The Initiation

by Chris Babu

  “I’ll tell you later, Sid,” Drayden said. He pointed to his eye and then to the ceiling.

  Sidney nodded, indicating she understood they were being recorded.

  Though not far, the looming station at Chambers Street remained out of view. The tracks probably turned somewhere ahead.

  Chambers Street’s significance stood out on several levels. It served both the Two-Three Line and the One Line. It was the first major station since Fourteenth Street to do so, and the final one as well. The One Line, which ran parallel to the Two-Three Line they were following, branched off there. More notably, Chambers marked the southern boundary of the Precinct and the beginning of the Palace. If they passed through, they would enter the Palace. Underneath it, but still.

  The pledges sped through the tunnel now, making decent time. When they arrived at the station, a little over fifty minutes should remain. The Bureau gave them a gift at Franklin Street with no challenge. That freebie, combined with the significance of the Chambers Street station, guaranteed a brutal challenge.

  Voices echoed somewhere up ahead.

  Drayden slowed to a walk and pressed his index finger to his lips. “Shhhh,” he whispered to Catrice and Sidney.

  Sunlight through a grate to the street above brightened the tunnel.

  Drayden walked below the grate and stopped to rest. He looked up.

  Charlie and Alex reached them, and everyone was huffing and puffing, out of breath.

  Two Guardians huddled on the grate above their heads, chatting. One appeared middle-aged and the other much younger, barely older than the pledges.

  “You think bigger rocks eat the smaller ones?” the younger one asked.

  “What? You’re some kind of special, aren’t you? No, big rocks don’t eat small ones,” the older said with food in his mouth.

  “How do you know? How do they grow then?”

  “Kid, how’d you make it through Guardian training? I need a new partner. How can they eat without mouths? The rocks just grow naturally. They don’t eat each other. Break’s over; let’s go.” He dropped something through the grate.

  The banana peel landed on Charlie’s head.

  The other pledges laughed in silence. Charlie laughed too, and threw the peel at Drayden. It smacked him in the chest.

  He held it, the levity of the moment fading. It reminded him of his mom. Drayden reached up and touched his hat. The Initiation was designed to test for bravery, and indeed it did. He would enter the upcoming challenge and handle whatever the Bureau threw

  at him.

  They hustled again, Charlie and Alex lingering far behind.

  “Dray,” Sidney said, “what type of challenge do you think is next?”

  “No idea. The last challenge wasn’t a challenge, and the one before that was the maze. I think it was a bravery challenge, though it was kinda both. But whatever’s waiting, between the three of us, we’ve got it covered.”

  “You worried about Alex trying to retaliate?” Sidney asked quietly.

  “No,” Drayden said. “He was asking for it, and he knows it. He also knows if he comes at me, I’d beat him down again. I should have done that years ago.”

  Sidney practically swooned, grinning widely.

  The tracks curved to the right. As soon as they rounded the turn, they ran into Chambers Street, the gateway to the Palace.

  Drayden wished his mother could see him now, on the outskirts of the Palace. He got the sense that she could see, that she was with him. It was probably his imagination, or the painkillers at work. Still, he felt her presence, a warmth, watching over him.

  Drayden took a deep breath, shook out his hands, and marched down the platform. The others followed.

  The Bureau had blocked off the whole uptown side of the station with a wall that ran the length of the platform. They walked on the downtown platform with the Two-Three Line tracks on the left, and the One Line tracks on the right. Not a significant modification, and nothing else jumped out.

  Drayden picked up the pace, cognizant of the dwindling time. He reached the middle of the station where they usually faced the challenges, and stopped, digesting the scene.

  Nothing.

  Would the Bureau cut them a break two stations in a row? It was possible, but unlikely. As he examined his surroundings, he locked eyes with Alex.

  Alex’s purple left eye puffed out grotesquely, nearly swelling shut. Dried blood crusted the edges. Alex said nothing, dripping rage.

  “Could today be our lucky day?” Sidney asked. “That whole thing about the upcoming challenges being harder might have been a bluff to get us to quit.”

  “I don’t think so,” Charlie said. He pointed at the far end of the platform. “Look!”

  A table.

  The pledges sprinted toward it, slowing when they reached the familiar picnic table.

  Past it, the Bureau had painted five red circles on the floor in a straight line. They ran parallel to the tracks, spaced a few feet apart, about a foot in diameter each. Each one contained a number, painted in white. Number one started in the back, with number five in the front.

  A small metal box with a black button in the center rested on a stand alongside the first circle. Above the circles, a narrow shiny metal box hung down from the ceiling. About eight feet in the air, it began at the first circle and ended at the last. A clock above the table continued its countdown: 00:53:53, 00:53:52…

  Drayden ran to the table and plucked up the note. “All might be done, but for one. A group’s wellbeing supersedes any individual’s. Solve this complex puzzle to demonstrate your embrace of this core ideal of the Bureau. Each of you will stand on one of the circles. A hat will be lowered from the box onto each of your heads. The hat will be either green or red. You will not know the color of your own hat, or the hat of anyone behind you. You must each correctly guess the color of your own hat, starting from the back, by saying red or green out loud. You will not know if you guessed correctly until the end.”

