by K A Riley
Trench steps closer to the Seventeens, gesturing toward the weapons like they’re prizes to be won. “Welcome to the fun stuff, Recruits. Let me introduce you to our little family.”
One by one, he points to the weapons and calls out their names, adding little details as he goes.
“This chunky fellow is an FN F2020 Assault Rifle. Then there’s this whole family of Sig Sauers. A 2020, a 2032, and this 2040 with the longer barrel, expanded clip, silencer-fitting, and ergo-handgrip. You can see how they kept the gold-plating over the years. This lanky lady here is a Bolt-Action .338 Gen 2030 rifle. The scope, barrel, and stock snap together like this.”
With a couple of deft motions, Trench assembles the rifle and clicks its stand into place. He sets it on the grass next to the case before moving on.
“This classic is a Golan Corner-shot. Great for alleyways and corridors. Nice way to kill the enemy before he even knows he’s got company. Here’s a Magpul FMG-9 folding submachine gun. Here we have a gas-powered 12-gauge. This little white one is a plastic and carbon-fiber composite. Nice and light but blow-your-face-off deadly.”
He goes on for several more minutes, giving us an abundance of details about each weapon. For some of the guns, he gives their military history. For others, he tells us about the engineering that went into them, or recounts in graphic detail the mess they can make of an enemy’s body when fired.
Trench’s knowledge is impressive, but it’s a total information overload. I’m hungry and tired and way too out of it to pay much attention. The last thing I want to think about right now is blood and guts and the dead bodies of war.
After a few minutes, Granden catches Kella eyeing the corner of the case that holds the gold-plated handguns.
“I can tell you’ve got good taste,” he says. He hands her one of the weapons and encourages her to fiddle around with it. “Go ahead. See how it feels in your hands.”
As if she’s been doing it all her life, Kella slaps a magazine in, slides the bolt back, and squints down the length of the gun’s barrel.
“Impressive,” Granden says with a charming smile. He’s not much older than us, maybe twenty or so. I can see Kella blush at being on the receiving end of his attention. He steps around behind her to show her how to extend her arm and keep both shoulders lined up. “See. Square, like this,” he says with one hand on her elbow, the other making its way from her shoulder down to the small of her back.
Kella is smiling from ear to ear now, although I’m not sure if it’s from the feel of the gun in her hand or the feel of Granden pressed up against her while he demonstrates proper form. Kella is fashion-magazine gorgeous and accustomed to getting what she wants based on how she looks, but she didn’t have a lot of romantic options back in the Valta. Here, with Granden, she’s found a whole new opportunity to do her annoying flirty thing.
I roll my eyes and leave Kella and Granden to their lesson. I join the others in sorting through the weapons, telling myself not to panic as I feel the weight of the guns in my hands.
“Each of you, grab any one of them you want,” Trench says, “and follow me.”
After we’ve each taken our weapon of choice, we follow Granden and Trench out into the middle of the Agora. As we walk, Trench punches in a code on his little electronic device. “You’ll love this,” he promises, waggling the cell phone-sized piece of equipment.
“What is it?” Card asks.
“With this little guy here, we can transform the Agora into pretty much anything we want.”
In the distance, a line of human-shaped targets rises up from the ground like magic.
“Time for your first lesson,” Trench announces gleefully.
Beside me, Amaranthine stops in her tracks.
“Come on,” I say with an encouraging smile and a tug on her elbow. “This is what we’re here for. We don’t have a choice.”
With her head down, she mumbles something about moral objections. “The Eastern Order never did anything to me. Why should I learn how to kill them?” She tosses her rifle onto the ground behind her.
Rain is walking just a few steps ahead, and she spins around when she hears those words. “Never did anything to you?” she shouts, instantly nose-to-nose with Manthy. “Show me our town! Show me your family! Show me mine!”
Amaranthine raises her head and looks into Rain’s eyes, but only for a second. “I just don’t think it’s right to kill people. Why does the Order have to be our enemy?”
