by Mara, Alex
We stood outside the capsule room, which seemed to be 8013's semi-permanent post as a Gale, and he raised one apologetic palm. A human affectation. "I'm sorry, sir. I delivered your request, but his Scarlet didn't respond. And I haven't seen her since she retrieved 8024 this morning."
"Locate her," I said.
"Yes, sir," he said—I was getting really sick of his "sirs"—and he whispered almost inaudibly into his earpiece. I wished I had the infiltrators' ability to read lips.
As it was, I stood there with my eyes squinted and read nothing. Finally, his green eyes flicked up to mine. "It appears 8024 has been escorted into the seduction training room."
"They're early," I said. I turned, starting down the hall. If I moved fast, I could catch him before he went in. I just needed a minute or two.
"Yes, sir," came 8013's voice from behind.
"Stop calling me sir," I said over my shoulder.
And in my periphery, 8013 went silent. But I knew—I just knew—he still had that upturn to his lips.
Five minutes later, I came breathless in the viewing room. This training was my purview, and Scarlets weren't supposed to be starting early with modules I was meant to observe.
For a second I imagined reporting her to Ides, and then I remembered I would probably never deliver another report again.
That is, if we managed to escape. Which was looking pretty unlikely given how, on the other side of the glass, Blaze and the Scarlet had just begun the seduction training.
I was too late. If he refused to sleep with this Scarlet as he'd told me he would, things would get a whole lot trickier for us.
I dropped into the seat, watching as Blaze and the Scarlet-in-training came into the room like the leads in a play.
I had heard about plays when I was a girl: they were held on stages, and the actors paced around the bare space and both audience and actors pretended it was really a living room or an office or a street corner.
And if this were a play, it would be titled The Seducer.
Blaze's goal was to figure out the Scarlet's particularities, the right words to say and places to touch, and in what order to do them. If he succeeded at this and ended up sleeping with her—my throat tightened at the thought—then he would pass the training.
But she wouldn't make it easy; Scarlets were trained to be impossible to read and nearly impossible to please. Every step Blaze took was more likely to be a misstep with her, and only one in ten who made it this far actually succeeded at seducing the novice Scarlets.
Most often, there had to be real, unadulterated attraction. The infiltrator had to make the Scarlet truly desire him, which was near-impossible in the time they had. He had to go from stranger to paramour in an hour or less.
All while standing under a bus awning in public.
Why did we even have the street scenario, when the whole world had gone to shit? Chalk up one more reason why they weren't succeeding on the surface: because we didn't have streets or buses.
We didn't even have proper cities anymore, for that matter.
Nonetheless, the novice Scarlet stood under the awning like she'd ridden one before, waiting with the sort of affected innocence I knew she didn't possess.
Blaze's trainer had done this on purpose, I realized: his Scarlet had pulled Blaze from the capsule room, bringing him early to the training. She knew something had transpired or was transpiring with him, and she didn't want us to talk this morning.
I initiated the sequence on the console in front of me, and the street spun into life. Combustion engines hummed, birds called—oh, how I missed birds—and a hologram of a young man approached the awning first, stood a respectable distance from the Scarlet.
The hologram was designed to create a little jockeying for the female, something to get the blood singing and amp the infiltrator's competitive urges.
But where was Blaze? Just the Scarlet and the hologram stood there, and most often the infiltrators entered the scene right away.
I stared around the large space, finally spotted him off in the shadows. His arms were folded, and I wondered if this was some sort of protest.
Was he refusing to participate in the training?
The young hologram segued into flirting. He was handsome, brown-haired, dapper in a suit like he was on his way to somewhere important. “Care for a cigarette?” he said, tapping the pack in his jacket pocket.
“I don’t smoke,” the Scarlet said, offering a small smile—politeness, which meant she felt the debt.
A small silence elapsed before the hologram nodded. Just as he was about to replace the pack in his pocket, Blaze finally strode into the scene.
He came to the awning, but didn't stand beside the other two. Instead he stood behind them, by the bench.
The hologram replaced the pack in his suit, pressed his hands into his pockets. The both of them watched for the oncoming bus.
By the bench, Blaze removed something from his own jacket—a paperback. He opened it as though he were just resuming from where he'd left off. I tilted my head, tried to catch the title, but it was set at too odd an angle.
He seemed entirely unconcerned, lost in himself.
At the curb, the hologram proceeded to his second attempt. He had removed a cigarette for himself, but his other hand held a leather briefcase, one too nice to set on the curb. “Would you mind holding this for a second,” he asked the Scarlet, “while I light mine?”
It was a clumsy attempt at flirting. The Scarlet's eyes traveled over each aspect: the briefcase, the cigarette, his lifted eyebrows. But it was such a small request—especially in the wake of his offered cigarette—that she nodded her assent.
“Allow me,” Blaze said. At some point he’d come forward, now stood between the female and the hologram, and though the two males were the same height, he somehow seemed taller, more imposing.
He wasn't looking at the Scarlet. He had never looked at her.
He and the hologram sized each other in a quarter-second, and the female’s eyes conveyed the obvious: her face was lit on Blaze. Her body angled by degrees toward him.