  Sweat trickled down Drayden’s cheek. He cleared his throat and continued. “If the person in circle one guesses incorrectly, that person will be exiled. If more than one person guesses incorrectly, everyone will be exiled. If anyone attempts to view their own hat, or a hat behind them, or if any word other than red or green is spoken, everyone will be exiled. After the last person has answered, you are to remain still until you are given a signal of the results. When you are ready to begin, the person in circle one will push the button. Good luck.”

  Drayden fell to his knees, the note floating to the ground. Up to this point, the difficulty of the brainteasers was mostly due to the pressure. It came from both the time constraint, and the consequence of answering wrong.

  This was something different. This problem was really tricky. Even alone in a classroom with nothing on the line, Drayden would struggle to solve it. How could every person possibly know what color hat they wore without looking? It must have a solution. But while not given a defined time limit, they must solve it in less than ten minutes. Otherwise they had no shot of finishing the Initiation, based on how many challenges remained. Some of those would be bravery ones. It couldn’t be done. The maze took sixteen minutes, the pool thirty, and the rock wall forty.

  Drayden pictured his father getting the news that he’d been exiled. The last time he’d seen his father, the man had been red-faced and yelling. He’d shown more emotion than Drayden had observed in sixteen years. Maybe Dad was right after all. The Initiation was a trap. They were never intended to pass. The Bureau hadn’t underestimated the time required to finish when they gave only ninety minutes. They just handed the pledges an insurmountable task. They’d lied about the time at the start. Perhaps they’d lied about the prize at the end as well. Did the Initiation exist solely to exile kids? Or kill them, after torturing them for a while?

  Drayden should have heeded
his father’s warning. It even fit with Thomas Cox’s claims. The Bureau had a sudden need to furtively increase exiles, and the Initiation offered a convenient solution, if anyone was stupid enough to enter. Then why bother hosting an Initiation at all? Why not just exile them from the start? He bet in years past the Initiation accomplished what the Bureau claimed, so most of it was already set up. Much of it could even double as training facilities for the Guardians. They might have held it anyway this year because the twisted Premier had a sick interest in seeing how far they could push people before they’d break. Drayden buried his face in his hands.

  “Drayden?”

  He raised his head.

  Catrice stood in front of him, clutching her paper and pencil. “Let’s get to work. We can solve this, but I can’t do it without your help.”

  He gazed into her dazzling eyes. A tiny spark lit in his belly. To hell with it. Trap or not, he wasn’t going down without a fight.

  “Um, you guys,” Charlie said. “If there’s anything we can do, let us know. We should probably just stay out of the way. We’re here if you need anything.” He, Alex, and Sidney wandered over to the circles.

  Drayden and Catrice sat facing each other. Drayden stuffed his hat inside his backpack and pulled out his pencil and paper. It felt a bit pointless, given they needed the solution about five minutes ago. They would still have to go through some sort of iterative problem-solving routine. He should approach it methodically like a real scientist would.

  “Let’s start basic. We all just guess the color of our own hats. Fifty-fifty chance of being right. Two-and-a-half of us would answer wrong. Two or three people, probably. We could get lucky, but that’s a terrible strategy. If even two people are wrong, we’re exiled.”

  Catrice tapped her pencil on the side of her head. “What if…what if we split into pairs? One and two, three and four, and then five, alone. The person in the back of the pair calls out the color of the hat in front of them. That person in the back has a fifty-fifty chance of getting their own right, and the person in front has a hundred percent chance.”

  Drayden tugged on his left ear. “It’s better than everyone guessing. But only a little better, right? Let’s think. Person four and person two would answer right. Persons one, three, and five would still be guessing, with a fifty-fifty chance. We would need two of those three to guess right. And let’s not forget that person one can be exiled by themselves if they get theirs wrong. Why’d they create that rule, anyway?”

  “I don’t know,” Catrice said. “I guess just to make position one more dangerous? That whole thing they said about the group versus the individual wellbeing. However we do it, who’s going to want to go first?”

  A chill ran through Drayden’s body.

  00:51:45, 00:51:44…

  He slapped a hand on the floor. “There has to be a better way, Catrice. I refuse to accept that this challenge tests our luck. There’s a trick, and we’re missing it.”

  She chewed on her pencil.

  Drayden rubbed his chin. “Each person will be wearing either a green or red hat, but we won’t know how many of each there are. You won’t know yours, or the ones behind you. You’ll know what the people in front of you are wearing.”

  “Is that all we know?” she asked.

  Wait a minute. Drayden’s eyes widened. “No, that’s not all. You know what each person behind you said. That’s the key, it has to be.”

  Catrice closed her eyes, deep in thought.

  Drayden ran his fingers through his hair. “What if the person behind you could give a code somehow?”

  “They can’t,” Catrice said. “You can only say ‘red’ or ‘green,’ and it has to be a guess about your own hat.”

  She was right. Drayden groaned in frustration. “I don’t know…something to do with probability? Like, if the person in the back sees all red hats, he would guess green? Or if the person in front heard all greens, he guesses red?”

