“It’s for their own safety,” said Mom. “And ours.”
I agreed with her — it was too dangerous to take chances with something like this. But I also felt bad for the Johnsons, who were not in for a fun time.
They would be kept isolated in quarantine until their test results were confirmed. The blood samples took twelve days to culture, which was a joke because, if you had contracted rat fever, you would be knocking on death’s door by then, anyway. Until then, they were potential plague-spreading M&Ms — rat fever Mike and Marys. Mom had told us that the name came from someone called Typhoid Mary, an Irish cook who immigrated to the States in the early 1900’s. She was a carrier of typhoid fever, and although she was never sick herself, she’d infected scores of people in the New York area before she was identified by public health authorities and taken away to spend the rest of her life in isolation on North Brother Island — the early-twentieth-century equivalent of Q-Bay.
Mrs. Johnson glared at us and shook her head as she was led to the waiting transport, but Mr. Johnson looked merely resigned, or perhaps defeated. Rosy-cheeks gave Robin a long look then trailed after her father. As the doors of the Q-Bay transport closed behind them, we climbed onto the Fun Bus and handed our social security cards to the hostess. She scanned their barcodes into the automated attendance register, misted each of us lightly with a spray from her decon aerosol can, and directed us to the hand-sanitizer dispenser. Someone waved from the back of the bus. Recognizing the short blond hair and heavily muscled frame of Bruce, I steered Robin and my mother to free seats near the front instead.
The picnic started off bad enough, with the same old bland, tasteless, sterilized food quickly slipped in under lifted masks, many of the same neighbors commenting how I’d grown, and the same exchange of rumors and stories about the war on the pandemic, all in the massive city park almost completely deserted except for our group. But then it got worse.
Mom walked off to go chat to neighbors she knew, probably to dish the dirt on the Johnsons or maybe to compare hairstyles. She was out of the running for the award for most extravagant look. One of the women had hair patterned with diagonal stripes all the colors of the rainbow, and she’d continued the look on her face, with furry rainbow lash extensions merging into vertical stripes of multicolored eye-paint stretching up over her eyelids and brows, and onto her forehead. She looked like an image from my science tutorial: dispersal of the light spectrum through a triangular prism.
Robin, still fuming, plonked himself under the shade of a tree and stuck his nose into a thick book, and I was left alone on our picnic blanket, lying in the warm sun with a protective arm over my eyes. This might have been pretty good, actually, but Bruce took it as an invitation to join me.
“Hey, Blue, how ya doing?” he said and plonked down next to me on the blanket.
I didn’t feel comfortable lying down next to him, but when I stood up and said I was going for a walk to see the flowering dogwoods, he invited himself along. I had no idea how to tell him he wasn’t welcome without being horribly rude, so I said nothing. He walked beside me, complimenting my hair and eyes and even my false lashes, and every time we came to a tree stump or boulder, he offered to help me over. The park was eerily empty. There were no ducks on the ponds, no dogs being taken for a walk, no children playing in the open areas. Dogwoods glimmered in the sun like ghost trees, their stark, dark wood stabbing through the masses of white blossoms.
The only interesting moment of the whole social came at the end, when Bruce and I were making our way back to the bus.
“That was a great shot you had in the game, when you hit Sarge. Lucky.”
“I guess.”
“I’m looking forward to taking you on again.”
“How?” I said, looking at him directly for the first time. “Do we get to play another game?”
“Don’t you know?”
“Know what?”
“Your mom didn’t get a letter about you?”
“Not that I know of. Though she did say something about good news that she’s planning to tell me tonight. A surprise of some kind. What do you know?”
“I won’t say anything except that it’s super-cool. You’re going to be maxed out by the news. When my folks told me — dude! I was blown away.”
“What? What is it?” I demanded, but Bruce would only tempt me with hints about what he knew, and taunt me with what I didn’t, all the way back to the bus.
The minute I was in the seat next to my mother, I turned to her and said firmly, “Mom, you tell me that good news, right here, right now.”
