As the first arrivals, Olivier and Pascal felt somehow important, even though Pascal was one of the youngest. None of the new boys could match his prowess with a gun, and he forced himself to cope with smoking in order to stand out from those who were being made to try it for the first time and coughed violently. The days began to merge into each other. The boys would wake, groggy and nauseous, eat the thin soup with its token bits of vegetables, make sorties into the forest to search for fugitives, scrap a bit amongst themselves, fire a few rounds at makeshift targets, smoke, drink and sleep. They were issued with blue T-shirts and had their heads shaved down each side to show that they belonged to the same group. They were all housed in the same village hut with its blacked-out window and the door firmly locked at night. Pascal tried to remember his previous life, but couldn’t find his way through the blur of images. Nothing seemed to make sense, only what he was told by Seb and the feeling that he could be someone special if he obeyed.
