by Karen Bao
A crackly voice commands me to take cover behind this tree or set up a grenade under that rock. Sometimes the orders are more complex: set up a lethal trip wire between two points in a group of three or guard the southwest corner of a hexagonal building while other unit members infiltrate the interior.
Though I’m fatigued, I pass the night sleeplessly in Eri’s cot. It smells like her, spicy and sugary, but off—a constant reminder that up on my cot, her snoring form is exposed to danger. Thankfully, nothing stirs in the darkness.
The training area is still disguised as an Earth forest when we return for more soreness the following morning.
Yinha strides in. “Yesterday, many of you were dragging your feet. Were you tired? We’re going to take care of that today. Have fun jogging with all your equipment. Five kilometers. Let’s go.”
Although all the other trainees groan, I don’t let myself join them. This reminds me of the first week, when we ran in circles around the perimeter of the dome, but this time, rocks and roots bar our way, gusts of air blow from the walls to slow us, and kilograms of equipment weigh us down. I watch my feet constantly to avoid tripping. Soon, a pattern in the obstacles emerges: two low roots, a high root, a rock, a mid-sized root, an overhanging vine, and two low roots again. I break away from the horde of trainees and set a steady pace behind Wes, who, as usual, overachieves in front.
“Hello, Stripes,” he says without turning.
How civil he acts, considering we haven’t talked in two days! There’s something different about him now that he considers me a real threat to his standing.
“Good morning.” I tail him, letting his bigger body block the directed airflow so that my own running is easier.
“Are you upset by what I said?” He gets right to the point. “I was being inconsiderate—please forgive me.”
There he goes with the apologies. Remembering Mom’s pink skin the day everything began, I pound my simmering frustration into the ground, causing my strides to lengthen. Good, I’ve made practical use of my emotions.
“My family needs the prize money too. I wish I could change the situation so that this . . . pettiness . . . wouldn’t come between us—”
“You can’t.”
He must come from poor stock as well. He had to take a small job as a department assistant, like I did. But how did he find time to practice running, fighting, and shooting? Who taught him those skills? The best explanation is that his parents are low-ranking Militia officials, but in that case they would still get decent pay, rendering the financial motive implausible. Also, if Murray is his only sibling and has a job of her own, no one is dependent on him. I wish I could find out more about his family, but my handscreen won’t provide information on citizens who don’t reside on Base IV.
Nothing makes sense. I dislike thinking in circles even more than jogging in circles.
“Phaet, will you please run next to me? I want to see you.”
Sighing, I comply.
“I promise I will explain it all when I can.” So there is something else. “We should meet back at the Medical quarters tonight. At the least, we can stay in the top two.”
“Fine.”
Matching our strides, Wes and I pass the slowest trainees, who have shamelessly resorted to walking. Eri whoops as we race past her, but I barely notice.
My instincts are funny. The first time I set eyes on Wes, I didn’t like him. Something within me knew to beware those cold, shiny eyes.
That night, I fight with Wes as never before, testing my limits and his. We’re sore from the day’s labor, but our movements build to a frenzy, an ephemeral kaleidoscope of limbs. He doesn’t call out suggestions anymore, needing to concentrate wholly on our duel. My fists fire like tiny sparks at his face and torso; my feet whip out in attempts to trip him.
He hooks a foot behind mine and pulls my heel from under me, the same tactic I used against Io Beta in the first evaluation. Before I fall onto my back, I throw all my weight into a punch aimed at his chest, which he deflects with his shoulder. His fingers capture my wrist; he pulls me in and hooks his elbow behind my neck.
“Gotcha.” His breath tickles my ear; his sticky cheek presses against my forehead.
Inexplicably, his arm around me slackens—as does his focus. Wes never loses focus.
Out of concern rather than malice, I punch him in the gut. I feel a sour surge of satisfaction before his torso collapses inward, curling around itself like a withered stem. He anticlimactically plants his rear on the floor.
