The Perfect Soldier

by B D Grant

  Boston snorts as she reaches for another slice. “Yeah, she’s totally better,” he says. I chuckle quietly without drawing her attention.

  Glensy gives me a look of indignation. “The last time she was held captive by these people, she was starved. Can you really blame her?” he keeps his voice down.

  “No, you’re right. She’s being smart,” Boston acknowledges.

  Lena’s eating the apple when I glance back over at her. There is no hint of toast on her tray, but around her waistband I can see a slight bulge below her shirt.

  Walking through the halls, there isn’t a lot of foot traffic. There are Tempero stationed around to make sure none of us get stirred up or attempt to wander off. The few kids who have been escorted the barracks and cafeteria talk about how big this place is. One kid was taken to a laboratory of some kind two levels up, but he was blindfolded as soon as he got on the elevator. He only said it was two levels up because the elevator beeped twice before it stopped. None of us older kids from the bus have been allowed beyond the barracks and cafeteria.

  We don’t even leave for medical treatment. Instead, a handful of Rogues dressed in white roll a medical cart in each evening for treatment. One nurse talked about taking me up for burn therapy, but nothing ever came of it.

  Right now there is only one Tempero around, sitting on one of the two tall stools outside the cafeteria’s entrance. The Temp looks thoroughly bored as he stares up at the ceiling tiles, occasionally glancing around at the near-empty hallway. Glensy walks ahead of Boston and me as we leave the cafeteria for the boys’ barracks.

  Over his shoulder, Glensy says, “Are you two seeing this?”

  Walking in our direction is Dr. Baudin, our old Physics professor, talking with two other men. The last time I laid eyes on him, he was passed out on the floor after we shot him with a tranquilizer in his house. He says something about wanting the Tempero to work on him when he’s eating like they do during meals on this floor. The two men with him chuckle in agreement.

  His eyes land on mine, and there’s a flicker of recognition. Something catches his attention at his feet. “I’ll catch up,” he says to the men as he saves them onward. He crouches down, apparently examining his shoe. Glensy slows as we approach our hunched-over ex-physics instructor. Without looking up, Dr. Baudin calmly says, “Are you the one who shot me?” He unties his shoe and then begins tying it back.

  Glensy jerks his head around. He looks at Boston and me, confused. Boston can barely contain his smile.

  On the day of the raid, after finding out that our school’s faculty members were shooting their own students, Boston and I went in search of weapons. I remembered that Dr. Baudin had once removed a gun that was concealed inside his jacket before a scrimmage between seniors and faculty, so his place was the first one I suggested. He lived in a tiny house on the edge of campus, so we headed there with the hopes that we wouldn’t encounter anyone. All of the faculty had either run for it or were still fighting the raiders, so we didn’t expect to find him there, drunk in his living room watching a black-and-white TV show in his sweatpants. He didn’t seem to have any idea of what was going on around campus, and he pulled a gun on us. While Boston and I were busy trying to explain why we needed weapons, Glensy had slipped in through the back door. I didn’t know it at the time, but Glensy had been trailing the two of us for a while to see whose side we were on. He managed to pick up an advanced rifle from off of one of the dead raiders, which I guess was loaded with bullets and tranquilizers. I had never seen a rifle like it before, but it had a small lever that allowed him to choose which to use.

  “It was a tranquilizer,” Glensy admits. “It wasn’t that bad.”

  Dr. Baudin stands, his shoelace in a tight, looped bow. He stares at Glensy square in the eye, head tilted upward.

  “Have you been shot with a tranquilizer before?” His voice is cool, controlled. Glensy avoids his gaze, staring at the floor.

  “Let me shoot you with one,” Dr. Baudin says, stepping past him. “Then you can tell me how not bad it is.”

  I’d always kind of liked him, although he drank more often than not. The only other time I’d visited his tiny house, he had talked about burying explosives in the yard around his house for security. I’m pretty sure he’d been serious.

