by Shanna Miles
“What the hell kinda accident is that?” Fay asks.
Her eyes get wide and then she leans in close. “I dunno, but I heard it was some kind of sex thing. The US consulate got involved. Scandal. I don’t know. I do not know! I can’t say for sure, but he’s gone,” she rattles on. Barbie’s a fast talker.
“I’ll link up with you,” Fay says breezily without any real hint of conviction, and it’s then I make it my business to get him to email her in the next half hour to secure that spot. I know Fay—he can get obsessive. If he doesn’t have something to do, he’ll make grief his whole life. I don’t want that for him. I want a bag full of buttons for him just like I would want it for me.
“Cool. I’ve got your email. I’ll shoot you the details. My sister’s dating a guy on the selection committee, so I can get you in no problem.”
“This isn’t like your cousin with the fifty-dollar iPads, is it?” I joke, trying to lighten the mood for myself.
She rolls her eyes. “That moron is dead to me. It’s nothing like that. Promise. Hey, I gotta go before they lock this place down.”
“What do you mean?” I ask, and she points to the marquees, which have all changed from a basic black background to orange.
“There’s some demonstration outside. You guys don’t travel as much as I do, so you don’t know, but I can smell when something is about to go down. I’d rather be home when it does. I hope your flight doesn’t get canceled. It was great seeing you two. Make sure you post pictures from your DR trip!”
As soon as Barbie leaves, Aabidah walks over with a bag full of French macarons. I do a little happy dance and immediately feed one to Fay. He takes a bite, exaggerating how good it is, and licks the tip of my finger.
“Stop!” I playfully push his face away.
Aabidah rolls her eyes. “Our flight’s been delayed two hours. They’re doing extra security checks.”
“Are they going to can—”
She cuts me off mid-breath—“No!”—and then takes a deep breath of her own. “No. They won’t. It’s just a delay,” she says firmly, but I can tell she’s not sure. “I’m going to find one of those massage chairs. I’ll meet you back here in ninety minutes.” She doesn’t even look back at me for a confirmation, just walks away, leaving a cloud of anxiety trailing behind her.
A cancellation would be a death sentence. I don’t want to think about it, though. I look over at Fay, who’s still pretending that salted caramel macarons are the best thing he’s ever eaten.
“So. A delay means I get you for another hour and a half. Can you stand? Walk?” he asks, and I wonder where he’s going with this. He gets up, brushes the crumbs from the side of his mouth, and holds out his hand like the chivalrous prince in a fairy tale.
“I can walk. Where are we going?” I ask again. I push myself to my feet and place my hand in his. He’s got that Cheshire-cat grin on, and I’m wondering what he’s got cooked up in his brain. An hour and a half isn’t that much time for an adventure, but this is Fay. Anything is possible.
“We’re running away,” he says.
“Oh!” I reply, and place my hand on my cheek in mock surprise. “Can I ask where to, dark prince?”
“To the moon. To the stars.”
26 Alpha 9, Lunar Base, 2260
FAYARD
THERE ARE GALAXIES BEHIND MY eyes and there is music in my ears, a slow melody that makes me sad and comforted at the same time. It doesn’t want me to wake up, but I fight it. I’m trying to say my name, but it keeps coming out slurred. Spit dribbles down my chin, and after some more coughing fits and expelled phlegm I’m beginning to regain sensation in my lips. A few minutes after that, my tongue comes back on board, and I’m able to answer the baseline questions that’ll get me out of processing, into a bio-controlled uniform, and to the cafeteria for a real meal.
“Name?”
The voice is disembodied, so I’m not sure if it’s attached to a real person or a program. The intake room is featureless, just an aluminum box with a door where they shove all the newly arrived cryopods. In the more rural colonies they don’t even shove you in a room; they just set the pods out in a field, crack the seals open, and wait.
“Private Fayard Leanthony Azikiwe.”
“Leanthony, huh?”
Well, that proves it’s a real person.
“Vital signs are in the normal range. Look directly ahead of you: the eastern wall is a monitor and will display a series of images. Please tell me the name of each image you see displayed.”