“You can be their best friend, then,” Rain shouts, “but trust me—you just made an enemy!” She shoves Amaranthine’s shoulder, causing her to stumble back two steps.
Cardyn rushes over and tries to jump between the two girls, but Rain doesn’t seem particularly interested in a truce. Her anger is ramped up in a way I’ve never seen out of her before. Reaching over Cardyn’s outstretched arm, she steps forward and throws a wicked right-cross that catches Amaranthine just under her left eye.
Amaranthine’s head snaps sideways. Her long, dark hair splays out, and she stumbles back another two steps. Her eyes go wide as Rain pushes her way through Cardyn and continues her assault. Rain’s small, not much more than five feet tall. But she’s going after Amaranthine with a ferocity Card can’t contain, and I’m not brave enough to try to stop her.
Rain storms toward Amaranthine again with Brohn and the others running over at the commotion. Amaranthine clips her heel over the rifle she dropped a second before and hits the ground with a heavy thud. Rain leaps on top of her, her fists flying in a wild flurry. Brohn shoulders past me and catches Rain’s wrist just as she’s getting ready to strike again. He yanks her to her feet and drags her away from Amaranthine as Rain kicks and screams at Brohn to let her go.
“Knock it off!” Brohn thunders, as he tosses Rain harder and farther than he probably intended. She staggers several steps back, but somehow manages to stay upright.
“You didn’t hear her, Brohn!” she shouts, still glaring past him at Amaranthine, who’s on the ground with red eyes and a thin trickle of dark blood flowing from her lip. “She doesn’t care about what’s happened. She doesn’t care about all the other towns like ours that the Order’s blown to hell. She never lost anyone except her psycho mother, who was almost as psycho as her!”
Amaranthine has her arms folded across her knees, head down, eyes closed.
I kneel down next to her and beg her to get up and join us. Granden and Trench are on the move, heading in our direction us with quick strides. “If you don’t do this,” I say, “they’ll…”
She lifts her head for a second and looks into my eyes. “They’ll what? Kill me?”
“I don’t know, Manthy. Just please...”
She looks over my shoulder to where Granden and Trench have just pushed their way past Brohn and Rain to position themselves over us.
“Do we have a problem already?” Trench growls. His friendly demeanor has been replaced by a scary intensity. I don’t know him well enough to test the limits, so I muster a meek “Not at all” as Manthy finally lets me help her to her feet.
“It’s okay,” I tell her quietly. “Everything’s going to be okay.”
She pulls her hair away from her face and dabs at her bloody lip with the cuff of her sleeve. “For now, at least,” she says. “For now.”
9
With Amaranthine on board for now, we follow Granden and Trench halfway across the Agora to the firing range they’ve set up with the gizmos on their belts. With a whir of gears, this part of the giant field magically transforms before our eyes from a clean carpet of short grass to a full-on shooting range. There are concrete bunkers, synth-steel barriers, and rows of paper targets floating in the air on invisible mag-beams that run the length of long shooting alleys.
Trench explains that a station to our right contains a trap for pigeon-shooting. I don’t mind the thought of killing birds. We’ve had to do it for years just to survive in the Valta. But the idea of it still brings images of Render to mind, and
a little knot of anxiety expands slowly in my chest. Karmine catches my distress and explains that “pigeons” are just clay targets and the “trap” is just the machine that launches them into the air. “It’ll be fun,” he assures me. I nod gratefully and step forward with the others.
Lagging behind, Rain is still fuming. Brohn puts his arm around her to comfort her, and I expect her to shrug him off, but she doesn’t. That’s the kind of guy Brohn is. He’s not always a peace-maker or a pacifist. I’ve seen him get rough sometimes—even with Sixteens when we were just Juvens screwing around in the Valta. He lost as many scrapes back then as he won. But what he won, more than fights, was respect. He always stood up for the Juvens against the Sixteens and for the Neos against the Juvens. He was good at getting even the strongest kids through the roughest of times. It’s an ability he’s had for as long as I’ve known him. He’s less about making peace and more about weathering the storm.
