"What is this, an audition?"

"Seems to me like you need one."

"Go to hell. I'm functioning just fine."

"Prove it."

"I know what you did," the doctor said. " I don't know how."

"Well?" Vivian encouraged.

"You damaged every muscle, tendon, and ligament associated with moving your arms, all the way from your little fingers to the anchor of your twelfth rib. You've got pain and discomfort, and your fine motor control is messed up."

They flew by a cluster of three small homes, set close together a hundred yards off the two-lane road at the end of a long shared driveway. They were old places, once fine, still sturdy, now maybe a little neglected. Mrs. Alba turned her head and took a long hard look at them, and then she faced front again.

"How did you hurt your shoulder?" She asked.

"You're the doctor," Vivian said. "You tell me."

"Your shoulder was injured before, and it could have healed. But you put it under some unbelievable stress. I have seen such issues with people who get caught in hurricanes, and they catch onto something and try to haul themselves to safety. Like dragging their own body weight against the force of a gale. But yours aren't more than a couple of days old. And it's the wrong season for hurricanes. So I don't know just what you were pulling against that did that much damage."

Vivian said nothing.

"You will heal though. But it will take a while if you keep aggravating the injury."

Vivian had been using her trait during the attack on the Vanguard warship, but it had only made it worse, for she had put some really heavy strain on her hands. She made a mental note to avoid any serious activities for her left hand.

"Down here." Mrs. Alba said. Vivian set the helicopter down on the wide road. Up ahead was their destination, a collection of several tents spread in a cleared space, just before a valley of rocks.

The Zone. That's what the compound was called.

A double barrier of dense barbed wire encircled it, backed by a high fence and watchtowers that never slept. In Vivian's mind, it merged with all the other hated lice-ridden prison labour camps she had seen. In this place, all the captured foreign prisoners were marched out to work in the depths of the forest that surrounded them, twice a day for as long as their sentence lasted. Most didn't get to live that long.

"I'll go in," Victoria said, having finally remembered to give Vivian her name. Vivian didn't return the gesture. "They are expecting me. What will you do?"

"I'll find my own way in." Vivian huffed.

"It's very heavily guarded. More than two hundred guns here."

"Don't worry about me. Get those lists."

The doctor went on as Vivian took a less direct route, through the trees. She stopped when she noted movement far to her right. Two long lines of prisoners, shuffled back towards the camp in silence, guarded by armed men. It was obviously time for their midday break from perpetual labour. Four women sat on a felled pine tree, huddled together for warmth, and making the most they could of their rest time. Vivian tipped her head back to ease the ache in her shoulder and stared up at the blank white sky. Another spasm of coughing from a fragile-looking woman drew her attention back to them. She was sick. Vivian felt an unfamiliar ball of anger burn in her chest. This was no life. Not even fit for an animal. But anger was not the answer, because all it did was drain the few scraps of humanity she possessed from her veins.

All around, as far as the eye could see and the mind could imagine, stretched dense forests of pine trees, great seas of them that swept in endless waves across most of western Vanguard, growing where humans had existed before, where nature had taken a stand and evicted man. And through it all, they were attempting to carve a road. It was like trying to dig a coal mine with a teaspoon.

"Hurry! Back to work!"

The guards crowded around the prisoners and shouted orders. Along the length of the arrow straight scar that sliced through the trees to make space for the new road, hunched bodies pulled their ragged gloves and got to their feet. A collective sigh of resignation rose like smoke in the air as the brigades of prisoners took up their hammers and spades once more.

The sick woman was one of the first to get to her feet, eager to prove she could meet the required norm, the work quota for each day. Only that she swayed, her blue eyes glazed, and she would have fallen if she hadn't been clutching her shovel. The frail body shook as coughs raked her lungs. The girl looked her way, and Vivian gazed hard into the sunken eyes and what she saw there made her chest tighten.

Too soon to die.

And that moment, on a weedy patch of rock in an empty Vanguard wilderness, was when Vivian made her decision.

She would get them all out of there, even if she had to kill every last guard.

*****

Every. Last. One.

Haize