by Karen Bao
“The last oil and natural gas reserves were depleted. Temperatures were rising and so were the seas.”
Three meters from me, a lanky dark-haired girl in maroon Beta robes yawns without bothering to cover her mouth. She can’t be any more bored than Yinha, who’s probably given this exact speech to each batch of soldiers every two months for years.
My eyelids grow heavier as the history lesson progresses. Ice caps collapsed and lowlands flooded; oil-producing countries started a global economy-crushing embargo. Inundated cities constructed massive rafts and floated off to sea, the financial burden leading to civil wars and international breakdown.
“Two superpowers grew out of the chaos,” Yinha says, “the destitute but aggressive Pacifian alliance, and the Battery Bay bloc, riven with liberal debauchery, which it still tries to spread. Both spew poison into the environment and propel themselves across the oceans, seizing the few pitiful resources that are left.”
Yinha tells how Earthbound governments poured money into researching bizarre geoengineering schemes and how our scientist ancestors, from many different countries, knew the schemes would fail. They collected the funds, started constructing Base I, and brought their families with them to the Moon.
I feel bad for not paying more attention, because I’m thankful to live on the Bases. The founders thought of the Moon as a last refuge for the human species, and my family was lucky to have a place here.
To finish, Yinha holds one hand toward us, palm facing up. We join her in shouting the motto of the Lunar Bases: “A beacon of humanity for the glory of science.”
Our first assignment in protecting the beacon is to shed our loose robes and change into trainee suits. The instructors laugh at our confusion as to where to do it.
“Right here,” Yinha says.
“Change in front of twenty-five hormonal teenage guys?” The tall girl next to me wears the familiar green robes of Phi; the color is striking against her dark olive skin. Around her eyes, she has the beginnings of crinkles, radial like the veins on a gingko leaf, from constantly grinning. “See? Stripy-hair is freaked.”
She’s referring to me, perhaps even mocking me for being the blatant outlier in this group—or I’m being defensive because of nerves. My heart is propelling so much blood through my head that I’m getting dizzy.
But she’s also challenging a captain, one who seems to relish authority. None of us knows whether Yinha also enjoys abusing it.
Captain Yinha scrutinizes the girl’s frizzy black curls, which refuse to stay in the knot required for women, and glances at her handscreen. “Nashira Phi, I’ll tolerate your cheek for now, but other officers might not.”
A few trainees exhale, relieved. We hadn’t expected such leniency, instead bracing ourselves for Nashira’s verbal or physical punishment, for Captain Yinha to enjoy making an example out of her.
“That said,” Yinha continues, “don’t expect privacy in the Militia. Here, men and women are equals in every way. Do I make myself clear? Cool.”
Mom always told me not to judge people by their handscreen profiles, and I rarely look at anything but the name. But self-preservation gets the better of me; glancing down, I see why Yinha was terse with this girl. Nashira—who “prefers to be addressed as Nash”—gets decent marks in Primary but has a reputation for asking “unnecessarily specific” questions in Lunar History class.
The trainees spread out, trying to find contraptions to duck behind. This is the famous Militia training dome, where a flick of a switch can alter gravity, where a linoleum floor can sprout a forest overnight, where sound takes half a second to cross the room and bounce back. Rumors fly that the laws of physics don’t apply here, but that’s nonsense. They’re just manipulated.
Nash disappears behind a wall with various handholds meant to simulate rock climbing on Earth. Noting the stares I’m receiving from other trainees—sizing me up, because I wasn’t in their Primary class, because I look so young—I hide behind the same wall. But I choose a spot far enough from Nash so it doesn’t look like I followed her.
Hands shaking and fumbling, I discard my white robes, sliding into a snug black shirt and loose pants full of pockets. A tough canvas jacket goes on over the shirt.
“Done yet?” Yinha’s voice booms across the white dome, magnified because it’s coming from everyone’s handscreen as well. “Cool. We’re running a kilometer to warm up. That’s two laps along the perimeter. Get behind the green line.”
Neon green flashes to my left, indicating our starting point. The trainees saunter in its general direction; several shove one another in order to get there first.
