by Baen Books
I stopped in front of the building. Although a few people in the aqueducts built doors for the caves where they lived, mostly we used curtains, or strings of beads, or we hid our private spaces well enough that people couldn’t find us unless we invited them. Although I was pretty sure I’d reached the door, I didn’t know what to do.
“Do you wish to enter?” a voice asked.
Ho! I looked around, but saw no one. Well, Gourd’s screen had talked to me. Maybe doors talked in Cries.
I turned back to the door. “Enter. Yah.”
It slid to the side, retracting into the wall. Huh.
I walked into the Pharaoh’s Army Career Center. The place looked as boxy inside as outside. I’d entered a medium-sized room where a woman with dark hair sat at a counter. She dressed more sensibly than anyone else I’d seen in Cries, in a jumpsuit the colors of rock, all browns, grays, and dusty red. Yah, that was good. It would help her blend with her surroundings, not here, but outside, like camouflage. She had a screen rolled out on the counter, one brighter than Gourd’s, with no dark patches. Holos flickered above it. Relieved to see something I recognized, I walked to the counter.
The woman glanced up. When she saw me, she blinked.
“Eh,” I said.
“Uh, my greetings,” she said. “What can I do for you?”
“Enlist,” I said.
Until I spoke that word, I hadn’t thought through why I’d come here. But it had been in the back of my mind, never letting me relax. In that instant, as I looked at the woman, I realized that since I’d stepped out under the sky, I stopped feeling restless for the first time in I didn’t know how long, maybe years, maybe most of my life.
“You want to enlist in the army?” she asked.
“Yah.” I waited, wondering if I needed to do anything else, or if now I was in the army.
She pushed her hand through her hair. “Wait here please. I’ll get the recruiter.”
#
I wasn’t in the army yet. They had me do stuff. First they took me to a shower and asked me to clean up, so I wouldn’t get dust in their machines. I stripped and stood in the tall box while a spray misted over my body. I tasted the mist and it didn’t have the tang of poison water. It couldn’t be drinkable, though. They wouldn’t waste so much fresh water just to clean a person.
When I finished, I stepped out and found my clothes on the table in the small room, exactly where I’d left them, except they smelled and felt fresh. Someone had whacked the dust out of the cloth or maybe cleaned it in a mist-and-drying thing like the shower. Strange. I liked the way they felt against my skin, softer than normal. Not that I would admit that. Gourd would laugh, Dig would tell me to toughen up, and Jak would want to take them off. I smiled at that last thought and had to remind myself I was mad at him.
I looked around, wondering what to do. Dark panels stretched from the floor to ceiling on my right. As I turned toward them, they lit up, showing people. I walked over and waved my hand through a holo. It was an image in front of the panel, nothing real, but the people looked so alive. Three women and two men stood there, dressed in the camouflage jumpsuits everyone here wore. I liked that they weren’t smiling. Cries images showed people smiling too much, teeth white and bright, usually while voices told you to buy whatever the people held, or were doing, or whatever. These soldiers didn’t smile, at least not overtly. But they looked proud. Confident. Strong.
I walked to the next panel and another image activated, a woman in a jumpsuit. She stood with a handsome man in regular clothes and two kids, a girl and a boy. A voice spoke, but it wasn’t telling me how much I wanted to buy their clothes or their stuff. It talked about “wages” and “benefits.” After listening for a while, I figured out it was trying to sell me something too, the army in this case, but it sounded like the bargain they offered actually included things I might want, like a way to provide food and protection for my circle.
The third holo made me stare for a long time. It showed explosions, with people running and shooting guns. It wasn’t like any fight I’d seen before. Sure, we could blow things up in the Undercity, but no one was that stupid, at least not most of the time. Even a small explosion could bring down the walls. The ruins were built well, incredibly well, or so Orin told me. They’d lasted thousands of years and would probably last at least that much longer. They wouldn’t keep standing, though, unless we took care of them, and setting off freaking bombs didn’t qualify as care.
This battle had many explosions, many guns. The fighters used machines for weapons and transport, battling at a distance. I watched the scene replay over and over. Their guns were huge, powerful, seductive. And legal. I wanted this. But I wasn’t stupid. This recording was trying to make me feel that way. What struck me most about the soldiers, though, was one simple, ice-cold fact.
I had no idea who they were fighting.
If I went into this army, I would be a protector, yes, but not for the Undercity, or at least, not only them. I’d be protecting people I didn’t know against an enemy I didn’t understand. The people in the recording won their battle and stood together, weary, their uniforms muddy, but they held themselves with pride. They had won. A part of me responded with an intensity that took my breath. Yes! This was for me. Another part warned me to slow down. I didn’t ken this fight. I needed to know more.
I turned from the holo—and discovered a woman with red hair watching me.
“Eh,” I said.
“We’re ready to start your exams,” she said. “But you’re welcome to keep watching the recordings if you’d like.”
“I come with,” I said.
The recruiter took me to a room with tech-mech I didn’t recognize. The table where she sat me down had a screen like Gourd’s, except this was larger and had no dark patches. The woman tapped a code onto the screen, bringing up holos until she found what she wanted. She turned on what looked like a camera and then left me alone in the shiny room.
