"I don't know," I finally said. "I just want to go. I'll be back."
"Of course," Lobo said. He opened a side hatch. "Where else would you go?"
I smiled and stepped outside. From anyone else, the same comment might have infuriated me with its smugness, but that's not how Lobo meant it. I knew him well enough to be sure of that. He understood. We had each other and little else, maybe nothing else. That was okay. It was more than I'd had for many decades of my life.
Even though it was only mid-morning, the air was already thick and warm and clingy. As Lobo sealed himself behind me, I set out for the square. Boys were still coming from barracks behind the pad where Lobo rested. They swerved around me, watchful eyes on me, unconsciously and automatically staying more than an arm's length away. I was an enemy who had attacked in the night, and now they were heading to hear the terms of their occupation. They were acting sensibly; I'd have done the same.
I reached the square and stayed on its edge, in the back with the guards. Lim, appearing tired but relaxed, surveyed the young mob.
I searched the perimeter until I found Schmidt, who was standing almost exactly opposite Lim. A group of four boys joined the larger group. Thirty seconds passed. No more appeared. Schmidt nodded.
"I'd thank you for coming," Lim said, her voice booming from speakers I couldn't see, "but we're going to try very hard not to lie to you, and thanking you for something we forced you to do is too close to a lie for my taste."
A few boys chuckled briefly but stopped at the angry looks from those near them. Lim had gotten their attention, though; the square was quiet save for the soft breeze, the construction sounds of the repairs at the corners of the complex, and the occasional short bird cry.
"You know you're prisoners," she said, "because we have armed guards, and we won't let you leave."
At this, many of them began talking, mumbling, and shifting in place. Maybe they'd harbored other hopes, or perhaps the directness of Lim's approach wasn't working as well now as it had a moment before.
"What are you going to do with us?" a voice from the middle called.
"Help you," Lim said. "We're going to help you learn to deal with what's happened to you and live like normal kids again. When you're ready, we'll take you back to your families—or find new families for you, if yours are no longer—" she paused, as if she didn't want to finish her sentence "—alive."
"We don't want your help!" several boys simultaneously said.
"I understand," Lim said. "I believe that many of you, maybe even most of you, feel that way. You don't get a choice, though. I'm sorry, but you don't. Even if you don't believe it, you do need help."
"You killed our families!" a boy a few yards in front of me yelled in a voice I thought I recognized. Others all around the square began screaming, so many words coming at once that I couldn't make out most of them.
I shifted left a few steps so I could get a better view of the first speaker. He was the boy from the shower, the one who had attacked our team. For a few seconds, I couldn't recall his name—it hadn't seemed important at the time—and then it came to me: Bony. He'd called himself Bony.
Lim crossed her arms and stood silently.
A few rocks smacked into the air in front of her and bounced off.
I moved a bit to my left and caught the profile of the thin, transparent shield in front of her. Smart.
The boys quickly figured it out, too, because the rocks stopped flying.
"No fair," a voice somewhere near the center said.
At that, boys all over the square laughed, and the rest of the yelling died down.
"No," Lim said, "it's not fair, not at all. Since when was any of this fair? Did the men who trained you tell you that fighting was fair?" She looked slowly over the crowd of boys, as if daring each one to say she was wrong. "I thought not, because they were not stupid."
She had their full attention again. I was impressed. When I'd last seen her, she couldn't manage a meeting without losing control of her anger. Now, she was manipulating hundreds of boys—and keeping herself in check.
"No," she said again, this time shaking her head, "they were not stupid. Far from it. They were smart. They knew that if they worked you and addicted you and trained you and didn't feed you enough and didn't let you sleep that they could turn you from children into soldiers, soldiers they could command. And they did." This time, she nodded. "They did. They made you all soldiers."
"Damn right!" several voices said. Murmurs of agreement and even a few cheers swept through the boys.
Lim held up her hands, and as if the assembled children were now under her command, they quickly feel silent. "That's all over now. You're not soldiers anymore."
"What?"
"No!"
"What do you mean?"
"Who are you to tell us what we are?"
"Wait until our brothers return!"
I couldn't keep track of who was saying what as a chorus of responses showered Lim.
She remained silent until the cries faded away, the whole time appearing to be listening closely. When she spoke, her voice was firm but held no trace of anger. "The sooner you let me finish, the sooner you can return to your barracks. You can drown me out, but you can't out-wait me." She surveyed the crowd slowly, not challenging them, not angry, just stating a fact. When no one spoke, she nodded once and continued. "Thank you. Let me try to answer all those questions. What I mean is simple: Your days as soldiers are over. The rebels should never have—" she paused as a few shouts came from the boys and continued when they were quiet "—they should never have made you soldiers. You're children, and children should never be soldiers."
At this, the boys began yelling again.
In response, Lim fell quiet.
They went at it for almost fifteen minutes, different groups taking turns screaming, questions and insults and sexual suggestions coming in almost equal measures.
