by Amy Tintera
The Nineties were rowdier than usual today. I shoved the last piece of bacon in my mouth as the hollering rose to an annoying level. I dropped my tray on top of the trash can and headed for the exit.
A flash of color streaked across the white floor, coming to a stop at my feet with a squeak. It was a newbie, shot down the slick tile like a toy. I just missed stepping on his head and planted my boot on the floor.
Blood trickled from his nose and a bruise had formed under one eye. His long, lanky legs were sprawled across the floor, his thin white T-shirt clinging to the frame of an underfed former human.
His close-cropped black hair matched his eyes, so dark I couldn’t find his pupils. They probably used to be brown. Brown eyes usually took on a golden sort of glow after death, but I liked his blackness. It was in stark contrast to the white of the cafeteria, to the glow of the other Reboots’ eyes.
No one came near him now that he was in my space, but someone yelled, “Twenty-two!” and laughed.
Twenty-two? That couldn’t be his number. I hadn’t seen anyone under forty in a few years. Well, there was a Thirty-seven last year, but she died within a month.
I nudged at his arm with my boot so I could see his bar code. Callum Reyes. Twenty-two.
I raised my eyebrows. He was only dead twenty-two minutes before he Rebooted. He was practically still human. My eyes shifted back to his face to see a smile spreading across his lips. Why was he smiling? This didn’t seem like an appropriate time to be smiling.
“Hi,” he said, propping himself up on his elbows. “Apparently they call me Twenty-two.”
“It’s your number,” I replied.
He smiled bigger. I wanted to tell him to stop it.
“I know. And yours?”
I pulled up my sleeve and turned my arm to reveal the 178. His eyes widened and I felt a surge of satisfaction when his grin faltered.
“You’re One-seventy-eight?” he asked, hopping to his feet.
Even humans had heard of me.
“Yes,” I said.
“Really?” His eyes flicked over me quickly. His smile had returned.
I frowned at his doubt, and he laughed.
“Sorry. I thought you’d be . . . I don’t know. Bigger?”
“I can’t control my height,” I said, trying to pull myself up an extra inch or two. Not that it would help. He towered over me and I had to lift my chin to look him in the eye.
He laughed, although I had no idea at what. Was my height funny? His laugh was big, genuine, echoing across the now-silent cafeteria. It didn’t belong here, that laugh. He didn’t belong here, with those full lips curving up with actual happiness.
I sidestepped him to walk away, but he grabbed my wrist. A few Reboots gasped. No one touched me. They didn’t even come near me, except for Ever.
“I didn’t catch your name,” he said, turning my arm so he could see, oblivious to the fact that this was a weird thing to do. “Wren,” he read, releasing me. “I’m Callum. Nice to meet you.”
I frowned at him over my shoulder as I headed for the door. I didn’t know what it was to meet him, but nice was not the word I would have picked.
Newbie day was my favorite. As I headed into the gym later that morning with the other trainers, excitement rippled through my chest. I almost smiled.
Almost.
The newbies were sitting on the shiny wood floor in the center of the large room, next to several black mats. They turned away from the instructor to look at us, their faces tight with fear. It looked like no one had puked yet.
“Don’t look at them,” Manny One-nineteen barked. He was in charge of wrangling the newbies their first few days here. He’d been doing it for longer than I’d been here, and I figured it was because he was bitter about missing the opportunity to be a trainer by one minute.
All the newbies focused their attention on Manny except Twenty-two, who gave me that weird smile before turning around.
HARC medical personnel were lined up against the wall behind Manny, holding their clipboards and some tech equipment I couldn’t begin to understand. There were four of them today, three men and a woman, all dressed in their usual white lab coats. The doctors and scientists always came out to observe the newbies. Later, they would take them down to one of the medical floors to be poked and prodded.
“Welcome to Rosa,” Manny said, arms crossed over his chest, eyebrows low like he was trying to be scary. Didn’t fool me. Not now, and not when I was a twelve-year-old newbie.
