by Alex Holt
She had been in her engineering class when the Grand-High Leader’s recruiters had come. There had been no warning. Suddenly several highly decorated soldiers were having all the students line up next to a series of tape-measures and outlines. Some, they dismissed back their classes before even getting to that point. She considered trying to slip away, but the guns at the soldiers hips froze her in place. She passed through the initial measuring station. Too tall. A sigh of relief, though her gut froze as she glimpsed one of her friends in a side room, just a little shorter than her…
But her own ordeal was not yet over enough for her to have those kinds of thoughts. She was shoved into a small office where a pinch-faced older woman stood studying paperwork in the gloom. The soldier still held her atm, ordering her to turn her face one way and the other while the woman glared intently.
“She fits the look”.
Before she knew it she was shoved into a guarded room, amid a number of other women. Even as the terror was setting in, she realised that they were all the same height. The same build. Similar features.
More were shepherded in and the confusion grew, not daring to speak lest the soldiers decide to do something. One girl tried to break free and run. There were gunshots and she didn’t come back.
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The following weeks merged into one. They were taken to a huge grey complex, where instructors drilled them in some elaborate set of routines. None of them could work out what it was for. They had to wear either white or black dresses, but the pattern of it was too complex to work out from the ground what was happening. Discipline was strictly. Food was withheld when they didn’t perform to expectation. Sometimes girls vanished. “Fraternising” was discouraged by whippings.
Then one day, with no prior warning they were all transported to a huge field in the middle of the countryside. Even the strict instructors looked on nervously, as they were told to put on newly provided red or yellow dresses.
They performed their routine with few stumbles, but even the instructors looked and soldiers to be sweating. A helicopter passed over at one point and she noticed the guards standing even more stiffly to attention. Then it was gone over the horizon, and a halt was called.
The girls were told to change back to the original uniforms, shuffled back onto the coaches, and then driven to the centre of the Capital and told to get off. The coaches drove away without a word, leaving them confused and alone in a world that thought them dead.
Tears came to her eyes, although what emotion fed them she couldn’t truly say.
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As the Grand-High leader sat in his helicopter he thought that that had been a very clever dance number to direct him to his birthday party. What excellent dancers those girls must be. Then his mind turned to other thoughts such as canapes and presents, and within an hour had forgotten the performance entirely.
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