Recruitment

by K A Riley

  We step out into a hallway, which we follow until we hear the sound of boot-steps up ahead. Just down the hallway from us is a solidly-built guard. I can’t see his face, but I’d recognize that clunky, boxy body anywhere. It’s Chucker. He’s got his back to us as he taps out some code on an input panel on the wall. A set of silver double-doors opens top to bottom in front of him. From here, we can see the skybridge begin its crawl from the Cube over to the Halo. Chucker begins walking along the skybridge even before it reaches the other side. We inch along, hugging the hallway wall, until we can see him disappear on the far side of the bridge through another set of horizontal double-doors. He walks to the right and disappears from view, and we follow along on the skybridge, the wind whipping at us as we cross with the Agora far below.

  On the Halo side of the bridge, the corridor is as shiny silver inside as it is outside. The walls are embedded with black viz-screens and long lines of circuitry snaking through nearly every surface. Small rooms, alleyways, and shallow alcoves appear every ten or twenty yards on either side of the long, rounded hallway.

  I expected more guards. More resistance. But the place has the eerie quiet of one of the bombed-out buildings back in the Valta. Like it’s been denied the life and energy it was meant to have.

  Finally, as we round a bend, we spot Chucker again. His back is to us as he taps in code on another input panel, this time in front of a large round door.

  I signal to Brohn and Manthy to duck into one of the shallow alcoves on their side of the corridor while I duck into the opposite recess on my side. The small space looks like it must be some kind of information terminal. It’s got holo-projectors and a communication input panel. There are high-tech scanner ports but also some pretty low-tech metal levers and energy outlets. But that’s not what interests me.

  It’s the language of the digital labels for each component of the terminal. I don’t know what is, but it’s not English. Or French. Or Chinese. Or any other language I can recognize on sight, even if I can’t really read it. The red markings are a series of long curls, dots, and thin bands. If they were black and a little bigger, they’d look a lot like my forearm tattoos.

  Across the hall, I see that Brohn and Manthy have made the same discovery. Brohn gives me a “what the hell?” look, which I have no choice but to answer with a baffled shrug.

  For now, we need to focus on Chucker. He’s maybe thirty yards away and clearly standing guard by the large round door. Something on the far end of the corridor has attracted his attention, but he returns his focus to his post. His head’s on a swivel as he scans the corridor to his left and right. We’re just far enough around a bend and deep enough in our little alcoves so that he doesn’t have a clear view of us. Still, I’m not taking any chances sticking my head out just to have Chucker shoot it off.

  I trace a pattern on my inner forearm. Instead of Render, though, I focus on Brohn just across the corridor. I picture his face, the line of his jaw, the cadence of his voice. I imagine him sitting across from me like he did back in the Silo. Then next to me. I can smell the gentle scent of his skin. I press my eyes tight and concentrate on how he makes me feel when I’m around him. I can feel his emotions mingling with mine and our voices as clear as day in each other’s heads.

  We need to see what he’s guarding in that room, I tell him silently.

  Even with my eyes closed, I know he’s looking across at me. Confused. Startled. Pleased. His voice slips into my head:

  He’s too far away. He’ll hear us if we charge at him.

  Can you get him to look the other way?

  Yes. But it’ll cost me a knife.

  Manthy and I have you covered. Do it.

  Across the hallway, Brohn slips a knife from his inner jacket pocket and clicks it quietly open. Kneeling down and holding the weapon by its blade, he flicks his wrist with a quick snap. The knife spins in a blur, flashing through the space behind Chucker’s back in between him and the door he’s guarding before skidding to a loud, metallic stop just past him on the corridor floor.

  Chucker’s head snaps around to identify the source of the sudden clanging reverberating throughout the Halo. By the time he gets five steps down the hall and leans down to pick up the knife, Brohn and I are on him.

  Brohn hits him high, leaping up to crack him in the back of his thick neck with a vicious elbow strike. At the same time, I swipe Chucker’s legs out from under him with a spinning heel-kick. He twists around but goes down hard, face-first into the corridor floor. Brohn finishes him off by grabbing him by the back of the head and smashing his face into the floor a second time. Chucker’s leg twitches and then goes still as Manthy dashes up to join us. Brohn recovers Chucker’s gun and slides it under his belt at the small of his back.

