by John Dixon
“Yes, ma’am,” Scarlett said. Behind her, Hopkins was giving some new arrival a hard time.
DeCraig pulled a single card from the deck and laid it facedown on the desk between them. Above her spectacles, her brows lifted. “What card is that?”
“I don’t know, ma’am.”
“Try,” DeCraig said. “Think for a second. Pretend that you can see the face.”
Scarlett stared at the blue-and-white paisley. She saw no numbers, no suits, nothing. “I don’t know, ma’am.”
“Guess, then.”
“Ace of spades.”
DeCraig picked up the card and sighed. “Your answer is as incorrect as it is unoriginal, I’m afraid.” She turned it toward Scarlett. The four of hearts.
“No worries, Winter,” DeCraig said, tucking the card back into the deck. “My whole time here, we’ve only had one remote viewer, and he ended up buying The Farm by Thanksgiving.”
Scarlett still wasn’t sure what The Farm was. Punishment or exile. Maybe both.
Next, DeCraig asked her to move the pen with her mind.
Scarlett asked how she was supposed to do that, and DeCraig told her to stare at the pen and picture it moving. “Hope for a pushing feeling in your forehead, force going out.”
Scarlett tried and failed. Utterly.
“She’s negative,” DeCraig told Kyeong, who looked neither surprised nor disappointed. “Oh, well, Winter. I was rooting for you, but…” DeCraig shrugged. “Seamus, where do we send her now?”
“Um,” Kyeong said, and hesitated. “Room 17.”
DeCraig looked surprised. “Seventeen?”
“That’s what her paperwork says.”
DeCraig nodded, looking puzzled…and troubled. Then she recomposed her face, half smiling. “Room 17, then, Winter—and good luck.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Scarlett said, standing. “Thank you, ma’am.”
Hopkins chuckled as she left. “So long, goat. Have fun in 17.”
SCARLETT REPORTED TO ROOM 17, but there was no one there. There wasn’t even a sign-in sheet. She looked at herself in the big mirror that covered the upper half of one wall. It was undoubtedly two-way glass like they had in police stations. A metal desk was shoved up against the pale cinder blocks of the opposite wall, presumably to make space for the odd chair dominating the center of the claustrophobic room. The thing looked like some kind of S&M wheelchair, with straps hanging from several points.
She stepped closer, realizing she’d seen a chair like this before, back in juvie, when that kid from Downingtown had flipped out and attacked a guard and they’d strapped him into—
The door banged open behind her.
She spun around, startled.
A wave of camouflage pounded into her, knocked her from her feet, and drove her to the ground. The air rushed from her lungs. Several soldiers pinned her down, ignoring her protests and talking to one another calmly, calling out which arm they had, which leg, as mechanically as robots.
She shouted and struggled and cursed. They ignored her.
They lifted her, carried her to the center of the room, set her in the chair, and started fastening the straps. A deep, garbled voice said, “Don’t bother to fight, Winter.”
Lopez swaggered into the room and stood at parade rest, watching with cold eyes as the guards restrained Scarlett’s arms and legs and cinched belts around her waist and chest.
“Make them tight,” Lopez said.
“Drill Sergeant,” she said as the soldiers torqued the restraints, “I didn’t do anything.”
“No talking out of turn,” Lopez said. Then, to the guards, “Get her head.”
They pulled Scarlett’s head back, yanked another strap over her forehead, and cranked it tight. Claustrophobia filled her with squeaking rats scratching madly for escape.
“Leave us,” Lopez told the guards.
Scarlett watched them go with a sense of panic. Heat throbbed at her center. Her muscles twitched beneath the restraints. “Drill Sergeant, I—”
“Lock it up, Winter.” Lopez swept Scarlett’s testing results from the ground and stood beside the chair, reading. A dirty boot print covered the back of the paper.
Lopez shook his head and gave that sharp animal snort again.
Her aching muscles tensed involuntarily. That noise hit her right in the bone marrow.
Lopez crumpled the paper and dropped it to the floor. “You’re holding back.”
“No, Drill Sergeant, I—”
“What are you hiding, Winter?”
“Nothing, Drill Sergeant.”
