The Camaraderie

Hannah is approached by three threatening men whilst heading home from martial arts practice. Convinced they intend to attack her, she takes them down with ease, but then moments later finds herself accused of assaulting undercover police officers and tasered for failing to drop her weapon. She wakes up in a very different world: the language spoken is foreign, her real name is unrecognized, and even her body has changed. She soon learns she has been living for months in complete oblivion, a captive at the Camaraderie in Hellyn, which turns out to be a very long way from home.

The Camaraderie feels like a prison even though the staff call it a training school, and her fellow inmates insist they are thrilled to be there and desire no other life. They say they are the chosen ones training to serve Hellyn and there is nowhere else they’d rather be; even the deliciously attractive Adam laughs at her when she insists she has been kidnapped. Their Camaraderie captors play a cruel game of manipulation to ensure inmate compliance and obedience and they target not just the rebellious ones, but also the most beautiful amongst them. The internees might have more desire for freedom and less passion for their studies and following the rules if they had any recollection of life before the Camaraderie, or if they knew what fate awaited them come graduation day, but they are carefully kept ignorant of both their prior lives and the world beyond the Camaraderie walls. Hannah has her suspicions that Hellyn is a violent, backwards and misogynistic country; a place that is unforgiving of untamed, free-thinking Camaraderie trainees like her, and she wants no part of it. She must leave before she becomes a lost cause just like her friends, destined to spend the rest of her life either in oblivion or dying in someone else’s war.

The story unfolds through the eyes of three characters: Hannah and Adam, both trapped in the Camaraderie, and Arras, a graduate of the Camaraderie.