  “Now we just need to get inside,” I say. “You’re up, Manthy.”

  Our connection is fading, but I get clear pulses of emotion from Brohn. He’s worried about being here. About me. He wants me to be safe. He wants to protect me. He wants us to protect each other.

  His feelings are a beautiful dance of colors, complicated and overlapping.

  Retrieving his knife from the floor by Chucker, he pries off the cover of the access panel. Manthy steps forward. With a couple of deft motions, she’s got the leads exposed, and she quickly disables the door’s security protocols.

  Brohn and I exchange a look and take simultaneous deep breaths.

  “Ready for what’s on the other side?” I ask.

  He says, “No,” and gives me a wink. “But whatever it is definitely won’t be ready for us.”

  Manthy finishes her override and gives Brohn and me a thumb’s up. We brace our feet against the floor, and get ready to storm in.

  Manthy inputs an open-door command, and the big silver door slides open with a thin, metallic whisper.

  Brohn and I do a fast survey of the room. One person in a white lab coat, facing away from us and staring at a viz-screen, stands on the far side of the room. She whips around as we charge in.

  Hiller.

  Brohn has the barrel of Chucker’s gun pressed to the center of her forehead before she knows what’s happening.

  “Time for a little truth,” he says, his teeth clenched.

  “What truth do you want?” she asks with an air of self-satisfied confidence she definitely shouldn’t be feeling right now. While she’s clearly startled to see us there, she covers her shock with a tense smile. “The truth about what’s been happening here? Or the truth about what’s about to happen? To you. To the war. To the world you thought you knew?”

  “What is this place?” I ask her over Brohn’s shoulder. “What is it, really?”

  Hiller doesn’t answer, but her eyes dart involuntarily over to the monitor just behind her.

  I step over to it, but I can’t read any of the figures or symbols. They’re in the same style we saw out in the alcoves in the corridor and like the patterns on my arms.

  “What’s this say?” I ask Hiller. Even as I utter the words, I realize how strange it is to hear myself barking orders, especially at an adult who holds my fate in her hands. But I’m brimming with a new energy, a new confidence, and a new knowledge that my fate is in my own hands now more than ever. “I can’t read this,” I say.

  “Of course not,” Hiller sneers.

  “I can read it.”

  It’s Manthy. She steps past me and up to the monitor. She scans her finger over the red and blue figures of the holo-screen. The lights quiver and dance at her touch. “It’s us,” she says. Her voice is choppy and strained. She sounds tired. “It’s our deployments and outcomes. Intel: Scheduled for manual labor in hazard zones. Tech: Scheduled to be channeled into the service industry. Combat: Scheduled to be programmed to kill without question. Special Ops. Scheduled for…” She pauses like she doesn’t recognize the word right away.

  “Scheduled for what?” I ask.

  “Termination.”

  I can feel my brow furrowing in confusion. None of thi
s makes any sense.

  Brohn has been in control of himself up until now. But now he’s in a rage.

  He presses the barrel of his gun to Hiller’s forehead. “What does that mean? Termination?”

  “It means what you think it means. You’re as foolish as you are young, and you’re as deceived as you are dead.” Hiller pushes away the gun, but Brohn pulls it back and keeps it aimed a spot in the middle of her forehead. “What do you think we’ve been training you for all this time?” she shouts.

  “To fight against the Eastern Order,” Brohn says evenly.

  Hiller laughs. “There is no Eastern Order!”

  “What?”

  “No Eastern Order. No enemy. Not like you think. There never has been.”

  Brohn squints and then gives a little laugh, himself. “You’re crazy. We’ve seen the war. The Eastern Order destroyed our town. Killed our families.”

  “The violence was real. But the Order? That’s just an invention of our own government. A way to instill fear and keep control.”

  Brohn shakes his head hard. “Not possible. We’ve seen—”

  “What? Staged stories on a bunch of viz-screens? You saw what we wanted you to see. We showed you what you needed to believe.”

