Taken (Erin Bowman)

something useful, and I have gone too long without seeing my brother.
    Crevice Valley’s hospital is far more advanced than Claysoot’s. Illuminated screens blink. Strange units hum. The place is deserted when I arrive, with the exception of the patients who sleep soundly in the dim room. I find Blaine in the back, on the very last bed.
    The arrow has been removed and he sleeps in shorts, a bandage wrapped around his thigh. The bandage looks silly, as if his leg snapped in two and they tried to tie it back together with a piece of string. His hair is growing back, like mine, and his chest rises and falls softly as he sleeps. He’s hooked up to some sort of machine, tubes from it burrowing into his arm.
    I reach a hand out to hold his. It is heavy, stiff like a statue.
    “He’s doing better. Even if he doesn’t look it.” A young nurse stands behind me. I hadn’t realized there was anyone else awake.
    “Do you know how much longer? When he’ll wake up?”
    She shakes her head. “It could be a day. It could be months. There’s no way to be sure.”
    Months? What if he’s like this forever? What if he never wakes up? I drop his hand. I can’t look at him. It’s like watching Emma get carted off to Frank’s prison. I don’t want to see another situation I am powerless to change.
    I hurry toward the exit and the nurse calls out to me.
    “You should come back and talk to him sometime. I think he’d like that.”
    I look at Blaine one last time, and then leave without another word. I manage to sleep a little after that, although I’m not sure how. The thought of losing Blaine again, of being just half of myself for the rest of my life, terrifies me. My palms sweat throughout a dreamless sleep.
    Morning brings a regime that I can scarcely complete. After a breakfast of gruel, Bree leads me to the Conditioning Room, which is an enclosed and sizeable training space located at the end of a tunnel housing the captains’ quarters. There’s a rock wall for scaling, targets that hang overhead, and a series of stairs and platforms I have no desire to climb.
    Bree leaves me with Elijah for introductory training and heads to a more advanced conditioning session led by my father. He waves at me reassuringly, but then, as if he feels foolish or uncomfortable showing affection, turns his attention back to his troops.
    Elijah has us start with a ridiculously lengthy run, following a path on the ground that creates an oblong loop through the room. A stitch forms in my side after the second lap, but I fight through it. I focus my thoughts on Emma. I promise myself, right then as I run and struggle to ignore the cramp in my abdomen, that I will return for her at any and all costs.
    A dozen laps later, my legs are jelly, but Elijah is far from through with us. After a series of exercises called pushups, squats, and lunges, we take to scaling the rock wall. He orders us to climb in all directions: top to bottom, side to side, diagonally. Each pass takes more effort and concentration than the previous, muscles growing weak and footholds becoming harder to find. When we move on to a drill Elijah refers to as suicides—sprinting at varying lengths—I have lost all feeling in my legs. By the time Elijah passes out bows and arrows, I can barely stand without my knees knocking.
    Shooting is at least enjoyable. The moving targets that zip by overhead create a near-realistic effect. My arms are tired from climbing, but I manage to hit nine out of my ten targets. For once, I easily outshine the others in my group. No matter how long I am away from it, shooting an arrow straight will always be second nature. My hands are incapable of forgetting the exact tautness to achieve before a release, the way to set my shot and exhale on followthrough.
    We finish the session with a final lap around the room, and I collapse onto the floor upon completion. When my lungs stop screaming, when I can finally breathe without panting, I sit up to discover that the others in my group have already left.
    “You did well today,” Elijah says as he stacks bows back into a storage cabinet. He looks too young to have started a rebellion. “You kept up, and on your first session, which is more than most can say.” I thank him, and he excuses himself, mumbling about a status meeting he is late for.
    I stay on the ground, stretching my already tightening muscles. Bree’s group is wrapping up their session in the distance. My father has them climbing