by John Dixon
Roll with it, she told himself. You have the haircut, uniform, and dog tags. Play their game, do your time, and get on with your life.
They formed lines facing away from a row of upperclassmen wearing red sashes on their white uniforms. Scarlett understood what she was supposed to do. When called, she would execute an about-face, march to the line, drop her bag, salute, and report to the Cadet in the Red Sash, saying, Sir, New Cadet Winter reports to the Cadet in the Red Sash for the first time as ordered. Then listen to the guy, salute, and say, No retreat, sir.
Simple.
They called her forward, and she found herself face-to-face with the human manifestation of a Jack Russell terrier, a muscular little guy whose close-set eyes drilled into Scarlett, giving her the kind of hard look thugs had tried back in juvie. Big deal.
“New Cadet,” the guy said, eyeballing Scarlett, “step up to the line not on the line not over the line not behind the line. New Cadet, step up to my line.”
Scarlett stepped up, dropped her bag, and—
“New Cadet, do not stand on my line. Step up to the line not on the—New Cadet! Do not look down. Step back, New Cadet. Pick up your bag and get to the back of the line.”
Scarlett went back and waited, annoyed, until it was her turn again. She stepped up to the line, dropped her bag, saluted, and said, “Sir, New Cadet Winter reporting to the Cadet in the Red Sash for the first time as ordered.”
“New Cadet,” the Jack Russell said, and Scarlett tensed, waiting for it. “Was this the first time you reported to me?”
“No, sir.”
“New Cadet, can’t you count to two?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Yes, you can’t, New Cadet? You’re telling me that you can’t count to two?”
“No, sir.”
“Back of the line, New Cadet. Try again.”
She marched back down the steps, went to the back of the line, and turned away, fuming.
The Cadet in the Red Sash called her again. She marched back up the steps, listened to him bark, toed the line, dropped the bag, and—
“New Cadet, get your bag off my line.”
Scarlett bent and reached, but the bag wasn’t on the line. “Sir, it isn’t on—”
“New Cadet,” the guy said, “you do not speak unless spoken to by a superior. Did I speak to you, New Cadet?”
“No, sir, but—”
“New Cadet, what are your four responses?”
Scarlett rattled them off.
“Do any of those responses contain the word ‘but,’ New Cadet?”
“No, sir.”
“You said ‘but,’ New Cadet. Are you calling me a butt, New Cadet?”
“No, sir.”
“New Cadet, why haven’t you saluted me?”
Scarlett felt like a piñata. “Sir, I—”
“You’d better hope you’re not in my squad, New Cadet. Back in line.”
Again and again Scarlett approached the Cadet in the Red Sash, and again and again the little hammerhead found some reason to trash her. Where she stood, how she saluted, where her eyes looked, how she reported. The guy was on a power trip. Scarlett grew more frustrated and angry with each failed attempt.
He called her forward once more. She marched to the line, dropped her bag, saluted, and started to report again.
The Cadet in the Red Sash cut her off. “New Cadet, you seem upset. Do you have an attitude problem, New Cadet?”
“No, sir.”
“You look like you want to cry, New Cadet. Is that what you want to do, New Cadet? Do you want to cry?”
“No, sir,” Scarlett said, and glared down at him. “I want to smash your ugly face.”
SCARLETT EXPERIENCED AN INSTANT OF intense satisfaction, watching the cocky guy’s face contort with shock. Then screaming upperclassmen surrounded her, bellowing orders, demanding answers, talking over one another, an absolute feeding frenzy…
“Cadets!” a deep voice thundered, and Scarlett’s tormentors snapped to attention.
Scarlett smiled with relief. It was Rhoads’s right-hand man, Fuller, dressed now in an officer’s uniform with captain’s bars.
“Hey, Captain Fuller,” Scarlett said.
Fuller scowled. “New Cadet, pick up your gear and follow me—now.”
