"Soldier?"
June Blanche's whole life turns upside down at the age of sixteen. As the front door to the small family cottage opens with a creak and two officers stand on the other side, she feels uneasy. The door grates closed, her seven-year-old sister scoots closer to her on the couch, and then she hears it. Your parents...car accident...come down immediately...your aunt...on her way...It's all a blur. At the time, she wasn't quite sure she understood the meaning of death. Her parents are just gone? She'll never see them again? Like the snap of a finger. Whoosh. Completely gone from existence.
Her sister's already sick. Cancer, they said. Stage three. We're so sorry. But who's sorry? Her parents are dead. Her sister is dying. The world around her is crumbling as she knows it. And her aunt? The one that supposed to take over care until June can escape with Paige at eighteen? She moves them to another fucking country if you can believe it. You need a new environment, she says. Fuck that, Jane replies. She has no other option, though, and Moscow apparently has a really good medical program that can help Paige, so Jane decides it's OK.
At eighteen, she attends school there. Briefly, she studies engineering, and the thought of her parents' car just giving out like that? It drives her mad. Then, she switches and decides she wants to be a doctor. She studies and studies and studies and takes care of her sister and repeats for so long that she feels like she's running on nothing, but she succeeds! She finishes school early and takes her sister under her care and - and then everything changes again.
She gets a job. A good job, a seemingly stable one, but a secretive one. But answer her this: If a strange man shows up at your door and says he can cure your dying sister in return for your service, do you accept the job? June does without thinking. Her sister moved to a goddamn stage four! She had to. It was like being backed into a corner.
And so it was decided: June would go back to the states, perform this job...and get her sister cured. The catch? Her sister has to stay in Moscow with her aunt. And June? She's assigned to aiding an unstable, brainwashed super-soldier, up until he disobeys a direct order and she's suspected of placing that idea in his head and she's the one that gets strapped to the metal chair in his place.
"Ready to comply."
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