“Mr. Reynard gave it to me,” she said, fiddling with the bracelet. The metal had left a green stain on her inner wrist, which she rubbed away with her fingers.
“You shouldn’t accept gifts from him,” Two said.
She rolled her eyes. “It’s just a bracelet.”
“I’ve heard rumors about him. Besides, what’s he doing talking to you?”
“He just wanted to wish me a happy birthday.”
“You and twenty others.” He snorted. “Anyway, wasn’t that practically a month ago?”
Neither of them knew their actual date of birth, just the month they were born in. On the first day of each month, every subject born in that month would receive their annual vaccines, along with a special dessert.
She had given herself her own birthday once, just to have a day all to herself. She had thought Two might want to do the same, but birthdays didn’t interest him any more than jewelry did. The only thing he seemed to care about was his future—who he was going to become, not who he was now.
“You’re one to talk.” She nudged his foot with one of her soft sneakers. “Weren’t your shoes a gift from your mil-log teacher?”
Glancing under the table, she was unsurprised to find his boots in pristine condition, without a speck of dirt to mar the leather’s shine. He must have cleaned them before he had even changed uniforms. His laces were tied neatly, and he had tucked in his pants legs.
Smiling at his dedication toward detail, she remembered how proud he had felt to be elected his team’s commander. His military logistics teacher had commemorated the occasion by giving him a pair of what he had excitedly called “real military boots.” At first, he had been too nervous to wear the boots in the forest, afraid that he would ruin them. Even now, months later, he cleaned them every day and kept them polished to a mirror-like luster. They were one of his few personal possessions, and certainly his most precious.
“That’s different,” Two said, flushing at the comparison.
“How so?”
“Because we’re both guys, and he didn’t give them to me expecting…” A strange look passed over his features, and he cleared his throat as if some crumbs had gotten trapped inside.
“Expecting what?”
“Nothing.” He shook his head, swallowing some milk. Once he had drained half of his glass, he set it on the table and wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “Besides, I have to clean them every day to set a good example for my team, or he’ll take them back. It’s just a commander’s perk, it’s not like they’re an actual gift or anything.”
She felt a twinge of annoyance at his excuses. So it was fine that he received presents from his trainers, but she couldn’t because she was a girl?
“Forget it,” Nine said, tugging down her shirt sleeve to conceal the bracelet from his unwavering gaze. “Don’t worry, I like your gift better.”
The portrait he had drawn of her now hung on the white-washed cinderblock wall beside her bed. He had captured her likeness perfectly, using charcoal from the fire pit to add an illusion of depth to the pencil drawing. She would treasure it forever, or at least until the paper disintegrated from age and the graphite faded away.
“Don’t accept any more gifts from him,” Two said.
“Are you jealous?” she teased. “He’s just a guard. He was just being nice.”
“I’m serious.” He looked as though he wanted to say more, then sighed, muttered something under his breath, and crammed another forkful of meatloaf into his mouth. He washed the food down with a sip of milk.
“Want to study for the Russian test after lunch?” she asked. Russian was one of the few classes she had with him. Multilingualism was as important for soldiers as it was for politicians, and even the children being raised for corporate roles were expected to learn foreign languages.
She already spoke fluent Russian and German, and had moved onto learning Arabic and Mandarin. According to her history instructor, countries in the Middle East and Asia were going to dominate the future economic markets, and communication was key. Germany had a bustling economy and German was spoken fluently by a large percentage of the European Union, while knowing Russian would prove advantageous on the political front and in the former Eastern Bloc countries.
Even if she didn’t become a politician, there was always a need for industrial espionage.
“I’m not really in the mood for studying right now,” Two said.
“Are you sick?” She leaned over the table to place a hand on his forehead. Even though he had changed out of his camouflage clothes and back into his regular uniform, she could tell he hadn’t showered yet. He smelled like crushed pine needles and a sweet, smoky scent that was uniquely his.
Just his natural aroma made her heart race and awoke a pleasant tingling in the pit of her stomach. The rush he gave her was rivaled only by the worry she felt when she touched his smooth brow. His skin burned against her palm.
“I think you have a fever,” she said, frowning.
“I’m fine. I just have a headache is all.” He gently pushed her hand away from him and returned his attention to his plate. “D-05’s a good tactician, so it was a tough battle.”
“If you keep working so hard, you’re going to get sick,” Nine said, watching him eat.
He always exerted himself more than he needed to, especially in the days before wargames. After his classes ended, he would run strategies past her or read up on military maneuvers instead of playing games with the other subjects. He justified his obsession by claiming that he had to work twice as hard to be noticed, but she didn’t believe him. He had always been like this—living in a constant state of velocity, driving himself forward until he burned out from exhaustion.
“I said I’m fine. I don’t need you to worry about me.”
Suddenly, an auburn-haired girl appeared beside her and slammed her hands on the table.
Two looked up from his meal with flat disinterest.
“This is all your fault!” the girl said, glaring down at him.
