by K A Riley
Kellerson shakes his head and shrugs one shoulder. “Don’t ask me what’s good for the Execs and what isn’t. They decide that. Our job is to get you to the Western Recruitment Processor. After that, you aren’t our business any more. A bunch of us will be assigned to guard duty over you, but that’ll be the extent of it. You’ll see once we get there. Eight buildings. Eight guards. Eight of you.” He sucks in air through his teeth like he’s thinking, then says, “Makes for a kind of a nice symmetry, doesn’t it?”
“But no one gets…I mean, they don’t…do they?” Terk looks to me next, but I have no support to offer him. For all I know, we’ll all be dead by this time tomorrow. Besides, I don’t want to think about it. It’s hard enough trying to keep my mind off my sadness at losing Render.
Kellerson raps his knuckles against his clipboard. “Look here, Seventeen. I got a program roster here with a lotta names and numbers on it. Let’s just say there’s more numbers going into most of the Processors than there are coming out.” His friendly wink doesn’t make his words any less terrifying.
“The Execs need us, though,” Terk says, his voice almost a whine as he looks across at Rain next. As small as she is and as big as Terk is, she’s always had the ability to talk him out of his fears. I’ve seen her do it more than once, and despite the fact that I’m not her biggest fan I have to admit that it’s impressive. “Why recruit us if they’re just going to kill us?” he whimpers.
Rain starts to lean across the truck to put a reassuring hand on Terk’s knee, but Chucker barks at her to sit back. Startled, she obeys. “Don’t worry,” she tells Terk quietly, “No one’s getting hurt or killed. We’re being trained to keep ourselves alive and our nation safe. You’ll see. When this is all over, life will be so much better. We’ll take the Order down, drive them out, and we’ll all get the freedom back that they tried so hard to take away.”
Terk gets ready to say something else, but I lay a stealthy hand on his forearm. I’ve got a feeling that he’s about to turn this thing into an interrogation that wouldn’t end well for him or for any of us.
He gets my unsubtle hint, closes his mouth, and leans back against the truck’s rattling wall.
Kellerson flicks a thumb toward Amaranthine, who’s slouching in the corner by the rear lift-gate, her hair falling around her face in its usual mess of dark brown tangles. She’s wrapped in silence and in her own arms—not to mention in an invisible cloak of pure attitude. “So, what’s her deal?”
“She’s just a little off,” Kella says with a laugh and a dismissive wave of her hand.
“She doesn’t have a ‘deal,’” I say, sounding more snarky than I mean to. “Her name is Amaranthine, and she—”
But I’m quickly interrupted by Chucker, who barks at me to sit back. Which is impossible, since I’ve already got my spine pressed against the cold steel of the truck’s wall. The guy has a thing about sudden or unauthorized movements, and I’m beginning to wonder how many past Recruits he’s killed in this very truck.
Kellerson holds up his hand again and shakes his head at me. “I told you before, Seventeen. Don’t bother. You don’t need to give me details, and I don’t need to know. At the Processor, you’ll just be another number anyway. Just another cog in the machine.”
Grumbling along the twisting, pitted road down the mountain, the jostling truck pitches us back and forth against each other. It’s a strange sensation, being in a motorized vehicle for the first time in so many years. Along with all the old tech going down, the accompanying EMP drone raids of ten years ago also knocked out all the ion cells, lithium batteries, and the capacitors in all the vehicles in the Valta—from cars and trucks to motorcycles and snowmobiles. Even the little grav-scooters the older kids used to fly around on became useless lumps of carbon fiber and synth-steel. We still rode bicycles from time to time, but the rugged, cratered terrain after the raids and the fact that there wasn’t really anywhere to go made our feet the most sensible means of transportation.
