Recoil

by Joanne Macgregor

  His lips were firm and warm and opened up a current of energy which both electrified me and welded me to him. His mouth, when he opened it against mine, was like a channel into the heart of him. He tasted of coffee and, at the corner of his mouth, minty toothpaste. His hands moved down from my face, over my back, along my waist and down to my butt as he hugged me tight against him. I was icy, burning, desperate to breathe, determined not to pull my mouth off his. I wanted to melt into him, to stay there forever. My hands crept up to touch his jaw, his temples, the silver ring through the dark brow. His body shuddered against mine.

  When finally we came up for air, I was different, changed. This was something else I’d never known, hadn’t even suspected.

  Quinn looked like he had been rocked too.

  “Faith!” he said, his voice deeper, rougher than usual.

  “Who’s Faith?”

  “It’s Irish for wow. Freaking wow!”

  I grinned. “Good thing we’ve been working on our aerobic fitness.” My voice was high and breathy.

  “Never reckoned I’d be grateful for the training,” he said, lowering his head to mine again.

  And while I allowed my fingers to explore his thick hair, his muscled arms and shoulders, we tested our aerobic capacity for a good while longer.

  Chapter 13

  Clocked

  The next morning, before breakfast, Quinn knocked at my door.

  “I wanted to give you this.” He handed me a small jewelry box.

  “Are you proposing?” I teased, and was delighted to see I’d succeeded in making him blush for once.

  “Nah, no diamonds. But those” — he gestured to the box — “come in pairs, and I wanted you to have the other one.”

  Inside the little box was a silver earring, the mate of the one threaded through Quinn’s brow. My eyes filled.

  “It was getting a bit lonely, all by itself in the box.” When I didn’t respond, he continued uncertainly. “But you only have to wear it if, you know, you like.”

  “I like.”

  He grinned. I threaded the hoop through my right ear, and as I closed the clasp, it felt like I was setting the seal on us. We, too, were a pair.

  I only wished my shooting was going as well as our relationship, because even with weeks of practice, I hadn’t gotten much better at shooting live targets. Everyone in the unit had their own theory about why I could hit the bull’s eye in a paper target at a thousand yards, but couldn’t reliably take down a rat at a quarter that distance.

  “You obviously don’t want to hit them, and your subconscious sabotages your shots,” said Leya.

  “Maybe you want to leave here and go home,” suggested Tae-Hyun.

  “No way,” I said.

  “It’s because you’re fantasizing about me naked when you should be focused on the rat,” said Bruce.

  “Even less way!”

  “Guilt,” said Cameron.

  “You’re overthinking it, you’re jinxing it,” said Mitch.

  “Funny one, Mitch,” I said, not smiling.

  “Stop thinking about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, and if it’s right or wrong. Just do it, man,” he said.

  Sarge’s opinion? “You need to take a teaspoon of cement and harden the hell up, soldier!”

  “I can hack it,” I said. If I told myself that often enough, it might become true.

  I was super fit from the daily runs and the workouts on cross-trainers and rowing machines, and way stronger from weight-lifting and resistance-training than I had been before I came here. But I couldn’t figure out why we had to be so fit and so strong. A lot of the kids at ASTA had weight to lose — a result of living lives indoors in front of PC screens, I guessed — and all the divisions, black, blue, green, red and orange, had a daily physical exercise regime. But none of the other instructors pushed their cadets as hard as Sarge pushed us.

  “You need to be prepared for anything. A high-caliber weapon system can top twelve kilograms — that’s pushing thirty pounds including scope and ammunition, and not including the other equipment you might have to lug around, such as range-finders, spare magazines, specialized optics, GPS and comms equipment, hydration-packs, and your sidearm.”

  He never said this kind of thing in the gymnasium, of course, where cadets from other divisions might be running past on the track, or lifting weights on the equipment, or practicing fighting skills on the nearby mats. He was absolutely vigilant about keeping the work of our division secret until the day we all “graduated” from basic training. In our very first lecture, on our very first day, he had told us The Code — a set of rules that would govern our unit. Top of these was the code of silence. Under no circumstance were we to talk about our training with anyone outside of our unit, and we were not to ask cadets from other divisions about their training either. In fact, Sarge strongly discouraged us from what he called “fraternizing” with the others.

