultn't kill him. But I had seen someone pass out from the pain of their knock back quite a few times before. Bulletproof vests were bulletproof but not pain proof.

"Think of this as a history lesson." Glore is saying, smiling evilly. "In the war, when people were taken captive by the enemy side to America, such as Afghanistan or The African forces, they would use torture tactics to get information out of the captives. Along with whipping, this was one of their main tactics. They didn't want to kill the prisoner, so they would give them a bulletproof vest, strap them to somewhere like this and repeatedly shoot them. It was effective as it gave the prisoner pain, but did not kill them." He smiles over the students. They all squirm under his gaze, scared. So they should be. This man was psychopathic.

The other trainers stand by me, each with straight faces. They had learned to deal with stuff like this. They all just look ahead, except for one girl, Tala I think her name is. She's a C, but an ignorant one at that. She looks at me curiously.

She had a short black bob, strung through with tiny black plaits. She has regulation grey eyes, of course, and wasn't entirely a stick like most other girls. She has a completely oblivious personality, and is extremely-well, to say the least-annoying. She's made countless attempts to try make friends with me, but like many others-such as Reese, my roommate-she has given up.

"You like him don't you." She ponders.

"What?" I reply, confused. "I don't like him."

"Don't deny it. It's all over your face." She talks as if she knows everything. "Anyone who knows anything about feelings could tell that you like him."

I sigh, not really bothering to argue. "It's complicated." Glore loads the gun, clicks the safety off and aims at Calix.

She shakes her head. "No, it really isn't. You like him it's as simple as that." Without another word, she turns looks at Calix.

Glore shoots the first round and Calix winces against the pain. My heart skips a beat.

Glore waits two seconds, savouring the moment. Then he reloads, lines Calix up in his sights and shoots the second round.

I try hard to keep my face straight, but I fail exceedingly.

Glore pauses and Calix catches a few breaths of air. Then he shoots again and Calix cries out in pain. Continuously being slammed against a wall isn't really good for your health.

I vaguely see Tala take one last long fleeting glance at me and then she walks forward and steps between Glores gun and it's target. Glore stops shooting and glares at Tala.

"You have a death wish girl?" he asks.

Tala doesn't say a word, she just reaches up to her vest and unzips it. Then she pulls it off herself, holds it out at arms length and drops it, leaving herself completely vulnerable to bullets.

"Go ahead and kill me. Kill me in front of all these witnesses. See how that works for you."

Glore continues glaring at her, but uneasiness is in his eyes.

"The Complex won't do a thing to me girl. Not if your interfering with my training. Now move."

But Tala stays right where she is. "This method of training is wrong. What does it prepare them for? Being even more scared of a gun?" her words actually make some sense and to my surprise, I see some nods around the room.

Glore glares at her, and I hold my breath. Then he turns the safety off his gun and I exhale.

"Get the boy off the wall." he says to two of the trainers near him. They rush to the wall and start unstrapping Calix. Glore turns to the other students and his eyes sweep over them. "Drop and give me 50 push-ups." He booms, clearly agitated. The students do as they're told.

I lock eyes with tala and mouth a 'thank you'. She just shrugs as if it was nothing.

Calix is let off the wall, coughs, sees Glore glaring at him and glares back.

Even after being shot repeatedly, this kid had extreme nerve.

Glore just looks away from Calix and back at Tala. "Get out of my sight. I didn't kill you but I don't want you in my training again."

Tala just smiles sweetly, but sarcastically and says, "gladly." Then she turns and struts out of the room.

Glore turns back to Calix who is still standing there, catching his breath.

"What are you doing? What, you think just because I'm not going to shoot you you don't have to train? Drop to the ground and give me 50 push-ups like everyone else!"

Calix continues glaring, but doesn't say a word, abiding Glore's command.

I paste on my normal hard face and look over the students. A girl of the age of about 13 or 14 is struggling, breathing in hard, and almost collapsing on the floor.

