by K A Riley
After this, the rest of the school year should be a breeze.
2
Lesson
Brohn hooks his hands under my armpits and hauls me to my feet.
He’s big and strong, which makes me feel small and weak.
I hate that.
I try to shrug him off, but my muscles have decided to ignore my orders and have opted to fall asleep on duty, instead.
I’ve been in some pretty intense fights before, and I know full well how to handle myself. But right now, my legs have gone wobbly, my eyes have gone wonky, and the room looks like someone slathered it in six layers of Vaseline-coated plastic wrap.
By the time I start to blink the world back into focus, Kress has her back to me and is pacing panther-like in front of the rest of the class. In my throbbing head, her voice sounds like it’s coming from the far end of a train tunnel.
“Here’s your first lesson: Don’t drop your guard. Ever.”
Great. Now you tell me.
I look up from where I’m still bent over and trying to catch my breath. The five other kids from my Cohort are standing there wide-eyed while I feel my cheeks go hot and red.
I’ve known Kress longer than any of them. If anything, I should get special privilege. So it’s not fair that they get to stand around and gawk while I take a personal inventory to determine how many of my internal organs are still where they’re supposed to be.
I don’t know if the room is spinning or if I am, but either way, I really wish it would stop. It’s bad enough getting the wind knocked out of me. I’d rather not add a round of uncontrollable public vomiting to top it off.
Brohn holds me at arm’s length until he seems satisfied I’m not going to spew up my guts all over him. Patting my shoulder, he says, “You’re alive. That’ll have to be enough for now.” Then, turning his back and leaving me wobbling on my own, he walks over to join Kress.
So much for special privilege.
Render flutters over from his perch on a ledge on the far side of the room and lands on Kress’s shoulder.
She flicks a treat up to him with her thumb, and he gobbles it down.
The other members of my Cohort—Libra, Sara, Mattea, Arlo, and Ignacio—are standing in a line now, frozen in military attention, as Kress continues to pace.
The eleven of us in the Academy’s first class have been divided into two Cohorts, cleverly called “Cohort A” and “Cohort B.” Apparently, originality isn’t an Emergent ability anyone around here possesses.
I don’t know the new girl Roxane from Cohort B, but I know both sets of the twins pretty well. I should have been placed with them. It’s my bad luck I get stuck with all these Newbies in Cohort A.
Like me, they’re wearing the Academy’s standard issue combat kit:
Form-fitting black cruiser pants with gray trim, flexible fabric joints, and Kevlar inserts. Matching military-style vests. Black field boots. And white, half-sleeved compression tops with the Academy’s seal—a black raven on a blue shield with the school’s Latin motto, “Corvus Oculum Corvi Non Eruit,” on a crest over the heart to complete the school uniform.
I once asked Kress what the motto meant. She told me it translates as, “A raven will not pluck out the eye of another raven.”
I thought she was kidding.
She assured me she wasn’t.
“In the best and worst of times, we stay united in word, purpose, plan, and soul,” she told me. “That’s what makes a Conspiracy strong.”
I’m not feeling especially united or strong at the moment.
Standing at rigid attention, Libra looks nervously happy. Sara looks bored. Mattea and Ignacio look like brainwashed military recruits. They all look terrified.
Slouching in front of Kress, Arlo is sporting the same, grubby gray hoodie he eats and sleeps in. And I’ve got on my favorite red leather jacket, which I zip up with trembling fingers as I limp over to take my place with my classmates.
“There’s a lot of fear out there in the world,” Brohn bellows to the six of us with a wave of his hand. “And a lot of desperation. The first step to surviving is knowing and respecting that fact.”
“The rules in here will largely be the same as the rules out there,” Kress tells us. “None.”
Render ruffles his hackles, stares at the six of us with those button-black eyes, and makes a few clacking sounds that I swear sound like laughter.
