by Karen Bao
After waving good-bye, I amble out of the Medical quarters, wondering what in the universe he’s doing there—poking around, maybe, or practicing his Medical skills. Most likely, he’s exercising even more, outworking people like Jupiter in order to outplace them in the end.
I wish he wouldn’t, because he’s crossing into the realm of the inhuman. It would be a relief if he revealed his physical limits—providing he has any.
This week, the trainees exercise for no more than two hours a day. We spend the rest of the time sitting on our behinds learning about the Militia’s arsenal of weapons. The most devastating, hydrogen bombs and intricate bioweapons, require large groups to coordinate and deploy; only top-ranking officers go near them, and only Base I has them. The Bases have never had occasion to use one, so we’re not even sure how much damage they can do. Another weapon, the Gamma gun, generates rays that cause radiation sickness and death within a day. We’ve never used that one either.
More standard arms include the popular laser blasters: sleek, transparent weapons small enough for a soldier to carry on a utility belt. They’re not difficult to aim and almost never need recharging, so like generations of trainees before us, we affectionately call them “Lazies.” The manual warns us in red letters of their one weakness: SHOOTING AT A REFLECTIVE SURFACE MIGHT CAUSE BACKFIRE. Wasn’t that obvious, by the nature of the laser mechanism? I suppose some unfortunate trainees who didn’t read the manual or forgot basic laws of optics fired at glass or steel and blinded themselves—perhaps projectile weapons make better arms for people like them.
To guard against metal Earthbound bullets and the electromagnetic waves from the lasers, we carry heavy ballistic shields to supplement a special type of body armor. But despite the wealth of technologically advanced arms at our disposal, the training dome is devoid of them on the first day of weapons instruction.
“We’re going to start with this.” Yinha draws a small, straight knife from her boot, and the trainees groan. “Unlike our other weapons, the dagger has been around since Earthbound prehistory. It’s an excellent tool for building reflexes. And in actual fighting, it’s useful as a backup in case a Lazy runs out of power. Good for close combat. You can also throw it. And if you look at your boots, they have cool little pockets for storage.”
The instructors pass out standard daggers to all of us—silver, symmetrical, made of the lightest, strongest polymers available. The weapon in my hand is the size and shape of my old trimming knife—but I won’t be pruning plants with this.
“Partner up with someone you trust. We’re going to study basic form. To further your training, I’m also going to deactivate some of the grav-mags, so get ready for moon-grav. Am I understood? Cool.”
Nash grabs my hand. The gravity settings in the training center shift until I feel as light as I used to in the greenhouses. My eyes close; I can almost smell the soil and the unripe-fruit scent of my best friend. Mom would be waiting for us at home with a small but intricate dinner, listening to Anka’s chatter while prompting Cygnus to look up from his trigonometry homework and talk about his day at Primary. . . .
No. Until she leaves Medical, she can’t be more than a muddle of wonderful memories.
We arrange ourselves two by two in a line. Wes picks the fourth-place trainee, Orion, and twirls his dagger around his forefinger while he waits for instructions. Instinct makes me want to tell him to stop lest he slice his hand open, but—he’s Wes. He knows what he’s doing.
We ease into thrusts, strokes, and parries. With a certain degree of focus, I find a rhythm in using the dagger and a grace I never felt in the greenhouses, where every cut, precise to the millimeter, met with arboreal resistance. Now, with no plant fibers in the way, I feel as if this weapon were designed specifically for my use—it’s small, silver, and silent, exactly like me.
Not everyone experiences the same affinity.
“This thing is useless,” Nash grumbles as she parries at an angle twenty degrees too far clockwise. “And the moon-grav doesn’t make it any better.”
I disagree. The ease of the blade, along with decreased gravity and Wes’s nightly help with hand-to-hand sparring, makes this feel like dancing. I jump over Nash’s head multiple times and even manage to do a forward roll in midair.
“Hey, don’t kill me.” Nash retreats with a distressed expression.
