by Mara, Alex
If we fell off, we'd drop twenty feet to a canvas below. If we made it across, we had to leap from the plank across a six-foot divide to a ledge, which we'd have to catch the edge of and pull ourselves up onto.
That was where our engineering was supposed to come in. We weren’t just designed for seduction; we’d been given physical attributes normal humans didn’t possess.
I lifted my hands, palms brought into relief under the fluorescents, and tried to activate the sticky pads, which should have appeared like blisters on my fingers. At least, that was what it had looked like when 8017 showed me.
But it didn't happen for me. I'd tried a half-dozen times, and I couldn't make the sticky pads activate.
It was the first time I'd had trouble with any of the trainings. Cognitively, I picked up on things lightning fast—faster than most of my model. I could say that without ego. I'd also beaten 8013 in our first tanto training, so it wasn't all physical things I struggled with.
It was just this. With this, I wasn't quite there.
Which was going to make climbing the wall particularly difficult. It came after the ledge, a fifty-foot vertical climb without handholds.
We'd need to use the sticky pads on our hands to get ourselves up to the top, where we'd press a button that would whisk away the timestamp to a database somewhere.
If that timestamp read anything more than two minutes, it meant recycling.
Recycling was more or less an inevitability, I was realizing.
Though maybe not for 8013. He was flying through the course, climbing the rope as though levitating up it. Which made sense: he must be over a week old, and had completed the course more than seven times.
When he came to the wall, he briefly ducked down like a cat before he leapt up onto it, landing a good six feet up from the ledge itself. From there, he sticky-padded his way up toward the buzzer in complete silence.
We were all silent, too. It was a respect thing.
When 8013 got to the top of the wall and pulled himself onto the final platform, he pressed the button not with his whole hand, but a single finger. One minute, forty-five seconds.
“That’s the fastest yet,” 8017 whispered.
"For him, or in general?" I asked.
"For anyone."
“Good, 8013,” said our Scarlet, who was overseeing us. I had learned by now that she oversaw just about everything when it came to the male infiltrators. She held a stenopad, which she marked with her finger. “8014?”
"Is she always so severe?" I whispered to 8017.
"The Scarlets are trained that way," 8017 said. "If she's severe, she's conditioning you. If she's nice, she's conditioning you."
"The upshot is: she's always conditioning me."
8017 nodded once. "Bingo."
I didn’t like the thought of being conditioned by anyone, but especially not by my Scarlet. She was hard, severe, unforgiving. And so I made myself a silent promise: I would resist. Every command she gave me I would question in my mind.
I wouldn’t execute orders mindlessly. I wouldn’t be her pet.
And I also I realized, as simply as you'd recognize a smile, I liked 8017; he was truthful, loyal, patient. These were qualities I wanted to display.
8014 had already climbed up to the first platform. He started at once, ploughing through the obstacles, but slipping on the plank walk before regaining himself.
He completed the course with less aplomb than 8013, but still just slid under the two-minute requirement at the end.
On we went: 8015, 8016, and then it was 8017 ‘s turn.
When he stepped up, 8018 watched him with an avidness I'd never seen before. It was a helpless, aching expression. A pair of lines formed between 8018’s eyes as he watched 8017 take the monkey bars with swinging ease. He started on the rope, shimmying himself up.
“He looks good,” I said to 8018.
“Yeah,” 8018 said, his eyes never leaving his partner. That was the appropriate word: partner.
And that moment I looked away from 8017 was when it happened. A high-pitched thwick, like a pants zipper being undone, and then a thud.
When my eyes flicked back, 8017 lay on the tile beneath the swaying rope. He was on his back like a starfish, and he let a groan unlike any I'd heard from my kind.
Pain. Not the quick pain of a tanto cut, but deep and ongoing.
8018 rushed forward, dodging past the netting and canvas to where 8017 lay.
“8018, leave him,” Scarlet said, lowering her stenopad.
