The Light Brigade

by Kameron Hurley

  “Not exactly high on the list of skills you need for intelligence,” she said. “I mean, you’re a case in point.”

  We had four hours of personal time on Sunday mornings. Most people caught up on corp news, slept, and—finally, in week two—watched and recorded personal messages. Getting access to those messages made pretty much everyone giddy, except for folks like me, who weren’t expecting any.

  There wasn’t much privacy in our unit; wasn’t privacy anywhere in the corps. We viewed our messages in open booths outside the cafeteria. The line the first day was too long after breakfast, so I went later, toward the end of our Sunday free time. I had six messages waiting from Vi Ruiz, my ex-girlfriend. I deleted those without watching them. They were just ghosts; I’d gotten a lot of them before. I learned to just trash them. The others were from Andria and Rubem, the two friends who’d been at that last party with me before I joined up. It already felt like a lifetime ago. They had ended up in another class a week before me, in Mendoza.

  Our heads-up displays ordinarily would have been able to manage messages for us, link us in directly with whom we needed to talk to. But they didn’t want us getting anything raw from the outside. Every message that got through to us was filtered, censored, and filtered again—then we had to watch them out in the open.

  I activated Andria’s message. Her face bloomed on the screen, so detailed I could count the specks of turf that smeared her chin, and the individual burst vessels under her bruised left eye. Her sallow complexion was mottled and peeling from too much sun. Despite knowing her hair would be cropped I found it shocking to see her massive black curls shorn away, revealing a delicate, sloping forehead and pate covered in black fuzz. Behind her, Rubem signed something at me, but it was obscured by a passing recruit.

  “Dietz!” Andria said. “You’re in week two, right? Knowing you, you don’t even check messages until week three, ha! Oh shit, there’s so much I wish I could tell you, but I bet they censor it. Me and Rube are great, fine. Don’t wash out! We need to deploy together. The three of us. Somebody’s gotta do the grunt work, right? Shit!” She held up her left arm. Her left hand was missing at the wrist. In its place was a semiorganic replacement. You could tell the ones that were fake, because the skin was still too shiny, and the color never matched. She made a fist, surprisingly fast. “Live fire exercise,” she said. “You should—” the video cut out, a black background, and REDACTED over the top of it. I waited. The video cut back in. Andria, looking over her shoulder, yelling at Rubem. “Yes, two minutes!” Turned back to me. “We’re going to win, Dietz.” She held up both hands, pointer fingers raised. “Over and out!” The video cut.

  There were a couple more like that, mostly pep talks from Andria. She knew me too well. Maybe felt sorry for me. I hoped not.

  “Anything good from home?” Jones asked at lunch in the cafeteria the next day. I wasn’t sure if he was asking me or Muñoz.

  “When do we get black-out drunk?” Muñoz said. “That’s what I’m waiting for. How many more weeks until that?”

  “Bad news?”

  “Nothing,” Muñoz said. “Same shit. What about you, Dietz? You got friends?”

  “Yeah, Muñoz, I have friends.”

  “I mean, you being so charming and all,” she said.

  “It’s all those big words. Has folks falling all over themselves for me.”

  Jones said, “You ever read Jorge Amado? Or Machado de Assis?”

  “I don’t think Dietz reads.”

  “I heard of Amado. Not the other one. Aren’t they censored?”

  “Not for citizens,” Jones said. “Machado de Assis once said, or wrote, rather: ‘Everyone knows how to love in his own way; the way, it does not matter; the essential thing is to know how to love.’ ”

  “What’s that have to do with anything?” I said.

  “I saw you delete a bunch of messages,” Jones said. “From a girl.” He raised his eyebrows.

  No goddamn privacy.

  Muñoz perked up. “You have a girlfriend, Dietz?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Does she know that?” Muñoz said.

  I wasn’t going to talk about Vi here. “You got one of those quotes for every occasion?” I said to Jones.

  Jones poked at his protein cake and chewed slowly, rolling his eyes upward. Then, “I like eyes that smile, gestures that apologize, touches that can talk, and silences that declare themselves.”

  “Those quotes work on all the girls?” I said.

  “Jealous?”

  “If it works, yeah.”