“Oui. Yes. I mean, okay.”
“I see here that you’re a polyglot. Which division have you been assigned to?”
“Counterintelligence,” I reply, and feel a pang in my right temple. I reach up and feel an electrode attached to my head and then feel one on my chest; I didn’t notice either in my post-cryo fog. They’re collecting more than vital signs. I take a deep breath and focus.
“Your intake will take slightly longer, in that case. Your first image is ready… now.”
“Earth, cloud, cinq—I mean… the number five. Bowl, spoon, hovercraft, filtration tank, mountain.” The images speed up and slow down, changing in size to test my visual acuity and in complexity to assess my memory. I’ve gone through about ten slides when the voice pauses.
“Could you repeat what you just said?”
I kind of zoned out, so it takes me a second to remember. “Um, shoe. I think.”
“No, you said cat.”
“Okay, cat.”
“Private Azikiwe, cat is the next image, not the last. Have you been given prior knowledge of the intake assessment?”
“No.”
Silence. I have made a miscalculation, but I can’t see how. I’ve never seen the test, and there’s no way to know what is on the tests anyway. They’re random. I would have to be able to see through walls to cheat. My temperature is rising. I know they can see this in the vital signs, but this isn’t a normal tangent for intake. They don’t need any reason to dig into my background. I take a few deep breaths—in for four counts, out for eight. My heartbeat slows. I’m turned inward when they finally come back.
“Private Azikiwe, did you dream while you were under?”
“Yes. My dreams are always quite vivid when I’m in cryo.”
“Can you tell me what they were about?”
“They’re nonsense. I’m always myself, but I’m on different colonies. A ship’s docking station? A lake? Possibly Earth. I can never hold on to the particular details when I wake up. There is a girl.”
“Her name?”
“I can’t remember.”
“What does she look like?”
“Beautiful, with, uh… I know that she’s got, um… I can’t really remember right now.” It’s always like this. I wake up with a warm feeling akin to being hugged by someone you love, and then nothing. Every detail evaporates as my awareness of myself settles into my current reality.
Silence again. They’re watching my vitals, I’m sure of it, trying to see if there is a lie stripped bare in the binary, but there isn’t. Not this time. Eventually, they come back on.
“All right, private. Let’s do this again.”
* * *
The first days out of cryo are the worst. Your muscles are stiff, your brain is mud, and the only thing you want to do is eat. Couple that with your body’s need to acclimate to whatever new atmosphere you’ve just landed in and you’ve got a recipe for unchecked emotion. We’re military, so planet-hopping is part of the deal. Some people laugh, like my bunkmate, Ralphie. He giggles, even in his sleep. Even when he’s awake he’s always smiling. Predawn five-mile run? Smiling. Midnight gray-water duty? Smiling. Rapid-fire jab to the solar plexus? Big grin.
“That’s the aggression I want to see, 675! 459, stop smiling and recover,” Captain Baqri bellows from the observation booth. 459 doesn’t take the advice, and the other soldier gives him an impressive beating, despite their small size.
459, otherwise kno
wn as Ralphie, limps off the mat, helmet still secured but a slight bit foggy on the inside.
“A beast,” he croaks.
I nod and help him get his gloves off so I can attach an anesthetic patch. No one’s allowed to go to the infirmary before all the matches are done. Captain’s rules. You have to be near death before you’re allowed to be carried out. It’s only happened once, and I think that was because the poor fool was moaning so loudly no one could concentrate. He was transferred. Of course, we didn’t realize who it was until the next day and he was gone. The numbers aim to keep things anonymous; the gear is full-body, and helmets are tinted. But after a few matches you can figure it out, especially if you’re on the same team.
The room we’re practicing in is quite small, but the virtual- reality overlay makes it look like we’re all in an arena. The observation booth is probably twenty meters away, but the illusion has it situated a few kilometers above us, with the captain and other members of the instructional staff looking down on us like gods. A single spotlight shines from the ceiling on the dueling pairs of students below. The rest of us wait patiently on the sidelines for our numbers to be called at random. You could fight twice in a row or not at all. It just depends on the luck of the draw. I assume it’s to build stamina in the uncertainty of war, but in the moment it just feels cruel and unnecessary. I’m bored. I can fight, but I prefer more effective strategies for disarming my opponent. Besides, most of these other kids have been raised on military outposts with food rations and artificial sunlight. I was raised on an ally colony, separate and used to its own ideas, like freedom of religion and sustainable farming. As a result, I’m taller than nearly everyone else, and a few stone heavier.
