by Allen Ivers
Aaron was having none of it. He heaved the boy onto his shoulders and began the march. Cursing, Carmona wove his was back into the crowd in search of a partner, not to be left behind.
Was Aaron suicidal? Or had he some delusion that this would work?
Aaron made his leg of the journey without much trouble, trying to balance the time leftover for his diminutive partner and giving the boy plenty of time to catch his breath.
But at the far end, when they were to trade their duties, something happened. The boy refused.
As duo after duo passed them up and the clock wound down, the tearful little man tried to walk off the field toward the waiting transports. But Aaron wouldn’t let him leave, physically keeping him on the field with hands pressed to chest. If his partner quit, Aaron would also be disqualified. He could not let that happen.
He would selfishly endanger the boy to save himself.
The guards noticed this as well, readying their weapons for any surprise. Riley sat forward in his seat, peering at the display. The image vibrated with the hundreds of footfalls on the field, but he could make out the general attitude of the exchange. The boy had no heart for this; Aaron had heart enough for them both.
The image stilled just enough for Riley to make out one phrase:
“Do you ever want to go home again?”
After a weighty pause, the boy dropped to one knee, as though to pledge service to a long-dead King. Aaron laid himself across the boy’s shoulders. Groaning under the load, the boy stood back up and joined the dregs of the Capitals trudging their way back across the field.
Some collapsed halfway, feuding and crying. They blamed each other and their weaknesses. They turned their hot fires inward.
Through it all, through muck and torn earth, Aaron and his little squire hobbled forward. They were among the slowest, passed up by those racing time and fear. But they never stopped, their bickering at an end.
Carmona and his partner overtook them, shouting words of encouragement as they slipped by. Everyone they passed near called out to them, and feuding pairs were soon back on their feet.
The little underdogs might as well have been carrying a battle flag, bearing inspiration itself forward to the top of a distant hill, and leading forward the charge behind them.
Bray looked at his stopwatch, as though to confirm the giant digital clock ticking down on the glass wall was accurate. This was going to be heartbreaking.
If they took too long, they would be turned to those transports regardless. And all that faith and belief and fire would turn to ash. Bend the rules for them, and those that already fell would demand satisfaction. Shut them out, and those inspired by the exhibition would turn sour.
Either way, the crowd might boil.
“Weapons free, Gunny,” Riley murmured, seeing the nightmare as it stumbled forward.
That’s when the little boy fell to one knee. Aaron screamed in his ear. They were too close, had gone too far. Just a few dozen more steps. He had done more than this before. Pain is discomfort, discomfort can be ignored. Stand up. Do it now.
The little squire screamed, knees shaking to and fro so hard they might click against each other. But up he went.
The crowd cheered. And as though he might draw strength from their enthusiasm, the boy’s walk broke into a jog.
They crossed the line with 2.8 seconds to spare. They slid across it more than anything else, with the poor boy flopping onto his face in the blood and grime. The exultation was intoxicating, and even the observing commanders and citizenry found themselves applauding the Cinderella story.
Riley let out a sigh of relief. No uprising today.
A total of 758 Capitals qualified through the program. The remaining hundreds were escorted at gunpoint to the waiting transports. There were no goodbyes. There was resentment and vitriol, even a few scuffles to break up.
They all felt entitled to a uniform and a duty roster, to the freedom they had long ago sold at the altar of immorality. Just under half of the assembly had earned the right to earn it back.
Riley would be surprised if as many as ten survived to claim it.
4
Aaron
Quinn hadn’t spoken to Aaron since the Stadium. He was likely embarrassed. The kid never did like being so much as adjacent to the spotlight, let alone in the center of it.
He had suffered an ACL sprain from his final push and, while not quite bedridden, had been instructed by Eden to minimize his activity. Jensen and Carmona were kind enough to haul the few possessions Quinn owned to their new lodgings.
Everyone had been very supportive.
Precisely what Quinn didn’t want: his name being mentioned with uncommon frequency.