“What’s this, then?” He stomped on the crumpled paper. “Zeros across the board? You’re not strong or fast or smart, and you can’t do any cute little magic tricks…or at least that’s what you want us to think.” Lopez leaned close. Scars crosshatched his emaciated face. Scarlett could smell the unlit cigar stub and coffee and Lopez himself, an animal smell like yet unlike sweat, with something sharper underneath, a scent that belonged in a barn or a zoo, the man not fully human any longer. “You’re going to tell me the truth.”
“I am telling you the truth, Drill Sergeant. Honest.”
“Lock it up!”
Scarlett’s eyes slammed shut against the force of the drill sergeant’s bellow.
Lopez continued in a calm voice. “I was in an outfit called the High Rollers. My team leader taught me all about truth. You’ve heard of black ops?”
“Yes, Drill Sergeant.”
“Well, High Roller ops were dark-side-of-the-moon black. Deep undercover, no rules of engagement. We fixed problems that the country couldn’t admit to fixing. You follow?”
“Yes, Drill Sergeant.”
“You sure are agreeable, Winter. I like that.”
She forced a smile. Her muscles throbbed with the force they’d absorbed. She had to get out of here.
Lopez scowled. “Maybe charm’s your hoodoo. You gonna sweet-talk your way out of that chair?”
“No, Drill Sergeant,” she said. Her memory dredged up Dan’s voice. Your whole life you’ve tried to sweet-talk your way out of everything. “Drill Sergeant, ask Colonel Rhoads. He recruited me. He can tell you why I’m here.”
Lopez ignored her, saying, “The High Rollers get this target, a driver for the bad guys. He’s heard stuff. Stuff that can save lives. So we grab him and take him someplace where nobody can hear him scream and tie him to a chair and ask him where the bad guys are hiding. This driver, he’s a squirrelly little guy, about your size, twitchy. He doesn’t look tough. But this isn’t America, you know? He’s hard as a lifer in the state pen. Says he doesn’t know anything. My Team Leader looks at him and says yes, he does. So we keep asking. We even make him a little uncomfortable.” Lopez reached out and squeezed Scarlett’s shoulder, his thick fingers digging into the throbbing muscle. “You know what I mean, Winter?”
“I think so, Drill Sergeant.” She had to get away from this crazy son of a bitch.
Lopez nodded. “We worked on him a little, knocked out a tooth or two. The TL had a way of whipping us into a fury. But this driver, he was tough, the type of guy if he wasn’t such a scumbag, you could almost respect him. The TL asks him a question, this guy spits blood and shakes his head. So Gerber, this real twisted bastard who’d been in law school before he got recruited into the High Rollers, he pulls a blade, lays it across the guy’s cheek.”
Lopez pressed a finger so close to Scarlett’s eye that her eyelid snapped reflexively shut.
“Gerber tells the guy that blind people have great memories on account of they’re not distracted by visual input. Tells him he’d better start remembering or we were going to improve his memory. But the driver still wouldn’t tell us anything. Kind of like you.”
“I’m telling the truth, Drill Sergeant.” Wild with fear and pain, she squi
rmed within her restraints. “Let me talk to Colonel Rhoads.”
“Don’t interrupt, Winter. I’m just getting to the good part. The TL says, ‘The truth is elemental.’ Says with a stubborn bastard like this driver, we have to ‘use the elemental to extract the elemental.’ And he walks out of the room…”
Lopez swaggered from the room as if acting out the scene. From the hallway, his garbled voice said, “And he comes back with his element of choice.” Lopez reentered the room holding a blue cylinder with an angled brass stem on top and a small dial at the juncture. “Fire.”
The guy had a blowtorch. “I want to talk to Rhoads,” she said again.
Lopez said, “The TL opens the valve and sets the torch on the ground.” He twisted the dial and set the thing on the floor between them. She heard the hiss of gas. “Lets the guy hear it.”
“This is crazy,” she said. “I’m not lying, okay? I’m just not like these other people. I’m not special.”
“The TL pulls out a match,” Lopez said, talking over her. He reached in his pocket, came out with a wooden match, and held it close to her face. “By now the guy’s eyes are bulging, and he’s jabbering away, but he just keeps telling us the same lies.”