I retract my guilty hands and join him. “Sorry.”
“I’ll recover soon enough.” His voice catches on a few syllables as if he’s hurt. But he’s emitting some kind of mirthless laughter. “You absolutely amaze me.”
I inch away. Part of me had prepared for a surprise resumption of our match. “What?”
“You heard me.” Wes draws himself up and raises a flat hand perpendicular to the ground. Is he going to hit me? I’ve never encountered this peculiar gesture.
“This is what you do—we call it a high five. Raise your hand like this. Exactly.”
He slaps my hand, stinging it a bit, but it makes me feel accomplished. Victorious.
“Not so hard, is it?” he says between laughs. When he’s this agreeable, it’s hard to stay upset with him.
I glower at my hand in puzzlement. “So that gesture of goodwill was for socking you in the stomach.”
“In essence, yes.” Wes’s face turns serious again. “Please don’t be upset with me anymore, Phaet. We’ve helped each other so much.”
It’s true, at least in part. Wes has raised my ranking by more than a dozen places and turned me into a carbon-based fighting machine. “Besides the Jupiter debacle, how have I ever helped you?”
“You let me beat you nearly to a pulp on multiple occasions.”
I almost laugh.
Wes tousles his hair, searching the air around us for adequate words. “All joking aside, remember how I said I’d never really found a friend in the world?”
I do.
“You might not consider me one. Not like Umbriel. But you’re like the little sister I never had. You showed me what real companionship could be. . . . No matter how unlikely it seemed that we’d get along.”
He called me his first friend, a little sister. An Anka of his own, as if he and I share a multitude of lovely things from childhood memories to specific sequences in our DNA. I’m not sure why, then, I feel incomplete, or what else I expected to hear.
“Come on, ready for another go?” he says.
Though my muscles burn and my back is dotted with spots of soreness, I get up. Our conversation has exhausted me as much as the workout; I put my hands on my lower back, rolling my head from side to side. My neck makes loud cracking noises.
“You all right?”
I return his previous frankness. “Sore.”
We trade blows for a minute or so, but when I reach around for a right jab, pain shoots from my shoulder down my arm and through my fist. Weak, I think as he grabs my hand and forces it down.
He drops the fighting stance. “I don’t think you’re actually all right. Want me to take a look?”
I vigorously shake my head.
“It’ll take a minute at most. You see, carrying heavy packs tends to strain the lumbar vertebrae and the shoulders, especially in women.”
I narrow my eyes but note that he indirectly called me a woman—not a girl, not some imaginary little sister.
“Well—the sexes are equally valuable, yes, but their bodies are built quite differently. Not that differences shouldn’t be embraced.”
“Whatever.” Now I sound like Anka.
“Er—you’ll need to be still.” Delicate fingers probe the grooves between my back muscles through my shirt. Several times I jerk, either because a nerve fires with pain or because chilly goose bumps rise on my arms.
“Knots everywhere, or as Medical calls them, myofascial trigger points. After overuse, t
he muscle stays permanently flexed and causes lactic acid buildup. It’s not too hard to remove them with massage. Er—perhaps lie down on your stomach?”
After I do as he says, Wes sits down beside me. His cool hands roam my upper back; I suddenly feel too warm and wonder if my shirt is damp from sweat.
“Ow,” I carp when he pinches the flesh over my left shoulder blade. It feels like he’s picking up the muscle and dropping it somewhere else. But after he lets go, I feel relief.
“Oops.” Wes pats the area. “I should have mentioned that targeted massage can be quite painful.”
He pinches again and again. Soon I’m squirming when it hurts and giggling when it tickles. “This isn’t massage; this is you rearranging my back.”
“I could rearrange your neurons too, if you’d like.” He taps the back of my skull with his knuckles.
“You probably just killed fifty of them.”
“Kid like you has a few to spare.” There he goes with the compliments, but . . . “kid,” yet again.
