Authors: Kat Ross
The only thing that seems real and honest and true is my mother, but I can’t talk to her about any of this. I’m not sure why. But my mind just freezes up at the very thought. Fortunately, she’s one of those rare people who knows how to be with someone and not talk incessantly the entire time. She’ll come to my room and read a scientific journal or invite me to help chop vegetables for dinner. We can share a smile or communicate in a hundred other ways without breaking the silence, and it’s not heavy or oppressive. Just peaceful.
The first time I saw my reflection in a mirror, I thought it was someone else. Because that skinny girl with the long, sun-bleached hair and crazy bloodshot eyes could not be me.
Could it?
It’s lunchtime, not that I pay attention to such things, and my mother comes into my bedroom with a sandwich. It must be a weekend since she’s home. I don’t bother keeping track of the days. She’s obviously worried about me. She says it’s been two months. I nod like I am aware of this. But it could have been two weeks or two years, neither would surprise me. Time loses all meaning when you decide to stop living in the present. I do know I’ve lost a lot of weight, and I didn’t have much extra to begin with.
“Hey, honey.” She sits on the edge of my bed. I notice that her hair is almost completely grey now. She’s still beautiful, with her dark, inquisitive eyes and high cheekbones. “Listen, I’ve been talking with your father. We think you might be ready to go back to school. See your friends.”
She doesn’t say, see Jake, but I know she’s thinking it. He’s come to the house a half dozen times but I won’t let him in. I just can’t look at his face right now. He was there. I know because my father told me. Described his heroics in great detail. How he distinguished himself in the bloodbath on the island. What a bright, shiny future Jake has before him. When I said there’s guilt to go around, Jake is definitely included in that equation.
An army shrink showed up once too, about six weeks ago. I threw a bowl of tomato soup at her head. She didn’t come back.
“It’s doing you no good lying around here all day. The commandant says you can still graduate if you pass your final.”
She pushes the sandwich toward me. I push it back.
“That’s two and a half weeks away. Just think about it, OK? I’ll support whatever you decide, Jansin. You can always wait until next term. But it might be a good thing to start living again.”
“OK, Mom.”
She pauses. “We haven’t really talked about it, and I understand if you don’t want to, but. . . did anything happen to you? While you were with those people?”
She means, was I raped? “No, nothing like that. They were very good to me, actually.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure.”
“I love you.” She kisses my cheek and goes, leaving the door cracked. I get up and close it.
It’s fake drizzling outside, but of course there’s no breeze to rustle the curtains. They’re light pink, like my comforter and wall-to-wall carpet. The posters on the wall are of movie characters and sports heroes I worshipped nearly a decade ago. It’s the room of a stranger, or a friend I haven’t seen in years. Maybe she’s right. Maybe I need to get out of here.
When the doctor comes, he tells me my druggie days are over. No more prescriptions. That’s fine, because I’ve stashed a bunch of pills away. Just in case.
I spend the afternoon thinking about the dead. Not only Will, although it’s him my thoughts obsessively turn to, like picking at a half-healed scab. But the others too. Charlie. Nileen. Bob. Banerjee. Lisa and Fatima. The dirty girl with black hair.
My father told me there were no survivors. I didn’t expect there would be.
I think about how the clan’s ancestors escaped the end of the world against all the odds,
escaped the bloody hypercanes
, only to be gunned down by the very people who abandoned them decades before. Of course, they attacked us first. That’s what my father would say. Tit for tat. It just goes on and on. I’m so weary of death. And my father still wants me on that Greenbrier team. He hasn’t said it outright, but he’s dropped hints.
Tit for tat. Us and them.
There’s always a
them
. And if there isn’t, we’ll find one.
Charlie. Nileen. Bob and Banerjee.
She was a good leader, the captain. I could have followed her without question. Even when she wanted to throw me overboard, she was only doing what she thought was right for the group. Ruthless, yes. Cruel, no. There’s a world of difference between the two. People listened to her out of respect, not fear. You can’t be soft and make it up there. Not if you’re responsible for a bunch of people, including kids.