  “If you socialize with each other only, you’ll build a stronger team and won’t be tempted to venture into classified information with unauthorizeds. Your fellow squad members are your new family: squad before blood.”

  I ignored this and spent every spare moment in Quinn’s company. Because we had very little downtime, I made the most of mealtimes by sitting with him in the cafeteria.

  Bruce scowled whenever he noticed me with Quinn, and often joined us, uninvited, at one of the steel tables where we ate our meals. He had set himself up as some sort of chaperone, guarding me to check I wasn’t too free with either my words or my affections.

  I wondered, sometimes, whether he reported back on us to Sarge, because Sarge’s word was both law and gospel to Bruce. His every other sentence started with, “Sarge says,” or “According to Sarge,” or ended with, “… but I’ll check with Sarge.”

  The first time he saw me eating dinner alone with Quinn, he came over and demanded to know what we were talking about. Perhaps he was worried that I was telling Quinn about the day’s events. We’d spent that Sunday morning lying on our bellies on the ground, sopping wet and muddy from the hard rain, lined up in a row on the outdoor shooting range. We were working on our high-precision shooting — using heavier caliber bolt-action rifles stabilized on bipods and sandbags, shooting at cardboard targets a full kilometer away on the other side of a shallow, bushy gulley. Apart from the distance, and the rain which obscured our vision, a cross-wind complicated the shot.

  Even worse, Roberta Roth had come out to watch us. Having her perched beside Sarge, the scalloped arcs of her umbrella like the dripping wings of great black crow, only added to the pressure. From time to time, they would lean in close to discuss something — probably us cadets, from the way their gazes latched onto each of us in turn.

  “Right, cease fire!” said Sarge after we were all drenched and covered in mud. “Let’s have some new tangos.”

  He gave the command over the radio to Juan, who was setting up the targets at the far end of the range.

  “Earplugs out and listen up. How about a little competition to make this interesting, my piggies?”

  He often called us pigs and had once explained, “That stands for Professional Instructed Gunmen — and gunwomen, princess, let us not forget the women! Once you graduate, you’ll officially be HOGs.”

  “What’s that stand for?” I’d asked.

  “Hunters of gunmen.”

  “But we’ll be shooting rats,” I pointed out.

  “I guess I’ll have to call you HORs, then,” said Sarge, and Bruce and Tae-Hyun had nearly bust a gut laughing.

  Now he smoothed his moustache, staring at each of us in turn.

  “Right, piglets, you each get three shots. Cadet with the tightest grouping on his target gets the afternoon off. Cadet with the widest cluster gets an extra two hours of PT, with an emphasis on upper-body strength training. I know how much you love that, Goldilocks.”

  I didn’t know whether I was more motivated by the chance of spending a whole afternoon wi
th Quinn, or by the fear of another two hours of torture, but I was determined to win. I might not be able to bench-press my own weight, but I could shoot straight. My waterlogged jumpsuit was weighing me down, though, and restricting my movements, so I unzipped the top, rolled it down and tied the arms around my waist. I was soaked to the skin, and my white undershirt may have been transparent, because Bruce goggled at my chest as though I was a contestant in a wet t-shirt contest. I guess he was still distracted when we received the command to fire, because his first shot went wide. He cursed, refocused and was better pleased with his next two shots.

  I was pleased with all three of mine.

  “You call this good shooting, boy?” Sarge said to Bruce, when we’d hiked across to inspect our targets, envious of Roth, who returned to the comfort of the compound. “My grandmother can shoot better’n this, with her eyes closed!”

  Bruce’s face darkened in an angry flush as Sarge continued, “I would say you shoot like a girl” — Sarge often made sexist comments like this — “only the girl has shot better’n you.”

  “No she hasn’t, look! She only hit her target with two rounds. One of them clean missed the target.”

