Chapter 15
Never have I had so much fun crawling beneath barbed wire, weeping through tear gas, and lobbing fake grenades. They say we'll have to wait until we get topside to throw real grenades lest we accidentally collapse the aging coal mine. But the dummy grenades give a satisfying little poof, followed by clumps of red dye to show if you are dead.
I wonder, if my father had lived, would I have followed in his footsteps?
Maybe…
I grip my M-16 and skip down to the underground shooting range the way Nasirah and I used to hop-skip to the park, our hands locked as we sang nursery rhymes, back when she was two and I was only nine. We all line up, just thirty of us today, and wait anxiously for the strangers who arrived late last night under a cover of secrecy.
Andrea bellows, "Officer