  Boston smiles his usual easy smile as our old teacher passes. I stand tall, waiting to see if he’s going to give us any more trouble. If I were in his shoes, I probably would’ve thrown a punch. After all, we had left him on the floor in the middle of a fight, and we took the only two guns we could find in his house.

  I hear the stool at the end of the hall move, screeching along the tile. I glance back to see the Tempero watching us, standing.

  “Either of you kept the weapons you stole?” he asks, barely moving his lips. He glances down at the Tempero with a quick jerk of his head, and the man glares suspiciously before hoisting himself back onto the wooden stool.

  Boston pats himself down front and back as if it were a possibility. “I must’ve forgotten them when I got dressed this morning.”

  Dr. Baudin turns his head slightly at the sound of a woman coming briskly down the hall from the same direction that he and the other guy came from.

  “We don’t have anything. You’re friends searched us before we got here,” I add.

  Dr. Baudin gives us another look before continuing on his way toward the cafeteria.

  “Boston?” the woman coming up quick calls out to the three of us.

  “That’s me,” Boston tells her.

  “Come with me,” she says hurriedly, turning on her heels to head back the way she came.

  Boston noticeably deflates. They’ve been taking Veritatis from the barracks nearly every other day to test their ability. From what the younger guys have said, it’s more boring than being stuck in the barracks. “What for?”

  She doesn’t look back as she speaks. “I said, come with me.”

  “Great,” he says, giving Glensy and me a quick glance before hesitantly stepping forward.

  “Give’em hell,” Glensy cheers under his breath as Boston follows the woman. He mocks the way her arms swing wide as he falls in line with her footsteps.

  It’s not until close to suppertime that Boston finally returns to the barracks.

  Since lunch, Glensy and I had been hanging out waiting on him to show up. For the first couple of hours, we went over what we imagined has happened in the outside world since our bus was hijacked weeks ago. Things have gotten quiet in the whole boys barracks since we stopped talking. When we were first brought here, I thought the barracks were huge. It had bunk beds lining both walls, bathrooms and showers behind a curtain on the far end. Now, every time I walk in the boys barracks, I feel claustrophobic.

  I can hear some of the boys snoring lightly farther down. Not like there’s much else to do in the long afternoon hours. Soon everyone will start getting up and moving around again as supper creeps closer. It would be nice to have some kind of ball to bounce off of the wall across from the bunk beds. They’ve given us a couple decks of cards, but we let the younger play with them mostly to keep them entertained. I think about playing a round of solitaire, but that sounds even more boring, so I just lay back on the top bunk I share with Boston, wondering if Mitch is out there looking for us.

  Minutes pass, and my eyelids flutter closed. As I wonder again what Mitch is up to, I feel the bed jostle from movement below me. I pop up looking over the rail that lines the outer edge of my bed. Boston’s head is hung low, giving me full view of the back of his head and skinny neck.

  Glensy, from the top bunk of the next bed over, catches sight of Boston as well. He rolls over to the other side and hops down from his bed. He grabs the sheet off of the younger boy who’s sleeping on the bunk below his. Glensy shares his bunk bed with Max who was a stage two at our old school, fourteen years old. Before the raid, he had been friends with one of the guys in my ability advancement group, Evan. I had liked Evan, and being
around Max has me thinking more about him. The last I saw of Evan was the day of the raid. He and a couple other stage twos were trying to get themselves and some younger kids off campus. Getting to Anne had been my main concern when we ran into each other, so we only stopped long enough to exchange information on the spots around campus to stay away from. I hope he did better than I did that day getting his friends to safety.

  Glensy takes Max by the upper arm and lifts him up. It’s no easy task considering Max is a Dyna too, so he has a good bit of size to him. “Skat,” Glensy says to him quietly, not waking the others.

  The kid sleepily obliges without complaint, walking past the other bunk beds all the way up toward the bathroom stalls. He finds an empty bed above another sleeping boy and crawls into it. Glensy shoos away the few other nearby Seraphim who are still awake, waving them toward the back of the room. Again, his demands are met without hesitation.

