Rebellion

by K A Riley

  Wisp runs through more of the details and issues a dozen orders over her comm-link to the Insubordinates. At least two more hours pass like that until I feel my eyes glazing over. I have no idea what time it is, but between flying around with Render all day and absorbing all of Wisp’s and Rain’s planning details, my reserves are depleted, and I feel ready to collapse on the spot. Finally, Wisp seems to notice and says we’re calling it a night.

  Exhausted, Rain and I are just getting ready to file out when Manthy asks Wisp if she can stay with Olivia. For a second, I don’t know where the voice is coming from. Manthy has an uncanny ability to blend into the background, and I’m still not totally used to her disappearing-reappearing act.

  Wisp shrugs and says, “Fine with me” and then looks over at Olivia who is beaming that pretty smile of hers from her wired-up and pieced-together face. “I’d love some company,” Olivia says.

  Rain and I say our goodbyes and trudge upstairs on shaky legs. Inside our room, we meet up with Brohn and Cardyn who look as wiped out as we are, and the four of us collapse into our beds.

  Cardyn stares for a second at Manthy’s empty bed. “Do you think Manthy will be okay downstairs?” he asks through a gaping yawn.

  Brohn gives him a crooked squint. “What do you mean? Why wouldn’t she be?”

  Cardyn shrugs, and it occurs to me that he’s not worried about Manthy. After all we’ve been through, he knows better than that. I think he might be worried about himself. Not in a selfish way. More like in an I-miss-Manthy way that he doesn’t want to admit. It’s actually pretty cute. I used to wonder if Cardyn and I would stay like brother and sister forever or if something romantic would develop between us like everyone else seemed to expect. It never occurred to me to consider a third option: Cardyn and Manthy. I laugh to myself at how crazy that sounds and then again at how perfect it sounds.

  Cardyn soon falls into a deep, gruffling sleep.

  I’m fading in and out as Rain and Brohn compare notes about how things are going so far.

  Rain sounds optimistic and says something about having a good feeling, especially with Wisp leading the way. “And I think it’s good for Manthy to get to know Olivia. Kindred spirits and all. This could be a new home for us. San Francisco, I mean. A good place for us to finally settle down, you know?”

  Brohn grunts a little and sounds suddenly serious. “Let’s see if we’re all still feeling that way in five days. Let’s see if we’re still feeling anything. Right now, this is all just fun and games. Now is when everything looks like it has no choice but to go right. On Friday, it gets real. And let’s face it, Rain. These kids…they may be juiced up for the idea of war, but they aren’t anywhere ready for the reality.”

  In the silence that follows, I think about how long five days used to seem and how short it seems now. Wishing that Rain is right but fearing that Brohn is, I fall into a restless sleep filled with more visions—one of them of Brohn being shot and killed—I pray never even come close to coming true.

  7

  Monday

  The next morning, Monday, we rise, shower, and dress before heading to the Mess Hall. This time, everyone is up and about, and the whole floor has the feel of a college dorm with an assortment of tired boys and girls plodding around in the hallway, passing in and out of rooms, and rubbing the sleep from their weary eyes.

  Brohn and Cardyn must have really worked them hard yesterday. All the hustle and bustle I saw on my visit upstairs has given way to a kind of sloth-y fatigue. Two girls are doing slow stretches against the wall. Another girl, probably not more than twelve or thirteen years old, is sitting, eyes closed and cross-legged, on the floor. Three older boys, one of them with red splotches and dry skin on his face, are passing a green comb between them and running it, one boy at a time, through their oily black hair. Just down the hall from them, a cluster of boys and girls, also older—maybe in their late teens or even early twenties—are complaining about their aching muscles. A lanky boy with loopy curls of reddish-brown hair is slowly wrapping a strip of cloth around what looks like a series of cuts on his knuckles.

  Brohn gestures toward the boy with a tip of his head. “That’s Ethan. Good skills but gets frustrated easily.”

  “Did he do that in your combat training yesterday?” I ask, pointing to the boy’s red knuckles.

  Brohn shakes his head. “Got mad when he lost a sparring match with his buddy over there and punched a hole in the wall.”