“Yes, sir,” Scarlett said. She grabbed her bag and followed Fuller, who marched rapidly across the courtyard. She hurried after him, feeling ridiculous as she struggled with the ungainly blue bag. New cadets watched with wide eyes.
Scarlett caught up to Fuller just as the man entered the cool dimness of the sally port beneath one of the tall dormitories. “Sir? I’m sorry about that, but—”
“Lock it up, Winter,” Fuller said. “You do not speak unless spoken to.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, thinking, What a jerk. He’d been all smiles back at the house, saying how nice it was to meet her and yucking it up at lunch. Now, he was suddenly all business, a gung-ho ramrod just like her father and all the rest of these guys, only worse, because he’d actually pretended to be friendly.
They turned down a street and marched on without speaking. Fuller went up the steps of a dormitory. Scarlett followed him inside.
“Sir, I…permission to speak, sir?”
“Denied,” Fuller said.
They couldn’t just kick her out for one argument, could they?
Yes, they can, her own mind answered. This wasn’t high school, wasn’t even college…not real college. This was the military. West Point. The Harvard of the Military, Rhoads’s voice echoed in her mind, which added, no place for someone like you.
Fuller led her down into a basement. The low ceiling was busy with fluorescent lighting, exposed wiring, pipes, and conduits. They passed a locker room with wooden benches and walls tiled beige and walked past storage rooms enclosed by wire fencing. Fuller went up three steps and stopped in front of a tan door that read I-2 TRUNK ROOM. He unlocked the door and turned on the lights, and Scarlett followed him into a room filled, aptly enough, with storage trunks.
Fuller closed the door.
Scarlett tensed. Why had he closed the door?
Fuller moved past her and pushed aside a cart stacked with trunks, revealing a scuffed section of wallboard marked with the imprint of a boot sole where some beleaguered plebe had apparently blown off steam by kicking the wall. Fuller reached out and pressed his thumb into the heel of the boot print.
The wall whooshed aside, revealing the space behind: what appeared to be the top landing of a circular stairwell that spiraled down into the darkness beneath West Point.
“This way,” Fuller said, and Scarlett followed him into the stairwell. Lights clicked automatically to life overhead. The air here was cool and stale. Fuller gestured to a button on the wall. “Hit that.”
She slapped the button. The wall slid shut behind them.
They descended, twisting around and around the stone steps for what felt like several flights until the staircase ended at a wall of burnished steel. Fuller reached out and pressed a thumb into the steel, which whipped aside, revealing a large concrete corridor with a high ceiling. Against the opposite wall, a line of around twenty new cadets turned their heads to stare at them.
“Eyes forward,” a wiry cadet in the white uniform of an upperclassman told them.
Some obeyed. Others kept looking.
These recruits were different from the squads in the courtyard. Up there, maybe one in five were girls. Here, the split was fifty-fifty. This crew was more racially diverse, too, and better looking. The girls were pretty, and the guys were handsome, though three guys and one girl were freakishly huge, bigger than bodybuilders. This group was apparently less disciplined, too. Watching over them were additional upperclassmen and MP types in camouflage BDUs with Tasers on their belts and nightsticks in
their hands.
“Back of the line, New Cadet Winter,” Fuller said.
“Yes, sir,” she said. She went to the back of the line and stood behind a girl who’d pulled her bright red hair into a tight ponytail, revealing the blue tattoo on the back of her neck: a Z intersected by an infinity symbol.
“Winter’s the last,” Fuller told the cadre. “Made it to the Red Sash, then failed epically.”
The wiry upperclassman—his name tag read Hopkins—gave Scarlett a tough-guy glare that harkened back to the Cadet in the Red Sash, only Hopkins looked more like a Doberman than a Jack Russell, long, lean, and angular, with just enough muscle to generate damage and no excess mass to slow him. Hopkins said, “We’ll fix her attitude, sir.”
Scarlett ignored the guy, trying to understand the implications of what Fuller had said. She’d made it the farthest? These others had all been pulled before the Red Sash?
Oh, man. She’d joined some kind of reject brigade.
