by K A Riley
A ring of windows in an interior balcony lets us look all the way down to the first-floor Atrium far below or up to the bank of snow-covered skylights two floors up.
Right now, twenty of the Dorm Rooms are empty—Kress says the goal is to fill them with more students like us. The other two round rooms are occupied by our two Cohorts with one group assigned to each room.
For now, though, we all cluster into the Lounge, the huge central rec room—filled with games, activities, and comfortable furniture—with doors leading out to each of the ten Dorm Rooms.
We’re barely through the sliding silver door from our own Dorm when Libra leaps onto a couch, bouncing herself onto her knees.
I wonder how perfect her smile would be if someone knocked out a couple of her teeth.
Sara collapses back into a reclining leather chair, her arm slung over her eyes. “Libra, how can you possibly still have so much energy?”
“Are you kidding?” Libra gushes. “Today was great!”
“Getting beaten up for six hours straight…that’s your definition of ‘great’?”
“But think about how much we learned!” She makes a dramatic show of throwing air punches at invisible enemies.
Dropping gingerly onto a four-footed, linen-covered ottoman, Ignacio pokes at his ribs and winces. “I learned that Kress’s knuckles are made of synth-steel.”
Holding a pack of ice to her badly swollen cheek, Mattea moans her agreement. “Be glad. They went easy on you. I can’t feel anything below my hairline.”
“How about you, Arlo?” Libra calls out from across the room.
“How about me, what?”
“Back me up. That was great, right?”
Arlo seems to sink even deeper under his dark hood. “Sometimes…I miss pain.”
“What?”
Arlo answers Libra by curling up on his side with his back to us.
Sitting cross-legged on one of the four soft, orange-cushioned chairs in the middle of the room, Roxane flips her ivory-white hair back and giggles.
Grunting as he tries to work out a cramp in his leg, Ignacio asks her what’s so funny.
“Pain.”
“Pain?”
Roxane stands up and walks over to stand right in front of him. He sneers and glances over at me before turning back to look into the pale blue eyes of the small, blank-faced girl in front of him.
“Suffer,” she says. It sounds like a command.
“Is that a threat?” Ignacio hisses through clamped teeth.
Roxane presses a fingertip to his chest but doesn’t say anything.
Offering up an uncomfortable laugh, Ignacio smacks her hand away.
“Die,” she says. This time, she presses the palm of her hand to his forehead and pushes his head back, hard.
Furious, Ignacio bounds to his feet and shoves Roxane with both hands, sending her dainty-limbed body sprawling backwards, arse over elbow.
Small and waif-like, she crashes through a pair of armchairs before stumbling and collapsing to all fours on the floor. Peering out from behind her platinum hair, she stares blankly for a second through empty, emotionless eyes as Libra and Mattea leap to their feet and jump in between her and Ignacio.
“Hey!” Mattea shrieks at him. “What’d you do that for?”
Ignacio puts his hands up, palms out. “You saw what she did. She’s crazy.”
“She did start it,” Sara offers from the reclining chair where she’s stretched back with her fingers laced behind her head and doing an excellent job of looking completely bored.
“And I finished it,” Ignacio snaps at Libra and Mattea. “Any questions?”
The two girls in front of him pause and exchange a look before retreating, with Mattea muttering, “What a jackass” as they go.
Trax is over on one of the thick, high-backed loungers, his eyes wide as he takes in the scene.
Chace is sitting on the floor at his feet where she’s been scrawling away with her holo-stylus on the shimmering pad of yellow-white light hovering above her wrist. Now, she’s open-mouthed and wide-eyed.
Ignacio throws Chace a sinister glare and flicks his thumb toward Roxane. “Be sure your little historical record there shows that we’ve got a psycho among us.”
Standing side by side and still as stone against the wall, Lucid and Reverie watch it all, their dark eyes flashing back and forth across the room. I can’t tell if they’re scared, pleased, or if they’re just comparing telepathic notes about the sudden burst of violent drama.
