The Designate

by J B Cantwell

  They might.

  They had to.

  And with that in mind, drunk from the silverberry, I drifted off to sleep as the stars began to poke through the atmosphere above.

  Birds whistled around me, their calls echoing in the small clearing. I kept my eyes closed, though rays of sun were starting to come through the trees. I had slept well, but hard. No dreams had come to me, no subconscious answers to the many problems I faced.

  I could feel by the cold next to me that Bear had gone. I regretted this, as I had fallen asleep with my hands in his fur, a most comforting thing to feel after a lifetime of emptiness.

  More whistling came from above, and I opened my eyes. The birds were darting from tree to tree, singing their songs to one another. In the tree just above my head, a tiny chipmunk held onto a huge nut in his pudgy cheek. I laughed.

  “Hey Sam,” I said. “Look at this little guy.”

  I looked over at where Sam had slept the other night, but I found that his cot was missing.

  “Sam?” I called.

  I sat up, relieved that the pounding in my head had stopped. But when I looked around, panic took up residence in my chest. I couldn’t breathe.

  They were gone.

  I jumped up from the little bed and walked as quietly as I could around the clearing.

  “Sam?” I whispered. “Margaret?”

  I looked up into the trees, but they were as bare as the clearing was now. The group had even put out the fire, hiding it with a small mound of dirt.

  I searched and searched as far as I dared move away. The last thing I needed was to get lost.

  Finally, feeling dejected, I went back to my cot. It was as if that one, single little bed had been the only thing that had been placed here, that I had been the lone traveler.

  They had left my backpack, and to it a note was scrawled in untidy handwriting.

  “We decided you should be the one to hide this. Be careful. We will try to do the same.

  —Margaret”

  I stared around at the trees, at the little grove that had been so busy just hours ago. Now it was abandoned; they had left late in the night while I had slept. Now my plan weighed on my shoulders alone.

  The gift of the chip remover was heavy in my hands, and I immediately flipped my cot over and began to dig. It was my best bet at finding it again. I doubted anyone would come back for the bedding, and the soldiers in the Service wouldn’t give it a second glance.

  When I was done, I flipped the thin mattress again and sat back down. I put my remaining tools back into my pack and looked around. Only the birdsong let me know that the forest was alive. All I had experienced over the past few days could have been a dream for all I knew. Or maybe I had lost my mind and hallucinated it all.

  I reached up and touched the spot, healing now, where they had pulled out my chip, and I realized the truth. It had been real. I had tasted the richness of the world outside, the friendliness of the people who fought to defend it.

  They were gone now, leaving me here with no choice but to go back to the Service, to hope that the Primes would accept my story.

  I got up, strapped on my pack, chose a direction, and began the long walk through the trees.

  Episode 5

  Chapter One

  I walked for what felt like days, my body still exhausted from the whole ordeal. The woods were slowly dimming around me, and the sounds of the forest began to come alive as the sun set somewhere over the trees. I hadn’t brought anything from the camp; there was nothing else to bring, so I just had my pack. A small package of nutrition squares, a canteen of water, and a mylar blanket. There was plenty of room in the pack for more; if I had still carried my weapons, it would have been filled with ammunition. I would have been slinging a rifle on my shoulder. But the Fighters, of course, had taken all of my weapons.

  I was like a blank slate.

  The dark was closing in now, and I considered stopping to make camp. I had learned how to build a fire back in boot camp, and my army knife had a special little tool in it to strike sparks. I was scared to do anything that would cause too much attention, but at the same time, that was exactly what I was trying to do. Fire or no, I was risking a bullet to the head.

  I gathered a pile of dried out pine needles and a few small branches. Then I swept away the needles on the forest floor to make a sort of fire pit, somewhere I could build the fire and not send the whole place up.

  The flint worked quickly enough, and soon the needles were ablaze. I set two of the five branches over them, and they quickly caught, burning hot.

  I sat and stared at the flames, transfixed by their movement and color. Aside from the past two nights, I had never had a fire to myself out in the woods. Brooklyn didn’t have woods, and if anything burned there it would be a tragedy, not a comfort.

  I dug out my mylar blanket and hugged it around my shoulders. Without the group of Fighters around me, I was aware of every tiny sound that came out of the woods. Small animals seeking shelter for the night. Larger ones come out to prey. I wondered if there actually were bears in this area. I supposed there could be, though my paltry set of crackers would probably not be enough to entice them.

  Branches snapped. Wind blew the tops of the trees, rubbing them together like a squeaking doorway.

  I took out a cracker and nibbled at it. I wasn’t sure how long it would take me to find my way back to base, so I stopped after just one square. My stomach rumbled for the delicious stew the Fighters had fed me for the past couple nights. Back in New York, was that how the victors ate? Was that what their years of Service would win them?

  I washed down the last cracker and lay down before the fire. Between it and the mylar, I was pretty comfortable. The rocks underneath where I lay bit into my side, but the relief of the pain in my head was heavenly, and I dropped off to sleep almost immediately.

