by Jesse Gordon
Monica stared hard at the tabletop. “Okay. I get it. I’m in deep trouble.”
“I’m simply laying out the facts. Physical and mental stress aside, you have to understand who you’re dealing with. These are people who’ve invested decades in the Patriot way. The system has never been popular, and even though it’s a mess behind the scenes, as long as they can make it look like it works, it works. They’re going to do whatever it takes to prevent a repeat of last year’s walkout.”
“I wasn’t going to hole up here forever.”
Greg’s features softened. He reached out and clasped her hand. “It’s hard. I know. Being an elite is one thing, but being a Patriot elite…well, that’s an entirely different kind of beast, isn’t it?”
Monica nodded. She knew Greg was scolding her in his own way, but it was okay, because he wasn’t yelling. He never yelled. “I didn’t think it would be like this. I was expecting long practice hours and lengthy travel times, but not the falseness. There are so many people depending on me for points I’m not allowed to give.”
“We all have to come to terms with the reality sooner or later.” Greg let go of her hand and leaned back in his chair, rubbing his eyes. “I once asked you if you knew why Keene’s Gymnastics was still small potatoes.”
“Yeah,” said Monica. “I remember.”
“We’re one of a precious few old-style clubs where the training program is independently funded by the parents’ fees, a few county grants and the like. We literally have to create something from nothing every season even though I’ve had enough cumulative talent to jump on the Patriot bandwagon for the last fifteen years. But as a parent it’s only natural that you want to protect your children. I admit that as a coach I feel as if my athletes are my children. It’s hard every time one of my girls makes the national team. I know that it’s a marvelous accomplishment, and that her skills will do great things for her—but I also feel as if I’m betraying her, sending her out prepared, but still sending her out.” Greg closed his eyes. “I’m afraid I’ve been doing my gymnasts a disservice by training them for a system I don’t much like. And yet, the alternative is to do nothing at all. To wait and wonder and wish for what might have been.”
This was a side of Greg Monica had never seen before. “So…you regret KG?” she asked.
Greg opened his eyes and smiled halfway. “Oh, my, no! I made my choice, and I’m sticking to it. It’s just…in order to do something you love, you sometimes have to do things you don’t.”
“You think I should go back to Olympus, then. Finish my term.”
“I think you should do whatever you feel is right for you.”
“I don’t know if I can go back,” said Monica. “It’d be selling out, giving in to the system. But if I cop out, I don’t know if I can live always wondering what it might have been like to follow through, to make good on all the promises.”
“I hear you,” said Greg. “And I wish I could somehow make things easier, but you’re not my daughter. And you’re not a little girl. I can’t make your decisions for you. I can, however, ask that we share a slice of this delightful-looking cheesecake before it walks right off the table.”
Monica smiled. “You know what I like.”
There were napkins and plastic eating utensils inside the box. While she held it steady, Greg set himself to cutting her a generous slice.
“Just a small piece,” she told him.
“Come now, you’re on your spring break!”
“Well…okay—just this once.”
“Good girl.”
CHAPTER 43
Greg stayed for an hour or so, talking about old times, the gym, news bits. When it was time for him to go, Monica hugged him tightly and very nearly started crying. Then he was gone, and she was alone, standing by the door and listening to the echoes of his voice in her mind.
Quietly, she gathered up her things and replaced them in her backpack. She put on her socks, her sneakers, her backpack; she retied the cheesecake box, and, hefting it under her arm, she exited the room.
She left Midnite behind and went for a walk, entering Chinatown and browsing the many stands of an open-air market, though she wasn’t interested in buying anything. It was the lively backdrop she was after, motion and movement to hopefully kick-start her decision-making abilities. In fact, she was so deep in thought that she didn’t realize she’d left the marketplace and turned a wrong corner until she was already halfway down a narrow alley segmented by a twenty-foot tall chain-link fence.
A dead end.
“You can’t get through that way,” said someone behind her.
Monica turned and headed back towards the alley entrance. Off to the right, a man who’d just exited from the back door of some store or restaurant was heaving a pair of garbage bags into one of the bins. He looked young, perhaps in his late twenties, though stress or a heavily burdened life had given him a permanent frazzled, agitated facial expression.
He reminded her of John.
“The owners were getting tired of people using the alley as a mini expressway,” he said, doing a double-take, stepping toward her. “Oh, wow. You’re Monica, right? Monica Sardinia? I’ve seen you in the videofeeds, you and the other Patriot girls. Holy shit, this is amazing! I’m Tyler.”
Monica shook his hand hesitantly. Her bodyguards were nowhere to be seen—she’d inadvertently lost them in the marketplace.
“You have a gymnast’s hands,” Tyler said. “A soldier’s set.”
Monica looked past him, wondered just how closely she was being monitored by Tompkins’ men, and how long it would take them to get to her should the need arise. Tyler had a hungry look in his eyes, maybe sexual, maybe not, but voracious nonetheless.
