Recruitment

by K A Riley

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Kella says, trying to hold eye contact with Rain but failing. She glances over toward the Shower Room, then at Rain, and then quickly back at the ground. “You’re crazy. Karmine and I don’t have anything going on.”

  Rain turns to me. “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

  “Hamlet,” I blurt out, enjoying the game a little too much. “Act three. Scene two.”

  Rain raises her eyebrows at me and smiles. “Very good.”

  She presses on while Kella pretends to be engrossed with a loose thread on her gray blanket. “It’s just that you’ve always been close. We all have. We’ve had to be. But you two…well, let’s just say that it’s nice to see you…”

  Kella looks up, waiting for Rain to finish, but Rain just leans back on her elbows and smiles.

  “Nice to see me what?” Kella asks with more urgency than I’m sure she intended, her blue eyes flashing.

  “You know. Loosening up. Not quite so cold as you used to be.”

  “I’m plenty loose.”

  “Says the girl who was all business back in the Valta. What did last year’s Sixteens used to call you? ‘Cool as Cream Kella’?”

  “Cool’s not the same thing as cold,” Kella says defensively.

  “Fair enough,” Rain says with her hands up in a gesture of partial surrender.

  “Besides, who made it your business to assess my personality?”

  I look back and forth from Kella to Rain, not sure if this mild teasing is about to turn into a full-on brawl. Whatever it is, Rain defuses it with a smile and a sudden shift from lying back on her elbows to scooching up to the end of her cot to sit cross-legged in front of Kella, who’s sitting on her own cot with her head sagging down and her feet flat on the floor, her toes wiggling like nervous little newborn mice.

  “C’mon, Kella. You have a better personality than anyone I’ve ever met,” Rain says. “Seriously. That’s why it’s nice to see you two together. It’s nice to see you coming out of your shell, and I think…I mean, I’m just saying, that there’s something about Karmine that seems to be helping.”

  Kella finally looks up and gives Rain a half smile. She says, “He’s okay, I guess,” then starts undoing the long blond French braid she’s been wearing for the past couple of days.

  “So do you think you two might be an…item?”

  Kella blushes and laughs, and I’m thankful to feel the rest of the tension flit out of the room. “Maybe,” she says. “We do have a lot in common. The way we think…the way we just are. But I guess I always thought of him as more like my twin brother. At least I used to.”

  “Until he got tall and cool-looking with those muscles and those shapely legs, right?”

  Now Kella’s cheeks really do go full red, but she also looks happier than I’ve seen her in a long time. She sits up now, with her shoulders relaxed and a sparkle of silver in her blue eyes.

  “I don’t care how he looks,” she says with a glance over to the Shower Room to make sure we’re not being overheard. “But you’re right. I admit it. We have a connection. I don’t know what to call it. It’s not really the gushy romantic stuff our parents used to talk about. And it’s definitely not like with Cleo and Martin.”

  Rain holds up her hands and says, “Whoa. That’s a whole other situation.”

  Everyone knows the Cleo and Martin story. It was as big a scandal as you could have in a town made up mostly of kids. On November 1st, eight years ago, the Recruiters showed up to take away the Cohort of new Seventeens as usual. While we all gathered in the square to watch, they scanned the Recruits, stopping at Cleo, who was visibly nervous. One of the Recruiters called out to his buddy, “This one’s pregnant.” Our jaws hit the ground. Martin grabbed Cleo’s hand, they both blushed, and Cleo started to cry. The Recruiters pulled her away from Martin, loaded him and the other Seventeens into one transport truck and flung Cleo, who was screaming and clawing at them to let her go, into another.

  We never heard from either of them again.

  “Don’t worry,” Kella says. “It’s not like that. It’s…different.” She turns to me with a smile. “You know what I mean, Kress. About a strange connection, one you can’t explain, but it seems to mean so much anyway?”

