by Kate Moretti
“I’m sorry—what?” I ask in shock, looking up at the general.
“You can’t be seen by enemy optics or land-to-air missile tracking—”
“Why would that matter?” I ask, suddenly unsure of the situation that I’ve gotten myself into.
He shakes his head. “What did you think ‘saving lives’ meant?”
While I contemplate what lies ahead, he walks over to the right of the cargo doors to a large handle; the general pulls it down, causing the doors open. Air and the thunderous sound of the engines pour into the bay. He waves me over. I hesitate, nervous about what he’s going to have me do.
“The suit defaults to autopilot, but you’re a smart girl—you should be able to figure it out!” he shouts over the noise, setting a hand on my back.
“Figure what out?” I shout back.
He smirks again; I’m starting to hate that stupid little smirk of his. “How to fly! You’re a fledgling now, and there’s no more room in the nest, so figure it out!” With that, the general shoves me out the bay doors, and I’m falling toward the earth with nothing to comfort me but the light of the moon and the tight hug of my new suit.
It feels darker each night we go out. The upgraded optics I had R&D outfit our suits with allows us to view everything in near-daytime light but, for some reason, it all feels darker to me.
I think back to the night Relleg shoved me out of the C-130. Ten months ago. At first, I had a hard time understanding why he would shove an untrained civilian out of a cargo bay at some ridiculous height with close to a hundred million dollars in hardware strapped to her body. That was until the suit took over.
The display kicked in with a variety of readouts and scientific data including wind speed, pitch, and altitude. Oh, and that ridiculous height was twenty thousand feet. The wings and the afterburners activated, and I leveled out as the suit held me at a steady cruising speed of five hundred miles per hour. It was specifically designed to operate on its own and teach the user in-flight. That first night was just the beginning.
As impressive as the suits were, it was strikingly clear from then on why Relleg had recruited me: their R&D teams had hit a wall. After a week of spending the better part of my days inside that suit, I had a good deal of changes for them to make on the design. Two weeks later, the rest of my team was recruited, and I was pulled down to supervise R&D’s advancements on the hardware while another young woman by the name of Riley headed up the software division.
“So let me get this straight,” Riley says over the comms, snapping me back to the present. For the most part, I keep my mouth shut on missions unless I’m giving an order, but she and Yancy have a tendency to catch up on gossip during our return flights. It doesn’t matter one way or the other, since the comms can’t be hacked—well, except maybe by Riley. Either way, you won’t hear a peep outside of the suit. But it does get annoying at times. Luckily, everyone in our group has the mental capacity to multitask and keep focus on mission parameters while engaging in chit-chat. For five of the most intelligent people in the world, it’d be pretty sad if we couldn’t.
“You’re saying the Japanese have been putting together a concerted effort to hunt us down?” she asks in disbelief.
“That’s the word. Supposedly, several eyewitness sightings have led to the belief that there’s a large, unknown reptilian species out there, eating humans.”
I scoff at the notion.
“What?” he responds. Ten months of damn near living in this suit, and I still forget they can hear everything thing I say and do on the open channel. “It’s not that hard to believe. The new optics and wings you’ve cooked up make us look more like dragons than anything else. Hell, your little minions down in R&D codenamed the new heavy suits ‘Drake.’ Wait till we get to play with that bad boy. They just need to get the active camo working so we can be more discreet.”
“Minions?” Riley asks.
“Oh, come on, you and Sarah are like the dark queens of the underworld down there. All your little minions running around, making changes the second you bark an order. The new helmets look more demonic than the old ones, which just proves my point.”
Riley scoffs. “You’ve been reading too much fantasy.”
“Hey, don’t knock the fantasy,” Yancy says. “I’m positive that book on dragon lore I lent Sarah had a play in the new fabrications.”
He’s right—it kind of did. With how young we are and the work we do, it helps to look intimidating.
“Shut up,” Britney wines. “All you guys do is talk every freakin’ time we do a drop. Could we please for once just get a little silence. Enjoy the view, for Christ’s sake.”
“Hey, Sarah,” Yancy says. I don’t respond, and unfortunately, he takes that as a cue to continue. “You were the first to join the program, right?” This time, he doesn’t even give me a chance to respond. “How old are you now?”
“Almost seventeen.”
“And you haven’t had the urge to hit on me once. I swear they’re putting something in our food, something that kills our hormones.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Britney laments.
“Okay, now you’re annoying me,” Riley follows up.
“What? Seriously…”
“Shut your mouth,” Gideon demands. For the first time in a half hour, the comms go quiet. Gideon hardly talks, and on the rare occasions he does, everyone listens. It probably helps that he’s brooding and a good six inches taller than Yancy is. Apart from being the tallest in the group, Gideon’s pretty muscular and has a commanding presence, even though tall for us is five foot eight. Guess it’s all about perspective.
“Thanks,” I say to Gideon over a private channel. He doesn’t respond—he never does—but I like to think that it means something, regardless. I could have gotten them to shut up on my own by pulling rank, but at times, it seems easier to let them yap and get it out of their systems. Still, Gideon and I can only take so much.