  It was the click that woke me up.

  I could smell the last of the smoke from the fire, but now it was nearly dawn. The chamber of a gun poked at my head, sending waves of misery through my entire body. I rolled over to find three soldiers standing over me, each gun trained on me.

  “Wait!”

  It was Hannah.

  “That’s Pink!”

  “No,” Josh said. “How do you know that?”

  “She’s been my bunkmate all along you idiot,” Hannah said.

  Josh visibly became larger then, puffing out his chest and flexing his muscles, all gifts from the Service.

  Hannah laughed and turned away from him.

  “How did you get here?” she asked. “You’re not on our radar. We thought you were killed by a fighter.”

  “No.”

  Now was the time, and my story would have to stay consistent each time I told it. I couldn’t ever tell anyone the truth. Not even Hannah.

  “I went on a sort of … rampage,” I said. “I lost track of things. In that second hideout, I killed that man, a Fighter, and I just freaked out. I ran from the group and fired out into the forest.”

  I shook my head at the memory, the part of the story that was true.

  “But then they found me,” I went on. “A group of three Fighters. I thought they would kill me. They all had guns. But then one of them hit me over the head from behind.”

  My hand went up to the lump that impact had caused. The swelling was just starting to go down.

  “Then, when I was down, they had this weird sort of tool. They put it on my chip and—” Real tears were swelling now at the memory of so much pain. “They ripped it out of my head.”

  My face was wet, and I wished I had something to blow my nose into.

  Hannah winced at my story. Even Josh looked uncomfortable at the thought.

  “So how have you been getting by out here on your own?” Hannah asked.

  “I wasn’t alone,” I said. “They took me prisoner and tortured me.”

  I was thinking fast now. Why on Earth hadn’t I worked out my story while I was walking yesterd
ay?

  “They would gouge at the hole from the chip to make me talk. It hurt so badly,” I sobbed.

  “What exactly did you tell them?” Josh asked, his voice instantly curt and angry.

  “I told them the truth,” I said. “I told them that we had been digging away from the base but that I didn’t know where the tunnels would rise up. They were scared when I told them that. I guess they can’t all spend their time in the trees. There were people on the ground, cooking and things.”

  “And what did you—”

  Hannah cut him off and reached out for my hand. I took it and she helped lift me to my feet. My head still felt blurry from the wound, and even the small poke Josh had given me had made things infinitely worse.

  “What are you doing?” Josh demanded. “We can’t take her back!”

  “Sure we can,” she argued. She looked at me. “You can walk on your own, can’t you sweetheart?”

  I smiled, but laughing hurt my head. “Yeah, I think so.”

  “There,” she said, turning back to Josh. “There’s no problem. If she’s able to get herself back to camp, and hopefully back to base, on her own steam then they’ll care for her. That’s the rule, yes?”

  Josh frowned, not answering.

  “Yes, that’s the rule,” she said again.

  Josh turned away and began walking, mumbling his disapproval.

  I stuffed my mylar blanket into my pack and threw it over my back, trying to look powerful enough to walk further. I was tired, though, and I knew Hannah could see it in my face. She came close to me, gripping me by my shoulder straps.

  “Are you going to be ok?” she asked. “Because you know if you’re not … we’ll have to … you know.”

  “I know,” I said. “You’ll have to leave me.”

  I put my hand up against my head. It was like I could feel every pulse of blood that ran through my body just by touching the area where the chip had been.

  “And I can’t help you,” she said. “You can’t lean on me. Nothing. You have to do it yourself or we’ll both be headed for the Burn. You understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Alright then, Pinkie,” she said, patting my shoulders with both hands. “Off you go!”

  She turned and walked away.

  It was a new day, I told myself. That jab from Josh had been nothing. A minor irritation to a healing wound. I would make it back in one piece. I would tell them what I could, which wasn’t much.

  I would make them believe.

  Chapter Two

  Fowler wasn’t happy.

  “And what is this?” he snapped as we walked into camp.

  They had taken over the Fighters’ original camp and made it their own. Something about it seemed cocky to me. The Fighters had been sneaky, and it seemed to me that there might be traps here yet unseen by my fellow soldiers.

  “How are you not dead right now? And why is your chip not sending out a signal?”

  I touched the side of my head. He stormed over to me and ripped my hand away from the wound.

  “Fighters,” I said, my only argument.

  “You’ve gotta go back to base for this,” he said. He grabbed one arm and practically tossed me into the closest hole. I reached for the ladder towards the bottom, glad I hadn’t broken anything.

  “Mason!” I heard him shout, so loudly it made me jump. Were we so arrogant that we thought we could afford to give our position away, just so Fowler could yell out his frustrations? “Get her back to base. Make yourself good for something.”

  I remembered Laura Mason, a Green in the intake room back at recruitment. Nervous, hiding with her head low as Lydia pounded me. I was willing to bet that being out here in battle had her close to cracking up.