“Your trainers will pick you tomorrow. Today they will observe you,” Manny continued. His voice echoed across the gym. It was a giant empty room with dingy white walls that had been stained with blood many times.
Manny began listing off their numbers and pointing for our benefit. The highest was One-twenty-one, a well-built older teenager who probably looked intimidating even as a human.
HARC coveted the higher numbers. Me, above all. My body had had more time than most to adapt to the change, so I regenerated and healed faster than anyone at the facility. Rebooting only occurred after every bodily function shut down. The brain, the heart, the lungs—everything had to go before the process could start. I’d heard the number of minutes dead referred to as a “rest,” a time for the body to regroup and refresh and prepare for what was next. The longer the rest, the better the Reboot.
Today was no different. Manny paired off newbies and ordered them to go at it, giving them a chance to impress us. One-twenty-one picked up the fighting quickly, his partner a bloody mess within minutes.
Callum Twenty-two spent more time on the floor than standing in front of his shorter, younger partner. He was clumsy and his long limbs went everywhere except where he wanted. He moved like a human—as though he’d never Rebooted at all. The lower numbers didn’t heal as fast and they had too much leftover human emotion.
When humans first began rising from the dead they called it a “miracle.” Reboots were a cure for the virus that had wiped out most of the population. They were stronger and faster and almost invincible.
Then, as it became apparent a Reboot wasn’t the human they’d known, but a sort of cold, altered copy, they called us monsters. The humans shut out the Reboots, banished them from their homes, and eventually decided the only course of action was to execute every one of them.
The Reboots retaliated, but they were outnumbered and lost the war. Now we are slaves. The Reboot project began almost twenty years ago, a few years after the end of the war, when HARC realized putting us to work was far more useful than simply executing every human who rose. We didn’t get sick; we could survive with less food and water than a human; we had a higher threshold for pain. We might have been monsters, but we were still stronger and faster and far more useful than any human army. Well, most of us anyway. The lower numbers were more likely to die in the field, making training them a waste of my time. I always picked the highest number.
“I give Twenty-two six months,” Ross One-forty-nine said from beside me. He rarely said much, but I got the feeling he enjoyed training as much as I did. It was exciting, the possibility of shaping a scared, useless Reboot into something much better.
“Three,” Hugo countered.
“Wonderful,” Lissy muttered under her breath. At One-twenty-four, she was the lowest of the trainers, and therefore got last pick of newbies. Twenty-two would be her problem.
“Maybe if you trained them better all your newbies wouldn’t get their heads chopped off,” Hugo said. Hugo had been my trainee two years ago, and he was just ending his first year as a trainer. He already had an excellent track record of keeping his newbies alive.
“Only one got his head chopped off,” Lissy said, pressing her hands against the messy curls that sprang from her head.
“The others were shot,” I said. “And Forty-five got a knife through the head.”
“Forty-five was hopeless,” Lissy spat. She glared at the floor, most likely lacking the courage to turn that glare on me.
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br /> “One-seventy-eight!” Manny called, motioning me over.
I walked across the gym floor into the center of the circle the newbies had made on the ground. Most avoided eye contact.
“Volunteer?” Manny asked them.
Twenty-two’s hand shot up. The only one. I doubt he would have volunteered if he had known what was coming.
“Up,” Manny said.
Twenty-two bounced to his feet, a smile of ignorance plastered on his face.
“Your broken bones will take five to ten minutes to heal, depending on your personal recovery time,” Manny said. He nodded at me.
I grabbed Twenty-two’s arm, twisted it behind his back, and cracked it with one quick thrust. He let out a yell and jerked the arm away, cradling it against his chest. The newbies’ eyes were wide, watching me with a mixture of horror and fascination.
“Try and punch her,” Manny said.
Twenty-two looked up at him, the pain etched all over his face. “What?”