  Glensy and I, by far the biggest out of the group and the oldest, established the necessity to follow our orders the second night we were in the barracks. A male Rogue had been stationed outside of our barracks around the clock, and two of the youngest boys, around six years old, got into a tussle right outside of one of the restrooms. The Rogue came in charging. It was only a split second before two Dynamar bigger than me and Glensy joined him.

  They had grabbed the boys by their arms and yanked them apart so hard that they both started crying.

  “Hey, come on! They’re kids!” I said, climbing down from my bunk as quickly as I could. “Leave them the hell alone!”

  One of the guys shoved me back. Luckily, a Tempero came in and diffused the situation before it could escalate.

  For being the one to speak up, I was pulled from the barracks by the Rogue who had been at the barrack’s entrance and was taken down the hall to the left of the cafeteria where we weren’t allowed to venture. They brought me to one of several rooms that had a metal bar bolted across the outside of the door. I was shoved inside. The room was a small, all four walls padded like some insane asylum with no knob on the inside. I don’t know how long I was there—a couple hours or so. Fortunately, it was just a warning.

  When I got back, the bathroom stall doors had been removed. None of us were allowed out of the barracks to get supper that night. So during that evening, Glensy and I decided to have a meeting with the younger kids. We gathered them all in the back, and I told them about the room I’d been taken to.

  After a few days of everyone being on their best behavior, they stopped sending Rogues to stand outside of the barracks all the time. They could still hear us from the hallway pretty easily—it’s not like there’s a door—but it’s something.

  As it stands, Glensy, Boston, and I are the oldest at seventeen, so the three of us sleep in the beds closest to the hallway in case anything like that arises again. It’s the only thing we could come up with as a defense. We still don’t know exactly why all of us were taken, but if the raid taught us anything, it was to always be prepared for a fight.

  I step down from my bunk to squat beside Boston. In the light, his face looks as though he’s been put through hell for days, not just a few hours. His cheeks are glistening. Boston isn’t a crier. Not that any of us really are, but he didn’t even cry when he got shot in the shoulder during the raid. Wrinkles I’ve never noticed before are etched into his forehead and between his brows.

  His voice cracks. “I’m not going to talk about it.”

  “That’s a first,” I say jokingly.

  He pulls up the bottom of his shirt to wipe the snot collecting on his upper lip. He turns away from me.

  Glensy walks over, but I shake my head. He gives us a wide berth, heading past us to the open entrance to our barracks. He picks a spot right inside the entrance to lean against. He stands there casually, but this way he can look out without being noticed by anyone looking down the corridor.

  “It wasn’t what I thought,” Boston says softly, still peering down at the ground.

  I try to follow his train of thought. “The school was a front. We all know that now,” I tell him.

  Boston clasps his hands together, hard. They shake from the strain. “I was the front,” he says in a hoarse whisper.

  I place a hand on top of his clenched hands. The shaking stops. “Are you going to tell me what happened? Because what you’re saying isn’t making a lot of sense.”

  He tosses my hand away from him. I have to scoot back as he stands.

  “I’m a moron, that’s what.” He paces between our bed and Glensy’s. “It made sense at the time, but it shouldn’t have. I was an idiot.”

  “We all should have known what has going on. Howard fell off the face of the earth in front of all of us and everyone just went along with it—”

  Boston cuts me off, his voice raised. “And he’s dead!”

  We found Howard during the raid after we gained entry into the basement. We all thought he had received early placement as a thanks for being at the top of the Veritatis ability group and assumed had some nice government job somewhere.

  Boston had lost so much blood from his shoulder wound that he never went into the basement. I never told him about Howard.

  I don’t know why the Rogues would tell him about it now. I get a firm grip on Boston’s shoulder, thinking that at least I can handle him if he gets out of control. Glensy glares at me from his spot by the entrance.