I lean down and whisper to her. "You need to get off your knees. It's better on your toes. And drop your stomach closer to the ground." I instruct and she nods slightly and corrects herself.

Out of the corner of my eye I see Calix staring at me, but I don't look at him.

I had made the decision to stay away from him at all costs.

Of course, that decision would not last very long.

-*-*-

Training lasts the whole day, as normal, only stopping once so the trainers can have lunch. A trainer stays behind to make sure the students are doing as they're told-Glore had put them on precision practice, which was basically just punching a boxing dummy until you knew the basics of it-and then the rest of us had gone to the cafeteria and grabbed a quick lunch of the dreary plain stuff the complex always fed us.

Then we had gotten right back on training, up until approximately 4:30 in which everyone was relieved of training to do their duties.

I had a free afternoon, rare in my life, and I spent it in my room, reading and writing.

It was maths. I had made a habit after becoming a black to continue the classes like whites had to after they took the devotion. You had to continue doing schoolwork for half of each day even after the devotion, even with the other half taken up by the apprenticeship they have to do.

I had always been too caught up in planning for freedom for an apprenticeship, but I had taken an interest in schoolwork. After I- when I became a black, I had at first thought nothing about schoolwork. Then one day, I had seen a group of white students, about the age of 13 or 14, running around and laughing, and talking about how and their maths teacher was, and suddenly I longed for that kind if thing. Some pitiful teachers gave me some old-but extremely thick- extension books in which I had spent most of my spare time in, learning Pythagoras theorem and trigonometry.

Very few people knew about my strange habits, only Reese-who at first had raised an eyebrow but now just walks into the room while I'm reading and looks right past the books-and the teachers that supplied me with the books-who just sigh when I drop by them when I'm off duty and give me new books.

I'm doing a unit of revision, mainly algebra, when Reese walks in. I just continue doing my work and tell her to close the door behind her, but she clears her throat and I look up to see Calix standing there, looking at me wearing just a tank top and tights, and reading glasses over my contacted grey eyes, a calculator in my hand and a thick maths textbook in my lap. The strangest thing is, he isn't at all surprised.

I take off my glasses, agitation overtaking my beating heart that quickens when I see Calix.

"Something up?" I ask.

Reese scoffs. "Nothing, except for the fact that bullet-lover here apparently has a thing for the F. I told him you weren't interested but he insisted on seeing you to tell you something most likely ubertastically interesting." She speaks the word ubertastically with sarcasm, and I don't bother to correct her on her horrible grammar.

"He's fine Reese." I say to her and close the maths book. She stares, her jaw dropping.

"Oh my god, the F has a thing for bullet-lover." She says and I roll my eyes.

"Go find your boyfriend Reese and be shocked with him at how strange it is that I have a 'thing' for the new kid." I tell her and she shrugs and walks out of the room. Calix goes to close the door but I tell him not to.

"Why?" he asks.

I shrug. "Black rules, you can't have a boy and a girl alone in the same room with the door closed."

He smirks and slides closer towards me. "I wonder why they'd make that rule."

I roll my eyes. "Don't be an idiot. You may have gotten me to kiss you but we aren't that close." I say and he pretends to pout.

"Why are you here anyway?" I ask.

He shrugs. "I just wanted to see you I guess." His fringe falls over his eyes, his green, green eyes.

"I hear you've gotten a new nickname." I raise an eyebrow and he smirks.

"Yep. Bullet boy. Because I'm like a bullet, working my way into your heart."

I once again roll my eyes. "I don't think that's what it means."

He shrugs. "Oh well. Anyway, you wanna go somewhere with me?"

"Where to?" I ask.

"I don't know, the white side?" He says, referring to the side of the dome that belongs to the independents.

"Where abouts on the white side?"

"The market?"

I sigh. "Why not?" I tell myself and stand up, following Calix out.

That's when the men leap out of the shadows and grab me. That's when it all goes black.