by C. G. Hatton
“Shit,” I mumbled, rubbing my hand across the back of my neck.
The girl smiled. I hadn’t seen her before. She was a bit taller than me but looked about the same age. She reminded me of Maisie. Except she didn’t have black hair, hers was dyed blue. She was wearing a dark blue tee shirt. It looked good on her.
“You new?” she breathed.
I jogged alongside her, trying to favour my left leg and not end up in a ditch. “That obvious?”
She smiled again. She was running comfortably. I had the feeling she was taking it easy and staying at the back to round up the stragglers. I was glad she had.
“How far do we go?” I said, sounding more pathetic than I intended.
“Thirteen miles,” she said, holding back and glancing behind us as we ran. “Six and a half out, six and a half back. If you get to the firing point and hit the target in less than thirty five minutes, you win. First five back in get extra rations for a day. Last five miss dinner. You turn back before the waypoint, you get zapped. That was a warning. It gets worse.”
I couldn’t imagine worse. We were just kids. They’d have regulations and stuff. They were supposed to be taking care of us even if we were supposed to be juvenile delinquents.
“What do you get if you win?” I said.
“Dunno. No one’s ever done it. And seriously, looking at you right now, you don’t stand a chance. What’s wrong with your leg?”
“I’m fine.”
She smiled. She seemed to find me funny. I didn’t know if that was a good thing. I was just glad of the company.
The path headed up into the hills, leaving the river behind, the trail turning into a mudfest. I splashed through a puddle, slipped, turned my knee as I tried to catch my balance, slid and slowed to a walk. I stopped trying to hide the limp. A couple of kids ran past us and I became acutely aware that I was last.
“Really, I’m fine,” I muttered. “Go, I’m fine.”
She ignored me, stayed by my side and said cheerfully as if she wasn’t going to miss dinner because of me, “What’s your first name, Mister J/D-13-Anderton?”
I opened my mouth to reply but shut it. I didn’t know what to say. Everyone had been calling me LC from the minute I walked onto the Alsatia but I didn’t feel like that was me. And I didn’t want to say Luka. That was a different me from a different time. She didn’t seem to mind that I didn’t say anything. She didn’t offer me hers and she stopped trying to make conversation.
The rain was getting heavier, the undergrowth getting more dense either side of us. Rivulets of water were starting to run in winding trails across the path. We walked in silence for a while then she nudged me back into a run. I was half expecting her to challenge me to a race but she didn’t. She kept it steady like she was willing me to keep going, nurturing me to make every footstep, one after the next. She should have called a race. I respond better when I have unrealistic challenges thrown at me. As it was, she was making me want to say screw it and take all damn day.
We must have been going for about an hour when the first hints of light started to show in the sky and the first of the other kids appeared on the trail heading towards us, a mix of green and blue shirts in the lead. The path wasn’t that wide. We’d been going steadily downwards again, heading back down onto the flatter moorland, and meeting up again with the river. I reckoned we were past half way out. It was nice in a way, trees and bushes on one side, the river on the other and birds starting to sing. She’d given up trying to get me to run.
The other kids ran past us, Hilyer at the front, by a mile. He passed us without a word. A couple of the others shoved past, elbows out. Jem ran past with an easy grin and a wave.
The girl with blue hair took my hand in hers and pulled me on.
“Come on, cute boy,” she said, still cheerful, “what the hell did you do to your leg?”
I just shook my head. I didn’t feel like talking.
She smiled, dug something out of her pocket and pushed it into my hand. A chocolate bar, in a plain green wrapper like the kind we’d always stolen from the ration packs the soldiers left lying around. I split it with her, like I always used to with Maisie, wandering along like we were out for a stroll.
“What did you do to your hand?” she said.
“I got shot.” It sounded lame. I don’t know if she even heard what I said. I ducked under a low branch and almost slipped again in the mud, blinking against the sparks that flared in my leg.
She said something I didn’t catch.
“What?”
“Did it hurt?”
