The Battle Begins

by Devon Hughes

  “Do you know what happened in the final match of the last season?” Moss asked quietly.

  “The Invinthible won,” Enza replied.

  “Yes, by killing all the other Unnaturals. All of those on Team Scratch and even his own team, Team Klaw. Sometimes it’s just common sense to be afraid,” Moss said solemnly. “In here, fear is what keeps you alive.”

  13

  MARCUS GOT OFF THE ELEVATOR AT SKYPARK SIX, SKATEBOARD in hand. S-Six was a former rooftop farm that had become defunct after the crops died out, and it was the perfect place to practice his kick flips and frontside pop shove-its. It was also pretty much the only place outside the apartment that Marcus was allowed to go—deemed safe because it was as far from ground level as you could get—and even then, his mom would only let him go early in the morning, before the sun got dangerous. That meant Marcus was usually stuck skating alone, like he did everything else.

  Not today.

  From the entrance, Marcus could see a group of older guys making passes in the dried-up fountain–turned half-pipe, or grinding the edges of the raised garden beds. He rolled his board back and forth under his foot, itching to join them.

  “Hey, check it—it’s the recluse,” one dude said, pointing his way. His grin revealed a chipped front tooth, and he was old enough to have what passed for a scraggly beard.

  Marcus was caught off guard by the remark—he didn’t expect anyone to know who he was—and he stopped rolling the wheels, feeling a flush crawl up his neck.

  “You gonna try something, Bubble Boy?” another called out. “Or just creep all day?”

  Marcus was now sweating inside all the padding his mom made him wear, and most of the guys had stopped skating to smirk at him. They didn’t want to hang; they thought he was a little baby.

  If he could nail a hardflip, they’d respect him—he doubted any of them could do that. Marcus wasn’t sure he could, either, but he couldn’t just walk away. Not now. He ripped off the stupid protective gear and started up the stairs with his board.

  When Marcus reached the top step and lined up his board, the first guy shouted, “Mean tricks are for big kids, little man.”

  That got a few chuckles, but Marcus ignored them. This was as much his park as theirs.

  Pop the tail, kick flip, then jump, he rehearsed the trick in his head. Easy.

  He inhaled deeply, getting his courage. Then, feeling the board beneath his feet, Marcus took two hard pushes and kicked off. As the wheels rolled over the edge, he stomped on the back of the deck, then kicked out his front foot to spin the board.

  Jump! he thought.

  But he was already getting serious air. Keep it fluid, quick, and he knew he could land it.

  “Marcus! HEY!” someone yelled.

  Marcus jerked midair and lost his balance. His skateboard careened away, but he couldn’t get his feet back under him because of the steps. Not that there was time—there wasn’t even time to put his hands out before he smashed into the concrete.

  Then the world went fuzzy.

  “Marcus!” Someone was shaking him. “Oh, man, Marcus, I’m so sorry.” Pete was crouched over him, practically cooing with concern as he assessed the injuries.

  “I’m fine, Pete,” Marcus grunted. Pete was twenty years old and lived in his own apartment, but sometimes Pete would meet Marcus at the skate park on his days off to hang out. Though Marcus wasn’t expecting him today.

  Marcus sat up, trying to shrug his older brother off him, but a stab of bright pain in his shoulder made him cry out.

  “Don’t move it,” Pete said, pursing his lips. “Something might be broken.”

  As his brother helped him up, Marcus winced. Beyond the shoulder, his hands and knees were scraped up pretty bad, too. With everyone watching him, he felt like an amateur, but then one of the older guys yelled, “Duuude!” in this voice of pure awe, and some of the others started to hoot and clap.

  Marcus nodded at them shyly, and he couldn’t help grinning as he followed Pete out of the park, cradling his arm. It must’ve been a pretty sick trick before he bailed for them to cheer like that, so maybe it was worth it.

  But by the time he was settled beside Pete in his aircar, the glory had faded as Marcus realized what the injury meant: his mother was going to flip. He’d gotten roughed up skating before, of course, but those were little cuts he could hide with long sleeves. A broken arm?