  “I did it!” Boston says wildly, shaking off my hand. He lowers himself to the floor, sitting with his legs crossed and rocking slightly. I sit down on his bunk, afraid that he might lunge at me if I’m on the floor.

  “Boston, what happened, exactly?”

  He stops rocking. “My dad’s dead,” he says to the floor.

  I stare at him, more confused than ever. “You told me about your dad’s passing a long time ago.”

  “I didn’t believe it.” He starts rocking again. “He is dead though, and I killed all of them.” His rocking intensifies along with the volume of his voice. “I killed them!”

  I go to grab his shoulder again, dropping down to the floor. He looks up at me as if he hadn’t seen me this whole time and then collapses into my chest, sobbing loudly.

  Glensy looks as confused as I am. Not knowing what to do, I mimic how Gran used to hold me when I was inconsolable as a kid. I hold his head against my chest as I wrap both of my arms around him. “It’s okay, Boston,” I say, placing my chin on the top of his head. I notice the glances from the other boys, and I start to get a bit uncomfortable.

  After a moment, I hear hurried footsteps over the sound of Boston’s cries.

  Glensy calls out from the entrance in a low voice, “Incoming.”

  All of the bodies in the room straighten except for Boston, who doesn’t seem to have heard. Glensy steps back into the barracks to allow the two Tempero women entry.

  I too move out of their way so that they can reach him, exuding calm and collection. Boston doesn’t fight as one of them injects something into the top of his arm and then coaxes him to lay down. After a moment, his eyelids start to droop.

  The Tempero who slides the used needle into her pocket looks at me expectantly. “What upset him?” She’s one of the better nurses; she’s treated my burns regularly, and she does a good job of putting me at ease with her Tempero ability while she works.

  “He wouldn’t tell me.”

  The other woman nods, and no further questions are asked. I wonder if this means that one of them is actually a Veritatis, or if they’re just assuming.

  “If he gets worked up again, come get one of us.” As if they won’t be waiting outside.

  “Will do,” I tell them.

  Both depart without another word, leaving Boston on the floor. I can’t help but wonder what the younger kids must be thinking when I kneel down to lift him up. Thankfully, Glensy comes over and helps me lift Boston into his usual bed below mine.

  Neither set of footsteps stop on the other side of the barrack entrance. I must�
�ve been wrong—they have no plans to stick around. Glensy pulls Boston’s blankets up to his chest and then stands. We watch Boston in his sleep for a moment. His lips twitch in his deep sedation.

  “What happened?” Glensy asks. I can’t do anything but shrug. It wouldn’t help him understand if I told what Boston was saying before his meltdown. I don’t understand it myself.

  The other boys are still congregated in the back of the room.

  A mouse-like voice from outside the entrance says, “They finally told him.”

  My head snaps to the entrance. For a second, I think that maybe one of the Rogues had stayed behind after all.

  Lena is leaning against the entrance to our room, her arms wrapped tightly around her chest as if it were cold. Her blonde hair, like a rung-out mop, is hanging in chunky sections over her shoulders.

  “You know you aren’t allowed to be here,” Glensy says. She turns from the entrance without another word to either of us and disappears.

  Despite my better judgment I follow her, with Glensy reluctantly on my heels.

  Lena hears our quick footsteps coming up behind her and she tenses.

  “Wait up,” I say, whispering as loudly as I dare. She stops in the hallway looking like a bunny caught in headlights.

  The Tempero stationed down the hall outside of the cafeteria calls down to her, “Is there a problem?”

  Lena jumps at the voice. Aggressively, she responds “No!”

  “Here comes the calming vibes,” Glensy warns as we stop beside Lena.

  The Tempero hasn’t moved from his post, but I feel him exercising his ability in a brisk breeze of emotion. It is so quick I wouldn’t have noticed at first if I hadn’t been paying attention. For a moment, I wonder if I might just take a nap right there on the floor.