“Did what hurt?”
She grabbed my right hand and waggled it. “Getting shot. Did it hurt?”
I pulled away, shrugging her off. I didn’t want to talk about it.
“Was that when you hurt your leg?”
I gave her a look and she dropped it, grinning at me and picking up the pace with a light, “Come on, it’s not far.”
We left the trees behind, and eventually the trail widened out, stretching across the moorland, a tall metal tower looming about a half mile ahead of us.
“Is that the waypoint?” I reckoned it was at about the right distance.
She nodded, mouth full of chocolate.
I waved my half of the bar at her. “Where do you get this from?”
She shook her head, grinning. “Trade secrets. You gonna tell me how you hurt your leg?”
“If you tell me where you get the chocolate from.”
She laughed.
We made it to the final waypoint before she said anything else.
“Don’t stop,” she said. “You have to touch it before we go to the range.”
I wanted nothing more than to stop and sit for a minute, but I knew if I did, I wouldn’t be able to get back up. And she wasn’t going to let me anyway. She took hold of my hand, made sure I tagged it with my other hand – “You have to make contact,” she said – then she pulled me away and onto a path towards the firing range. There were ten firing positions, prefab Earth Empire kit, knee high metal barriers separating them, each with a mat to lie on, same as the ones the soldiers at the garrison on Kheris used to practise. Except these had some kind of clear plastic contraption attached to each position.
I unslung my rifle and chose one. A hatch slid open as I approached, a magazine with five rounds lying in there waiting for me. At the same moment a heavily digitised, female voice announced, “Weapon active”. Earth doesn’t like its AIs to sound too human. I slid a round out of the magazine and held it, tumbling it round my fingers, looking round, half a mind to pocket it to see what would happen.
“Don’t even think about it,” she called. “You’ll get zapped so bad, you won’t wake up till next week.”
That wasn’t surprising. I didn’t ask how she knew and fed it back into the magazine.
I stood there, staring out across the moorland. There was one target on each shooting lane, set across the other side of the river, three hundred metres out. Most of the targets in the other lanes were down but not all. I looked at the target set in my lane, a small metal circle sticking up out of the heather.
“You know what you’re doing?” she asked from her position.
“Yeah.” I knew exactly what I was doing. I dropped down, chambered the round and lay there prone for a second, sighting, then shot wide. Five times. It was nice to be off my knee even though the mat was wet and I stayed there for a minute longer, eyes closed, just breathing in the fresh scent of the undergrowth in the chill air.
I didn’t realise she was watching me until I looked over. She smiled, then put her target down with one perfect shot.
“I get the chocolate from the chef,” she said, once we were heading back. “First rule of anywhere – make friends with the chefs.”
I’d never met any chefs but I didn’t say that.
She nudged me. “So what did you do to your leg?”
“Dislocated my knee.”
“How?”
�
��I fell off a roof.” After being stabbed in the stomach but I didn’t say that either.
I was expecting her to laugh but she looked serious. “I broke my leg once. Hurt like hell. Does it hurt?”
I nodded. I could see the others all way off in the distance ahead of us. “Do we seriously get no food tonight?”
She laughed then. “What do you think? Come on, I know the chefs. And hey, mister cute and mysterious, if you ever feel like telling me your name, mine’s Kat.”
There was no one in the yard when we got back, the rain easing off to a drizzle. I limped through the gate and sat down as soon as we were in, not caring that I was soaked, stretching out and pulling up my pants leg. My knee was swollen something ridiculous.
She crouched next to me. “You need to get inside.”
“I don’t think I can move.”
“You don’t want to get sent to the infirmary.” She said that like it was the worst place in the galaxy. “Come on, get up. We need to get you into your bunkroom. I’ll get you ice for it. Trust me, you don’t want to go to the infirmary.”
“What’s so bad with that?”
She gave me a look. “Trust me, you do not wanna get sent to the infirmary.”