  “Look closer. All of you, come look.”

  We all clustered around my target. From close up, it was easy for them to see what I already knew. My second shot had passed through the hole made by the first, just nibbling off an extra crescent of paper on the edge of the perforation.

  “Snake-eyes!” Sarge pointed at the double hole. “That’s how it’s done, son.”

  In disbelief, Bruce ripped the paper target off its backing and peered up close at the target board, checking the holes that matched the target shots. Then, using a long blade on the multi-tool he always wore on his belt, he prized my rounds — both of them — from the hole and cursed again.

  “Good shooting, Blue. You’re dismissed, soldier. Enjoy the rest of your day. Bruce, Fiona will meet you at the track at 14h00 sharp. Embrace the pain, son. Because pain is … ? What is pain, piglets?”

  “Pain is good, Sarge!” we all shouted back.

  That night, when Bruce came over to where Quinn and I sat eating and chatting, he still looked mightily pissed. And exhausted.

  “What are you talking about, Blue? Telling him how much better you are than me?”

  “I’m not much better than you, Bruce,” I said. “And I won’t be the one to break the code.”

  Bruce looked only marginally mollified, but Quinn sat back and smiled, seemingly suddenly very relaxed, as if he’d heard something that pleased him.

  “Are you better than him?” he asked, as soon as Bruce stomped off.

  I hesitated, not wanting to appear big-headed. “Mostly,” I said.

  “Good. I don’t like him. I hope you beat him every chance you get. Plus, I have a real soft spot for intelligent wonder-wenches!”

  I was too glad that he considered me intelligent to wonder why he did. If anyone in our unit had the super-smarts, it was Leya. She had, she said, already registered for a college course in Political Science, and she loved nothing better than a good debate about immigration or civil liberties, or canvassing everyone’s opinion on the best way to wage war against the plague. She, too, often joined us at mealtimes. And wherever Leya went, Cameron usually followed silently behind, though he didn’t add more than a word or two to the discussions.

  “You know,” said Quinn one Friday afternoon as we finished our lunch, “I can’t say I like this.”

  He tapped the computer printout on the table in front of him. Every Friday, each cadet was issued with a report on their “physical parameters”. It was an itemized list and nutritional analysis of everything we’d eaten in the previous seven days, a log of our time spent in the gymnasium, results of any exercise assessments we’d been put through (testing strength, endurance, aerobic capacity and flexibility), our pulse-oximetry, blood glucose and blood pressure scores, plus our weight and fat-to-muscle ratios, as taken before dinner every Thursday evening.

  “I’m surprised they don’t measure and analyze our output at the toilet.”

  “You don’t think it’s a good thing that they keep tabs on our health and fitness?” asked Leya.

  “I simply don’t think it’s necessary that they note our every input and output,” said Quinn. “Or that they know our every movement — which they do, thanks to those” — he cast a dark glance at the nearest fisheye surveillance camera — “and these.” He flicked a finger against the steel ID bracelet encircling his left wrist.

  “You think they monitor everywhere we go?” I found it hard to believe that.

  “Well, obviously we get clocked going into and coming out of the gymnasium.” Quinn pointed at the logged times on his report. “What’s to say they aren’t logging all our other movements?”

  “Paranoid much?” said Leya.

  “If you haven’t done anything wrong, then you shouldn’t have anything to hide,” said Bruce, taking an uneaten half of a roll off my tray, wiping it in the gravy on my plate, and shoving it in his mouth.

  If Robin had done that to me, he would have earned an elbow in the ribs, but I still wasn’t sure enough of my way around people to feel confident doing it to Bruce. Besides, my elbow would probably bounce right off those bulky muscles.

  “You’re not paranoid if they are out to get you,” said Sofia Medina, a pretty and petite girl from Quinn’s unit, who occasionally joined him at our table. She had dark hair and soft brown eyes made exotic by intricate henna patterns ornamenting the skin on her cheekbones and temples. She looked like she was wearing the sheerest of filigreed masquerade masks.