But 8018 didn't back off. He didn't even miss a step as he dashed to 8017's side and dropped to his knees.
"8018, return to the line," Scarlet said, severe this time.
But 8018 might as well not have heard her; his entire being was focused on the prone 8017.
And in the midst of it all, I took a small pleasure in watching Scarlet reduced to stamping her black boot on the ground.
She approached, and as she did, one hand went out. "You see this?" she said to the rest of us. "This is what will get you recycled. You do what you're told first, operate on your instincts second. If you all make it to the surface, you'll understand—"
“What’s happened?”
I turned. It was Darcy West, half-running to where 8017 had fallen. Her honeyed hair flowed out behind her; this was the first time I’d seen her without it tied in a bun. She, too, wore two lines between her eyebrows.
“This one fell, Doctor,” Scarlet said. She stood with the stenopad by her side.
Darcy West knelt with 8018. She touched the vital parts of him: his head and neck and face. She asked him questions, and he offered minuscule nods or shakes of the head. I was surprised by the care she showed; 8017 was most likely headed to recycling anyway, especially after that fall.
But she just seemed to care. Despite herself, even. Like she knew she shouldn't, but she couldn't help it.
The rest of us stood silent, watching. Eventually, by some miracle, 8017 sat up.
It seemed my model was engineered hardier than I’d realized.
“I slowed my descent a little with the sticky pads on the rope,” I heard him say, and he lifted his hands to reveal a pair of red, burned palms. The outer layers of skin had been torn off in a nasty way.
“8018, you’re up,” Scarlet called.
Darcy West flashed Scarlet a look, which made me like her even more. She helped 8017 to stand. "Scarlet, take this one to the medical lab."
Scarlet pushed her red hair out of her eyes and gestured with her stenopad. "Doctor—"
"I'll oversee this morning's obstacle training," Darcy West said. She allowed 8018 to help 8017 up and start a slow stumble toward the doors. Scarlet fell into an unhappy walk behind them, ferrying them with her stenopad like some sort of shepherd.
When Darcy turned toward the rest of us, my heart had already started beating faster. The door at the room's far end slid open and shut, and she surveyed those of us remaining from beneath her veil of loose hair.
She pushed some of it behind an ear. "Who's next?"
"I am," 8018 said, jogging back toward the group. One hand was set over his chest like he felt pained himself, but he climbed right up to the platform to start the course.
As he swung and climbed and ran, I watched Darcy West in profile. Her eyes never left 8018, as though she could will him to succeed by not blinking.
At her side, her free hand had folded to a fist, the stenopad for taking notes completely forgotten.
I'd come pre-equipped with an understanding of beauty in my training. Symmetry, shiny hair, a good waist-to-hip ratio. But when I thought the word "beauty," just then, I wasn't thinking of those things at all.
I couldn't describe what I was thinking of, except I felt it in my chest.
A buzzer sounded, and my eyes rose to 8018, who had one triumphant finger on the finish button. One minute, fifty-three seconds. Good enough.
He was breathing harder than he should have, but given what had happened, I felt relief he'd finished at a
ll.
"Well done, 8018," she said. "Next."
And for the next six minutes—the amount of time it took for the other models to complete the course—I indulged myself again, watching her watch them.
Until her blue eyes flicked to me, and I nearly flinched. It was my turn.
I clapped my hands in the chalk, climbed onto the starting platform. When I made to activate the sticky pads, they didn't respond. I lifted my hands, my lips forming a straight line. Come on. Come on, you bastards.
Nothing.
"Begin, 8024," came Darcy West's voice.
So I leapt off the platform, caught hold of the first bar, and began. Without the pads, I had to leverage my full weight—over two hundred pounds—across the distance.
I grunted each time, but with her watching me, and with recycling on my dinner plate, I swung with ferocious, knuckle-whitening persistence until I threw myself hard onto the rope.
As I leapt, I caught a glimpse of the timer on the wall. Thirty seconds. Too long. Way too long.