“Maybe he didn’t know anything,” she said. “Did that ever cross your mind?”
Lopez didn’t appear to hear her. “The TL lights the match.” Lopez held out a palm and scratched the match across his thick calluses. The match popped to life, shining brightly.
The smell of sulfur made Scarlett feel like screaming.
“The TL picks up the torch—” Lopez bent, doing the same thing. “—and lights it.”
With a huff, the blowtorch came to life, burning blue.
“I have some weird power, but I don’t understand it,” she said. “Okay? Like this bomb blew up and should’ve killed me but didn’t, and like right now, my muscles hurt, because—”
“The driver sees the flame,” Lopez said, “remembers everything. Tells our interpreter the bad guys are holed up across town. But the TL shakes his head, says, ‘No, they’re not,’ and we believe him, because nobody could read people like the TL. He says, ‘Fire will reveal the truth.’ ”
Lopez held the blue flame inches from Scarlett’s face. Its sound swelled to a roar. Feeling the heat, she tried to cringe away, but she was locked in place, paralyzed by the restraints.
“And you know what?” Lopez bared his teeth, clamping the stubby cigar in a hideous grin. “The TL was right. Fire brought truth.”
“You’re crazy,” she said. “Keep that thing away from me.”
Lopez shook his head. “An hour later, the bad guys were dead. Our problems in that sector disappeared overnight, abra-bye-bye-cadabra.”
“Rhoads is going to hear about this.”
Lopez chuckled derisively. “You poor stupid girl. Colonel Rhoads sent me in here.” He turned up the torch and lowered the flame toward her restrained forearm.
“No!” she shouted, struggling wildly. “Help!”
Lopez pushed the brass nozzle closer.
She screamed in horror as the blue flame touched her forearm—and plunged inward.
She felt a rush of warmth but no pain, as if Lopez were holding a hair dryer rather than a blowtorch. Heat rushed up her arm through the meat and bone, filling the aching bicep and shoulder, and whooshed into her chest, where it joined the burning vortex.
Lopez pressed the nozzle closer, filling her with flame.
“Get the hell off of me!” she shouted, and she pushed out at Lopez reflexively and instinctively, not with her restrained body but with her will, her intention, her mind.
Lopez bellowed with surprise, shielding his face from the wave of heat that had burst from Scarlett. The blowtorch fell to the tiled floor with a loud clank and lay there, huffing flame.
Lopez lowered his arms, pulled the cigar from his mouth, and smiled at the smoldering stub. “Thanks for the light, Winter,” he said, all the menace gone out of him. He picked up the torch, killed the flame, and gave the mirror a thumbs-up. “And for future reference, that’s ‘Get the hell off of me, Drill Sergeant.’ ”
AFTER LOPEZ LEFT, SCARLETT RAGED in impotent solitude until a worried-looking DeCraig appeared, coming through the door as tentatively as a visitor at a wake.
“Hey, Winter,” she said. “You all right?”
Scarlett snapped, telling her everything in an angry torrent.
DeCraig nodded thoughtfully and explained it the way she saw it. Scarlett had to be patient, had to put this behind her. They couldn’t know what Lopez was up to, let alone Rhoads, but hey—no harm, no foul, right?
“No harm?” Scarlett said. “Did you miss the part about the blowtorch?”
“Lopez must have assumed that the flame wouldn’t hurt you,” DeCraig said.
“So this is what, the world’s most twisted practical joke?”
DeCraig shrugged. “Maybe they needed you to think it was dangerous. Maybe your ability hinges on adrenaline or something. Maybe—”
“If you say it was for my own good,” Scarlett said, “I will hurt you…ma’am.”
DeCraig grinned. “I administered your TK test, Winter, so I’m not worried about you hurting me while you’re tied up.”
Scarlett surprised herself by chuckling. She was still pissed at Lopez and Rhoads, but DeCraig was cool.
“You good, bro-tato chip?” DeCraig asked.
“Did you just bro-joke me?”
“Why not?” DeCraig said, undoing the restraints. “Why should guys get all the good nicknames? A girl can only call her friend Sis-tine Chapel so many times.”
