by Tarah Benner
Contents
Other Works
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
one - Eli
two - Harper
three - Harper
four - Eli
five - Harper
six - Harper
seven - Eli
eight - Harper
nine - Eli
ten - Harper
eleven - Harper
twelve - Eli
thirteen - Eli
fourteen - Harper
fifteen - Harper
sixteen - Eli
seventeen - Harper
eighteen - Eli
nineteen - Harper
twenty - Eli
twenty-one - Eli
twenty-two - Harper
twenty-three - Harper
twenty-four - Eli
twenty-five - Harper
twenty-six - Harper
twenty-seven - Eli
twenty-eight - Harper
twenty-nine - Harper
Also by Tarah Benner
The Defectors
Enemy Inside
The Last Uprising
Recon
Book One of The Fringe
Amazon Edition
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This book is a work of fiction, and any similarities to any person, living or dead, are coincidental and not intentional.
Copyright 2014 Tarah Benner
To Andrew and Nicole — my best friends and favorite critics.
The atomic bomb made the prospect of future war unendurable.
It has led us up those last few steps to the mountain pass, and beyond there is a different country.
- J. Robert Oppenheimer
one
Eli
It always goes quiet during a fight.
They tell you everything slows down. Your heart rate speeds up. Your muscles tense, and your vision zeros in on the threat. That’s all true.
What they don’t tell you is how the fight makes you nothing and everything all at once.
They hang a bright florescent light over the ring so you can’t forget you’re under a microscope. You can’t see them, but they’re watching you.
If you get greedy or try to take something for yourself, they’ll send you out to remind you that you’re only alive because they allow you to be. They own you, but ultimately, you’re expendable.
The crowd sees none of this. To them, you’re fascinating and powerful: the man who beat the machine, the fastest race horse.
That’s enough to make anyone drunk on their own ego, except you don’t see the crowd. You don’t even hear them shouting.
Tonight, it’s just me and him.
Miles is six feet four inches of pure muscle hulking in the corner, his dark skin glistening with sweat. I’m only a couple inches shorter but much leaner. This is an illegal fight — he’s not even in my weight class.
I don’t know how he got so big. He must be stealing rations again. In Recon, they give you just enough to stay strong, but not strong enough to run very far.
He’s tatted up from hip to shoulder, and I’m probably the only one who notices the solid “B” stamped over his heart in the stormy haze of ink.
This isn’t just a fight. Miles is my only friend. He fights as a big “fuck you” to the board, which is funny, considering it’s only at their whim that these fights take place. We have to pay off the controllers with a cut of the bets, but underground fights among tier-three workers are an open secret.
Miles fights in the hope that he’ll be injured badly enough to be excused from duty for a month. One month isn’t a lot, but it can mean a lifetime in Recon. A month off duty means one less deployment.
It’s the final round, which means I have to make it count to get him roughed up bad enough. My left eye is starting to swell, and he’s got a fat lip, but those hits were just to get the crowd warmed up.
I regulate my breathing, waiting for the bell. Down here, I don’t have to pretend to be grateful or functional. I don’t have to think; I can just fight. I don’t have to be the good soldier. I can be ruthless, angry, off the leash.
That’s why you’re everything in a fight.
When that bell rings, I become the man they made me — the one whose only purpose is to kill. That’s how they make you nothing.
The ref steps out of the way, and Miles comes at me. He’s all offense, and for good reason. He’s the killer whale in the ring — the top of the food chain — whereas I’m the great white shark that stalks its prey with patience.
He’s not as slow as the other sluggers, but all I have to do is dodge Miles’s brick-wall punches and wait for him to tire himself out. I can’t lose focus for even a second, because one well-placed hit from him, and it’s lights out — see you tomorrow.
As we circle, I try to forget his laundry list of weaknesses. When you train together every day and fight at night, it’s not fair to take that cheap shot to his bruised rib or target his weak left knee. He knows I won’t hurt him. I don’t fight dirty against other Recon.
Miles lunges; I dodge. He delivers a cross. I block it and aim a jab. He’s undefended, but he barely feels it. I throw a round kick. His knee buckles, but he recovers and swipes at me again. I duck and deliver two punches to his side.
I can tell when he’s had enough. He’s just fast enough to aim an uppercut that I can’t avoid completely. It glances off my chin, but it still sends me flying back against the ropes.
Miles punches again, but this time I block his hit and strike my elbow across his face, meeting him halfway with a punch to the gut. I grab his shoulders, pushing him down so I can jab the back of his neck with my elbow. He falls to one knee, and I get him with a right hook.
A slightly better friend would give him a second to recover, but I want this to end. I bring my elbow down on his spine again, and he crumples onto the mat. He taps out, and the crowd goes wild.
