On the Hex scoreboard just before lunch, that shoots her up to first place overall. Lohengrin drops two places to third, while Lyssa is just behind him in fourth. That’s three of us in the top four. A heck of a first day for our squad.
And me? Well, I’m way down in thirty-seventh. And that kinda hurts. It makes me think my teamies won’t want to be my teamies for much longer, not unless I get my act together.
But they’re supportive and they don’t brag at all, and when the lunchtime alert appears and we squeeze into the elevator together, I reckon the four of us are going to be alright here.
The first time I visit my quarters, I'm pleasantly surprised. Not that it’s a great room or anything; perform a star jump in here and you’ve already sized up the place. No, it's the welcome present I can’t get over—the severed head of a skivvy ’bot. The exact same head I threw to Mr. Thorpe-Campbell that day in the cafe. It sits there on my bedside table, dead eyes, tangled wires and everything, a constant reminder of a day I’d rather forget.
But Thorpe-Campbell doesn’t want me to forget. I must have impressed him that day, and he wants me to carry on where I left off. Or something. Because on the table next to the skivvy is a note that reads, USE YOUR HEAD.
I snort a laugh when I see it because, well, there are a few people I’d like to head-butt in this place, but I’m guessing that’s not quite what he has in mind.
Lyssa's quarters are next door but one to mine, so I ask her to show me how everything works. I missed the induction and the guided tour, I remind her.
“Okay, I'll give you the dime tour of your little mancave,” she says, “so long as we make it quick. I'm starving and I need a shower. I stink.”
“True.”
“Hey! Do you want this tour or don't you?”
“Sure. Sorry.”
“Eww.” She pulls a face in disgust. “Who put that thing there?” She glares at the severed robot head. “Is that yours?”
I shrug. “One of the teachers left it for me.”
“What kind of sick joke is that? Really...gross. You should take it to my dad’s office, make an official complaint against the jerk teacher that—”
“What do you mean? Your dad works here?”
“Um, yeah.” Her voice trails off as though she’s just said something she shouldn’t have. “He's one of the recruiters. He flew back in today.”
“Wait—not Mr. Thorpe-Campbell?”
“Huh.” She tilts her head a fraction. “How did you know that?”
“Mr. Thorpe-Campbell? Your dad?”
Her face bunches up into a sheepish pout, and she shakes her head. “I never was any good at keeping secrets. Jeez. Not even for one day.”
“But I thought your surname was—”
“Van Buren’s my mum’s maiden name.” She glances behind us, then lowers her voice. “You can’t tell anyone I told you. Promise!”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Jim, it’s really important. If he knew I’d told you, he might pull me out of here.”
“Hmm. First you answer a few things for me. I feel like I’m the last one to know anything around here. Your dad—who is he really?”
“You mean you don’t know?” She shoots me an incredulous gaze. “He told you his name, right?”
“Yeah, but—”
“Then it’s your own fault for assuming the wrong thing. He’s the Charlie Thorpe-Campbell. As in... the most famous orbital runner in history.”
History. Maybe not my best subject. “How stupid do you think I am? The real Charlie Thorpe-Campbell retired from RAM-running over a century ago.”
“True.”
“So where’s he been for the past hundred-and-odd years? In a freezer?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Where, then?”
She shrugs. “As far as I know, he’s been on Mars. He won’t tell me any more than that, neither will Mom.”
“Your own parents don’t trust you?”
“Not with keeping secrets. I’ve never been able to keep them, as you’ve just found out. They’re so good at it, it always sticks in my throat. Sooner or later I’ll spill everything I know to anyone who’ll listen, which is why I’ve never met anyone outside the Initiative until today. They haven’t let me. I’m a walking, talking security nightmare. Dad’s words, not mine.”
“What do you mean? You’ve been a prisoner in your own home?” Hard to swallow. She seems way too worldly for that.
“Not in my own home exactly. But the places I’ve stayed at, the people I’ve spent time with—they’ve been carefully chosen. All part of the Initiative.”
“What’s the Initiative?”
“You’ve just joined it, Sunshine. I don’t know what hooey Dad ladled into you to get you to come here, but you’re now a part of the most top secret military initiative since the Commerce Wars.”
