Game Changer: Day 8

Word Count: 48,042

Summary of Events:

Hawk paid a visit to Corporal Ognianov in an effort to figure out just why he didn't recognise her and found her rather unwilling to answer his questions, not seeming to understand why his lack of recognition bothered him so much; when she got up to refill her drink, however, Hawk made a significant discovery . . .

Excerpt of the Day:

As he watched her he observed that she had a large, significant scar across the back of her neck and Hawk’s mind suddenly flashed up a memory of a little girl, a large knife, and lots of blood.

Hawk slid off the fingerless black glove that covered his right hand unless he was in water or bed and looked at the straight mark across the back of his hand. His mind immediately transformed it to be near-gushing deep red blood, the whitish colour of the long, slender metacarpals showing for the nanosecond after he lifted the corner of his shirt off of the wound to look at it again.

He looked up at her when she returned and suddenly his mind realised why he didn’t recognise her.

“You’re a blonde,” Hawk said, looking her in her eyes, which sat underneath eyebrows that were the same sort of golden-brown colour as his were.

She looked defensive.

“You’ve coloured your hair brown,” Hawk said, keeping his gaze locked on hers. “I thought you died. You were laying facedown on the floor, blood running from the back of your neck. I may’ve been two years away from my CES, but you sure looked like your head had been severed to me. I never heard anything of you again after that.”

Slowly she reached up and rubbed the back of her neck where he knew the scar was from the knife that had been wielded against not only Corporal Ognianov and Hawk, but over three dozen other exceptional students at the Institution, some of whom had been killed by the kid who’d been punished for cheating on his tests and was going to be sent away from the Institution to be educated for a different job.

From what Hawk had heard afterwards from the older kids the kid who’d attacked them had blamed them for besmirching his reputation because one of the exceptional girls in his class refused his romantic advances.

In order to stop him one of the commanders was forced — after shooting him in several wounding places to no effect — to shoot him in the head and kill him.

The scar under Hawk’s left eye and the one across the back of his right hand were his only wounds because he’d been rather late to the conflict. He’d not seen the young woman who now sat before him get struck.

“Why were you hidden away?” Hawk asked. “He was killed.”

“I couldn’t go back,” she replied. “You seriously think a six year old could return to a place where she nearly got her head chopped off?”

Hawk shifted his jaw. “Not even when you were older?”

“I was fourteen when I was finally able to face the fear and go back,” she replied. “It was advised anyways, with the progress I was making on my own they wanted to see me in an environment like that before they acquiesced to my seeking a CES test, and they also told me I needed to face that fear because I was going to be wounded in combat someday.”