Since they were too late for the mess hall, they ate MREs together in the gym. DeCraig’s first name was Lucy. She was a few years older than Scarlett, a college dropout from New Jersey. She liked books, horror movies, and cats and had a serious boyfriend who currently was serving on a submarine. That brief meal, with its easy flow of conversation, was the first Scarlett had enjoyed here.
Then, as if nothing had happened, it was back to business as usual. Days passed, and no one mentioned the blowtorch incident. Lopez acted like nothing had happened.
Captain Fuller, who turned out to be the official liaison to West Point, disappeared. Rhoads appeared only at first formation each morning, where he provided a sunny pep talk before abandoning them to Lopez, his menacing guards, and the malicious upperclassmen.
Scarlett envied the other new cadets, among whom a fledgling camaraderie was forming. When a guard knocked the wind from one sprinter, Jakes helped the breathless cadet to her feet. After Lopez belittled Vernon for singing “The Star Spangled Banner” too loudly, another meathead surreptitiously patted the burly new cadet’s back.
She missed home, her friends, her mom, her motorcycle, weed. She missed laughing and getting laid and catching a buzz. She missed freedom.
She trudged on alone and bore up as best she could. There was no time to make friends, not for her. The cadets couldn’t talk in formation, at meals, or during class. As a group, they had no downtime, and the new cadets all lived in solitary confinement. The only place for mingling was ability-based training…and she was alone.
Meanwhile, guards lurked, punishing anyone who showed up late to formation, whispered in line, or nodded off in class, a thing they all fought against. The schedule lied: lights out at 2200, first formation at 0500…seven hours of rack time, right? In reality, they trained after lights out and then cleaned and studied by flashlight. They woke at 0400 to prepare for the day. Add frequent midnight hazing and rotating charge of quarters and fire guard duties, and sleep became a lost dream. They were punchy with sleep deprivation.
Lopez and the upperclassmen rode them hard, nitpicking constantly and stressing professionalism and pride at every turn.
Every morning, the cadre presented leadership and et
hics classes. Scarlett winced at their hypocrisy, especially when Hopkins led a class on the core values: duty, honor, country. Just the night before, Hopkins and his thugs had again battered her through the door, leaving her unable to sleep because of the painful force throbbing in her muscles. She glowered as Hopkins reminded the class of the most important rule here at The Point: cadets could use their special powers only as directed. Breaking this rule would result in immediate and severe punishment. Repetition would result in the Chamber or even transfer to The Farm.
The Chamber was either solitary confinement or some type of torture device. The Farm was almost certainly a prison or insane asylum. Her fear of both grew daily.
They ate lunch in the main mess hall alongside real cadets. More stress, more nitpicking, all for nothing. Just a bunch of high-strung overachievers playing the stupidest game in the world.
Then the dreaded afternoons.
They received their daily medications. Then, as her visibly excited classmates split into ability-based training groups, guards led Scarlett away. Her classmates watched her go, eyeing her with suspicion and contempt and pity. She hated it.
She hated Room 17 even more. Here, day after day, they subjected her to what they called testing and she called torture.
One day, the guards in rubber suits restrained her, attached electrodes, and shocked her repeatedly, filling her with rage and desperation and a crackling yellow static that burned her head to toe until she released it in a blast of miniature lightning bolts.
Another day, half a dozen meatheads in padded suits slammed into her and thumped her with punches and kicks. The strikes didn’t hurt. Their force sank into her, filling her muscles with sizzling force, and that hurt. Then the pressure exploded, and she tossed them away like so many scarecrows stuffed with straw.
After each session, Lopez gave the big mirror a thumbs-up and left without so much as a “nice torturing you, Winter.”
Then Lucy DeCraig. Always Lucy entering the room, asking, “You okay, sis?”
Mail call was bittersweet. Scarlett loved receiving letters from home, but the guards kept confiscating stuff. When Mom sent cookies, Scarlett got only the accompanying letter. When Ginny sent a flattened joint inside three pages of Bukowski poems, Scarlett received “hours,” which amounted to marching back and forth in the gym alongside other petty offenders. One night, three female guards pulled Scarlett into their office and held up a picture of Nick lying naked on a shag carpet. A leering guard pocketed the photo and said, “No pornographic material allowed.” Scarlett earned more hours for telling the guard where she could stick the photograph.