“It doesn’t seem like military. Everyone’s so...informal. And they’ve pretty much left us to our own devices in the Hex.”
“Don’t you believe it, kid. We’re being watched all the time. Every move we make. This place is micro-managed down to the smallest grain of sand.”
“We’re being monitored right now? All of us?”
“Every last buggo.”
“So how can you be so sure they haven’t heard everything you’ve just said?”
“I can't. And that's the point. Take my advice, Jim. You can be yourself with us, but it's okay to keep secrets. In somewhere like this, a secret is the only thing you've got that's really yours.” She picks up the note, taps it with her fingernail. “Good advice.” Then she starts the dime tour, leaving me to figure out what she thinks USE YOUR HEAD really means.
If Hex time is for mingling, for mixing it up with my fellow buggos, the remainder of the day is tied to a pretty strict routine. Sure, we attend classes together and run circuits as a group, but the vast majority of time outside the Hex we spend as individuals. If not alone, then definitely in competition. Math test scores count toward your overall ranking, as do Craft, Design & Tech workshop assignments, RPS (Reasoning and Problem-Solving) role-plays, lap times on the track, and the countless other academic and physical parts of the extra-Hex curriculum.
It can be a slog, but then we always get to return to the Hex. That’s our time, our release: two hours every morning, another two before dinner, and a final hour before lights-out. We laugh, we play, we go ballistic on the apparatuses, desperate to be the best at whatever we do.
We eat our meals alone in our quarters, and no one else is allowed in. Not under any circumstances. Lyssa was my first and only guest, and that was only once. I quickly get used to it. The food arrives via a flux tube. It comes shrink-wrapped, hot and sweaty. And it's first-rate. As well as being nutritional, it tastes amazing. Rachel, our resident fanatical healthy eater, reckons it’s been bio-engineered, maybe straight from the IC farm worlds. Me, I just scoff the stuff down and belch my approval, just like Sergei would do.
So that’s mealtimes, en suite showers, glowsuit dry-cleaning (I leave mine in the machine overnight, every night), plus any allotted research time on the digipedias, and bedtime: all spent in complete isolation. I don’t exactly mind being on my own. It’s kinda relaxing, and gives me chance to regroup between the crazy hours. But if I’m being totally honest I can’t wait to get back to the Hex. To my pals. To the unsupervised world at the bottom of the facility, where we seem to make up the rules as we go.
And with team-mates like I have, those rules soon become the rules that all other teams follow. Now if only I could rise to the top with them, score-wise.
Speaking of rising, I’m not sure if I should tell someone about the strange recurring dream I’ve been having. It started on my third night in the Hex, and I’ve experienced it pretty much every night since. It never lasts long, only a few minutes, but in those few minutes I swear I’m totally awake inside the dream. Something inside me clicks into gear, and I know, without any doubt, that I’m both dr
eaming and in complete control of that dream. Those dodgy adverts for Destiny Now and the other brain-blenders sell it that way, but I never believed them. It’s a shock when it happens, but an amazing one. I'll try to explain.
The first thing that happens is I float up to the ceiling, literally float—the most awesome freeing experience it’s possible to have. The laws of physics are clearly what I decide they are. Then I make my way, in mid-air, to the door of my quarters and glide through it as if it isn’t there. There’s a sand bike waiting for me somewhere far below, and I know that if I can just float down to it and choke the throttle, an extraordinary adventure will start. No limits, no rules, just the map of my imagination waiting to be drawn.
But I never reach the sand bike. I always land on a dark staircase instead, running at full speed. There’s no bottom, only carpeted steps and endless blackness and a raging, inescapable dread hot on my heels. I don’t know what’s chasing me or why I’m running, but this is the way things are, the way they’ve always been. If I slow down, the dread will catch me. If I speed up, I’ll fall. So I run like I’m five years old and just discovering the confidence, the rhythm of sprinting downstairs for the first time.