I stay silent and still for the remainder of my “treatment.” Wes takes a while to finish both sides; my back feels looser but I’m still too warm.
“Thanks for being a good patient—minus the initial squirming. Would you like to walk back to the barracks now?”
Unlike the other nights, Wes wants to come with me. I could argue against his offer in a number of ways—he could get in trouble for going near the girls’ cots, people would say nasty things about us, it would take longer for him to get to the boys’ half of the room—but my tongue sticks to the floor of my mouth.
Wes’s company provides protection, but the twinge of guilt in my gut won’t leave. Had Umbriel stolen into the Medical quarters and lurked in the darkness, he would have accused me of fraternizing with my competition.
And when I lie in Eri’s cot, again losing a battle with insomnia, I see Umbriel kneading his brows in disapproval as clearly as if he were imprinted on the back of my eyelids.
23
THE TENSION AMONG THE TRAINEES stretches to a breaking point as the last evaluation approaches. Jupiter lands Orion in the Medical quarters after “accidentally” positioning a trip wire near his feet. Paranoia sets in. I never wander around after lights-out without wearing Wes’s infrared glasses. Nash and Eri chatter about their concern that life as a soldier will be even tougher than life as a trainee. I disagree—by then, I’ll know my placement and will be freer to visit what’s left of my family.
After the night he redistributed my back muscles, Wes and I get along admirably, preferring to compete as a team rather than as enemies. If we can beat the other forty-eight, the top two spots are ours. But I need the money of the first-place trainee, and I want to surpass everyone’s expectations of me—even my own.
Only the number one rank will satisfy me, but to preserve our alliance, I don’t say so.
In the training dome, Arcturus takes over and gives us strategy lessons for the field. The eyes of most trainees glaze over with indifference; they won’t become officers anytime soon, but the highest-ranking among us sit attentively, typing with our index fingers on our handscreens. We might give orders of our own in a matter of weeks.
“Never send troops into completely unknown territory. Send a small recon team first to gather intelligence about the geography and the people. Secure the highest ground. Play to the capabilities of each soldier in your unit. Do not pause in your directives for long, lest your soldiers panic. Follow the orders from your own superiors at all times. And always secure a meeting location if anything goes wrong.”
The morning of the evaluation, no one knows what to expect.
“Hope you all slept well,” Yinha announces. “Today’s will be the most difficult of the evaluations. We’re going outside again. There will be one team of twenty-four and one team of twenty-five, each guarding a cache of supplies, represented by a green box. The object is to find the other team’s box and bring it to your side of the arena. Everyone will be individually evaluated based on what we see in our cameras, set up around the area. Simple. Straightforward.”
Each trainee is issued a gray pressure suit, the better to blend in with the regolith—the dusty mess that is the lunar surface’s poor imitation of soil. The suits aren’t as bulky as old Earthbound astronaut garb but leave a good half-centimeter of air between our bodies and the plastic-like material. I seal my limbs inside my suit without complaining, like some of the girls, that it makes me look “fat.”
We’ve dealt with the outdoors before. I can’t fathom why this will be the hardest evaluation of all—harder than that race through the Montes Carpatus.
“Outside, it’s nighttime, but you may not use any illumination. The yellow team will wear helmets with dim yellow lights on the forehead and rear; the blue team will wear helmets with blue lights. This will be the only means of team identification. Shooting at the lights with your simulation Lazies and hitting them will result in the victim being physically removed from the contest.”
We’ll be virtually blind for this evaluation, which will make it both difficult and dangerous. I glance at Nash, whose arm envelops a hyperventilating Eri.
Vinasa—no one speaks of her, but everyone thinks of her.
“We are trying to mimic ground combat,” says Yinha. “So our two top trainees will lead the teams. Follow their orders as you would any officer’s.”
The thought zaps me into shock. I’ll be in charge of over twenty other trainees, pitted against Wes and his bloc. If we lose, my score could take a nosedive.
