by Tarah Benner
By now, I’m so close to her that I can detect the faintest hint of freckles skirting across her nose. They’re doing something strange to my insides, but I ignore the feeling and keep my scowl firmly in place.
“The captain?” she says in a fake impressed voice. “Wow.”
The way her lips form the word, I know she’s fucking with me. A ghost of a smile flickers across her face, but I can detect the undercurrent of panic in her eyes.
“You’re dismissed,” I growl. “Get out of my gym.”
Jones doesn’t need telling twice. She skitters off to join the others for lunch, and in this moment, I know I’m right.
There’s something off about Maggie Jones. I just can’t put my finger on it.
21
Maggie
I stumble out of the training center in a daze, shaken and unnerved by Jonah’s assessment. He suspects something — I can tell.
Who can blame him? I’m clearly not cut out for this. I’m going to have to step up my game. Otherwise I might get kicked out of the Space Force before I have a chance to do what I came here to do.
I hightail it to the dining hall, running a hand over the top of my head to smash down the curls trying to escape from my bun. I keep my head down while I wait in line, hoping I don’t see anyone I know. If Tripp or someone from the press corps sees me, my cover will be blown.
The bots serve me a steaming slab of veggie lasagna with dried globs of cheese and the most pitiful bowl of iceberg lettuce I have ever seen. I can’t exactly take advantage of Tripp’s first-class dining ticket — even when there’s a steaming bowl of lobster trotolle with my name on it.
I grab a drink at the end of the line and look around for an empty table. I can’t exactly go sit with my squad — not after I earned Adra a grueling round of suicides.
“Hey, Jones!” yells a voice to my left.
Davis is sitting at a table with Ping, Casey, and Adra. He and Casey seem to be rehashing Ping’s amazing run on the obstacle course, because Ping is bowing from his chair.
Davis waves me over, and I break into a grin. I can’t believe they want anything to do with me, but it feels nice to have friends.
I sink down in the corner seat, glancing over at Adra. She’s determinedly stabbing her fork into a rubbery brick of lasagna, and she won’t meet my gaze.
The guys seem oblivious to the awkwardness between us. They’re still laughing about Casey’s performance, which was almost as much of a shit show as mine.
Davis mimics Casey sliding down the apex ladder and busting his nose on the lowest rung, and I take a few bites to give myself time to recover from my conversation with Jonah.
“Better eat up,” Davis says to me after a moment.
“Yeah,” says Casey, shoving a hunk of bread in his mouth. “Otherwise Wyatt might come over here . . .”
Davis scrunches his face into a surly expression. “Time’s up! No lunch for you!”
They both double over in a fit of laughter, and I force myself to smile. I’m glad someone found the incident funny.
Ping lets out a nervous burst of laughter, and Adra shakes her head. “Asshole.”
“That wasn’t cool, man,” Ping agrees. “You were almost to the end.”
I let out a breath of relief. So they don’t hate me for being terrible.
“Wyatt’s such a dick,” says Adra.
“Careful,” says Davis, jerking his head at the table of officers behind us.
“I don’t care if they hear me,” Adra snaps. “They probably think the exact same thing.”
“Jonah’s not a dick,” says Ping.
“Oh, you’re on a first-name basis with him?” scoffs Adra.
“Jonah’s cool once you get to know him,” says Ping. “His CO must be riding him to make sure we can pass our PFTs.” He glances around conspiratorially. “Anyway, the other sergeants are worse.”
“I’m surprised you noticed with your head so far up Wyatt’s ass,” Adra mumbles.
I look back to Ping, expecting him to look angry, but he just laughs it off.
“For real, though,” says Davis, “I heard the PFT is brutal. Buford administers them at the end of basic, and if you don’t pass . . . I guess they send you right back to Earth.”
“I don’t believe it,” Casey mumbles. “That would cost a fortune.”
Davis shrugs. “I think they do.”
“It doesn’t matter,” says Adra. “Wyatt’s been riding her since she got here. And he cornered her back there.”
“What did he say?” asks Ping.
I feel my face heat up as everyone turns their attention to me. “Basically that I better get my shit together,” I mumble.
“Screw him,” says Adra. “He is such an asshole.”
“Yeah . . .”
“You should report him to Buford.”
“No.”
“Why not?” Adra presses. “Tell me you don’t think he deserves it!”
“No, you’re right,” I say. “Wyatt is an assho —” I break off. Adra is shaking her head, her eyes bugging out in panic.
“Go ahead, Jones,” says a cold voice behind me. “Finish that thought.”
An icy wave of dread rushes through my body, numbing me from the inside out. I turn slowly, face to the floor, and my eyes land on a pair of shiny black boots. They travel up a pair of strong, solid legs, past Jonah’s magnificent ass, to a wide muscular chest.
By the time they reach Jonah’s face, I am completely frozen with shock. He’s clutching an empty tray in his hands, and his knuckles are as white as a bone.
“What did you call me?” he asks, his eyes full of malice.
“Nothing, sir,” I mumble, hoping his glare doesn’t vaporize me on the spot.
Jonah doesn’t move. I sense his gaze panning over the others and feel a cold nervous sweat bead up under my arms.