“Punch her,” Manny repeated.
Twenty-two took a hesitant step toward me. He swung at me weakly, and I leaned back to miss it. He doubled over in pain, a tiny whimper escaping from his throat.
“You’re not invincible,” Manny said. “I don’t care what you heard as a human. You feel pain; you can get hurt. And in the field five to ten minutes is too long to be incapacitated.” He gestured at the other trainers, and the newbies’ faces fell as they realized what was coming.
The cracks reverberated through the gym as the trainers broke each of their arms.
I never liked this exercise much. Too much screaming.
The point was to learn to push aside the pain and fight through it. Each broken bone hurt just as much as the last; the difference was how a Reboot learned to work through it. A human would lie on the ground sobbing. A Reboot didn’t acknowledge pain.
I looked down at Twenty-two, who had slumped to the ground, his face scrunched up in agony. He looked up at me and I thought he might yell. They usually yelled at me after I broke their arms.
“You’re not going to break anything else, are you?” he asked.
“No. Not right now.”
“Oh, so later, then? Great. I’ll look forward to that.” He winced as he looked down at his arm.
Manny pointed for the trainers to go back to the wall and gestured for the newbies to come to him.
“You should get up,” I said to Twenty-two.
Oblivious to Manny’s glare, Twenty-two slowly got to his feet, raising an eyebrow at me.
“Are we doing my leg next?” he asked. “Can I get some warning next time? A quick ‘Hey, I’m going to snap your bone with my bare hands right now. Brace yourself.’”
One of the trainers behind me snorted, and Manny snapped his fingers impatiently. “Get over here, Twenty-two, and sit. Quietly.”
I joined the trainers, taking a quick glance at Twenty-two as he plopped down in the circle. He was still watching me, his eyes sparkling, and I quickly looked away. What a strange newbie.
THREE
I SNUCK ANOTHER GLANCE AT THE END OF THE LINE AS I PICKED up my tray for lunch. Twenty-two was there, scanning the cafeteria. His eyes rested on me and I quickly turned away as he began to wave.
I focused my attention on the human behind the counter as she plunked the steak on my tray. There were three of them lined up behind the glass counter, two women and a man. Reboots used to do the service jobs at HARC as well, until the humans began to get restless about the lack of employment and HARC created a few more jobs to keep them happy. Still, they often looked less than enthused about serving Reboots.
I let them fill my tray, and then I headed across the cafeteria to take my usual seat next to Hugo. I stuck my fork into the perfectly cooked steak and popped a bite in my mouth. HARC gave a line to parents of Reboots about how we were so much better off in their care (not that the parents had a choice). We would be useful, they said. We could have something resembling a life. I didn’t know if we were better off, but we were certainly better fed. A Reboot could survive on less food, but we performed at our best when we were fed regularly, and well. We became weak and useless, like a human, if we were denied food.
“Can I sit here?”
I looked up to see Twenty-two standing in front of me, tray in hand. His white shirt was bloodied, probably from one of the Nineties taking a second opportunity to break him in. It would often go on for a couple days, until the guards got tired of the commotion.
“The Under-sixties are over there,” I said, pointing to Ever’s table. They were talking and laughing, one boy gesturing wildly with his arms.
He looked back at them. “Is that a rule?”
I paused. Was it? No, we started that one ourselves. “No,” I replied.
“Then can I sit here?”
I couldn’t think of a reason why not, although it still struck me as a bad idea.
“Okay,” I said hesitantly.
He plopped down in the seat across from me. Several of the One-twenties turned to me, a combination of confusion and annoyance on their faces. Marie One-thirty-five squinted, her head swinging from me to Twenty-two. I ignored it.
“Why do you do that if it’s not a rule?” he asked, gesturing around the cafeteria.
“The closer numbers have more in common,” I said, taking a bite of steak.
“That’s stupid.”
I frowned. It wasn’t stupid. It was the truth.