  At first, my chest tightens because I think she’s talking about Brohn. I didn’t think anyone but Cardyn had ever noticed that I was attracted to him. It’s not like we spend much time together—if anything, we avoid contact like we’re both afraid of what might happen if we ever get too close. Not to mention the fact that I’m pretty sure Rain likes him a lot, too. Nothing like an awkward love triangle to make our living situation utterly horrible.

  So I let out a choking cough when Kella says, “You know, like with you and Cardyn.”

  “Wait!” I blurt out. “What about Card and me?”

  Kella seems relieved to have Rain’s attention turn my way. With a seriously impish smile, Rain reaches across the space between our cots and puts a hand on my knee. “You’re kidding, right, Kress?”

  “Kidding about what?”

  “You know. How you and Cardyn would sneak off all the time back home, just the two of you, romping away to your little secret hiding places in the woods. We’ve all known about you two for years.”

  “First of all, I’ve never ‘romped’ in my life. And if I ever do decide to ‘romp,’ I doubt it will be with Cardyn. There’s no us, so you can put that out of your minds right now.”

  “But you have to admit, you two have something special,” Rain says.

  “Yes. It’s called friendship. You should try it sometime.”

  She laughs, and I’m glad she realizes I was joking. She’s not someone I want mad at me.

  “You don’t want to be…what’s that term again?” Rain asks as she thrums her fingers on her leg and stares up at the ceiling.

  “Just friends,” Amaranthine says quietly.

  We all stare at her as she drops her eyes and lowers her head. When she retreats back into Amaranthine turtle-mode, Rain shrugs her shoulders and nods.

  “She’s right. There are only a finite number of possible relationships that can exist between any two people. You can be friends. Related. Partners. Teammates. Lovers. Guess which one Cardyn wants the two of you to be?”

  I can’t get my head around Rain’s question. Card’s my best friend. No, he’s more than that. After losing my father and brother, in a lot of ways, Cardyn has been everything to me. He’s been with me through so much—even the secret stuff, like my training with Render. What Rain might think were amorous stolen moments between us in the woods in the Valta were actually some of the most special times in my life. Card and I talked about our hopes, our feelings, our fears. We supported each other when we were down and reveled in each other’s happiness when things were going great. We had an intimacy then, a bond beyond Rain’s limited ideas of what two people can mean to each other. Besides, when did “just friends” get to be such a bad thing? Cardyn isn’t “just” anything to me. There’s no way I’ll let someone that close, that special, that indispensable in my life, be demoted to a “just” anything.

  “Maybe there’s more kinds of relationships than you think,” I say to Rain as I stand up. The showers are off now, and our voices will be easily audible to the boys. I’m grateful for an excuse to finish the conversation, which has veered into some pretty weird and slightly awkward territory.

  When the boys come out of the Shower Room, they’re dressed in the same outfits we wear every night for sleeping in the Silo: black gym shorts over army green compression pants, with charcoal gray t-shirts. Everything’s tight and form-fitting but still breathable and as comfortable as a second skin.

  “Quite a day,” Brohn says with his hands gripping the ends of the damp towel resting around his neck. He runs his fingers through his smooth, wet hair. The move makes him look tidy, elegant even. I stare at him for a moment, wondering if he has any idea how often I think about hi
m. If Kella and Rain haven’t clued in, maybe he hasn’t either. Maybe...

  “You ladies ready for your turn to get clean?” he says, interrupting my thoughts. It’s his trademark phrase. He says it every time they get the shower first.

  “We’ll shower,” Rain says with a wink as she stands up and leads Kella, Amaranthine, and me toward the Shower Room. “But that doesn’t mean we have to get clean.” She runs her hand along Brohn’s face before giving him a wink and a light slap.

  He laughs and puts a hand to the red splotch on his cheek. The boys are clearly amused and respond with laughs of their own and with playful punches to each other’s arms and shoulders as they make their way to their cots.

  I can’t help but feel a rush of envy at how easily Rain touches Brohn. She’s comfortable in her own skin in ways I may never be.

