Disorder

by Martha Adele

  Almost every kid in the room rolls their eyes at me. Every kid but Henry, who turns back to Janice to hear her answer. She smiles down at me and folds her hands. “‘Druppelen’ is what we describe as you earn what you work for. Meaning the harder you work, the more you succeed. In order to earn wages with druppelen, you have to work, while geven rewards those who work as well as those who don’t.”

  “Well, that makes sense,” I answer. “So what flaw would druppelen have?”

  Janice takes a moment to consider her answer. The expression on her face isn’t exactly a smile, but more of a mixture of amusement and disappointment. She lets out a small chuckle. “There’s always a flaw.” Janice unfolds her hands and walks back over to her desk and types something on her computer. “Whether it’s small or large. No system is perfect. Geven is supposed to keep everyone equally rich, while in reality, it keeps everyone equally poor. Druppelen is supposed to reward those who work hard, but it may only reward those who get lucky or who work hard at certain jobs. For example …” Janice pulls up a picture on the screen of a woman in a white doctor’s coat, very similar to Dr. James’s, and a woman wearing a gray jumpsuit with gloves and a trash can. Janice stands back up and holds up her little remote toward the screen. “These two women work equal hours, and both of their positions are important to life in Bergland. The difference that I am trying to point out is that our doctors and our cleaning services are on much different pay grades.”

  Janice sits back down in her desk chair and turns the screen off. The light-blue hologram flickers away, revealing the white marker board behind it covered in writing about geven and druppelen. “In Bergland, we provide food, housing, careers, hobbies, entertainment, and retirement for every citizen. But then again, we have a very involved system that makes sure everyone is following their schedules. We give people free time to do things they enjoy, and we have offices that you can go to if you want your schedule changed or adjusted. We don’t try to control your whole life. We just try to organize it.”

  The girl from earlier that answered the question without raising her hand butts in, saying, “But when we all move out of the mountain, we won’t have schedules like these, right?”

  Henry nods. “That is what we have been told, but wouldn’t continuing the schedule system help maintain order?”

  A few of the kids that were talking about Henry groan loudly at his question, but he ignores their arrogance and waits for Janice’s answer.

  Janice nods back to Henry and leans back into her chair. “Well, yes. The schedule system would help us stay organized, and we will administer schedules just as we do here. But there will be more options when we leave the mountains. We will have more career opportunities out there than we do in here. The space in Bergland is limited, meaning we have to restrict where you can go and what you can do. But outside, you will have more room to explore different places, ideas, and hobbies.”

  “Like what?” James, the boy from earlier who dozed off, sits up straight in his chair and stretches, obviously barely staying awake. “What can we do out there that we can’t do in here?”

  The obnoxious kids beside me all murmur something under their breaths to one another. I can’t make out what it is, but Janice takes notice of their disruptions. She stares them down until they stop talking. It takes them a few moments to notice, but when they do, they all face forward and wait for her to continue.

  “In the mountain,” Janice answers after everyone stops talking, “we control all of the farming space. Out there, you can own your own farms and do what you want with them and sell what you want from them. That’s just one example. Another would be reporting. We don’t have any reporters in Bergland other than the ones who do the news every now and then, and even then, they are just reading a script.”

  “Why did you guys choose the mountains if you don’t have much room?” I ask. Again, every kid in the room other than Henry looks to me with surprise, as if it was a miracle that I spoke, as if it was amazing that I could even come up with a question like that.

  “Bergland has always been a temporary idea. Never have we planned on staying here forever.” Janice rises from her chair and walks to the other side of the room. She points to a picture she has framed of people working on an old elevator in a stone-covered shaft. This elevator isn’t one that is covered all the way with metal doors like the ones now, but only little gates that come up to the man’s waist.

  “His name was Jackson Renner,” Janice tells us, “the man who helped save what was left of the Diligent. He was a miner before all of the Diligent’s hidden bunkers were bombed. When the bombing started, he gathered his mining team, and they managed to help a little under three thousand people get to safety from many different Diligent bunkers and cities. Though they saved many, we lost hundreds of thousands. Renner and his team joined forces with all of the builders and engineers they saved to build Bergland. We have never stopped their task of adding on to Bergland and improving upon the structures. Their determination to work with what they could turned this mountain into what it is today.”

  “What happened to the hundreds of thousands?” Logan asks. The girls sitting behind me and to my right all seem shocked that he asked, but more pleasantly surprised than they did when I asked. “Did they all die?”

  “No,” Janice plainly states as she moves away from the picture and leans against the marker board. “Many of them, yes, but a good portion of them were taken hostage into Bestellen. Those who refused to conform and never speak of Diligent ways again were executed or tortured for answers. Others conformed to save their own skin, for which I don’t blame them. I believe they are the ones responsible for spreading the word of the Diligent in a land where your speech is greatly restricted. I have always wondered if they chose to conform in order to tell others about their beliefs or if they actually complied with the commands of their new government.”