He shrugged and took another bite of meatloaf. Although there was no change in his expression, his darkly-lashed eyes chilled over like panes of frosted glass. In the pale glow of the fluorescent rods above, the color of his irises seemed to fade by the moment, losing its intensity. Growing colder.
“You don’t even care, do you?” the girl asked, her brown eyes flashing. “He was my friend, you know. He was a good person, but you just see it as a game.”
He swallowed and licked the sauce from his full lips. “It doesn’t matter how I see it, D-05. It doesn’t change a thing.”
“Wait, what’s going on?” Nine asked.
D-05 swiveled around. “Has he told you what happened?”
“Don’t bring her into this,” he said, his voice suddenly ice-cold. “She’s a pol. She doesn’t need to know.”
D-05 gave a harsh bark of laughter. “Oh, but she deserves to know. She deserves to know how Twelve is dead, and you’re just sitting here, stuffing your face like it doesn’t mean a damn thing!”
“I wasn’t the one who told him to climb that tree, and I wasn’t the one who pulled the trigger.” Two rose to his feet, pushing his tray away. “You can starve yourself all you like, but death will always be a part of warfare. If you can’t accept that, you’re not cut out to be a mil.”
As he strode out of the mess hall, Nine stood, torn between chasing him down and grilling the other girl for answers.
“What happened today?” she asked, turning to D-05.
D-05 scoffed and shook her head in disgust. “Why don’t you ask your boyfriend that?”
As the other girl walked away, Nine sighed, deciding to do just that, and set off in the direction he had gone.
She and Two had been best friends for as long as she could remember. They knew each other so well that sometimes she found herself finishing his sentences. But as she passed the pair of handcuffs hanging from the pole in the center of the room, she realized that l
ately she had struggled to tell what he was thinking.
She walked past the barracks and into the woods. Birds chirped in the trees and a light breeze shook the branches. Aside from those ambient noises, the only other sounds were the crunch of twigs beneath her feet and her own steady breathing.
Cameras rested in the crooks of some trees, their dark lenses following her every move. She wasn’t worried about being punished. It wasn’t against the rules to go into the forest during break time.
Soon enough, the foliage thinned to form a grassy meadow. Wildflowers grew in abundance, scattered across the clearing in vibrant bursts of blue, red, and orange. The fence was visible to the north—a hulking chain-link barrier topped with security cameras, spot lights, and coils of razor wire. They had discovered long ago that the edge of the meadow was just out of the motion-detectors’ range, and ever since then, this had been the place Two went whenever he was deep in thought.
Now he lounged in the center of the clearing, surrounded by forget-me-nots and evening primroses. As she approached, he lifted his head and regarded her.
“Do you want to talk about what happened?” Nine asked, sitting next to him on the warm earth. She reached for his hand, but he moved it away before she could touch him.
As she opened her mouth to repeat the question, he sighed and let his head fall. Golden sunlight dappled his milky skin but failed to bring color to his complexion. All of a sudden, he looked so exhausted, as if his ordeal had sucked him dry, draining him to the bone.
“D-12’s dead.” Two’s long, sooty lashes fanned across his cheeks as he closed his eyes. “He fell from a tree. I guess his wounds were so severe, there was no way to save him, so they had to put him out of his misery. I can’t…I can’t stop thinking about how quick it all was. I thought something more would happen, you know. But it was over in an instant.”
Over the last year, the changes she witnessed in him had been mainly physical. His voice grew lower by the day, losing the rough strain that had briefly afflicted it. In his face, puberty had already begun to hone the softness of preadolescence into hard, lupine edges, stropping his beauty into something sharp and dangerous.
But, staring down at him now, she saw the beginnings of a different transformation altogether. He was changing right in front of her, taking baby steps closer to the soldier he had been born to become. Desensitizing himself to bloodshed.
She had a feeling he was holding something back, screening the full truth from her, but she decided to just let it go. If he didn’t want to talk about it, she wouldn’t force him to.
“I’m sorry that you had to go through that,” she said.
“It’s a part of warfare,” Two muttered under his breath. “People die. Life goes on.”
After a minute or two of just sitting there, she settled down next to him and took his hand. This time, he allowed her to entwine her fingers through his own.
She squeezed his hand, and he squeezed back. His grip never failed to comfort her, and she hoped that her touch affected him the same way.
“Is there anything I can do to help make you feel better?” she asked, tracing the lines in his palm with her thumb. His skin was roughened from military drills, and hours of target practice left gunpowder ingrained under his nails and in the creases of his fingers. Her hands were softer; pencils and textbook pages were far kinder than ropes and tree bark.
He hoisted himself up on one arm and gazed down at her. His vivid blue eyes drilled into her, his pupils narrowing into pinpricks as the sunlight struck them.
“Anything?” A teasing smile caressed his lips, but she could tell he was still distracted. Behind his expression, she saw a ghost of worry. “Is that an offer?”
“Only for you,” she said, smiling back.
She liked knowing that she could give him the same pleasure he readily offered her. They shared a mutual trust and hunger. Sometimes she felt like they had been born the same animal, conjoined then torn apart, only to unconsciously seek out the other.