Chapter 12
She pulled me to my feet and we headed in. It was never going to be that easy. The guards intercepted us, took the rifles and steered us off to the huge hangar that was set up as a gym. No chance to dry out and change, never mind get meds. She didn’t protest. I had to bite my tongue. I was learning.
The other kids were all in there, doing circuits. Before I bust my knee, I would have loved it. Right then, I could hardly stand.
They gave us bottles of water. Kat was told to go grab a snack then join a line. I was taken to a first aid station where a couple of medics were cleaning up a kid with a bloody nose. Brennan was there. She took one look at me and cursed under her breath, then pushed a high energy ration bar into my hand and told me to sit down.
I perched on a bench, sipped at the water and ate the rat bar, looking around. None of the instructors looked anything like Markus. I spotted Hilyer and watched him running beep tests. Relatively easily it seemed, despite having just run thirteen miles. He was trashing everything they threw at him. The briefing we’d got from the guild was to expect a physically tough regime but this was something else. Our first day and it felt like we’d landed in the middle of a selection procedure, some kind of ‘fail-it-and-you’re-out’ test. Except this was prison so there was no out. That left only one other option, they wanted to see what everyone’s breaking point was.
There were armed guards around the whole perimeter of the hangar, half of them with rifles at the ready. I don’t know what they were expecting.
They got the other kid cleaned up and sent him back into the fray. Brennan turned to me.
“I can handle this one,” she said to her colleague, and told me to prop my leg up on the bench. She cursed again when she saw the state of my knee.
I almost screamed out when she touched it.
“Dislocated?”
I nodded, biting my lip.
“When?”
“Four or five weeks ago.” It felt like eons. A lifetime ago.
“Surgery?”
Another nod.
She prodded at it, manipulating it, and I almost passed out when she popped something back into place.
“You shouldn’t be walking on it,” she muttered, injecting meds straight into my leg. The pain subsided almost immediately. She wrapped a pressure bandage around it, tight, pulled down my pants leg, avoided looking me in the eye and looked round at the guard watching us. “He’s good to go.”
I followed him to a row of mats where lines of kids were doing sit-ups and push-ups, an instructor shouting out counts. I dropped into position. I could do that.
I managed fifty two push-ups before it degenerated into a pathetic twitch for a couple then I collapsed onto the floor, arms burning, knee screaming and lower back seized. One of the guards knelt beside me, leaned in and whispered slowly, “You do this, you do it properly or you don’t do it at all.”
I was stupid enough to gasp out, “Is that an option?”
He wrapped me over the back of the head with his baton. “Get your ass over to the next station. You get three strikes here and you’re in solitary for the night.”
That sounded tempting but I dragged myself up and limped over to the next line, his voice shouting after me, “That’s one strike, Anderton.”
I didn’t care. I wasn’t there to get fit.
The next station was a cinch, but I pissed them off even more. Hold a heavy medicine ball out in front of you, arms straight, without moving. I could do that forever. I locked my elbows and stood there, weight on my right leg, calm, going someplace else in my head, thinking about the ocean I’d never seen and working out planetary drift and jump calculations. I was only half aware of the other kids either side of me, crying out in pain, dropping the ball and getting yelled at. I had no idea how long I stood there but I slowly realised it was quiet, opened eyes I hadn’t realised I’d closed, and saw everyone standing looking at me.
The whole gym was silent. Jem had a huge grin on her face, Kat looked disappointed and Hilyer was just staring like he was thinking I was an idiot. I was an idiot.
One of the instructors walked up, stood in front of me glowering, then batted the ball out of my hands. “Get your sorry ass over to the wall.” He spun. “The rest of you, back at it. This is not a freakshow.”
The wall looked easy but I could see kids struggling half way up and dropping off, swinging down on the harness. I’d never climbed with a harness before. They hooked me up, showed me how it worked and yelled at me to go. I made it to the top, hit the buzzer and jumped off, abseiling down and bouncing off my right leg. It was hard not to laugh. The Wall in the Maze on the Alsatia was tough. This climb was kids’ stuff.
