Tempted by Molly O’Keefe @MollyOKwrites

PROLOGUE

1865
Andersonville Prison, Georgia

THEY WERE EASY TO IGNORE. The wounded. The dying. The battle-weary and nightmare-ridden. The old soldiers like him who had crossed that bridge at Antietam and walked the blood-soaked road out of the Battle of the Wilderness—they were made of hide and bone and grit.
Most of them would not walk out of this hell. Perhaps none of them.

He didn’t even see those soldiers, his fellow prisoners, anymore. They were a sea of sunburned flesh and rags. Burned-out holes where eyes should be.

They looked just like him, he imagined, should he ever see himself again.

Even the raiders, with their savageness barely contained by their flesh, he could ignore. Their taunts and efforts to control the sea of prisoners inside the stockade with brutality and fear no longer filled him with outrage. Somehow he even managed to ignore the rain and the relentless heat. He didn’t notice the flies anymore, either.

Whatever was left of him from before the war—gone. Lost in the heat. The degradation.
But when the gates opened, letting in new prisoners stumbling in formation, clutching their haversacks and a threadbare blanket each—all that was left of what lay outside those barricades—Steven had to look away. Into a white-blue sky heavy with heat and empty of clouds.

They are not men. None of us are, he thought, over and over until the words meant nothing and he could live in his body again.

“Whose is this?” the soldier in charge of the division of thirty men asked during mess, holding up the cube portion of cornbread and the sliver of raw bacon that was their ration for the next twenty-four hours.

Steven’s name got called and he took his ration and split it in half, twisting the other half in a handkerchief for the morning.

One of the new prisoners, a kid not old enough to shave by the looks of his chin, got the last ration, a miserly bit of cornbread. The boy gobbled it down, took the bacon and nearly did the same with it too.

This boy was no concern of his. But not so long ago he’d been in charge of boys like this one, and he’d been good at it, and the instinct rose up from where he tried to keep it buried.

“Wait on that, boy,” Steven murmured, keeping his voice low and his eyes down so as not to draw any attention.

“What do you mean?” the boy stammered. He sounded like the Irish soldier who’d lived in the tent next to Steven until the dysentery killed him.

“Lots of hours until morning. That’s all the food you get.”

Underneath his sunburn and his light, pale hair, the boy went white.

He’d seen that before too. That unholy moment of recognition. The boy would cry himself to sleep tonight. And the raiders would torment him. And Steven could keep his head down and turn away, go back to his tent, his own misery, his own tooth-and-nail fight to keep the small fire of his humanity and his dignity and hope burning in all this darkness.

Or he could help this boy, show him the small space where the other Irish soldier had slept. He could fight off the raiders, who didn’t bother him anymore. Not after he bit Vic’s ear nearly off.

But what would it matter? The boy, with help or without, would die eventually.
They all would.

We are not men anymore. None of us are.

So he turned, saying nothing, leaving the boy to the other soldiers to destroy or care for as they would.