I freeze.
“Where’d you learn to be so good at this?”
Shrug.
“Okay. How about I attack, you parry. That way I won’t end up in the Medical quarters again.”
We chuckle as she makes a haphazard slash in my direction.
“I’m not actually going to use this undersized knife in the field. Right now, it’s for the giggles—hey, Stripes, check that out!” Nash points over my shoulder.
Orion is attacking Wes with perfect form, his right arm elegantly parting the air. Both boys laugh as Wes evades every stroke, spinning on his toes or swinging his dagger with a series of flourishes to block Orion’s. Every now and then, he jumps and twists in midair, folding and unfolding his limbs like the petals of a black morning glory. When Orion catches a break, which is rare, he fans himself with his thin shirt, exposing a well-defined chest that I’m sure distracts Nash a good deal.
She whistles crudely at them.
While Orion busies himself winking at her, Wes taps his flat abdomen with the equally flat side of the dagger. “Gotcha.”
Orion snarls playfully, and the acrobatics resume.
When I find the lower half of my face abnormally stretched, I realize I’ve been grinning at the spectacle of grace. I don’t notice the shadow sprinting closer to them—not until a sliver of silver meets a plane of black, and Wes staggers, clutching his right arm to his chest. Rivulets of red flow between his fingers.
That same red coats the dagger in the hand of Jupiter, who’s slowing from his mad dash.
“Everybody stop!” Yinha’s amplified voice shouts.
My breakfast churns in my stomach, threatening to rise into my esophagus. Wes’s blood, like burgundy poison, pools on the floor.
“Jupiter, do not spar with anyone other than your partner.”
“It was totally an accident!” insists Callisto, threading her arm through his. But no one believes her. Jupiter has hit a bloody new low.
“Orion, please escort Wezn to the Medical quarters.” Yinha’s voice crackles menacingly. “Jupiter, you have earned a ten-point deduction from your total score. Everyone can resume sparring now.”
No one does.
Jupiter grunts; the brutish sound echoes through the silent dome. He should show more appreciation, considering that Yinha should have suspended him from Militia for attacking another trainee without permission; if she did, he’d go to Penitentiary, fail to secure a Specialization, and head straight to Shelter. There must be a reason why she didn’t—perhaps he’s demonstrated too much potential for Defense to give him up, or he’s bribed her in some way. “A Sputnik can always set you straight,” Mom often muttered while typing news reports.
Orion slings his arm around Wes even though Wes looks stable, albeit pale. I shudder out of revulsion and confusion as the boys limp between Nash and me, Wes staring directly into my face.
His irises have never looked more like mercury.
12
EVERYONE GIVES JUPITER A WIDE BERTH after the incident, but we cluster around Wes as if he’s a magnet pulling at the trace metals in our blood. When I visit him in the Medical quarters that night, a mostly female crowd surrounds his cot. I only manage to slip him a smile before curfew.
Otherwise, training continues as usual. We practice aiming Lazies and wielding ballistic shields. The shields are deadweight heavy and give me aching muscles by the end of each session, but I stubbornly run my laps around the Medical quarters every night until curfew. The beating of my feet clears my mind.
I observe myself in mirrors when I practice knife throwing, aiming at various points in my surroundings and
always checking my form. After a few disastrous attempts, it gets better. Late at night, I run calculations in my head, trying to determine a dagger’s spinning motion, to picture the graph of the blade’s angle to the ground oscillating in a sine wave. The launch angle needs to counteract the parabolic path caused by gravity, so during evaluations and such, I’ll have to account for different grav-mag settings. With practice, instinct rather than computation guides the daggers where I want them.
After a few days, Wes resumes training and shows up in the Medical quarters to exercise. I touch his left bicep with a questioning expression.
“I feel a lot better,” he answers, and I drop my suddenly graceless hand. “They erased what Jupiter did to my arm. I can prove it to you right this second.” He slips into fighting stance, saying, “Have at you, Theta!”
