Dove Arising (26 page)

“Yinha, show her around so she doesn’t get lost,” Skat adds.

“Yes, sir!”

The General takes over. “Remember, Yinha, you also have a meeting with Colonel Arcturus to prepare for the new trainees’ arrival. Don’t be late.”

“Yes, sir!”

Crossing his feet on the table, Skat chews off part of his middle fingernail and examines the result. “What you waiting for? Leave.”

That’s all? They called me and Yinha up here to assign me to patrol the patrols? I imagine pulling Skat’s chair out from under him so that he falls, squirming, onto the floor.

For one day, I have Yinha’s tour around Defense to keep me busy.

The privates exercise in a cylinder-shaped room shabbier and larger than the training dome. They salute us halfheartedly. Only Eri smiles at me as they jog by in formation; the others stare with either mild interest, like Io, or disgust, like Ganymede. Even people who weren’t in my trainee class give me looks that guarantee they’ll talk about me as soon as I turn my back.

The officers’ gym, one floor above the privates’, looks and smells better. Expensive equipment and rows of adjustable free weights line the walls. After watching me strain to work the bench press, Yinha lies down and hoists the bar above her chest with perfect form—until a man around her age begins flirting with her, addressing her as “Yee-haw.” She curses at him and leads me away to the Medical quarters lobby, where scores of soldiers wait for voluntary injections such as painkillers, caffeine shots, and muscle-enhancement drugs. At night, she scans in my thumbprint, retina, tongue, and chosen personal password of 08
T
03
M
97 so that I can access my apartment, the Defense intranet, and the mid-level Militia files on my own. She bets me ten Sputniks that I’ll forget the “too-numerical” password within a week.

Every day after that, while Yinha’s indoctrinating the new trainees, I walk endless loops around the Atrium, chastising unfocused privates and checking the civilian security mirrors for infractions that never occur. In the evenings, I grow uneasy with the absence of a sibling to help or a friend to be with. I explore to ward off loneliness and the longing to run home for a long hug—from anybody. But I can’t. Neither can I approach Umbriel, who has likely heard about my actions. I’m sick of rejection.

My thumb gives me access to every department, from Shelter to Law. On my handscreen, I peruse the operating manuals for all military equipment and view the blueprints for almost every structure on the six bases scattered across the surface of the Moon. They’re similar in setup, though Base I has the most complex floor plan.

I don’t look up statutes on disruptive print or check the status of Mira Theta’s trial.

Despite the new information crowding my head, I also don’t forget my password. A week later, Yinha unhappily transfers ten Sputniks to my family account.

I’m more comfortable alone with her than in public. In Defense, lower-ranking soldiers, including my former fellow trainees, salute me wherever I go—but that’s not the worst of the unwanted attention. People goggle at me when I’m on patrol; a week after I became captain, Journalism aired a news report filled with video clips from training, and the reporter commented on my “selective muteness.” I had the misfortune of seeing the report in the Atrium but the fortune of wearing my helmet, whose visor I slid down before anyone could identify me.

Young girls braid silver string into their hair to mimic my gray stripes, and despite my uninviting glower, mothers approach me to ask for advice, hoping to give their daughters an edge in Primary and Militia. If I’m walking with Yinha, she apologizes about our next meeting or training session—appointments that she fabricates on the spot—and punts me in the shin, indicating that we can escape.

Worse, my training friends are slipping away. I manage to wave to Nash only once, in a corridor. As for Wes—Eri has been assigned to his platoon, so she can talk to him all she likes. Her fiery head bobs alongside his coppery one as they traverse Defense. To avoid encountering them—together—I bury myself in my handscreen and hurry away. Every instance leaves me with a frigid soreness buried so deep inside that no amount of heat therapy could wring it out.

The monotony of Atrium patrol breaks down after a week and a half.

From my perch on the third-floor terrace, I notice a knot of people dressed in green and white exiting Market. They’ve stopped moving, forming a “roadblock” with respect to the surrounding crowd. Shiny black helmets zigzag toward them—privates trying to prevent a traffic jam. I descend one floor to get a closer look.

It’s my family.

Mom has fallen. Although she can hardly stand, she probably insisted on walking without help. Atlas hoists her to her feet, his hands under her arms. Umbriel and Cygnus look like they want to help, but they’re holding piles of vegetables—bought with my income, I imagine.

I turn away, gloom already gathering atop my shoulders to weigh me down. In another life, I might have walked with them, carrying those groceries or looking out for Beetles. Now I’m the enemy, hiding from my family while they bolt away.

They pushed me up here. I can’t flip up this visor and reveal myself as long as they turn their backs on my existence.

29

THE NIGHT THAT GEOLOGY’S SEISMOLOGISTS say a big moonquake is coming, I huddle under the table in my empty apartment, trembling. Quakes shouldn’t worry us, because the metal that composes the bases’ exteriors is mixed with a flexible polymer that bends without breaking. Besides, most quakes are so tiny we can’t feel them. But they remind me of Dad, and they scare me more than everything except death.