The thrum of the truck’s engine is both aggressive and surprisingly pleasant. Motorized things have always fascinated me, from the cogs in Dad’s little gizmos to the micro-processors of Render’s ocular implants. Not just artificial machines, either. I used to love reading about the inner workings of the most complex machine of all: the human body. There’s even an old anatomy book we used to read as part of our lessons in the Valta. Out in the woods, with Render keeping us company, Card used to quiz me. Over the years, I learned the name of practically every muscle, ligament, and tendon. I learned the nine regions of the abdomen, the layers and types of skin cells, and the functions of the central nervous system. I even memorized the six types of synovial joints: Pivot. Hinge. Saddle. Plane. Condyloid. Ball and Socket. For some reason, that one always impressed Card the most. I tried teaching some of it to the younger Neos and Juvens as part of my required teacher-rotation, but I wasn’t as good at teaching stuff as I was at learning it, and most of my lessons kind of fizzled.
Along the way, really just to challenge myself, I did extra reading from old high school textbooks on math, biology, and physics. A few years ago, with the help of a Sixteen named Nadia, I tried to get through a chemistry book, but I didn’t understand most of it and eventually got frustrated and gave up.
The truth is, I liked the detective novels the best, but most of those got burned up in the third wave of drone attacks that hit the town’s only library five years ago. To this day, everyone wonders knows what our little town did to deserve such a fate.
“Who goes out of their way to slaughter anyone as helpless and innocent as us?” one of the Sixteens of 2037 asked the day after that raid. Her name was Harlan. She was a strange blend of whiny helplessness and random cruelty. Brohn, only eleven years old at the time and very much a Juven, pointed out the irony of her asking the question while she was absently crushing tiny black ants with her thumb.
At the end of the road, the truck grinds to a clanging, mechanical halt, but the doors don’t open. Instead, we hear voices from outside and a series of pings from some sort of electronic device.
Kellerson informs us that we’re about to cross the desert.
“Just a checkpoint,” he assures us. “Gotta make sure we are who we say we are. Believe it or not, you Seventeens always rate V.I.P. treatment.”
“What is it about us anyway,” Rain asks. “Why us? Why do they want the Seventeens?” It’s a question we’ve all asked ourselves many times over the years.
Kellerson drops his friendly smile and gives her an acidic stare. “Careful, little girl. Look around you, see where you’re at. You think me and Chucky-boy here are alive ‘cause we asked a lot of questions? Questions lead to answers. Answers lead to knowing too much. Knowing too much is the first shovelful of dirt on your open grave. Catchin’ my drift?”
Rain nods, shocked by his hostility, but I can see the gears turning in her head. She’s always been a problem-solver. An unsolved riddle is a cancer in her bones. Now her curiosity is clearly piqued, and I don’t doubt that she’s going to find the answers she’s looking for one way or another. I just hope Kellerson was exaggerating about the open grave part. Rain and I will probably never be close, but I respect her mind, and I admire the way she never lets anyone sidetrack her from whatever mission she’s on at the moment.
The truck starts up again and we continue on our way. I’m not sure how long we’ve been on the road now. Three hours? Six? Without windows—and with a flickering overhead bulb as our only light—it’s pretty much impossible to keep track of time. The disorienting sensation is compounded by the stiffness that’s set into my shoulders and the narrow rivers of sweat I’ve got meandering down my neck and back. It’s a strange combination of sensory deprivation and sensory overload. I wonder if that’s by design.
At various times I try to sleep, but of course it’s impossible. Too much is happening. Has happened. Is going to happen. Only Amaranthine, down at the end of the bench, seems to have drifted off. The rest
of us try to close our eyes from time to time, but we always snap back to attention at the slightest jolt of the truck. Jolts that are coming harder and more often now. The road feels like it’s going from nicely paved to more and more deeply cratered every half mile or so. Are we in the war zone? Is this the Eastern Order’s doing? Is this the devastation we’re expected to help stop? I can’t see anything beyond the interior walls of the truck, but in my mind, the outside world around us is littered with obliterated buildings, overturned cars and grav-trams, huge cities in fiery ruins, and stacks of burned bodies. The casualties of war.
I shake the images from my head, afraid they’ll make me go crazy.
After what feels like a week of bumping over dunes and dipping through craters, the truck screeches to another stop. More pings. I’m bracing myself for the driver to take off again, but this time, the engine clicks off and huffs a deep sigh before going still. The little noises I couldn’t hear before over the rumble of the truck—the shifting of our bodies, our breathing—suddenly sound awkwardly loud.