Her attraction entered my chest like a fine needle.
Somehow Blaze had read the Scarlet perfectly: his casualness and non-acknowledgment of her made her want him more. It was an old trick, sometimes entirely ineffectual, but with this particular female, it worked.
“Appreciate it,” the hologram said, passing the flickering, virtual briefcase to Blaze.
And I could tell by her body language as she and Blaze stood next to each other under the awning: the first stage of the scenario had been decided with the delivery of two words, three syllables.
I pressed my finger to the voice activation trigger. “Scarlet, would you like to proceed to the bedroom?”
"Yes," she said, her voice soft.
That was exactly what I wanted to her say, I reminded myself. He needed to pass this training. So why did I hesitate to hit the button on the console that would open the door to the bedroom?
I screwed up my mouth, forced my finger down. The door hissed open, and now Blaze and the Scarlet came into the other half of the room, where they stood next to a wide bed. To their left, a dresser, the promise of a bathroom somewhere beyond.
A picture window let light in through the gauzy curtains and the female’s face illuminated prettily, the precise angles of her chin and cheek golden in the sun.
The hotel room scenario.
This was where—if he succeeded, and I had no doubt he would—Blaze would have his first sexual encounter. This was a necessary part of his training, what allowed him to fully understand the opposite sex.
And, for some reason, this first contact always made the Infiltrator model more powerful in all aspects of physicality, as though they could not peak until this barrier had been crossed.
After that, they required it regularly. Often. Of the 126 that had survived the trainings and evaluations to be released from the facility, the 28 earliest Infiltrators had become we
ak, clumsy, died in the course of one mission or another. We didn’t realize their need for this kind of physical contact.
It was an awakening. One that could not be taken back.
Blaze stepped forward, his eyes on the female. They appraised one another, and her lips parted. She was willing.
The foot of my crossed leg tapped the floor. I still had my crème-de-menthe headache, and everything seemed to be throbbing: my eyes, my entire face. It all just hurt.
And my chest did, too. It felt tight like a newly strung drum.
In the hotel room, Blaze had not moved. The female had even taken a step closer in an attempt to lure him, but his eyes appeared glazed. I pressed the voice activation. “Proceed, 8024,” I said, my tone sharp.
When he heard me, his eyes flicked to the glass. It was one-way, but somehow he knew precisely where to look. His green eyes were so intense on me he might have been staring through a clear pane. The fine hairs on my arms rose, my nerves tingling.
He stepped around. He passed the Scarlet-in-training without touching her, and he approached the glass until we were feet apart, and he still stared. With need. Hunger.
The feeling from the dream filled me like a pitcher, rising, rising. Save him, Darcy. Save him. Save him. I could feel his mouth on me, his fingers twined in my own. His heat.
My shaking finger found the button. My voice came out as a tiny thread through the thunder of blood in my ears: “Proceed, 8024.”
But he would not proceed.
Twelve
Thursday, May 7, 2053
8:03am
Blaze
I sat in the narrow viewing room across from Darcy West. She looked unhappy.
After my refusal to complete the training, the projection of the hotel room had disappeared, and her sharp voice came across the intercom. “10015,”—she’d been addressing the novice Scarlet, I assumed, by her original number—“please return to your capsule. Your handler will meet with you shortly.”
So even Scarlets had handlers. The facility was a wonderful pyramid of propaganda and brainwashing.
The novice Scarlet had hung there a moment, her eyes flicking to me, and I could tell she wanted to say something. To object, maybe, even if Dr. West was her creator.
But she was obedient in the end, and the Scarlet's footsteps sounded across the bare floor. The door slid open behind me, she passed through it and I had been left alone, still staring at the glass.
“8024,” Darcy had said through the intercom, her tone still as sharp, “leave the training room and wait for me in the hallway.”
I’d waited in the hallway for several minutes, my back to the wall. I speculated whether she had done this on purpose: making me wait, making me sweat.
And if that was the case, I didn’t care—what had been done was done. I couldn't complete the training because that Scarlet wasn't for me, and I wasn't for her. Not in that way—and frankly, not in any way.
And because I was an infiltrator and my genetics very nearly eliminated any potential for anxiety or nervousness, I waited with a strange ease I knew I shouldn't feel, closing my eyes and setting my head to the wall until I’d heard the door to the viewing room slide open.
But Darcy hadn't done it on purpose. Of course she hadn't. When she stepped out, two lines sat between her eyebrows, and I saw the fear and worry in her eyes. She waved me over. “Come in.”
And despite everything, I had glanced at her lips before she turned. They were still as eminently kissable as they'd been when I had first kissed them.
I could tell the viewing room was uncomfortably narrow for her with me in there, and she leaned against the desk with her arms folded.
She gestured for me to sit on the rolling chair, pushing it with her foot from the desk. I sat, folding my hands.
To the right of us lay the wide one-way glass looking into the room where I’d just failed the final phase of my seduction training.
My eyes flicked that way. What had once been a bedroom now appeared sterile, bare—which was how it had always been. Only the trick of the training had allowed it to seem like a welcoming place. Another place.