“Hurry up,” Yinha says. “You’ve got loads of exercises before we’re done today.”
Nash sprints toward the line, showing off her long, powerful legs. Though all I want is to keep hiding behind the wall, I tail her, holding myself tall. We’re among the last to reach our destination, and we end up behind a swarm of eager trainees. Why are they so desperate, when we’re not being scored?
“Go!” barks Yinha.
Nash pulls ahead. I hang back to gauge my body’s aptitude for running and to observe the competition. I’m of average height among the girls, but small overall; with my proportionally short legs and long torso, I need to make up for my smaller strides with a higher frequency.
While I strategize, unaware, someone’s foot stomps on mine.
“Watch it, granny!” shouts a girl with a runny nose. Strange she should call me that, since I’m closer in age to any younger siblings she might have.
By the second lap, I overtake a panting Nash, but my lungs burn and sweat trickles into my eyes. I was never good at this during conditioning. Looking ahead, I see two boys race neck and neck toward the finish line. One’s tall and stocky, pain obvious on his face. It’s the friendly landmass who fixed his hair in Canopus’s office. The other boy, who has a smaller build, takes leisurely strides that barely ruffle his reddish hair.
Oh no. Bitterness simmers within me as I remember his curt repetitions of “sorry” on that awful day, the meek apologies that couldn’t make up for leaving three children without a mother, and his artificial civility when we saw him in Shelter. Despite the dangers in Militia, he grinned when he told Anka he was about to join. Now I understand why. He’s looked forward to outdoing the other trainees and to an ego boost.
As the Giant begins to tire, Copper Head prances past him. Then the Giant rams into his rival, forcing Copper Head to stumble onto an outside lane. The Giant’s open hostility tempers my satisfaction at seeing Copper Head put in his place.
They cross the finish line together.
Thirty seconds later, I follow in the midst of a swarm of trainees. If I’m to pay for Mom’s treatment, I have to improve, and quickly.
“The last twenty of you, move it!” Yinha commands the stragglers. She nods with approval at the Giant, who rests his hands on his knees, and Copper Head, who stands off to the side to stretch his quadriceps. “Nice job to the two who finished first. Seems we have some well-conditioned trainees.”
Immediate recognition—that’s why they pushed themselves so hard. Although training has just begun, the instructors are already paying attention to them as potential officers.
“Today’s workout will be cardiovascular conditioning,” says Yinha, “so take a moment to catch your breath and stretch. Next, we’re jumping, crawling, and doing other stuff that gets your heart rate up. We’ll finish with another half-kilometer run. Got it? Cool.”
A grid of torn muscle fibers, swollen and blotchy at the microscopic level, comes to mind. If I’m lucky, a single-digit percentage of the cells in my arms, legs, and torso will end up like that by tomorrow. Sometimes I wish anatomy class had been less graphic.
We divide into groups of five, each of which gets a hundred-meter-long straightaway to work with. The original circular track disappears, and neon lights indicate the new paths.
We sprint. We hop on one foot, back on the other. We crawl
on hands and knees, and crawl on one hand. We tackle cartwheels, roundoffs, and forward rolls with varying degrees of success.
“This is how you get in shape!” Yinha hollers as motivation.
By the time the cooldown run arrives, my kneecaps pound and the room around me jolts with every step.
Copper Head finishes a full five seconds before everyone else and jogs around Yinha, avoiding her eyes.
Who is he? The day he came for Mom, I was too upset to identify him using the voice-recognition software on my handscreen. I’ll learn his name soon enough—but more important, how do I reach his level?
6
THE MESS HALL’S THICK TABLES ARE EMPTY when the ravenous trainees troop inside for dinner. I sit near the end of the room with Nash and two other girls, my back against the wall.
“You following me again?” Nash says.
I shake my head and drop my gaze to the tabletop, wishing Umbriel could back up my denial. No, I wish I were home with my family, or in the Phi complex. Anywhere but here, surrounded by hot glares that could incinerate me at any moment.