Aaron pushed open the double doors like a cartoon sheriff entering his favorite saloon. The doors didn’t swing with that classic fluidity; instead, they clacked hard against the back wall and hung there, like they’d lost their childish spring from ages of use.
The hundred or so Capitals inside were far too busy ensconcing themselves in their lush accommodations to notice his entrance. And Aaron, himself, found his jaw loose at the majestic barracks he now called home.
One of three longhouses on the premises, their facility more resembled an empty warehouse. In a past life, it had been; when materials and munitions had been cleaned out for the transports, furniture had been hauled in.
Cots had been bolted to the ground and walls with rusting three-inch iron spikes, as though the paranoid hasty designers were afraid the furniture might run off of its own accord.
Now there was a thought -- that one of the Capitals might hoard the allotment of bedding, sitting atop a throne made of threadbare linens and treated rebar, issuing edicts to his followers and granting favors in exchange for but a few hours with a creaking foam mattress.
The authorities really didn’t trust them at all, with the intentionally obvious security cameras tacked into the ceiling, ominous bulbs every dozen feet or so.
Tucked in the corners and along the dimly lit walls, Aaron could make out small colonies of rats trying their best to make no noise, but having left nowhere to hide between half-inch steel walls and a cold cement floor.
What once had been a haven full of crates and supplies was now a wild safari, with scant cover and too many dangers. The few entrances and exits available to them — cracks in the aging floor or creaking steel panels — were staked out by the more enterprising Capitals, doing everything possible to look nonchalant before pouncing on any measly critter that strayed too close.
Where humanity went, these little hitchhikers always seemed to follow. And the little critters rarely considered that they may be more prey than opportunistic parasite. Aaron made a note that the disease-ridden fleabags would have to be purged to prevent outbreaks. Fresh meat wasn’t worth the bubonic consolation prize.
The Capitals congregated in their usual clans, with border disputes between neighbors and hierarchical spats over the top bunk. There was little more than shoving and yelling. No one wanted to jeopardize their meal ticket, but they wouldn’t compromise their status either, hard-won in the Pits.
Even the eighth-floor cultists were holding a special prayer meeting on the Westside, using the hard-won good fortune from the Stadium Trials to recruit more believers. ‘They had won nothing that had not been given by God,’ the speaker intoned over and over again with different terminology each time. Traveler, Dunsweir — what’s in a name, after all? Whatever Power In The Sky, they owed it fealty.
And of course, by extension, to the speaker. They owed their speaker devotion should they wish more windfalls. That curveball was forthcoming, near the end of the service. But the hopeful and the hungry would swallow any pill if it meant more promises of less suffering.
It was far more difficult to convince them that they were being fooled than it was to fool them in the first place.
Aaron set about looking for young Quinn. He was likely somewhere near the rest of the Fifth Floor crowd.
He
could spy Jensen and Carmona in a friendly contest of strength. The two had pulled aside a trunk to use for their arm wrestling challenge — the prize obviously was who got to sleep top bunk.
Their hands clasped and arms swollen as they fought each other. Their shoulders rolled and gazes locked in a sweaty display more suitable for the hedonists from the sub-basements.
It was a brand of masculine preening that Aaron never quite wrapped his head around, a strange cocktail of dominance and dignity stirred up with a dash of sexual insecurity.
Eden and Nora stood nearby, shouting encouragement to their competitor of choice; often both.
“Are you going to let that little piker show you up, Jensen?!”
“Stop helping him!” Carmona barked back through clenched teeth.
Jensen grinned to hide his grimace, “Gettin’ a bit tired, are ya?”
“It’s all about the leverage,” Carmona smiled, resetting his grip and slamming Jensen’s hand to the table.
Nora cheered, more excited by the tension than the result.
Jensen worked out his wrist and immediately reset, “Best of three?”
“Left hand?”
Jensen shrugged, trading his sides and the two were back at it again.