“You purposefully failed the training,” Darcy said. Beneath the harshness, I heard something like desperation in her voice. She leaned on the edge of the desk beside the computer, her white coat swept over her body. Her stenopad was held before her like a shield, and her breathing came faster than normal. “Why did you do that, 8024?”
My eyes lifted, scanned the four edges of the ceiling. I couldn't find a camera, which meant we were unseen. That made sense: this room wasn’t meant for clones.
The fact she’d brought me in here was probably unusual—an anomaly. But there could still be a microphone, someone listening. Actually, there probably was.
“I couldn’t,” I said. That was the truth. My body wouldn’t let me touch another woman. It had already decided on the one before me, even if I’d only tasted and felt her for a moment in a storage closet.
The lines between her eyebrows deepened, and I wanted to press them away. Instead, I remained seated. “What do you mean, ‘you couldn’t’?”
“Do you want the 8024 answer or the Blaze answer?”
“There’s a difference?” And now she was writing something on her stenopad, her hand moving fast. When she glanced up, she nodded at me. Keep talking, that nod said.
"Yes," I said. "The Blaze answer is much more interesting."
She turned the stenopad around for me to read. STAY ALIVE. I'LL COME FOR YOU.
And despite my genetics and my engineering, I felt her words like an electric line straight up the center of my body.
So Darcy West had decided to buck the system after all. Did that mean we were ditching this hole in the ground? Well, until we could talk in private, it was a good thing I was exceptionally skilled at surviving.
She wanted to help me. In that moment I wanted more than ever to kiss her pretty face. Instead, I offered a slow and meaningful nod.
We spent a full five seconds staring at one another before her eyes dropped, and she turned the pad back around. “I want the real answer, 8024—whatever that is.”
Time to practice being a good little infiltrator. I shook my head. “The real answer is I momentarily failed in my training. Give me another chance, Doctor.”
She exhaled, her lips parting. And in that moment I imagined crossing to her, my nostrils filling with her scent. I would dare to set one finger under her chin—I knew it would be warm, smooth—but she would raise her face ahead of my finger, evading me.
Her cheeks would bloom pink, and she would lift her eyes from my chest to stare at me with round eyes. Something would pull tight in my stomach, and I'd know if she looked at me like that any longer, I would kiss her.
But none of that happened. She was still leaning, and I was still sitting, both of us at opposite ends of the room.
"Why do you think you deserve another chance, 8024?" Darcy was saying. Keeping up the charade.
"Because—" I started, but I was interrupted by a soft chiming emanating from the desk.
"One second," Darcy said. The look on her face told me she hadn't expected that to happen. She spun around and leaned over to press a button on a keypad. "Yes?"
"Sorry to interrupt, Doctor"—it was my Scarlet's voice, damn her—"but 8024 is required for his next training session in combat room 3."
A pause. "He's failed his seduction training. I'm debriefing him," Darcy said.
"Yes, sir, but my handler has requested that I gather all first-week iterations of the male infiltrators for their next training."
A lie. I could very nearly hear the venom in my Scarlet's velvet voice.
Silence fell, and I knew Darcy was trying to come up with an excuse as to why I couldn't be in the training. But this was tricky, because she couldn't behave anomalously herself.
Ides had set the whole place up cleverly: just as Darcy was watching us, I knew now those Scarlets were watching her. And I still hadn
't had a chance to tell her that my Scarlet knew about our moment in the storage closet. She knew I had asked Darcy to leave with me.
Just like she'd instructed me to "stay alive," Darcy's best option was to keep her head down until she came for me.
I saw her entire body shift with a sigh. "Right. Fine. I'll send him over now."
And then she removed her finger from the keypad, ending the connection.
"You heard her," she said, not looking at me.
"What about my debriefing, Doctor?" I said.
She didn't turn back to me. Instead, she stood upright, and her fingers went to the viewing glass. She seemed to be closely observing her own fingertips, sliding them up toward her face.
When the five splayed fingers reached the level of my chest in the reflection, she and I met eyes in the glass.
Stay alive, those blue eyes said. I'll come for you.
Then she turned, and her hands clasped in front of her. “Following your training with the others, come straight to my office for the rest of your debriefing. Understood?”
"Yes, sir," I said.
But neither of us moved. In the silence, my hand went out to her. It remained there, waiting, because this wasn't something a microphone could detect. This was just between us.
She stared at my hand, and when her fingers came out, they were tentative. They touched my own, and every nerve in my arm surged. She squeezed my hand, nodded at me.
I lifted her fingers to my mouth, touched my lips to her knuckles, and turned to leave.
* * *
Thursday, May 7, 2053
8:24 a.m.
When the door slid open to the prep area for combat room 3, my Scarlet stood there with 8023. He held a tanto in his right hand.
Of course. I had embarrassed her by refusing her unrefusable offer of ultimate power—probably interfered with her perfect record, too—and she'd enlisted help in getting rid of me early.
"Glad you made it, 8024," she said, one hand sweeping around the room. For a woman who wanted me dead, she sounded remarkably like one whose only goal was to make me a better fighter.