Constantly craving each other.
Leaning over her, he brushed a strand of hair away from her forehead. Then he rested his arms on either side of her body and lowered his face into the crook of her throat, nuzzling her.
As his lips traced her jawline, the space between them seemed charged with electricity. His hot breath raced over her skin like static, teasing the fine hairs on the nape of her neck and boiling her blood.
“I love you,” he whispered between kisses.
“I love you, too.”
“I need you.”
As his soft lips followed her neck down to her collarbone, she drew her arms around him, running her fingers through his overgrown crewcut. Even at a distance, she would have been able to identify him from his hair alone. The only other person she had seen with hair as dark as his was a woman who sometimes came by the Academy. As for in absolute darkness, it would be his scent that drew her in, that warm, spicy fragrance like burning firewood.
No matter how he changed, she felt like she would recognize him anywhere.
They were bound to each other forever.
Case Notes 3: Subject Two of Subset A
Sitting at the front of the room, next to the old projector, Two watched an interview play out on the screen in front of him. It was an interview only in the most basic sense of the word. The use of pliers and a blowtorch made it abundantly clear that the interrogation would never have been sanctioned under the Geneva Convention.
As the captive began screaming in agony, Two sighed and leaned back in his chair, allowing his mind to wander. Over the years, he had become skilled at distancing himself from tedious, painful, or stressful situations. There was a place inside him where he liked to go, where it was quiet and shady like in the forest. Although he eagerly anticipated the day he’d leave the Academy, it was always the flowering meadow he returned to, the aroma of sun-warmed grass and wildflowers muddling his senses, or the cool, tranquil creek and its moist, musky odor. Familiar things.
The scene on the television screen faded, and the shrieks and hiss of the projector’s motor softened into the rustling of leaves and the whisper of water. Within moments, his daydream became more substantial than the movie room, and he imagined himself sitting along the creek.
“Aren’t you going to come in?” Nine asked, standing in the shallows. The water reached scarcely higher than her belly button in real life, but in his daydream, her clothes were drenched and clinging to her body. Her fine flaxen hair ran over her shoulder like molten platinum, and a soft blush colored her cheeks.
“Not yet,” he said in his daydream.
“Come on,” she said and splashed some water at him. He cherished the sound of her laughter. “I thought you were supposed to be brave, soldier.”
Although Two sat in the dark, warmth spread through him. Before he could stop himself, he chuckled softly, drawing a strange look from the subject sitting next to him. He blushed, realizing that the other mil must think he was laughing about what was playing on the TV, and turned back ahead.
Enough daydreaming. He had better things to think about, like what he was going to do about Mr. Reynard.
Over the last several weeks, the guard had given her little gifts, like candy from the outside world and cheap jewelry that turned her fingers green. Two could tell that the presents confused and troubled her, but he didn’t think she realized just how forceful Mr. Reynard might become. She had been taught to trust authority figures, while, through videos like these, Two had learned how to execute them.
I need to kill him, he thought, watching as the interrogators tore out the man’s fingernails one by one. Before he can hurt her. There’s no alternative.
He had once overheard a girl in Subset B talking about what Reynard had done to her. He would never let the man touch Nine like that.
Reporting Reynard’s behavior to the Leader would do nothing. There had been others like him, and it was the accusers, not the perpetrators, who ended up being punished
. It would be better to deal with it on his own terms than hope for justice.
At the end of the interrogation tape, the man was beaten to death by his captors. The violence no longer fazed Two. The first time he had been brought to this room, he had been so sickened by the uncut footage that he couldn’t eat dinner. Now, his stomach grumbled at the thought of chili and cornbread, his favorites.
He hoped there would be something good for dessert. No gross Jell-O cups. Maybe chocolate cake or apple pie.
The next video began with a line of unarmed men and women arranged against a plaster wall peppered with old bullet holes. In some places, the holes were so closely placed that the plaster had fallen away in chunks, revealing underlying brick as red as raw flesh. As the executions began, fresh blood splattered across the mortared cracks between the bricks. The wall that the prisoners huddled against almost seemed like a living thing, wounded and bleeding.
He watched the civilians fall one by one and began planning a murder of his own.
The important thing was making sure that nobody found out that he was the person responsible. Murdering a guard would be a death sentence. No mercy. Could he make it look like an accident? What about a suicide?
D-12’s face flashed through his mind. He recalled the way those features had deformed and how the light had faded from the boy’s eyes, and he felt a sudden nauseating fear.
Could he really do it? Could he kill Mr. Reynard in cold blood and get away with it?
You don’t have a choice, he thought as the screen faded to black and the supervisor turned the lights back on. You need to kill him. No hesitation.
As he stood to follow the other subjects out into the hall, the supervisor grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled him away from the main crowd.
“Sir,” Two said politely. He didn’t recognize the man, but that was normal. Strangers often sat in during these sessions, studying him and the other mils.
“What’s your number?”
“Subject Two of Subset A.”
“You know, I find it interesting how you chose to sit at the front.”
Hades Rising Page 3