As for me, I’m watching everything too, only I’m sort of amused.
The two sets of twins and I have been living here for five years. I got used to that. If the six new kids want to kill each other and return things to how they were, who am I to stop them?
Trax pushes himself up from his seat and walks over to where Roxane is still sitting in a crouch on the floor. He offers her a hand, which she accepts, and he lifts her to her feet.
“We better get to our room,” Trax announces. “We don’t have a lot of time before our afternoon class.”
His sister flicks off her holo-pad and nods.
Gathering up Lucid and Reverie from their stoic posts against the wall, Trax ushers their Cohort through the doorway and into the adjacent Dorm.
Watching them go, Ignacio scowls and cracks his knuckles, staring daggers at the back of Roxane’s head as she disappears into the next room.
With Cohort B off in their own room, Libra, Sara, Mattea, Arlo, Ignacio, and I head in the opposite direction toward ours.
We sit down on our beds or in the rattan armchairs, but I can tell we’re all too wound up to even think about resting before our next class.
“Well, that was quite the argy-bargy,” I say.
Ignacio scowls in my direction. “The what?”
“You know. A go Have at arms. A punch up. A corking row.”
“A corking what?”
“A brouhaha. A fight. Does anyone speak English in this country?”
He stares at me for a second. I’m guessing he’s trying to figure out if I’m psychotic, sarcastic, or on his side.
“You should’ve gone ahead and killed that psycho,” Sara tells him.
He glares at her before his gaze softens and his fists unclench. “Roxane may be a first-rate, top of the line lunatic, but I’m not killing anyone.”
“You heard what Kress and Brohn said about the world out there,” Sara shrugs. “I think we’re going to be doing a lot of killing before this is over.”
“We’re supposed to be saving the world,” Libra reminds us all from her bed, which is adjacent to mine. “We’re not killers. Especially not of each other.”
“Speak for yourself,” Sara growls.
I hate admitting I’m curious, but I ask Libra, “How’d you all get here, anyway? I never did get the whole story.”
“You mean how did we get here from D.C.?”
“Yeah.”
“Our truck,” Sara yawns, crossing her legs and tucking herself deeper into her chair. “You saw it.”
“I saw what was left of that wonky clunker.”
“It got us here,” Libra says. “That and Granden. The GPS conked out after about two or three days, so we didn’t really know where we were going after a while. Mattea was able to get us on track—”
“And stop anyone we came across from killing us,” Ignacio adds.
I swing around to face Mattea.
I don’t really know any of these new kids that well. I can tell she wants to brag, but her eyes drop, and she just offers up a modest shrug.
“Mattea is a communicator,” Libra explains with far too much squealy enthusiasm for my taste.
“A communicator?”
“She can speak any language, practically instantly.”
“You mean like English, French, Spanish…?”
“Not just that kind of language,” Mattea says under her breath.
I swing around to face her. With our six beds set up in
a semi-circle around the perimeter of the room like this, it’s easy to see each other. “What other sort of language is there?”
From her chair, Sara rolls her eyes like she can’t believe how stupid I am. “She speaks literal languages. But also figurative language, body language, colloquialisms, jargon, slang, regional dialects…you name it.”
“She can read between the lines,” Libra explains. “Intentions, desires, threats…all the stuff behind the words.”
Sara gives an exaggerated yawn, arms spread wide and everything. “Sounds pretty useless in a scrum.”
“It is,” Mattea whispers.
“But boy, does it come in handy for talking our way out of trouble!” Libra gushes.
I look over to Ignacio for confirmation, and he offers up a reluctant nod. “It’s true. She talked us all the way here.”
“I like how you talk,” Mattea says to me. “You’ve got strength and fear. A little bit of queen. A little bit of commoner. There’s a balance to you—an eyeful of talent and an easy-peasy way of being in the world—I don’t think you even see.”
Her voice sounds oddly familiar, and then I realize, it’s my voice.
“Wait! Are you mocking me?”