  “I have several someones back home,” Jones said. “So yeah, it works. But shit, it was easier to sign up than deal with all that drama.”

  “Quote some dead guy and get laid?” Muñoz said. “You must come from a real small town.”

  “Why didn’t you become a poet, Jones?” I said.

  “You think Teni supports poets? C’mon, Dietz, your ghoul is showing.”

  “I was being sarcastic.”

  “There are some writing jobs that come with good perks, that’s true. I’d love to be a corporate journalist. Maybe after the war.”

  “Don’t they tell you what to write?”

  “Nah, you just have to get stories approved by the Corporate Communications Office before you publish. You have a lot of freedom in how you write something, as long as you’re writing about approved subjects.”

  “If you’re a citizen.”

  “Only citizens can become journalists,” Jones said.

  “Why?”

  Jones shrugged. “Just the way it is.”

  “You benefit from the citizenship model,” Muñoz said. “Citizen journalists have more to lose if the corporate message isn’t consistent. I mean, if Dietz here bashed Teni publicly, they couldn’t take much away.”

  “Fuck you,” I said.

  “I think that’s very pessimistic,” Jones said. “Citizens are just better equipped to talk smartly about these subjects. We have been, you know, educated.”

  Muñoz laughed so hard it sounded like a squeal. “You old citizen families. You’re all the same. Like talking to a propaganda poster.”

  “What?” Jones said.

  “Andria wasn’t allowed to tell us what’s next,” I said, because I didn’t like where the conversation was going. I didn’t like to talk about politics.

  “What does that have to do with anything?” Muñoz said.

  “It was censored,” I said. “What she was trying to tell us happened this week.”

  “Great,” Muñoz said, stabbing her food and glaring at Jones. “That’s always a good sign.”

  • • •

  There was good reason for the censorship. The corps has its reasons. It protects itself.

  Next up was the torture modules.

  We got in formation on a Tuesday morning; it was hot, muggy, and a fine drizzle coated everything.

  “The enemy is going to do a lot of terrible shit to you,” the drill instructor said. “It’s our job to prepare you for that. That’s why we’re going to do the terrible shit to you first.”

  Muñoz rolled her eyes.

  I didn’t. I fixed my gaze on the DI. I wanted to get some idea of what was coming.

  I’m not going to tell you about the torture modules. Not yet. I’m going to say it was three days of shit. I’m going to say: Immersive experiences are pretty fucking immersive. I’m going to say: They should have sent us all to a shrink, after.

  But they didn’t.

  Not yet.

  We kept going.

  We kept going.

  Because that’s what war is.

  You keep going until it’s over.

  Or you’re dead.

  5.

  It has come to my attention that this is the week we teach you not to starve,” the drill instructor said. “I suppose that’s necessary, considering we’re going to throw your soft asses out into the woods next week to sink or get eaten by jaguars and parasites.”


  We were in formation, day one of week three. I had never been so tired in my life. Muñoz stood next to me, swaying on her feet. What the DI hadn’t said about virtual torture camp was that reliving horror after horror meant you weren’t going to get a lot of sleep. After that had come the nightmares. I still thought I saw shit out of the corner of my eye: kids with busted heads, men holding up bloody machetes. I still smelled the coppery stink of blood. I snorted to try to clear it.

  “We have a hike today, children!” the DI said. “At the end of this hike, you will know what pain is. You will understand real exhaustion. Most importantly, you will be able to feed your goddamn selves instead of trying to eat each other.”

  A few recruits tittered, from the back. I figured they were among the few who had outwitted the torture modules. It was possible to beat the modules, I’d heard, but maybe only three or four in any class managed it, and they were always promoted to intelligence. Muñoz hadn’t been one of them. She was still pissed about it.

  The DIs marched us nineteen kilometers into the jungle. We followed a worn path at first, but then it was hard hiking for all one hundred and twenty of us left in the class. We had a fifteen-minute break around noon for water, pissing, and some protein bars, then we were marching again.

  Jones started to lag behind me and Muñoz. He had the long gaze of somebody who wasn’t really there. I splashed his face with water.

  “Move your ass, Dietz!” the DI yelled from up front. “Muñoz! You’re wasting your breath back there with Jones. You get behind, you won’t catch up. Move!” The DI was in a jeep that paced us on the road below. Why the fuck we didn’t get to hike on the road was beyond me. There was a second jeep at the back to harass the stragglers.

