by J B Cantwell
“My brother.”
I stared at the note for a while, realizing that we had more in common than I had thought. She was here to save someone, and so was I.
But that similarity wasn’t enough to make me trust her. She could be fishing for information, looking for a way to get me into trouble. I would have to wait and see.
Finally, I stood up and opened the lid of the toilet, dropped the note into it, and flushed the evidence away.
Chapter Two
We were almost done. Just one last day of training until we officially became soldiers. My worries about going to the Burn were all but gone, and I looked upon the three recruits at the bottom of the board with pity. It turned out to be three new people. Josh, Anna, and Elijah had not only advanced past Burn status, but had continually made their way up the ranks. They had seemed so weak at the beginning, but now they were stronger, but not much larger than when they had started getting the injections. The Burn spots in the ranks had run through most of our unit like a flu virus. Nearly everyone had fallen at some point to Burn status. After that, they were all jockeying for position out of it. Whatever they gained from those long nights was not something they wanted to repeat. I was one of the few that had never fallen into Burn territory.
Now the three recruits at the bottom of the list were Tim from Chicago, a girl named Rachel I didn’t know, and surprisingly, Blake. He had spent a fair amount of time at the top of the list, he and Hannah fighting for the first place spot. But something had gone wrong for him along the way. He had lost whatever self-confidence he’d come into this program with, and soon he was tripping and panting just like the rest of us.
I didn’t care much for Blake, but I was still concerned. Maybe they would get through it alright. Maybe they would be okay.
But that was a childish wish, and there was no room for wishes here.
In the morning we did simulator training, glorified video games made three dimensional by our lenses. They had converted an entire section of land, so we were actually running and moving on real ground. But our enemies were simulated by the lens program, attacking us from all angles. By the end of the morning we were all exhausted and drenched in sweat.
Nobody talked during lunch. We were all starving, and by now we had learned that, while unsavory, the mash they fed us was making us strong. Just a half hour break, long enough to stuff ourselves and rehydrate.
Then we ran.
It seemed like forever. I had trained myself for years to run long distances slowly enough to not show my injury. But I had never run for hours at a time. Once an hour they would stop us, give us water, then send us on our way again. I was, as usual, trailing behind the others. But I wasn’t last. Behind me all three Burn recruits plodded along. It seemed they had given up the race toward infantry entirely. Up ahead Hannah and Elijah were leading the pack as we approached the finish line.
Then it happened.
She went down.
Somewhere up ahead, a clear distance from the other runners, Hannah’s ankle twisted, and she hit the ground.
The other recruits ran around her, nobody offering to help. I only had moments to make a decision. What was my goal here, right now? And what would Hannah have done if she had been in my shoes?
She would have kept on running, I was sure of it.
I was close to the bottom of the board, just two rungs up from Burn status. Training had been hard, and I hadn’t been as prepared, mentally or physically, as I had thought before joining. I couldn’t afford to stop.
I approached Hannah, saw her pleading eyes as she looked up at me.
And I ran past.
She’ll make it.
“Get up!” I yelled behind me as I passed.
Watching her was torture. I desperately wanted to help her, but I knew that if my time to finish the course was too long that I could be bumped down on the board. I had no choice but to keep running.
I sped past the girl in front of me trying to reach the end so I could see the drama play out. Would she make it? We were so close now, the finish line looming up ahead. As I crossed it, a new surge of adrenaline hit me, and suddenly I felt like I could run miles farther.
I turned to watch the rest of the race. The first of the Burns were passing Hannah now as she struggled to get to her feet.
She must have known. Not finishing the race would send her straight to the bottom of the board. The other three noticed this, too, and picked up their pace. Would she take one of their places?
Panic shrouded Hannah’s face, and as she rose and started again, she had a bad limp from the injury to her left foot.
“Come on!” I screamed.
She didn’t have a choice. She had to run, hurt or not. The three Burn designates had passed the finish line now, Hannah trailing them, desperately trying to keep herself upright. Another fall and she would be done for.
Finally, after what felt like hours watching her struggle, she made it across the line, falling into a heap at the very end.
“Oh, thank God,” I said, kneeling to help.
She pushed me away sharply. “Get off me.”
“What? Why?”
“You should’ve helped me before. Now you’ve shown your true colors.”
I was stunned by her reply. Hadn’t she been the one to bypass picking me to be on her team for the training exercise that day weeks ago? She had said it herself: when it came down to it, nothing but the board mattered. And if I had stayed back to help her, it would be me on the bus to the Burn.
“You know I couldn’t help you,” I said, growing angry. “There’s nothing that matters but the board, right? That’s what you told me.”
“This is different,” she snarled. “You knew I’d go to the Burn if I didn’t make it across.”
I couldn’t think of what to say. I hadn’t done anything to her except play by her own rules. I felt my face flush with a combination of guilt and anger.