  Cameron made a soft noise which might have been a laugh.

  “Who are ‘they’, and why would they be out to get you?” asked Leya. She was peeling an orange and breaking it into segments.

  “You don’t think that we’ve gone overboard with the restrictions and government control in the last few years?” said Quinn. “We’ve lost our privacy, censored our media, choked the free flow of people and ideas, had our civil liberties steadily eroded — it’s banjaxed!”

  “Sounds like you’re a member of the Civil Libs,” said Leya, offering Quinn an orange segment.

  “Well, I wouldn’t go that far,” said Quinn, shaking his head and looking like he regretted saying so much. “But they do make some good points.”

  I wasn’t sure what I believed. I’d never thought deeply about the politics of the plague, but now that Quinn had pointed it out, I realized how closely we were monitored inside the Academy, and how tightly we were controlled outside of it. Until this moment, I’d felt much less restricted here than at home. I’d met so many new people, learned so many new things and been so focused on the goal of getting out, that I had felt much freer. But I was probably even more closely watched here than under my mother’s anxious eyes.

  “I think the Civil Libs are full of crap,” said Bruce. “And if you agree with them, then so are you.”

  “I think my brother would agree with you, Quinn,” I said, wanting to give him some support.

  “Would he?” said Leya.

  I nodded. “My mother wouldn’t though. She’s completely obsessed with the virus and keeping us safe. She would say losing some privacy and freedom in exchange for gaining security is a good trade.”

  “Your mother is right. Safe is a darn sight better than sorry,” said Bruce, licking the last shine of gravy off his fingers. “I agree with Sarge. He says those Civil Libs are a bunch of pansy-assed, rat-loving, terrorist-protecting traitors!”

  “Bit of a sweeping statement, don’t you think?” said Sofia.

  Quinn was pinching his lips together, as if to stop himself giving Bruce a piece of his mind.

  “Sarge says, one of these days those spineless maggots are going down. Ever since the plague began, this nation has been stronger and more united, we’re better for it.”

  “What?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

  “Not
the deaths and stuff — like, obviously that’s majorly bad. I mean that before, whatever the one side of the political field said, the other side disagreed with on principle. And vice versa. We couldn’t get anything done. We were an easy target, man. A nation divided.” Mitch nodded along to Bruce’s rant. “But now we’re all focused on the same thing. Nothing unites a nation like a common foe, that’s what —”

  “— Sarge says!” Leya and I finished for him.

  “What do you think?” I asked Leya.

  She shrugged and looked at Quinn then back down at her own report. “I think I need to spend some more time doing weight training if I ever hope to stop Cameron whooping my ass at arm-wrestling.”

  Cameron’ face went pink, and the rest of us let the topic slide, though from the way Quinn ran a finger under his collar, he was still bugged by the conversation.

  I could see his point. It was not only our weekly physical measures that struck me as excessive. Between theoretical lectures and practical exercises in observation, camouflage, observation skills and memory training, stalking, weapons care and sharpshooting, we got way more training than could be strictly necessary to take out the odd infected rat.

  My theory was that Sarge thought he had something to prove. It turned out that our black unit was the newly established division that Roberta Roth had been speaking about in her welcome speech, and Sarge was no doubt determined that his new unit be the best, fastest, strongest and most highly trained of all the divisions. Either that, or the population had been protected from the full truth about the plague rats. From the way we were being trained — as if for a full-out war — I figured the problem was way worse than we knew.

  Part Three

  Chapter 14

  The Choice

  The Jinx in the mirror looked very different from the Jinx who had started boot camp here at the Academy six weeks ago.

  I was leaner, my muscles more defined, and multicolored bruises marked my arms and legs and hips. There were calluses on my fingers and palms from constantly holding, loading and firing weapons, and I held myself differently — straighter and more alert, as if I was expecting something and was ready for it. My lips looked swollen. Of course, that was a consequence of Quinn and my continued exercises in aerobic capacity rather than a function of the daily drills in the vast gymnasium or shooting practice out in the woods surrounding the compound.