  We moved.

  It was after dark when we got to rest again. The DI and the handlers parked ahead of us in a clearing. Eight folding tables stood at the center, and around the periphery of those: a bunch of wooden boxes.

  I, honest, thought the boxes were full of munitions, grenades. Thought they were going to run us out and then see who survived a live fire exercise. Who knew, with them?

  They gave us water. Then the show started. We stood around the tables, expectant as lambs to the slaughter.

  “All right, children,” the DI said. He climbed up on one of the tables and fixed his fists on his hips. “You all hungry? You’re working for dinner tonight!”

  The handlers kicked over the boxes.

  Two dozen fat white rabbits tumbled out. The rabbits hopped away from the boxes. Nibbled at the ground cover. Hopped some more.

  “Simple task, children,” the DI said. “You and a partner catch your dinner. Kill it. Skin it. Eat it. Before something else in that jungle does. Handlers here will help you along, should you so desire. Move!”

  I snapped up a rabbit, the first to manage it. I stared into its flat black eyes. Muñoz and Jones came over, no doubt ready to have me do the dirty work. It was probably the first time they’d ever stared their own dinner in the face.

  “What’s wrong, Dietz?” the DI said. “You squeamish?”

  “Sir. No, sir,” I said.

  “Get going! Or you wanna starve? That more familiar to you?”

  I stared at the rabbit kicking in my hands. All around me, other kids who had never done so much as squash a spider were trying to figure out how to off a rabbit. Injured rabbits wiggled away and hopped into the forest, pursued by exhausted recruits.

  “Sir, I know how to kill a rabbit, sir,” I said. “Just not sure it’s necessary.”

  He leaned over me. “Kill and eat that rabbit, Dietz. That’s a fucking order. More necessary now?”

  I met his look. You aren’t supposed to do that. I have a problem with authority, though. I hate it when people tell me what to do. I want to push back at them, hound them, evade them, punch them, push them, defy them.

  I pulled the utility knife from my belt, still looking at the DI, and gouged the rabbit in the jugular. Blood squirted into the DI’s face. A more humane way would have been to break the rabbit’s neck using a branch, but there were no sticks lying nearby. The blood made a better point.

  “Goddamned!” the DI said, wiping away the spray.

  I broke the rabbit’s neck then, pulling sharply. It’d been terrorized enough. Oath of vengeance or not, I wasn’t a monster. Not yet.

  “Drop and give me fifty, Dietz!” the DI yelled.

  “Fuck you!” I said.

  He hit me. Hard.

  I flailed, lost my balance.

  “There’s one of you in every class,” the DI said, looming over me, “some ghoul-spawn trying to prove their mama wasn’t garbage. I have news for you, Dietz. You’ll always be garbage.”

  I lay with my face pressed to the ground, wondering if I really wanted to come up and get another hit. He wasn’t some Frankie, flailing around trying to look tough. He knew how to kill me. He knew how to hurt me without leaving a mark. He’d done it before.

  “Sir,” I said.

  “What was that?” He pressed my head deeper into the mud.

  “Sir. Yes, sir!”

  “Up,” he said.

  I crawled up from the mud. The others were dutifully hacking and skinning their rabbits, badly. One skinny pair of recruits already had a carcass cooking. The smell reminded my exhausted body I was ravenous. Hunger roared back, a sharp, gnawing pain that bent me double. Jones and Muñoz had my dead rabbit in hand, still puzzling over it.

  “Haul your ass to camp,” the DI said to me. “Stand at attention at the flagpole until I relieve you.”

  Camp was nineteen kilometers back the other direction. I was exhausted and dehydrated. I had a good idea of how bad that could be. I stood with my mouth open, leaving that unsaid.

  “Haul ass, Dietz! You think I’m a fucking parrot? Not going to repeat myself.”

  I stumbled past him, still disoriented from the blow to the head. Muñoz caught my eye, but quickly looked away. I staggered, trying to find the way back. The DI kicked me in the ass. I pinwheeled, just caught myself, and pushed on toward the path we had marched in on. My legs burned, two hunks of dead meat at the end of my body.

