“Lifeblood color of your sister?” The woman continued on with the interview.
“Pink.”
Looking down at my milky-white hands, all signs of my blue hue forever gone, I closed my eyes trying to block out the painful memory of watching my sister take a bullet to the head. As her life left her body, all lifeblood left mine. As her eyes went black, my skin went white. Pink evaporated from her body the same time the blue dissipated from my own.
“Your name and original planet?”
“Truth,” I answered not much louder than a whisper. “My name is Truth from the planet of Unin.”
“An original Unin?”
“Yes.”
“And your sister’s name?”
Clenching my fist, and doing the best I could to control my temper, I took a deep breath. Why did this woman need to know anything about my sister? It wasn’t like my sister was now a Pallid Slave about to be shipped off to one of the working planets. That honor rested with me. Her color, her cause of death, or anything about her was not important anymore. My twin sister, Trinity, was gone and the less I had to relive the memory, the better.
“Sister’s name?” the woman asked with more authority this time.
“Trinity,” I snapped.
For the first time, the woman looked up from her one-finger tapping. She clearly didn’t like the way I spoke to her, but at this point, I didn’t have much to lose. I was already deemed a Pallid Slave, and I was being sent to an unknown far off planet to do some type of backbreaking duties. My home of Unin had all but been destroyed, and what was left was quickly being devastated by civil wars throughout. Everything I once believed, once knew, once fought ruthlessly to protect, had now vanished.
For centuries, Lifeblood Twins were believed to hold a special gift—a possible answer for immortality. Each twin would be born a different color that didn’t exactly make the entire skin a solid hue, but rather it would illuminate from underneath. The opalescent beauty of lifeblood held a mysticism still undiscovered. Lifeblood Twins were thought to be descendants of an ancient God who used lifeblood for eternal existence. To be born with lifeblood, put you at a level of superiority. You held the possible key to everlasting life. Being born a twin with lifeblood was once a gift rather than the curse it was now.
That was until the invasion of Dren. The Drenkens killed thousands upon thousands all to gain the knowledge on how to recreate the lifeblood that flowed beneath our skin. Their quest for immortality, fueled by a merciless need for power, brought on three decades’ worth of war. They failed in this mission, but they did not fail in destroying Unin. In fear that all the LifeBlood Twins would soon become extinct due to the heavy battles, and that they would lose all hope in discovering if, in fact, our blood did hold the secret to immortality, a treaty was eventually created that protected the Unin Lifeblood Twins as long as the lifeblood ran through our veins. The lifeblood still served a purpose—or at least the Drenken believed so—but if the lifeblood left any citizen of Unin, the terms of the agreement was that the remaining twin would become a Pallid Slave. We became useless other than to serve in the workforce. A Lifeblood Twin was no longer sacred—or protected under the treaty—without the other twin alive. And it wasn’t like this could ever be a secret. If one twin died, the lifeblood would die as well. The sign of no lifeblood was absolutely no color. A ghostly, waxen twin would be left standing.
So here I was. A Pallid Slave. Colorless. Alone. Where once an opalescence of azure flowed freely beneath my skin, what now remained was a wraith-like non-existence of pigment.
The woman reached into a box and pulled out two wristbands made of metal—one blue, the other pink. “Here, put these on. Blue on your right.”
I did as she asked, snapping both closed. It seemed odd to see the colors of what once belonged to my sister and me pressed tightly against my white flesh. It was a painful reminder that the only color in my life would now be limited to the two bracelets branding me as a Pallid.
“Skills?” the woman asked. Her voice irritated me, and I seriously considered, for a moment, taking her life by reaching out and snapping her neck, but then it wouldn’t be fair to her other twin who would become a Pallid Slave at no fault of her own.
“Skills?” she asked again.
“Killing people,” I answered truthfully between tightly clenched teeth. It truly was the only thing I was good at. Being born during the Drenken invasion, I was brought up to fight. Going to battle was inevitable, so learning the skills of war from the time I could walk was the focus of the Unins. I was raised by commanders and generals in one of many soldier camps, only to become skilled enough to kill before being sent off to war. It was the way of the Unins and what had become of the Lifeblood Twins. There were no loving mothers or protective fathers. Parents’ only purpose was for procreating more soldiers to drive out the Drenken, and sending them off to the camps as soon as the toddler years had passed.