“I don’t see how the minutes you were dead affect your personality,” he said.
“That’s because you’re a Twenty-two.”
He raised an eyebrow before returning his attention to his meat. He poked it like he was afraid it might jump up and return the favor if he bit into it. He wrinkled his nose and watched as I popped a chunk in my mouth.
“Is it good?” he asked. “It looks funny.”
“Yeah, it’s good.”
He looked down at it doubtfully. “What is it?”
“Steak.”
“Cow, then?”
“Yes. Never had meat, huh?” All types of meat were hard to come by in the slums, unless a human took a job with HARC. They controlled the farms, and hunting was often a fruitless effort. Overhunting had stripped the land of most wild animals years ago. A rabbit or squirrel would pop up on occasion, but I didn’t see them often. Reboots ate better than most humans, which only made them hate us more.
“No,” Twenty-two replied. His expression suggested he had no interest in changing that.
“Try it; you’ll like it.”
He raised a bite to his lips and shoved it in quickly. He chewed slowly and swallowed with a grimace. He looked down at the hunk of steak left on his plate.
“I don’t know. It’s weird.”
“Just eat it and quit bitching about it,” Lissy snapped from a few seats down. She had little patience for her newbies. Twenty-two would be no exception.
He glanced over at her briefly, then back to me. Lissy frowned at his total disregard for her.
“She’s kinda grouchy, huh?” he said quietly to me.
Always. I almost smiled when I looked over to see Lissy stabbing her meat like it was trying to get away. Hugo raised his knife over his steak with a grimace, imitating her. Ross One-forty-nine blinked twice at him, which I was pretty sure was his version of a smile.
“Everyone’s saying she’ll be my trainer,” Twenty-two said.
Lissy’s head popped up and she pointed her knife at him as she spoke. “Everyone is right. So shut it and eat that.”
Twenty-two’s defiant face was different from any other I’d seen. His smile didn’t disappear; it merely changed to a mocking, challenging grin. He dropped his fork and leaned back in his chair. He didn’t have to say make me. It was clear.
Lissy shoveled her remaining food in her mouth and jumped to her feet, muttering to herself. She shot a look at Twenty-two as she stomped past.
“I hope you get yourself killed quickly so I don’t have
to put up with you for long,” she growled.
“I think that’s the strategy she takes with all her newbies,” Hugo said with a chuckle, watching as she pushed Fifty-one out of her way and flew through the exit doors.
“She’s supposed to make them good Reboots,” I said, the memory of pulling the knife out of Forty-five’s head flashing through my mind.
“Then maybe you should do it,” Twenty-two said, perking up. “You get to pick, don’t you?”
“Yes. And I don’t train such low numbers.”
“Why not?”
“Because they’re no good.”
Marie One-thirty-five let out a short laugh, and Twenty-two cast an amused glance from her back to me.
“Maybe because they don’t have you. Also, I’m insulted.” His smile suggested he was not.
I poked at my plate with a fork. He could have a point. The lowest of the newbie groups never stood a chance. Was it because of their number? Or because of Lissy, who trained by screaming at them? I looked up at him, at a loss for what to say. I’d never thought about it.
His smile faded, clearly taking my silence as a rejection. It was not how I meant it, but I kept my mouth shut as he began eating.
I wandered down to the sixth floor after lunch. I was often bored in the days between training cycles, unsure what to do with myself. I couldn’t imagine being a lower-number Reboot, one of the many not cut out to be a trainer. They had little to fill their days, especially since HARC considered most forms of entertainment unnecessary for a Reboot.
I peeked into the indoor track room and saw several Reboots running, some racing or chasing after one another. I moved on to the next room, the shooting range, which was full, as usual. It was a favorite pastime. Reboots at every booth pointed their guns at the paper men lined up against the wall. Most hit the intended target—the head—every time. HARC didn’t trust us with real bullets, so the ones we used inside the shooting range were made of plastic.