The screen asked questions. It wanted me to read and do math and talk about random things. It showed patterns or strings of numbers and asked what came next. That was easy. It projected three-dimensional figures, balls, blocks, and more, and wanted me to describe how they would look if they rotated. That was easy, too. We had to do that all the time in the aqueducts, especially if our lights went out. I liked it a lot less when the screen asked about my life, where I came from, how I felt about various subjects. How did I know how I felt? I didn’t answer those questions. So it asked about history and dead people I’d never heard of, about strange cities, places, and customs. A lot of it made no sense, like stoichiometry and kinematics. The questions went on an on, stretching my brain until my head hurt.
After all the talky-talky with the screen, two recruiters took me to a huge room they called the gym. They had me run, jump, push weights, do sit ups, pull ups, push ups, and any other type of up they could think of. That part I enjoyed. When I did a few kicks to warm up my legs, they got excited and asked what else I could do in fighting. A fellow in a jumpsuit sparred with me. I used rough and tumble moves he didn’t seem to recognize, but he had plenty of moves I’d never seen. He was fast and sharp and clever, and yah, I had to admit, he fought better than me. The entire time, he stayed as cool as ice. He did get angry once, when I rolled and punched him in the knees. I wasn’t sure why, but then, not a lot about these people made sense to me. I couldn’t understand everything they said, either. At least they didn’t ask me to talk as much as the screen had wanted.
Finally they sent me to take another shower. They seemed to think this was normal, to shower twice in a few hours, just because I’d exercised. This enlisting business continued to be strange.
I was intrigued.
#
Sergeant Corvin wore the same jumpsuit as everyone else here. He sat behind a large table, what he called his desk. I sat across from him. My chair felt soft and the seat moved, just slightly, but in the right way to ease my stiffness. That was so strange, i
t made me tense up more. It didn’t matter. I was too busy trying to follow Sergeant Corvin’s words. He talked a lot, and none of it sounded good.
“Your academics need work.” He was reading from a tablet. “You failed most of the exams. You read and write Skolian Flag at the level of a twelve-year-old.” He sounded surprised, as if he hadn’t expected even that much. I had no idea what he meant anyway. I’d never heard of Skolian Flag.
“You failed chemistry, biology, and physics,” he continued. “Your astronomy score was zero.” That didn’t seem to surprise him. Then he paused. “You almost passed geology. You also know some history and archeology.” He glanced at me. “You live under the city, don’t you? In the ruins.”
“Yah.” They kept asking me that.
He nodded as if this might explain why I almost passed geology, whatever geology meant. “Your math isn’t so bad, especially probability and statistics. You passed, not with flying colors, but still a pass.” He squinted as new holos flowed over his rectangle. “Holy shit. That can’t be right.”
I waited, wondering what else I had managed to fail.
He looked at me and spoke bluntly. “Did you cheat on the IQ tests?”
I had no idea what IQ meant, but I hadn’t cheated on their freaking tests. “Nahya.”
“I don’t understand what that means,” he said.
I tried to remember the way Orin spoke. “No. Not cheat.”
Corvin went back to his tablet, tapping its edges, bringing up new holos. “They monitored you the entire time.” He spoke as if he were talking to himself instead of me. “You didn’t have a chance to cheat.” He considered me. “According to this, you have an IQ in the top twelve percent of all people. The EI that tested you says your scores are probably even higher.”
“EI?”
“Evolving Intelligence. It thinks you didn’t fully understand the language it spoke or the tasks it wanted you to do.”
Well, I didn’t understand this sergeant, so his EI had a point. I waited to see what else he had to say.
He went back to reading. After a moment, he whistled. “I guess that shouldn’t be a surprise. I saw you down in the gym. But still. This is incredible. You’re clearly the most physically fit recruit to come through here in the three years I’ve worked this desk.”
“Like to run,” I said. “Fight.”
“You ought to join our track team. You’d smash the competition, especially in marathons.” He brought up a holo of me sparring with the other soldier. It played above his screen. “You could join an army tykado team, too. You don’t know the moves, but you’d probably learn fast. If you put in the work, you could earn a black belt.” When he got to the point where I punched the soldier in the knees, he gave me a sour look. “Assuming you can learn to fight fairly.”
That made no sense. “Fight never fair.” You did whatever you needed to survive.
Sergeant Corvin set down his tablet. “If you want to join the army, you’ll have to follow the same rules and regulations as everyone else.”
“I can do rules fine.” I used extra words to stress my point.
“You’ll also need to study. We require all recruits to pass secondary school exams.” He spoke carefully. “You’ll also need to learn to speak our language more fluently.”
What? I spoke fine. These people were the ones who didn’t know language. How they could use so many words to say so little baffled me. None of this sounded good. I hadn’t come to learn words.
“When fight?” I asked.
“You’ll train while you go to school. If you enlist, the army will pay for your education.”
I wasn’t sure what to say. I needed to think. “Not in army yet?”
“Not yet.”