“Aren’t you gonna take one of those for yourself?” Ralphie asks as he leans back on the bench. His mouth has started to relax, and his vital stats, visible on the leaderboard hovering next to the observation window, are beginning to level out.
“Not yet. They slow you down.”
“You’ve already fought twice today. They can’t call you again.” Ralphie coughs, still a bit out of breath.
Captain Baqri’s voice booms out over the intercom. “Next up, 675 and…”
“What’s with the repeats?” Ralphie asks.
“Azikiwe,” I hear in my helmet. “You’re up.”
“Fucking hell,” I hear one of the kids in our group say as they encouragingly slap me on the back. But I decide to be like Ralphie and smile even though I’m angry.
“Final match, 675 and 712. Four minutes. No breaks. Hand to hand. No gloves.”
A collective groan erupts among the bystanders. Hand-to-hand matches are grueling. This is an endurance test as much as anything else. 675 is small, much smaller than me, but judging from the previous matches, and judging from their earlier match with Ralphie, they’re fast and strategic, waiting for just the right opportunity to strike somewhere debilitating. I’m pulling off my gloves and reconfiguring my helmet to something lighter. It still covers my chin, but it’s mostly flexfilm. Great for temperature control, not so great for protection from broken bones. After detaching key pieces of the helmet and stripping down to just shorts and my full-body flexfilm, I bound into the arena and stop cold.
675 is a girl.
27 TAMAR
I CAN SEE HIS MUSCLES go slack once he gets a good look at me. I’m guessing he’s a guy. With the suits there’s no real way to tell, but it doesn’t matter anyway. We can politely hash out pronouns after I’ve won. This is going to be harder than I thought. I don’t need any special considerations just because I’m a girl. Most of the guys don’t care, but there are a few from the more isolated colonies who hold on to ancient beliefs about inferiority or some crazy idea that I need them to protect me. I can tell by 712’s reaction that he’s the kind of guy to throw this match, and if he does, we might be here all day. The captain adds overtime if it’s a draw—he doesn’t believe in ties, only winners and losers. He’ll want to show that girls can take as much punishment as the guys. That’s my worst-case scenario. Most likely I’ll end up in the infirmary or in an artificial coma, neck deep in nanigel while my muscles are rebuilt. Who has that kind of time?
712 is frozen for a beat or two before he begins to bounce again. He’s warming up those fatigued muscles after two previous fights, and I notice that he’s favoring his left foot. There may be a weakness there I can exploit. I stand stock-still while I continue to look him over. He’s tall. Thin, but covered in lean muscle. If he doesn’t knock me out in the first minute, I may be able to run him down, let his fatigue topple him without a hit.
“712, 675, this fight is judged on hits, deflections, and total knockout. You have four minutes on the clock in ten, nine…”
The adrenaline begins to build and I can’t keep still. Suddenly I’m on beat with my opponent. He’s hopping from foot to foot, totally in the zone. The mat changes from yellow to green and rises six feet in the air to keep interference to an absolute minimum. The buzzer sounds and I go for it. Two layouts, a tuck, and a half twist. It’s showmanship and requires more grace than aggression. He’s surprised—I know because I’m able to get in three quick jabs to the side of his right knee and a kick to his shin before he thinks to retaliate. He doesn’t hold back, either. His hook rattles me, and I see double before my vision sensors recalibrate. It takes longer than it should, and he has time for another shot, but he doesn’t take it. He should have. I would have.
“Visual acuity seventy-six percent,” my helmet tells me.