“There’s no room for error in here,” Brohn explains. He directs everyone’s attention to the areas of the room dedicated to sparring, training, assessment, competitive fighting, and combat skills analysis. There are no mats, no roped-off rings, and no equipment—just a few sections of the room divided into quadrants by strips of pink and white holo-lights embedded at right angles in the floor.
In neat stacks off to the side, only partly concealed by a red, ceiling-high sliding curtain, there are more stretchers and first-aid kits than I’ve ever seen in my life.
“Some of you might remember being taught things by your parents. Or by friends or by older brothers and sisters. Some of you might have even heard stories about what regular school was like before the wars.” Brohn scans our Cohort and crosses his arms hard across his chest. “This isn’t that.”
“We’re not here to train you to survive,” Kress adds. “Our mission is much bigger than that.”
“We’re here,” Brohn says evenly, his voice a gentle but powerful rumble, “to teach you how to help others to survive. Saving yourselves out there will be easy. When you’re in trouble, all you have to do is run. Sticking around, saving others…that’s heroic.”
“You’re going to save the world,” Kress promises. “But first, you need to know how to save yourselves.”
“And that starts,” Brohn continues, “with alertness, not as something you turn on when you think you might need it…”
…but as your default setting,” Kress finishes.
Render tilts his head back to kraa! his agreement.
Like a church bell ringing underwater, his guttural voice peals out in blaring, metallic-sounding clangs in the huge room.
Kress and Brohn guide us over to the side of the room where one of the practice spaces has been sectioned off. I don’t want to show weakness, so I walk as straight and upright as possible, even though the vibrations from the shot Kress gave me a minute ago are still rattling through my bones.
The back of my head hurts, my lungs haven’t decided if they’re going to start working again, and the air in the room is still shifting and hazy.
I’ve known Kress for over five years now, and I’ve seen her in action out there in the world—here and in England. I’ve seen her shred enemies with her razor-sharp Talons, the special gloves she wears with the built-in switchblades. And I’ve seen her fire all kinds of weapons and break out all kinds of martial arts moves.
But I never knew she could hit quite that hard.
Mattea, the exotic, boyishly thin girl with the dark skin and wide-set eyes, clears her throat and asks if we at least get headgear and gloves for whatever lessons we’re about to learn. “It’s how I’ve seen soldiers training,” she explains. “It’s what they wore in the Processor.” Her voice is crisp and confident.
“Are you going to have headgear and gloves in the field?” Kress asks quietly. “Are you going to raise your hand and ask the wild, cannibalistic kids of the Unsettled to take a time-out while you outfit yourself with proper sparring equipment?”
Mattea tilts her nearly-shaven head down about half an inch. “No.”
“Are you going to ask the True Blues to take a break from loading their shotguns while you look for a good place to hide? Or hope the Devoted decide not to brainwash you into their cult?”
Mattea’s head drops a bit more. Her eyes dart side to side before settling back onto Kress’s boots. “No.”
Kress takes two full steps until she’s nearly nose-to-nose with Mattea. Even though she’s got a dead-serious squint to her eyes, her voice is so
mehow even quieter than it was before.
“Are you going to ask the Survivalists or the Syndicates to go easy on you since they’re organized and armed and you’re just a seventeen-year-old girl who’s spent most of her life as a helpless lab rat in a Processor?”
Mattea’s chin is now fully buried in her chest, her eyes fixed firmly on the floor. “No.”
“No,” Kress repeats. “Good answer.”
Kress goes back to pacing in front of us while Render gives us all terrifying evil eyes and mocking, squelchy clucks from his perch on her shoulder. “We can’t afford to have you confuse training with real-life combat. The split-second it takes for you to figure out which is which is the split-second where you wind up with your head on one side of the battlefield, your body on the other, and a great big pool of your blood and a long line of your internal organs in between.”
Libra, pouty and clearly a little stunned, raises a shaky hand. Her perky smile isn’t quite as bold as it was when she dragged me in here. “So…um…this training you’re going to give us…it’s…um… life or death?”