Yancy also switches over to a private channel to continue his argument. “Seriously, though, I’m not joking around.” I can tell by the tone of his voice that something has him spooked. Past all the sarcasm and light-hearted bickering that he does with Riley, Yancy is an unmatched strategist and cryptographer. If something causes him to scratch his head, it’s worth taking note.
“Five attractive young adults between the ages of seventeen and twenty, you’d assume at some point, one of us would develop feelings for someone, or at the very least want to get physical.” This isn’t the egotistical ramblings of a young man with raging hormones—this is the worried musings of stumped, logical genius. “Look, Sarah, you’re like a brilliant, reserved pit bull waiting to strike. Riley has that whole tomboy attitude going on with the overpowering essence of a woman who’ll knock down anything in her way, and Britney, well…” He pauses to find the right words, presumably so he doesn’t come off as sexist. Yancy doesn’t always pick the right phrasing when it comes to referencing women in most contexts. That right there solidifies any question I have about the severity of his point. “Britney is a soldier through and though. Her critical thinking skills and reaction times are unmatched, not to mention her background in chemical compositions. To top it all off, you’re all beautiful in your own unique way, each and every one of you.”
“Oh, thanks.” I groan, knowing full well he didn’t mean it in a negative manner, but how he reacts to my comment will drive the point home.
“You’re not hearing me!” he scolds, though there’s no real frustration in his voice. It’s just raised, like a cashier yelling to a customer who forgot his keys. “There’s—” He stops. If everything else didn’t freak me out, that sure did. Yancy is rarely at a loss for words, regardless of whether or not they’ll get him into trouble. “There’s something going on. There are enough great qualities flying around between all of us that someone sh
ould feel something. I know how I am, and I know I should like all of you, but I don’t. You’re just team members who help me stay alive, and it shouldn’t be like that.”
After taking a few more minutes to think it all over, I run the past ten months through my head. He’s right—I haven’t felt anything for anyone. There’s this increased numbness washing over me as I try to drum up some emotions—any emotions—about anything. The fact that we’re so accomplished at a young age, the fact that we’ve seen things no one will ever see, hell, the fact that we’re alive given everything we’ve been through. Nothing. I feel nothing about any of it.
“You’re right. Something’s wrong. What do you think it is?” I ask. “I mean, it’s not like your sarcasm has really dampened that much.”
“I’ve been going over it my head for a while now, and the only theory that makes sense is that they’re drugging us in some way. They’re drugging us to suppress certain emotions. They’re all about efficiency, right? Maybe they’re trying to make us more efficient for whatever else they have planned for the team. So they block out love, right? Joy, surprise, fear, anything that will hold us back from being more efficient—but they keep certain things working so we don’t notice.”
Strategically speaking, it makes sense, which explains why Yancy came to this conclusion. But speaking as a realist, it’s insane. I know machines; I know physics and mathematical laws. I don’t know humans, but this all just seems a little farfetched. On the flip side, we may be super intelligent, but we’re still young. We’re still going to have rebellious personalities and emotional reactions if left to our own devices, and we haven’t.
“Okay, let’s see if we can’t find something out when we get back. We’ll keep our eyes and ears open. Do it discreetly, y’know? No need to worry the rest of the team yet.”
“Okay. Sounds like a plan.”
“Please sit.” Relleg motions to the seat across from his desk. It reminds me of the first time I met him in Professor Haku’s office last year, especially with the Hawaiian skyline gleaming through the windows behind his desk. Dear God, that feels like a lifetime ago. It’s amazing what you can experience and learn in just a year. This whole facility is deep underground; the view is simulated to help prevent claustrophobia.
“How are the Birds of Prey?” That’s what we call ourselves now. We were Fledglings when they gathered us up around the world—the best and brightest—but now we’re something else. We’re predators in the sky, unflinching reapers sent to pluck the most dangerous people from this world and deliver them to hell. But even reapers run out of time.
“Fully functional. I’m working on some new improvements for the fuel delivery systems at the top of the thruster—”
“That’s not really what I was asking, Sarah.”
Yancy’s death. He’s asking about Yancy’s death. How could something like that slip my mind? It has to be the drugs they’re giving us. They’ve upped the doses and want to know if it’s working.
A month after Yancy brought his theory to my attention, he claimed to have found that Relleg was dosing us with a targeted emotion-suppressing drug. Supposedly, it was an aerosol system that was unknowingly administered in our rooms and through our suits’ oxygen supplies. Before he had the chance to show me the proof, he died on a mission. His thruster system malfunctioned during a parabola. That shouldn’t have happened. I built those things to be as close to perfect as possible. The thruster system’s power would have been at its lowest setting due to being in a fall pattern and—
“Sarah?”
My mind is running a hundred miles a minute, and I’ve been rambling about the physics of Yancy’s accident. The fact that Yancy’s dead is not registering with me at all.