I bury my face in my hands.
Including kids.
Ironically, they found us because of the clear weather I was so happy about. An orbiting satellite two hundred miles up photographed the activity on the beach at 0900:47 local time and passed the images to Central Prefecture Command, where an analyst who had been assigned to my case full time determined that the new data warranted deployment of military force.
In her report, which I asked for a copy of and read about two dozen times, she estimated there was an eighteen percent chance this was the group that had me, assuming I was still alive. She probably had strong personal doubts that such was the case but was too diplomatic to express them in writing. Apparently, several previous operations had ended with a lot of dead bodies but no Jansin Nordqvist.
Moles were scrambled, hostage extraction teams mobilized, weapons locked and loaded.
Ubi maior, minor cessat
.
I wonder what they did with Will’s books. If they burned them, or stole them, or just left them for Kelaeno.
Is it possible to have a midlife crisis at the age of sixteen? If so, I’m deep into one right now. If I let my parents send me back to school, if I graduate, there’s no questioning orders or choosing missions. You do what they tell you to do, period. And once you’re in, there’s no quitting, no retiring. You know too much about them for that.
Here’s the question that has been plaguing me: What happens if they send me on a hostage extraction mission like the one that killed everyone I knew? It might not even be a real extraction, it might be a wipe-the-slate-clean mission with extraction as a pretext. Because now that they know for sure there are people up there,
insurgents
up there, to use the proper euphemism, do I really think they’re going to sit back and let them exist?
Or let’s say for the sake of argument that never happens. I’ll still be doing some pretty bad things; it’s a given in this line of work. I didn’t used to think of them as bad things, I thought of them as unpleasant but necessary things. Necessary to protect my prefecture and way of life, et cetera. I’d only be doing my duty, and I happen to be very good at it.
The big problem is that I’m spectacularly unsuited to do anything else. I have no science training outside areas like explosives and chemical weapons, and worse, no aptitude for it. Plus you have to start on that track from a really young age. By the time you’re sixteen like me, your career choice has been set in stone for years. The only alternative is a factory job, but I’ve heard horror stories about the conditions.
Some people go into business on their own, call themselves independent contractors, like the guys who were hired to guard the camp. What they really are is mercenaries, and most of the missions are as bad or worse than what the military does. In fact, the military calls those guys for stuff that’s so beyond the pale they want deniability if it comes out. Cushy gigs like the vacation camp are few and far between.
There’s something else too. Now that I’ve been to the surface,
lived
on the surface, the thought of staying down here forever is almost unbearable. Even with the superstorms. Maybe I could pull a Banerjee and go AWOL. She did it, so I know it’s possible. I just have to graduate and worm my way into a surface assignment. I might not survive, but at least I’d be free.
All these thoughts are still churning around in my head two days later, when my father drives me to the train station. I’m wearing my uniform to travel, per regulations, but it hangs loose on me now. I had to belt the pants so they don’t fall down around my ankles. My shoulder-length hair is pulled back into a severe bun. I plan to fight them if they try to make me cut it again.
“Be safe,” he says, giving me a long hug on the platform. “I’m proud of you, baby.”
“I will. C’mon, Dad, it’s gonna leave without me.”
He finally lets go and hands me my bag as I climb aboard. The train is long and sleek, with a sharply streamlined profile to minimize air resistance. It looks like a huge silver crocodile.
“Say hi to Jake!”
I turn away and pretend not to hear him.
It’s a mid-morning train, only half full. We ease out of the station and start accelerating. It’s a maglev, short for magnetic levitation, which means it hovers just above the tracks, so the ride is perfectly smooth. I find my compartment, drop my bag on the bed, and go buy a cup of coffee. In less than seven hours, I’ll be disembarking in Cheyenne, and an hour or so after that, I’ll be back at the Academy. If I make it through the final, which is notoriously grueling, I’ll be permitted one week of home leave, then given my first assignment. I’ve been anticipating this moment since I was old enough to understand what had been chosen for me. The problem is I don’t want it anymore.