Still, as she struggled to get back to her feet, I offered her my hand. She pushed me away, but the truth was that she couldn’t hold herself upright without help, and no one else around was offering. She leaned on my arm, her light body suddenly heavy against me. I looked down and saw, surprisingly, tears.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “You won’t go to the Burn.”
“I might,” she snapped, brushing away her tears with her other hand.
We lined up before Holt, all standing at attention and awaiting his command. Hannah stood on one leg, the best she could manage.
“Well, these past weeks have been inspiring, have they not?” Holt boomed. “We have learned who here are the strongest links,” he walked by where Hannah and I stood, “and who are the weakest.” He kept his face stoic, not even glancing at us. “Now you will each move on to your designated jobs within the Service. The final results await you now in the bunk room. Dismissed!”
Despite the long run we had all just completed, most of the recruits ran toward the building, anxious to see their results.
This time I stayed behind, helping Hannah manage the distance between where we stood and the door.
“You should go to the infirmary,” I said.
“No,” she said. “I want to see the board first.”
I understood. Even though I had mostly kept pace during the run, there was always the chance that any of us could be knocked down to the lowest rung.
I draped Hannah’s arm over my shoulder and helped her through the hall.
The room was alive with laughter and whoops. Apparently there had been a few changes to the board. I scanned the rankings for my name and my official designation.
Riley Marie Taylor
Designation: Infantry
256
I let out a long low breath of relief. Then I saw Hannah’s name. She hadn’t fallen far enough to be doomed with a Burn designation, but it was very close. Only a single point between her and the unlucky ones had kept her safe.
Hannah Murphy
Designation:
Infantry
193
We would be serving together. I squeezed her shoulder and then saw the disappointment clearly on her face. She had been so close to the top, and now she had been thrust so low in the ranks that she had barely avoided a life filled with illness and decay.
Some of the other recruits weren’t smiling, either. But they had been designated to the one job that everyone here had worked so hard to avoid. Blake sat on his bunk, staring into space. Rachel was curled up on hers, sobbing.
It seemed that nobody else cared about them, their fallen, hurting comrades. No one offered any solace or support. They simply celebrated their own salvation.
I dragged Hannah over to her bunk and helped her pull off the boot on her injured leg. She gave a cry of pain, and though the swelling was bad, the bones weren’t broken.
I turned away and started toward Blake.
“What, you’re just gonna leave me here?” Hannah called.
“Five minutes ago you didn’t want me near you,” I said over my shoulder. “You could use a break.”
Blake’s face was ashen, disbelieving. He didn’t look up when I sat down beside him.
“You’ll be ok,” I said, lying.
He stayed silent, his eyes unfocused.
“Not everyone gets sick,” I tried. “Some people work for years and years. Just keep yourself protected and you’ll be fine. You’ve heard the stories.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’ve heard them.”
“Just keep your mask and all the safety gear on no matter how hot it gets,” I said. “Three years of being uncomfortable is worth a lifetime of freedom. You’ll still get the money in the end.”
A single tear slid down his face.
We both knew that this was unlikely to happen. I wracked my brain. Had I ever heard of a recruit who had made it through the Burn unharmed?
“You’ve gotta be tough,” I went on. “Remember that the time will pass. No matter how miserable your situation, time always passes. And then it’ll be over. You’ll be back home before you know it.”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“Thanks,” he said. “I guess if I really think about it, I might be safer in the Burn. You guys will be in the trenches, fighting the real enemy.”
My chest tightened. I hadn’t thought of that. Somehow, as I had struggled through training, it had never occurred to me that my own life was in just as much danger as those at the bottom of the board. I had been so focused in training, on staying up with the infantry designates, on thinking of Alex and a way to get to him, that I hadn’t considered the prospect of my own death since that first day.
“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe that’s true.”
I stood up and headed for the chow hall. I didn’t go back to help Hannah. I didn’t sit to comfort Rachel. I ate my mash alone before most had washed off the sweat of the day. Some despondent. Some triumphant.
I was neither. I sat waiting for the first few recruits to trickle in to dinner. Then I stood up and took my tray. As I placed it on the revolving tray catch, I put my finger up to the chip on my head. I wiggled it, making my vision distort. I pulled harder, rewarded with a shock to my brain so painful I nearly doubled over.
I was caught. We all were. Caught up in the harsh security of this place, caught in the lies of our government. I wondered if anyone in our group would make it three years. I somehow doubted it. The women weren’t the ones who came back, and most of the men didn’t either. It was those men, created by the tricks and injections of the doctors, who would return home, cash in hand. Or maybe it would be Josh or Anna or Elijah who would survive; whatever serum that ran through their veins had given them the edge in the competition to keep their names in the middle of the board. Maybe whatever drugs they had been given would help them in the end.