  “Mom will never let me skate again,” he said dejectedly, slumping into the seat.

  “Sure she will.” Pete hit a button that locked them onto a cable track and then typed in their parents’ address at the Eris Escape Tower, floor 247.

  “Do you know how long it took me to convince her to let me come to the Skypark the first time?” Marcus asked as they started to glide down the cables. “She wanted me to wear a gas mask, even though the park’s enclosed in glass, and then she finally agreed only if I wore zinc sunscreen and an insane amount of padding.”

  “Maybe you should’ve been wearing the padding just now, eh?” Pete countered, cocking an eyebrow. When Marcus rolled his eyes, he sighed. “Look, give Mom a break, okay? She’s just a little protective is all.”

  “Understatement of the century!”

  It’s not like Marcus didn’t get why she worried. After their dad died from radiation exposure in the Greenplains, they were all pretty freaked. She wanted to keep her boys close. But there was close, and then there was claustrophobic.

  “At least you have your own place,” Marcus told Pete.

  “Yeah, right next door.” Pete rolled his eyes. It was the only way their mother could cope with the prospect of him moving out.

  “But you get to leave the high towers for work every day. When Mom sees my arm, any tiny bit of freedom I had is gone. It’s going to be simulated reality and filtered air and sky living for the rest of the summer.”

  Pete chewed his lip, obviously feeling guilty. Then he pressed something, and the aircar came to a sudden stop. It swung a little on the cable as Pete started typing new coordinates into the navigation system.

  “Where are we going?” Marcus asked.

  “I’m taking you to the NuFormz facility,” Pete answered. “There’s a care center there where we can patch you up.”

  Marcus’s heart skipped a beat. NuFormz was on the island where Pete worked with the Unnaturals—the only things Marcus loved more than skateboarding. Bruce was a geneticist there and had helped get Pete a job as a tech when he was first trying to woo their mother. But the island had always, always been off-limits to Marcus. As was pretty much anything outside the high towers.

  “Are you serious?” he asked Pete.

  “I can fix you up myself, and this way you can have one last hurrah before you’re on lockdown. Just don’t tell Bruce, okay? I don’t really feel like getting fired.”

  “Like I’d ever tell Bruce anything,” Marcus said, offended at the suggestion.

  “Come on, he’s not that bad,” his brother insisted. For some reason, Pete felt like he had to defend their stepdad, even though Marcus could see the way Pete’s lip twitched every time Bruce called him “Peter” in that condescending voice of his.

  “Not that bad?” Marcus repeated. “Bruce is the enemy of fun,” Marcus said.

  Pete and Marcus’s dad had been fun. He’d been hilarious and goofy and up for any adventure. He was an explorer who took risks other people were afraid to because he thought he could save the world. Bruce was his total opposite, a boring, anal-retentive lab geek.

  “He even smells weird,” Marcus added. “I still don’t get what Mom sees in him.”

  “Formaldehyde,” Pete muttered. “That’s what he smells like. But speaking of Mom.” Pete wagged a finger. “She’d better not find out I took you to ground level without a gas mask.”

  “We’re not even going outside,” Marcus said. “Isn’t there an aircar port right in the building?” Pete raised an eyebrow in response, waiting. “My lips are sealed,” Marcus promised.


  Pete nodded and the aircar jerked to a start again. It shifted onto a different cable track, this time toward the river, and they zipped down hundreds of stories in seconds. Marcus tapped the deck of his skateboard against the door of the aircar excitedly. It was cool enough to be descending below the fiftieth floor, but to be going to the place where they trained the Unnaturals was unreal.

  “You are seriously the best brother ever!” Marcus beamed at Pete. “Major props.” He reached over for a fist bump and then grimaced at the ache in his shoulder.

  “Careful,” Pete said, but he was grinning. And when he ruffled Marcus’s shaggy blond hair—a gesture that never got any less annoying, no matter how often he did it—Marcus didn’t even pull away.

  They were gliding above the river now, with Reformer’s Island just ahead. On one end of it, something gold glittered in the sun, and Marcus recognized the rounded roof of the Unnaturals stadium. As he imagined all the newly designed mutants getting ready to fight inside of it, Marcus could hardly remember to breathe.