  One of the rude boys in the middle of the room snorts and leans back into his chair. “I bet they only did that so that they wouldn’t be forced to stay in a mountain for the rest of their lives.” His theory earns chuckles from all of his obnoxious followers.

  Janice rolls her eyes at his comment. “I won’t stop you from making assumptions, especially when you already know they aren’t true.” She looks back to Logan, Mavis, and me with an expression that says “Don’t listen to him. His arrogance will be his downfall.”

  The class mutters to one another, giving Mavis an in to say something without feeling the pressure of everyone listening. She meets Janice’s eyes and quietly asks, “Will we ever get to go outside again?”

  Janice looks around the class to all the people talking among themselves. She moves past them to her desk chair and scoots it over beside Mavis, Logan, and me. “We have very few people who are allowed to go outside right now, and those people are really only our pilots and our engineers that fix things like wind turbines. We can only let those people go outside for very small amounts of time to protect them as well as us.”

  Logan shakes his head and looks from Henry, who is listening intently, to Janice. “Are we ever going to be able to go outside again?”

  Janice takes a moment to think before she answers. “Hmm … 100 percent honestly? The best chance we have to be able to go outside again as we please rests in us winning this war.” She leans in toward us three and Henry. “And between us, Bergland will be launching full attack very soon.”

  Henry, beside Logan, sniffles and pushes his glasses back up his face. “Are we finally getting sick of playing this game of back and forth?”

  Janice nods to him and smiles. “It’s time for a revolution.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Logan

  The sound of one of the hand weights clanking against the others snaps me back into listening to John drone. “After those, we do sprints until I say stop. Some days are longer than others.” John turns from the track back to me. �
�Any questions?”

  “No, sir.” I look around to see around fifteen to twenty men. Every man looks to be built of pure muscle. Some are lean, while some are large. But there is one thing I know for a fact: I am the weakest one in the room.

  “Good. John nods to me with a serious expression on his face. “Follow me.” Though John’s expression is serious and I should be focusing on my current surroundings, I can’t. All I can see is John looking at Mavis the way he did earlier. All I can see is his smug face as he fiddles with his food and looks Mavis up and down.

  I try to forget it as we walk around the corner of the room to a large obstacle course, similar to the one that was in the first training room Janice showed us. This course is larger, faster, and longer than the original course I was shown.

  I watch as one of the leaner men soars through the course with ease. He dodges the swinging posts, jumps over and ducks under the balls being launched at him from afar, and jumps from ledge to ledge. The lean man is followed by a slightly taller and thicker one. The larger man goes through the course a bit slower. He gets bumped by one of the swinging posts but stays on his feet. He trips over one of the rolling bars but manages to get back up on his feet. The large man goes running, trying to make it through the ball portion, but gets hit twice and goes flying off the risen course. The man lands on the blue foam ground and gets spit out just like the kids from the other course.

  The lean man walks off the end of the course and grabs a water bottle and a rag. He wipes his hands off and glances over to me. His short brown buzz cut matches John’s, but his stance doesn’t. His stance is somehow much less offensive than John’s. The man sees that I’m watching him. He nods to me and takes a few gulps of water.

  I nod back.

  John walks past the course with his hands folded behind his back. “These courses are here to help you with your stamina, speed, and reflexes. These are not here to show you what it will be like to fight. They are only here to help you get stronger.” The lean man in the corner stares at me for a moment before disappearing into the rest of the room. John continues to walk as I follow. We make it down the open room to a set of double doors.

  John swings the doors open and reveals another room, which is much smaller. It has a wall of guns, suits, and helmets with face covers on one side and a man sitting at a steel desk in front of a wall of screens on the other side. Each screen shows a different area of what looks like video footage of a flat arena with a few walls here and there. Everything in the arena is the same bland brown color other than the people. In the footage, there are a bunch of men in black suits running around. A few of them are leaning against the walls, rolling, ducking, covering, and so much more. They are all shooting at things that aren’t even there and acting as if they are in a real war, a real battle.

  I point at the screens and turn to John. “What are they doing?”

  The man at the desk turns around to look at John, who gives him a subtle nod. The man scoots his chair forward and presses a button on the desk that lights the whole desk up with holographic buttons that he begins pressing rapidly with no real pattern. Within seconds, every screen changes into the same image, but there is no more brown. The brown walls are now buildings, rubble, and trees. The ground’s plain and flat appearance has changed into grass, broken roads, and water. The atmosphere in each screen is that of a real battle.

  “This is what they see when they put those helmets on.” John steps forward. One of the men in the top-right screen gets shot by an official and flies backward. He lands on the ground, holding his right shoulder. “This is our simulation room where we train our soldiers for battle. We change the room into what our actual targets look like so they are prepared for what is coming. We also change it into random maps to keep them prepared for any unexpected changes.”

  Two of the other men in the top-right screen run out to grab the man who had been shot. They each grab his underarms and drag him back behind a building. The injured man holds his shoulder and scoots up against the building.