Yinha reads off the teams. Nash, Orion, and Io are with me on the Blue Team. Wes has Eri and the notorious trio of Jupiter, Ganymede, and Callisto on Yellow. Our teams are evenly matched in terms of skill, but Wes must deal with the three most dastardly suckers ever to pass through training. They’ll probably refuse to listen to him, and the judges will find him an ineffective leader. Worse, Jupiter and Callisto won’t hesitate to use their parents’ power to place ahead. It’s not fair, and it makes me wonder if someone in the high command is setting Wes up to lose.
The instructors issue the usual burden of equipment to carry on our backs. Then they shoo us into a Titan ship—one of the medium-sized models—and even with a suited-up Nash by my side, I panic as soon as the ship exits the air lock chamber. My fingers and toes shake; every sound seems to arrive at my ears after a long, echoing journey. No one talks to me, though, because we’re all asking ourselves the same two questions.
Will someone die today, like Vin? Will it be me?
We have fifteen minutes to explore the marked-off area and strategize before the evaluation begins. Every step I take pushes me higher and farther than I’d anticipated, but soon I remember how to move efficiently. I triple-check the gauges on the inside of my helmet to be sure that my pressure suit won’t spontaneously explode in the near-vacuum that surrounds us. If Dad were here, I wonder if he’d be relieved, or proud, or concerned. . . . I don’t remember him well enough to know. Would he lose his nerve, as Mom would if she knew I was in space? After his accident, she wrung her hands and screamed whenever Anka got too close to a window.
Trainees from years past have been here, traversing the sloping terrain. Patchy footsteps pepper the regolith. Boulders litter the ground, many taller than I am—perfect for cover. There’s the dark outline of a low hill close to the back of the Blue half. Yellow’s side is nearly the mirror image of ours, so that from the start, no one has an advantage. First things first; I’ll need to change that.
I turn on my microphone. “Hi.”
A few people greet me in return.
“Ideas?” I want us to think together, rather than have me make decisions in spite of having zero qualifications. Wes will likely follow standard procedure and decide everything himself, but I figure that my fifteen-year-old mind, in conjunction with twenty-three older ones, might match his genius.
A gaggle of responses overwhelms my eardrums.
“One at a time,” I chide.
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“The rocks are tippy,” a dreamy voice replies. According to my visor screen, it’s Io.
“Yeah, I tried to move one,” says a boy named Pan. “They’re really light; three people could pick one up.”
Huh. Each rock looks as if its mass were a metric ton. Of course—the instructors designed this field to be manipulated and probably inserted fake boulders—hard shells stuffed with foam. Moon-grav also contributes by making everything lighter, about one-sixth its usual weight.
“What if we make some kind of defensive formation with the smaller rocks?” Pan says.
The rest of the team jabbers their approval before tossing out other ideas.
“A wall.”
“A fortress.”
Some proposals are downright ridiculous, like “chuck the boulders at the other team.”
But a female teammate suggests, “Make a fort, just don’t put the box in it.”
I stop in my tracks. “Yep, make a circle with the boulders at the top of the hill. Good one.”
“Thanks!” she gushes. “But where will we put the box?”
My team starts chattering again, sounding like twenty-three Ankas. “Put it in someone’s backpack.”
“Yeah, have someone carry it so that it keeps on moving.”
But the simplest idea is the best. “Dig a hole,” suggests Orion. “Dig a hole and stick a boulder on top. Have some people guard it.”
Instead of talking, I have resorted to what I do best: listening. While arranging our defenses, we decide on a passive strategy of hiding behind boulders and ambushing attackers. Orion will lead the stealthiest of us on a miniature recon mission to discern the location of the other team’s box. I’m going to hide within the boulder structure on the hill, because as Orion points out, there will be pandemonium if I’m shot down. But just in case, I give secondary command to Nash, whom people seem to like.
It’s all the planning we have time for. Too soon, the match begins.