It occurs to me I’ll have to keep up this rhythm and this speed forever unless I can do something to end the chase. That’s when I remember—this is all inside a dream. I can do whatever my imagination wants. So I lift off the staircase and start to fly—
The dream always ends with a flash of blinding wings that swallow the darkness. I scream something that sounds like Mum, but I can’t be sure if the sound escapes the dream with me or it gets swallowed too. I’m in bed, looking up at the ceiling, out of breath. A dragonfly whizzes past me. It’s silent, no buzz. There are no dragonflies on Mars except in captivity, so it can't really be there. I search every inch of my quarters but I never find it.
Though the dream changes slightly each time, the outcome never does. I’ve had it dozens of times now. What does it mean? Why do I always see the dragonfly after I wake up?
Is it that feeling of being watched, being followed? I’ve never been without it. And because of that, I reckon I know the spotlight better than most people do. Hiding from something for so long makes it a part of you, and the longer you hide, the harder it is to overcome. For me it started when I was five, gazing down from my balcony to an emerald lawn and non-stop sprinklers and a dead dad and sister. My family name, written in blood, there for the whole world to see. I ran and ran and never stopped looking back. It was only years later, when I was safely under Sergei’s wing, that I realised how dumb I’d been in not leaving that name behind. Trillion. It was all I’d ever known. Like my own reflection. Well, they’ve both changed since that day; but that day hasn’t. That was the day my life began for real.
Unlike me, Lohengrin has never been able to escape the spotlight. He was born to it—a prince, envied by all, hated by most for the harsh laws his mother imposed on his troublesome homeworld, Rhea. In recent times, that planet has seen more uprisings and rebellions than it has seasons of the year—there are six of those, by the way. But Queen Mircalla has weathered them all, without any outside help. She’s tough and wily and, from what Lohengrin tells us, one heck of a snowboarder.
Lohengrin doesn’t say much about his palace upbringing on Rhea, but that doesn’t stop Lyssa and Rachel from quizzing him every chance they get, even flirting with him. I could do without the last part, but I can’t say I blame them; he is heir to a freaking planet.
“So you’ll inherit, like, a gazillion credits eventually,” muses Lyssa, her tact doing its customary face-plant. We should all be used to that by now, but her comment hits Lohengrin hard. The skin around his eyes wrinkles as he does his best not to frown. She didn’t mean to wound him, of course, any more than a coconut means to drop on your head when you’re carousing on the beach. But the situation on Rhea could explode at any time, and Lohengrin’s parents are living on borrowed time there. Everyone knows it. It’s one of the main reasons they enrolled him in the Hex, Rachel reckons. To keep him as far away from the throne as possible.
Rachel and I shake our heads when Lyssa isn’t looking. I like that we still have that shorthand, that silent rapport, even if it’s at another friend’s expense.
“Last time I checked, money doesn’t buy you much in here,” Lohengrin replies, nodding at the scoreboard. He’s now in fifth, slightly behind Lyssa in fourth, and way behind Rachel, who’s still first—her lap times give her a massive boost every time we run. “What do you reckon? Should we just give her the crown right now and be done with it?” He gives Rachel’s thigh a playful nudge with the side of his fist—a little too playful and intimate for my liking. “Or break her legs, maybe?”
“Tell me about it,” says Lyssa. “I thought I was gonna be the track star here. Guess I’ll just have to blow you all away with my adacem—I mean acamed—oh hell, whatchacallit—brain—”
“Farts?” Another reason Rachel Foggerty’s topping the leader board: when she’s ahead, she stays ahead.
Lyssa laughs, and wrestles her into a headlock.
“Hey, Foggerty!”
The girls immediately let go of each other to see who’s shouting from across the arena. “Foggerty, come over here. We need to ask you something.”
After clocking the speaker, Sarazzin, she turns to me, worried. “Ah, crap. What should I do, Jim? He’s not taking no for an answer.”
Lohengrin and I instinctively step between her and the loud-mouth. He’s a stone's throw away, but he has a posse with him, and they’re all fixing to head this way if she doesn’t do as Sarazzin asks.
“How long has this been going on?” I ask.
“Since last week. He barged me over on the running track, said it was an accident, then helped me up and said I should join his team. He seems to think they’ll let us choose our own groups soon, so he’s recruiting now, getting all the highest scorers together. After physics class he asked me again, said I was stupid if I turned him down.”