I run at him and hit the mat on both knees, avoiding his swing. I’m small enough to bend back and suffer only the slightest hit from his fist. I’m in the perfect position for me to home in on his weak spot: his ribs. My hits aren’t as powerful as his, but they are effective, and I can hear his anguish when my jab connects with his body. He tumbles back several feet and nearly falls off the edge of the mat before he catches himself. I hop up and back away quickly.
He twists and groans between short panting breaths. He tries to straighten and folds almost immediately. He looks like a wounded animal, and there’s no way for him to make his pain end other than to go through me. I’m squat, moving, both hands in front of my face, ready, but I’m thinking more about him than myself and I don’t move fast enough. In seconds he’s got me off my feet and over his head and, smack, my back is on the mat.
“Visual acuity thirty-two percent.”
I can’t breathe. Every ounce of oxygen has been knocked out of my body. My mouth opens and closes like a fish, but no air is coming in. Fire builds in my chest, and I’ve lost control of my arms and legs. Two beats later I gasp, and sweet air fills me again as 712’s helmet comes into focus right above me.
“Seven, six, five…”
They’re counting my knockout. I can’t be knocked out. I wriggle, I squirm, and somehow I make it onto my knees as I try to crawl.
“Three, two…”
At the last second, I stumble upward. My back is on fire and my legs are filled with stone. He’s returned to his corner, but he doesn’t look much better. 712 is no longer hiding the fact that he’s got a broken rib—maybe ribs, plural. One hand is holding his side protectively as he keeps the other balled into a fist right in front of his jaw. There’s still time on the clock. Hits don’t matter now. It’s about survival. If I attack him this time, he’ll have to come at me hard. Maybe knock something loose that isn’t so easily repaired, and I don’t have much left in me for hits. I need to run the clock. I can’t win, but I can move around the mat and hope for the captain’s mercy. 712 is limping, but he’s already shown that he’s unwilling to decimate me in a head-to-head battle… which gives me an idea.
“Helmet, give me a capoeira rhythm. Berimbau. Mid-tempo,” I mumble beneath the plastic lens in front of my face.
“Berimbau. Received.”
I fall into the ginga, the sweeping left-to-right rhythmic dance of capoeira. My opponent stops moving. For a moment I think maybe I’ve misjudged him, b
ut it only takes a second before he falls into the rhythm with me.
Two minutes on the clock.
We start easy with a meia lua de frente, a kind of half-moon frontal kick. I swing with my right leg, foot flexed, and he mirrors with the left. We try again, moving closer together so that the movements are a pantomime of a real fight, where we come within a hair’s breadth of touching each other. He can’t hear the same beat that I hear in my helmet, but it feels like he doesn’t have to. He’s in the moment with me. One breath, one heartbeat, one sliding parry after the other. Armada, a kind of spin kick. Esquiva lateral into esquiva baixa, he kicks out, his long legs nearly toppling me over as I bend and almost kiss my right knee, arms stretched out like bird wings.
“Increase tempo.”
The berimbau speeds up and so do my movements. Without a word, 712 follows me, arms, legs slicing through the air with the kind of grace you can only be born with and matching me so smoothly it’s like we’ve been doing this for years. It’s fluid. We aren’t an orchestra; we’re the metronome. A feeling, deeper than déjà vu, sends a shiver across my skin, and a twist in my gut erupts like a bomb. I fumble. Just long enough for his foot, which was in an arc above my head, to come crashing into the side of my face. I fly before hitting the mat with a thud just as the buzzer sounds. Match over.
The mat decompresses, and I’m suddenly surrounded by people.
“Visual acuity ten percent.”
I see a face, blurred but too familiar to be a stranger, fading into the crowd.
28 TAMAR
HEY, SIL? HAVE YOU EVER been on a train?” I ask.
“Huh?”
“A train. A transportation device. Old. Pre-wipeout technology,” I reply.
“Do I look like a transpo scholar? Maybe that guy rattled you a little more than you want to admit,” Sil says as she adjusts the fuel levels on her side of the cockpit.
I let out a nervous laugh, suddenly embarrassed about something as silly as a dream. Then for a split second I wonder if I should go for a mental review. My grandmother had visions she swore were premonitions. They committed her. Nope. Best to just shake it off. It’s probably a symptom of the nanigel.