And I slid on the rope. I slid until my skin rawed on my hands, and I'd dropped a full five or six feet before I stopped myself with my legs wound tight around the rope.
That was when it happened. Apparently my body needed a little pain, or maybe the promise of certain death, but I felt the pads in my hands activate.
If I hadn't had boots on, my feet would have done the same. As it was, they were stuck to the standard-issue socks we'd been given as part of our uniform.
I glanced at the clock; forty seconds had elapsed.
Still too slow. With the pads activated, I let my feet dangle and kicked my boots off. I freed one hand to yank the socks off each foot.
"8024, what are you doing?" came Darcy's voice.
I didn't respond. I smiled, and then I started to climb. With the pads on my hands and feet, I might have weighed nothing, and my body practically sailed, feathery, right up to the knot.
By the time I reached the top of the rope, I'd heard a gasp from down below.
Darcy West, I thought as I threw myself onto the netting, you just wait.
I poured down the netting to the plank. I caught a glimpse of the timer: one minute, twenty-five seconds. I needed to move faster.
As narrow as it was, I took the plank at a sprint, one foot in front of the other until I was moving fast enough to dive across the gap. The canvas sailed beneath me as I leapt, landing with a somersault and rolling toward the ledge—my last obstacle.
I climbed it with hands and feet, straight up, leveraging myself so hard I swung up and onto the platform and had to stop myself from overshooting the button.
When my finger touched it, the buzzer sounded.
No one spoke. Breathing fast, I looked down at Darcy West and the rest of my model. And then up at the timer. One minute, forty seconds.
But no one was staring at the timer. They all stared at me, mouths open. And something felt strange about my fingers—not just the pads, but when I looked down at them, I understood.
I had grown claws.
* * *
"Put your shoes on, 8024," came Darcy West's voice. "And accompany me to interrogation room one."
I'd just dropped from the final platform into a crouch on the floor, and Darcy stood above me with her stenopad clutched to her chest.
She looked—and sounded—more serious than I'd heard her in the full day I'd known her. Which was, actually, my entire life. Those lines had reappeared between her eyebrows.
The others of my model were slowly filing into the hall and back to the capsule room. 8013 glanced back at me—and at my hands—before he disappeared through the door.
My claws had retracted back into my fingers just a moment after I'd looked down at them, and as I folded and unfolded my hands, they didn't reemerge.
I glanced up at Darcy. "Where is that?"
She pointed toward a door opposite the main entrance. "Out that way, take a left. First room on your right."
"Sure," I said. "I'll meet you there." And without another word, jogged over to my discarded socks and boots and proceeded pulling them on. Behind me, I didn't hear her footsteps start up until a few seconds had elapsed.
When I came into the interrogation room, she was staring down at an ominous-looking chair set right in the center of the small, windowless space. The seat was angular, the back exceptionally tall, the arms fitted with restraints.
So we were going to have a nice chat, then.
The door shut behind me. "I've got to hand it to you," I said, "that bit of engineering was clever."
Darcy glanced up at me. "What are you talking about?"
"Not just sticky pads, but claws? Who needs a tanto when—"
She raised a hand. "Stop."
I stopped, because Darcy West had shown respect to 8017. The least I could do was show respect to her.
"How did you do it, 8024?" she asked. "How did you activate them?"
"Will you call me Blaze?"
She blinked once, slowly. "What?"
"My name. It's Blaze."
"Okay," she said, exhaling through her nose. "We need to get a few things straight, 8024. First, your name isn't Blaze. Do not ask anyone to call you that."
"It's what you called me."
"When?"
"Yesterday, on the treadmill."
“I said you were blazing fast, 8024. It was an offhanded thing I said because you run well.”
"Why shouldn't I have a name?"
"Because of this," she said, one hand jerking toward my perfectly human fingers. Her voice pitched upward when she felt exasperation, I noticed. "Because if you walk around asking people to call you a human name, and if you take your shoes and socks off during the obstacle course, and you sprout claws to climb walls, you're going to end up interrogated. You'll end up—" But she stopped herself.