Lim stood silently. As far as I knew, she'd been up all night, and her temper was legendary, but she never wavered from her calm, flat affect.
When the area fell quiet once again, she continued as if they'd never interrupted her. "Your captors—and the rebels were always your captors, never really your brothers, for what big brother makes his little brother carry a weapon and fight in a war?—are not coming back. We have captured all of the ones who were stationed here. Government forces are in the jungle protecting this complex. It is ours."
"So you are the government?" a boy yelled.
"No," she said, "we are not. We are an independent group here to help you. Some of you asked who we were to tell you what you are and what you're going to do. All we are is a group of concerned adults who want to help you become kids again and have families again."
"You called our brothers our captors, but you have captured us!" the small boy, Bony, yelled at her.
"You're right," she said, nodding. "We are. We captured this complex and you because we could not think of any other way to free you. We're going to hold you here until you're ready to return to normal life and we have families ready to take you."
"This is my family!" Bony yelled. Others joined him, cheering for themselves, for each other.
"No," Lim said when they finally stopped. "You and the adults who commanded you are the only people you believe understand what you've been through, and so you all feel like you've become a family, but those adults were never your family. They used you, and when one of you failed or fell, they killed him and left him behind." She stopped and slowly scanned the crowd. "You know I'm telling the truth."
"They did what they had to do!" a boy yelled.
Lim shook her head. "No, no they didn't. They used you. What we are going to do is help each of you become ready for a real family, your old one or, if need be, a new one. All of us who are going to work with you have been in wars before, so we understand fighting and what it does to you. We can help you, and we will."
More jeers and taunts followed.
Again,
Lim stayed silent until they stopped.
"For now, you may do whatever you want," she said, "with only two limitations: If we find you with a weapon, any weapon, we will take it away, and from this moment on, you will not have any more root."
"What?" The crowd hurled cries of frustration and disbelief at her.
"Your captors made you addicts," Lim said when they were all quiet, "so you have to eat root to feel right. When you don't eat it, you feel sick. We will give you drugs to help clean it out of your systems, so you can start to be yourselves again—and so you can sleep."
"Real warriors don't need to sleep!" one of the boys across the square from me yelled.
"That's right!"
"We fight while the weak sleep!"
"Root makes us strong! You're just afraid of us!"
"You want to poison us with your drugs!"
More rocks bounced off the shield in front of Lim.
She ignored them and stayed perfectly still, her arms at her sides, her gaze on the crowd.
When the yelling finally stopped, she continued. "We've already destroyed all the root in the compound. You're done with it. Even with the medicine we'll give you, this will be hard. None of this is your fault, but the only way out of it is going to be rough. I'm sorry for that. I really am."
She turned to go.
"Running away?" Bony yelled. "Afraid of us?"
Lim turned back to face them. She smiled slightly. "No, I'm not going anywhere. I'm staying here until we're done. You're stuck with me."
"Come down here and say that to my face," Bony yelled, puffing up his chest. Lim had a good third of a meter and many kilos on him, but the kid wasn't just posturing; he was ready to fight.
I smiled despite my tension and fatigue. I had to admire his determination. I certainly understood his attitude.
Lim shook her head. "No," she said, "I won't. I won't fight you. None of this is your fault, and I won't punish you for it."
She turned and walked away, across the roof and down something I could not see.
The boys stayed where they were for a few seconds before drifting away in packs of twos and threes and fours.
I watched them go and shook my head. I wondered if Lim and her counselors had any idea what they were facing. They'd all been in combat, but how many of them had been there as children? It was different, I knew it was, but I couldn't explain it to them without revealing more of my past than I would let anyone know.
A hand touched my left shoulder. I grabbed it, pulled forward and spun behind the body of the person who'd touched me. I relaxed when I realized it was a guard, a blond man with skin light brown from tan. He stood a hands-width shorter than I was and carried a gun in his left hand. He wore coveralls, not a proper uniform, with an activefiber tag over his heart that read "Chris Long."
Long held up his right hand and kept his weapon where it was. "Sorry for surprising you," he said. "Lim told me not to do that. I should have listened more carefully."
Still tense from his approach, I nodded and said, "Yes."
He glared at me for a second, unhappy with my response and tensing as if he were about to throw a punch. He stretched his head from side to side and said, "Sorry. We're both fighters, but that's not what we're here to do. We have to teach these kids how not to be soldiers, how to fit into the world like normal people. We're not doing our jobs if we fight among ourselves."
"Your jobs," I said, "not mine. I'm done with this."
"That's what she told me," Long said. "Lim asked me to let you know that all our ships are here and you're free to go. She said she'd thank you herself, but she has more work to do and needs to grab some cot time." He stuck out his hand. "I was on Blue team. Your ship's surveillance helped us a lot. Thanks, and good luck."
I shook his hand, nodded once, and headed back to Lobo.
"Maggie's vessel is in-bound," Lobo said to me privately over the machine frequency. "Are you sure you want to leave before it gets here?"