Before Dad set out on his last Geology expedition, Mom saw the forecast about the Far Side’s upcoming moonquake and pressed her face against his shoulder, begging him to stay. I’d never seen her so scared—but I had seen them arguing over the previous few weeks. Although they tried to hide it from Cygnus, Anka, and me, I heard feverish whispers late at night. About something that happened long ago, and whether they should
ever
tell us about it. I still don’t know how any of it fits together. Maybe it doesn’t.

That last night, Mom left the bok choy and tofu in the pressure cooker, and the dish turned to mush. We didn’t have dinner, but I don’t remember feeling hungry.

“What’ll they think of me if I don’t go?” Dad said over and over. Maybe he meant his coworkers and his lab’s principal investigator, or the Committee itself.

“Where are you going?” I asked. I babbled quite a lot as a child. “Can we come?”

Dad picked me up in his strong arms, even though I was a big girl, already six. “You, my dove, help Mommy while I’m gone.” He kissed my forehead twice. “Okay?”

“I promise, Daddy.”

He never came back, but I kept my word.

The door light flashes blue, pulling me into the present. I slide out from under the table, which is trembling even more than I am, and let Yinha in. Her unbound hair hugs her face, emphasizing the sharpness of every feature.

“Stripes, you okay? I, uh, saw your stats, and figured you might want company. This quake’s going to be magnitude 4.3—definitely a doozy.”

The first tremor rocks the residence tower back and forth like an upside-down pendulum. Through my window, I see clouds of dust obscure the mountain in the distance.

I clasp Yinha’s hand and drag her farther into my apartment. We huddle under the oversized table, and she snakes a scrawny—but strong—arm around my ribs. I can’t fully inflate my lungs, but it’s a cozy feeling. “Thanks for coming.”

“Thanks for letting me in,” she says. “I
hate
quakes. The only thing worse than sitting through a quake is sitting through a quake alone.”

I cuddle closer to her as the tower rocks again. “Aren’t you a recon officer? You could go to Earth to get away from them—be gone months at a time.”

“I could, yeah. But that wouldn’t be cool for my big brother.”

“Hmm?”

The tower bounces up and down as if we’re resting on a giant’s jiggling kneecap. Yinha cringes. “Yeah. Bai was a special private, lost his leg on a recon mission. A year ago. Right around the time I got promoted. I stick around to make sure he’s doing okay. Why didn’t you know about him? Didn’t you check my stats?”

“I don’t like to make premature judgments.”

Even in the dark, Yinha’s face looks green. “You don’t check stats? So you don’t know about my cruddy Primary scores either. I used to pretend stats don’t exist, just like you. But when you’re a captain, you see suspicious stuff everywhere. And sometimes, knowing someone’s stats is enough to save your behind and whip theirs. Since I
was
your instructor and
am
your neighbor, I thought you’d at least run a background check. Or, you know, sneak extra surveillance pods into my apartment.”

She doesn’t laugh—Yinha never laughs at her own punch lines—but I do. When my body is shaking with mirth, the tower’s quivering doesn’t feel so bad anymore.

“Recon is full of combat situations. And I’m an
awful
soldier.” Yinha waves her hand in front of her nose as if she smells something foul. “Disgustingly bad.”

I pull an incredulous face. She can shoot three arrows into three dummies at once and pilot a Pygmette through the smallest crannies in the Defense compound.

“Really. When I was a special private, the corporal in charge always told me not to look into people’s eyes if I had to shoot them. I kept looking, anyway. Looking and missing. It’s easier teaching the mechanics of killing people than actually
doing
it.”

I know for sure that she approved of my refusal to attack the fake Batterer cruiser. I feel even safer, and so glad that she has taken me under her wing.

The tremors stop. Lights on my ceiling blink green, signaling the all clear. We emerge from under the table. My robe rack has been knocked over and the fruits from my countertop have toppled onto the floor, but nothing is irreparably damaged.

“Cool?” Yinha asks, dusting off her black uniform.

“Mm-hmm.”

My handscreen lights up with a message delivered during the quake—it’s from Defense headquarters.

CLASSIFIED MEETING, TOMORROW 07:00. CAPTAIN PHAET THETA, PRESENCE DEMANDED.

“Huh,” says Yinha. “About time they gave you something to do.”

“How’ve you liked Atrium duty?” Skat drawls, his feet perched on the table in the top-floor command center. “Well, that’ll be over soon. Things are about to get more . . . more . . .”

“Labor intensive,” finishes the General. He jabs a button on his handscreen, and the satellite-tracking icons disappear from the ceiling. Now, the Committee’s silhouettes loom around us in a ring as if we are ten-centimeter-tall midgets trapped in the center of the conference table. The six members stare down with eyes that nobody can see.

They’re making one of their rare appearances—for me.

When Umbriel and I were in first-year Primary, we made up nicknames for the Committee members, whose real names we had to memorize and match with silhouettes for class. The featureless black masses petrified us, hardened our tongues into stone until we imbued them with absurdity. The Base IV representative Andromeda Chi, the only female, became Lady A. The others—Hydrus Iota, Cassini Omicron, Janus Lambda, Nebulus Nu, and Wolf Omega—became Stouty, Spider Hands, Frowning Mustache, Handsome Profile, and Eyebrow Man.