“What news?” said Robin, turning around from the row in front to face us. His mood had improved now that the social was coming to a close.
Mom smiled at both of us. “I was going to save it for later, when we have our brownies.”
“Mother, now!”
“Tell us,” Robin chimed in.
“No one else is supposed to know,” she whispered. “I’m not even sure I can bring myself to let you go.”
Robin and I pulled our heads in close to hear her. “The good news, Jinxy, is…” She reached into her pocket, pulled out a printed email and scanned it until she found the part she was looking for, then she read it out to us very softly, “Is that based on your performance in The Game and the simulation prize, you have been selected as a recruit for the Advanced Skills Training Program at the Advanced Specialized Training Academy, ASTA. On the first of May, if you so desire, you will begin your training to become a member of their first ever elite sniper squad.”
“I’m going to be a sniper?” I whispered back, stunned. “What —”
“Hold on, let me finish,” said Mom, trying to find her place on the letter. “Ah, here it is: ‘to be deployed in the elimination of dangerous rodents’.”
Robin cackled with laughter.
“You’re not going to be a sniper, Jinxy, you’re going to be a ratter!”
Chapter 9
Pirate
I sat in the black Hummer, facing its new occupant, intensely aware of many things all at once. His long, lean frame and dark-mahogany hair — worn a little too long, so that the end bits curled against his neck. The silver ring threaded through one of the dark brows above eyes the color of slate, eyes which crinkled at the corners. The heat warming my cheeks. And an irrepressible urge to smile back building inside me.
He was wearing the lightest of protection — thin gloves and a basic surgical-style gauze mask which I knew from Mom’s lectures on the subject would stop only particles and droplets coming at you from the front, and did little for airborne viruses. I could — almost — see the edges of his mouth smiling beyond the mask’s loose-fitting sides. Risky stuff.
This morning, I had been determined not to be the only person wearing way more protection than anyone else, so I’d smuggled an E97 mask in my pocket to swap out before I got into the transport. I’d already said my goodbyes to Robin and my mother separately.
“Robin, please keep an eye on Mom. I know she’ll worry about me, but don’t let her get too anxious or, you know, go … dark. Again. Come out of your cave occasionally and spend some time with her, okay? Promise me.”
“Sure.” He gave me a tight hug.
“And please do the waste incineration for her.” The chore of lugging the contents of the bio-disposal bins to the basement and feeding them into the incinerator had always been mine. “You know how it freaks her out when she has to touch that stuff.”
“Don’t worry about us, Jinxy. Go and have fun with your rats.” He was grinning.
“I totally intend to have fun,” I said, ignoring his tease. “That’s why I need to know you’ll take care of Mom.”
Downstairs, my mother made final adjustments to my respirator, zipped my PPE suit right up to my throat, and tucked a bottle of hand sanitizer and a pack of antiseptic wipes into my pocket. Her eyes were anxious even as she smiled down at me — the child who was Daddy’s little girl but who for months had
made Mom grilled cheese sandwiches or tuna salad for dinner, brought her water to take her meds, nagged Robin to get to school on time, and later, to log on for his cyber-tutorials. To her, I was still a little kid who liked Captain Crunch and watching old reruns of The Simpsons. And yet, apparently, I could shoot, and I was leaving home to learn how to shoot real live plague rats.
“To think my daughter is going to have such an important role in the war against the plague. I’m so proud of you!”
The words, “Your father would be so proud of you,” hovered between us, but they remained unspoken. My mother never spoke about Dad, and if Robin or I mentioned him, her eyes would cloud over and fill with tears. When the two of us wanted to talk about Dad and the days before the plague, we did so in private.
“Don’t be too soft on Robin, Mom. If you let him, he’ll dream all day and read all night. Make sure he does his schoolwork and finishes the semester, and encourage him to do more programming units on The Game — he’s really good and could turn it into a career, unlike poetry. And he needs hugs every day, even when he pretends he’s too old for them.”