As if reading her thoughts, he smiled, stepped closer. “I’m not a pervert or anything. I’m a fan—I have a wife, two kids. My daughter’s seven years old, a gymnast—recreational. We can’t afford the fees for the elite clubs, so we take her to the public gym. They’re nice there. Volunteers. Christians. My family and I saw you at the NCPA meet last year. We all agreed you were so pretty, so strong—one of America’s brightest. It was awesome to hear you’d finally turned Patriot.”
“Thank you,” Monica said, inching her way towards the street, trying to be polite about it.
Tyler reached into his jacket pocket for something. Monica swallowed hard, braced herself for any manner of offensive items, from knives to guns to vials filled with noxious chemicals.
He pulled out a photograph.
Handing it to her, he said, “I want you to have this. It’s me and my brother, just before he was shipped off to Africa last year. He tells me his platoon—the Sardinia Sharpshooters—have all your scores committed to memory. He’s stationed along the Barrier. Rough times down there, keeping those pesky insurgents away from our crops. Because of you, though, they were able to upgrade the equipment at my brother’s outpost. Response times during air raids are down to minutes now.”
Monica felt a lump in her throat. Tears welled in her eyes. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry?” asked Tyler, perplexed.
“I didn’t know. I never would have…I didn’t know how it all worked. I would have…I didn’t know.”
“You didn’t know what?”
“The Patriot System. How we’re all so tightly intertwined. I had no idea my scores meant so much.”
Tyler looked genuinely confused. “But…you’re Monica Sardinia—an elite. How could you not know what you were competing for?”
Monica couldn’t answer, for not only did she not have an answer to give, she was, at that moment, assaulted by a barrage of police officers pouring into the alleyway. They swarmed around Tyler, hit him, threw him onto the ground. Monica shouted for them to stop, but her pleas were ignored as one of the officers grabbed her, whisked her right off her feet and carried her out into the street, to one of the squad cars. The officer must have thought she was struggling, because he kept telling her to settle down (really, sh
e was merely trying to wriggle around so that she could see what was happening in the alley). With rough hands, he thrust her inside the car and closed the door.
Kim was waiting inside; he looked neither pleased nor displeased as he spoke into his headset. “We have Ms. Sardinia, sir.”
“Is that Mr. Tompkins?” Monica asked, noting with some trepidation that her cheesecake box had become dented.
“Never mind that, Ms. Sardinia,” said the officer riding in the front passenger seat. “Are you hurt? Injured in any way?”
“No, not at all. Tyler—that man in the alley—was just telling me about his family—”
The officer seemed not to hear her. “It’s all right now. He won’t bother you. You’re safe here with us.”
“But—”
“Please, buckle up.”
“Where are we going?”
“The Heroes’ Matrix,” answered Kim.
* * *
Located in Sacramento’s Global Tea Garden, the Heroes’ Matrix was a towering, pyramidal-shaped monument listing the nation’s Patriot elites, past and present. Listings were sectioned off into multiple tiers; the higher someone’s rank, the farther up the pyramid their plaque was placed.
It was a light walk from the parking lot to the monument. Monica and Kim followed a winding path past several ponds and over various moon bridges. Upon arriving at the ground tier, Kim directed her to one of the air lifts.
“Say your name,” he instructed as she stepped onto the platform, “followed by your rank and occupation. You’ll be taken to the appropriate level.”
“You’re not coming?”
“No, ma’am.” Kim stepped away.
Monica cleared her throat. “Monica Sardinia. Lieutenant Patriot. Gymnast.”
The lift beeped and rose into the air, carried her a few tiers up, closer to the Matrix’s base than to its apex, but higher up than she expected. She stepped along the walkway, skimming the listings (there were so many!) until she found her own, glowing inside its marbled alcove. Beside her name (and unhighlighted) were the names of her teammates, and, beneath, in alphabetical order, were the names and ranks of those directly associated with her scores.
It’s like an extended family tree, she thought, and imagined a gruff-looking colonel sitting in the stands during one of her conferences, watching intently as she performed her routines. The moment she landed a difficult dismount, the colonel was on his cell phone, relaying which platoons in his company would be getting which allotments of much-needed funds—and if she didn’t do so well, if she wobbled, bounced, stepped out of bounds, or fell…what then? Did he make the same call, albeit with a far less positive message? Did he get up and leave? Did he hold his head in his hands because he knew somewhere there were a few dozen men and women who would have to be overlooked when it came their turn at rations and supplies?
Monica felt a slight breeze as someone stepped beside her.
Hades.
Part of her was glad he was here. “What a mess,” she said. “I’m really in deep, aren’t I?”
Hades said, “The idea was simple: the NPAA was to have its athletes spend a year away from their friends and family, with limited planetside contact. Uninfluenced by the media or by peer pressure, an athlete would be primed to focus solely on her training. That’s why younger girls are preferred: they’re less likely than are teenagers to question authority—but you can’t remove the human element. The struggling of the Patriot System for twenty long years should have made that clear. However, once these things get started, they tend to take a hell of a long time to lose momentum. And as civilized as we believe ourselves to be, all our social refinements mean nothing if we don’t have physical bodies in uniform to carry them out.”
“I’ve been a fool,” Monica murmured. “I blamed the NPAA for passing me by every chance they got, but I was just as ignorant as any other schoolgirl pretending she’s paying attention in class. I wanted the glamor without understanding the consequences.”