On my right is a sensor for my thumb. I scan myself in; the little bar on the top reads, THETA, PHAET. 2,650 KILOCALORIE DIET.
“Leave the kid alone, Nash,” the lovely girl across from me says. Her skin is bronze and freckled, her hair is wavy and black, and her eyes are shot through with gold. “She’s probably my little sister’s age. Chitra’s terrified of boys, and we’re about to see boys with guns.”
Biting back a laugh, I decide I like her wit.
Nash scowls. “Itty snob. Look, Vinasa, she’s ignoring us, like we’re not worth her breath.”
No, that’s not it. I shake my head, panicked, but Nash has turned her attention elsewhere.
The tables rumble as decades-old conveyor belts carry our personalized meals from the walls to our seats—it’s nothing like having Mom ladle vegetables onto our plates and watching Anka wrinkle her nose if she smells horseradish or okra. Are they missing me like I miss them?
The square section of plastic before me tucks itself away, revealing hot food in a circular compartmentalized tray that rises and screeches into place. Dinner is knobs of whole grain bread and a vegetable soup with bits of lab-grown beef drifting in the hearty broth; dessert is a personal cantaloupe, a new fruit the size of an orange with skin that peels away just as easily. Cygnus and Anka would be jealous, not because of the food’s quality—Mom could make even an underripe eggplant taste delectable—but its quantity. I’m going to finish every last crumb of bread, every last drop of soup, and my cantaloupe too.
“I don’t care where I place, or how much Defense pays me,” the short girl sitting across from me is saying to Vinasa, who compared me to her little sister. She has white skin and hair as orange as a marigold blossom, cropped short like Cygnus’s. “Actually, I’d rather rank low so they don’t put me on Earth recon.”
Earth recon missions are unpopular but necessary assignments for high-ranking soldiers. From what I’ve read in the Luna Daily, Battery Bay and Pacifia have more problems between them now that we leave them alone—but we make a point of keeping an eye on them. My Earth Studies teacher once joked that the two cities are like teenage lovers: fickle, silly, bickering. They float atop the ocean, sometimes chasing each other and sometimes speeding in opposite directions. They’ve each tried to get as many other countries on their side as possible; now, most of the planet’s population belongs to one of the alliances.
Vinasa swallows some bread and looks as if she’s trying not to hiccup. “Don’t know if you can bet on that, Eri. Beetles have seen more Earth ships nearby these past few years, so the Militia’s sending more people to dispatch those ships and on actual recon missions.”
“Ugh, and the food on the ships is probably even worse than this. . . .” Eri hasn’t touched her meal; she glares at it, as if doing so will turn it into fresh sushi and fluffy coconut cake. “Think we can get our parents to send some real bread?”
Groans of assent arise from around the table. These girls surely grew up in middle-income families, eating the kind of food mine only bought for special occasions. White bread, still warm from the Culinary steam ovens, filled with fruit paste or lab-grown meat. Water infused with carbon dioxide and sweet stevia leaves that bubbles delightfully on the tongue.
I whisk my soup with the spoon, aiming to create a smooth, sloping vortex until I admit to myself that the chunky liquid will never cooperate.
Nash’s low voice wafts from beside me. “It’s not that bad, Eri. At least they care about our health.”
Defense is feeding us now so that we can do their bidding before either completing our service or dropping dead. Great investment, I think with a sardonic smirk. We might as well take advantage of their generosity.
“You know who’s going to place at top two and end up on recon?” Vinasa winks at Eri, whose face turns the color of a radish. “Wes Kappa.”
I wonder if she’s talking about Copper Head.
“Yeah, Eri, your stalk-ee ran like a comet today—I mean, if comets could run,” Nash adds. “I saw you staring at him like . . . well, the way you’ve stared at him since Level Ten Primary. . . . Top twenty in every subject! Pretty hair like the surface of Mars!”
Eri hunches over her food and shovels a spoonful of the soup into her mouth. Now’s a good time for her to eat it, when she’s so embarrassed she won’t notice the taste.
She swallows. “Fuzz off, Nash.”