  “Great,” I say. “A hot-head.”

  “He’ll be okay. He learns fast, and there’s a lot on the line. A few more days’ll be enough to get him ready.”

  I know Brohn is trying to convince himself as much as he’s trying to convince me. I give a quick glance behind us to where Cardyn, Rain, and Manthy are walking along, taking in this bustle of early morning stirrings. “I’m not sure a few days are enough to even get us ready,” I tell Brohn. “And we already have a ton of experience and a full arsenal of survival skills.”

  Ethan looks up at us as we pass but then slips back into his room with two other boys and three girls like a school of fish fleeing from a great white shark swimming by. Other than that quick visit upstairs to check in on Brohn and Cardyn, this is my first time seeing so many of these rebel Insubordinates together in one place. Dressed mostly in military surplus army-green cargo pants and an assortment of pastel-colored compression t-shirts and tank-tops, they seem to be content milling around, chatting and comparing notes about their first two days of training. Their cackling overlap of conversations and their shuffling movements give the wide hallway the feel of an impromptu cocktail party. Like Ethan and his skittish friends, they all get quiet as we pass.

  They may be shy, but it’s nice to know people, especially people our age, care enough and are willing to risk so much to oppose Krug and his Patriot Army. Unfortunately, it also highlights how much trouble we’re in. As I’m looking around more carefully, it occurs to me that these are still just kids, and I wonder if the entire rebellion is in the hands of a bunch of immature and ill-prepared children who are about to get spanked.

  “Are there more to the Insubordinates than this?” I ask Wisp.

  “There are older members,” she explains, talking over the murmur from the parting crowd around us. “A few families are here with us in the Style. Most of the Insubordinates live in their own places, their own apartments in their own neighborhoods. They have to be careful. It’s not the kind of situation where you want to be out on the street with an “I Hate the Patriot Army” picket sign. Not if you want to wake up alive the next morning. Being against the Patriots means being against Krug, and being against Krug, for Krug anyway, is the ultimate sacrilege. The Insubordinates you see here are mostly the castoffs and runaways, the ones with nothing to lose and nowhere else to go. We take care of them as best we can.”

  The “castoffs” continue to step to either side of the hallway as we pass. One of them, a sad-eyed girl with a transparent synth-cast on her right arm, offers a daring, “Hello” to me. I say, “Good morning” back, and she smiles and averts her eyes. I honestly can’t tell if we’re royalty, celebrities, aliens, ticking time-bombs, or a line-up of circus side-show freaks.

  “What’s up with them?” I ask.

  Wisp waves good morning to a cluster of shaggy-haired pimply-skinned boys who stare awkwardly as we walk by. “They’re not sure if you’re real.”

  “Me or all of us?”

  “Mostly you.”

  “What is she?” Cardyn asks, leaning over Wisp’s shoulder. “A ghost?”

  “Kind of.”

  “Kind of?” I ask through an incredulous squint.

  A shirtless boy with a towel slung over one shoulder steps up and hands Wisp an info-pad. She scans it, nods, and presses her thumb to the identification plate. The boy says, “Thanks” and scuttles off into a nearby dorm room.

  Wisp tosses an amused look in his direction. “Imagine if you heard that the one thing that could restore freedom
and order to the world was a teenage girl who talks to birds. Then imagine seeing her walking past your bedroom. That’s kind of what this is.”

  “Bird,” I correct her. “It’s just Render. I can’t talk to all birds.”

  “The day’s young,” Wisp says through a cryptic smile.

  “And I’m certainly nobody’s savior,” I grunt.

  “The day is very young,” Wisp says.

  Before I can respond, a tall girl with nervous, darting eyes says, “Good morning, Major” to Wisp and asks her if a delivery is still on for later today. Wisp tells her “Yes” and instructs her and her team to be at the back door at sixteen-hundred sharp. The girl salutes and trots off to join a bunch of other kids who are milling around in an open dorm room doorway.

  “What was that all about?” Card asks. “Weapons delivery?”