They got me to do it three more times then made me stand there waiting while they called Hilyer over.
He glanced sideways at me as he got ready, hooking up with the harness, and mouthed, “You think you can take me?”
I knew I could.
Someone yelled, “Go,” and we went for it. I was faster than him even with a dodgy knee. I pulled off stupid reaches to get ahead, risking losing it completely to gain an inch, not even keeping contact with the wall a couple of times to get an advantage by throwing myself up and across the handholds.
Hilyer wasn’t far behind. He was good but he was running it by the book. There was no way I was going to let him beat me, except I suddenly had Mendhel’s constant warnings echoing through my brain, heard Maisie saying again and again, “Don’t be an idiot…”
It wasn’t just me anymore. And that was one hell of a realisation.
I fumbled a hold, let my right foot slip so my weight crashed onto my left leg, and had to bite back a cry as my knee gave way. I grabbed for a new hold and pressed my forehead against the cold surface of the wall, well aware that Hilyer was passing me.
There was no way I was going to make it easy for him. I started moving, got my momentum back and chased him all the way to the top. He waited for me, gave me a grin and jumped backwards to abseil down.
I reached the ground to shouts of, “Show’s over. Everyone get cleaned up and report to the hall.”
My knee was throbbing. Hilyer gave a laugh and took off, Jem hooking her arm into his and throwing me a grin. I couldn’t see Kat or Brennan around anywhere. I limped into the changing rooms and waited for everyone to go before I stripped off and showered.
I stood there, lost in the stream of hot water, soaping slowly. The jagged scar on my stomach was still red, the holes and surgical scars on either side of my hand still raw. They’d said it could take a while. Kheris was still keeping its hold on me. I rinsed off the soap and turned.
Hilyer was standing there, a couple of the bigger kids behind him.
The water was still pouring. I was butt naked. They were
all dressed, boots and all. If they came at me, I’d have no chance.
“All alone, Anderton,” he said, his voice low. “Not smart being alone here. Just us. No guards.”
I glanced up and around. There’d be surveillance.
“Trust me,” he said, “they wouldn’t get here in time to make a difference.”
I didn’t say it but I’d thrown the climb to make him look good. What the hell else was I supposed to have done?
The others moved up close behind but he waved them to stay. He leaned in through the doorway. “Take this as a warning.”
I stared at him, wishing Mendhel had told me how to play this stupid game. All my training had been the AI strings, the codes, what they wanted and how they wanted me to get it. Hilyer was supposed to be watching my back.
He turned and walked out, his new cronies following.
I half expected them to be waiting to jump me in the changing room but it was empty, just a guard at the door banging his stick on the frame and shouting me to hurry the hell up. I dressed, rewrapping the bandages round my knee and hand, and left. Hopefully the hall meant food.
It didn’t. The hall was set up with little individual desks not tables, all separated like they were about to give us a test. There was a board on each table, inert, everyone sitting there waiting, segregated out into the four blocks. There was one table free, at the back. I sat at it and looked up, checking out the staff in case one of them was Markus. No such luck.
“You have sixty minutes,” an instructor announced from the front. “Your time starts now.”
The boards lit up, everyone started entering data furiously, solving puzzles, calculating formulae that got harder as you progressed. I read through it right the way to the end before I started. The board was set up to look like it was an isolated unit but it wasn’t, it hooked up to the main system. I nudged it, got access to a database further in, and looked up. No one had noticed, none of the guards giving me a second’s glance. All the other kids were at it still. Hilyer was working slowly, not like him. I’d seen how fast he could work. And there was something weird about how he had his board angled, sitting back every now and then and moving it aside before carrying on. It was so blatant it was ridiculous. The kid next to him was huge, tape across his nose like it had recently been broken. He was copying Hilyer’s answers. Raine. It had to be. I couldn’t believe none of the guards were calling them on it. It was all crap anyway. Some of the questions were so easy a six year old would know it, some of them so hard they were impossible, like they were setting us up to fail.