“If you’re all done bitching that your lives are so hard, grab your mouth guards and get your asses back to the training center. Now.”
Nobody needs telling twice. There’s a loud scrape of chairs as Ping, Davis, and Casey get up to dump their trays. Adra moves at a much more leisurely pace, but I nearly trip over my own feet in my rush to get away from Jonah.
I glance over at him as I dump my tray and catch him staring at me from across the dining hall. The waves of dread keep crashing over me, making it nearly impossible to breathe. If Jonah didn’t have it out for me before, he most definitely does now.
“Dude,” says Adra. “That was brutal.”
“You could have warned me,” I snap.
“I tried! He literally came out of nowhere. What was I supposed to do?”
“Nothing,” I say weakly. “It’s not your f —”
I break off and stop dead in my tracks. Striding into the dining hall looking fierce as hell is . . . Alex. She’s dressed in a dark-green metallic pantsuit with enormous shoulder pads, and she’s staring directly at me.
Her expression registers brief confusion, followed immediately by rage. She gives an infinitesimal shake of her head, her jaw locked in an expression of fury.
I swallow and lengthen my stride to catch up with Adra, tearing my gaze away from Alex.
To her credit, Alex doesn’t say a word. I can feel her eyes burning a hole in the back of my neck, but she doesn’t blow my cover.
I try to breathe normally, but I’m having a hard time. It feels as though an elephant is sitting on my chest. My hands are shaking, and I’m sweating all over.
In less than twenty minutes, I managed to piss off my fake CO and my real boss. I am so incredibly screwed.
By the time we reach the training center, Jonah is already waiting under the enormous number thirteen.
His expression is cold, unreadable. He has something horrible planned. Maybe we’ll be spending the afternoon scrubbing toilets with our toothbrushes, or maybe he plans to throw us out into space and watch while we asphyxiate.
Once we’re all assembled in a line, he orders us to
follow him and leads us out of the training center. We walk down the same narrow hallway, and for one horrible moment I think he’s taking us back to the obstacle course.
Instead, he stops halfway down the hall and scans us into another room. We file in one by one, and I can practically taste the tension.
We’re standing in a room filled with hanging punching bags that smells like bleach, sweat, and pain. The floor and walls are covered in thick foam mats, and suddenly I realize what Jonah has in mind.
Along one wall is a window that looks in on the gym from a smaller observation area. Maybe that’s where the officers gather to watch privates beat the shit out of each other.
“Grab some gloves and partner up!” Jonah barks. “No talking.”
I follow the others to a bin of black boxing gloves in the corner of the room. I select the pair that looks the smallest and turn to Adra to be my partner.
To my dismay, Adra’s expression doesn’t match my level of dread. She looks ready to punch someone.
“Today we begin your close-quarters combat training,” says Jonah, stuffing his own hands into a pair of boxing gloves and thumping his fists together. “Most of you look like you can’t take a punch. We’re gonna fix that or die trying.”
I swallow. This is not what I signed up for.
“Now, your first defense against any attack is your stance,” says Jonah. “Chin down, hands up, feet shoulder-width apart. Keep your weight on the balls of your feet. You need to keep moving, but you also need to be able to strike from any position.”
He demonstrates the boxer stance and makes eye contact with each of us one by one. “Never, ever cross your feet, and never let anyone get you on your heels.” He beats his gloves along the sides of his head. “Protect yourself. That means hands up. Got it?”
There’s a general murmur of assent, but my head is spinning as I try to copy Jonah’s stance. Chin down and hands up makes sense, but walking around on my tiptoes feels incredibly stupid.
Jonah spends the next few minutes coming around and correcting our posture. When he gets to me, he rests his glove on the top of my head and forces my chin down until my shoulders meet my ears. He raises my gloved hands so that my face is protected, and I catch a glimpse of those probing blue eyes.
He’s still angry with me — I can tell — but he seems to be putting his resentment aside. Right now, he’s focused and attentive — or maybe he’s just anxious for me to get my ass beat.
“All right,” he says, smacking his gloves together again. “Now it’s time for footwork.”
The next drill is deceptively tricky. Jonah has us all line up and practice moving in a boxing stance. It should be simple: left-right to take a step forward, right-left to go backwards, left-right to move to the left, right-left to move to the right. The idea is to move each foot the exact same distance and avoid crossing one foot over the other, but the execution is surprisingly difficult.
Once he’s convinced that we can move backwards, forwards, and side to side, he teaches us how to throw a jab and a cross. We add the strikes to our bizarre square dance, and I start to wonder how this could possibly help us win a fight.
As if Jonah read my mind, he claps his gloves together again, and I get a now familiar swoop of dread. “Okay. Find your partner. You look like you’re ready to hit each other.”
By the time Jonah dismisses us for dinner, I’m ready to fight someone for real.
We spent the afternoon learning how to slip and parry punches, and Adra got her chance to sock me in the face repeatedly.
The idea was to throw soft, slow punches at our partners to give them a chance to defend, but apparently “soft” and “slow” are two words that aren’t in Adra’s vocabulary.