The sounds all flood in at once: the cheers, the boos, the drunken insults from the Exterior Maintenance and Construction guys. My arm is yanked into the air, and I try to keep my expression neutral so no one can see me coming down from the adrenalin high.
“Aww. Fuck you, man,” Miles groans.
“You wanted me to drag it out?” I murmur, not making eye contact with the expired slab of meat on the mat.
“You could at least . . . let me get one good hit in . . . so I don’t look like . . . a pussy.”
I grin despite my best efforts and reach down to pull Miles to his feet. He spits out his mouth guard, and one of our guys in the corner yanks off his gloves.
As if anyone could mistake Miles for a pussy. He’s the scariest guy here.
“One good hit is too many,” I say.
He rolls his eyes, and a line of blood dribbles from his nose. “Is Brooke here?”
“Why would she be?”
He nods once and looks at the mat. Brooke is tier two. They shouldn’t even be seeing each other anymore, and Miles knows it.
I climb down, and people are slapping my shoulders and pumping my arm. I resist the urge to swat them like flies. It’s mostly burnout chicks with vacant eyes and tier-three workers looking for a little distraction. Most of them are just trying to forget they’re serving a life sentence at the bottom of the ladder.
I know I should be grateful. The compound saved me from a slow, hard death on the Fringe — o
r at least it made my death a little slower and easier.
Once a month, I’m sent out under the pretense of gathering data on radiation levels, air quality, and wildlife. But in reality, Recon’s job is to defend the compound against some of the same thugs I used to run with on the Fringe.
Miles drags himself over to the ropes, and I help him down. If it were me, I’d just go home and ice my face, but you don’t get exempt from deployment without recommendation from the medical ward.
The clean, smart doctors up there will patch him up, shake their heads, and go home to their families, feeling oh so lucky and fulfilled. They escaped this life.
The crowd clears away, and I sink down on the rickety bench outside the ring to mop the sweat off my face. The referee appears with a battered credit transfer device. He’s probably pissed he has to work late. EnComm merchants have lives and families — not just a job. They sell their wares and then close up shop and go home.
Numbers flash on the screen as he adds fifty credits to my account. When he walks away, I put on my interface and automatically transfer twenty-five to Miles’s account.
We always split the winnings, no matter who ends up a drooling pile of garbage on the mat. Not that the ref would care. All he wants is a good fight. That’s what everybody wants.
Now that it’s almost midnight, the pounding of the bass from Neverland has reached a teeth-rattling decibel. It shakes the grimy walls around the ring and climbs up the foundation to meld with the beats emanating from the levels above.
I hate the wary looks the tier-two people give us when I drag Miles onto the megalift. EnComm, Manufacturing, Operations, Control — they’re comfortably middle of the pack. Their lives are good enough that they don’t go making trouble, but they try to ignore people like us because they know it could just as easily have been them. Every time the lift stops on the way to the upper tunnels, the people who get on are cleaner and more domesticated.
Tier-one people take one look at us and avert their eyes. They know who we are, but they don’t like to think about it. Systems, Information, and Health and Rehab workers are as privileged as it gets in the compound. They don’t want to have to look at the people whose job it is to die slowly of radiation poisoning on their behalf.
The megalift stops on one of the dorm levels, and the loud, upbeat music rattles the lift shaft. Everyone’s partying tonight because tomorrow is Bid Day, a sick tradition that makes my stomach clench with dread.
The doors open, and two girls stumble in giggling. They’re covered in glitter and wearing short red nurses’ dresses. Their laughter stops when they see Miles hanging off my shoulder, and the blond one hiccups loudly.
I see it in their eyes; they can’t wait until tomorrow. All the higher-ed kids are living it up in anticipation of their bright futures in a tier-one section. They think their future is set.
I was that certain once. I’d gone to my Bid Day Eve party wearing blue. But nothing ever shakes out the way you think it will.
Right now, they’re still friends — equals — but that’s all about to change.
Tomorrow, each section will place their bids based on recruits’ Vocational Aptitude scores. Most higher-ed kids take classes geared toward a tier-one or tier-two section, but the kids who score low on their VocAps usually end up in tier three — Recon, ExCon, or Waste Management.
After the bidding ceremony, I’ll get seven shiny new twenty-one-year-olds. It’s the third class I’ll be tasked with training, but it’s futile, really. Most of the kids from my first year as a lieutenant are already dead.
I made a mistake with that first class — I let myself get attached. I told myself I would train them better so they could live longer, but the numbers don’t lie.
Early death is a statistical certainty in Recon.
We go out into the Fringe so the rest of the compound can sleep soundly at night. We tell them the outside will be inhabitable soon, even though none of them will leave the compound in their lifetime. We don’t tell them who we’re chasing away — what they should really be afraid of.