“What did you say?” Lyssa hooks a protective arm around Rachel.
“That I already had a team. I thanked him for the offer, but you can see what he’s like. Look, they’re all coming now. What should I do? I don’t want to cause any trouble.”
“Don’t do anything,” says Lyssa. “They’ve got their team, we’ve got ours. No law against that.”
“I think I should just go...before you guys get hurt.”
“Smart as well as fast, Foggerty,” the loudmouth observes after overhearing us. “You should have hooked up with us on day one.” Sarazzin, C., already in the top ten on the leader board, is now changing the game, rigging it, in fact, to put himself on top and keep him there. I recognise three other top-tenners standing beside him. Orkney is there, too, with Ramirez, another of the biggest guys in the Hex. And that obnoxious mop-head who weirded me out on my first day, whose name I never did catch, skulks around behind them. Sarazzin coolly eyes each of us in turn. “You’ll fit right in, Foggerty. We promise. Don’t we, people?”
A handful of amused but steely nods of agreement from his posse do not bode well for us.
“Why don’t you let her choose for herself,” I shoot back. “You’ve got plenty enough on your team as it is.”
He scoffs. “What’s it to you, grid-licker? And anyway, I am letting her choose for herself. Either she comes with us or we go to work on all four of you right now. Decisions, decisions.”
“That’s not a choice. That’s blackmail,” Lohengrin corrects him.
“That’s right, Duck-Boy.” An insult aimed at his hair pattern. “And here’s some air-mail, priority delivery.” Sarazzin’s right hook catches Lohengrin on the bridge of his nose, ripping into the cartilage. Blood jets out all over Lyssa. She stands there in shock for a moment, before wiping her face and staring at her red fingertips.
Then, without warning, she lunges at Sarazzin like a tigress. The momentum knocks him off his feet. He squeals. While the others manage to
pull her off kicking and screaming, blood streams from two oval gashes in his nose.
Lyssa’s bitten him!
This is insane.
Rachel, pale as chalk, steps back out of the way. I try my best to pull Lyssa free from the posse but this has gone too far for them to let her go. I'm manhandled from behind. God, I wish I was bigger! We’re made to watch as Orkney and Ramirez, not wanting to be seen hitting a girl, hold her while the two female members of the group take turns slapping Lyssa’s face. She spits and kicks, but the blows keep coming and pretty soon she can’t hold back the tears.
Finally, in a rage, I prise myself loose. I deliver an elbow to the scum on my right. Before I know it I’ve dragged the evil girls away by their hair and I’m laying into Orkney. He’s much bigger than me but I don’t care. He can’t hurt my friends while he’s fighting me, so I’ll keep flinging fists for as long as I can.
A forest of arms yanks us apart. Every boy and girl in the Hex heaves in to separate us. I struggle on, desperate to reach an enemy to whale on or a friend to protect. But I can’t fight forever. It’s no use. It’s time to USE MY HEAD. On the far side of the gymnasium now, I’m becalmed by a tide of non-threatening faces telling me to take it easy. My temples start to sting—a delayed reaction to being hit repeatedly and accurately.
“Where’s Lyssa! Rachel! What happened to Lohengrin?” No one seems to know anything. “What’s wrong with this place? Where are the teachers?”
There the bell sounds for first period.
While Lohengrin, Lyssa and Sarazzin are taken to one side by the Medical Officer, the rest of us involved in the fight are split into two groups. Graaf the quartermaster arrives, chewing gum, to escort Rachel and myself up to the Overseer’s office on the top floor. I’m shivering with hate all the way. Rachel’s shaking, too. She's also pale and pouring with sweat. Neither of us says a word, nor does Graaf until he deposits us in the anteroom, which is more like an art gallery than something you’d expect to find in an ice-hewn military academy. Portraits of famous people from the history of space exploration, together with technical diagrams of their craft and key pioneering equipment, adorn the otherwise gloomy, bare rock walls. Charlie Thorpe-Campbell is one of them, alongside his legendary RAM-racer, Bluebird.
Star Binder Page 9