Kellerson explains to us that the drive is finally over.
“We walk you down the rest of the way,” Chucker adds curtly, part explanation, part order.
We pile out of the truck, our hands over our eyes against the blazing sun that pounds down in streaks through thick red clouds. It’s like we’ve traveled to another planet entirely. Up in the Valta the air was clean, at least. We lived in the bright white light of the unfiltered sun. Here, the air tastes grainy and toxic. It feels like sand on my teeth.
Kellerson takes the lead, and we follow him down an abandoned highway with Chucker, his monstrous rifle slung on his shoulder, keeping an eye on us from behind. The pitted road winds through a small forest of dead and dying trees until the rough pavement thins out, and we’re walking on hardpacked soil.
From the worn footpath leading to the Western Recruitment Processor, we can see an array of eight huge cube-shaped buildings, all black, set up in an octagon with what looks like a giant lawn between them. At first, the trees obscure most of the view, and I’m not sure what I’m looking at. But as the woods thin out, I guess out loud that what we’re seeing is one of the “Arcologies” Card was talking about from the viz-screens.
Kellerson laughs. “You guys really have been in isolation, haven’t you?”
“We’ve been living the way we live,” Brohn says in a surly voice. The cryptic answer to an impossible question is the first thing he’s said in hours. There’s no sign left of the friendly, warm young man I was sitting with last night.
He’s right to divulge the bare minimum, of course. We don’t know these men or anything about their politics, let alone any orders they might have to shoot anyone they think isn’t toeing the party line.
“Those are the Cubes and the Agora,” Kellerson explains with a laugh, ignoring Brohn’s icy glare. “Also known by us guards as ‘Trials and Tribulations.’ That’ll be home for you for the next eight weeks.” He keeps walking but points out past the tree-line to a tall building that’s under construction way off in the distance. “The Arcologies are giant towers like that one, that will rise thousands of feet up into the sky. They’re whole cities in one convenient location,” he proclaims proudly, as if he was the actual designer and architect. “People live in them. Work in them, too. They never have to leave. Never have to worry about getting bombed out by the Order. Total independence. Total isolation.”
“Sounds a lot like where we just came from,” I say but immediately wish I hadn’t. I’m not one to put my neck voluntarily into a noose.
As if to confirm my fear, Chucker gives me a menacing growl from the back of our little procession and barks at me to keep my mouth shut. I’m not used to being yelled at, and I feel like I might start crying. I know that would be the kiss of death, so I clench my jaw, bite down on my cheek, and try to remember to keep my opinions to myself.
The long hike is exhausting, partly because we’re all tired, hungry, disoriented, and dehydrated. But also because we don’t know what to expect when we reach our mysterious destination. I can’t speak for the other Seventeens, but that fact alone has given me non-stop heart palpitations and an annoying eye twitch.
At the top of some of the hills, I’m able to catch a few more glimpses of the Western Recruitment Processor. The eight onyx-colored buildings look identical, but out of place with their polished black luster among the groves of trees, many of which are cracked in half and dying, and the scorched brown earth of the surrounding areas. At one point, Card tugs my sleeve and gestures with his head toward a small clearing between a patch of dead trees. I’m not quick enough to get a full look, but what I think I see is enough to frighten me: It looks like a dust covered ghost town filled with hollowed out buildings leaning over, crumbling, ready to collapse. The shattered remains of what was probably a city, now flattened and dead.
Like a much bigger version of the Valta.
We’re forced to keep walking so the image disappears quickly enough. Still, I can feel it burning its horrible reality into my memory. If that’s what the Order’s managed to do to the big cities, what hope does the Valta have? What hope does any of us have? Those half-built Arcologies Kellerson was describing are small consolation. I can’t imagine the self-contained cities-in-a-building being finished in the middle of a war, and even if they are, who’s to say the Order won’t just bomb them into oblivion?
I never thought I’d be grateful for sore and blistered feet, but I am. The sharp pain is taking my mind off of the horrors all around us—horrors we’re about to be trained to face head-on.