Even Solomon and Keira were watching from their nearby bunks, hungry eyes and icy stillness. The psychotic pair of attack dogs were rarely motivated to do more than was necessary, and found the flailings of their compatriots downright adorable. ‘Efficient’, was the word Keira had used.
Aaron had trouble telling her apart from the machines they used to work with.
Solomon caught Aaron staring, his dark eyes widening with recognition and pale lips curling back to reveal his stained teeth. Was he happy to see Aaron, or willing him into cardiac arrest?
Oh good. That was a ration bar in his hand. For a moment, Aaron could’ve sworn the man was eating one of the rats as casually as a child would candy.
Then again, it really wouldn’t surprise Aaron if Solomon was just using the oatmeal as a palate cleanser. He could swear, half of Solomon’s behavior was meticulously designed to be unsettling, like there was a puppet master somewhere behind a curtain pulling strings on his marionette. Every motion coming just a half second delayed so as to be as jarring as possible.
It didn’t bother Aaron anymore, not after a year of exposure. But that first few months were chilling, catching the creeper refusing to blink for hours at a time.
Aaron sauntered up to the melodramatic monster with all of the formality of a backyard barbecue. “Quinn around?”
Solomon nodded at a bunk on the far side of the dick-measuring contest.
“Give him space, ya?” Keira advised, never taking her hungry eyes off the action. Her consumption of the gladiatorial foreplay could not be disturbed by anything short of an incoming attacker. It was then Aaron noticed he could only see one of her hands.
Aaron nodded and marched away in the indicated direction. Privacy may have long since been jettisoned as a concept, but that didn’t mean courtesy had to go with it. Proximity had exposed him to all kinds of behaviors and none of it fazed him anymore.
At the edge of the clan’s borders, far enough from the shouting gladiators and the jeering audience, sat Quinn. The young man could barely be called that, still with his soft boyish features and frame.
He was short and lean, like a loaf of bread that hadn’t finished cooking. Give him a few more years and a healthy diet, he might grow up to be a person, but as of now, he might not even know how to shave.
He played with his deck of cards, bridging them and ruffling them from hand to hand in an idle dance to occupy his mind while his eyes traced over the opposite wall. He was propped up in his bed, leg immobilized to prevent further injury.
Aaron had to applaud Eden’s ingenuity. There was no plant-life taller than waist height, and what metal was available had been reserved for other uses -- most especially not for Capitals.
In lieu of this, Eden had bundled some grass together and tight woven it into a stiff rope. This makeshift bamboo did not want to bend in any way and when lashed to his knee, effectively locked Quinn’s leg fully extended. There was no way he could further injure himself. It was a creative solution.
Quinn didn’t even look up. Another person trapped in their thousand-mile stare, “Bunk’s taken.”
Aaron looked at the empty space above him, “You sleepin’ in both?”
No response.
Aaron leaned against the bed frame, “You can do this, Quinn.”
“Do what, exactly?” Quinn asked, grey eyes turning to fixate on Aaron like there was an accusation being withheld, “I - I’ve never even thrown a punch before!”
It was Aaron’s turn to have no response. What’s the appropriate response to that? ‘First times’ and ‘rising to occasions’ and ‘meeting challenges head-on’ did not fit the circumstance. Aaron all but crowbarred the young boy across a finish line where he would be trained to fight an alien menace for a whole year. Two hundred some odd days of combat was not this boy’s skill set.
Quinn smelled the indecision, “I shouldn’t be here, Aaron.”
“But you are,” Aaron quipped back, “Your sister doesn’t want you in jail for the rest of your life.”
Quinn clapped his hands, folding the cards together like all sixty were one object. “I won’t be,” Quinn snarled, “None of us will. You know why?”
“Well, not with that attitude,” Aaron crowed, deflecting off of Quinn’s apocalyptic prediction. This was a bomb that needed defusing.
Quinn settled back in his bed. Progress, maybe, but Aaron hadn’t cut the power on this explosion. He’d just reset the timer.