Recycled? I wanted to say, but didn't. Instead I swallowed, opened my mouth. She swept her hand through the air. "No—don't say anything."
I closed my mouth. Opened it again. She looked very severe.
"I was faster without my shoes," I blurted at last. "And the claws helped with the wall.”
Her eyes narrowed. “That's not the point."
"What is the point, Doctor?"
She threw her hands up. "The point is for you not to ask what the point is. You shouldn't be activating your claws already. You shouldn't be taking your shoes off. Most of all, you shouldn't be asking questions like this—you should just do what we tell you."
When she brought her hands down, the edge of the stenopad struck the interrogation chair with a thud.
And despite the severity of all of it—the trainings, the potential for interrogation, for recycling, the almost-certain death that awaited me—I couldn't help but think something irreverent.
I liked her like this.
"You're smiling at me," she said.
I straightened my mouth. "If I'm destined for the recycling bin, I might as well go out having enjoyed my life."
She sighed, lowered her eyes. "8024, you're different. You know that as well as I do. The thing is, the man who runs this facility wants unquestioning infiltrators. He wants warriors who won't betray him or us."
"I wouldn't betray you."
The blue eyes lifted, searching my own eyes and my nose and mouth and back up to my eyes again. "Is that right?"
I could have laughed, but that might have made her more nervous. The chances of me betraying Darcy West—the human I'd known longer than anyone—were so small you couldn't pick them out with a microscope.
But I realized with a start that, in her severeness, she fully expected betrayal. Because, of course, that was my programming: infiltration, seduction, and above all, completion of the mission. Whatever that entailed.
So I didn't laugh. Instead, I set my jaw. "I promise you: I will never betray you."
Her lips twitched, and she nodded. I could tell she wasn't fully sold as she brushed past me toward the door. "Just don't do anything a
nomalous anymore—especially not the 'long nails.' For your own sake."
And I was left alone with the interrogation chair and the prospect of being the perfect, unquestioning soldier. I didn't like it. I didn't like it one bit.
But I did like that woman.
Five
Sunday, May 3, 2053
10:09 a.m.
Darcy
The gym was a tiny mausoleum, a shrine to scientists and doctors who never exercised.
Through the picture window, a one-way view into the greenhouse dome with its sunlike lamps. If I half-squinted at one, I could pretend it was the real, blazing thing.
The Ides staff never exercised. That was a truth, but on Sundays? Well, I could have run sans clothing.
As it was I climbed onto the stationary bike in the only sports bra and shorts I owned, and as I pressed the machine to speed, I remembered:
Riding a bike was a ridiculous thing.
The last time anyone had ridden a bike—on Earth's surface, at least—was before. Before the world changed, before humans lived with artificial lights always on them.
My parents had explained that people rode bikes when they had places to go and great swaths of earth to cross to get there. And by "great swaths" they meant ten or fifteen miles.
Beacon itself only encompassed a few square miles. And I had never left the boundaries of the city except to come to the facility.
So I climbed off the bike. When I got onto the treadmill, 8024 flashed into my mind, running like a streak in the cardio testing room.
The most innate, natural human activity: running. Running to, running away. We were nature's apex predator because we could run and run and run.
Well, we used to be the apex predator. Nowadays, infiltrators like Blaze were meant to level the field.
No—8024. Why had I thought "Blaze"? He didn't have a human name.
I pressed the treadmill to a speed of 5.5 miles per hour, which I figured was perfectly acceptable for a scientist. We were creatures of the mind who happened to work with, dissect, and sometimes completely reconfigure the body.
Besides, I was the only one in the gym. The only one who would be there all day.
Which was exactly what I'd hoped for. I needed time to think about everything that was happening with the infiltrators—why three aberrations had occurred in the last week. 8017, 8018, 8024.