  This was going to be the best day of his entire life.

  14

  DESPITE HIS HOPES, MARCUS DIDN’T GET TO GO INSIDE THE Dome stadium. Instead, they entered the compound through a squat, gray, windowless building on the opposite side of the island, where they took a painfully slow elevator underground, went through a zillion checkpoints, and walked down a maze of hallways that, even though they had the most perfectly waxed floors Marcus had ever seen, Pete forbade him from skateboarding.

  It didn’t matter, though. Marcus was willing to crawl if it meant he could see the monsters.

  First, Pete insisted on dealing with his arm. Marcus expected Pete’s lab to be like a factory, full of all sorts of cool tools and wires and stuff for fixing the Unnaturals, but the care center turned out to be a tiny room with a gurney and an antiseptic smell that reminded Marcus of when his dad was in the hospital. It turned his stomach and made his heart feel weird and tight, and he would’ve walked right back out if it weren’t for the promise of mutants.

  Instead, Marcus obediently sat on the gurney and let Pete torture him with all sorts of stinging swabs on his scrapes and totally unnecessary gauze wrapped too tight around his knees. Marcus got excited when he saw an X-ray machine—that would’ve been cool at least—but after making him move his arm into all these wavy, modern dance–type moves that hurt so bad he gasped, Pete said he could tell it wasn’t broken.

  “It’s just a nasty sprain,” he said. “You got lucky.”

  Marcus still had to wear a sling that his mom would notice, and he didn’t even get a tough-looking cast out of it.

  He turned to Pete, eyebrows raised high with hope, and finally, finally his brother asked, “You ready to see them now, or what?” Marcus leapt off the gurney so fast it collapsed.

  “Let’s go!” he shouted, and raced into the hallway.

  Marcus forgot about the pain in his shoulder as soon as they entered the Pit. He wasn’t sure what to expect. Charging stations? Autotransistors? Warp receptors to enable the virtual fight simulation? This looked more like a gymnasium. Hearing the snorts and screeches and stampeding feet, he got goose bumps. He couldn’t believe he was really here!

  The Pit was at least four times the size of the Skypark, with a twenty-foot high chain-link fence running around the perimeter, and a parrot perched on top. Having spent his life in the Sky Towers, the bird was the first animal Marcus had ever seen. It had brilliant blue and yellow feathers, and eyes that watched him intelligently.

  “Don’t stare too long at Perry,” Pete said under his breath. “Bruce has got that evil-eyed bird trained to report my every move.”

  Marcus nodded. That wasn’t too hard. As beautiful as Perry was, he was the least interesting creature in the room.

  Pete wouldn’t let him go inside the fence, but Marcus could see plenty from where he stood. The Swift, an animal with a black panther’s body and white rabbit’s ears, was running loops around the steep-banked track that ran along the gym’s perimeter, and every time she streaked past, Marcus’s hair whipped around his face. In the center of the gym, other new monsters were training on machines and working with handlers. Marcus watched as a woman tossed basketballs to a giant bear, and it popped one after another with a set of curved teeth so big they almost looked like tusks.

  “That’s Miracinonyx ursidae,” Pete rattled off the scientific name automatically. “Saber-toothed grizzly bear.”

  Marcus nodded. The Fearless. He’d started reading about the new teams the moment the stats were posted to the network feed. The creature turned her head as if she’d heard, fixing them with her golden stare. A long, striped tail swished behind her.

  “And there’s the Underdog,” Marcus said, recognizing the black-and-tan German shepherd–bald eagle mix. He was in the corner, stretching out his wings, and the images on the simulink definitely hadn’t done them justice—the span had to be at least nine feet! “Totally incredible.”

  “Is it really that much better than what you see when you warp?” Pete asked.

  “Oh, no, they’re exactly the same. . . .” Marcus raised his eyebrows with mock seriousness. “Except for, you know, warp nausea, static interference, and low-res-supposedly-4D visual, versus actually being able to feel the ground shuddering as they run, or watch them move without a fraction-of-a-second time delay, or smell the sweat in the room.”