Aaron dropped to the floor, sitting against the wall beside Quinn, “Nobody chose to be here, Quinn. But this morning, we chose to be anywhere else. We’re willing to fight for it, and I don’t know about you… but I’ve got enough fight in me for at least a few others that run dry.”
“I’m used to talking, man… and when I’m not talking, I’m running,” Quinn’s voice quaked, “That’s all I know how to do.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Aaron reasoned, “They’re gonna spend some time teaching us how to do the other thing.”
“What was it like?”
“What was what like?” Aaron whispered, knowing full well what the kid was asking. What was it like to kill? But he wanted the kid to say it. Get comfortable with it. It was going to be his trade for the next year.
Quinn glanced down at Aaron, like he was afraid to meet the gaze, “Well, I’m not gonna ask Solomon!”
Aaron chuckled at the thought. He’d most assuredly get an answer, but one that would haunt his waking moments and lurk in his dreams for at minimum a decade. Aaron, on the other hand, got up every morning and went to bed every night as a human being rather than an anthropomorphized act of bloodshed.
But of the Fifth Floor folk, who else could Quinn ask? Carmona was an innocent man; Nora punched one too many people; who knows what Jensen did.
Eden didn’t much relish talking about her old patients. She had viewed her crime as a kindness. The families agreed. The Ministry didn’t.
Aaron was the only approachable resource Quinn had.
So Aaron settled into that memory and the fleeting joy of his own internal wit abandoned him. He could feel the moisture in the air, heavy and gripping his throat, choking him. The sun blanketed behind a thick cloud bank, and the smog tinging the little available light a baneful orange.
The towering structures that vanished into the fog overhead reduced to a texture of urban architecture, a skybox full of dreams lifted out of reach by soft, moneyed hands. The grime and detritus under his feet slushed together, congealing into the mud of a city -- the sludge that forever marked the cloth of the impoverished. It was the stain worn only by the meek.
His clothes clung to his skin, heavy and layered to shield against the bitter cold and the howling winds. A chain link fence rattled against its bin
dings. The market had been packed shoulder to shoulder as families strained to load down their bindles with necessities.
The gaggle of half a dozen languages called out in a kind of somber chorus of desperation but quiet contentment.
It had been such a good day.
The man had been fast, impossibly fast. Maybe if Aaron had only been watching closer, he’d have seen it all coming. But suddenly there had been a gun.
And Aaron had to make a choice. The drunken man may have been fast, but speed was no substitute for good decisions.
The blood hung light on his fingers, as though he were too full for it to fully soak in, its warmth toxic and foul against his skin. The crowd parted around the deed, disassociating from the action but somehow unable to flee. There was a horror in their eyes, predictions of what would follow.
No one helped him then. No one tried to hide him or shelter him. He found nothing but their remorseful eyes beaming wishes for clemency.
They were not to be blamed. There was no one in that crowd that could help carry the Atlas weight that was about to fall on him.
“Aaron?” Quinn probed, cautious and wary. Had he just stirred up something he shouldn’t have?
Aaron gave him a kind smile, easing the young boy’s wary thoughts, “It’s not very poetic, I’ll give you that much. The closest thing I can tell ya, it’s like… somebody cuts the strings. Turns out the lights. And suddenly they’re just laying there. Nobody’s home.”
“I’m sorry,” Quinn preempted, trying in vain to take responsibility for Aaron’s discomfort.
“Nah,” Aaron dismissed him, “Guy didn’t exactly leave me much choice.”
He could still see the striations along the gun barrel. Somewhere down that channel was a focusing lens and a capacitor and a trigger and a callous disregard for human life. They were all directed at Aaron, and a breath away from execution.
Stand and die. Or fight.
How was Aaron to know his prospective killer’s bloodline, whose father sat in which Ministry? How justice would upend upon an act of self-defense in the face of the ‘right’ victim? How an off-duty cop loaded on vodka can have any violent circumstance excused by superiors? How paperwork gets lost in the databases and memories curiously purged? How every domino settles into place as dictated when the correct sequence of levers precedes it?