The calming effect he’s having on Rain right now might save our lives.
Or at least our grades.
Still, I can’t help feeling a pang of something close to envy to see them huddled so close together. It makes me wonder, if I were more like Rain—prettier, more confident—if Brohn and I would be closer.
“We’ll start basic,” Trench says, pulling me out of my thoughts. He’s the weapons expert while Granden seems to be in charge of keeping us calm and organized, which has begun to seem like the tougher job.
Hiller is clearly the one who’ll be running the mind-games, not to mention watching us from on high in her creepy floating laboratory that hovers over the Agora like an alien mother ship.
Trench leads us up to the shooting range, and I’m sorry when we get there. It’s not that I’m afraid of the guns so much as the fact that the grass feels amazing under my feet, and I want to rip off my shoes and socks and sprint around barefoot for an hour or two. Something about the feeling of soft grass is so soothing, such a simple pleasure…
But Trench’s voice snaps me out of my reverie. “We’ll start with a static use of the handguns,” he barks out so everyone, including Rain and Brohn in the back of our little group, can hear him. “That’s the easy one. After that, we’ll get into mobile firing, firing from cover, and then some assault tactics starting today and continuing over the next two weeks.”
First, he demonstrates proper loading, aiming, and firing techniques. He goes over gun safety and maintenance, flying through each lesson and not taking any questions along the way. There’s a robotic calmness to his voice, like he’s given this same spiel a hundred times, which he probably has. But there’s also an urgency to the whole thing, and I’m reminded that this may be educational and interesting and even fun, but there’s a war waiting for us outside of this Processor.
After his demonstration, Trench puts us through our paces, one by one. We fire down range at the targets floating twenty, then fifty, then one hundred feet away.
My gun is heavy in my hand. The kick-back jars my elbow, hot discarded cartridges fly out of the gun, and I have to cough away puffs of white smoke that explode from the chamber every time it fires. There used to be a hunting store in the Valta, but it was destroyed in the early attacks. A few personal rifles, bows and arrows, and other hunting equipment were scavenged from some of the wrecked houses and businesses in those days, but ammo quickly ran out and over time, broken weapons just couldn’t be repaired anymore.
By the time I was old enough to handle a weapon, we didn’t have more than a few good hunting knives, an old cross-bow, two long bows, and maybe a few dozen arrows left. So this is my first time ever handling an actual, working firearm.
It turns out that what I thought were paper targets are actually sims, holograms that replicate the look of shooting ranges. Granden announces, “The Agora is a chameleon of holographic projections, matter-manipulators, and endless bins of training equipment stored underground. You’ll see what I mean,” he adds with a wink. “This place will have mock-combat scenarios, mazes for war games, and you’ll see every landscape from desert to arctic, and everything in between.”
I don’t doubt him. I’m impressed by the tech they have here, though it makes me wonder why the Valta is still cut off. I mean, if the Processor can rig holo-sims, run mag-grav and electro systems, and have a huge field that transforms into all the things Granden claims, why can’t the Valta at least have a couple of working light bulbs?
I don’t dare ask, of course, but quietly I’ve griped about it to Card a bunch of times. Finally, during a break from the target practice, he asks Granden, partly because he wants to know too, but I’m pretty sure it’s mostly because he wants to shut me up about it.
Granden is more gracious about answering the question than I would have thought. I expected him to tell us to mind our own business or to keep our minds on the task at hand. “The Eastern Order is enemy number one,” he says. “Distraction is enemy number two.” But he leans on his silver, high-tech rifle and tells us not to worry. “Power is being restored everywhere. It’s just a matter of time before either it gets up to the Valta or else the kids left in the Valta get recruited and have a chance to live out here in peace with the rest of us.”
“What about the Arcologies?” Cardyn asks. “Do you know anything about those?”