“I don’t follow,” I say, shaking my head in feigned ignorance. I can’t let him know that I think they engineered Yancy’s accident; I have to play off the fact that I’m used to fieldwork and the dangers that come with it, acting as if the drugs are doing their job. Which, let’s face it, they are.
“One of your team members is dead. There’s nothing about that that you find unnerving?” Relleg asks with a peaked eyebrow.
“It’s part of the job. We knew this going into it. We know we’re not invincible. It’s only a matter of time for any of us, but there’s more that I can do to perfect the system so this doesn’t happen again.” There’s plenty I can do with the resources down in R&D. Perfection may be unobtainable, but that doesn’t mean we should stop striving to—No! No, I need to stay focused on the drugs and what we’re going to do about them.
“Mm.” He nods. “Well then, I guess there’s not much more to say about the matter.” He’s waiting for me to disagree, but I’m just sitting here, emotionless. “You’re dismissed. Report to your operational commander at oh six hundred on the fifteenth for your next briefing.”
I stand and nod before leaving his office. Sometimes, I feel the urge to salute Relleg whenever our briefings are over. Maybe it’s because the first time I met him, he was wearing that service uniform with the overly impressive achievements pinned to his chest. Maybe it’s because the facility in general uses terms like “operational commander,” even though it’s not a military institution. Whatever the reason, this isn’t the military, and we aren’t soldiers, so I fight the urge and just walk out of his office.
It only takes me a few minutes to get to Riley’s room. I open the door to see Britney and Riley sitting on her bunk and Gideon leaning against the back wall. The rooms aren’t that large, so it’s a little tight with all of us packed in. They’re about the size of a single dorm at the University of Hawaii, but to be fair, they’re not meant for meetings, just sleeping.
“How’d it go?” Riley asks eagerly from the bunk below me.
“I’m confident Yancy was right.” I exhale. “And that his death wasn’t an accident.”
“Oh, man,” Riley says and rubs her forehead. “What about the other test?”
“Wait, what other test?” Gideon asks from the corner. Four words, holy hell. I think that’s the most I’ve ever heard him say at one time.
I ignore Gideon on purpose and continue my conversation with Riley. “So, you found the information we were looking for?”
“Yeah.”
“What information?” Gideon presses with a little more emotion. It’s working.
I scoff in his direction to fuel the fire.
“And then you were able to mirror the readings and kill the feed?”
“Two days ago.” She smiles.
“What the hell are you two talking about?” Gideon shouts.
We all turn and stare at him. I don’t know about the other two, but I’m still amazed he’s speaking so much.
“Relleg’s been drugging us to suppress certain emotions. Yancy claimed to have found proof the day of his accident.” I make air quotations with my fingers. “But he never had the chance to deliver it to me. I put Riley on the case, and after a lot of hacking magic, she found a hidden subroutine that was monitoring a delivery system to our rooms. It wasn’t exactly labeled, but you don’t go to that much trouble to hide a basic system. She shut yours off two days ago.”
Gideon blinks rapidly a few times and then glances around the room as he processes the information. I can already tell that the drugs are out of his system. “Why me?”
“Simple really. In your psych profile—”
“You’ve seen my psych profile?”
“Of course I have. I’m team lead. I’ve seen all your psych profiles. Anyways, in your profile, it states that you’re introverted and tend to be standoffish when it comes to new people, but loyal and emotional around those whom you view as family.”
He shrugs. “So?”
“So, we never saw that side of you, which means they started dosing us early in the program.” I pause to let him think b
ack over the last year. “All we ever knew was stoic Gideon who never said a word, despite having spent, in some cases, a hundred hours a week around us. Given your profile, you never would have taken Yancy’s death so lightly. None of us would, but the rest of us felt comfortable around each other a lot quicker in the beginning. So, having been eased away from what we already knew at the beginning, it would be less notable than, say, you lashing out.”
“Wait, let me get this straight. We work in a private facility and were recruited by a man who pretended to be an active military official. This facility, which is probably unknown to most, if not all governing entities in the world, is using technology that’s a good forty years ahead of what’s commercially available to further its own agenda. On top of that, they’re drugging us to remove certain emotions or hormones in the hopes of making us perfect little minions of darkness to do their bidding. This is what’s happening?”
Everyone turns their attention to me. I rank highest, so it makes sense that I would be the one to lead them out of this mess, even if I don’t want to. I know Relleg’s manipulation isn’t right, but I don’t really care at the moment. I’ll have to rely on what I know about the old me and Gideon’s emotions to push us over the hump.
“I don’t know about you guys, but I don’t like to be backed into a corner, much less blindfolded and led there under false pretenses.” Looking at my feet, I think back to Yancy taking the time to commit to his words. Once the words pass over my lips, the damage will be done, and youngest or not, they’ll follow me into the fire. It’s wrong that what I’ve created over the last year is going to be used at the sadistic will of a few powerful people. I know it’s wrong, even if I can’t feel it. “So I guess we’re breaking out.” I look back up to see everyone’s reactions.
“Whoa, is that… I mean—”