  Wisp shakes her head. “Toiletries. You wouldn’t believe how stinky some of these kids can get.”

  Several of the Insubordinates creep forward toward Brohn and Cardyn and tell them how much they’re enjoying the training so far.

  “We’re really learning a lot, Sir,” a slender boy with the faintest blond hint of a moustache tells Brohn as he pads along, puppy-like, beside him. “This is already the best week of my life.”

  “Jerald, right?” Brohn asks.

  The boy beams broadly. “Yes, Sir!”

  Brohn stops walking. “There is no ‘best’ about any of this, Jerald. I’m glad you’re having a good week so far. I really am. But if we don’t do this right, it’ll be our last.”

  The boy called Jerald hangs his head and takes a step back as Brohn and the rest of us pass by.

  “Sir?” Rain chuckles out of the side of her mouth.

  “I didn’t tell them to call us that,” Brohn protests.

  Rain answers Brohn with a drawn-out, “Riiiight” and gives him a playful punch to the shoulder.

  Brohn blushes. “We have a big job to do here. Nothing wrong with getting a little respect along the way.”

  “No, Sir,” Rain giggles. “No, Sir. There’s certainly not. Sir.”

  With Brohn trying unsuccessfully to hold back a smile, we walk uninterrupted the rest of the way down the corridor. Stepping into the Mess Hall, Wisp enters a series of codes into the input panel on the wall, and nearly instantly, plates of steaming vegetables and tofu appear through openings all along the table tops.

  “I don’t suppose there’s any deer?” Cardyn asks. “Not that Chef Angelique’s many spinach, bean, and tofu recipes haven’t been delightful.”

  Wisp grimaces at Cardyn.

  “I know we had to eat meat for survival back in the Valta. But here, we adhere to a strict vegetarian diet. As humans, we’ve done enough damage to the planet and to our fellow sentient Earth-dwellers.”

  “Is this one of those ‘thou shalt not kill’ things?” Cardyn whines.

  “If you’re referring to the biblical rule,” I remind him, “the more accurate translation is ‘thou shalt not murder.’ Exodus. Chapter 20. Verse 13 of the King James Bible. Killing is justified for any number of reasons. War, self-defense. Stuff like that.”

  “And we need to kill to live,” Wisp says as she slides into her seat. “Just try breathing without slaughtering bacteria. But we don’t need to engage in deliberate slaughter, especially at the expense of animals and the land.”

  The rest of us slide into our seats as we begin to eat and, as Wisp explains more about how her dietary philosophy intertwines with her work with the Insubordinates and against Krug and his Patriot Army, the rest of the Insubordinates file slowly into the Mess Hall.

  They fill the room, and we all eat military style with the Insubordinates gathered along the rows of long rectangular tables. A quick head-count tells me there are forty-eight Insubordinates in all. That’s an assortment of forty-eight freedom fighters, who, according to Brohn, range from those with some military training to those who have never been in so much as a thumb-wrestling contest.

  Down on the far end of the room, there’s actually a family of four: a hetero couple with two teenage boys about our age. Another family sitting across from them has a grandmother, a mother, and her four children. That’s three generations of rebels under one roof. Still, as Wisp pointed out, the vast majority are kids about our age, some a few years older, some a few years younger, all of them wide-eyed, inexperienced, and very bad at hiding how nervous they are about what’s to come. They remind me of a slightly cleaner and better dressed version of the kids we stayed with at Adric and Celia’s camp before making our way here. Absently, I tap my jacket to feel the thin bundle of papers I keep folded up in the inside pocket. A girl named Chace drew a bunch of pictures of us when we stayed with them for a few days in their mountain camp. She had a real gift as an artist, as a tracker, and also as a kind and very caring human being. I keep her drawings with me at all times as a reminder that we’re not in this alone, and we’re not in it for ourselves. We mean something to the people who need us.

  In the Mess Hall, the restrained and groggy chattering from the hallway a few minutes ago has descended into a strange graveyard silence. The Insubordinates are sitting shoulder to shoulder, crammed into the bench seats with a buffer of empty spaces between us and them. Rain looks up from her breakfast and notices dozens of eyes on us.