Fuller led them down the cavernous corridor to a massive door twenty feet high, twice as wide, and built seemingly of concrete and steel, like the blast door to a nuclear bunker. The door ground heavily aside to reveal a large concrete box of a room. They marched into the box, and the door behind them groaned shut. The majority of each wall was another blast door. Scarlett looked up and saw cameras high above in each corner.
The door in front of them slid open. They marched into a well-lit, brightly tiled corridor past a glassed-in space that reminded her of a police station reception counter except that the half dozen people she saw inside all wore camouflage BDUs. Fuller checked in at a sliding window, then a door opened at the end of the hall, and the new cadets marched into a two-story lobby. To the right was another glassed-in room, this one looking more like the main office of a school than a police station. To the left were what looked like classrooms, the small windows in their doors dark. Above, situated along the rail of a metal walkway, a pair of guards stared down, holding, she was startled to see, M4 machine guns.
Fuller marched them toward a pair of double doors over which a sign read Welcome to The Point and beneath that Training Tomorrow’s Leaders Today. Between those lines was a logo much like West Point’s: the same black and gold design, same Spartan helmet, same star beneath, only instead of a sword, this logo had a lightning bolt.
They entered an auditorium with a gleaming wooden stage and tiered seating for perhaps 300. Hopkins and the other upperclassmen joined uniformed cadets lining the far wall. Scarlett and the other misfits sat in the first row, as directed—and shot to their feet again as Rhoads strolled onto the stage, wearing his dress blues but no beret. His gaze swept over them. “At ease, New Cadets. You may be seated.”
They sat.
“My name is Colonel Rhoads,” he said, standing behind the podium. “Welcome. I know that some of you—” He paused and smiled. “—heck, all of you, had a rough morning, right?”
The new cadets responded in an affirmative jumble blending Yeah with Yes with Yes, sir, and the freakishly muscular girl piped up, “You got that right, sir!”
Fuller cut through the babble, saying, “You will all respond ‘Yes, sir!’ ”
They chorused, “Yes, sir!”
“Motivated!” Rhoads said. “Way to sound off, New Cadets. You might be wondering what in God’s name you’re doing down here, eighty feet below the annual R-Day dog-and-pony show. Well, I’m here to tell you. What you just experienced was the shock-and-awe rite of passage through which all West Point cadets enter Beast Barracks and their plebe year. Unlike those above us, every last one of you failed.”
Here we go, Scarlett thought, shifting in her seat. He’s kicking us out.
“In all fairness, your failure was expected,” Rhoads said. “Presently, you don’t have what it takes to make it here at West Point.”
Fuller shushed the grumbling.
“I speak only the truth,” Rhoads said, “but let’s be fair. How many of you actually applied to West Point?”
Scarlett glanced down the row. Not a single hand rose.
Rhoads said, “We recruited you. Yes, you need remedial assistance, but we will get you up to West Point standards. You will become professionals of the highest order, part of the Long Gray Line, men and women defined by three words.” As he spoke each of these three words, he knocked his ring against the wooden podium. “Duty. Honor. Country. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir!” she chorused along with the others. She was confused yet relieved. Rhoads wasn’t giving them the boot. No jail, then—at least not yet.
“You will live and train in this facility, with me, my cadre, and the upperclassmen who preceded you. Eventually, you will interact with the regular plebes and cadets, dining with them, taking classes alongside them, training with them, and, of course, attending football games beside them.”
“Beat Navy!” Fuller shouted.
“Beat Navy!” the cadre and upperclassmen echoed.
“Cadet Amer,” Rhoads said.
“Right here,” a female voice responded. Scarlett swiveled in her seat. Cadet Amer, a striking brunette with dark eyes and a heart-shaped face, leaned against the wall, smirking. Of all the cadets, she was the only one leaning, the only one smirking, the only one with her arms crossed.
“How many days until Army beats Navy?”
“One hundred and sixty-two days,” Amer said.