Okay.
I trade blows with Wes for ten whole minutes, according to the timer on my handscreen, and land a few punches and kicks before he fells me. Although I’m still pathetic compared to him, we’re more evenly matched than before.
“I might actually be afraid of you,” he admits. “Want to take a break? Let’s go for a run. I found something I think you’d like to see.”
He leads me off, covering the circular perimeter of every floor before sprinting up a flight of stairs. We repeat this pattern seven times before we reach the top of the tower. Finally, he stands still. I try not to breathe too loudly. It would disturb the quiet, which is punctuated only by the whirring of disused medical equipment.
Side by side, we tiptoe into a small room, presumably a single-patient facility.
“Now look up.”
Through the small glass window in the ceiling, I see Cancer twinkling far, far away. I never knew the Medical quarters had real windows on the top floor, but I’m glad Wes did. This is my first glimpse of the sky in weeks. I never thought I’d miss it, but now I long to grab every cubic centimeter of space’s murky blackness and clutch it to my chest. I mustn’t shift my eyes from the stars to anything else, because if I do, maybe some will shoot away so fast that I won’t find them again. It’s a silly thought—the universe isn’t expanding quite that quickly—but there are thousands of light-years from their location to ours, so the way I see them, as they were ages ago, could be different from what they have become. Just as Cygnus and Anka—and Mom—may have changed from the way I see them in my mind.
Wes sits down on the cot and pats a spot nearby. I take it, making sure to stay at least half a meter away. Umbriel would chastise me if he were here—especially if he saw Wes sitting on his handscreen, finally not fidgeting. I’ve never had a blocked-handscreen conversation with anyone outside my family or Umbriel’s. Nevertheless, I slide my hand underneath the seat of my pants out of reciprocal courtesy.
“In my old home, we could see the entire sky from an observatory.”
How beautiful the sight must be. Base I, I’ve heard, has more windows than any of the other five. It isn’t any wealthier, but it’s less efficiently constructed because when our ancestors built it, they hadn’t yet found their moon legs, and they sacrificed insulation and shielding for aesthetics.
The greenhouses are the only buildings in Base IV with full glass ceilings. How lucky I was to see stars at all.
Willing my voice not to crack, I speak slowly. “I used to lie on the greenhouse floors with my best friend and pretend I was falling into the stars.”
Upon hearing a complete sentence leave my lips, Wes gawks at me. The Earth’s reflection creates an arc of sapphire across his eyeballs. I smile—he can be funny too.
“When you do speak, Phaet, you do it so . . . imaginatively. Like you can see the words take shape, and you pick only the most interesting combinations to say out loud. Is that what you spend your quiet time doing, writing pretty things in your head?”
I’m liberal with smiles today. I give Wes another.
Wes leans back on his hands and contemplates the circle of sky in the ceiling, a serene expression passing over his face. Tapping noises, tiny meteorites striking the carbon-reinforced glass, reach our ears. On the Moon, our only precipitation is “grit-rain,” a phenomenon that leaves small dents on the exterior of all our buildings. Calling someone a “piece of grit” is a routine insult.
“Your best friend—would she be angry with me for putting that bruise on your cheek?”
“He probably would.” Umbriel might nick surgical scissors and mow down Wes’s shiny hair during the night.
“A bit protective, no?” Wes chuckles, expelling every ache in his body instead of mere carbon dioxide. “How long have you two been friends?”
“Fifteen years.”
“Since you were born?”
Nod. Our fathers, both named Atlas, were close companions in Militia. They had their first children at nearly the same time and raised Umbriel, Ariel, and me together. Mom likes to remind us that Atlas Phi taught me the alphabet in an hour, and that Umbriel took his first steps with his hand in Atlas Theta’s.
Then Dad was sent on that botched topographic assignment. Our families kept going after that, and sometimes I wonder if going on is all we know. Shutting my eyes, I summon Umbriel from my memories, imagine him sitting here, fussing over my hair and asking how my day was. It’s sweet and painful all at once.
