Recruitment

by K A Riley

“See. That’s what I was thinking, but I didn’t say anything before. We’re supposed to find out the chances of the kids crashing into each other, not avoiding a collision. We need to subtract one-eighth from one. That means seven-eighths. Seven over eight. Seven over-ate. It’s the middle box.”

  Without stopping to think, I sprint back over and press the button on the middle box. Just like with the first box, a round panel slides open. I thrust my hand inside and feel around until I grab onto a lever. I pull it, and it gives a satisfying click. Behind us, the clock stops at three seconds, a vent kicks on and sucks the yellow smoke back up, and the big double doors swing open.

  Hiller is standing there with Granden, Trench, Chucker, Kellerson and the two men from the medical crew.

  Before we even have a chance to react, Kellerson and the med crew guys whisk Terk away, while Granden, Trench, Chucker, and Kellerson join forces to herd us out of the Delta Cube and out to the middle of the Agora. Still reeling from shock and coughing violently from inhaling traces of that yellow smoke, we’re in a daze as the four guards position us onto the Capsule Pads and transport us down into the Silo. We stumble off the pads, trip across the room, and drop down onto our cots, the weight of what we’ve just witnessed pressing down on us like a tangible force.

  Trying to choke down their coughing fits, Brohn and Rain tend to Amaranthine, who is coming to but still groggy. Karmine and Kella and I dash to the Shower Room where we kneel in front of toilets in separate stalls and vomit in unison. Three stalls down, I can hear Cardyn throwing up into another toilet.

  When we’ve cleaned up, gotten our bearings, and are finally able to take a decent breath, we gather together on our cots in the Dormitory.

  Rain is choking on her words. “It’s all my fault. I thought for sure I had the answer. I was so damn sure of myself, and really I was just being a cocky idiot.”

  “I pressed the button,” Card says. His eyes are as red as Rain’s. He puts his fist to his forehead and drops his head down. “I practically told him to stick his hand into that thing.”

  Kella has collapsed into Karmine’s arms. Her face is buried in his shoulder. Her voice is muffled, her body wracked with sobs. “I suggested there might be a key in that thing. It’s my fault as much as anybody’s.” Karmine’s face is wet with tears, but he holds his head up and looks at the ceiling as he strokes Kella’s hair.

  “It’s my fault,” I mutter through my hands. Brohn gets up from his cot and comes over to sit next to me. For the first time, he wraps his strong arms around me and holds on tight. “I had a feeling…,” I mumble. “I knew there was something about the riddle…about the wording…but I didn’t react. I didn’t say anything.”

  I never thought I could feel this miserable with Brohn’s arms around me. “It’s not your fault,” he says.

  I’m sobbing now. I can barely get the words out. “I think Terk might say different,” I finally manage.

  17

  Our night in the Silo is different this time. There’s no laughter. No chatter. No fun guessing games about what our next training assignment might be. No nursing our sore muscles and rehashing the events of the day.

  I spend my time standing up and pacing around the room, then collapsing back down on my cot. The other six all perform some variation of my pattern, alternating between their cots and moving around the space like emotionally-exhausted zombies. The springs groan under us as if they’re sympathetic to our pain.

  I don’t know why I bother wiping away my tears when they just keep coming back.

  After hours of agonizing, I realize I have no idea how much time has passed, but I feel like I’ve been losing my mind for days now.

  Brohn, who’s still awake just like the rest of us, announces he’s going to take a shower to clear his head. But he comes back a minute later to tell us the water’s not working.

  “Nothing?” I ask, thankful for a chance to think about something else. Anything other than Terk and his horrific injury is a blessing at this point. Each time I think of it, I feel an awful mix of nausea and guilt.

  “Barely a trickle,” Brohn says. He plops down next to me on my cot, lays a welcome hand on my knee, and asks how I’m holding up.

  “I’ve been better,” I confess. “I just can’t get it out of my head. That image…”

  “Me neither,” he replies with a tensing of his jaw. “But maybe that’s for the best. Keeping our thoughts on Terk, I mean. Maybe he’ll recover faster if we keep sending him positive mental energy.”