I wandered out into the hallway, despondent about my future. Fear filled me as I thought of every option I faced. Now my fate had been chosen for me, shining down in bright white letters from the viewscreen. I headed toward the bunk room. I wanted to see it again, all our names up there. To make sense of it.
And then, there they were. Walking past me in perfect unison. Twenty bald heads, each six feet tall or higher, eyes forward, steps aligned.
I grappled for the note in my pocket, weeks old now and worn down around the folds and edges. I palmed it, waiting for Alex to pass. I could see him just a few men back, his eyes focused forward on the recruit in front of him.
He didn’t look at me. Not once. His gaze ahead never faltered. I quickly held out the paper, stuffing it into his hand as he moved past me. No one behind him seemed to notice my action or care one way or the other.
But as Alex moved, his fingers did not wrap around the note I had so desperately guarded, waiting for any chance to communicate with him again.
The paper dropped to the floor as if there had never been anything in his hand at all. I watched as boot after boot stepped on the note, all eyes to the front, to their sergeant and his commands.
I picked up the note, dirtied now, and stuck it back into my pocket. I watched the men as they continued down the hallway, turning left at the end.
He didn’t take the note, didn’t even look at me. It was as if I didn’t exist at all, as if only the call of his sergeant penetrated his mind.
Where were they going?
Dinner, maybe. Training, maybe. Some sickening room where drugs were pumped into their systems, maybe.
I picked up the note and turned and walked back to the bunk room. A few were milling around, some still upset about their assignments, some just quiet. I found the one pair of eyes I was looking for and headed straight to the bathroom. I didn’t need to look behind me to know that she was following. A moment later the stall door next to mine closed and latched.
“What do you want from me?” I wrote. “What can I do?”
“The doctor, Chambers,” she wrote. “He’s the one who pointed you out to me. He told me to make an example of you, to make you look weak. He wanted you in the general infantry so that you and I could join forces.”
A chill ran down my spine. Chambers. Joining with Lydia was what he expected me to do to repay my debt to him for letting me through the selection process. This is what he had meant when he’d said we would be “friends who would look out for each other.”
It seemed odd to me that he wanted to make me look weak, a quality that I thought I portrayed on my own.
“Join forces how? What does he think we’ll be able to do? We can’t even go into the next room without them knowing it.”
Absently I fiddled with the chip over my ear again, rewarded with a new pang of lightning shooting across my brain.
“I know. Chambers said that we would get an opportunity somehow. He’s the reason you’re in here at all. He could’ve flunked you because of your leg, but he didn’t because he saw your scores. You rated the highest he’d seen in Intelligence and Valor, two qualities we need to have at the same time in anyone tied to the resistance. The fight against the people doing this to the men.”
So that was the reason I was here, the reason Chambers had let me pass. It wasn’t because they thought I would make a good soldier. And Chambers wasn’t expecting anything from me in a physical way, which was a relief. I was here because they wanted me to join their group.
My stomach swirled uncomfortably. I rubbed at my leg. It still smarted from the long day of running.
“You didn’t have a choice but to join again after being convicted,” I wrote. “How did your brother end up here, too?”
“He was trying to protect me,” she said. “He joined just as my sentence began, on the same day that my training started. But he was too big. They took him away before we even made it to the barracks. But, more than that, there have been rumors among the other Oranges, those of us who survived the first tour. We can’t find a lot of the Oranges from last time around, from when we were still designated Red. We all knew each other, figured we would find one another after the tour
was over and regroup. But lots of Oranges vanished at the end of the last tour. Only the Reds and a handful of Greens survived.”
“I don’t get it,” I wrote. “How could a whole designation of people just vanish? There must be a reason. Maybe they decided to make them into these super soldiers like Alex and your brother.”
“I don’t think that’s it. The missing never made it home.”
I paused, unsure of what to write.
“What can we do?” I finally asked. “We’re as trapped as anyone else is. Does Chambers have ideas? Are there other people involved?”
“Yes, there are others.”
“So I’m just supposed to trust you now? After you beat me for entertainment in front of a room full of recruits? You berated me at every chance, whether or not there were people around to notice. Answer that.”
She paused, and then I heard scribbling on the paper.
“I had to do that. I was directed to do that. And you walked in there with that ridiculous pink hair, all ready with your imitation combat boots. You looked like an idiot. You made it so easy. So why should you trust me? Because we’re going to need to work together on this. That’s the whole point. But we have to keep up the charade. We’re all individual players in this game, the war game, but with Chambers’ help we can do more good than just firing at the enemy. I met Chambers when I lived in the Stilts. He’s a double agent for the resistance. My crime was an attempt to break into the Stilts, or at least that was what it looked like to the police. Now that I’m here I’m supposed to try to take the system down.”
The Stilts. The place I had always been curious about, but had never seen up close.