A door slid open and the red-haired woman entered. Corvin glanced at her. “What’s wrong?”
She set another tablet in front of him. “We got the results of her medical exam. Look at this.
Corvin frowned at the tablet. “That can’t be right.”
“We did several checks.” She looked up at me. “Do you know your age?”
Of course I knew my age. “Fifteen.”
Corvin blew out a gust of air. “Well, shit in a chute, I’d never have guessed. You look older.”
I almost laughed. Good saying about the chute. I’d have to remember that one. I didn’t smile, though, because I didn’t know these people. “Fifteen bad?” I asked.
“You’re too young,” Corvin said. “You can’t enlist at fifteen, not even with parental consent.”
I stared at him. That was it? After everything they’d made me do, all I’d gone through to get here, the fears and uncertainty and terrifying beauty of the day, all they had to say was You can’t do it?
“Got no parents,” I told them. “I decide what I do.”
“I’m sorry.” He sounded like he meant it. “But we have no choice.”
I wanted to punch something. I would have hit the desk, but I didn’t want them to think even less of me than they already did. So I held back my anger.
The woman spoke quietly. “Young lady, if you still want to join the Pharaoh’s Army in a year, come back then. Although you can’t be deployed until you’re eighteen, legally you can commit when you’re sixteen. You’ll have to spend two more years in school, but you would need that anyway given your exam results. That means you’d be enlisting for six years instead of four.”
Corvin was frowning yet again. “If she doesn’t have parents, she should be in foster care, not living as a homeless kid under the city.”
Damn. One of the few things I remembered about the orphanage was the specter of foster care and labor camps looming in my future. I stood up. “I go now.”
“I don’t think a foster family would take her,” the woman was telling Corvin.
“Probably.” He looked worried. “A year from now, she could be dead from an overdose.”
“I don’t think so.” The woman tapped the tablet. “Look. She’s clean. We found traces of hack, but it looks more like exposure from her environment. Her body shows no history of drug abuse.”
Yah, talk about me like I’m not here. I headed for the door, which I hoped would move aside for me the way it did for everyone else. It snapped open like the membrane on a pond-clam, and I stalked into the hall outside.
It took only a moment to reach the room where I’d entered the building. I was a few paces from the outside door when the woman called from behind me. “Bhaajan, wait.”
I froze. I hated that they knew what to call me. When we gave our names in the aqueducts, we showed honor and trust to the person we told, and I wasn’t ready for that yet, not here. However, it had also been the first question the EI asked me, and it hadn’t let me continue without answering. So now these people knew: I was Bhaajan, daughter of Bhaaj.
I turned as the woman came up to me. She was breathing as if she’d been running. “Please, wait,” she said.
I scowled at her. “No foster.”
“I know.” She took a breath. “We wanted to say—come back in a year. We think the army could offer you a lot.” Her voice quieted. “It’s a way out, Bhaajan. The road to a new life.”
I was angry enough that I didn’t want to believe her. But something was stirring inside me, a feeling deep and big that had always been there. I wanted “out.” I wanted to be one of the soldiers I’d seen in those holo-panels. I could, if they’d give me a chance. I wanted to come back so much, it hurt.
I considered the woman, who hadn’t given me her name. I hadn’t earned it. I hadn’t earned Corvin’s, either, but however little he thought of me, he had done me the honor of giving it.
“Maybe come back,” I said.
I went out then, leaving the Pharaoh’s Army Career Center. I jogged through Cries under the endless blue sky, headed back to the Undercity.
#
I stood on the midwalk of the Lizard Trap canal. Torches set in the walls shed golden light and a faint haze over the scene. Jak,
Gourd, and Dig were down in the canal, rough and tumbling with the dust gang that claimed the territory next to ours. Jak kept clowning around, bouncing on his toes, then pretending to lose his balance and flip over in the dust. Everyone laughed, all of them together, their voices like music.
On the midwalk across the canal, Top Deck, Ketris, and Byte sat with a group of adults from other circles, drinking and talking. Little dusters were playing below, many of them, running around, calling to each other. Farther down the opposite midwalk, a group of kids were singing. Their music filled the canal, echoing along its length. Another group of dusters, two girls and two boys about ten years old, were dancing not far from where the older gang members were working out. I knew those four; our gang was helping them train, just as when we were that age, older kids had trained us. Their dancing combined rough and tumble moves with rhythmic steps, all in time with the singers.
“Pretty,” I said. Pretty wasn’t the right word; that scene had a beauty beyond what I felt able to express. I could have stood all day, watching. My heart felt strange, as if it hurt. This was my home, or it would be for one more year, if I didn’t screw up or die before I turned sixteen.
Jak glanced up at the midwalk, then stopped and grinned. “Eh, Bhaaj!” he yelled.
Everyone turned, and then they were racing toward me. Laughing, I climbed down from the midwalk and ran toward them.
For now, I could rough and tumble, and get some dust back on my clothes.
IV
The Road Taken
Jak lay stretched out against me in the dark, his breathing quiet and steady. I knew he was awake. When I turned toward him, he pulled me into his arms, and we lay together in the night.
“Stay,” Jak whispered.