  “I don’t know…” Catrice shifted uncomfortably.

  What the person in the back sees.

  It hit him at once.

  “Catrice,” he said softly, “I know how to do it. And why the first person is special.”

  She bolted to attention. She tucked her hair behind her ears, and stole a peek at the clock. “How?”

  “The color you guess is the code, and it all starts with what the first person says. He tells everyone else exactly what they need to know. That first person still has a fifty-fifty chance of guessing right. Everybody else is guaranteed to get theirs.”

  Catrice shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

  “The first person can see everyone else’s hats, right? He counts the number of green and red hats. He’s going to say a color, but it’s not going to be a guess about his own hat, it’s going to be a code. If he sees an odd number of green hats, he says green. If he sees an even number of green hats, he says red. He just has to hope he was right for himself, but he solved it for everybody else.”

  Drayden scooted closer. “Let’s assume he sees an odd number of green hats, like one, with the other three red. He calls out green because one is an odd number. Now it’s the second person’s turn. He can see three hats in front of him. If he also sees an odd number of green hats—one—it’s the same thing the first person saw. Which means his own hat must be red. Because if his hat was green, the person behind him would have seen two green hats, an even number. Then you go to the third person. If he sees an even number of green hats, say zero for example, then he knows he’s wearing a green hat. Since the person behind him saw an odd number of green hats—one, and so on. Unfortunately, the first person still only has a fifty-fifty chance of being right.”

  “I got it! Nice job!” Catrice leaned forward and hugged Drayden. She pulled back, looking into his eyes. “We can’t do this one for everyone else. They’re going to have to think their way through it. If any of them mess up, we’re all screwed.”

  Drayden frowned. “Yeah. I know. Let’s walk them through exactly what they need to do.”

  “Person one only has a fifty-fifty chance of passing, and can be exiled alone. They can’t improve those odds. Someone is going to have to take that first spot.”

  Indeed, someone was. Who would volunteer? Nobody, of course.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Catrice said.

  “Alex.” Drayden deflated a bit from guilt as he said it.

  Catrice whispered in his ear, “You could tell him to stand in position one because it’s the easiest. He calls out green or red depending on how many green hats he sees. He probably wouldn’t even understand that he might be exiled. If he guessed wrong, and we all got ours right, we continue the Initiation and he’s gone forever. Kill two birds with one stone. But Drayden…that would be wrong. No matter how evil he is, we can’t do that to him.”

  She was right. As tempting as it was, Drayden could never do that, even to Alex. Despite the years of torment, at one time they were best friends. Alex didn’t deserve to be duped, exploiting his lack of intelligence for their own gain, at the cost of his life. It would be a despicable act.

  They were so close to the finish line, though. Even if the Bureau expected them to fail, they solved this puzzle and could be on schedule for the following challenge. He was so close to the end he could taste the Palace. He could guarantee a safe and better life for himself as well as his family. Wasn’t that why he’d entered the Initiation? Wasn’t that more important than Alex, a genuinely bad kid? Three more stations to go, and he achieved the safety he craved.

  But at what cost? He might reach the Palace that way and attain its facade of security. He would never truly feel safe, because an act of cowardice would have paved the way. He would never be free, the way Tim and Mom were. He would always find something to fear. Despite its evil, the Initiation had taught him something about bravery. Bravery isn’t the a
bsence fear. It’s choosing to overcome it.

  The Drayden of yesterday, the scared and weaker one, would choose the darker path, shafting Alex, just as he had all those years ago when he turned his back on Alex in the first place. He wasn’t totally innocent. Alex was right about that, and Drayden had to face it. It had been easier not to see what was happening to Alex’s life, so he didn’t look. He could have been his friend at school or something, just someone to lean on, but he hadn’t done that. He had cut him off completely.

  Drayden recalled what his mother had taught him about karma, after she saved that woman’s life at the FDC. If he tried to screw over Alex now, karma would come back to bite him. Conversely, if he were brave, the karma gods might protect him. He wasn’t even sure he believed in all that stuff, but this would be a heck of a time to test it out.

  It was as if the Bureau had designed this challenge specifically for him. The challenge wasn’t even about red and green hats, it was all about choosing who would go first.

  All might be done, but for one.

  While the Bureau ostensibly presented this as an intelligence challenge, choosing to go first required more bravery than any of the other challenges thus far. It carried a fifty-fifty chance of exile for only that person. The architects of the Initiation were keenly aware of the dilemma of circle one. The Watchers were watching. He knew deep down what the answer was. He knew who had to be the one.

  “You’re right, Catrice.” Drayden rose and stood tall. “I need to go first.”

  “What? No! I didn’t mean you. Charlie or Sidney might even volunteer for it. Drayden, it can’t be you.”

  “It’s okay. I need to go first. For me.”

  She hugged him. “You don’t have to prove anything. And I don’t have anyone else.”

  Drayden held her. Those words revealed the most emotion, and direct affection, Catrice had ever expressed. It moved him. She meant it. Throughout all the years he’d known her, she’d never seemed to need anyone. It only increased his desire to become closer to her. Except she was human too. He pulled her closer.