Kress winks at her. “Libra, if you can’t survive the training in here, you can’t survive the world out there.”
Libra gulps, nods, and takes such a big step back that I think for a second she might bolt for the door.
Brohn gestures us toward the center of the room. I’ve never seen a person offer up such a charming smile and look so rip-your-head-off deadly at the same time, but he’s managing it. “Come on,” he tells us with a wicked grin. “Class is in session.”
3
Krav Maga
For the next six hours, we fight.
And I’m not talking about little kid Judo class with stops and starts and gentle words of encouragement from a kindhearted sensei.
Kress and Brohn are serious.
Deadly serious.
First, they run us through some of the most basic elements of Jeet Kune Do, Tae Kwon Do, and Muay Thai kickboxing. “Just to give you a taste of what you’ll be doing in this class,” Kress tells us, “and in some of the follow-up classes over the new few terms.”
Then, the two of them launch into a rapid-fire volley of lessons.
Their demonstrations are a whirlwind of control, precision, and power. Gathering us around them, they run us through movement after movement—kicks, punches, grappling techniques, blocks, attacks, and counter-attacks—until we’re all doubled over, hands on our knees, gasping for breath.
After what feels like forever and with my lungs scorching hot and dust-dry, I’m sure we’ve got to be almost done with the lesson.
Class has got to be nearly over, right?
We’ve been at it for hours. But Kress and Brohn plow right along, leaving us with no choice but to dig deep and do our best to keep up.
“Those are some of the basics,” Brohn says with smooth calmness and with a dismissive flick of his hand. “Just a preview. But today, we’re going to start with Krav Maga.”
Wait. Did he say, “Start”? How long have we been at this?
“Krav Maga is a practical, real-world fighting style,” Kress explains. “It’s designed to give you the skills you’ll need to hurt, incapacitate, disarm, and, if necessary, kill an opponent. Speed and lethality will be your goals. Situational awareness will be your friend. Your body will be your weapon. Like with Wing Chun—which you’ll learn later—defense is also offense.”
Kress and Brohn usher our Cohort into a circle around them.
With the six of us clutching our sides and struggling to stay focused, Kress and Brohn go into a blindingly fast display of hand-to-hand combat that I’m sure is going to end with one or both of them dead in the middle of the room.
With quick punches, impossibly fast knee-strikes, hammer fists, forearm presses, and ferociously applied wrist-locks, they grapple, lunge, and attack each other with the viciousness of a life-or-death situation. And this is just sparring.
When they stop, they’re not even winded.
These two are working on a whole different level.
As they break us into three pairs for partner training, they toss around terms like “soft tissue,” “pressure points,” “instant incapacitation,” and retzev—which they tell us means “continuous motion.”
“No time to think, pause, or plan,” Kress warns. “It takes about one-tenth of a second for your central nervous system to get a signal from your brain to your muscles. Whether it’s throwing a punch, dodging a strike, or pulling a trigger…we need you to cut that time in half.”
We all stare, and I know they’re waiting for one of us to object, to claim that what she’s asking is impossible. But we don’t say a word. We don’t dare.
They expect us to be tireless, fearless, and to absorb every speck of information they throw at us. It’s only the first class of Unarmed Combat, and they’re already teaching like our lives depend on it.
After another demonstration, something occurs to me:
They’re not just fighters. They’re dancers, choreographers, strategists, scientists, athletes, and artists.
I’ve fought alongside Kress and Brohn before, but I guess I was too busy enjoying the adrenaline rush to realize how much I was missing.
For the past five years, Kress has been trying to teach me to connect with Haida Gwaii, to channel the white raven’s natural skills and adopt them as my own. I thought I was doing okay. I thought my evolving coordination, strength, speed, and senses were making me a superhero.
I thought wrong.
After hours of relentless lessons, my head’s spinning worse than it was when Kress nearly knocked me out at the beginning of class.
