Flashback ( PDFDrive )

But Keefe was right. They were hopelessly and gloriously out of
their depth. Far more than she’d ever let herself admit.
“So what are you saying?” she asked. “You want to give up?”
“Of course not. I just . . . don’t know how to beat them. Everything I
try only makes it worse—even when I think I’ve been so careful, it
turns out I played right into their scheme.”
“That’s because they think we’re predictable,” Sophie informed
him. “And they’re right. We always do what they expect. We have to
break the cycle somehow. We have to . . .”
Nope.
She had no end to that sentence.
And as the seconds dragged by, she realized there was freedom in
admitting that. Power in letting her heart sink to that absolute low.
Maybe hitting the bottom gave her something new to stand on.
Or maybe the medicine was seriously starting to mess with her
head.
Either way, something was stirring inside her—something that
went against everything she’d been telling herself to resist.
“I’m tired of being weak,” she whispered, remembering Gethen’s
taunts in the desert. “I want to fight back—and I mean really fight.”
“Like . . . with weapons?” Keefe asked.
She nodded, waiting for the queasiness to hit.
When it didn’t, she told him, “Yeah. With whatever it takes.”