  The man at the desk in front of us clicks a few buttons. “The suit they put on simulates the pain of a real bullet wound or whatever hits them. The pain will fade within a minute, so he will be fine. No real damage is done.”

  “So the Taai train in this as well as the other soldiers?” I ask.

  John nods. “You won’t be doing this today. Don’t worry.”

  We watch the men on the screens throw grenades, duck and cover, run into and up buildings, try to get citizens out of certain areas, and do hand-to-hand combat at certain points. They do everything imaginable in this simulation, which leads me to ask John, “What exactly is the difference between the Taai and the other soldiers?”

  John ushers me over to the set of double doors, and we begin walking back out to the main area by the track course. “The Taai is our elite military group that we send to get citizens away from certain areas, to sabotage defense buildings, to lure large groups of officials to one area and take care of them, and many other special assignments that our regular soldiers can’t do.”

  I look around to see a few men running around the track and a few men lifting weights, all looking at John and me. “Have any of the Taai gone on any actual missions yet?”

  John shakes his head, and we continue to walk. “Not yet. We are holding off until we have our plan perfected. Right now, it looks like it won’t be much longer before we unleash full-on ground and air warfare.” He looks out to the obstacle course as another man runs through it, getting clobbered by the shooting balls. “And once we do that, there is no going back.”

  “Well”—I feel the words fall out of my mouth without any effort—“obviously.”

  As soon as the words fall out, I lower my head. I know that I shouldn’t have said that, but it just slipped out.

  John cocks his head at me and scoffs. “Well then.” John turns to the rest of the room and barks out, “Attention!”

  All of the men in the room come marching over and line up side by side. I look around, then back to John, who is staring past me to the lined-up men.

  “Soldiers.” John folds his hands behind his back. “It seems Forge, our new recruit, wants to show us how to do the course.” He turns back to me and looks me in the eye, challenging me. Challenging me to speak up or to challenge him back, but I don’t. John makes my blood boil just by looking at him, but I won’t have him know that. I won’t let him know he gets under my skin.

  I walk past him, keeping a straight face, right up to the beginning of the course. I step onto the red plate and wait for the course to begin. The silence of the other soldiers, mixed with the snickering from a few of them, makes the pressure rise. I look over my shoulder to see the guys on the end of the line snickering and muttering things between each other. Beside the snickering boys, toward the center of the line, is the lean boy who had run through the course flawlessly. This boy stares at me for a moment before giving me a nod.

  A whirring noise begins as the red plate I stand on lifts me into the air. After rising about ten feet, I hop onto the platform with the large swinging poles. I dodge left, right, right, left, lunge forward, and pause. I make it through the first set of obstacles with no impact from the poles. The adrenaline pumps through me as I know I have to finish this course to earn their respect. I can hear and feel my heartbeat in my head as I approach the swinging rings that are just like the monkey bars back in the other course. I wipe the sweat off my hands and jump up to catch one of the rings above me before I swing away from the ledge, only to have the chain holding it up give out.

  As you grab each ring, the chain it is attached to gives out a random amount, meaning you have to get across the rings quickly before they lower you too much to the point you can’t get back up.

  I roll my neck and my shoulders back and jump into action. I swing from ring to ring to ring, only allowing each one to give out a few inches. I make i
t to the end of the rings within seconds and am faced with the next set of obstacles. The firing balls.

  I look at the wall that the balls come out of to find a few small cylinders all aimed at me. I look down to see a yellow line marking where this obstacle begins. As soon as I step across the line, the balls start firing rapidly. Over and over. I step back behind the line to see if I can get them to stop firing, but they don’t.

  Realizing that there is no way out of this other than to run across and get to the other side, I take off. I duck, I jump, I freeze, I dodge. I make it halfway across the ledge, almost to the end, when one of the balls shoots out and hits me in the head full force.

  The dense ball catches me at an angle that throws me off the ledge, and I land on the foam floor that swallows me up as I hit the ground. When the floor resumes its hard state, I sit up and look back to the line of Taai. The boys on the end of the line chuckle at my failure, while the lean boy that nodded to me earlier does nothing but looks to me with disappointment.

  I rise to my feet and touch my temple, where the ball had hit. I am definitely going to have a bruise there tomorrow, but the pain I feel is nowhere near as irritating as the fact that John made me do that in front of everyone. I begin walking back toward John when one of the larger boys on the end chuckle a little too loud.

  “Hey!” John roars. “What’s so funny?”

  The large kid with the zigzag pattern shaved into the side of his head and his pals on the end stop chuckling, but they have trouble wiping off the smirks on their faces. I can’t help but clench my fist while I try to keep from forcibly blinking. I clench once. Twice. Three times.

  “Oh, you must think it’s funny that Forge here made it farther in this course on his first try than any of you did on your first ten tries.” John lets out a little sarcastic chuckle as the smirks on the boys faces fall. “Yeah, that is pretty funny.”