  “Recover?” I ask, leaning away from him in disbelief. “You’re assuming he’s even still alive. Even if he is, he’s not going to ‘recover.’ He didn’t stub his toe or catch a cold. That box took his arm. Not even that. Hiller took his arm. She set us all up. And did you see how fast they took him away and hustled us all out of there?” I’m breathing hard now, trying not to start crying again. “Listen, Brohn,” I say at last, “I’ve got a bad feeling about the way things have been going.”

  “How do you mean?”

  Before I get a chance to explain, Cardyn and Rain, who have both headed into the Shower Room to try and figure out what’s going on with our plumbing, come back out and sit together on Rain’s cot. It’s just as well, because I don’t have all my theories sorted out in my head, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Brohn thought I was just being a paranoid psycho.

  “I heard what you said,” Rain says. “And I think I know what you mean. Terk said something weeks ago, back when we were first recruited. Remember?”

  “Back on the Transport Truck, right?” Card asks. “I was thinking the same thing.”

  Rain nods, but I shake my head. “I don’t remember. What did he say?”

  “He asked why we’d have to worry about getting hurt or killed if this was just training.”

  “So?”

  “So, Kellerson never answered that question.”

  “Well, to be fair,” I reply, “he didn’t really answer any of our questions.”

  “That’s exactly my point. Why build this massive facility, this ‘Processor,’ and dedicate all this time and resources into training us, but then be all hush-hush about certain parts of it? It doesn’t make sense.”

  Karmine and Kella have been off in the Mess Hall having their own quiet conversation, but now they walk out and join us on the cots. Kella sits cross-legged at the head of hers, with Karmine next to her, his arm around her shoulders. She still seems shaken by the day’s events. Although Karmine seems to want to comfort her, his red eyes and the way he keeps biting his bottom lip tell me he’s barely holding things together himself. Our resident warrior’s always talked a good game when it comes to the war against the Order. He all but reveled in his own injury.

  But this is his first time getting an up-close look at the toll it can take. It’s the first time for any of us.

  “We heard what you were saying about Terk,” Kella says after taking a deep breath. “Do you think…do think we’re in real danger?”

  At first, I assume she’s asking Brohn. He’s the guy everyone turns to when they have concerns and questions, after all. But when he doesn’t say anything, I look up and realize everyone’s looking at me.

  “I don’t know,” I reply, trying to hide my shock. “But maybe that’s not the question we should be asking.”

  “Then what is?” Karmine asks sullenly.

  “Why does it seem like they want to hurt us?”

  The room goes quiet for a few seconds, then Rain nods. “I agree. Whether what happened to Terk was a simple training accident, a sick lesson of some kind, or a deliberate attempt to weed one of us out…none of that matters. Kress has been knocked unconscious. Kar’s had his arm fractured. Kella’s got a broken bone under her eye. And now Terk. There have been way too many injuries for this to be a coincidence.”

  “Hurt is one thing,” Kella says, nodding in agreement. “Having your arm literally cut off in some stupid training game is something else. Especially when we’re supposed to
be getting trained to fight the Order. Why subject us to something so dangerous? Especially Terk. He was the biggest and strongest of all of us. What good does it do to send him into combat with one arm?”

  “I think we need to consider changing our approach,” Brohn suggests quietly, looking around like he’s afraid someone will overhear us. “We need to do a better job of keeping tabs on Hiller and her crew. See if we can figure out what’s really going on. You know, watch the watchers.”

  “But how?” Kella asks. “They keep us down here half the time, and the other half, they’ve got men in towers with guns ready to take us out.”

  Raising his eyebrows, Cardyn shoots me a look that screams Tell them.

  “Fine,” I sigh. “Maybe I can help.”

  “How’s that?” Brohn asks.

  “You know about my connection with Render.”

  “I know you’ve had him for a long time.”

  “What’s this about, Kress?” asks Rain.