About ten years ago, some colorful individuals derived the swearwords fizz, fuzz, and fuse from nuclear fission and fusion, violent processes from which the best lunar weapons draw their power. I’m unused to profanity, but given Militia’s coarse environment, hearing such phrases shouldn’t be a surprise.
“But it’s so much fun to tease you!” Vinasa erupts into laughter, clutching her middle. “Also, you do nothing about him, even though he’ll never make the first move.”
Nash snorts. “Vin, Wes is right there, with Orion. Quit with the giggles unless you want them to hear.”
Indeed, Copper Head sits at the end of a nearby table full of babbling trainees, facing the wall and watching the evening news on his handscreen. The fellow responsible for most of the mirth—Orion, I suppose—has peachy skin and wears his wheaten hair in a stubby ponytail at the nape of his neck. His face and shoulders are so strong, even the hairstyle doesn’t make him look effeminate. While he makes conversation with the unfortunate girl beside him, her spoon misses her mouth and stew spills down her front. I let out a snort of amusement.
Oblivious, Copper Head spears his bread with his fork and chomps it with his premolars, on the side of his mouth. Something on the news holds his attention, or he’s pretending it does. Because I’m in a similar social situation, I feel a sudden closeness with him, but I repress it. He deserves no empathy from me.
After dinner, Colonel Arcturus Theta, an older officer with a round, ruddy face and gray hair shaved close to his scalp, delivers a lecture on rules that focuses on our 23:00 curfew—“23:00, and not a second later!” We mustn’t wander about after curfew; boys and girls must be in their respective halves of the barracks after curfew; handscreens must be silenced after curfew. . . .
“People call him Arcturus the Assiduous.” In the row above me, Orion whispers loudly to Copper Head. “Because he flips grits every time people don’t follow his exact directions. And he’s super picky about squat technique. Assiduous. Get the double meaning?”
On a better day, I might have laughed. It would feel wrong now, with my family scattered all over the base.
Arcturus’s eyes dart to our section of chairs. When he turns to a different part of the crowd, his droopy cheeks wobble.
Twenty minutes later, he finishes. We drag ourselves to the barracks, where cots for all trainees are stacked in columns—girls in one half of the room, boys in the other. I gulp, wondering how I’ll fall asleep with so many people around.
I dart to a quiet corner and claim
a top bunk. I’ve always liked to see everything. Even though the lights are still on, and the cot is too bumpy for restorative rest, my eyelids begin to close as soon as I orient myself horizontally. With a stranger’s soft breathing in the cot next to me instead of my sister’s, I drown in the loneliness that’s been seeping into my blood all day. In a futile attempt to fight it off, I imagine Mom’s dark eyes watching me as I wander into the void.
7
THE NEXT DAY INVOLVES STRENGTH training, which works muscles I didn’t know I had to the point of misery. I had hoped that my time in the greenhouses would prepare me for this kind of exertion, but I was sadly mistaken. The Giant does the most push-ups, crunches, and squats, with Wes Kappa a close second.
Periodically, I glance at my handscreen clock and wonder about my family—at 16:00, in the middle of a pull-up, I think, Did Anka get home? At dinnertime, while in my usual seat against the wall: Did Caeli remember to make food for two more people? And Mom . . . oh, I hope her fever’s subsiding. . . .
Later in the week, we spend hours reviewing form and martial arts techniques. My sore muscles bewail every punch and parry. The double roundhouse kicks are the worst, requiring a quick pivot in midair to hit the left and right flanks of an opponent. Most satisfying is the axe kick, which aims to crush a bone or two beneath the heel. I earn myself dirty stares when my foot flies up past my collarbone. Years of crawling and twisting in the cramped greenhouses have kept me flexible.
When Yinha orders us to pair off so she can critique us two by two, I lurk near Nash, Eri, and Vinasa, who argue over which two will form a pair and who will face someone new. Eri shuffles off into a crowd of trainees, and I follow—she seems like a safe opponent.
Before I summon the courage to approach her, the Giant swaggers over to Wes Kappa and grabs his arm. Trainees scoot backward as they face off.