The other members of my Cohort aren’t faring any better.
We work with partners for this part of class, but Kress and Brohn bounce from pair to pair, stopping us, telling us what we’re doing wrong, and showing us how to do it right.
Their instructions come at us as fast and ferociously as the combat moves, themselves.
Poor Arlo—quiet and shy—gets paired up with Libra and her constant happy chatter. Even exhausted, she finds a way to blather on about nothing.
Sara and Mattea seem to make a good team and are picking up this style of fighting faster than the rest of us. They’re not at Kress and Brohn’s level yet. Not by a long shot. But at least they’re making a pretty good show of it.
I get paired up with Ignacio.
At well over six feet tall, he towers over me. He’s toned and glossy-skinned, and I can make out each bulge, ridge, and ripple of every muscle in his body.
He keeps smiling at me, flexing under his tight white tank top, and giving me little winks like he thinks I’ll be distracted by his dishy good looks.
Let’s see how pretty that face of yours is after I’m done with it.
I’m fast but undisciplined. At least that’s what Kress always tells me.
In the center of one of the lighted sparring squares, I do my best to stay focused in my Krav Maga battle with Ignacio. I’m able to tag him with some pretty good body shots, but when he charges at me, I panic myself into a purely defensive posture, which I know I’m not supposed to do. He catches me with a forearm to the side of my head, and I drop to a knee.
He adds insult to injury with another sassy smile and another smarmy wink as he reaches out a hand, with a glimmer in his golden-amber eyes, and offers to help me up.
Bloody hell, he’s cute.
Okay. Maybe I was a little distracted.
I smack his hand away, and we go at it again. I’m faster than he is, but he’s doing something that makes my muscles twitch in a weird way from tense to relaxed and back again. For a second, it feels like I might be having a heart attack.
I know he’s an Emergent, of course. And I’ve heard he can do something weird with electrical impulses. I wonder if he’s doing something cheeky to my central nervous system right now.
The thought of him screwing around in my head makes me mad.
You can beat my
body. But no one mucks around with my brain!
Technically, we’re not really supposed to be using our Emergent abilities in class, not until we get more training in how to use them without accidentally killing anyone, including our teachers or ourselves. But since our abilities are a part of us, it’s next to impossible not to access them from time to time.
Especially in times of pain or stress. Which this is.
Whether he’s cheating or not, Ignacio gets me on the ground and winds up on top of me with my arms and shoulders pinned under his knees.
“Looks like I win,” he gloats, one hand curled over my throat, the other balled into a ready-to-strike, cocked fist by his shoulder.
I take a second to point out that the blood on his face and pooling around on the floor next to us is his, not mine.
When he presses his fingers to the corner of his lip and inspects them for blood, I take quick advantage of the distraction, buck my hips up, and give him a thunderous knee to the goolies.
Groaning in pain, he rolls to the side, and I scramble to my feet, fully prepared to kick his face into a pasty dough.
But I’m stopped by Brohn who tells me, “Nice job, Branwynne. You can chalk this one up as a kill.”
I grin and reach out a hand to help Ignacio to his feet, but he snarls at me and grunts himself up, his eyes still crossed from my shot to the pills.
With all of us now breathing hard and begging for water, Kress and Brohn drag the six of us into a ring surrounded by a glowing border of pink holo-lights. They tell us we can have a break as soon as we force them out of the circle.
“One at a time?” Sara pants, her short blond hair dark with sweat and matted to her forehead. Her chest is heaving, and her cheeks are cherry-apple red. Like me, she’s trying to conceal her fatigue, but she can barely get her words out.
“One at a time,” Kress grins, “or as a team. We don’t care.”
So we leap at them—all six of us—and are knocked back just as fast.
Sara and Mattea are both taller than me and pretty strong but with no real combat experience. Kress has them doubled over and teary-eyed before they know what’s hit them.