I crave a distraction, anything, so I walk down to the media car. The few people there are all deep into the HYPERCANE NETWORK! (“The Most Trusted Name in Superstorm Coverage!”). I find a corner booth, maybe even the same one I sat in with Jake a million years ago, and flip through the channels until I find a news broadcast.
It seems that our water dispute with Greenbrier has escalated to the point that envoys from both prefectures have been recalled home. Nu London and Sino-Russia just joined Raven Rock in imposing a trade embargo, but Aegyptus and the Pan-Africans are remaining neutral.
The secretary-general of the Union of Prefectures and Associated Subterranean City-States deplores the build-up of troops on both sides and urges a swift diplomatic resolution to the crisis.
When the heavily made-up blonde anchor pulls out an animatronic monkey that pees and tells me it’s the hottest new toy on the market I switch the TV off. Back in the compartment, I change into a T-shirt and stretch out on the bed. Eat the chocolate on the pillow. Five hours left. I don’t think I can handle the rain-swept valley right now, it’s too close to what I lost, so I choose a vista of snowcapped mountain peaks with the rising sun in the background.
What would Will think of all this? He’d probably say it’s impressive and ridiculous at the same time. Ridiculously impressive. Or impressively ridiculous. I wish he were with me so badly. I already know what he thought about the Academy.
Sounds vaguely fascist.
And he was right. Do I want to be one of them?
No. I don’t. But I’m going back anyway. So I’m not sure what that makes me.
Four hours and seventeen minutes to go.
A jeep is waiting outside the station, which is bare bones, nothing like the glittery bustle of Raven Rock. They don’t need to send someone inside since there’s only one exit.
“Cadet Nordqvist?” the driver asks as I toss my bag in the back.
“Yessir.”
He grins, showing even white teeth. “You don’t need to ‘sir’ me, I’m just a sergeant.”
The driver has the usual high-and-tight haircut, with an open, friendly face. Latin stock, I guess, from his flat cheekbones and brown skin. He watches me in the rearview as we pull away from the station.
“How was the trip?”
“Good coffee.”
Unlike the urban centers, we don’t have manufactured weather out here; it’s too expensive, for one thing, and there’s just not enough people to bother. The car enters the long tunnel that leads to the Academy. I’ve driven it so many times, I know every twist and turn.
I can see he’s dying to ask and just working up the courage. It takes him about two minutes.
“So what are they like? The savages?”
“Not much different from you and me, Sergeant,” I answer.
“I heard they go naked and worship the moon and shit.”
“Well, they do, but it’s not so bad once you get used to it. Kind of liberating, actually.”
He squints at me like he can’t tell if I’m joking or not. I try to keep a straight face.
We emerge from the tunnel into a wide open space. A minute later, we reach the first checkpoint. A large red and black sign warns vehicles that they are approaching a restricted area and all visitors will be subject to search. Another, slightly more ominous, adds that the area is patrolled by working military dogs. Everything is enclosed in a fifteen-foot-high barbed wire fence.
The guard in the booth waves us through and we drive for another five minutes. The first buildings of the Academy come into view.
It was built fast and cheap based on the cylindrical Quonset hut design popular in the 1940s, which turned out to translate well underground, especially if you’re in a hurry. Each galvanized steel structure can be packed into a dozen crates and erected in a single day by ten men. No special skills are needed to assemble them.
The result isn’t very aesthetic –they resemble old airplane hangars – but it’s functional, which is always the military’s top priority.
I just want to go to my dorm and fall into bed, but the driver bypasses the sleeping dorms and heads for one of the Academy’s few concrete buildings. The commandant’s office.
“She wanted to welcome you personally,” he says, pulling up in front of the entrance. “Good luck, cadet.”
I thank him and go inside. The room I’m standing in bears no relation whatsoever to the drab grey exterior. Deep pile carpeting, polished antique furniture, soft lighting. And this is just her secretary’s office.
“Nordqvist!” he says, looking up from his laptop. “It’s been terribly dull around here without you.” He looks me up and down, takes in the long hair. “They won’t let you keep that, you know.”