After dinner, I change in a bathroom on the middle deck and slink back to the newsroom with my tail between my legs.
“What — the fuck — were you — thinking?” yells Alex the second I walk through the door.
The douchebag tech guy from Topfold and the fancy Swedish chick both turn to look in my direction. I sigh. I’m sweaty and bruised and in desperate need of a shower. I am not in the mood for this shit.
“Alex, before you say anything —”
But Alex is apoplectic with rage. Her hair is tumbling out of its careful knot, and it looks as though she already sweated through her blazer.
“Conference room — now!”
I don’t have the energy to argue. I just march into the big glass cage, preparing to put on a show for the nosy assholes hanging around the newsroom.
Alex stalks in behind me and slams the door. Or, rather, she tries to slam it, but the rubberized coating along the edges of the glass dampens the sound.
I take a seat at the far end of the table, immediately wishing that I’d stayed on my toes and practiced Jonah’s boxing stance.
“What — were you — thinking?” Alex yells, leaning over the desk and positively quivering with rage. “Posing as a member of the Space Force? Pretending to be a soldier so you can — what? Prove that there’s a story there?”
“I know how this looks,” I mutter. “But I —”
“Save your excuses, Maggie. You are finished. I mean it.”
“You don’t understand.”
“Oh, I understand.”
“I had help,” I say quickly, standing up and glancing out into the newsroom. Douchebag tech guy and the sultry blonde are still staring at me with interest. Rationally I know they can’t hear through the walls, but I’m still paranoid that they could be spying on me.
“What are you talking about?” Alex cries. She looks as though she’s about to break down in tears, and for a moment, I feel a twinge of guilt that my actions could blow back on her.
I lower my voice and turn my back on our audience so there’s no chance of someone reading my lips. “I mean someone knows I’m working on the story,” I say. “They reached out in the middle of the night last week and offered to help.”
“How would someone know you were working on this?” Alex growls.
“I don’t know.”
“Did you tell anyone?”
“No. I swear.”
She shakes her head, justifiably confused. “And what do you mean they’re helping you?”
“I mean they reached out with a fake military ID and a position in the Space Force. It’s a long story. The point is I’ve taken the place of a girl whose assignment got scrubbed. They think I’m one of them, and I have ten weeks of basic to —”
“No!” says Alex, looking as though she wants to leap over the desk and strangle me. “No, no, no! Absolutely not.”
My heart sinks. She’s going to yank me off this story. I’m going to be stuck writing about donuts and Franken-meat for the rest of my life — or worse.
Alex shakes her head again, big enamel earrings clanking. “Do you have any idea what will happen when you’re caught?”
“I know,” I say quickly. “And if they send me home —”
“Send you home?” She lets out a deranged burst of laughter. “No. Oh, no. They aren’t going to just send you home and forget about this.”
Alex’s eyes bulge so big that I’m slightly concerned that they’re going to pop out of her head. “Your career will be over,” she says. “No publication will want to touch you. You’ll be lucky if you’re not brought up on criminal charges.”
I let out a groan of frustration and turn away from her. I knew she wouldn’t understand. This was why I was so determined to get something tangible before I went and revealed my methods.
“There’s a story here,” I say slowly. “I know there is.”
“There might be!” says Alex. “It doesn’t matter.”
I turn back around. Alex looks just as frustrated as I am, but I have a feeling that we’re exasperated for very different reasons.
“You can’t just pretend to be a member of the Space Force,” she says. “If you get caught —”
“I’m not going to get caught,” I say roughly.
I glance around again and take a step forward, lowering my voice to make sure we’re not overheard. “Listen. Whoever is helping me . . . They’re really high up.” I touch my Optix and pull up my fake ID, beaming it to her so she can see it for herself.
“Whoever did this . . . They know I’m onto something.”
“But you don’t know who might be helping you!”
“I know.”
There’s a brief moment of silence as Alex scrutinizes the fake ID. That familiar feeling of failure and disappointment is worming its way back into my gut.
She’s going to tell me that I’m off the story — or that I’m out of the press corps. I don’t have the luxury of taking a stand. I need this job more than I’d like to admit.
“Wow,” says Alex after a moment, flipping off her Optix.
I freeze, not sure I heard her correctly. I certainly wasn’t expecting that.
“This is good,” she says after a moment. “You were right.”
Wait. What? She can’t be saying what I think she’s saying.
“Whoever sent you this is the real deal. We are in way over our heads.”
I open my mouth, but no words come out. Did Alex just use the word “we”?
“I’m going to regret this,” she says with a sigh. “I just know it.”
“Regret what?” I croak. She’s going to fire me. I can feel it in my bones.
“Regret allowing you to keep going with this,” she says. “Clearly there’s a story here, and whoever sent you this . . . I think they’re your source.”
“You think it’s someone in the Space Force who knows what’s going on?”
Alex shrugs. “I have no idea, but that’s what you need to find out.”
I hesitate. Surely she can’t be saying what I think she’s saying.
“Does that mean I’m not fired?”
“You’re on probation,” says Alex with a glare. “Get to the bottom of this — just do it fast. And don’t come crying to me if you get caught.”
22