  I swallow hard, knowing that for the first time in my life, I’m about to betray my father by giving away his secret. “Our connection goes deeper than you might realize.” I glance over at Cardyn. “Deeper than any of you realize.” For a second, he looks surprised, even hurt by the revelation. “Sorry, Card. I told you there were some things I wanted to keep to myself.”

  I take off my jacket and extend my arms, wrists up. Wearing just my black t-shirt, the markings on my forearms are clearly visible to the others.

  “Your tattoos?” Kella asks. “We’ve seen them a million times. What about them?”

  “That’s the thing. They’re not tattoos.” I bite my lip, knowing I’m about to pass the point of no return. “They’re a type of implant. My dad was working on this technology long before we even moved to the Valta.” I turn to look at Brohn, recalling what I told him on the beach at Final Feast. “When the war started a few years before the first Recruitment, my dad was working with a bio-tech team. They were trying to come up with ways to bridge the Digital Divide.”

  “What’s that?” Karmine asks.

  “Honestly, I don’t really know. Something about getting past the use of digital technology to understand itself. That’s what Dad said, anyway. The idea was to see if digital technology could be blended with our human neuro networks. So instead of prosthetics and artificial body parts, where the tech is integrated with the body but still kind of different from it, the bio-tech would have merged them somehow. Instead of just A.I. where computers become more human, we humans would become more like computers, or something like that. Remember, Dad told me this stuff when I was still pretty little, so my memories might not be exactly crystal clear. Anyway,” I say as I run my hands along the pattern of dots, curves, and lines embedded in my forearms, “these are kind of a prototype. I can input certain commands by tapping and tracing patterns that only I know into the array. They don’t even need an external energy source since, technically, they’re powered by my brain.”

  “And they let you communicate with your bird?” Rain asks. By now, Amaranthine, who was lying down on her cot, is sitting up, listening attentively.

  “Not exactly,” I reply, frustrated that I’m doing such a terrible job of explaining how it all works.

  “What then?”

  “They enhance my ability to communicate with my bird. No. That’s not exactly it, either. They enable us to communicate with each other. It’s not exactly that we talk to each other—more like we can kind of see through each other’s eyes or minds. We can tap into each other’s feelings. Honestly, I’m not sure how it all works, myself. And it kind of comes and goes. It’s not like some super power I can control.”

  “Yet,” Cardyn says.

  I give him a thank you shrug for his optimism.

  Brohn leans forward and takes my forearm in his hand. For a second, his fingers hover over the black array of lines and curves. He looks at me, questioning, and I tell him it’s okay. “You can touch them.”

  He traces the curved lines and gently taps at the black dots with his fingers. I know he’s just being curious. He’s anxious to get to the bottom of our situation, to figure out a way to figure out what’s going on in the Processor. He’s not being intimate or anything…at least, I don’t think he is until I look into his eyes, which are fixed on my own, rather than at the design on my arm.

  It feels nice to have my arm in his hand, his finger dragging lightly across my skin. It feels calming after the events with Terk. It just feels…good.

  Finally, he lets go and abruptly rises to his feet to move over and sit on his own cot. “So you think you can use this thing…this bio-tech-whatever connection to help us out?” His tone is all business, and just like that, Brohn is back to keeping his distance.

  “I’m not sure,” I reply. “I can try to connect with Render again. I’ve done it before. But there’s no guarantee it’ll work.”

  “Maybe not. But there’s a definite guarantee that it’s our only chance, so I think I can guarantee that it’s definitely worth a shot.”

  “Okay,” I say. “I’ll do it.”

  Everyone gathers around, scrunching in closer on their cots to get next to me. Even Amaranthine has moved over to watch. But being the center of attention is making me tense. I don’t know if I’ll be able to access Render when I’m a bundle of nerves and perspiration.

  I tap out the pattern on my array that opens up the connection. Back in the Valta, I learned early on that if I don’t keep the access closed most of the time, I get filled with a kind of feedback sensory overload. It happened for the first time when I was a Neo. I was off in the woods experimenting with my connection to Render, and I must have left the connection open too long because the overload hit me like a wrecking ball. I wound up passed out on the forest floor until I woke up the next morning with a massive migraine and a lesson painfully learned.