“I’ve never been in one. Not yet anyway. But they’re being built throughout the country. I’m sure you saw one of them on your way in. Not finished yet, that one. But soon, though. The idea is to centralize, keep everyone and all the power in one place. They’re saying just three or four of those per major city. Once that’s done, the Order will have no one left to fight, and we can wipe them out once and for all.”
“Sounds kind of like genocide,” I say.
Granden laughs and waves me off with a flick of his hand. “It’s not genocide to protect your country, your people, from extinction. Our survival depends on the best and most well-trained we have to offer. And that means all of you. Provided you get through the training.” He slings his rifle over his shoulder and leads us back to where Trench is preparing us for our next lesson in the shooting range.
We practice for hours. Trench is relentless in his pursuit of excellence from us. He’s an odd guy, thin and kind of insecure with that patchwork of thick scars on his face that he never talks about. During breaks, he jokes around with us, asks us about the Valta. But on the firing range, he’s all business. He drills us in everything from weapon-selection to proper stance to the most effective breathing techniques to enhance our composure and improve our accuracy.
A full two weeks pass like that.
Each night after our training, Granden does his trick with the gizmo on his belt—he calls the device a “Catalyst”—and eight clear Capsules rise to the surface from underground in the middle of the Agora. Every night, we step into the Capsules, which lower us down into the “Silo,” our barracks, which consist of lockers around the perimeter of the main Dormitory, the Shower Room, and its attached Changing Room through a doorway on one side. A small Mess Hall sits on the other side, which is where we eat our meals together. The food is mostly synthetic but still pretty good. Better than I expected anyway, at least from a military training program. Dinner, which is our only real meal of the day, appears from chutes in the Mess Hall wall.
At meal time, we sit together at a long table with four seats on either side. It always feels like we should be comparing notes and decompressing after another long day of training, but most of the time, we’re too tired to talk much.
On our first night in the Dormitory, we slept on cots laid out for us in two rows of four. But on our third night down there, Brohn suggested that we rearrange the cots so we could talk better. “Our own little debriefing at the end of the day,” he said. So we rearranged the cots to form a spoked pattern in the middle of the room. Now, we all sleep with our heads at the center. That way, we can discuss the day’s events, guess at what the future holds, and keep each other company as we fall asleep. Well, we all
do that except for Amaranthine. She sleeps the opposite way, with her feet in the center and her head out at the perimeter of our circle of cots. Always has to be different.
I wouldn’t mind so much except that no matter how many showers she takes, her feet always smell like death.
We train all day. We move from target practice with handguns to clay pigeon-shooting with a modified version of the Beretta DT33 series rifle. “This sleek beauty, Trench explains, “has a laser-crafted burnished forcing-cone for greater accuracy and less recoil.” Karmine drinks every bit of that kind of stuff in like it’s the last glass of water in the desert. Terk and Kella, too. Terk’s not as good at shooting as Karmine and Kella, but he enjoys it almost as much. Karmine and Kella are focused with tunnel-vision on killing the Order. Rain just cares about getting the highest scores.
Brohn’s good at shooting, too, although he says he doesn’t enjoy it. I find that hard to believe. I’m pretty sure I’d enjoy anything I was that good at.
I’m not the only one who’s noticed his skill. Granden and Trench both compliment him all the time, and even assign him to give the rest of us pointers. Rain’s noticed, too. Of course, that’s not exactly surprising. She’s been spending almost all her time with Brohn these past few days. They stand next to each other at the shooting ranges. They sleep in adjacent cots down in the Dormitory and keep up their whispering conversations, even after they think the rest of us have fallen asleep.
Whenever I find myself thinking about their budding relationship, I try to force the thoughts from my mind. It’s good that Brohn’s found someone. He’s a nice guy, and he deserves some happiness.
I also like to tell myself I’m not jealous.
Out on the range, I tease him, saying it’s cute how chummy he and Rain are getting.
“We’re not chummy,” he protests.