Hades rested his hand on her shoulder. “Same here. I was twelve years old. What did I know of the world besides what I’d read in textbooks and seen in the feeds? I left the sport after Heroes’ Day, but it was too late. I’d become the poster boy of the Patriot System. That’s what they’re after: the image. I have no experience as a coach—you know that. Brenda is the one who does all the work. For me, every minute is another lie. But fate delivered us into these lives. If not here, than somewhere else, sick and starving, arguing, fighting with others over a puddle of muddy water. So, we wear shiny uniforms instead of grimy loincloths. We argue and fight over feedstocks and biofuel prices instead of small patches of dirt. We pretend to be purposeful human beings.”
Facing Hades now, Monica asked, “Is that what I’m supposed to do? Pretend?”
“Call it a fake-out,” Hades said. “Do whatever it takes to get through this. Finish your term.”
“How does that fix things?”
“It doesn’t. But, then, we were never invited to ‘fix’ things in the first place.”
“We can make a difference—”
“As a whole,” Hades interrupted. “Over time. One person can’t do it overnight.”
Monica shook her head. “You’re wrong. A single person can be the…the…” She grasped for the right word. “The catalyst.”
Hades looked amused. “You think that person is you?”
Could be, Monica thought. Look how everyone’s shitting over my taking a time-out. She didn’t tell Hades, though, because she knew it was a supremely self-righteous thing to say even if she didn’t mean it in a self-righteous way.
Instead she asked, “What’s the lottery?”
“The what?”
“The lottery. I heard you and Coach Tracie talking about it the other night in the lounge.”
“You were eavesdropping?” Hades folded his arms and glowered.
“It’s not like you were making an effort to keep your voice down—and you said you didn’t care if anyone overheard.”
“Yeah, well…” Hades looked away, stuffing his hands into his pockets. He chuckled nervously. “What the hell, right? The lottery is an agreement between Patriot nations to, um, ensure a certain amount of acceptable losses during the competitive season. That means fake-outs, forfeitures—”
“And athletes being shot,” said Monica.
“That, too.”
“Did that poor girl know what was in store for her?”
“I’m assuming it was choreographed beforehand.”
“That’s still awful.”
“Yeah, well, every government has its trade secrets. What’s important is that it looks real.”
“That’s why our underdog status is so important. That was our lottery draw, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Hades.
“Will it be like that on Heroes’ Day?”
“I can’t say.”
“Tell me!” Monica exclaimed.
Hades gave her a look of warning. “I can’t tell you because I don’t know. The coaches aren’t given their instructions until the day of the meet. Sometimes we don’t know until the exercises have already begun. I’m sure you’ve seen me on my cell phone on more than one occasion.”
“Oh.” Monica’s demeanor softened. “Doesn’t that bother you?”
“It bothers me all right—but look at it this way: You can go up against the NPAA and the U.S. government, the United Nations, and whomever else is involved in the proliferation of the Patriot mentality; you can spend the next twenty years of your life in courtrooms and on news shows trying to sell your cause, and meanwhile you won’t have time for anything else—or you can make your little contribution on Heroes’ Day, go home, and live your life. As ordinary and unspectacular as you may think it is, it’s yours.”
“What about the girls who come after me?” Monica asked quietly. “Don’t they deserve to know the truth?”
Hades’ patience appeared to have run out. “Look, Monica. I’m tired. I
want to go home. I have a wife and two sons waiting for me. I don’t need to live my life as a superhero. Neither do you. You’re a fantastic athlete, but you’ve got to get a hold of your emotions. The NPAA is willing to forget about your running away—”
“I didn’t run away, I just—”
“—if you complete your term with the Patriot team. You’ll go home a Hero, with money for college, a nice house for you and your parents, a big, fat, shimmering entry on your resumé. Now…there’s a shuttle waiting. What’s it going to be?”
* * *
The door swished open. Monica stepped through and set her bag down. At the center of the practice area, the girls were doing modified push-ups; there was a noticeable silence as everyone gradually became aware of her presence. In a moment they simply stood, watching and waiting, pointing and whispering, “It’s Monica! She’s back!”
Tracie crossed the mat, came to stand before her. She frowned, searching her face and eyes for something—and when she found it, she nodded. “I trust your spring break was restful?”
“Yes, Coach Tracie,” Monica replied.
“Good. Suit up and start your laps. Then we work on your beam routine.”
She returned to the group. No emotional response, no indication that she was the least bit relieved to see Monica again—but that’s how it had always been.
The difference now was that they both knew better.
CHAPTER 44
Although the media trumped it up as an amazing feat of strength and perseverance, it was no surprise to Monica that Jackie, Britney, Lisa, Kristen, Autumn, and herself made it to Heroes’ Day. When the qualifying world teams were announced in late July, she calmly and quietly accepted her role in the farce, acting neither too detached nor too gleeful, particularly during interviews. Her time away during spring break, as well as the four months of intense training thereafter, had lulled her into a mode of acceptance and helped her develop a steady patience as she worked to fulfill her term, to get it past.