“Was he the tall boy in your apartment, the one with you in Shelter?”
Nod.
“That explains a lot. Is he the reason you don’t talk? Because he has spoken for you all your life?”
I jab my right forefinger at my handscreen, and then promptly resume sitting on my left hand.
“It can’t be only handscreens that keep you quiet. Look at you now—we’re sitting on ours, but I’m the only one talking. Maybe you’ve got something to hide, or maybe words scare you because they’re so permanent. Don’t you hate that you can’t ever erase what you say?”
“Not really.” I’ve never felt dislike so strong it became hate—but yes, the longevity of the spoken word in the files of the Committee’s eavesdroppers, and more so in the memory of other people, irritates me.
His fingernails dig into his palm. “Did I upset you?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Sorry.”
The more he says, the heavier the air grows. With my eyes, I trace the seams between the tiles on the floor, searching for the shortest pathway from my left foot to the doorway.
Wes doesn’t stop pushing, but in spite of his efforts, I am as inanimate and immovable as one of the tiles. “Fine, fine, forget everything I’ve said, but answer this one question: What are you so afraid of?”
He talks as if he can peel back skin and muscle and bone to see straight into my soul. I’m so uncomfortable that I could faint—I’m usually the perceptive one.
Wes bunches the fabric of his pants in his fist. “If your best friend were asking, you’d probably tell him, no? I wish I were close to someone, like you are to him. . . . What did he say about your joining up so early?”
“Umbriel said enough.” His prolonged opposition is nothing I care to repeat.
“Forgive me for what I’m about to admit. . . .”
I blink at Wes expectantly.
“I wish he’d tried harder to stop you. For physical and mental health reasons, no one should face this Militia ordeal until they’re ready, or until they absolutely must.”
I close my eyes so that he can’t see my exasperated eye roll. What useless words! I know I’m an underage trainee and constantly in danger, but there’s no way to reverse the decision that brought me here and no need to critique it.
“And there’s another line of reasoning, saying even in the worst of times, live on for life’s sake—don’t gamble it away—”
I seize his wrist, pinching two of his tendons between my thumb and middle finger.
With his left hand—now unprotected—he gestures frantically for me to cover my handscreen.
Glaring, I cross my arms and block the audio receptors.
“Hmph.”
He struggles to pick up our discussion from the point at which we dropped it. “Er, now you’ve seen why I didn’t make many friends in Primary, or in Medical. Things inevitably turn awkward when I try.”
I won’t indulge his self-deprecation. “You’re fine here. People have reasons for associating with the top trainee.”
“You too, I presume.”
“Of course.”
Wes sighs and musses his hair. It falls perfectly when he’s done. “At least you’re pleasant to spend time around.”
“The same.”
We listen to the grit-rain on the ceiling. I hug my knees to my chest and rock back and forth on my tailbone. This is like sitting with Umbriel, but quieter. Despite his physical prowess, Wes has a less commanding presence than my best friend.
“You know, even though a lot of people here pretend to ignore you, they can’t stand to see you do badly. Maybe it’s because you’re just fifteen.” He yanks the laces on his boot, finally getting nervous at talking for so long.
“Is that why you’re helping me?”
Though Wes inhales like he’s going to respond verbally, he decides against it and settles for a shrug.
After we descend the stairs and say good-bye, Wes lets me start walking to the barracks first. Unlike Nash or Umbriel, he doesn’t want to publicize his companionship with me, fragile as it is. It’s better this way.
When I arrive, Eri squeezes me hard. Her cropped hair tickles my cheek. “Where were you?”
I respond with an ambiguous facial expression and shuffle with great concentration toward my cot.
“Stripes, I also wonder where you hop off to. Every night now.” Nash matches me stride for stride. “I have a few theories. One: to Jupiter’s cot to sock him senseless. Two: off on hot dates with one of the boys. More than one of the boys? Three—”