“I know what I’m doing! I’ve been a mother for sixteen years, Jinx, I’m hardly likely to stop now.”
You did before.
“Of course,” I reassured her. “And don’t worry about me. I’ll be perfectly safe.”
“I’ll always worry. It’s part of my job description as a mother. I suppose you’d better go now, they’re waiting for you.”
“Love you,” I called to them.
“More!” they shouted back.
As soon as I was in the decon unit with my back turned to Mom and Robin, I swapped my half-face respirator for the lighter, form-fitted mask. When the decon unit door clicked open, I hurried off to the transport, not turning to wave. I didn’t want my mother to see that I was hardly out the door and already I was breaking her rules.
It looked like the same twelve-seater Hummer, though its sides were a plain, glossy black with no PlayState logo. I was surprised to see that the official standing beside the open door, holding a clipboard and pen, was Fiona, one of the instructors from the simulation.
“Hi! How come you’re here? Do you also work at the Academy?” I asked, confused.
“Stow your bag,” she said, pointing to the trailer behind the vehicle.
As I hoisted my luggage into the trailer, I noticed that many of the other bags bore airline tags. This transport must already have collected new recruits from the airport. The recruits starting their training with me today probably came from all over the Southern Sector.
Fiona closed and locked the lid, then held out the clipboard and pen to me.
“As you were informed in the documentation sent to you, you need to sign a non-disclosure confidentiality agreement about today’s proceedings. Also, before you get inside, please note that there’s to be no talking on the transport to the Academy.”
It struck me as a little extreme, but there must be a good reason for it, so I made no objection as I signed the form and then climbed inside.
Bruce had seated himself up front. I noticed that he had shaved some sort of geometric pattern into the strip of buzz-cut hair above his ears. He gestured to the seats opposite him, which were impossible to avoid since all the rest, except for the spot right next to him, were taken. It was awkward, being in one of the two seats that faced everyone else, including Bruce. Why did I keep finding myself in this hot spot?
Ten sets of eyes stared back at me — from faces that were black, white and brown, male and female, with a variety of different styles and colors of hair. One boy near the back had hair cut into a triangular scarlet afro. It was hard to tell because of the masks, but I guessed they were all a couple of years older than me. I’d made a good call on the face-mask because only one person, a slim Asian boy with a ponytail, was wearing a half-face respirator.
“Do you know if Leya is also coming?” I asked Bruce. I was keen to make a friend of her.
Fiona spun around from her seat up front and shushed me. “I told you — no talking.”
I made a placatory gesture with my hands.
We didn’t collect Leya. I hoped this was because she lived clear across town, and this transport was collecting recruits only from our side of town, and not because she hadn’t made the cut. We made one more stop en route to the Academy — outside a small house in a low-income neighborhood closer to the center. It looked like a scene out of a movie from before. There was an old-fashioned wooden swing-bench on the front porch, a low picket fence with peeling white paint out front, a basketball hoop mounted on the wall above the garage, and a blue-and-green toy pedal wagon lying on its side in the short driveway fringed with crimson azaleas. Did anyone actually swing on that seat or play in that yard?
Several people came out the front door at once — didn’t they have a decon unit? — a tall teenage boy carrying a big, black duffel bag in one hand and a cat in the other, a shorter young man holding the leads of two dogs who were madly barking and leaping about, a much younger girl in an orange dress, and a middle-aged couple whom I assumed were their parents. The tall boy handed the cat to the little girl and then hugged each of the family in turn, even kissing the girl and the woman. I stared at them, shocked. None of them, except the boy now striding toward the Hummer, was wearing a mask or gloves.
He signed the form Fiona handed him, but when she warned him of the no-talking rule, he lifted his eyebrows in surprise.
“Really? Why’s that?”
Fiona eyed him for a moment before sniffing then replying, “Because this transport includes recruits from across different … specialties. And you don’t yet have security clearance to hear about them.”
“Okaay,” he said slowly.