“Outstanding,” Rhoads said.
Whoa, Scarlett thought. Amer must be some kind of savant, one of those people, you tell her your birthplace and date, and before you can say Rain Man, she says you were born on a snowy Tuesday and recites your hometown phone book from memory.
Rhoads straightened, gripping the podium like a steering wheel, and smiled down at the new cadets. “You’re no doubt wondering why we brought you here. Brace yourselves.”
Here we go, she thought, and pressed her palms into her thighs.
Rhoads said, “Ten years ago, the government was alerted to the existence of ‘posthumans,’ an emerging breed of men and women with incredible abilities that manifest around the age of eighteen.”
The new cadets murmured among themselves. Fuller squashed the chatter.
Rhoads said, “The first of these posthumans were detained, studied, and in many instances trained by the U.S. Army—with varying degrees of success. Since that time, armed with a better understanding of the strengths and liabilities of posthumans, West Point has taken on the mantle of instruction. Posthumans are genetically superior to the general population in numerous ways, including their special powers, but we have learned that they often face challenges as well. Difficult home lives, frequent discipline issues, social problems, struggles against authority.” Rhoads knocked his ring once more against the podium. “I suspect that each of you is a posthuman.”
Posthuman? Scarlett thought. I couldn’t be—but an invisible feather tickled over her scars. She remembered the burning car, her brother flying through the air, the incredible explosion outside the guest house.
She glanced at her classmates and saw confusion, amusement, and wariness but no absolute shock, no outright denial.
Rhoads said, “Each of you brings incredible talent…and formidable challenges. How many of you came here straight from some sort of detention center?”
A third of the hands went up.
Rhoads nodded. “And which of you came here to avoid incarceration?”
Scarlett raised her hand. Others joined her. Half the group either in jail or on the way…
“Society is not ready for you,” Rhoads said. “The oldest, fiercest fear is ignorance. Sooner or later—and probably sooner, given the strange nature of recent terror attacks—the general population would burn you at the metaphorical stake.”
Rhoads paused, letting the message resonate. The cadre didn’t need to hush anyone. The new cad
ets were utterly silent, trained with absolute attention on the man behind the podium.
Rhoads said, “Here, you will train alongside other posthumans. With our instruction, you will learn to control and maximize your powers and to use them for the greater good. You will discover camaraderie and purpose. You will become a part of something bigger than yourselves: the Long Gray Line.” A faint smile lifted the corners of his mouth. His eyes, however, remained intense, almost sad. “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to The Point, ground zero for the development of tomorrow’s supersoldiers, the future leaders of the coming Posthuman Age.”
RHOADS STOPPED THEM OUTSIDE THE entrance to a gymnasium. Standing at the front of the line, Scarlett heard shouting and clapping, the pounding of running feet, and sneakers squeaking on the wooden floor. Over Rhoads’s shoulder, she saw a shining basketball court, bleachers, and above the seating an elevated running track on which stood a guard in camouflage.
“At ease, New Cadets,” Rhoads said. “Once I release you, you’ll be free to wander the gymnasium and observe the activities. At all times, you will maintain a safe distance.”
At last, she thought. A little freedom. This would be the first liberty she’d had since leaving her parents at Eisenhower Hall Auditorium.
Rhoads stepped aside and gestured for Scarlett to lead them inside.
She entered the gym and lurched to a halt.
Something—or, rather, several somethings—blurred past. She staggered backward, bumping into another new cadet.
“Whoa,” someone said.
Whoa, indeed…
Half a dozen sprinters in shorts and T-shirts tagged the far wall, spun, and sprinted back this way. They flashed past, running faster than Olympic sprinters. Way faster. The female cadet in front crossed the pylon finish line with a whoop and kept hurtling straight at the wall.
Scarlett tensed, expecting her to smash into the cinder blocks, but the sprinter ran straight up the wall to the elevated track twenty feet above, sprang away, executed a graceful flip, and stuck the landing like a champion gymnast.