  “You’re lying!”

  I put my hand on Brohn’s arm. “I don’t think she is.”

  “Why? Why us? Why the Seventeens?” Brohn’s face is contorted with rage, and he’s practically crying. Manthy is open-mouthed, and my brain is on a new level of overload.

  Hiller leans back against the slanted wall of read-outs and input panels and looks from Brohn to me to Amaranthine. Brohn steps forward, his gun still pressed to her head and orders her to answer him.

  She offers a sigh and a menacing stare. She’s putting on a brave face, for someone about to die.

  “Fine,” Hiller says at last, “I guess it doesn’t matter now anyway. Long ago, we discovered that an assemblage of genetic anomalies was causing certain people to manifest certain abilities. Always right around the age of sixteen going on seventeen. Always in the mountain towns around where you lived. Maybe because of the proximity to new kinds and amounts of radiation in the atmosphere. Maybe it’s an evolutionary upheaval or some glitch in the genetic code. No one knows. No one really cares why. The Processors were set up to determine which of you could help the cause and which could hurt it. If you could be used, you lived. If you couldn’t, or if you had the potential to do more harm than good, you died. All this so-called training you’ve been doing was just a matter of weeding out which of you was which. The Eastern Order was an invention created nearly fifteen years ago as a way to keep us at war so everyone stayed scared and no one asked too many questions.” Hiller looks again from one of us to the other. She looks scared, but she’s trying to sound brave. “Funny. The three of you here together. You were the real threat this year. The three who qualified for Special Ops.”

  I shake my head and lean toward her. “So Special Ops just means…?”

  “That we were the biggest threat to them,” Manthy whispers.

  Hiller glances at her and nods. “You’re the ones whose abilities went beyond our ability to control. Amaranthine’s techno-sensitivity. Kress’s telepathy.” She shoots me a look. “Oh, yes, Kress. We know all about it. And you, Brohn…well, you haven’t even begun to discover your power yet.”

  I can see Brohn tensing. Like Manthy and me, he has to be wondering what exactly his mysterious hidden power is. But Hiller doesn’t say.

  “Terk was the one we really wanted,” she continues. “Congratulations. The rest of you are all dead. We might have been able to use a few of you, but after this little stunt…”

  Brohn has both hands on the gun now. Somehow, he’s totally in control. His hands are way steadier than mine would be. “I’m not the one with the gun to my head,” he says.

  “You might as well be, Brohn,” Hiller says with a menacing grin. “You were never going to get out of the Processor alive anyway. Now, you’ve just sealed your fate. You’ve tripped all kinds of alarms coming in here like this. You won’t even get off the Halo.”

  Brohn looks back toward the door. Hiller takes advantage of his lapse in concentration. With her hands clamped on Brohn’s she pushes against his trigger finger, and an explosive shot blasts her brains out onto the console behind her.

  24

  Hiller’s body slumps to the floor, her head a mess of white hair and blood. Behind her, the console she was working at is lit up with schematics and scrolling lines of text in that strange language we’ve now seen a number of times.

  “They’re extermination orders,” Manthy says.

  “You can really read all that?” I ask.

  She nods.

  “It’s a sorting protocol.” Her voice is quiet, barely audible. She points to a series of dots and long, swooping symbols that are overlapping with holographic swirls of fluctuating charts and graphs. Manthy’s eyes dart back and forth as she scans what we’re seeing. “‘Special Ops’ is code. Like Hiller said, we weren’t winning anything. We were being selected out for elimination. ‘Special Ops’ just means they didn’t think they could control us well enough to actually use us. The Recruitment, the training…they were just a way to weed us out, to study us. And to help the government keep the Eastern Order lie going to maintain power, I guess forever.” Her voice is even and matter-of-fact, like she’s announcing the weather instead of informing us that we’ve spent the last three months living an impossibly deadly lie, not to mention the lie we’d been living for years before that. But as she stares at the images in front of her, I sense that she’s mesmerized by the crushing waves of reality and by the enormity of the betrayal.

  “So all that talk about improving us…?” Brohn asks.