  I think back to the conversation Brohn and I had in our last night in the Valta, when he told me I was attractive and mysterious. I wonder sometimes if he still thinks so. We’ve been sleeping in the same room for what feels like years now, so it’s not like there’s much about me that he hasn’t figured out.

  Or is there?

  In the Shower Room, the girls and I step into the individual stalls, disrobe, and scan our hands over the green input pads that have been programmed to provide the exact optimal water temperature and pressure for each of us. At first, we thought it was just a coincidence, but about five or six days into our training, Granden confessed to me out in the Agora that yes, the showers were calibrated to meet our personal needs. “You’re far too important to this war for us to risk throwing you into uncomfortable water pressure,” he’d said to me with the blankest expression and best poker face I’d ever seen. To this day, I have no idea if he was joking or dead serious.

  Right now, I really don’t care. The conversation with the girls has my head in a dizzying spin. I can’t tell if I’m more mortified about what they think is happening between me and Card or about what I wish might happen between me and Brohn. It’s enough to make me queasy. The shower is the perfect antidote. Soft beads of water, just this side of hot. My muscles relax. I draw my fingers through my slicked-back hair. The water swirls down the small drain at my feet, taking my tension and embarrassment away with it.

  16

  Every morning for the next two weeks, we rise up on the Capsule Pads and start a tough day of weapons and combat training. The mind-numbing repetition of it is somehow both comforting and infuriating. During all this time, I find myself avoiding eye contact with Cardyn and Brohn. The conversation with the girls has thrown me into some sort of vortex of shame, and I’m worried that anything I say or do will be construed as proof of my attraction to one or both of the boys. I remind myself that I’m here to work my way into Special Ops, as unlikely as that seems at this point.

  Fortunately, Card seems oblivious to my attempt to retreat from any kind of closeness. He still chats with me, asks about Render, speculates about the future. I’m grateful for his company, though I frequently glance around to see if Rain and Kella are raising their eyebrows knowingly at each other.

  Brohn spends the days in a quiet state, too. Maybe he’s reading my body language. Or maybe it’s something else. If I were Rain, I’d just run up and ask him while bouncing off the walls happily. But bouncing has never been my thing, so I just watch him from a distance, wishing things could have been different in this world of ours.

  After a final week of combat training, we’re finally told that it’s time for our next Cube challenge. I’m hoping that means more escape rooms and puzzles, which I find far more enjoyable than pretending I’m blowing people’s heads off.

  Granden and Trench lead us across the Agora to the Delta Cube. Other than the symbol “Δ” that appears just above the door, it looks exactly like the other seven buildings: glistening black, imposing, and as uninviting as a giant tombstone. Inside, Hiller is waiting for us as usual. She greets us with a big smile and an enthusiastic “Good morning!” like she’s about to send us off to our first day of school. I half expect her to hand each of us a paper bag with our lunch in it, then pat our heads and tell us what good children we are.

  Instead, we climb three flights of stairs together until we reach a landing leading out to a hallway. At the end of the hall is a single door, which Hiller opens for us with a wave of her hand.

  “Welcome to your second Escape Room. Or should I say, rooms.”

  We follow her into a windowless chamber which feels more ominous, somehow, than the last one we were in.

  A tall iron box, about six or seven feet tall and a few feet wide sits in the middle of the room. It’s thick, solid, and about the size and shape of an old-time phone booth. Some sort of pulley is attached to the top of the box toward the front with a thick braid of black cable rising up and disappearing into the ceiling.

  On the near side of the room is a line of six heavy-looking pedestals shaped like fluted columns, each about four feet tall, each with a large smooth boulder perched on top. The boulders are all different sizes, ranging from one the size of a bowling ball to one that’s as big around as good-sized tree trunk. Each of the rocks looks like it’s made of marble, and even the smallest one looks like it must weigh a ton.

  On the far side of the room is a line of six matching pedestals, although they don’t have anything on them.