  With the connection now open, I close my eyes and reach out with my mind for Render.

  Where are you?

  At first, I think I’m the one asking him the question.

  But then I realize it’s Render who’s asking me.

  I’m underground. I’m with our friends. Our family. Our Conspiracy. I’m safe.

  Images of the darkening red of the sky flash in my mind. Clusters of tree leaves and wild tangles of branches. There’s a flurry of motion. The black tips of Render’s wings. More flashes of sky mixed in with the charred ground. The images weave in and out of each other like a braid, and I get lightheaded and dizzy.

  Then it all disappears.

  “So what happened?” Brohn asks when I’ve opened my eyes again. “Were you able to connect?”

  I shake my head. “Not much. At least not well. It could be because it’s getting dark up there. Ravens don’t usually fly at night. They roost. Render needs to sleep like the rest of us.”

  “You don’t sound convinced that the problem is the time of day, though.”

  “That’s because I’m not.” I can feel the weight of sadness overtaking me all over again, but I swallow hard and push it away. “The connection hasn’t been the same for a while now. I might be…I mean, it could be that I’m…losing it.”

  “So what should we do?” Cardyn asks.

  “We wait until tomorrow,” Brohn says, sounding slightly annoyed that Cardyn’s so nonchalant about my obvious pain. “When we get up to the Agora, we’re going to have to deal with this situation with Terk.”

  Everyone in the room knows what he’s talking about, and we all agree. We need to head this thing off now, get some real answers, before things get out of hand and we all wind up like Terk.

  Or worse.

  But “tomorrow” never comes. Not really.

  When we get up the next morning, we do what we’ve done every morning for the past several weeks: Change into our Agora clothes. Check for updates to our scores on the viz-screen. Eat a small meal of a dry biscuit, some protein cakes, and a bottle of powdered energy drink, all served on a metal tray that slides out
from a chute in the Mess Hall wall.

  When we’re done, we head over to the Capsule Pads to get lifted up to ground level.

  But not today.

  The Capsules don’t activate when we step onto the pads.

  “Maybe the system’s down?” Card suggests.

  An immediate sense of foreboding tenses my muscles up. This place works like a well-oiled machine. It makes no sense that suddenly the Capsules would break down.

  “Maybe,” Brohn says. “But then why no contact? Why hasn’t anyone sent us a message through the viz-screen telling us to sit tight while they fix whatever it is that’s broken?”

  “Screw this!” Kella says angrily. “After yesterday, maybe they realize we need a day off. Anyway, I’m taking it.” She steps off her Capsule Pad and heads back to her cot, where she drops down heavily on her back, one arm slung over her eyes. I don’t know if it’s to keep out the light, or so we don’t see that she’s started crying tears of rage again.

  “I’m with her,” Karmine says. He follows Kella over and plops down next to her. He stretches out on his side with his elbow on a pillow and his head propped up on his hand. “If they want us, let them come get us.”

  Not that I agree with his bluster, but we don’t exactly have any other choice. We have no way to communicate with Granden and Trench, which means we’re stuck here until something happens.

  Following Kella and Karmine’s lead, we all return to our cots, where we sit and consider our options.

  As it turns out, there aren’t any.

  “Maybe try your Render connection?” Card suggests.

  “I’ll try, but I can’t promise anything.”

  I do, but this time there’s absolutely nothing. I know it’s not just a matter of me being underground. I’ve communicated with him from down here before.

  The connection is just gone.

  So we do the only thing we can: we wait. Time passes…and passes.

  I have no real idea how long we’ve been down here. It’s been at least six days now, based on the number of meal trays that have come down the chute. But it feels like a lifetime. We’ve all lived through drama before, here and back in the Valta. But there was always something to do. Somewhere to go. Trapped like this in an underground bunker, everything seems magnified. Every second feels like an hour. I can feel the tension around me, and at times I’m not sure if it’s my own rage heating the air, or everyone else’s.