  “Oh, they were improving us all right,” Manthy says. “Hiller was telling the truth about that much anyway. But it was for their benefit, not ours.” She scans the display and gestures towards parts of it with a small wave of her hand. The symbols and images scroll and morph at her touch. “This is about us. Our Cohort. Class of 2042. And not just in the Valta either.” She scans the images again to reveal a new cluster of symbols and morphing schematics. “See. There are more of us out there. More Seventeens being selected for Termination.” She turns to look at us. “That must mean they have powers, too. Or at least potential.”

  “So it’s been a big set-up,” Brohn says with a heavy shake of his head. “A con. But if they’re the other side, where’s our side? Is there even really a war going on? If there’s no Eastern Order, who bombed the Valta? Who killed our families?”

  Manthy and I don’t have an answer for him, but it wouldn’t matter anyway. He’s frozen. Stunned. He looks down at Hiller’s body, slumped and lifeless on the floor. The muscles in his forearm tense, and I honestly think for a minute that he might shoot her again just for good measure.

  Shaking off my own shock and remembering what Hiller said about alarms, I tug his arm. “We’ve got to get out of here, Brohn. Like right now!”

  He shakes himself out of his daze and peers out the door with Manthy and me just behind him. Giving us an all-clear nod, he leads us out of the room. Chucker is still lying unconscious on the floor. Leaping over his prone body, we take off on a full-tilt run down the corridor and back to the skybridge only to find it drawing back into the Theta Cube. Someone must have given it the order to retract, which means two things: Brohn, Amaranthine, and I have been discovered, and we’re about to be stuck on the Halo.

  I don’t even want to think about what happens after that. In front of us, the glistening silver bridge starts gliding away from us like some large aquatic animal slipping out into the sea.

  “Come on!” Brohn shouts. “No time to second-guess ourselves!”

  He explodes in another full-on sprint. His powerful legs propel him forward and out over the expanding void. His arms and legs flail with the effort as he soars across the increasing expanse of space.

  He
just makes it to the edge of the retreating skybridge, rolling forward as he lands to cushion the impact of the fall. Manthy’s not so lucky. Running as fast as she can, she leaps a half-step behind Brohn, but her foot slips on the far edge of the skybridge, and she starts to plummet into the chasm below.

  Sliding over to the edge of the bridge, Brohn snaps out his hand and catches her by the wrist. She reaches up to grab onto his forearm, and he hauls her up. They collapse together in a heap.

  Brohn and Manthy are faster, stronger, and better jumpers than I am. And the space between the Halo and the Cube is just too far now. I watch with horror as the Agora appears in the darkness below. It’s such a long way down.

  Wind whips through my hair and chills my skin. A wave of dizziness crashes over me at the sight of the open field of green grass looming under now-still Halo. The bridge, taking Brohn and Manthy with it, has retreated beyond any distance I could ever hope to clear. There are no options. A fall from here would kill me. I’ve got a chasm I can’t leap in front of me and the sound of men shouting and the thunder of their boots closing in behind me.

  I’m trapped.

  “Hurry!” Brohn screams. “You can still make it! I’ll catch you!” He slides on his stomach over to the edge of the bridge. His hand and arm are extended out over the void. Kneeling next to him, Manthy is trembling with desperation. Her eyes are pleading. Her face is a knot of urgency and worry. There is no mistaking the look of hopeless defeat on their faces. They know as well as I do that, one way or another, I’m as good as dead.

  I shake my head and call across to them that it’s too late. The skybridge is way too far away now. It’s taking Brohn and Manthy away from me as it draws away to the far side. Brohn continues to reach his hand out to me, frantically waving me over to him, screaming at me to do what he knows is impossible.

  “Go on!” I shout through my cupped hands across the distance. “I can’t make it. You’ve got to warn the others!” I turn back to see soldiers coming around the bend, rushing toward me from down the curved silver hallway of the Halo. I consider doing something heroic like charging at them and taking out as many as I can to give Brohn and Manthy a couple of extra seconds to escape. The soldiers will have to wait for the skybridge to extend again anyway.