Tuesday, September 20 was the gloomiest day since I could remember. I opened the curtains to a bright sunny morning. The sky was a glittering baby blue, a soft breeze waved through the air, rustling my brilliant white curtains. Today was the day They were coming. Coming to take me. Putting on my grey jumpsuit seemed harder than usual on this seemingly perfect morning. The institute shuttles ran exactly thirty seconds later than usual, a sure sign something was off. Morning attendance lasted an extra seven minutes, as the handlers checked the lines to perfection. Things took a turn for the worse during our daily walk when we were stopped twice by patrol agents looking for runners. A chill swept up my spine as They came. They had no souls, no hearts capable of feeling empathy. We had been living in peace for centuries before our planets invasion. They had come with technology beyond our wildest dreams, promising protection to my people. Protection by armies and weaponized machinery. Protection and knowledge in exchange for some of our plentiful resources. Instead, they used our resources, destroyed the culture that had shaped our lands, changed our native tongue into garbled nonsense, and murdered half of the population. I wouldn't call myself lucky. Those who died never had to see what our home had become, a junkyard for Their waste. What was left of the population had been “evacuated”. Forced to leave all of our belongings, homes, and lives, and were marched for seventeen days toward the crafts. Given little, and in some cases no food, many had died before reaching the destination. I will never forget the screams of hunger from a little girl next to me. They shot her, a poor child who cried her mother. Silenced before she could let out another yelp. My feet had stumbled for the first time after that, my bloodied and bruised feet have never walked the same. Sometimes before I go to sleep I can still hear her. I can still see her curly hair and the small paper doll that she clutched in her left hand. I can even see her last tear roll down her face before her small lifeless body was trampled by the neverending rows of prisoners. Her mother never got to say goodbye to her little girl. My worst punishment was to watch. I will never, ever, forgive Them for the loss of that innocent child. Somehow that child represented all of my hopes and dreams that were murdered and left to rot alone of the side of a forgotten road on a forgotten planet. Today was my time to die. Even as the handlers screamed my name through the endless rows I could only think of that little girl. They call it the Thinning, prisoners who do not have quality work are sentenced to one-year hard labor. I call it suicide. I was not going to die like others before me. My people were not here, my culture no longer existed and I had refused to accept it before. Today I was not going to die like every other broken soul who had stumbled through these doors. I was going to die like that little girl, not broken and afraid, but with my screams echoing for the world to hear and remember. They could kill me, but not my memory. They called my name again, armed guards ripped me from the safety of the line. Before They could push me through the prison doors, I smashed one guard into the nearest ID scanner. I had only enough time to say two words before the bullet pierced my heart. “Never forget!” my scream bounced off the walls of the dead hall, audible to every prisoner, guard, and soul who could hear. They could never take my last words away from me. They could never strip away my memory. They could not stop me from becoming a martyr. Not Them. Not the Humans.