  “There are three levels to this challenge,” Hiller explains. “Your mission is to escape from this room through that door on the far side. Walk down one level to the next room. Escape from that one. Walk down one more level. Escape from the final room, and your mission will be completed. I will meet you at the end…if you make it. I must warn you: the stakes are higher now. But the good news is that because of the three separate levels, your allotted time has been increased. You have exactly one hour. A holo-clock will appear above each exit door on each level to let you know how much time you have remaining. Any questions?”

  “Yeah,” Karmine says. “I don’t see the Order attacking us with too many brain-teasers. When do we get to go back out to the Agora and shoot stuff?”

  “Shooting stuff,” Hiller says, “as you so eloquently put it, won’t do you much good if your mind isn’t trained and operating at peak efficiency. Believe me, the Order is out there right now trying to prove they can not only outshoot us, but also outsmart us. Your job is to prove them wrong. Now, if there are no other equally pointless questions…?” She looks around with the judgmental gleam in her eye we all know so well by now. “Good.”

  Hiller gestures us inside and closes the door behind us.

  “Okay,” Rain says, hopping up and down like she’s just won a prize. “This should be fun.”

  “You have a strange definition of ‘fun,’” Karmine grumbles.

  “Says the guy who enjoys shooting and stabbing stuff way too much.”

  Kella laughs and comes to Karmine’s defense. “At least that’ll get us combat ready. Kar’s right. You can keep your riddles and puzzles. Give me one of those big FN F2020 assault rifles any day of the week.”

  Rain looks over and gives me a little eye roll. I respond with a quiet laugh as she surveys the room.

  I walk over to the big metal box. I run my hands along its surface and discover a seam running along its sides toward the front, forming a door of some kind. But there are no hinges, knobs, dials, levers, or anything else we might use to open what appears to be the door. The metal is blue and cold to the touch.

  “There’s not much to this,” I tell the group, “other than the pulley on top of what seems to be the box’s front panel.”

  Just to be sure, Rain tells us to check out the rest of the room as well. We tap the walls with our knuckles and look around for any hidden panels or unusual surfaces. But other than the tall box and the two sets of pedestals on either side of the room, it looks like there’s nothing here.

  “I’m going to go out on a limb here,” Brohn says, his palms resting flat on the top of the box, “and guess that the key t
o the exit door is inside this thing.”

  “The pulley must lift the door to the box,” Cardyn suggests, and everyone seems to agree.

  “I’ll buy that,” Rain says. She seems to be taking charge, which is fine by me. “The pedestals and rocks have got to be the key to opening the box,” she announces. “So it’s just a matter of figuring out what they mean.”

  The columns without the rocks on top are numbered one through six.

  “I get the numbers on this set of pedestals,” I call out to Rain. “But what are the markings on the other ones?” I walk over to where Cardyn is kneeling at the base of one of the pedestals with the odd markings.

  Sure enough, each of the pedestals with a large rock on top has a strange symbol on it:

  One of the pedestals has what looks like the number one. Another has a three. The rest of the marks don’t look like anything. Just dashes, almost like Braille, or maybe a computer code. Terk suggests that it could be some kind of alien language.

  “Let’s not get carried away,” Karmine laughs. “I don’t think we’re here to translate alien to English.”

  Terk blushes and hangs his head as Kella joins in to tease him about his suggestion, which is too bad, because I was thinking the same thing.

  Before we have a chance to do any more guessing, Rain lets out a laugh and says she has it.

  “Very clever!” she says. “It’s a digital read-out, only in reverse. Well, not reverse, exactly. More like inverse. Or contrapositive. It’s the accentuation of negative space.”

  “It’s the what of the what now?” Karmine asks. I can’t help but snicker. I have no idea what she’s talking about, either.

  Rain narrows her eyes in thought as she tries to explain. “See, old clocks used to use seven lines in combination to make the numbers zero through nine. They were digital, so they could only operate in horizontal or vertical lines. Either a line could be on, or it could be off. For the number zero, the horizontal middle line is off. The other six lines are on. So this is just a set of numbers. The first is missing the upper-left line, the middle line, and both of the lines on the right-hand side.”