“No.”
“Good. Don’t. And how come you sound like me?”
“I’m imitating you.”
“Well, don’t do that, either.”
“Sorry.”
“What are you apologizing to her for?” Ignacio sneers. “You can talk however you want.”
“She’s not mocking you,” Libra assures me.
“It’s true. I wasn’t mocking,” Mattea pleads. “I sometimes can’t control it.”
“Can’t control how you talk?” I ask.
“The accents, the imitations…they just…happen.”
“Well,” Arlo says. “That’s why we’re here, right? To learn how to control our abilities.”
Sara sits up straight. I think she’s going to respond to Arlo, but she swings around to face me instead, her unblinking eyes on mine. “Hey, Branwynne. Speaking of abilities, where’s that dumb pigeon of yours?”
“Her name’s Haida Gwaii. She’s a raven. And she’s a damn sight smarter than you.”
She rolls her eyes so hard I think they might leap from their sockets and make a run for the door. “Fine. Where’s that super genius dumb pigeon of yours?”
I glare at her, but she just grins back at me, which makes me want to leap over and pound her to a bloody pulp.
Instead, I remember my training and take a breath. “She prefers to stay outside most of the time.”
“Do you two communicate like Kress and Render?”
Nodding, I tell her, “Yes. But I’m not as good at it. Yet.”
Arlo clears his throat. “I heard you can walk through walls.”
I hold up my fingers in a “V” and tell him, “Twice.”
He says, “Marvie” and starts to ask me what that was like, but Sara seems intent on getting me miffed up. Leaning in, she jumps back into her interrogation, her eyes sparkling, her voice laced with acid.
“I heard you’ve got superhuman reflexes,” she scoffs.
“Mm-hm.”
“Enhanced coordination?”
“That, too.”
“And some pretty deadly strength.”
“Yep.”
“I’d like to see that.”
“Keep talking. Maybe someday you will.”
I head to the doorway leading to one of the communal bathrooms, making sure to give that trollopy slag Sara a nice, hearty flip of my middle finger on my way out.
7
War
Other than the middle of the night when we’re asleep, our two-hour, midday break is the only real unsupervised time we have to ourselves.
For that all-too brief window, we’re free to rest, recover, study, relax with a holo-text in the Reading Nook, or hang out in the Movie Room.
If we want, we can even leg it back down to the Tavern for a snack.
One thing we’re not allowed to do is leave the Academy.
“Ever,” Wisp stressed to all of us at Orientation two days ago.
When I raised my hand in the Auditorium and reminded her that, unlike the six newcomers who just joined us and the two sets of twins who spent most of their lives in captivity in techno-genetic military Processors, I’d already fought and survived in the “Divided States of America,” she stared at me for a long time. Long enough for me to gulp and find something else to look at.
“This isn’t a comic book,” she said, her voice cotton ball soft, her eyes on mine before scanning the ten other teenagers making up the Academy’s entire student body. “The dangers out there are real. The fact that you’ve seen them first-hand, Branwynne, should be enough for you to understand why we need to stay secluded. For now, at least. Out there, good guys don’t always win, and bad guys don’t always lose. The ones who died to overthrow Krug might be nothing more to you than faceless names in a story. For us,” she finished, tilting her head toward Kress and her Conspiracy seated on the stage behind her, “they were friends.”
So, I dropped my hand, shut my mouth, and sulked all the way up to my Dorm Room where I buried my face in my pillow and vowed to toughen up.
Now, two days later, battered and beaten from my morning class, I spend my two-hour break lying in bed, my arm draped over my eyes, as Libra chatters with Ignacio and Sara, Arlo naps, and Mattea sits and reads a holo-book, her back pressed against the side of Arlo’s bed.
At 2 PM, the blue and white lights flash to signal the start of afternoon classes. Cohort B mumbles their goodbyes to us before heading out to their Drone ID, Detection, & Avoidance class.
I’m a little jealous. Growing up in London, I got to see the drones and their attacks up close and personal, and I always wanted to know how to kill them.