CHAPTER 28
Dump Island, planet Pinkelponker - 139 years earlier
I ran along the beach as if the guards from the shuttle were chasing me.
No one was.
As Benny had taught me, I imagined them trying to catch me so they could beat me, tie me up, and kill me in front of the others. The more I focused on the images, the faster my heart beat, until the anger rose inside me and my breathing turned uneven and I couldn't get enough air. Sweat ran down my chest and my arms and my forehead, stinging my eyes. The heat, which hadn't bothered me a few seconds ago, now weighed on me. The sand, which I'd barely noticed moments earlier, pulled at my feet like hands trying to drag me down into the earth.
I slowed, but my imagination showed the guards overtaking me, knocking me face-first into the sand, climbing on top of me and holding me down until they could tie my hands and feet.
Anger you control can provide energy and power, Benny had said. Anger that runs unchecked, though, is the fastest path to burnout, to running out of breath and slowing, perhaps fatally.
I forced myself to resume my previous pace. After a few meters, I ran a little faster, pushing my legs to carry me more quickly along the beach. At the same time, I focused on my breaths, making each inhalation both bigger and as slow as I could manage. I exhaled equally slowly, letting the air leak out through my nose. I concentrated on the rhythm: Breathe in as much as I could as slowly as I could manage. Exhale gently through my nose. Repeat. As my heart slowed and my breathing came under control, I maintained the pace. I had to take a few gulps of air to refill my lungs, but after a short time I was able to return to breathing only through my nose.
My legs hurt, and I wasn't sure how long I could sustain this pace, but I had taken myself into the anger and recovered. I needed to improve my self-control, to try to stop my rage from ever becoming my master. By learning to back down from the anger without stopping or even slowing, Benny said I could feed off its energy and still remain focused on the task at hand, on the enemy in front of me.
I rounded a bend and saw Bennie ahead in the distance, stretched on his cart on a flat spot in the path, a tree next to him providing cooling shade. The mountainside tumbled closer to the water here than anywhere else, and the tide was high, so the sand narrowed to a dozen meters wide. I stuck to the narrow stretch of dry sand, not willing to change my path for anything. When Benny had first made us run, I'd been furious each time he came into view and for several minutes afterward; I'd hated working while he relaxed. Now, though, I didn't care. He couldn't make me run. No one could. I did it to myself. He wasn't the enemy. I was—the weakness in my body that stopped it from doing everything it should, and the weakness in my mind that tempted me to run slower or to stop, to do less than I was capable of doing. I couldn't allow those weaknesses to affect me. I had to be stronger, stronger than anyone else here, stronger than the guards, always stronger.
I stared at Benny, the rage filling me again. I wouldn't show him or any of them any weakness, not ever again. I forced myself to run faster, parting my lips slightly so I could take in a little more air, not willing to let him spot me breathing through my mouth and so not opening it visibly.
Right before he smacked into me, I saw Alex launch himself from behind a boulder I had just passed. I accelerated to avoid him, but I couldn't speed up enough.
He hit me.
I stumbled to the side and started to fall, Alex holding onto me with his one arm.
Once, not that many months ago, I would have fought against the force and tried to stand. Now, I did as Benny had explained and let the momentum carry me sideways into the wet, harder sand and toward the water. I relaxed into the fall and rolled in the direction we were going. I ended up on top of Alex and raised my body so I could force him to yield.
Something in the ocean moved in the edge of my vision.
I fell onto Alex and rolled once more. I ended with Alex lying on my chest. I caught the look of fear in his eyes and barely had time to tense my stomach mus
cles before Han landed on top of both of us.
Air rushed out of Alex. I smelled traces of the fish he'd eaten earlier. Water dripped off Han's body as he stared at me in surprise. For a second we all froze, no one prepared for this position. Before they could regroup, I punched Han in the neck with my right hand as hard as I could manage with the limited range of motion available to me. I knew the blow wouldn't damage him badly, but it shocked him and hurt him.
He clutched his throat and rolled off Alex to my left, away from the hand that had hit him.
Before Alex could recover, I pushed him on top of Han and climbed onto both of them, my left hand on Alex's throat.
"Enough," he croaked.
Han nodded in agreement.
For a moment, they were not the guys I knew, not my training partners, not two more kids doing what Benny had told them. They were my enemies. I had beaten them. It was time to finish them. My breath came rough and hard. The pounding of my own blood filled my head. I tightened my grip on Alex's throat and raised my clenched right hand.
They must have seen the anger in me, because fear filled their eyes.
I took in their expressions, recognized them for what they were. When I'd seen those looks before, when parents on Pinecone had come rushing to rescue their small children from their new friend because I was too big and therefore not a safe playmate, they had hurt me. I hadn't wanted anyone to be afraid of me. No one had needed to fear me. I would never have hurt those kids. They were my friends.
Now, though, the fear served only to confirm my victory. We all knew what we were doing and why we went through these drills. If the result was that my friends were a little afraid of me, so be it; they had learned something useful. Maybe they'd try harder next time.
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