Before my further recruitment.

[Katelin]

Patrolling the Castle
By Katelin

I am Katelin. I was born into a family that literally bled Templar blood. And therefore, I am Templar too. Recruitment didn’t really seem to come into it. It was expected before I even breathed my first breath.

For as long as I can remember, I was trained. You think of it, I was trained in it. You could make my life into a movie. I imagine even now I am telling you, face to face and lacking nervous twitch or signs of lying … you will still doubt me. But with all that training, I believed in myself. How could I not.

It took this to happen though to realise that what my life was wasn’t normal. I had no interaction with normal. My normal was filled with problem solving, learning languages, fitness regimes and a lot of discipline. The cyborgs looked after us. We were all girls in the facility, about 30 together. We all stayed away from Dr. Schreber as much as possible, he smelt like damp dog fur.

Most of my training was done with a girl my age, Haley. We were not friends. Being social was not a concept we were trained in, but I knew almost everything about her. How long it took her to break a sweat while we ran the treadmills at which speed setting, how many times she would chew her protein bar before swallowing and how long it took her to fall asleep each night.
It was a day like any other when we were sent out on our first mission, there was nothing to be nervous about. We were delivered to a location that took around 15 minutes travelling time from the facility through the snow. We were tasked with monitoring the vampire guard rotation and memorizing the routes they patrolled. At sunset, we were collected. It went on like that for so long, that it became routine. Haley and I were disciplined, we did not disobey our orders, we did the job and returned to the facility safe each day. We were sabotage mission experts. Never spotted.

In the reports that were shown to me in debriefing, the ones that those in power decided I should be able to read to have some closure, my training kicked in and I was so sorry for it. I felt ashamed. What they did, what they put into action was beautiful – perfectly planned and actioned. Of course it was, we all contributed to it. Had we known the consequences, I doubt that we would have known to stop it. She wasn’t my friend. I didn’t know what friendship was.