What is this doing to them ?
Ellie wonders at various times what will happen to them even if
they survive (many other times she wonders what it feels like to
die)
"On of the things I find strangest and hardest is that
we were having such conversations. How could this have been happening
to us? How could we be huddled in the dark bush, cold and hungry
and terrified, talking about who we should kill? We had no preparation
for this, no background, no knowledge. We didn't know if we were
doing the right thing, ever. We didn't know anything. We were just
ordinary teenagers, so ordinary we were boring. Overnight they'd
pulled the roof of our lives. And after they'd pulled off the roof
they'd come in and torn down the curtains, ripped up the furniture,
burnt the house and thrown us into the night, where we'd been forced
to run and hide and live like wild animals. We had no foundations,
and we had no secure walls around our lives anymore. We were living
in a strange long nightmare, where we had to make our own rules,
invent new values, stumble around blindly, hoping we weren't making
too many mistakes. We clung to what we knew and what we thought
was right, but all the time those things too were being stripped
from us. I didn't know if we'd be left with nothing, or if we'd
be left with a new set of rules and attitudes and behaviours, so
that we wouldn't recognise ourselves anymore. We could end up as
new, distorted, deformed creatures, with only a few physical resemblances
to the to the people we once were."
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