Bruce craned his neck to see the new recruit, then his eyes registered the empty seat next to me and he swung himself territorially across into it, sitting right up against me and gesturing to the newcomer, when he climbed inside, to take the seat opposite us.
Which was fine with me, because now, as the vehicle pulled off, I got to study the smiling gray eyes, the wayward mahogany hair, and the dark tone of his skin. I couldn’t decide if he was naturally olive-skinned or just deeply tanned, but together with the silver ring piercing his left brow, it made him look like a pirate. Black-and-white checkerboard sneakers stuck out below fraying denims — alone amongst all of us, he wasn’t wearing a disposable PPE suit. He was wearing faded Levis and a long-sleeved gray T-shirt printed with the graphic of a stick figure who had a single, vertical line for an eye, and something written below. As I leaned forward to read the message, the Hummer bounced roughly over a pothole and I lurched forward almost into his lap. He caught me around the arms, steadying me. Bruce grabbed a handful of the back of my suit and snatched me back into my seat beside him.
“Would you like to sit next to me” — the pirate gestured to the space beside him — “or perhaps in my lap?” His voice was deep with a slight lilt to it, and one eye twitched as he spoke. Unless … Had he just winked at me?
Fiona turned from her seat up front and scowled at me. No fair — I hadn’t been the one talking.
“No talking,” she snapped.
“You’re kidding, right?” the new guy said. “We were only playing around. I wasn’t talking about anything sensitive. Well,” he added with another wink at me, “not security-sensitive.”
“I never kid,” Fiona said.
Looking at her fierce frown, I believed her.
“And this isn’t a game,” she added.
The pirate raised his eyebrows at me. Then he leaned forward and stretched his shirt out from his chest so I could read the words printed there: “It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye.”
Then I did smile. Actually, I laughed. And so did he.
Chapter 10
Asta
The Advanced Skills Training Academy was located on the same private road on which the PlayState headquarters was located, but about half
a mile farther down, right at the tail end. It was surrounded by the same dense woods and protected by the same massive security fence with guard huts on the perimeter, and floodlights and video surveillance cameras mounted in key positions. I figured the two had to be connected in some way.
The complex was laid out roughly in the shape of a daisy — if daisies could have rectangular petals and an oval center. The rectangle closest to the road (about a quarter mile down a narrow drive) was the main Academy building — five floors high, gray brick with long sealed windows that glittered opaquely in the morning sunlight. This was where we began our processing, first passing through decon units, then gathering in a large marble-floored foyer along with around fifty or so other young recruits, none of whom were talking. Weird.
Looking around in the hope of seeing Leya, I noticed that the pirate was standing a few paces behind me. Bruce still stuck to my side like a barnacle, nodding approvingly at a massive 3D hologram which was projected on the first landing of the wide central staircase leading to the second floor. A yellow-and-red logo of upward-pointing arrows, like the chevrons on a sergeant’s insignia badge, rotated above the words Advanced Specialized Training Academy (ASTA) Inform, Protect, Improve.
When recruits from another transport were ushered in, I took advantage of Bruce’s momentary distraction to move away from him, off to the side of the room. The sound of introductory music made me glance up to the landing, and I discovered that the pirate was now standing next to me. He turned to look down at me — he really was very tall — and I could have sworn those gray eyes were smiling again. When the hologram started speaking, he turned his full attention to the holo-zone. It was a live transmission from none other than Southern Sector President, Alex Hawke, who welcomed us warmly to the Academy and wished us the best of luck in our training.
I wanted to listen to the rest of Hawke’s speech, but I battled to stay focused. I was too aware of the lean figure next to me. He was standing so close that our arms were pressed against each other, and I could feel the warmth of his body through my jumpsuit. I snuck a sideways glance at him. Although he seemed to be watching and listening intently, he somehow radiated an air of skepticism. Perhaps it was in the fold of his arms across his chest, or the small frown between his eyes, or in the evaluative tilt of his head. Once he shook his head very slightly and sighed softly.
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