  I waited at the base of the hole for her to join me. My head was throbbing less now, but my heart felt like it was beating outside my chest. I knew how far away our base building was. I would have to start crafting a convincing story now.

  Laura carefully turned to use the ladder on her way down. When she reached the floor, she looked down at her feet.

  “Hi,” she said shyly. She paused for a moment. Then, “We thought you were dead.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “There were times I thought I was headed in that direction, too.”

  She started down the tunnel, holding her head low beneath the rocky ceiling. With my head still aching, I didn’t need reminding about staying low.

  “So what happened to you?” she asked. “Fowler said you ran off. He wasn’t happy.”

  “Yeah, I did run off,” I admitted. “I had never … killed someone before. I kind of lost it.”

  She slowed her pace and stopped to turn to me.

  “I still haven’t killed anyone,” she whispered. Her secret was clearly terrifying her. “I’m scared they’ll find out and then send me to the Burn.”

  I snorted. I was starting to wonder if the Burn was preferable to this.

  “How are you at shooting?” I asked. “You could just aim badly and blame it on that. Maybe you’d even get reassigned.”

  Maybe I could do that, too.

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” she said. “What would they have me do? Clean toilets?” She leaned in, her whisper barely audible. “You know they’ll know everything. Everything we’re thinking, saying, all of it.”

  She touched her hand to her chip and nodded at me.

  I turned to show her the wound where my chip had been removed.

  “Oh, my God! How did that happen?”

  She looked even more scared than when she was talking about killing Fighters.

  I began to craft my story.

  “The Fighters caught me,” I said. “They hit me from behind, and once I was on the ground they dug the chip out of my head.”

  I began to shake at the memory, the feeling that a thousand tiny strands had been removed from my brain by force.

  Laura stared. She raised her hand to her own chip again, wiggling it around with her fingers, testing the sensitivity just as I had done days ago. Checking to see how hard it might be to get it out.

  “That must have been really painful,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  She turned and started back down the tunnel.

  “We should get moving,” she said. “Fowler will send the intel to base. They’ll be expecting us.”

  “What’s been happening while I’ve been gone?” I was relieved to steer the conversation in a different direction. I hadn’t lied. I knew we were being tracked through Laura’s lens. I had to be careful now with what I told anyone in the Service, more than ever before.

  “We’ve gotten through a couple of holes and taken charge of some of their land,” she said. “Fowler has been focusing on moving in a single direction, though. I think he’s trying to make it to the lake.”

  That made sense to me. If we could take control of just a sliver of the shore, we could pump water all the way from there to New York.

  “It’s been weird, though,” she said. “At the beginning there were Fighters everywhere. But for the last couple days they’ve completely disappeared. We’re just moving farther and farther into the forest, and we haven’t seen anyone.”

  My breath caught. I knew the truth.

  It was a trap.

  “Hasn’t anyone realized that they’re probably setting up an ambush?” I asked.

  “That’s what some of the others said, but the Primes are strict. They have orders to keep pushing through. Anyone who’s challenged them has been given extra duties. Cooking, setting up camp, things that no one really has the energy to do.”

  We walked in silence for a while. I didn’t want to keep talking, but I felt like I needed to practice what I was going to say.

  “The Fighters,” I said. “They took me hostage. First, they had me tied down to a bed so I wouldn’t bleed out from what they had done to my head. After a while they gave me some broth and let me sit up. They questioned me the whole time.”

  Immediately, I re
alized my mistake. What had they tied me down with? If I had been tied for days, as I was planning to tell the sergeant, wouldn’t I have marks from the rope?

  “What did they want to know?” she said

  “What our plans were,” I said, now distracted.

  I started scratching the areas around my wrists with my fingernails. I alternated between scratching hard and then rubbing with the sleeve of my fatigues.

  “What did you tell them?”

  My wrists stung, but I didn’t go so far as to let them bleed. Active bleeding would give me away. The wounds would have healed a little bit by now if my story was true. I wished I had thought about hitting myself in the cheek with a rock or something. Something to look more dramatic. It was too late now.

  I took a deep breath and carried on.

  “Nothing that they didn’t already know,” I said. “I told them where we were headed, to the lake. They wanted to know about the base, about how many soldiers we had, but I just lied about all of that.”

  “Wow,” she said. “How did you make all that up?”

  “I just took a guess at what they already thought was true, and I told them that. I said that the base only had twenty troops guarding it, and another fifteen out in the field. But the truth was that there are fifty at the base and a hundred out here. I was just trying to get through it without them hitting me on the head anymore, but now that I think about it, it was a pretty good story. They’re probably on their way to the base right now, ready to fight twenty armed soldiers when really there are fifty waiting for them.”

  “How many did they have?”

  “Only about twenty, maybe less,” I said. “I think they had more groups stationed closer to the lake, but I’m not sure.”

  But that was a lie. The truth was this place was crawling with Fighters. They were probably up in the trees overlooking their own base camp right now.

  But Margaret was smart. Too smart to give herself away this early in the game. She would wait until every last soldier was out of the building and then just fire away.