When we reach the medical ward, I’m relieved to see there are still some real nurses on duty. They rush out when they hear the lift, but the urgency leaves their eyes the second they realize we’re just Recon. We’re always in the medical ward for something.
A woman in red scrubs comes over with an automatic wheelchair trailing behind her. She helps me lower Miles into it, and he zooms off behind her to an exam room.
He doesn’t expect me to wait for him, but I’m always wound up after a fight — too high on adrenaline to stop moving.
It’s late, and the ward is mostly deserted. It’s clean and bright, just like all the upper levels. I can see blurred outlines of people in red moving behind the frosted glass walls like colorful ghosts. This is their life: bright and clean and organized.
The automatic lights flicker on as I walk down the empty tunnel. I’ve been here too many times to count, and I know where every door goes. My body is tired, and my feet carry me to my usual destination without consulting my brain.
I pass the intensive-care unit and an entire tunnel of closed doors to the only part of the medical ward where people are living instead of dying.
I rest my head against the glass and feel the smile tugging at the corners of my mouth. Sometimes I like to come here when I’m admitted postexposure just to remind myself that there’s still goodness in the world.
Three perfect bundles are lying in identical white boxes. They don’t know they’re already marked by their sections instead of their names. They don’t understand that hours after their birth, they already have their place in the world. It may change slightly when they receive their bid, but not significantly.
They’re Fourth Gen. They won’t remember the barrage of nuclear attacks that leveled most of the country during Death Storm or the years the compound was on the verge of collapse.
Two of them have their little eyes squeezed shut, but one is staring up at me. Just out of the womb, he knows I don’t belong here. There are no Recon babies — no tier-three babies at all. That’s no accident.
There’s a second room with a window like this one, but I’ve never seen it occupied. It’s separated from the main nursery by six inches of glass, and the incubator is covered in a big plastic bubble.
It’s where Fringe babies are monitored before they’re sent to the Institute to integrate with the others, but we haven’t had a Fringe baby in two decades. I was fourteen when they brought me in. Harper Riley was probably the last one, but she’s not a baby anymore.
two
Harper
I hate the trip down to the lower levels almost more than I hate Neverland. It feels like descending into Hell.
Sawyer and I are alone in the megalift, watching the white number over the doors tick down as we descend into the bowels of the compound.
She’s unusually quiet tonight, and I know her nerves are as frayed as mine — maybe even more.
We’ve both been on edge all week because everything we’ve done for the past three years has been leading up to tomorrow. Well, technically, today. It’s oh-five hundred, and I still haven’t slept.
All the late nights studying and years of putting up with Systems-track douchebags who were raised in tier one will be worth it when I receive my bid.
Systems has to bid on me. I’m the best developer in our year. Writing code is all I know how to do. There is no plan B.
I wipe my sweaty palms on my pants and give Sawyer a strained smile. I know she’s still thinking about her VocAps score — wondering if she did well enough to attract the attention of Health and Rehab. She has no reason to worry, though; she studied her ass off for that test, and she’s first in our class.
The megalift stops on the ground level, and I glance over my shoulder to check for controllers before hopping the scuffed silver turnstile in front of the frozen escalator.
We reach the Underground platform, and our footsteps echo loudly i
n the black abyss. The faint blue light of my interface illuminates the long dark tunnel, and I get a shiver, as I always do staring into the emptiness.
Only Operations workers are allowed to be here. If you take the stairs down from the ground level, you’ll reach tier-three living quarters. But on this side, you can see the supply train roll out, carrying goods to neighboring compounds in Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico. It’s also the fastest way to Neverland.
The door to the emergency stairwell groans loudly as I yank the sticky handle, and I have the immediate urge to disinfect my hands.
I take the steps quickly, not pausing to notice the way the temperature drops the farther we go or the distant vibrations beneath my feet. As the beam of my interface bounces off the dirty walls, the faded layers of spray-painted swear words leer at me in warning.
They never closed off the old Underground tunnels after one collapsed, which allowed a whole new world to take root in the compound: a den of drugs and sex and an endless parade of people trying to numb themselves to reality.
By the time we reach the bottom, the vibrations are rattling my teeth through the heavy steel door. I drag in a shallow breath. I don’t know how people enjoy this. The loud music, the darkness, the flashing party lights — it makes me feel panicked, aggressive, and a little bit sick.
Sawyer shrinks back against the bottom step automatically. If I’m out of my element down here, for her it’s like taking a spacewalk without a suit.
Neither of us is much of a partier, but I practically had to drag her out of our dorm to go find Celdon.
He’s already on thin ice with Systems. Celdon is a year older than us, which means he’s being sworn in tomorrow. He should have spent his gap year learning everything he could about network security, but he chose to spend it partying.
