Things were more complicated than Miss Antonina knew. The woman was a wicked liar. Mind games, that’s what she was playing with Tobi. Tobi had seen her do it to the other girls on the property during group sessions. She knew the rules by now. Take the girl’s experiences and twist them until there was no truth left. Eventually, the weight of her own guilt would crush her into the fine dust needed to reshape her into a willing new recruit of The Given Over. It was sick, demented.

She had confided in no one about how it had happened, not even her father. She had told him that she had found the girl alone in a field, unconscious, and couldn’t bring herself to leave her there. The truth of the matter was that Vawndila’s mother had begged to die by Tobi’s hands. Their encounter had been brief, mere moments, but the woman’s pleas had so moved Tobi that she had willingly taken the swaddled little girl from her mother’s arms, laid her carefully aside, and then proceeded to smash in the skull of this poor woman, Vawndila’s mother, who’s name she would never know, with a rock.

To be continued…