  Nineteen kilometers. Shit.

  I huffed down the track.

  I had done the hump. I had earned the meal. Earned the rest. Earned the sleep. What was I doing, going back? What were my choices? Turn around and get drowned in mud? My vision swam.

  The only way out is through.

  Fear and panic fueled me the first thirty paces. Then I zoned out. Oh shit, oh shit, nineteen kilometers. The whole way here flashed in front of me. The vomiting, the squatting in ditches, and the shakes, fuck, the shakes, the endless slog.

  I stumbled along, chest already burning. I’m stronger than this, I thought. I can endure more than this. He wants to psych me out. Wants me to squeal. Wants me to turn back and get down on my knees and beg for water, beg to eat. He wants me to wash out, wants me to clean his latrines until I goddamn wash out and cry for my dead mom and my dead dreams of citizenship.

  This was his real-life torture module.

  Don’t think about your body. Don’t think about the distance. Don’t think about water, glorious clear puddles of it, cold and clear as spring rain. Don’t think about how your body’s burning up your fat, searing it away until it’s gone and then starting in on the muscle.

  Don’t think.

  Hunger burns, then goes away. Burns. You think it will kill you, but it doesn’t. It fades, like exhaustion. I know this already, because I grew up with hunger. Woke up hungry. Went to bed hungry.

  I remember scavenging on the beach of a sludgy river called the Tajo Luz, me and my cousins. My brother was too young, still slung across my mother’s back. She walked ahead of us, scraping at the beach with a homemade rake, uncovering bits of discarded junk.

  Farther up the beach, where the sand turned to scrub, a flash of movement caught my eye. I climbed the shallow dunes. Nestled at the top was a twisted mat of plastic ties, bro
ken twigs, aluminum shavings, and synthetic fibers. A baby pigeon rested there, half in and half out of the nest. One wing lay outstretched, flapping uselessly. I took the poor little creature into my hands.

  “It’s all right,” I murmured. I ran my finger over its quivering head. Its heart fluttered against my palm.

  I slid down the dune and ran to catch up with my mother. I was barefoot, but the rough ruins of the beach hardly bothered me anymore. My feet were dirty, calloused things, hunks of sturdy meat.

  “Mama!” I called. She turned, her dark hair blowing back over her shoulder. The sun rose behind her, thick and runny as fresh egg yolk.

  “Mama,” I said, holding up the injured bird. “It’s hurt. Can we help it?”

  “Let’s get that home,” she said, and she smoothed the hair from my face. It reminded me of how I had stroked the bird’s tiny head.

  I beamed at her.

  We took the baby bird home along with six mollusks, some copper wire, and a meter-long metal hunk that bore the faded gray circles of the NorRus logo.

  I slept that night next to the baby bird. In the morning, my mother boiled off the bird’s feathers and cooked it whole. I’d like to tell you I had no stomach for it. But if you think for a minute I didn’t want to shove that weary bird down my gullet despite having sung it to sleep the night before, then you have never been hungry.

  My mother ate the bird herself, to ensure she made enough milk for my brother. I sat across from her on the floor and watched her consume the entire fledgling in three crunchy bites.

  I didn’t cry until she left to greet my father, just home from an expedition to the dumps of medical waste outside the nearby military training academy. Until Teni needed more pilots for the war with Mars, years later, we were nobodies. Ghouls. Just like everyone else there.

  I clutched my knees to my chest and cried because I was so hungry. I cried because I wanted the pain to end.

  I tripped over my own feet, the memory hot in my mind, and went into the mud. The fall was a relief. I lay there, chest heaving, snorting the earthy scent of the loam, rotten leaves slimy between my fingers.

  The first time Tene-Silvia corporate security came for my father was seven years after we got residency; seven years after he started running shuttles between Mars and the moon. Teni made real housing available to us, and baseline rations. But my mother was already dying by then, riddled with some chronic disease only citizens could afford to cure. Only citizens get access to advanced care, and we were a long way from that. I was in my early teens, both proud of and embarrassed by my parents. My brother stayed home to care for my mother; he was a little slower than me and hadn’t tested into basic education. Only citizens could get help at home; as residents, we had to figure shit out on our own.