And now Cohort B gets to learn exactly that.
I know I’ll have the same class soon—maybe even next term—but I really want to do it now.
Instead, I head off to my own Cohort’s afternoon class: Transportation and Mechanics.
Along the way, I grumble to myself inside my head.
What’s the point of learning transportation if we’re not allowed to go anywhere?
I wind up in the front of our procession with the other five members of my Cohort padding along behind me. We walk all the way down to the Sub-Basement, through the dark corridor with the weak wall lights, past the monstrous banks of humming mag-generators, and into the cavernous, domed maintenance room and vehicle storage hangar.
The class is taught by War. As the oldest of our teachers—and by far the biggest—he commands total respect and a fair amount of distance. While most of us feel comfortable asking our other teachers questions and even joking around with them from time to time, we all turn into mice in the presence of War. Even Libra keeps a pretty tight seal on her incessantly flapping lips.
Only Ignacio seems unafraid of him.
When War, standing over the husk of a disemboweled mag-jeep, tells us about the problems with arc-dynamos and integrated solar cells, it’s Ignacio who thrusts his hand in the air to challenge him.
“According to my research,” Ignacio boasts, clearly quoting something he probably read five minutes before we came down here, “the degeneration rate of the solar cells spikes in the presence of the exact radiation levels measured in the drone strikes.”
I have to give War credit. He’s twice Ignacio’s size and could probably rip his head off and floss his teeth with his spine if he wanted. But he pauses and treats Ignacio’s challenge like it’s the most reasonable thing in the world.
“That’s under laboratory conditions,” War explains through what’s slowly morphing into a menacing frown. “You’re not here to learn how things work in the lab. You’re here to learn how things work—or don’t work—out there.” He takes a breath, his boulder-sized shoulders and inflated chest rising and falling as he reins himself in. “The solar cell
s you’re talking about are always compromised by environmental conditions, age, wear-and-tear, irradiated dust and sand, airborne particulate matter, and a host of other problems you won’t find in any research center. And the drones you’re talking about are mostly second-generation Demolition Drones. The ones I’m talking about—the ones that’ll kill you—are the newest generation of Assault Drones. Two totally different animals. If you’re not convinced, I can always take you to Chicago where I grew up, and you can visit the tens of thousands of burned bodies stacked up in nice, crispy piles along what’s left of the river. At one time, I fought for, with, or against a lot of them….before they were just bodies, that is.”
Ignacio’s mouth opens like he’s planning to launch a counterargument, but he seems to think better of it and takes a half-step back.
“If there are no other…questions,” War says with a resonant rumble I can feel rippling on my skin, “let’s get down to business.”
According to our syllabus, we’re down here in the Sub-Basement for a lesson in how to cannibalize parts from one vehicle for use in another.
War leads us over to a second battered military jeep and a line of tables filled with an assortment of scavenged auto parts. After lining us up and ensuring we’re paying attention, he calls up a holo-display outlining our tasks.
The long list of lessons floats in a glowing block of text and graphics next to him.
“Transportation is limited out there,” War reminds us. “It used to be there were mag-cars rolling off assembly lines faster than people could buy them. When the economy collapsed, no one bought. With no one buying, no one was building. Supply chains got cut off. Auto plants and parts factories got blown up in the drone wars. And make no mistake. They weren’t accidental casualties of war. They were part of an entire infrastructure that got deliberately targeted to keep us poor, scared, and too ignorant and afraid to fight back. Not that we knew who or what to fight back against. Our fear left us with nothing. But see…that’s the thing—that’ll be the foundation for every lesson you learn in this class.”
He holds up a bundle of frayed wires that look like the stems of badly wilted flowers in his massive fist. He slips the bottom end of four of the wires into a housing in the base of a small black box and presses a button on its side. A holographic gauge materializes in the air with a weak indicator light showing a flicker of power. The wilted wires quiver and pulse with a hesitant but visible glow.
