Jamie was a pickpocket. We had been using her to steal items from the teachers and the MPs, but one day she got caught. She had managed to take one of the MP’s guns. As she was heading back to the barracks one of the MPs found out that his gun was missing. When they searched the barracks they found the gun in her mattress. They decided to make an example of her. She was to be tortured to death, publicly.



It was raining the day she died. They gathered everyone in the inappropriately named “peace garden” at nine o’clock exactly. What followed was the worst 13 hours of my life. To watch the girl that I trained, that I encouraged, that I used, die like that was almost unbearable. As echos of her screams bounced off of the walls surrounding the garden, I knew that this was my fault, it was my fault that she had to die like this. The look in her eyes as she died was almost unbearable, she was looking at me. It wasn’t a look of disgust or hatred, she looked at me like she was sorry. That she had messed up and wanted me to forgive her. As I looked back at her I tried to tell her that she shouldn’t be sorry, that I was sorry for making her steal all those things. She painfully managed to smile. She breathed her last at 10 P.M. exactly. I knew that from this point on I wasn’t just rebelling for the sake of rebelling, I was rebelling for Jamie.