  “Why do they keep looking at us?” she asks Wisp. “Kress here may be some kind of ghost to them, but they’re acting like we’re all going to leap at them and chew their faces off.”

  Wisp offers a scoffing chuckle at this just as one of the kids, an older-looking girl who introduces herself as Triella, tells us from down at the far end of the table that she heard about our time in the Processor. “You’ve got to tell us about it,” she insists. “Please?”

  I have to admit, I’m slightly annoyed at her enthusiasm at what was, for us, several months of radically intense physical and emotional trauma. But then I remember what Wisp said, and I realize we’re not really real to them yet. Just a collection of walking myths.

  Brohn and I exchange a look, and I tell him to go ahead. Triella and her friends scooch forward and lean in, their mouths hanging open as Brohn begins to tell them about the Recruitment.

  “I know you’ve been curious about it,” he begins. “And about us. I give you credit for going two whole days without asking about it. Okay. Every November first, the government gathered up the new Seventeens and took them away, leaving the rest of us to fend for ourselves for another year. In the Valta, it was just us kids. The last of the adults died trying to protect us in one of the drone strikes. We taught ourselves and each other how to read, write, learn, live, and survive, and we tried to forget about the next first of November when the Recruiters would come to take away the new Cohort of Seventeens.”

  With a frantic wave of her hand, Triella calls a bunch of other kids over, and before we know it, Manthy has quietly slipped away, leaving the rest of us to regale the throng with stories of training and torture and life on the run. Overlapping with each other and interjecting to add details or to correct errors in memories about events or chronologies, Brohn, Cardyn, Rain, and I fill the Insubordinates in on the reality of our mythology. We tell them some more details about growing up in the Valta with no adults around and having to fend for ourselves after the waves of bombings when we were still just little kids. We tell them about being recruited and being taken away to the Processor with the big silver Halo rotating above it. We go into detail about the physical and psychological tests, the Escape Rooms, the outdoor training in the huge Agora with its multiple configurations, the eight Cubes where we risked our lives, and the final getaway where two of our friends—Terk and Karmine—lost theirs. Cardyn finds a way to amuse the eager listeners with stories of what it was like being on the run and near death for all those weeks after our escape. Rain takes over when we get to the part about meeting Adric and Celia in the mountains. I tell them about meeting Vail and Roland and acquiring the truck that got us here, and then Broh
n finishes off with only slightly exaggerated stories about our time in Salt Lake City and our adventures in Reno.

  The Insubordinates, their mouths open and their eyes wide, hang on our every word.

  “And the Eastern Order?” Triella asks, although I’m sure she and everyone else in this room already know the answer.

  “That’s the real myth,” Brohn explains. “And like all myths, it can be more powerful than any reality. Myths feed on ignorance, laziness, and fear.”

  “Well, there’s none of those here!” a small boy sitting next to Triella proclaims with a fist to his heart.

  “Good,” Brohn says rather sternly while suppressing an amused grin. “Because any one of them can get us all killed.”

  Finally, Wisp jumps in to remind us why we’re here, how much work we have left to do, and how little time we have to do it in. “We’re falling behind,” she warns. “Every minute not gathering intel or training for combat is another minute that the Patriot Army has an advantage.”

  Granden is the first to push himself up from his seat at the bench table. He tells us that Wisp is right and that we’d better get moving. Although he’s sincere about agreeing with Wisp and seems genuinely eager to get upstairs and back to work, I get the sense that he’s also been a little squeamish about sitting here listening to us talking about our past and especially about the Processor. He was part trainer, part prison guard. He had a job to do, and he did it well. But it can’t be a time of fond memories for him. He was living two lives: one as the son of President Krug, who had assigned him the task of turning us into his personal slaves, and one as the human being determined to save us from that fate.

  Still twittering back and forth about our stories, the Insubordinates follow Brohn, Cardyn, and Granden down the hall and through the metal door where they begin to file upstairs for their next day of combat training while I get ready to head downstairs with Manthy and Rain to join Wisp and Olivia once again in the Intel Room.