We walk for what feels like forever, until we arrive at last at a massive chain-link fence, twenty feet high and topped with coils of dangerous-looking razor wire. Kellerson scans an input panel that unlocks a section of the fence, and we step through a cut-out door. “Don’t brush against the fence,” he warns as we walk through. “It’s still live. Touch it, and you won’t be.”
There are a few feet between us and the fence as we file past, but I hug my arms around myself, just to be on the safe side.
It’s another hundred yards or so up to the front door of one of the giant cube-shaped buildings that tower up, casting long shadows over the wrecked and partially-wooded land. The building is windowless, its surface glistening black, casting our reflections back at us. I don’t know what it’s made of, but it’s not like anything I’ve ever seen before, except maybe the viz-screens back home. Kind of shimmery like glass, but way stronger looking. Like shiny black steel.
Kellerson beckons us forward with a regal wave. “Welcome to the Alpha Cube of the Western Recruitment Processor.”
“What happens now?” Kella asks. Somehow, she doesn’t look quite as enthusiastic right now as she has for the last several months.
“The Execs will take you through their training program,” Kellerson replies with a ton of snark, as if it’s the most obvious answer to the dumbest question he’s ever heard.
“And then?”
“I’m sorry,” he says with a gentle shrug and a slightly cruel smirk. “But ‘and then’ is a little beyond my pay-grade. Don’t worry your pretty little self, Seventeen. I’m sure I’ll see you around.”
Before Kella can follow her questions with an impolite comment, a huge set of steel double-doors, each at least fifteen feet tall and lurchy as a battleship, start to grind slowly open with a metallic whir.
I step back involuntarily. I can’t seem to fight off the feeling that something huge is going to lumber out and eat us.
But instead, the big doors open at last to reveal a tall, stern woman with stylish silver-framed glasses and her white hair pulled back in an immaculate ponytail. She’s wearing khaki cargo pants with a green military shirt and a starched white lab coat like she’s half soldier, half scientist.
She’s flanked on one side by a surprisingly handsome military guy, maybe twenty years old or so, who introduces himself as Sergeant Granden and on the other side by a thin young
man, maybe even younger, who introduces himself as Trench. He’s angular and pretty good-looking too, despite, or maybe because of the long, thick scars on his face. Kellerson and Chucker stand behind us and herd us forward into a small semi-circle on the worn patch of grass as the woman and her two military escorts stand in the big doorway in front of us.
“We’re your training team,” the woman says. “I’m Captain Grace Hiller. Each unit of the training program consists of a Cube like this one with an indoor challenge, and the Agora that you’ll see out back, where you’ll undergo a series of outdoor training sessions. You’ll be here for eight weeks. That’s two weeks per session in the Agora plus at least one day in the Cube—though you will not be training in the last two Cubes. Those are the medical and control facilities. You’ll sleep in barracks at the end of each day. You’ll eat what we give you, when we give it to you.”
Her words sound threatening, but her voice is as pleasant as can be. She sounds like a kind aunt, rather than the woman who apparently holds our lives and futures in her hands.
With a wide sweep of her hand, Hiller gestures toward the big buildings. “These facilities and this program are designed to train you to fight the Eastern Order and push you to your physical and mental limits. You will be graded along the way. Everything you do, what you say, how you react…is subject to assessment.”
She looks around, appraising each Seventeen in turn. “You will receive points for a job well done. You’ll be deducted points for everything else. Your marks overall, broken down by each of the four deployments, will be posted on a viz-screen in the Silo, which is the name of your underground barracks. It’s where you’ll eat, sleep, and shower. Keep a close eye on your assessment numbers as they will determine where you’ll end up after your time in the Processor.”
Hiller points to a panel on the wall of the building where a display lights up to reveal five letters: T.I.C.S.O. Beneath the letters, a flow of holographic text and schematics scrolls in a constant stream. “The T.I.C.S.O. program represents the four possible deployments. Tech represents your ability to think like a machine, in ones and zeros. It’s for fiddlers and tinkerers, those of you who can make something useful out of a bunch of useless parts.”