  “Mmm, mmm, the sweet stench of animal BO.” Pete closed his eyes and sniffed the air.

  But Marcus was serious. He peered through the holes of the chain-link fence, watching in awe as the grizzly crushed another basketball. “It’s weird that they smell at all—the lab team really went all out. I just can’t believe how real they seem.”

  Pete cocked his head. “Uh, they are real.”

  “Not, like, real real.” Marcus waved his hand. “They’re androids. Programmed. Their cells are grown in little Petri dishes in a lab by Bruce and his guys. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I think they’re awesome! But they’re pretty much automopooches, right?”

  Pete crossed his arms and peered at him strangely. “Did Bruce tell you that?”

  “Yeah. Forever ago, when he and Mom first started dating. Made me swear not to tell anyone that they were really virtual models, but I don’t get why it’s some big secret. I mean, they’re still pretty rad. Why are you looking at me like that?”

  Marcus’s older brother was one of the most mellow people he knew, but right then, Pete’s cheeks were flushed a blotchy red and his eyebrows were knotted together.

  “So, all along you thought . . .” Pete ran a hand through his hair, searching for words. “Marcus, it’s not like that.”

  “Not like what?” he asked uneasily.

  “Some cells are farmed, yes, especially when they need to graft extra skin or build protein for horns. But the mutants aren’t just designed from scratch.” Pete stepped closer, and Marcus saw the pain in his brother’s magnified eyes. “They start off as regular animals, Marcus. And the shot of spliced DNA they receive comes from the bodies of other regular animals—there are donor animals above the housing block.”

  Marcus chewed his lip and shifted his feet. “What do you mean, ‘regular—’”

  “I mean real. Alive.” Pete’s voice was quiet but firm, and this time, there wasn’t any room for misinterpretation.

  Alive?

  Marcus fell back against the fence—he felt like he’d been socked in the stomach. He thought of all the blood he’d seen spilled over the years. He thought of how he’d cheered.

  Marcus couldn’t bear to meet Pete’s gaze, so he peered through the fence at the Unnaturals again, his good hand gripping the chain links so hard his knuckles were white. He recognized the Mighty from last season, and remembered how cheated he’d felt that the zebra-bull didn’t fight in the Mash-up, since he was Team Scratch’s best shot against the Invincible.

  Remembering what had happened to the other animals in that final match, Marcus now saw
the misery on the Mighty’s face. He saw the fear in the whites of the mutant rabbit’s eyes, and the grizzly’s anger.

  Real animals. Real pain, he thought, aware of the dull throbbing ache in his own arm. He thought of the words donor animals and remembered something Pete had said earlier—that the weird smell that hung around their stepdad was formaldehyde. Marcus hunched over his knees, worried he was going to be sick.

  “That’s why you don’t like to watch the matches,” Marcus said to the dirt, knowing it was true. Marcus had tried to get Pete to warp in with him a dozen times, but Pete always had an excuse for why he couldn’t make it.

  “I’m sorry, Marcus.” Pete rubbed his back gently. “I thought you knew.”

  Maybe he had known, somewhere deep down. Maybe the lie was just too convenient. A part of him wanted to go on believing Bruce, even now, to keep enjoying the show, willfully oblivious. But that wasn’t who he was.

  When the nausea passed, Marcus straightened back up. “How can you stand it?” he asked his brother, unable to keep the accusation out of his voice. “How can you work here, knowing what it is?”

  Now it was Pete’s turn to look away. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, and Marcus could tell it was something he’d struggled with for a long time.

  “I guess I just know someone needs to help them when they’re hurt.” He shrugged in defeat. “I’d rather it be me they can count on.”

  Shouts from across the training gym made the two brothers turn.

  “Fly! Fly!” a skinny man with a pinched face was yelling. He’d secured weights at the base of the Underdog’s wings, and strong, stretchy bands connected the dog’s hind feet to a post. The eagle-dog couldn’t seem to get even a foot off the ground before he was pulled back down again, his belly skidding along the floor as the bands snapped back. Even from here, Marcus could hear the whimpers.