Dasturn

Almost there, she says to me Soon enough you'll be free But without your love, I reply in sad It broke me but was not all bad You are too forgiving, she says to me You love beyond the logic to see I do not care, I reply in kind My heart will never obey my mind She cries, Why must you be so resolute? How can you live with what I did to you? I smile, Because I can and because I must Because I will never find like yours a love But I did not love you, she says to me She smiles in soft but unhappily I know, I tell her in my sheathed despair But I always will and will always care

CHAPTER ONE   beginnings It was the same every year, I think: the Academy would choose a potential group of First Wards - a student attending their first year at the Academy, like me - to take part in the 'Zodiac Program', as they called it. None of us knew what the Program was exactly about, but my brother, Elijah, a Sixth Ward, had told me that students were taken down to a gigantic dome or globe-like structure made of glass that rested at the bottom of the sea; he would never tell me anything further, no matter how much I pestered him.   'Stop thinking so much.'   I blinked, pulled back from my thoughts, and turned to Rue, a girl I'